by Eric Helm
As the choppers came closer, the radio burst into life. From his position near the jeep, Albright crawled to it and snatched the handset off the passenger seat. He stood up, saw the helicopters and then dropped to one knee. He spoke quietly, the words barely audible.
The aircraft turned slightly and began a long descent. None of them broke from the formation. Gerber cast a puzzled look in Albright’s direction. He whispered that they were maintaining unit integrity. The whole flight would touch down near them with the reinforcements and ammo they had requested.
Gerber nodded and turned back to watch the choppers. One ship left the formation, dived to the ground, hovered along it and then broke to the right, climbing rapidly. As it pulled up, a smoke grenade tumbled from the rear. It struck the ground, bounced and then began billowing yellow smoke.
The flight got closer. The noise from the choppers drifted across the village. When they were near the ground, they flared, almost in unison. As the skids leveled, the door guns remained silent. The gunships whipping along the sides of the flight didn’t fire. Everyone was waiting for the enemy to appear.
Then, just before the helicopters touched ground, one of them broke from the flight, crossing in front of it and spewing great clouds of smoke. The aircraft turned up on the side and swung around so that Gerber lost sight of the helicopters. He had never realized how effective Smoky could be.
Seconds later the aircraft touched down and then lifted off, climbing to the north away from the village. Still there was no shooting. The enemy, hidden among the hootches and cover of Ap Tan Hoa Four, refused to come out to fight.
As the smoke dissipated, a line of men moved forward. They swept across the open field on line, and as they approached the village they began to disappear from sight.
Gerber’s attention was drawn away as the flight turned again, coming toward them. It set up behind them. Again the smoke ship broke away and began to spray a gray-white cloud that obscured the village. Just as the cloud began to settle to the ground, a single aircraft dropped from the rear of the formation. It touched down near the jeeps. As the skids hit the road, the men leaped to the ground and the helicopter took off in a cloud of swirling dust and smoke.
One of the men ran around the rear of the jeep and fell to the rice paddy beside Gerber. He glanced at the village that was just becoming visible again.
“What you got?”
“Maybe two dozen VC and NVA. Haven’t seen them since they rushed us.”
There was a single shot, but it came from an M-16. The men that Gerber could see on the outskirts of the village dived for cover. A cloud of red appeared on the main street. Gerber figured that one of the strikers had thrown a smoke grenade, but there was still no return fire. A moment later the sweep began again, the men moving slowly now, staying close to the cover that was available.
A burst ripped through the quiet, but it sounded like an M-60 machine gun and not a Russian-made RPD. The American who had talked to Gerber crawled away, heading toward the jeep. He whispered something to Albright and then grabbed the handset from the radio. He spoke into it, nodded and then called back.
“Our guys are getting a little trigger-happy. They haven’t found the enemy.”
“They didn’t walk out,” said Gerber, “and the ground looks too wet and soft to hold much in the way of a tunnel complex.”
There was a single explosion from a grenade, but Gerber couldn’t see where it had detonated. He rolled to his left just as the roof of a hootch collapsed, the dirt swirling upward. From it came a sustained burst that sounded like ripping cloth. Several strikers returned fire, their rounds punching into the mud wall.
A moment later the weapon flew out the door, and a lone man, dressed only in black pajama shorts, followed it, his hands in the air. He had taken only three steps when a shot from the rear dropped him. As he fell, the strikers opened fire on another hootch. That was returned sporadically. One of the strikers began to crawl forward. He disappeared into a depression, and a moment later one arm and shoulder appeared as he threw a grenade.
The hootch blew up with a muffled roar. The roof fell in and one wall collapsed in a cloud of red dust. The explosion exposed two men. Gerber aimed at one, but before he could pull the trigger one of them threw down his rifle and staggered into the open. He fell to his knees and then onto his stomach.
The second man didn’t move until someone appeared in the door of the hootch. Then he tried to shoot, but the striker was too fast. The burst lifted the man off his feet and slammed him into a wall. He slid down it slowly as the striker leaped toward him, jerking the AK from his hands.
