On the upper portion of the set was a dial with frequencies and next to it a small round knob used to adjust and select the desired freq. Next to that knob was a multi-position switch for OFF-ON, mike and calibration. The calibration switch was spring-loaded and had to be held in the calibrate position with one hand while the freq was selected with the other. Pete cradled the handset between chin and shoulder while he dialed in 57.1 and listened for the “zero beat” to indicate exact calibration. He finally got it and began transmitting. Captain Bruton required all participating units to check in with him when the action began. He in turn would report to battalion.
“Dalton Salton One, this is Frog Delta One. You copy? Over...”
The response was a static rush of whistling and screaming.
He tried again. The same thing. He frowned. Cochran went pale. Both realized simultaneously what was happening.
“It’s being jammed,” Pete said, disbelieving. “Minh knows we’re out here all right—and he’s jammed our radio commo.”
At that same instant, excited shouts erupted ahead from the lead squad, then from the squad behind it. All eyes snapped to the left, where the Nguoi Nhai pointed across the rice paddy toward Canal Six. Black-clad figures were running along the bank, moving toward the rear.
The crack of a carbine rang out ahead, pulling all eyes back in that direction. Pete slapped Cochran on the shoulder and knelt with him while they assessed the situation. The running VC seemed to have a purpose beyond fleeing the village ahead of attacking forces. Pete yelled for Sparky, who dashed over with the spare radio, He tried another air link, with the same result as before. There was no doubt; the air was being jammed and jammed skillfully.
“Stay on the radios,” he ordered both RTOS. “Keep trying. See if you can raise the 155 battery.”
Piss Hole dropped down between Pete and Cochran. Cochran gripped his carbine so tightly his knuckles were white. Piss Hole’s eyes riveted on the scurrying VC just out of rifle range.
“Ohmja Nguoi Nhai!” he blurted out. Suddenly, they all realized what was happening.
“VC running hard, trying to cut us off.”
Minh had already formulated a plan, which meant he had been warned. Lump was right all along.
“That double-dealing, cheating commie cunt!” Pete raged.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
The doctor’s hands trembled so hard as he re-lived in memory that distant morning on Canal Six that tea sloshed from his cup onto his faded hospital scrubs. He looked at the cup as though surprised that the cup and his hand that held it should have a will of their own. He held the cup with both hands, but the cup continued to slosh. I marveled at how he could live here so close to the site where it had all occurred and not be chronically plagued with the shakes and the nightmares that produced them. I realized it would be impossible for me to remain even one night so near that memorial on the canal and the pratas it contained. Surely they haunted this Asian town.
But, then, perhaps it was not physical distance that counted. Consciously, at least, most of us retained the capability of imposing mental distance between the present and the traumas of the past. Of locking into neural compartments all that was ugly or unwelcome, then spending the rest of our lives trying to keep the doors locked. It was only when you slept that the memories and the ghosts of those memories followed you halfway around the globe to stalk your nights.
My own hands trembled.
Bonnie My Cochran stood up, her eyes pained. She reached for her husband. It was her turn to help him fight the demons. I remembered how my Elizabeth would sometimes reach for me in the middle of particularly bad nights.
“Ca’l, come help prepare lunch,” Bonnie My suggested in reasoning touchingly transparent. She wanted to provide him a few minutes’ respite from the past. “Mr. Kazmarek will stay, have lunch?”
“I—”
“For goo’ness sake, yes,” Bonnie cried. “Have lunch in garden. Most pleasant day.”
I thought she should be more eager to see me go, and take the past with me, than to stay and dredge in the murk of days better left behind locked doors. Instead, she seemed to feel it important I remain. Perhaps she sensed her husband’s need to talk over those days and come to grips with them in the presence of another old American soldier who had been there and understood.
Cochran looked grateful for the break. He appeared older now than he did when we started. He placed his teacup carefully on the little table next to his chair and stood up. He hesitated, hands clasped hard behind his back, gazing up at a flock of white tickbirds sailing silently overhead.
“Jack,” he asked, “how was Pete’s life? I mean, before he died?”
