Phloop! Somebody in the squad set off a flare. We were all exposed.
For a moment we all watched it in fascination. Then Monaco started yelling.
“Right side! Right side! Blow the mines!”
“No! No!” Sergeant Simpson jumped up and started waving his hands. I looked at where I had put the claymore and saw a figure moving away from it. “He turned it!”
The claymore went off, and we all hit the dirt. I could hear bullets whining by me. I stuck my head up and saw a tracer come at me. I ducked down again. Peewee was firing. I could hear the sixty. I stuck my head up again, and the tracers kept coming at me. I ducked down again. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t hit.
Peewee took the launcher from me and was firing it, snatching grenades from my rucksack and off my suspenders. I shook my head, trying to clear it. I put my head up again, and the tracers were headed toward the center of the squad. But they were high.
They had looked like they were coming toward me, but they were high. There were dozens of muzzle blasts. More than I had ever seen before. It looked like a whole company. We were outnumbered! My stomach cramped and my mouth went dry.
I got Peewee’s sixteen and started firing. Peewee had his pistol out. He let off a shot near my head that burned my ear and made my whole head ring.
We fired and fired. I couldn’t see a thing except an occasional muzzle blast, and they seemed to be moving away.
“Move it out! Move it out!” Sergeant Simpson was crawling along the ground. We started crawling after him.
“Go through the paddy!” Lieutenant Gearhart said, hoarsely.
“Hell, no!” Sergeant Simpson answered.
We followed Sergeant Simpson until we hit the wood line. He took the Starlight from Gearhart and looked back toward the paddies. Then he signaled us to follow him.
It was a good twenty minutes to the pickup zone if we were fast. We were fast.
Brunner called in the pickup chopper, and we waited and prayed. We didn’t hear anything. Then we heard small arms fire to our left.
“They hearing noises in the dark,” Sergeant Simpson said.
We waited; it started to rain. I thanked God for the rain. The moon drifted in and out of the clouds. I thought that maybe the Congs wouldn’t look for us. The rain dripped down from the branches above us. I was cold, my knee ached, I was scared.
A half hour passed and no chopper.
We heard mortar rounds going off. They seemed close. We all held our breaths, but they landed off from us. The Congs didn’t know where we were. They were throwing mortars into the field behind us.
Voices. Vietnamese. I couldn’t tell how many, or where they came from. I had taped some of the grenades to my belt. Now I pulled some of the tape off and put it over my tags, sticking them to my chest.
“Where’s the fucking chopper?” Monaco whispered.
“Maybe the rain’s too hard,” Lobel said.
I cursed the rain. Why the hell did it have to rain?
The voices were closer. We were bunched, too scared to move, to spread out.
A noise to the right.
We tried pressing against the trees, keeping our heads down. The moon came out partially. It was one Cong. He had his piece by his side. He looked around then put it down near a tree. He couldn’t have been more than the distance from home plate to the pitcher’s mound. Then he took his pants down, and squatted.
Lieutenant Gearhart stood and started toward the Cong. Monaco raised his rifle to cover Gearhart. For a few seconds I couldn’t see Gearhart at all. Then I saw him just as the Cong saw him, but it was too late. Gearhart was on him. Monaco went toward them. By the time he got there, it was all over. Gearhart had wasted the Cong.
The chopper. We heard it, but we couldn’t see it.
“Sweet Mother … Density One,” Brunner spoke into the phone. “Can you spot yellow?”
Brunner got an affirmative answer, and Brew threw a yellow signal flare toward the clearing in front of us. It flared up briefly and died, but the chopper had seen it. It came down quickly and we started for it.
“Come on!”
Peewee was on first with Monaco on his back. There was firing from behind us. They hadn’t spotted us yet. I got on the chopper and twisted to help the next guy on. It was Walowick. Walowick’s piece went off and ricocheted around the inside of the chopper and got one of the crew.
“Asshole!” The pilot kicked Walowick as Brew and Johnson got on.
There was a scream. Not just a scream, but a sound that was like something awful and almost inhuman.
“Man down!”
The chopper machine guns raked the wood line.
“Lights!”
Simpson and Gearhart were going back. Monaco was out the door and I followed him. The chopper’s guns were sweeping everything and I ran in a crouched position. The lights went on, and I saw Gearhart and Simpson helping one of the new guys. Simpson waved at the chopper and the lights went off. We got back into the chopper, and everybody grabbed something and held on tight as it pulled away.
“Who set the first flare off?” Monaco asked. “We got somebody here working for charlie?”
“It just … I made a mistake,” Gearhart said.
“Don’t be making no more mistakes, man, because I’ll frag your ass in a hot damn minute!” Monaco spat on the ground.
“Where the medic? Where the medic?” Sergeant Simpson’s voice was high and frantic. “Who the medic?”
“You just shot the fucking medic,” the door gunner said.
“I’m okay.” The medic was a long shadow in the dark interior of the chopper. I could just see flashes of his face as he started examining the wounded man. A moment later a red light came on. The medic looked deathly white with dark shadows under his eyes.
The wounded man screamed for a while, then begged for a while, then went back to screaming. We turned away from him, tried to shut him out of our minds.
The medic fumbled briefly with the wounded man’s fatigues, then cut them away from his chest. It was Turner, the new guy from the South. His eyes were wild and his chest heaving. He started to vomit and clutch at the arms of the medic. The medic pushed his hands away. He sprinkled some powder on the wound and taped a square bandage to his chest. He patted him on the shoulder and gave him the thumbs-up sign.
“Anybody else hit?” He closed the fatigues.
“My arm’s hurt.” The other new guy.
The medic put a flashlight on the arm. It was swollen, probably broken. He looked at the guy’s eyes, then put the flashlight out.
“You’ll be okay,” he said. Then he slumped backward.
“You okay, Smitty?” the door gunner asked him.
“Light shit, man,” he said.
By the time we got to the camp, Turner was dead. We got some guys to first aid the medic and the other new guy and then the chopper took them away.
“We got to kick your lieutenant’s ass,” Peewee said when Simpson came into the hooch later.
“We’ll see about him,” Simpson said. “But we got something else to deal with, too. When that flare went up, Perry, you know what I seen?”
“What?”
“I seen with my own two eyes the charlie run up to that claymore you set, turn it around, and run before Monaco got him.”
“Yeah?”
“Well, if he turned it around and it went off and it didn’t get none of us, how did you have the damn thing facing to begin with?”
“Oh, shit.”
Chapter 14
What had happened? The squad had been in a firefight, and we had been almost overrun. For the first time since I reached Nam we had been in the middle of it. Turner had been killed. And not by some faceless enemy, some random shot from far away, but by an enemy I could see and hear. And what about me? I had stood trembling in fear and waiting, and had run in near panic for the choppers and hoped and prayed for a few minutes more of life. The war was not a long way from where we were; we were in the middle of it, and it was deeply within us.