There was a wild burst of firing on the east side of the ville. The RPD opened up, supported by a couple of AKs. Green tracers struck the ground and tumbled harmlessly upward. The firing increased as more weapons joined it. Then came the answer from the Americans and the strikers. The sound of M-16s, M-60s and M-79s combined into a single, long detonation that washed out all other noise. Dirt and smoke drifted over the battlefield.
Slightly to the north of where he crouched, Gerber noticed a half-dozen enemy soldiers appear. They were trying vainly to keep their heads down, and this was exactly what Gerber had anticipated. He waited as the fleeing men came closer, then yelled for them to halt. One of them did, dropping his AK, but the others simply opened fire. Their shots were wild, kicking up dirt near Gerber and Fetterman and the strikers with them. The strikers returned fire, killing two NVA soldiers. A third tried to flee into the swamps but was cut down. The rest of the men dropped their weapons and lifted hands in surrender.
Gerber got to his feet and moved toward the enemy soldiers. When he reached them, he ordered them to get down, spread their arms and legs and lie still.
By now, firing in the village had begun to taper off. The M-16s were hammering away, but the AKs and the RPD had fallen silent. Gerber took cover near the side of an old ox-cart as the strikers maneuvered toward a hootch. When they were close, they used grenades, blowing off the roof and then dropping two of the walls. They poured more rounds into the smoking rubble until one of the Americans ordered them to cease fire.
A silence descended on the village. The men formed again and began a quick sweep, searching for the enemy. They poked into the hootches that were still standing, opened the family bunkers and kicked over stacks of loose lumber or piles of gourds. They opened the water buffalo pens and searched through them carefully. Occasionally they would find something: a couple of rifles wrapped in heavy cloth, or ammunition in tin cans that required an opener to get at the bullets.
A Special Forces lieutenant approached Gerber, and his gaze fell on the two men spread-eagled on the ground. “What you got?”
“Prisoners. We’d better get them into camp. See if we can get some answers.”
The lieutenant looked at the enemy soldiers and then at the body of Thompson. Albright had dragged the body closer to the jeep. Gerber could see the lieutenant’s jaw muscles working. There was hate in his eyes, and his finger tightened on the trigger of his weapon.
Gerber stepped toward the young officer. “If you kill them, we won’t find out what happened here. They’ll be nothing but dead soldiers. We keep them alive and we’ll be able to hurt the enemy more.”
Still the lieutenant kept his eyes on the two enemy soldiers. He moved the barrel of his weapon toward them slowly, as if thinking it over. Gerber wanted to step in and stop him, but knew that any movement might set him off.
“Lieutenant, think it over.”
“They won’t talk. They won’t say a word. They never do.”
“Look at them,” ordered Gerber. “These aren’t hard-core regulars. They’re not fanatics from the North. We handle this right and we’ll get a lot of information out of them.”
The lieutenant tore his eyes from the two men and looked up at Gerber. “You sure, sir?”
“I’m positive. A live soldier can tell us many things, but a dead one is just that — dead.”
“Al
l right, Captain.” He pointed at Albright. “Get these guys tied up and prepare them for travel. Check them for weapons.”
“Yes, sir.”
The men were all on their feet then. Fetterman had moved from his position and picked up Thompson’s body. He placed it in the rear of one of the jeeps.
“Sir,” said the lieutenant, “the choppers are on call and we can have them back whenever we want.”
“You satisfied with the sweep through the ville?”
The lieutenant turned and studied Ap Tan Hoa behind him. He stared at it for thirty seconds or more and then nodded. “Given the time of day and the fact that we got the enemy, yes, I’m satisfied.”
“Then whistle up the choppers and let’s get out of here.”
“Thompson’s jeep can’t be driven,” Albright informed Gerber.
“Then destroy it.”
“Captain,” said Fetterman, “you want to fly back or go in the jeep.”