I shrugged after giving it careful thought. “It was like he was married to Mhai’s picture.”
I stood up and we both watched the white birds until they disappeared.
“There was always a sadness in Pete I never understood,” I said.
Cochran nodded. He followed his wife inside. I remained behind in the garden, alone with my own disturbing thoughts. I strolled a pathway between beds of flowers and blooming vines, working to escape those thoughts and keep my mind focused on Pete and Mhai. Keep it busy and away from that damned and damnable canal.
It unexpectedly occurred to me that that day thirty odd years ago had also been a different day for Pete Brauer and C. C. Cochran.
I came to a living bamboo fence encircling the Cochran bungalow and garden. I started to turn back and away from what I knew lurked on the other side. I hesitated, feeling drawn by the same forces that compelled people to gawk at a bloody crash on the highway, attracted and repelled at the same time.
On the way to the clinic, after first passing the statue on the canal, I had kept myopically focused on the way ahead, as though walking in a tunnel, glancing neither to right nor left. Now, impulsively, I felt curiosity stirring. Bracing myself, I looked over the top of the fence, half expecting to find Mad Dog Carter or Daniels with his voodoo eye or, even worse, Bugs Wortham staring back at me.
“I’m tellin you, sir. Daniels knows. It’s a different day.”
I looked down the wide main street of Vam Tho as it broadened and flared out against the canal at the other end of town. My stomach knotted and my heart raced, even though I couldn’t see the statue from here. Instead, children and dogs and chickens and pigs and geese formed a raucous mixture that held my eye. Nothing seemed familiar after all this time. It could have been any of a score of gook villages my platoon and I had marched through during the war. It was merely one of many—except for that one-day. That one day that made it different.
I saw that the black Honda remained parked on the other side of the pedestrian bridge next to Van’s red taxi, The same old man I saw earlier getting out of it was leaning against the door, arms crossed. Even after all this time, the commies were a suspicious lot who never let up on their surveillance of strangers and foreigners.
I shrank back from the fence as his piercing gaze seemed to find me. He pushed off from the car and opened the door to take something out of it. He turned and slowly walked into the banana grove, glancing back only once before merging with the shadows. All dressed in black like that, he reminded me of how the VC had looked. Elusive and mysterious and a part of the night. It was an eerie sensation.
A little bare-chested boy walked by on the other side of the fence. He stopped and tilted his head up at me, smiling broadly. I recoiled. It was as though a face off the canal memorial had come alive, wrenching me back in time to that long-ago, lung-searing, gut-wrenching charge on Vam Tho.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Intermittent firing from both sides, none of it very effective, punctuated Third Platoon’s charge on Vam Tho. Corporal Shirkey chugged through the rice paddy water, screaming insults at the village. He pumped out 40mm HE rounds from his M-79. The grenades arced high toward the hamlet and exploded surprisingly loud for the size of the shell, spraying pellets in a pattern extremely devastating within its
radius. I shouted at him to, goddamnit, conserve his ammo.
Daniels had slung his machine gun by its leather strap from one shoulder, muzzle pointed downrange. He let out a short burst every few steps, so that his progress seemed to stutter. The platoon’s other two M-60 gunners beat out a kind of staggered rhythm with him. Red tracers sailed lazily at head level across the open paddy. They Thunked! and Whacked! into hooches and trees and bamboo fences.
Resistance was minimal—a few VC pinging back at us from breastwork defenses dug into earth at the edge of the village.
“Fire control!” Sgt. Holtzauer panted, waving his arms. “Goddamnit, girls, lets have some fire control!”
As we approached the edge of the hamlet, the attack having exhausted itself to a lumbering trot, VC faded back ahead of us. I glimpsed several black-clad figures darting among the hooches in retreat. I hip-shot at them with my M16. They ran across the single-log monkey bridge that spanned the canal on the opposite end of Vam Tho and vanished into the dense banana palms.
A stray round nailed a large sow, wounding it and causing it to go into a blind panic, squealing furiously and running about crashing through huts and spraying blood.
“Daniels got the VC pig!” Mad Dog Carter cheered. “That’s fire control.”
