by Dennis Foley
Twice again.
“Okay. Are you not able to speak?”
Twice again—still affirmative.
“Are you wounded or injured?”
Twice again.
Shit! Hollister thought. One man on the ground by himself and wounded. “Can you move to the PZ?”
There was a long pause. Hollister repeated the question. Still, another long pause. Then a single word: “Maybe.”
“Okay. Okay. You just hole up. We’ll fire that area up around you and get you out of there. Can you give us a strobe?”
Twice again.
“Okay. First, give us the distance and direction to whatever you suspect is near you.”
“Two zero zero break, three one five degrees. Troops,” the weak LRP whispered in a shaky voice.
“You ready, guns?”
“Affirm,” the gun lead replied.
“Good man. You relax. We got it. Keep your head down, and give us a strobe—now,” Hollister said.
Everyone searched the clumps of trees for the flashing strobe light. After a very long wait, it popped once, then twice, not too far from the point in the tree line where DeSouza’s team had broken out into the paddies for the pickup.
“There it is!” the door gunner yelled, pointing.
Hollister followed his finger to the spot.
“We got it,” the gunship lead announced. “We’re headin’ on in with miniguns.”
The lead Cobra rolled over on its side to set up a flight path that would pass right over the spot northwest of the strobe and two hundred meters away.
“Just hold on down there,” Hollister said as much for reassurance as a wish for the success of the gun pass.
The Cobra started firing short of the target location by about fifty meters and burned up rice paddy until the tracers stitched their way into the clump of vegetation that held the enemy gunners. As the tracers entered the brush, the pilot-gunner wiggled the guns to scatter the impact points to either side of the line of flight.
As soon as his rounds burst through the back side of the brush, the wingman began his run and added M79 grenades to the mix. The grenades popped out of the nose turret and thumped their way to and through the small trees.
Chapter 21
“CHASE, YOU GET IN there and pick up One-three Bravo. We’ll follow you in,” Edmonds told the pilot of the chase ship.
“Okay, One-three Bravo. You ready?” Hollister asked the wounded LRP still sheltered in the trees.
He broke squelch twice.
“Let’s do it now,” Hollister said.
Edmonds fell into formation behind the newly designated pickup ship, and began the descent into the PZ.
Unbuckling his seat belt, Hollister got out of the jump seat and took up a kneeling position on the chopper floor. Riding in the new chase chopper, he wanted to be prepared to be the belly man in the event they had to go in and pick up survivors of the other chopper—if it was shot down.
The Cobras announced they were going to keep firing into all the likely targets near the PZ to suppress any enemy fire.
As the two choppers slid toward the spot on the PZ where they hoped to find the lost LRP, Hollister leaned out and watched the progress of the pickup ship. As it reached a point not more than fifty feet above, and a hundred and fifty feet short of, the touchdown point, the LRP broke out of the trees and started moving across the open paddy.
He seemed to be walking okay, but he was bent over a bit and held his face with one hand.
The chopper slid into the paddy ooze at a point less than twenty feet from the lone LRP. At that point the C&C overtook the pickup ship and Edmonds guided the chopper over its top with barely fifteen feet between them.
Looking straight down, Hollister could see McCullen reach out and pull the LRP into the chopper. But they weren’t out of the woods yet. They still had to clear the PZ and get back up to a safe altitude.
The flash of light seemed to come without any noise as Hollister was thrown from his kneeling position up against the backs of the two pilots’ seats. He didn’t hear the explosion, but he did hear the high-pitched warning coming from the instrument panel, and he somehow caught a last glimpse of the RPM LIMIT light and the MASTER CAUTION light flashing on and off.
It was his nightmare! It was almost exactly the same as the dream that had brought him up from a deep sleep at least fifty times since his first tour in Vietnam.
This time it was real! They were going down! He had to get to something he could hold on to. He made an effort to reach for the legs of the jump seat and a red-hot bolt of lightning shot up his leg into his hip.
