The entire bank appeared to detonate underneath their running forms. Smoke and clods of earth choked the air. Shrapnel splattered into unprotected bodies, tearing short screams from the throats of dying men. Tinh, minus both legs, was hurled into the water at the canal’s edge. He gulped for air a time or two, like a beached fish dying, and then in fact died as his comrades stampeded by. So much for loose lips.
For the first time under Lt. Brauer’s leadership the Nguoi Nhai had suffered casualties and had inflicted none in return. It lent incentive to their dash for the hooches and palms. Pete policed up stragglers as the entire company scrambled out of the canal and entered thick gloom beneath the trees, among which were scattered the huts of a small hamlet satellite of Vam Tho.
After ordering Piss Hole to regroup the outfit and set up a hasty defensive perimeter, Pete grabbed Ensign Cochran to go with him. They hurried through the settlement to check out their position and situation. The village appeared vacated. Either that or its occupants had scurried underground into their war shelters to await the outcome of the confrontation.
They were disappointed to discover that the palm grove ended on the other side at a second open rice paddy. Only a line of tall reeds and grass marked the passage of a sewer drainage leading across it to more jungle beyond. Pete had led his Nguoi Nhai onto an island surrounded by a sea of rice.
Cochran exhaled loudly. “Jesus!”
Rifle shots flickered at them from the tree line on the other side of the paddy, a warning that Commander Minh had his blocking force in place.
“Of course, I shall have to defeat you,” Minh had confided to Pete during their extraordinary dinner meeting in Saigon. “It will not be a pleasure for me that the next time we meet must be in combat.”
After months of being tagged again and again, Minh had at least seized the opportunity to trap and destroy his old nemesis. A feat impossible, Pete felt, without the unwilling cooperation of a Frog who liked to boast and the willing assistance of a woman who claimed she loved him. Bitterness seemed to seep from the SEAL’s every pore.
He patrolled the area in the trees for defensive positions. VC had dug shallow firing pits all around the huts. Damned accommodating of them. Using these, with a machine gun placed along the overgrown sewer drainage to cover that likely avenue of enemy approach, they should be able to hold out until they could unjam the radios and call for artillery or air.
Providing they could unjam the radios.
Dih-Dah and Sparky crouched in a shallow hole at the edge of the path alongside the canal, trying desperately to make radio contact. A steady stream of whistling and screaming poured from the PRC-10s.
Pete ordered Piss Hole to spread the troops into a three-sixty perimeter around the tiny ville. That meant spreading them thin.
“I think we can hold out until help comes,” he said, but without real confidence.
The situation was not good. Trapped between two VC forces—a combined force of perhaps battalion-size—they were without radio contact and therefore unable to call in 155s to even up the odds. Explosions raked the edges of the palm grove as VC gunners shifted range and deflection, feeling for the Shit City Frogs. Soon, shells would be dropping inside the perimeter.
Palm fronds rattled like skeletons as a fresh breeze touched sweaty faces. A chattering of raindrops tiptoed across grass roofs and moved quickly on. When Pete was a kid at the juvenile home, one of the counselors was an old man with a bald head who liked to talk about the Great Depression. He called rain like that “midnight scampering on graves.”
Pete looked up at the clouds. They seemed to be directly in his face. Nothing could fly in that soup.
“God, please let it rain,” Cochran breathed in prayer.
“Amen. And hard,” Pete added.
They were both so tired their legs felt like lead pipes sunk into the ground. They had to forcefully extract their feet step by step. Pete was taking a leak against a tree when Piss Hole returned, loping through the dimness of the trees. He paused, grinned, and immediately eased tension with an unexpected jibe.
“Ohmja Nguoi Nhai, better you put that thing away quick before some VC shoot it off, put on him’s wall for trophy.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
When the first attack came, Pete and Ensign Cochran jumped into holes alongside the canal in the edge of the palms, part of the VC’s old fighting defenses. Looking over the tops, they saw a solid wall of bodies clad in black charging across the rice. Leaping and darting, crouching, running, shouting. Floppy bush hats. Muzzle blasts. Enemy seemed to pour across the rice paddy, like water from a breached dam.
