and accept, and Dalton’s priority was his patient’s health, not immediate cultural acceptance. He knew the latter would require time and patience, and he was going to be here for a year, so he was prepared to take it slow.
Dalton was dressed in plain green jungle fatigues, a Special Forces patch sewn onto the left shoulder, the gold dagger and three lightning bolts standing out against the teal blue background on the arrowhead-shaped patch. On his head, his green beret felt stiff and new, unlike the battered and faded ones the other members of the team wore.
Dalton looked up from the young boy as the northeastern sky flickered. Seconds later the manmade thunder that went with the light rolled over the camp. The sound of mortars and artillery pounding Khe Sanh had been a nightly serenade for the past seventeen days. Located less than four miles to the southwest of the bombarded Marine Corps base, the Special Forces camp at Lang Vei was an inviting target to the NVA forces as the Tet Offensive exploded in earnest throughout South Vietnam. Every man assigned to Lang Vei knew it, but so far, they had been left alone other than an occasional mortar attack.
“You should all leave,” the woman told the interpreter in Vietnamese.
Ba To, the interpreter, glanced at Dalton, knowing he had heard. “Why is that?”
The woman swept her hand at the dark jungle that surrounded the camp. “Many, many soldiers from the north. And their large metal beasts. They will kill all of you.”
“Tell her she’s welcome,” Dalton told Ba To. He rubbed a rag across his forehead, then proceeded to repack his M-3 medical bag. Metal beasts. They’d captured an NVA officer a week ago who’d told intelligence that tanks were being brought up to the Laotian border, only a kilometer and a half down Route 9, which ran along the southern perimeter of the camp. The report had been greeted with skepticism by the brass and concern by the rank and file. Dalton’s team sergeant, Mike Terrence, had sent an urgent
request for LAWs, light antitank weapons, to their B-Team headquarters. They’d received a hundred of the plastic tubes just two days ago. The LAWs, in addition to the 106-millimeter recoilless rifle in the camp’s center weapon pit, was the extent of their antiarmor capability.
Dalton looked across the berm and the rows of barbed wire at the jungle, less than two hundred meters away. The N VA using tanks was unheard of. At worst, the intelligence rep had insisted, if there were tanks, the N VA would use them for covering fire from the treeline. That made no sense to Dalton, but then again he was only a nineteen-year-old medic, straight out of the Special Forces Qualification Course at Fort Bragg. He’d been in-country only three weeks and the most dangerous thing he’d done was make the resupply run to Khe Sanh the first week he was at Lang Vei and hunker down in a Marine bunker while mortar and artillery rounds came in.
From the sound of the firefight to the northeast, there was no doubt that the Marines were catching hell. Since the offensive had begun, the only way in and out of Khe Sanh was by air. The same was true of the Special Forces camp. Highway 9 was cut to the east of Lang Vei, essentially isolating the A-Camp other than for helicopter resupply for the past two weeks.
The mother and son walked off toward the huts holding the Laotian refugees who had flooded into the camp in the past week, running before the N VA forces who were using their country as a free zone to organize their assault. Dalton wished Ba To a good evening, and they headed in opposite directions to turn in for the night.
Besides the American A-team, Detachment A-101, there was a mobile strike force company of the local Civilian Irregular Defense Group, CIDG, inside the walls of the dog-bone-shaped camp along with the battered remains of the Laotian battalion that had briefly fought the N VA before running to Lang Vei. Twelve Americans and three hundred indigenous troops, at the remotest edge of South Vietnam, close to the borders of both Laos to the west and North Vietnam just to the north.
This was what Dalton had been trained for: to work with the indigenous people of a country to teach them how to take care of and protect themselves. As a medic, Dalton had spent most of the past several weeks not walking combat patrols, but plying his medical skills among the never-ending line of patients. He’d already performed more minor surgery than most interns back in the United States. There was nowhere else for these people to go for treatment.
Dalton walked along the inside of camp, passing the dark forms of soldiers manning their posts. His goal was the command bunker that also held the small dispensary where he and the senior medical sergeant kept their supplies and bunked down.
Halfway there, right in the center of the camp, Dalton halted. His back felt like there was an army of small ants climbing up it, and he reached back to brush them off, when he realized that the feeling was inside his head, not actually on his skin.
The flat thump of a mortar round leaving a tube interrupted this strange feeling. Dalton had been in-country long enough to know that by the time one heard the sound of the mortar firing from outside the camp, the projectile was already over its apogee and on the way down. He ran for the nearest sandbagged position, the 106-millimeter recoilless rifle pit. Dalton jumped over the top of the four-foot-high sandbag wall as the first mortar round hit just outside the perimeter.
“Mind your p’s and q’s and watch where you put your feet, laddie,” a voice with a thick Boston accent greeted Dalton as he sat up, dusting dirt off his shirt.
Staff Sergeant Herman Dunnigan was the team’s junior weapons man, and the 106 was his pride and joy. He’d stolen it from the Marines two months ago, and Captain Farrel, the detachment commander, had already been called on the carpet twice for the return of the weapon. With the reports of N VA armor, the entire team knew that Farrel was is no rush to return the rifle to
the Leathernecks, who were much better prepared at their firebase for any sort of armor attack.
Dalton slid across the base of the pit until he was next to Dunnigan, who handed him an already lit cigarette, pulling its replacement out of his fatigue shirt pocket. Two more rounds went off in rapid succession, somewhere in the south side of the camp. Dalton flinched at each explosion.
“They got the range, ” Dunnigan commented. “They most certainly do, the little bastards. Of course, they’re probably getting adjusted by someone in the CIDG, so why the hell shouldn’t they have the range?”
It was accepted that the NVA had spies in both the CIDG and in the Laotian battalion. It was a bitch having to guard against attack from the outside and betrayal on the inside of the wire, but it was the nature of the Special Forces’ job. Dalton knew that some of the soldiers he was patching up could be shooting him in the back that very evening.
Dalton didn’t answer as he took a deep drag on the smoke. His hand was trembling. He was scratching his neck before he realized that, again, the itchy feeling was coming from inside.