He saw the ground outside the left door, and knew the chopper was tipping over, slipping sideways, and going down fast.
The impact was a blur followed by darkness and silence.
It was cold and dark when Hollister heard the voice. “Captain? Captain Hollister?”
It hurt just to open his eyes. His head hurt from a point at the base of his neck across the top of his head to just above his eyes. He could smell aviation fuel and musty paddy water. He opened his eyes, and found Sergeant McCullen stretching out the tails of a combat dressing.
“What …?”
“RPG took you down. The chopper ended up in a ball in the bushes over there,” McCullen said, nodding in the direction of the crumpled chopper carcass.
Realizing the situation, Hollister started to jerk himself up only to find he had almost no strength. “Edmonds? The crew?”
McCullen jabbed a thumb in the opposite direction. Hollister followed it with his eyes and turned his stiffened neck to see Edmonds seated on a nearby dike, his head hung, his flight helmet in the mud near his feet. Next to him was the body of Lambert and one of the door gunners. The other door gunner appeared to be unhurt and was still holding his dismounted machine gun and about two hundred rounds of linked ammunition.
“Oh, no! The pickup ship make it?”
“Sure! I’m here, ain’t I?” McCullen said as he reached down and applied the dressing to the upper part of Hollister’s leg.
The pain from the pressure made Hollister aware of his wound. He tried again to lift his head to look, but couldn’t.
“You caught something in the upper thigh. I don’t know what it was, but it ripped a pretty good hole in you.”
“Real bad?” Hollister asked anxiously.
“I’m no doc, but I think you aren’t gonna lose the leg or nothin’,” McCullen said.
No one ever told a wounded soldier the truth when he couldn’t see it himself. Hollister knew this and for a moment considered McCullen’s words as a lie designed to comfort him. But then he tried to convince himself that McCullen was telling the truth.
“It doesn’t hurt that much,” Hollister said.
“Harumph,” McCullen grunted. “I suppose a head shot wouldn’t hurt either on that stuff,” he said, reaching to flip up the empty morphine Syrette that had been pinned through the buttonhole on his shirt and bent over to stay there. It was routine to let the medics arriving later know the morphine had been administered in the field.
Hollister couldn’t remember when he had been given the drug or who gave it. “Shouldn’t I feel weird or something?”
“Don’t rightly know, Captain. I’ve never had any of that shit.”
The sounds of approaching choppers drowned out any further conversation. Hollister looked over toward the open paddy and saw Sergeant DeSouza standing in the middle holding a strobe light over his head for the approaching flight of the six slicks. Beyond him two other members of 1-3 were facing out, away from the LZ, providing some local security for the incoming choppers.
As they touched down, the troops from the reaction force fanned out to establish a perimeter around the downed chopper crew, the dead, the wounded, and the LRPs from DeSouza’s team.
As the choppers lifted off, McCullen leaned over and yelled loud enough for Hollister to hear, “They’re bringing in a Dust-Off for you. It’s right behind them.”
“What are they doing?” Hollister asked, a little confused by what was happening.
“They’re going to secure the area, evac the wounded, and then do a BDA on all the folks in the canal.”
“But I have two teams to put in before first light,” Hollister said, even more confused.
McCullen calmed his fears. “Don’t worry about it. The major’s taking care of it.”
The answer satisfied Hollister, who immediately slipped off into a dreamlike state of drowsiness.
The 12th Evac Hospital at Cu Chi was painted with the same red laterite dust that covered every item in the sprawling base camp.
Hollister’s head pounded and his stomach was on the verge of vomiting, but his vision cleared enough for him to realize that he was not looking at a painting, but a view through a window to the outside of the hospital ward. It had stopped raining, and the sun was high and bright.
The brilliance of the scene outside hurt his eyes, and his first thought was that it was a bad hangover. But as his head cleared a bit, he realized he was in the recovery ward of an evacuation hospital.
