“I’m just gonna tell Truex,” Thompson said grimly.
“What time we going out for Zim?” Johnson asked as they moved onto the food line.
“I’d thought we’d go out a bit early tonight and get him,” Williams said.
“Yeah, and they’ll be waiting for us,” Johnson said. “Why not now? It shouldn’t take long to find him, and with the choppers flying around, the gooks’ll be keeping their heads down.”
“Oh, shit!” Cram yelled so loudly, so suddenly, that everyone stopped talking. “They’re out of corn flakes. Hey, you!” he called to the cook at the back of the tent. “You’re out of fucken corn flakes. Yeah, you, goddammit! Where the hell are the corn flakes?”
The cook didn’t bother to answer. He just turned his thumbs down.
“Fuck it!” Cram yelled, slamming his hand down on the counter. “We work all night; you’d think they’d keep some fucken corn flakes for us. Motherfuckers! Fucken greedy motherfuckers!”
“Tracks make so much noise everyone
knows you’re coming.”
Trooper, 25th Division
Surgical Ward
U.S. Army Hospital, Zama, Japan
9
Track Unit
DENNEN WAS GEARED FOR war. After taking all the infantry and airborne training the Army could give him, he was assigned to a mechanized battalion of the 25th Division. Two days after he got to Nam he was choppered to his unit.
Dennen sat next to the crew chief the whole way out, looking over the M-60 machine gun at the checkerboard landscape rushing beneath them. He was checking the bolt on his M-16 when the crew chief tapped him on the shoulder and pointed out the open doorway. For a moment, Dennen couldn’t see anything. Then against the dark green of a tree line, he saw something flash. A moment later there was another flash, followed by a puff of white smoke.
“Phantoms,” the crew chief said, yelling over the rumbling of the chopper’s engines. Dennen, watching the smoke clear, slid home the bolt. Against all that green the puff of smoke looked insignificant.
The headquarters for the 25th Division lay forty miles northwest of Saigon, in the foothills of the central highlands. The Army had placed it astride one of the major infiltration routes from Cambodia; part of the protective arc offered up to Saigon by the 9th Division in the Delta, the 25th, based on Cu Chi, and the Americal and the 1st Division farther north. During the dry season, the land the 25th worked reached from impenetrable jungle, triple canopied, in the west to rice paddies in the south and north. During the monsoons, the jungle became wet and the paddies impassable, but it was dry now; the jungle was burning off and the paddies were rock-hard.
The chopper stayed at 1500 feet, out of the range of small arms fire, until it was over the base camp. Dennen braced himself as the pilot auto-rotated the copter down, and the huge base swung up at him. From 1500 feet it had looked like a great open dump, but as they plunged down, it became thousands of khaki-colored vehicles, fuel tanks and bunkers, and finally, as they came in, drab green Quonset huts. At the last moment the pilot eased up and, lowering the chopper down past a building, set it to rest on the pad.
The crew chief slid the machine gun along its mounting so that Dennen could get out the door. Bent over, carrying his duffel bag, he walked out from under the blades. The pilot, his head out the window, waited for him to clear the rotors, then gunning the engine, he nudged the chopper off the ground and, swinging it far out to the left, pulled it off the pad. In the three minutes it took Dennen to walk to the personnel center he was completely soaked with sweat.
Headquarters was sandbagged up to the windows. MP’s guarded all the entrances; it was all very proper and very military. Dennen was taken to Major Cohen, the personnel officer. The Major welcomed him to the unit, looked over his record, and going over to the map, showed him where they were and where he’d be. Dennen was about to leave when Cohen stopped him.
“Lieutenant.”
“Yes, sir,” Dennen said stiffly, coming to attention as he turned around.
“I see you’re a Ranger.” Yes, sir.
“Tracks are different than what you’re used to; they’re noisy. You can hear ’em coming. I want at least one gook for every track we lose.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good luck, Lieutenant.”
That evening Dennen rode out to his unit on a supply chopper carrying new machine gun barrels. The company had been fighting all day and had burned out almost all their 50’s. Still taking sporadic fire, they’d pulled into a night perimeter and needed the barrels in case they got hit again that night.