The hog and the VC fleeing from us broke the tension. Some hooting and tight laughter played down the jogging line of boonirats. Recondos swept unresisted into Vam Tho, howling like banshees, past the enemy’s abandoned breastworks and into the ville where women and children and old men either hid in bomb shelters dug into the floors of their huts or had fled with the VC. It was the same old fighting-the-VC story. You thought you had the enemy pinned down, but when you reached for his throat he was gone.
Colonel Hackman’s mean, green, lean fighting machine tore through Vam Tho, as Mad Dog put it, like salts through a goose. Scaring up nothing but squawking bare-assed chickens, scolding geese and more pigs. Mad Dog spotted the wounded sow darting for a hole in the bamboo fence, carrying her unearthly shrieking with her. He snapped off a shot that tumbled her. He walked up to where she lay still screaming, sides bellowing. He shot her again and the squealing stopped.
“The battle of the one dead pig,” he scoffed.
“Is it dead?” Bubba Lawmaster called out.
“Are you blind, Bubba? ’Course it’s dead. Fu-uck. Gotta kill somethin.”
Sgt. Holtzauer dispersed the milling troops like a mustached force of nature. “Cut the gaggle-fuckin, troops. Move on through to the canal and set up a perimeter. Wallace, Shirkey... ! C’mon, squad leaders, keep ’em movin. This ain’t no hen party, girls.”
I thought to look around for Bugs Wortham now that some of the tension and excitement had abated. I half expected him to be cowering in the reeds on the other side of the rice paddy. Apparently, however, he found the prospect of being left behind and alone more terrifying than attacking the VC. Crouched almost double, he pumped along so close behind Sgt. Wallace, his squad leader, that if Wallace had stopped suddenly Bugs would have run him over. He was so damned scared, judging from his expression, that the only thing he had eyes for was Wallace’s back.
At the urging of both the platoon sergeant and myself, boonirats moved on up to the canal, our forward control point, and fanned out along it to confront snipers hiding in the banana groves. Cpl. Shirkey found a pile of rocks to use as cover and engaged in a rattling duel with the hidden AK-47s. The rest of his squad lay concealed in reeds, chattering away at the enemy with their rifles, burning up ammo and letting off tension. The other squads started moving in to grab their share of the action.
“Cease fire! Goddamnit, cease fire!” Sgt. Holtzauer went red from shouting. “Stop your fuckin shootin.”
The firing was ineffective anyhow, with no discernible targets. I was afraid the enemy might be decoying us into using up our ammunition, after which he would attack us in force. I sprang to my feet and sprinted down the line of Recondos, banging them on their helmets with my palms or kicking their legs to get their attention. It was a foolish thing to do, exposing myself like that, but Sgt. Holtzauer was also on his feet doing the same thing on the other half of the firing line.
“Cease firin! Cease firin!”
A sniper’s bullet passed so near my head I heard and felt its sonic snap. I dropped to the ground. The shooter turned his attention from me to Sgt. Holtzauer. Holtzauer, indignant, threw the inconsiderate bastard the finger and resumed yelling for cease-fire. He walked along the canal bank, ignoring the banana grove and the few enemy it concealed. Shooting tapered off.
Boonirats stopped shooting to watch the platoon sergeant with awe and respect. The sonofabitch was fearless and he insisted the troops listen to him. Cursing roundly, lashing out at those prone soldiers too full of adrenalin to pay attention, he stalked along in plain sight until Third Platoon was once more under control.
He stopped and cast a shrugging look in my direction as though to say: See, that’s how it’s done.
Suddenly, a bullet slammed the big Texan to the ground like the fist of God had suddenly reached down and thumped his legs out from underneath him. The report of the shot followed.
Stunned eyes fastened on the patch of tall grass where he went down. To Third Herd, Holtzauer had seemed immortal. The platoon sergeant, not the platoon leader, was the core of an outfit, its nucleus around which the other soldiers solidified. I would be the first to admit that while I gave the orders, Sgt. Holtzauer was Third’s real power, the blood, sinew and bone force that made things happen. I felt a touch of unexpected panic.