Bullets tore overhead, zipping and hissing and snapping. Bark and chopped frond showered down. The cloth-tearing Burrrrrip-ip! of communist K-50s was easily distinguished from the rhythmic steady banging of friendly M60 machine guns. Harmonious M16 rattling counterpointed the deeper-throated chattering of enemy AKs.
“Tien len! Tien len! “ commie leaders screamed. “Mau len, dong chi mau len!
Attack! Rapidly, comrades! Attack!
Minh was in this battle to win.
Within seconds, VC reached the canal and were jumping in, sailing off the opposite bank and landing splashing to charge the emplacements only a few feet away. Pete’s auto Stoner recoiled into his shoulder as he selected targets from among the rushing human hordes. All he saw through his sights and muzzle smoke were black shirts and green cartridge belts. He fired; they stopped hard, then crumpled over. Other enemy soldiers immediately replaced those who went down. Pete continued to fire. Aim, squeeze the trigger, recoil. Aim, squeeze the trigger, recoil... Another black shirt jerked upright, then dropped.
A VC on the opposite bank of the canal spotted the Americans. He screamed something, dropped to one knee, and sprayed bullets. Cochran felt a bee sting tug into his upper arm. Pete shot the man. He fell and rolled into the canal and floated.
Pete emptied one magazine and replaced it. Cochran was already on his third thirty-round mag. A tree in front of them was catching hell from the withering hail of attacking fire, snowing on them bits of leaves and shattered bark. Geysers of water spouted from the canal less than six feet away. But the human waves continued to crash against the entrenched stones.
Caught in a crossfire, the VC were losing men rapidly. They fell en masse and the muddy canal water turned pink with blood. Dead and wounded floated in the pink water, dimpling the surface with black islands, and lay sprawled along the far bank. Distorted faces hurled bodies forward into the deadly rain of bullets.
“Tien len! Tien len... !”
When it appeared the defenders could no longer hold, whistles blasted shrilly and the attackers began to withdraw along the way they came. Some of them continued to fire while others dragged fallen comrades by an arm or cartridge belt. Cochran found himself picking among the crouching figures, seeing strained faces in his rifle sights, and knocking them off one by one. From the hole next to him, he heard Pete doing the same thing. They had the power of life and death; they could choose almost at will which would die.
“You die!” Pete growled as he banged away with the Stoner. “Piss on you, cocksucker. You die!”
The VC disappeared into trees from which they had emerged farther down the canal, There was a lull in the battle, broken only by the piteous cries and screams of the wounded on both sides, Pete and Cochran looked at each other. Perspiration dripped and sweat stung their eyes. Their mouths were dry and it was suddenly hard to catch their breath, like they had just run a mile through mud.
“You’re hit, C.C.,” Pete noticed.
“Only a scratch, Skipper.”
Pete sat on the edge of his hole, broke out his canteen and slowly looked around as he swigged gulps of water. He offered the canteen to his exec, but the young officer had his own. They drank and caught their breath before getting up to survey the damage.
Minh had taken a hard hit, but so had the Nguoi Nhai. Medics were dragging wounded back to one of the hooches which the
y had transformed into an aid station. A number of men lay dead in place, including the little radioman Sparky. There were blood smears everywhere. The survivors were very quiet. They looked silently up at Pete and Cochran with haunted eyes dark in strained faces. Tension thicker than the lowering clouds hung over the palm grove.
Pete appeared to have aged ten years within minutes. His eyes burned deep in his skull as he looked around at the broken little men he had trained and who had such faith in him.
“Bitch!” he murmured from some deep well of rage. “Cunt!”
Piss Hole had fresh ears strung at his belt. “There many wounded,” he reported. “I do not know of the dead yet. There enough ammunition for another assault, maybe. Maybe a little more. But not much.”
Pete lifted a rough hand and let it fall on the loyal Viet’s shoulder. Piss Hole had been a good and brave warrior. Even now he didn’t seem worried; the Ohmja Nguoi Nhai would think of something.
“Ti-uy Piss Hole,” Pete said. He paused to think about it.
“Ohmja Nguoi Nhai?” Piss Hole queried, puzzled.