“They’re kicking some ass out there, sir,” the chopper pilot said. “It might be hot. We could get you out in the morning.”
“Will it be any better in the morning?” Dennen asked.
“No, probably not.”
“I’ll go, now.”
“OK,” the pilot said, “then would you mind...”
Dennen helped them load up. They took rolls of razor wire, crates of ammunition, medical supplies, and cans of water, loading the chopper until it was full. It was almost dark before Dennen, with his weapon resting between his feet, settled in beside the door gunner.
“Could be bad news,” the gunner said, handing him a radio helmet. “Night ain’t the best time to go in hot.”
The pilot revved the engine and, pulling a little pitch, lifted the craft. It moved forward a few yards, only to settle down again. The pilot gave it more rpm’s, and the chopper lifted straining, lifted again, and settled back onto the pad.
“Overloaded,” the crew chief yelled.
Adding power, the pilot gunned the engine, bouncing the chopper down the runway to substitute forward speed for lift. He continued to push the engine, making the chopper vibrate so violently that Dennen could hardly keep his feet in one spot. As the helicopter gained height, the jolts became harder and harder and farther apart until finally halfway down the runway it stayed airborne. The door gunner, puffing out his cheeks in relief, sat down on one of the ammunition crates.
The pilot quickly took the chopper up to 1500 feet and turned northwest. The gunner plugged Dennen’s head set into the overhead radio jack. Outside the chopper, it was dark. Dennen could barely make out the edge of the horizon. A few stars were just becoming visible. Suddenly, ten minutes out, sharp cracking sounds began snapping past the open doorway. The pilot suddenly dropped the chopper and slid it off to the left. As they fell, Dennen could see a thin bluish-green line arching up at them out of the blackness.
“Watch that son of a bitch,” the pilot said over the intercom. Wrenching the chopper around, he took it back to the right.
“Four o’clock,” the gunner said, looking out the open doorway.
“Going down!” the pilot’s voice crackled through the head set.
Another burst of greenish-blue light hurtled past the open side of the chopper.
“Watch out, Ralph.”
“Roger that.”
Dennen moved back to give the gunner room to swing his M-60. Diving, the tracers followed them down to almost 500 feet and then stopped. The pilot leveled off.
Holding onto the door struts, Dennen looked at the gunner, who was grinning as he held up his thumb. The pilot’s voice cut into the radio set. “36, this is 33 Spider. Approximately 05 out from location. Please mark the LZ.”
“33 Spider, this is 36. Roger that.”
“36, this is 33. Are you taking fire?”
“33, roger that.”
“36, this is 33. What kind?”
“33,” the voice, strained and tired, came through Dennen’s head set. “Mortars; repeat, mortars. Will mark with strobe.”
“36, this is 33. Roger that. Will come right in.”
“33, affirmative.”
A few minutes later Dennen could see ahead of them a brilliant sharp white light flickering in the center of miles of blackness.
“36, this is 33 Spider. I have strobe in sight.”
“3
3 roger that.”
The pilot banked the chopper toward the light and flew in over the perimeter defense. Dennen watched the darkened silhouettes of tanks and armored personnel carriers pass under them. The pilot was easing into a hover when the gunner slapped his hands to his face, jerked upright, and fell backwards onto the shell cases behind him. Dennen grabbed him as he began sliding down the cases. Blood, turned a strange metallic green by the flashing strobe, ran out from under the gunner’s helmet. Dennen ripped it off. The whole back of the boy’s head was gone—blown away. Dennen held him till the chopper landed.
In the dark they took the body from him. The first sergeant, a grenade launcher tucked into the crook of his arm, led the way to the Old Man.
It was difficult going. The tracks had flattened the jungle but not destroyed it. The roots and veins were still there, bent and broken, all over the ground. They stumbled through to the center of the base, which was surrounded by tracks—thirty- and forty-ton shadows facing out in a circular perimeter defense with the command track, fire track, and angel track in the center.
