AK fire flickered the leaves to the left of my head as if to underscore my thoughts.
“The major… in the cage…. Help him.” He gulped, it seemed to help. “He was shackled out here like I was just now… without netting… for a week. Got to help him….”
Henson began to repeat himself and tilt his head at odd angles. Puckins cut the lock off the tiger cage with bolt cutters, but the major hadn’t moved in all this time.
“Corpsman! Corpsman!”
The corpsman, a young Hawaiian, rushed to us, then the cage. Running his hands along the major’s body, he’d stop at different points. Finally the corpsman sighed, tugged off the major’s dog tags, and handed them to me. Instantly he was off to where he was more needed.
“Pull out! Let’s get the hell out of here. Let’s go!” I yelled, taking a quick count of the platoon. “Wickersham, Serrano is going to need cover fire on rear security.”
Puckins took Henson and lifted him like a tired child over his shoulder.
Henson began to sob. “No, no, I couldn’t stop them.”
The glisten of tears streaked up Henson’s inverted face. He was a good NCO and accepted responsibility out of habit—any responsibility, all responsibility. A hard habit to break.
The withdrawal was no more confused than most. We slipped back to the sampans, keeping a watchful eye upstream. The firefight was increasing in intensity. Muzzle flashes resembled popping flashbulbs. The intermixture of red and green tracer fire lent the camp a festive air. One hut was burning.
Our chief petty officer, a black grenadier with a shaved head and an ebony earring, signaled over the din that we hadn’t lost a man, though there were some wounded. We then began to work the sampans downstream as planned.
Ackert… and regional generals… and whiz kids… be damned. Warm satisfaction was radiating from this op like heat from a wood stove. Henson was going home and we were going to start him on his way.
The reaction force from the main camp could be heard coming downstream after us. They were firing alarm shots and I could hear their sampans bumping into each other in the eagerness of pursuit.
From the rearmost sampan, Puckins and I stretched booby-trap wire across the river just below the water’s surface, the wire was arranged to trigger several claymore mines from the virtually impassable brush on each bank. While we worked, Sergeant Henson lay in the waist of the boat dozing fitfully. Another sampan stayed abreast of us as a lookout. The claymores would provide a little breathing room.
The crack of an AK-47 and a thud in the riverbank next to Puckins announced the arrival of the VC vanguard. We returned fire with a magazine’s worth of 5.56, a couple 40mm, and headed downstream. 1 wondered if we were capable of leaving a rooster tail. Puckins was uncharacteristically intense in his paddling. The roar of the detonation just behind us nearly capsized the sampan. A gust of stinking smoke and a peppering of spent shrapnel emphasized the closeness of the vanguard.
Once more we stretched out prepared booby-trap assemblies. And again a shuddering explosion followed only seconds later.
Sweat was rippling down my back with all the energy this godforsaken river lacked. With my mosquito netting flipped back over my head it seemed every insect in the swamp was seeking refuge in my ears.
As we prepared to rig a final booby trap, Sergeant Henson abruptly sat bolt upright in the sampan. At the same time I heard a rustling to my right. A small party was flanking us along the bank. Puckins sprayed a burst at the sound and there was a return volley. My right leg and shoulder shivered immediately with unexpected pain. I caught a glimpse of several blue-checked scarves, and a glint of gold fleck, I thought.
The world took on a dreamlike quality and I lay back in the sampan to enjoy it. My left hand trailed in the water. Sergeant Henson floated indifferently between the two pinwheeling rear sampans. The aurora borealis ripples of light flashed across the inner lids of my eyes. I seemed to have some question about celestial navigation. But there was no one around to ask.
“Ah, good. Good, Mister Frazer, you’re awake. Home is the hero and all that. Hero business ain’t what it used to be, is it? Well, you’re safe in drydock for now,” she said with annoying energy.
There is little more exasperating than a plain Navy nurse with unbridled enthusiasm. Buoyant and cheery, they insist they can heal all by pure example.
This one was absolutely effervescent. They left men no dignity.
Bandages and casts swathed my entire right side. I felt weak, vulnerable, and hung over. My face felt as if it had been sprayed with a Wesson oil atomizer. From the look of the place, I was in the hospital at Binh Thuy. Questions zipped across my mind like tracers.
“There’s a commander outside to see you.”
That brought back the answers to some of my questions. I remembered seeing Sergeant Henson drift by, clearly dead, in the midst of the running fire fight. Henson dead. The major dead. Two POWs reported dead. It would surely draw some bad press on the IV Corps general and his superiors. Better they had died emaciated, mosquito-bitten, forgotten and lonely, than to impede some ticket puncher’s career.
A tall, lean, sad-eyed commander walked in with measured strides. His jungle boots were spit-shined and his uniform crisply starched. This was to be a formal visit.
“Lieutenant Frazer, I have been assigned as the investigative officer by NAVFORV for the investigation into the SEAL operation, twelfth of August”—he drummed his fingers uncomfortably against his briefcase. By raising my head I could make out an Academy ring—“nineteen fifty-something. Anything you say may be used against you, should this eventually result in a UCMJ proceeding. I—”
Then the peace of the room was shattered by hard, fast footfalls in the passageway as two men in civilian clothes burst into the room carrying AK-47 assault rifles. Behind the weapons, Puckins and Wickersham, as inseparable and menacing as Scylla and Charybdis, hesitated just inside the doorway. The presence of the commander had thrown them off a beat.
I could guess what they had in mind: stash Mister Frazer someplace safe until this whole flap blew over. Someplace like Saigon’s Cholon district, where all the deserters lay doggo. Sorry, sir, we’re not sure just where Mister Frazer is right now. He said something about checking his agent net. Maybe if you came back next week…
This maneuver had met some success for others before, but neither Puckins nor Wickersham realized the heat our little operation had generated among the Saigon whiz kids. Someone had to burn—to appease the gods.
I noticed Wickersham glare at the commander and then study his AK thoughtfully. The commander was an unexpected complication. Wickersham’s eyes reflected the wavering balance now between hostility and indecision, and soon righteous anger would tip him out of equilibrium. In another impetuous minute he’d commit himself, waving the muzzle of the captured weapon in the commander’s face. There’d be words to the effect of, “Commander, sir, damn shame some doped-up, half-crazed VC terrorist violated the sanctity of this place of healing, making your wife a widow. Another ticket puncher lost to the world, a damn shame, a damn mud-sucking shame.” As yet the words were unsaid because unconsciously Wickersham knew their futility.
And still the tension in the room continued to build, crackling like a shortening time fuse.
The commander looked sick. But by now I realized that he had looked sick from the moment he had entered the room. He sensed the injustice of his assignment and it didn’t suit him. He didn’t like it, didn’t like it at all.