“We could capture everybody and tie them up, and cut the phone lines.”
“With a dozen and a half guys? And nobody is going to get away? You’ve been watching too much television, Lieutenant. I wouldn’t try it with the whole company. Besides, we are trying to do this without anybody knowing about us. No casualties, no kidnapping.”
Fairfax simply pouted. At some point I was going to be tempted to put him in a body bag, just like Donovan and Masurski.
He also protested when I ordered the men to dump their chutes and related gear at the edge of the clearing. He wanted us to carry everything out, just like we would if this was an exercise in the drop zone. Fairfax didn’t realize that this was combat conditions, or at least as close as we could get without getting shot at. I made the point by tossing my steel pot helmet on top of the collection of chutes and digging out a boonie hat. I also made a point of checking the clip on my.45, and slinging Captain Donovan’s over my shoulder. The other men noticed this and got very serious, and checked their own gear over as well.
We made ourselves comfortable until later that evening. At 2100 we moved out. I had my scouts out ahead of us. The center of the march was the three stretchers, each being carried by two men. Doc Gerald and I were with this group. I had a large stick I was using as a cane, and once I got down to the roadway, could make decent speed with it. Fairfax trailed behind us a little. Briscoe played tail-end Charlie, keeping an eye out for stragglers, and the rest of the men were used for flankers and to alternate with the stretcher bearers.
Our march that night sucked. The town was only a couple of klicks, maybe a mile and a half, down around the bend from where we had landed. If we could have kept going, we could have marched through it in ten minutes, with time to spare. Instead, we spent half the night crawling on hillsides and through the brush around the town, dragging stretchers and me half the time, just to go another two kilometers. Then we couldn’t make great time since we had to get off the road several times when traffic came through, once when a convoy of Nicaraguan Army trucks trundled through. Still we made about ten kilometers north of the town when it started to get light, and I called it quits. We holed up a couple of hundred meters off the road in a small notch in the hillside. It was now Thursday morning, 12 November.
I had Thompson rig up the radio again. “Let’s call home, see if anybody answers,” I told him. We were still way too far from home to reach anybody on the ground, but maybe they had a plane searching for us.
Thompson set the Prick 77 on a log and did what he did with it. “Whiskey Zulu calling Whiskey Home. Come in please. Whiskey Zulu calling Whiskey Home. Please respond.” He tried this a few more times, and told me, “Nothing, sir. I’m going to try an alternate frequency.” I just nodded to him. For all my math, I don’t really know how radio works. I’d be a fool telling the man his business. He fiddled with a dial, and then repeated, “Whiskey Zulu calling Whiskey Home. Come in please. Whiskey Zulu calling Whiskey Home. Come in please.” After several tries, he said, “Sorry, sir.”
We holed up for the day and moved again that night. During the day, I kept a couple of lookouts watching the road, and checking on traffic and Sandinista movements. We made a bit better time that night, but still couldn’t raise anybody on the Prick 77 before the march, although Thompson couldn’t find any faults with the radio. The next morning, the 13th, a Friday, we had made another fifteen klicks. By my estimate we had covered about half the distance to the border.
As was our routine by now, as soon as we made our invisible camp, Briscoe deployed sentries and Thompson set up the radio and made a call home. “Whiskey Zulu calling Whiskey Home. Come in please. Whiskey Zulu calling Whiskey Home. Please respond.” He let go the button on the handset, hoping for a response, and there was a sudden burst of static from the earpiece, along with a scratchy voice. Thompson looked up at me in surprise. There were some more scratches coming from the handset. I pointed to it and said, “Well, answer the phone!”
“Whiskey Home, say again, transmission was garbled.”
Thompson’s face had a look of intense concentration as he tried to hear through the static. Whoever we were talking to was a long ways away, but at least we were talking to somebody. Finally he turned it off. He looked up at me and Briscoe and Fairfax, and said, “I wasn’t getting all that much, sir, but I’m to try and call back in another two hours. It wasn’t the Army, it was the Navy!”
“The Navy!” I exclaimed.
He nodded. “Yes, sir. I really couldn’t get much, but it was somebody called Foxtrot Charlie Niner, and they were an Echo Two Charlie. Any idea what that means, sir?”
Fairfax looked confused, and Briscoe just shook his head. The only thing I could figure was that Echo Two Charlie meant an E2C, a Navy version of an AWACS bird, which flew off carriers and supposedly had more electronic equipment than God. Was the Navy out looking for us, too? I didn’t care how we got home, but if the Navy rescued us, we’d never hear the end of it!
“The only E2C I’ve ever heard of is a Navy carrier plane. Maybe there’s a carrier somewhere that can hear us. They say to call again in two hours?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So, we call again. Let’s get comfortable.” I dug another Lurp out of my pack and had Briscoe get a camp organized. We were running a cold camp, so no fires were used for cooking, but we still needed to designate a latrine area, garbage pile, set watches, and so forth. I was beat. After my really awful meal, I napped. I wasn’t the only one.
I woke up with a sharp pain when Thompson nudged my right foot, the one on my bad leg. I grunted and gave him a dirty look, but he apologized. “It’s time, sir.”
I nodded and got to my feet. Briscoe joined up with me and we went to where Thompson was set up. He flipped his switches and spoke into the handset, “Whiskey Zulu calling Whiskey Home. Come in please.”
This time the response was immediate and much clearer. “Whiskey Zulu, this is Foxtrot Delta Four. How do you read me?”
“Foxtrot Delta Four, we read you five by five.”
“Whiskey Zulu, good to hear from you.”
“Foxtrot Delta Four, even better to hear from you!”
“Where are you guys? Say condition.”
Thompson looked up at me. “What should I say, sir?”
I nodded. “Let me have it.” Thompson handed me the handset. I keyed the transmitter and said, “Foxtrot Delta Four, this is Whiskey Zulu Actual, do you read?”
“Loud and clear, Whiskey Zulu Actual.”
I grabbed the map and said, “No map coordinates Foxtrot Delta Four. Best we can figure we’re about 50 kilometers south and thirty kilometers east of…” I looked at the map again, and then gave him the map number and coordinates of a village that was on the Honduran map. “We are requesting immediate extraction.”
“Whiskey Zulu, you guys decide to go for a walk?” asked the incredulous voice.
“We just land where they drop us, Foxtrot Delta Four. Repeat, we are requesting immediate extraction.”
The voice got serious again. “Say condition, Whiskey Zulu.”
“We have two dead and one needing immediate dustoff, and we are low on food and water.” A dustoff was a casualty evacuation, similar to a medevac flight.
“Whiskey Zulu, be advised, we’ll need to pass this along.”
“Understood, Foxtrot Delta Four. We’ll call again at 1200. Whiskey Zulu clear.” I handed the handset back to Thompson. There were a lot of anxious faces looking at me. “Well, I would say this is a good thing. They know we’re alive, even if we’re not where we’re supposed to be. Now we just need to organize a dustoff.”