He didn’t remember anything from the chopper crash—not at first. But he knew he was hurt, and he quickly tried to sit up. He could see both his feet under the end of the sheets, even though they had been tented to stay just off his legs. He moved them, they reacted, but there was a dull throbbing in his right leg, in his upper thigh.
Determined to find out the extent of his injuries, Hollister tried to reach for the sheet, but found that his left arm was a mass of tape and tubing with two IVs converging into one needle inserted into the vein in the crook of his arm. He followed the tubes up and away from his body to an IV stand above his head that held a bottle of saline and one of dextrose something. He couldn’t read the full label.
With his right hand, he lifted the sheet. Underneath he saw that he was bandaged from his right hipbone to his calf. The top of the dressing was marked by the oozing wound. It was orange and yellow, and was centered on the outside of his upper thigh. He reached down to touch it to see if there was a break or something and was interrupted.
“Checking it out?”
He turned to find Second Lieutenant Katherine O’Connell, K.O. to her friends. She stood not much more than five-three and had bright red hair, green eyes, and a great smile punctuated by a band of freckles that crossed her nose from cheek to cheek.
“How bad am I?”
“Wound-wise or just as a patient?” she asked, teasing him.
“What?”
“Well, the doctors will be around to give you the details, but you interrupted the path of some large piece of fragmentation with a body block.”
“Bad?”
“You’re going to be one sore LRP for a while. But my guess is that you’ll keep the leg and have a scar that will be a conversation piece for a long time.”
“And?” he asked.
“And as a patient you are a handful.”
“What’s that mean? And how long have I been here?”
“You were brought in yesterday, about noon. They operated on you right after that, and you slept like you were in a wrestling match most of the night. Around three I had to put you in restraints to keep you from flopping on the floor or ripping your tubes out.”
He looked up at the two bottles of IV fluids and tried to conceal his embarrassment. “Must be some bad stuff in them.”
“Naw,” she said as she finished taking his pulse and slipped a thermometer under his tongue. “The anesthetic is a kick in the butt. Some guys sleep like the dead, some vomit their shorts up, and others have fistfights in their dreams. You went all twelve rounds last night.”
“Thorry,” he mumbled.
“Shush,” she said, scowling. “Don’t screw up my temp taking.”
He liked her. There was no doubt that she was in complete charge of her ward, and that she made the rules. She gave him two pills. Then she came back and gave him two shots and fussed with his dressings and the drain tube that stuck through the dressings and emptied somewhere out of Hollister’s sight. Within minutes after her visit, he was unable to stay awake and drifted off to a more restful sleep than the one the night before.
Around midnight Hollister awoke, again disoriented. The medications they were giving him were like a bad drunk. His head was foggy, and his stomach felt very tentative.
He tried to change his position so he could sit up. It was dark, and the only light in the room was the desk lamp at the nurses’ station on the other side of the room, about twenty feet away. A nurse was hunched over some paperwork, flanked by two stacks of patient charts.
In the other direction were five beds, all of them filled. One of the figures was in a full-body wrap tethered to the bed by a complete complement of tubes and drains. He was unconscious. The others slept in various states of disrepair. One was an amputee. His legs stopped at the knees.
“These are for you,” someone said.
He turned to find the nurse from the desk standing by his bedside. It wasn’t K.O., but an equally attractive captain with a pageboy haircut and a stethoscope around her neck. She handed him a couple of notes. Her tone was cold in comparison to K.O.’s. She was all business.
He tried to read them, but the light was too bad. “Is there any light?”
She reached into the sleeve pocket of her fatigue shirt and pulled out a penlight, which she snapped on and held so he could read.
The first note was from Sangean. All it said was Get some rest. See you in the A.M. Sangean.
The second read: Stopped in to see you, sir. But you were off somewhere. Be back when you land. And, I’m real sorry, sir. It was signed, PFC Cathcart.
“Finished, huh?” She snapped off the light. “Got to save batteries until my folks send me some replacements. Hard to get these little ones from Sam.”