The troopers not on guard duty stood huddled up against their machines. No one was smoking. There were no lights. Dennen and the Sergeant had almost reached the command track when one of the 50’s off to their right began opening up. A moment later, an RPG sputtered across the perimeter. Everyone hit the ground while that whole quadrant of the perimeter began firing. The noise was deafening. Kneeling, Dennen tried to see where the fire was coming from. Beside him the Sergeant broke open his grenade launcher and slipped in a round. Suddenly one of the tracks exploded. There was a hissing roar as the gasoline went off and a towering flame lit the whole area. Dennen could see figures hunched over, running from the fire, as the sharp firing of the AK’s broke over them.
Dennen got to his feet. “Get that tank over there,” he shouted. Mortars began whooshing into the perimeter. Silhouetted against the flames, troopers could be seen tumbling over as they were hit.
“Get it going, goddammit,” Dennen yelled. “Get that tank over there.” A sniper round whistled by his head. “That tank! Yes, you, move it out...Now, dammit...There!”
Roaring and puffing, the tank began backing up. From all sides of the perimeter red tracers sliced out into the surrounding jungle.
Dennen, urgently motioning the tank on, stepped out of the way as it rolled by. Gaining speed, it hit the burning track at almost twenty miles an hour, rolling it over into the jungle. With a grinding of metal it pushed the flaming wreck out of the perimeter and into the ground, putting out the fire. There, with tracer rounds skipping off its armor plate, the tank shifted gears and, with its machine guns roaring, began moving back into the perimeter. Dennen gathered some troopers and, moving out toward it, they killed three VC who were following it in. The incoming rounds stopped. The Sergeant found him again setting up a new perimeter.
“Sorry, sir,” he said, “it ain’t always like this.”
“There any patrols out?”
“No, sir, just our perimeter defenses.”
“There should have been!”
The ground was a shambles. All around them, in the suffocating dark night, medics were working on the wounded while the RTO’s were using the radios to call in Dust Offs.
They found the Captain near his command track, but in the dark Dennen could barely make out his face; the light from the radio dials was the only illumination.
The Captain motioned for Dennen to wait while he finished calling for gunships. Dennen leaned against the track, holding his M-16 in his arms. He counted two tanks and eleven APC’s; counting the one that had burned, that would be twelve. Each APC, he figured, carried one 50 and two M-60’s. At 1500 rounds per minute, that was a lot of fire power. Add the tracks together, and the amount became enormous. It would take a battalion even to hope to overrun their perimeter.
“Water, sir,” one of the troopers said, handing him a cup.
“Yeah, thanks. Where did you get it?”
“From the track.”
Dennen shook his head. “How many gallons does each track carry?” He could remember making it a day and a half on two canteens.
“About fifty.”
“Plush,” Dennen said, handing back the cup. Well, he thought, at least he’d be moving in comfort.
The Captain put down the horn.
“Not the best night to arrive,” he said almost apologetically.
“What is it? I mean, what did you run into?” Dennen took off his helmet and wiped his forehead.
“I don’t know,” the Captain said wearily. “Must be a base camp, I guess. They’ve been fighting us every goddamn inch of the way. We’re close to something, or they’d have pulled out. I lost two tracks today—three.” He pointed to the wreck still smoldering in the jungle. “Whatever it is, they don’t want to give it up. They’ll fight when they’ve caught us, or when they don’t want to give something up. Anyway,” he said, “I’m glad you’re here. Our forward observer was hit two days ago. You’ll be with the second platoon. I have the third and Sergeant Smith the first. First time with tracks?”
“Yes, sir, first time,” Dennen said. “I was infantry and Airborne.”
“Well, try to get some sleep. I think they’ll leave us alone for a while. Smith, take him to his track.”
A short time later, the gunships came over.
The Dust Offs flew in and out all night. Kept awake, Dennen listened to them moving in and out over his head. The noise was appalling. He had never heard such sustained racket. If the gooks weren’t awake before, they surely were now.
