Black Market

by Donald E. Zlotnik

  Koski looked at the captain and made a statement. “I’m walking point with him.” He didn’t ask, he told the captain.

  “Fine.” Youngbloode understood that there was no way Koski would leave Warner by himself, and he admired the loyalty Arnason’s men had for each other.

  “What about the wounded Marines?” Koski was still physically in good shape. He had taken a flesh wound through one of his lat muscles and a half-dozen cuts and frag wounds, but he knew that he still could carry one of the wounded men by himself.

  Youngbloode paused. He didn’t want to tell the men what Arnason had planned, but he wasn’t going to lie to them either. “We’re going to leave a small stay-behind force back here with them.” Youngbloode quickly added, “One of them has died, so there’s only two seriously wounded men left.”

  Koski thought for a second and looked over at Warner. He was torn between two loyalties. He wanted to stay with the detail protecting the wounded, but he couldn’t leave Warner to fend for himself, especially if he was going to be breaking point in the middle of the night. “Who’s staying with them?”

  “Arnason.” Youngbloode tried whispering the sergeant’s name.

  “Alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “No—”

  “Listen! He has the best chance. We can’t move those two guys or they’ll bleed to death, and if we all stay here…” Youngbloode didn’t need to finish his sentence. “We’ll be moving out as soon as it gets dark, unless the NVA attack.”

  Warner nodded his head.

  The artillery fires had kept the NVA at bay throughout the afternoon, and the unit that had surrounded the remnants of the recon teams had suffered heavy casualties trying to maintain a cordon around the trapped Americans. Late in the afternoon the NVA regimental commander gave his commander permission to withdraw and regroup his men before assaulting the American positions when it got dark. He was confident in his knowledge of American tactics and knew that the Americans would try to air-assault a company of infantry or maybe even a battalion near the trapped men, and then he was going to commit his reserve and render the Americans a crushing defeat. The surrounded Americans by the river were the perfect bait for his trap of antiaircraft weapons placed along the Laotian side of the river and scattered throughout the Khe Sanh Plateau.

  Arnason adjusted the artillery so that there was a gap in the circle of steel for the team to slip through. Woods and Welburg’s two flunkies had built a rock wall around the two wounded men and had stacked a couple piles of rocks for Arnason to use as fighting positions. He could call in the mortar round to within a few meters of his position if he had to and still be protected from the shrapnel if he stayed prone.

  Youngbloode scurried over to where Arnason sat next to the rock wall and whispered, “Good luck, Sergeant. I’ll be back as soon as I can for you.”

  Arnason grinned and nodded his head.

  Woods slipped over the wall and took up a position in the extra fighting spot.

  “What in the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Arnason was angry.

  “I’m staying with you.” The statement was nonnegotiable. “Spencer Barnett was enough for me, and I swore that would never happen again. All of us are going or I stay.”

  Arnason drew in a deep breath. He knew how much it had pained Woods when Spencer Barnett had been taken prisoner by the NVA a couple of months earlier. Woods had blamed himself for leaving him behind during a firefight, and Arnason could understand why he wasn’t going to do it again. “David, I’d feel a lot better if I knew—”

  Woods cut him off. “I’d feel a lot better if!”

  “Captain?” Arnason tried getting the captain involved.

  “I’ve already talked to him.” Woods made himself comfortable against the rocks. He planned on staying awhile.

  Youngbloode shrugged his shoulders. He had tried talking Woods out of staying back, but failed. He respected the team’s loyalty to each other enough not to order Woods to go.

  The shadow of the last man disappeared in the jungle. Woods felt very much alone, even though Arnason sat in the dark a few feet away. One of the Marines moaned and he reached over to gently rub his cheek. It wasn’t a very manly thing to do, but it was all the comfort he could give the badly wounded man, to let him know he wasn’t alone.