“I’m awarding you a battlefield commission, Ti-uy. Lieutenant Piss Hole. That misses something. What’s your real name, Lieutenant?”
“It is Trung Van Diem,” Piss Hole replied soberly.
“Lieutenant Trung it is.”
Piss Hole mulled it over, then permitted himself a self-conscious grin. “You will personally pin rank on me when we return Shit City, Ohmja Nguoi Nhai?
“You bet,” Pete promised.
In one of the other holes, Dih-Dah had laid down his rifle and was back on the radio, still trying to break through. Sparky lay dead in the next hole. In the distance, beyond Vam Tho, came the muffled sounds of another major firefight. Dih-Dah gazed absently in the direction of the noise as he worked. It sounded like Bravo Company of the army’s 9th Div, 4th Battalion, might be catching hell now. The radioman slowly shook his head. He still couldn’t raise Dalton Salton at Bravo Company or the 155mm artillery battery at FSB Savage.
Pete started to walk on, but Dih-Dah suddenly raised a hand to halt him. His brows lifted in surprise and his eyes grew round as he said, “Someone on radio wishes speak with Ohmja Nguoi Nhai. “
Also puzzled, Pete took the mike. Ohmja Nguoi Nhai was a name used only within the Frog company.
“This is Frog Delta One, “ he said.
“Ohmja Nguoi Nhai?” came back as clearly as though the speaker were standing on the other side of the canal. It took Pete a moment to recognize the slight British accent. He gave a little start.
“Commander Minh?”
Dih-Dah and Piss Hole stared at the radio as though God Himself had spoken through it. Cochran shook his head in bemusement.
“It is so sad to me, my friend, that it has to end this way,” Minh said conversationally. “You and your Frogmen fought well, as I knew you would.”
“It’s not over yet, Minh,” the SEAL replied stubbornly. “You ain’t seen nothing yet, Commander.”
“But it is over, Peter.” Minh’s dry chuckle came over the radio. There was a deep pause. “You were a worthy enemy. I had hoped that we might become friends after the war.”
How could you figure this man?
“You can come to the United States to visit me,” Pete quipped.
This time Minh failed to chuckle. There was another moment of silence, as though neither man, rivals in war and in love, knew exactly what to say to the other. Pete’s face looked tight and hard, the scar compressed and standing out pale. It was the face of a man confronting defeat in both war and love.
“Minh, answer me one question,” Pete ventured. “Was it Mhai?”
There was a deep sadness, a regret, in Minh’s voice when it came back through the air.
“There is no reason for further killing,” he said, almost pleading. “Surrender to me, Peter. I promise you and your men will be well treated.”
“Go to hell!” Pete retorted.
Minh sighed over the radio. “Mhai will miss you deeply when you are dead,” he said, then added, “And so will I.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
Sitting in the doctor’s little garden over remnants of lunch, little of which was actually consumed, I watched C. C. Cochran age as he recalled how the different day had been for Pete Brauer and him in the bush only a short distance away from my Third Herd inside Vam Tho. Lines visibly deepened in his thin face. His eyes narrowed, looked haunted and acquired the unfocused thousand-yard stare common to soldiers at war. In telling Pete’s story, he had also taken himself back. For a moment I thought he might collapse and be unable to continue. Bonnie My jumped up to place her small hand on the back of his neck. She gently massaged.
“Sometimes we all look back through black curtain of days in past,” she said.
Yes. Sooner or later, whether we wanted to or not, we had to go back through this curtain.
I still hadn’t told them I was the platoon leader at Vam Tho. That I was the cause for the memorial statue being erected on the canal bank. It was difficult enough admitting it to myself.
After a short while, Doctor Cochran resumed, his voice hollow and emotionless.
“In between attacks, Minh pulverized us with mortars,” he said with forced matter-of-factness. “I... I hear to this day the screams when the shells fell. The screams of the wounded and dying. Smoke filled the air and broken palms were toppling over. The hut that became our first aid station was blown up, killing all the wounded and one of the company’s three medics.