“I want to stay with the prisoners.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll go back with Sergeant Albright. We’d like a couple of strikers.”
“Sure. Listen, we’ll get Thompson’s jeep rigged for destruction. You guys get out of here now while it’s still light.”
“Yes, sir.”
It was late afternoon when Lockridge and Jones and their dates left the house. They had spent most of the afternoon in the living room with its partially boarded bay window, listening to the records that had come from the American PX. The thing that bothered Jones was that nearly all of them were still sealed in their shrink-wrap. They hadn’t been opened and hadn’t been played. Le Tran explained that most of them were gifts from other GIs and that she didn’t like to play them alone.
Lockridge raised his eyebrows. “That mean you don’t bring them home?”
Le Tran lowered her eyes coyly. “You are the very first to come here.”
“Well,” said Lockridge happily. He moved closer and put his arm around her shoulders. He noticed that she stiffened briefly but then relaxed.
They all sat quietly for a few moments, listening to Jefferson Airplane and then to the Moody Blues. Lockridge thought that it was all crazy. Here he was sitting in a room furnished in a strange mixture of Western and Eastern styles, listening to music by American and English rock bands in the middle of a war zone. Tomorrow morning he would be on duty again, carrying a loaded weapon and waiting to shoot at Vietnamese, but this evening he was in the home of a beautiful Vietnamese woman. He felt himself stir with desire for her. Not love, he told himself, because she was Vietnamese, but lust. He lusted after her body, but she wasn’t the girl that he would take home to his mother.
Almost as if she had read his thoughts, she stood and walked over to the record player. As she turned it off, she said, “You will take us to dinner now? A nice place with low lights and soft music?”
Jones shot a glance at Lockridge, telling him that he didn’t want to spend a pile of money. Lockridge ignored the look because his goal was in sight. He knew that if he spent enough money on her, she would feel obligated to be nice to him.
“Do you have something special in mind?” he asked.
She spun and clapped her hands. “Yes. Something very nice, but it will not be expensive. I know you do not have much money, even for a rich American.”
“Not all Americans are rich.”
“You earn more in one month than a Vietnamese can earn in a whole year of hard labor.” There was a flicker behind her eyes, but Lockridge didn’t know if it was envy or anger. She added, “You have so very much and the Vietnamese have so very little.”
“You seem to have a nice house here.”
“Upstairs there are holes in the roof and broken windows that we cannot fix. There is only one bed. My sister and I take turns. She uses it one night and I get it the next.”
Lockridge hoped that it was Le Tran’s night for the bed, but didn’t say anything.
“We work for a month for very little money, enough to feed us and buy us clothes. There is never anything left over.”
Lockridge nodded slowly as if he was beginning to understand what she was telling him.
“We apply for jobs at your bases, but the applications are always turned down. We do not know the palms to grease. We do not know how to get the jobs that will pay us a year’s wages in a single month.”
Here comes the pitch, Lockridge thought.
But instead Le Tran said, “So we give it up. We find other ways to earn money, but there is never enough.”
And then Lockridge understood completely. Le Tran and her sister didn’t want a job at an American base. Neither believed that Lockridge or Jones could get them employment. The sisters had taken to the street to earn money in the world’s oldest profession. Lockridge, who had claimed repeatedly that he had never paid for it in his life, suddenly found himself facing a good-looking woman who would ask him to pay for it. Her approach was subtle, bordering on the brilliant, but she was a whore, pure and simple.
For a moment Lockridge considered ways of getting out of the situation and then realized that he didn’t want to. Her admission took some of the excitement out of the evening because he knew that they would end up in bed. And then he decided it didn’t matter because that was exactly what he wanted and he could now relax a little. He didn’t have to be charming. He just had to have money.