  Warner paused for only a second and looked up in the sky. They had broken out of the jungle and were in a growth of tall elephant grass that was well over their heads. He had to slow down his pace repeatedly for the walking wounded and to listen for any sign of the NVA. Twice he had to stop and check to see if they were still following him. No one had to be told that any noise would give them away.

  Artillery explosions echoed over the plateau as the escaping recon men eased through the tall grass. The big 175mm guns were firing out of Vandergrift, sending shells all over the wide grass-covered plains. The accuracy of the big guns was too erratic for them to have been used to protect the trapped team, but the brigade commander was using their fires to try to prevent any NVA relief forces from linking up with the unit surrounding his trapped recon teams. Any aircraft flying over the area was immediately under fire from large-caliber antiaircraft guns located in Laos and in the northern corner of the plateau. The brigade commander realized that a very big battle was building up, and his concern shifted to his whole combat force and the battalions that he had already deployed around Lang Vei.

  The escape column had been gone for over three hours when Arnason heard movement in the jungle surrounding their small rock fort. He slowly eased around in his fighting position until he could face the direction the threat was coming from.

  Woods had heard the soft noise also and had reached for one of the M-26 hand grenades he had lined up in front of him. He strained his ears to listen to the night sounds of the jungle. The insects were making noise all around the perimeter except near the river. He heard the sound again and it came from the water. Woods’s first thought was that the NVA were sneaking across the river and were planning on attacking from that direction. He low-crawled over to the edge of the cliff and pulled the pin on the grenade, rolling over on his back so that he could toss the fragmentation device up and out over his head.

  “Fuck!” The single whispered word rolled up over the edge of the cliff and was answered by another voice telling the first to be quiet.

  Arnason crawled on his stomach over to the edge of the sharp drop-off and peered over. He could just barely make out five dark spots floating on small bundles of jungle vegetation below him. “Pssst! Americans!” Arnason whispered loud enough to be heard by the shadows. The reaction was immediate.

  The closest dark bundle touched the shore. “Who are you?” The voice was very suspicious.

  “Arnason.”

  “We’re Marines … recon force.”

  The other bundles of vegetation beached themselves in the shallow water at the base of the cliff. Arnason and Woods could see by the shape of their shadows that they still had their backpacks. The Marines climbed the cliff with ease and rolled over the lip up to where Arnason waited.

  “Are there any more of you?” He whispered so low that it was hard to hear him.

  “No, we were the northernmost team and haven’t seen anyone else until now.” The team leader kept searching the jungle as he spoke. “What’s going on here?” His team members moved out around the dark rock fort and took up prone fighting positions.

  “I’ve got two seriously wounded with me and another NCO.” Arnason nodded at Woods’s shadow. “We’ve been fighting the NVA all day.”

  “We haven’t fired a shot. We heard all the ruckus and decided to try and float out using the river.”

  “It would have worked until you hit the shallows about a click downriver. The NVA have that stretch very well guarded.”

  The wounded Marine stirred. Arnason slipped his hand over the moaning man’s mouth. The Marine team leader looked down at the long shadow on the ground. “Can they be moved?”


  “No.”

  “Hmmm … then it looks like we’ll have to stay here with you-all.”

  “That’s not necessary. We’re expecting a relief force in the morning.”

  “That’s good. We’ll stay with you and go out with them too.” The Marine flashed a brief smile in the dim light. He made a soft clicking sound and his men gathered around him and listened for a couple of seconds before dropping their packs and disappearing in a fan-shaped formation in the jungle surrounding the small LZ.

  An artillery shell exploded on the reverse side of the hill from the escaping column. All the men dropped instinctively and tried melting into the sod. Shrapnel whistled overhead. Youngbloode low-crawled up to where Warner and Koski were.

  “Close!” Youngbloode whispered.

  Koski nodded back.

  “Do you know where we’re at?”