Then relief as a string of profanities rose like an odor from the grass where he fell. I sprang up in a rush and threw myself belly down next to him before the sniper could get off another shot. My relief proved short-lived. The sergeant was hard hit. He lay curled up on one side, both hands clawing at his belly. Blood oozed between his fingers and there were smears of blood on his great handlebar mustache and blood diluted by cold sweat on his forehead. He groaned, obviously in a great deal of pain.
“Medic! Medic up!” I yelled.
Doc Steinmeyer appeared at a lunging gallop, causing the over-expectant sniper to miss his next shot. Steinmeyer was a Jewish kid from the Bronx with white-rimmed eyes far too large for his thin face. I was never sure if his eyes were naturally that way or if they would go back to normal when he rotated home. He was a good doc though. I helped him apply pressure bandages to the bullet hole just below and to the left of the sergeant’s naval and to the much larger exit wound in his back. Fortunately the bullet had missed his spine.
“Mother Kaz?” It was Wallace’s voice. It sounded uneasy. “How’s the Sarge?”
Sgt. Holtzauer groaned. “Just keep your fuckin mind on business, ya hear me, Wallace?”
“A-okay, Sarge,” Wallace said.
The Doc shot a syringe of morphine into Holtzauer’s thigh. He was already drifting into La-La by the time we dragged him back over the crest of the canal bank out of danger. I could overhear the troops sending anxious inquiries up and down the line, like children in a classroom where teacher had been suddenly removed with a heart attack. I knew I should get out there to reassure them.
“Sir,” Holtzauer said out of a half-daze, “the little motherfuckers are tryin to bait us to come across the canal.”
“I’ll get you a med-evac just as soon as I can,” I promised. “Hold on.”
“L.T.” He paused to catch his breath. “I’m sorry as hell to leave you like this. I did a dumb thing, thinkin I’d never be the one. It looks like I’m out of it. Sir, they’re all yours.”
“Don’t keep reminding me,” I said, using the old joke between us.
Things might have ended differently in Vam Tho if not for Sgt. Holtzauer’s getting it.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Mad Dog and Daniels chaffed to go after the cocksucker in the banana trees who shot the platoon sergeant. Their blood was heated up for battle; they craved enemy flesh.
“We g
ot ’em,” Daniels urged, rising on elbows behind his tripoded M60 to squint one eyed across the canal. He spat a stream of tobacco juice in a high arc. It splashed in the canal water. “They right over there, Lt. Kaz. Let’s all’a us go kick some gook ass.”
“Our mission is to hold Vam Tho, that’s it,” I retorted, moving up and down the line to let the troops know they still had leadership. I kept low behind the crest of the canal bank however. No use getting myself plugged just to try to prove something. “Let the other platoons and the ARVN Frogmen do the dirty job of mopping them up.”
“When the fuck is it gonna be our turn to get back at the bastards?” Cpl Shirkey demanded.
Third Herd was fast becoming the butt of ridicule from the other platoons in the company. All these weeks slogging the AO with Charlie picking us off one or two at a time—and what did we have to show for it on Colonel Hackman’s dic board? One single confirmed kill that the Dog knocked down while he was filling rice baskets in front of his hooch. Not much of a friendly to enemy casualty ratio. Colonel Hackman had brought it up at the last leadership meeting.
“Lt. Kazmarek?”
“Sir?”
“Have you looked at this board?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Your platoon has the highest percentage of friendly casualties of any other platoon in the Hardcore Battalion—and the lowest enemy kill.”
“Yes, sir.” What else could I say? That Third Herd had bad luck?
“Get out there and get with them, Lieutenant. Do you hear me? Get with them. You can’t mother the men, Lieutenant. You got to use them. Fight that platoon of yours, Lieutenant. Get off the defensive and go on the offensive.”
“Yes, sir.”
Third obviously drew the pud assignment on this mission because Captain Bruton didn’t feel we were up to a real fight with Charlie. A walk in the sun—and I had already got my platoon sergeant WIA with no enemy body count to make up for it. Daniels and his damned voodoo eye.
The Return: A Novel of Vietnam Page 23