CHAPTER 8
THE JUNGLE EAST OF AN LOC, NEAR THE SONG BE RIVER
Sergeant Justin Tyme came awake slowly. He was aware that it was dark, damp and hot. His body ached. He didn’t open his eyes right away because he was listening to everything that was going on around him. To one side were quiet voices speaking English. And he knew that he was lying on something wet. He remembered the enemy bullets ripping into the side of the chopper and remembered it diving toward the trees. Then the world had turned to darkness.
He opened his eyes and saw that it wasn’t quite as dark as he had thought. There were the last slanting rays of the sun filtering through the thick jungle around him. He could see two men to the right, both crouched behind a fallen tree, staring into the jungle, M-16s in their hands.
With an effort that sent pain through his whole body, he sat up. He wiped a hand across his sweat-damp face and rubbed the perspiration on his fatigue jacket. He felt like an old man with pain in his joints. Ignoring that, he stood swaying for a moment as a curtain of black descended and then rose. He took a step forward and felt a hand grab him near the elbow.
“You better sit down.”
Slowly he turned and saw the crew chief standing next to him. “What happened?”
“We crashed into the trees. You were knocked out. Gave us a scare, your being unconscious for so long. Look, sit down and I’ll get you some water.”
“Why are we still here?”
“Lost the radios. Survival radio isn’t working, either. Dumb Peter Pilot dropped it into the water as he was unassing the aircraft. Idiot.”
Tyme felt suddenly weak. He reached out to steady himself. The crew chief helped him to the cargo compartment and had him sit down.
“We need to get out of here.”
“Can’t do it. Or couldn’t. Not with you unconscious and the door gunner hurt. We couldn’t carry you and we couldn’t leave you.”
“We’ve got to get away from the chopper because the VC will find us.”
The crew chief took a canteen from under his seat and opened it. He handed it to Tyme. “Sip the water. Not too much right away.”
“I know.” Tyme lifted the canteen to his lips and drank slowly. He filled his mouth with water, sloshed it around and then swallowed it. Incongruously the thought came to him that only in the movies did men caught in the jungle spit out water.
When he finished, he capped the canteen and repeated, “We need to get away from here.”
“We’re probably better off staying,” said the crew chief. “There’ll be people looking for us, and they have a better chance of finding us if we don’t stray to
o far from here.”
Tyme stood up again and felt his strength returning. “Where’s my weapon?”
Again the crew chief reached under his seat. “Right here. Kept it safe for you.”
“Good.” He checked it, then made sure the safety was on. “Now why haven’t we been found?”
“That’s a good question. We’ve seen a couple of helicopters fly over, but without radios we couldn’t contact them. We popped smoke, but they didn’t see it.”
“Didn’t you get a distress call out?”
“One of the first rounds hit the bundle of cables under the cargo compartment and that severed the radios from the antenna. AC made his call in the blind, but we didn’t receive any acknowledgment. After the Peter Pilot dropped the survival radio in the water, we weren’t able to raise anyone.”
Tyme shook his head. “I thought you guys were a little sharper than that. Christ, what a boondoggle.”
The crew chief shrugged helplessly. “What can I say? This was a DSC mission. We don’t expect enemy action during them. We should’ve been better prepared, but this is the first time we’ve had the DSC ship downed by the enemy.”
Tyme rubbed both his eyes. “Even if we don’t move far from the crash site, we’ve got to get away from the aircraft. Charlie will be looking for it, and if we stay here he’ll have an easy time getting to us.”
“All right. I’ll get the AC over and you can talk to him.”
“We don’t have a lot of time. It’ll be dark in a little while and we should get set before then.”
The crew chief nodded grimly and moved off. Tyme noticed that he didn’t seem to have much knowledge of the jungle. He made noise as he walked, stepping on small plants just beginning to fight their way into the thick carpet of rotting vegetation. If the enemy moved through the area, they would find all kinds of signs that someone had been there. Apart from the remains of the downed chopper, the ground around it was littered with trash — bits of cardboard from C-ration containers, paper, cigarette butts and empty cans, a few scattered rounds and a paperback novel. These guys were treating all this as if it were a walk through the woods and they didn’t give a shit about littering.