  Warner nodded and pointed. “A couple clicks from Lang Vei.” He slowly got back up on his feet and started walking again through the elephant grass. Warner had noticed an hour earlier that the grass was getting lower. He used the barrel of his rifle and his free hand to part the tall, slender blades in front of him, and he could see down in the shallow valley spread out below. Lang Vei loomed in the moonlight.

  Warner signaled with his hand for the captain to come forward and join him. He pointed.

  Youngbloode took a deep breath. He had seriously thought that the NVA would have been waiting for them to break out of the cordon. Actually, it had been a fairly easy walk. He reached into his side pocket and removed his URC-10. He knew that he was close enough to risk making a call.

  “Sack Jacket … Mud Puppy 01 … Over.”

  The operator answered almost immediately.

  “This is Puppy 01 … We’re just outside of Green Whiskey’s location and would like clearance to enter … Over.”

  The brigade commander’s voice came on the line. “Puppy 01! Don’t move! Stay right where you are until I can clear a path for you!” The colonel was nearly in shock. Youngbloode had to be somewhere near one of the infantry companies if he could see Lang Vei, or if he was close enough to the camp to ask permission to enter. He looked at his watch and saw that it was almost four in the morning.

  Youngbloode turned the volume way down on his radio, held it up to his ear, and listened to the colonel make a half-dozen calls to alert the units in the area that a friendly unit wanted to make a night passage. The escape column waited a little less than an hour for the units to get the word out to their troops, and then the colonel gave him permission to move toward the main gate to the Special Forces camp. The very first early morning rays of light made it easier to walk, and Warner veered a little to his right so that he could approach the main gate at a better angle. The escape column hadn’t moved two hundred meters when they ran into the perimeter of an infantry company that was dug in. They had been very close, and everyone in the escape column knew that the line would have opened fire if they had run into them during the night. Luck had been very much on their side, but in war, luck always made the difference between the winner and the loser.

  The NVA commander had tried twice during the night to move a squad to probe the American position near the river, and both times 4.2 rounds had driven them back. The regimental commander decided that he wasn’t going to waste any more of his men in the attempt and that he would continue using the Americans as live bait for relief helicopters and infantry.

  Morning brought a fury of activity around the Lang Vei Special Forces camp. The First Corps commander had committed all of the air assets he had at his disposal to the developing fight on the Khe Sanh Plateau and had planned four B-52 Arc Light diversions for first light in support of the infantry already on the ground. CH-47s lifted off the Vandergrift pads in a swarm and flew out to Lang Vei, carrying 105mm howitzers underneath and crews with basic loads of ammo inside. Two batteries of 105s were being airlifted simultaneously, and very soon there would be twelve additional artillery tubes that could support the developing battle.

  Arnason looked down and saw his hand shaking uncontrollably. He knew that it was caused by the large number of amphetamines he had been taking since the patrol had started. Woods was checking the wounded, who were still alive but in a very bad way. They wouldn’t make it through another day.

  The Arc Lights hit without warning. The B-52s had been flying so high that they couldn’t be heard, and the formation had assembled above the South China Sea, putting their target areas into their computers. The far bank of the river shook, and huge pieces of trees and dirt bounced over the water. The ground to the north of the cliffs shuddered and the sound was deafening. Arnason grabbed for his ears and curled up in a tight ball on the ground. Two-thousand-pound bombs were landing as close as three hundred meters away but sounded as if they were landing right on top of them. Shock waves pressed against their bodies, and Woods was sure they were going to die.

  The five Marines stumbled out of the edge of the jungle in shock from the Arc Light bombings taking place to their north, south, and west. After a short delay a string of bombs went off to their east, three thousand meters in front of the advancing American infantry.

  Two Huey slicks and four gunships circled the small LZ minutes after the bombs had fallen. The first ship landed and Youngbloode hopped out of one side as Koski leapt from the other. The two wounded Marines were put on stretchers by Army medics, the chopper had lifted out, and the second one had landed before Arnason or Woods realized what had happened. All of them were suffering from mild shell shock, and none of the five Marines, nor Arnason and Woods, could hear; they were temporarily deaf from the concussion bombs that had been mixed in with the two thousand pounders.