“Parents! Oh shit,” Hollister said. “No one notified my parents, did they?”
“I don’t know. Why?” she replied.
“I’d just rather not upset them. I mean I’m in one piece.” He nodded in the direction of the amputee. “I shouldn’t even be in here with these guys. Should I?”
“You’re in here to recover. Has nothing to do with damage. You need someone keeping an eye on you till the anesthetic wears off. Then we ship you out to a regular ward.”
“Why?”
“Because we don’t want you here. You mess up my sheets.”
“No. Why do I need to be watched?”
“You watch a guy do parabolic vomiting from this stuff, and you’ll know why.”
He felt the uneasy response in his stomach. “Oh. I see. Yech!”
She repeated the checking and poking that K.O. had done earlier, then went back to her desk.
“Anything to eat around here?”
“Shssh!” she scolded. “You’re eating.” She poked her pencil toward the IVs.
“Bad stuff. My gut is keeping me awake making noise.”
“Hold on,” she said, getting up and going to a wall locker.
She extracted a teabag from the locker and dropped it into a cup on the medical table behind her desk. Next to the rolling table a hot plate was keeping a pot of water hot. She poured some of it over the teabag and dipped the bag a few times by its string. She brought the cup to Hollister. “Here,” she said. “Live it up.”
“Tea?”
“That’s all you can have, except Jell-O, and I don’t have any of that.”
“This is the worst!”
“No, there’s worse. And don’t ask for it.”
She walked back to her desk and got back to work. Hollister raised the tea to his lips and found it fairly pleasant, if weak. He leaned back and let things sink in. He inventoried his situation. He was wounded, but he didn’t know exactly how bad. He guessed he would be okay. He was worried about whether Susan and his parents had been notified. He had elected not to have them notified when he in-processed at IIFFV Personnel. But that was no guarantee they hadn’t already sent a
TWX back to the States and scared the shit out of his family. He thought about the others in the chopper and wondered if anyone had died or if he had just dreamed it. So much was a blur of reality, fragments of memory, and a headache that wouldn’t go away.
“Take these,” the duty nurse said, handing him a tiny paper cup with four different capsules and two chalky-looking pills.
He took them and washed them down with the tea. “Shit!” he said.
“Hot, huh?”
“I’ll say. That was pretty stupid of me.”
“You’ll do stupider things. It seems to be a pattern with you guys.”
“Us guys?”
“LRPs. Don’t you eat steel and spit out nails?” she asked.
“No, but we like folks to think that.”
“According to your records, this is the third time you’ve been wounded.”
It was the fourth, but he felt that telling her wasn’t going to make her feel any better about him.
“Clumsy, I guess,” he said.
She wasn’t amused. She just grunted and walked away.
He knew that the LRP reputation was still bad and still rubbing the Cu Chi base camp commandos the wrong way. It just never occurred to him that it would piss off a nurse.
Breakfast was more of the same. It came at seven and consisted of Jell-O, weak tea, and a single soggy piece of toast—burned on one side, cold on the other.
After breakfast K.O. returned. “Hey there! You’re getting a little color in your cheeks. How’s that leg?”
“You tell me. I’ve been here two days, and I haven’t seen a doctor.”
“Oh, the doctors have seen you all right,” she said while she attended to his IVs and took his vital signs. She made a few entries in his chart. “While you were snoozin’ they were doctorin’ and movin’ on to other patients.”
“They ever going to tell me anything?”
“Oh, it could happen. Some of them have even talked to the nurses.”
She smiled and walked to the bed across the aisle. Hollister didn’t miss the backside of her fatigues. Cute butt, he thought.
“Hey … Captain Hollister?”
Turning back from K.O.’s bottom to the other side of his bed, Hollister found PFC Cathcart standing there with a wire contraption sticking through his cheek. It wrapped over his head and around his neck and was attached to a leather straplike device that held tension into the wire.
