We moved as quickly as we could, but the heat and fatigue, and fifty pounds of gear, was slowing us down.
We took a few minutes’ break every hour and pushed on until dusk, not saying much, but I’m sure everyone, myself included, was thinking about why the lady hadn’t blown me out of the water. I had a few answers to that, and it had less to do with a sudden feeling of compassion on her part and more to do with fucking with our heads.
The sun had sunk into Laos, and the enemy moves at night.
We heard trucks and tanks rumbling somewhere to our right, then heard men chatting and laughing not far away. If I’d had a radio, I would have called in artillery on them. Actually, if I’d had a radio, I would have called in choppers to get us the hell out of there right after Muller and Landon got hit. But the lady had left us mute and deaf to the outside world.
We moved more quickly away from the enemy troop movements and about an hour later, we found a small hill covered with tall elephant grass where we set up a defensive perimeter, for what it was worth. We were six lightly armed guys, surrounded by massive numbers of enemy troops. Plus, one sniper, who knew we were there, but who wanted to keep us for herself.
We ate some dehydrated rations reconstituted in their pouches with tepid canteen water. No one said much.
About midnight, we took turns sleeping and keeping watch; two up, four down. But no one slept much. Near dawn, I was on guard duty with Sergeant Dawson, an old guy at thirty, who was on his second tour, and probably his last.
He said to me in a quiet voice, “You sure it was a woman?”
I nodded and grunted.
“You sure? You saw tits and stuff?”
I almost laughed. I replied, “I saw her in my field glasses. It was a woman.” I added, “They make good snipers.”
He nodded. “Had one in Quang Tri once. Killed four guys before we blew the shit out of her with rockets.” He added, “We found her head.”
I didn’t reply.
He asked the obvious. “Why didn’t she nail you?”
“Don’t know.”
“Maybe it’s like… maybe there’s a two-guy-a-day limit on her hunting permit.”
“Not funny.”
“No. Not funny.” He asked, “You think we gave her the slip?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”
And that was the end of the conversation.
We moved out at first light and headed south toward Rendezvous Alpha.
About noon, we got to believing that we might make it. There were no more big streams to cross, just a few little brooks that were choked with good covering brush, and there were no open areas on the map that we couldn’t avoid. But then we noticed that the trees and the brush started to look a little sick, and within half an hour, we realized we were in an Agent Orange defoliated area that wasn’t marked on the map.
Pretty soon we were moving through a dead zone of bare trees and brown, withered brush that offered no concealment. Dawson said, “Lieutenant, we got to go back and around this defoliation.”
I replied, “We don’t know how big the area is. It might be a full day detour, then we’re not going to get to Alpha.”
He nodded and looked around. He said, “At least Charlie ain’t around here. They don’t like the defoliated areas.”
“Neither do I.”
We took a break, spread out, and got down, as per standard operating procedure when a patrol is stopped.
Smitty pulled a jungle bar out of his packet and bit off a piece of the chalky, so-called chocolate. He said, “That bitch.” Meaning the sniper, of course. “That bitch could have wasted us all back there in that napalm area. She could’ve wasted at least you, Lieutenant, back at the stream, and maybe a few more of us. What’s her fucking game?”
I didn’t reply, and neither did anyone else.
I was getting a bad feeling about this place, so I stood, put on my rucksack, and said, “Saddle up and move out.”
Everyone stood, and Andolotti unzipped his fly and said, “Hold up. Gotta take a quick piss.”
About midstream, he pitched backward and landed with a thump on his back, still holding his thing, which was still streaming yellow piss.
We all hit the ground and lay frozen on the dead, chemical-smelling earth.
I called out, “Andolotti!”
No reply. I turned my head and eyes toward him. His chest was heaving, and I saw blood around his mouth. He gave a final heave and lay still.
From the way he’d been thrown backward, I knew he’d been hit square in the chest, so I knew where the shot had come from. Through the dead vegetation, I could see a slight rise in the land about a hundred meters due west. I called out, “Follow my tracers!” I took aim from my prone position and fired a long burst toward the rise. Every sixth round was a red, streaking tracer that looked like a laser beam pointing toward the suspected target.
Dawson, Smitty, and Johnson joined in with long bursts of M-16 fire, and we raked the hill, while Beatty, who had the grenade launcher, popped three phosphorous grenades at the hill, setting the dead vegetation ablaze.
I shouted, “Outta here!”
We moved back quickly in a crouch, firing to cover our retreat.
Beatty slipped another phosphorous round in his grenade launcher and was about to get off a hip shot when the launcher flew out of his hands, and he went backward like he’d been hit by a truck.
Dawson yelled, “Beatty’s hit!”
I shouted, “Move back! Move back!”
I was about ten meters from Beatty, and I could see he was still alive. I hit the ground and started crawling toward him, then saw his body jerk in three quick movements. A fourth shot hit his grenade launcher and a fifth shot threw dirt in my face. I got the message and got the hell out of there.
I joined up with Dawson, Smitty, and Johnson. We ran like hell until we came upon a dry gulley, which we dropped into. We moved in a crouch through the gulley for a few hundred meters until I gave the order to stop. This wasn’t the direction we needed to go, so I ordered everyone out of the gulley, and we moved quickly due south, toward our rendezvous point, which was still about thirty kilometers away.
We got out of the defoliated area and entered a place that had been carpet-bombed by B-52S. The forest had been blasted to splinters by the five-hundred- and one-thousand-pound bombs, and craters as big as a house dotted the landscape.
All around us were twisted pieces of steel, almost unrecognizable as once being vehicles. Pieces of rotting corpses lay everywhere, and the surviving trees were draped with body parts. Some sort of carrion-eating birds were feasting and barely noticed us.
The sun was sinking, and we were near the end of our physical limits and our mental endurance, so I ordered everyone into a bomb crater. We lay along the sloping earth walls of the crater, caught our breaths, and drank from our canteens. The place stank of rotting flesh.
Dawson grabbed an arm and flung it out of the crater, and then made the standard joke and said, “So, we count the arms and legs, divide by four, and we got a body count.”
No one laughed.
He finished a canteen of water and informed us, “Two bad things about bomb strike zones. One, Charlie comes looking for salvage and pieces of people to bury. Two, the B-52S sometimes come back to the same place to get the guys looking for stuff.” He added, unnecessarily, “We gotta get outta here.”
I agreed and said, “Take five, then we move.” I took out my map and studied it.
Smitty said to me, “Hey, Lieutenant, why’s she always missing you?”
I didn’t reply.
Johnson asked me, “You think she’s still on us?”
I kept looking at the map and replied, “Assume she is.”
I climbed to the rim of the crater and looked through my field glasses. I swept the area in a 360-degree circle, pausing every ten degrees to focus on any possible movement, any glint of metal, or a wisp of smoke, or anything that didn’t look like it belonged in its surroundings.