  Youngbloode and Koski helped them on the slick and slid in backward as the chopper banked over the river and gained altitude. Woods watched the small battlefield disappear and licked his upper lip. He tasted blood and realized for the first time that he was bleeding from his nose. He looked over at Arnason and saw that he was too, along with the Marines.

  Youngbloode patted Woods’s shoulder and smiled. They were safe now.

  Arnason leaned over and looked down at the ground flashing underneath the low-flying chopper. His hand was still shaking. He had no way of knowing that the great battle for the Khe Sanh Plateau was just starting and it would last for years.

  Epilogue

  The Navy corpsmen hurried to remove the wounded men from the helicopter. The pilot had wisely decided to fly directly to the large surgical hospital in Da Nang, rather than stop at one of the fire support bases and risk having to move the wounded to another aircraft.

  The crew chief walked around the olive drab aircraft and tried counting the bullet holes in the airframe. He gave up halfway around the Huey and stopped walking. The pilot joined him and the two of them just stood there with their hands in their pockets, staring in amazement over how many hits the chopper had taken while they remained airborne.

  Sergeant Welburg was lifted out of the helicopter and placed on a stretcher, where a team of corpsmen started cutting his uniform off his body, using heavy-duty scissors that looked like pruning shears. Welburg groaned and fluttered his eyes. He had been riding underneath a couple of the seriously wounded Marines, and his hair and body were caked with blood. The cold ground water coming from the hose the corpsman used to wash him off made Welburg shiver involuntarily.

  “I can’t find any wounds on this one.” The corpsman tried rolling him over using his free hand, and then called for help from a nearby doctor. The corpsman washed down Welburg’s backside and still couldn’t find any wounds.

  The doctor opened Welburg’s eyelid and shined a bright beam from his penlight directly into the sergeant’s cornea. The eye dilated instantly.

  “How you feeling, soldier?” The doctor had seen cases like this one before and didn’t want to waste any of his time.

  Welburg didn’t answer.

  The doctor leaned over and whispered in Welburg’s ear. “You should b
e taken out and shot for faking being wounded!” The doctor turned to leave the stretcher Welburg was on and looked back over his shoulder. “And I’m a liberal!”

  Welburg struggled to sit up on the blood-stained canvas stretcher. “Ugh! What’s going on? … Where am I?”

  The doctor ignored him and left to attend a bleeding Marine.

  Captain Youngbloode paused on the step leading up to the side door of his orderly room and stared at the neatly printed sign. He didn’t feel very much like a black tiger. He felt drained of everything. The brigade commander had declared his company nonoperational because of the huge number of casualties the unit had taken in the now-famous river fight. The NVA had lost over seven hundred men to the recon units’ accurate control of the air strikes and artillery. Youngbloode had proven his theory that recon teams could hide in the jungle and call in devastating firepower on enemy units. The senior staff officers would have to make some major modifications in the deployment procedures for the recon teams, but all in all, the concept worked.

  A deuce and a half stopped near the row of troop hooches and began unloading its passengers. Youngbloode could hear the muffled voices over the sound of the idling diesel engine. He smiled as the survivors of his company returned from the hospital. There had been only one man who hadn’t been wounded during the river fight, and Youngbloode was submitting the paperwork for his court-martial to the commanding general. The rest of the recon men had all received wounds, and there had been a big Purple Heart awards ceremony at the hospital for the survivors.

  Youngbloode smiled and opened the screen door. He was very proud of his company.

  “Good to have you back, sir!” The company clerk stood up as a sign of respect for the captain.

  Youngbloode smiled and nodded his head.

  “The morning report is on your desk sir, ready to be signed.” The clerk didn’t want to be pushy, but the important official document was due at the brigade headquarters before noon.