Dennen was pleased at how calm he’d been—his first firefight. He’d been ready. They’d made him ready—the months of training, the time in Florida, jump school. He lay there listening to the movement around him, comforted in the knowledge that he was as well trained as any soldier anywhere.
For Dennen there was nothing unnatural in what had happened. Fighting, for him, was a part of living. The strong won out, and the weak went under. That was all there was to it. Of course there was suffering, but that was the price you paid.
At daybreak the boys, wearing their flack jackets and steel pots, sat on their tracks, eating breakfast, while the Captain met with the unit Commanders. He had the map spread out in front of his track.
“OK,” he said, pointing down at the map. “We’ll go through in column. I want the two big boys leading the first and third platoons. I’ll take the center. When we hit something big, spread out in line and pull back 250 meters and let the gunships and artillery handle it. If it’s big, Brigade will CA in some legs. Dennen,” he added, “if it is big, I want you to put the arty in about 500 meters behind their position. I’ll call in gunships to anchor the flanks, and we’ll drive them into the arty.”
Dennen’s platoon took the first column. Settling into the command seat behind the 50, he motioned them forward, taking his APC to a position behind the lead tank.
It was not yet six o’clock when they began crashing through the jungle. He had never seen anything like it, even in Florida. It was like moving through a thick live curtain. Everything was circular and growing from the top down rather than the bottom up. Great vines—millions of them—some two or three inches thick, intertwined with one another, were anchored to roots crawling along the ground. Shrubs, some the height of small bushes, hid the roots under their tubular branches. Bamboo-like plants, five or six feet tall, shot up straight as poles through the tangle, cutting out what little sun got through the vines.
Bouncing and jumping, the tracks tore their way through this tangle, with the 56-ton tank in the lead to level a path. The three columns had to stay within ten feet of each other to keep visual contact, and even then they lost each other for minutes on end. The noise was always there, and over the smell of rotting plants was the thick nauseating odor of hot oil and gasoline.
They had been moving for half an hour when an APC in the column off to Dennen’s right suddenly spun to its left and began cra
shing through the bushes toward them, only to stop as suddenly, tilted, with its front end in a ditch.
“31/8,” the radio in front of Dennen blasted out, “31/8 threw a tread.”
“31/8,” the radio crackled again, “how long will it take to repair?”
Dennen stopped his column.
“31/8, about an hour.”
“44/8, 43, and 32 stay with 31. Catch up when fixed.”
Dennen pulled his APC out of the line and pushed through the jungle toward the damaged track. The three support tracks, turning out of their columns, joined Dennen’s APC in a diamond formation around the disabled vehicle, swinging out their weapons to cover all the flanks. Dennen ordered one gunner to stay on top of each track and the rest to stay on the ground. It was grueling, heavy work repairing the disabled vehicle. Guarded by their own tracks, the men strained to remove the heavy links. Far away they could hear the sound of explosions muffled by the jungle. Dennen, stripped to the waist and struggling with the jack stopped to listen.
“Grenades,” one of the troopers said. “The gooks string wires along the trees and hang grenades on them with the pin almost out. The track’s antennas catch the wires, pulling the grenades out of the trees, and bang! Most of the time they get everybody riding on top.”
“Sometimes they hang some phosphorous,” another trooper said. “That really kicks some ass.”
When the tank was fixed, they pulled out. Dennen ignored the path made by the tanks that had gone ahead and pulled his column off almost 100 meters before he turned in the direction the company had gone. He caught up with them about an hour later, and for the rest of the morning the whole unit drove back and forth across their sector.
At noon they lost another APC. It was like a ship being suddenly torpedoed. One moment it was there, riding in column, bold and brassy, and the next it was broken and burning, its insides blown out. The gunners on the other tracks swept their guns from side to side, and the troopers riding on the APC’s took the safeties off their weapons.
Dennen stopped his column and, sliding off his APC, walked over to the burning track. The gunners had been thrown clear; the medic was already bent over one of them. The track was lying on its side and above the tread was a small hole no more than four inches across. The steel around it was smoldering red. Dennen called over Sergeant Smith, and the two of them walked back to the place where the track had been hit.
365 Days Page 10