“That was the first time I ever saw tears in Pete’s eyes. He blamed himself. Lt. Piss Hole was... blown half in two. Wasted. He never knew what hit him. Pete and he had got real tight. Pete kept saying that if he had only killed Mhai that day he captured her, if he had only turned her over to the Nguoi Nhai or let Lump drown her in the river, none of this would have occurred.”
Commander Minh’s third attack broke through the defenders’ decimated perimeter.
“It finally started raining,” Doctor Cochran said. “But it was too late. You’ve been in Vietnam before, Jack. You know how hard a monsoon rain can be.”
He gestured toward the scuttle of black clouds bunching in the south and moving toward us.
“We may see an example of the monsoons this afternoon,” he footnoted, then continued, “Some of our Frogs managed to escape under cover of the rain. Fighting broke up into little pockets. Rain fell so hard you couldn’t tell from ten feet away if a man were friend or foe. We were all trying to split up to E&E into the bush and make our way to safety. There was a drainage ditch, a sewer or something, that angled across the rice paddy on one side of the village. It was all overgrown with reeds taller than our heads. It looked like the best bet for an escape. Pete helped me reach it.”
Fresh water from all the rain gorged the ditch, filling it from bank to bank, making it about thigh deep. Screened by blurring sheets of water, the two Americans succeeded in reaching the ditch undetected, where they crouched in the weeds to gather their bearings. Rain drummed noisily about them. All around, sometimes near, sometimes in the distance, gunfire stammered in bursts as VC hunted down stragglers and holdouts and finished them off.
Two indistinct forms appeared stoop-stalking in the wet gray stormlight, stealing through the grass. Their heads bobbed, rifles sweeping. Hunters. They spotted the Americans and the Americans spotted them at the same instant.
Pete had lost his Stoner, but had picked up a fallen Frog’s M16. Before he could bring the rifle on-target, one of the VC fired from the hip. The bullet struck Pete’s rifle and sent it spinning out of his hands. Cochran opened fire, missing in his haste.
Pete’s hand darted for the holstered .45 he always carried and which he used with such unerring efficiency. It filled his fist and came up spitting. It muzzle-flashed four times. Two bullets tore into each of the enemy soldiers. They fell out of sight into the grass, but one of them flopped about and gurgled in his death throes. Pete jumped from the ditch, walked over
and coolly finished him off with a head shot before returning to Ensign Cochran.
“Gooks are going to be like fleas in the whole AO,” he said. “Your best bet is to keep in the ditch til you get to the jungle. Stay low in the water. Float and go under if you have to. When you get clear, head toward Dong Tam and Shit City.”
“What do you mean, my best bet?” Cochran protested. “What about you?”
“There’s not much cover in the ditch,” Pete hurried on. “One of us might get through. Two of us together don’t stand a chance. I’m going to cut back through the edge of the village and see if I can’t follow the small canal. They won’t be expecting that. If it’ll keep raining, we both might make it.”
Rain roared and thundered and crashed around them. Cochran had lost his bush hat and water streamed off his face.
“Pete ... ?”
“Get the hell going. Haul anchor. Now!”
Pete’s gaze in the slanting deluge turned toward Vam Tho. Cochran suddenly realized what he was up to. It was madness. He was going to try to slip through all the VC in the world in order to reach Vam Tho. He looked as dangerous and determined as a bull elephant on the prod.
“Let her go, Pete,” Cochran said. “You’ll never make it.”
“We have unfinished business,” Pete replied grimly. “This was my fault for letting the bitch live.”
His mind was set. Cochran knew better than to argue with him when he was like that. Besides, they were wasting time. Stay in one place too long, neither of them would make it.
“God keep you, Mister Brauer,” Cochran said.
“God keep you, Ensign Cochran.”
Then Pete was gone into the storm.
Remembering that moment, Doctor Cochran’s eyes misted.
“I almost made it to the jungle,” the doctor recalled with a dismissive shrug. “Four VC came along the ditch toward me. I got down in the water as low as I could among some weeds, but they found me and dragged me out. I thought they were going to execute me right then, but one of them started jabbering something. They probably thought a captured GI was better than a dead one.”
The Return: A Novel of Vietnam Page 26
