“Terrific!” O’Connor said, beaming a smile.
“I’m not so sure it’s all that terrific, Terry. I’ve heard stories about the Que Son Valley and Fire Base Ross, along with LZ Ryder and LZ Baldy. They call it Indian country for good reasons,” Kirkwood said, frowning and now pointing his M14 out the door, wrapping his hand around the small of the stock and laying his finger on the side of the trigger ring.
“Wise fellow,” Toby Dixon then offered, leaning his shoulder into the machine gun, angling his body out the door, behind the weapon, ready to fire. “We usually start picking up a little ground fire once we clear the southeastern finger of Hill 55. Sometimes before then. Charlie and his cousin, Luke the Gook from Hanoi, hang out in goodly numbers south of that iron bridge, thick as fleas around this Cam Ne hamlet area, and pretty much litter the countryside from there all the way to LZ Ross.”
“What’s this, piped-in music?” O’Connor said, suddenly hearing the broadcast of American Forces Vietnam Radio streaming through his headset.
“That’s the ADF,” Captain Oliver answered. “Automatic Direction Finder. We tune it to the broadcast from AFVN in Da Nang, and the little needle on this dial here in the middle of the instrument panel points a bearing to their transmitter tower. We use it as a backup navigation aid, plus we get to hear music on the intercom, if we want. Adds a little ambience to the setting, don’t you think?”
“Gets me going,” O’Connor said. “All we need now is coffee service.”
“Got a thermos bottle full of it, and a jug of red Kool-Aid, too,” Toby Dixon offered, and laughed. “But you gotta serve yourself.”
“Goooooooood morning, Vietnam!” the voice coming from the radio broadcast said. “Air Force Sergeant Dan Styers, live and in the grid with your special-request fire missions this fine Saturday on AFVN, simulcasting from beautiful downtown Da Nang and Hue City/Phu Bai. Spreading the gospel of rock and roll throughout Eye Corps. First in the breach: There’s a bunch of jarheads up in Quang Tri Province, somewhere near Con Thien, filling sandbags today, and otherwise doing a little housekeeping and bunker mending along their DMZ home front. Staff Sergeant Ken Pettigrew, this one’s for you and your weapons platoon widowmakers with Echo Company, Second Battalion, Ninth Marines.
“From their September 1965 album,
Animal Tracks
, a cut that seems to have become an anthem around these parts, Eric Burdon and the Animals. We gotta get outta this place! Yeah, baby.”
“In this dirty old part of the city, where the sun refused to shine, people tell me there ain’t no use in tryin’.
“Now my girl you’re so young and pretty, and one thing I know is true, you’ll be dead before your time is due, I know.
“Watch my daddy in bed a-dyin’, watched his hair been turnin’ gray, he’s been workin’ and slavin’ his life away, oh, yes, I know it.
“(Yeah!) He’s been workin’ so hard. (Yeah!) I’ve been workin’ too, baby. (Yeah!) Every night and day. (Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!)
“We gotta get out of this place. If it’s the last thing we ever do. We gotta get out of this place, ’cause girl, there’s a better life for me and you.
”
Just as the bass guitar soloed its heavy downbeat between the chorus and the next verse, Staff Sergeant Dixon opened fire with his .30-caliber machine gun, sending a trail of red tracers toward the edge of a clearing beneath the low-flying helicopter. Hot shell casings rained on Jon Kirkwood, who had zoned out listening to the music. The shock of the gunfire’s sound and the heated brass and ammunition belt links dropping on his head and down his shirt collar sent him scrambling inside the chopper.
Terry O’Connor instinctively watched Dixon’s glowing stream of red-phosphorus-tipped tracer rounds burning through the air, and followed their ruby streaks to a dozen running soldiers dressed in olive green uniforms with turtleshell-looking helmets on their heads. Most of the men had rifles with wooden stocks and banana-shaped magazines jutting from beneath the weapons. Two men had long, tubular weapons with a flanged opening at one terminal, and a bulbous, green object fixed to the opposite end.
“Fucking NVA,” O’Connor said, and began firing his M14 rifle at the group of soldiers now running to cover.
“They’ve got a couple of B-40s,” Dixon said, training his line of tracers toward the two soldiers with the rocket-propelled grenades. “We can deal with the small-arms stuff, but an RPG in the cockpit could ruin our day. Focus your fire on those two guys with the stovepipes.”
Jon Kirkwood managed to stand, and snugged the rifle next to his cheek, shutting his off-side eye and looking down the top of the M14.
“Skipper! Don’t bother trying to aim,” Dixon said, seeing the captain struggling to gain his sight alignment before firing. “We’ve got them loaded with tracers. Just look at the target and guide your tracers to them. Like squirting a water hose.”
Kirkwood and O’Connor both raised their heads from the cheek pieces of their rifles and began firing and watching the bright red glow of their tracers strike. Between the two lawyers and the helicopter crew chief, they managed to knock down four enemy soldiers, including one with a B-40 rocket launcher. However, the second man with the RPG had gotten to the cover of the trees.
Terry O’Connor saw the white smoke from the ascending rocket headed straight at the wide-open cargo door, just as Jeff Oliver turned the Huey hard right and dove. Suddenly all that Kirkwood and O’Connor saw was the sky and the rocket-propelled grenade climbing above them, narrowly missing the belly of the aircraft.
While Oliver maneuvered the helicopter away from the clearing, hugging the treetops and racing from the enemy force, Lieutenant Bill Perry radioed news of the sighting and map grid coordinates ahead to the air liaison in the operations section at LZ Ross, calling for an artillery fire mission from the two gun batteries based there. As the helicopter vectored west, to get out of the line of fire, the call of “shots out” came over the radio headsets. In minutes, columns of gray and brown smoke and debris blew skyward in the distance, as the salvo of 105-millimeter high-velocity explosive rounds crashed into the forest where the helicopter had encountered the North Vietnamese unit.
“Damn, that was fast. Besides the RPG, did they even get a shot off?” O’Connor said.
“They were shooting the whole time,” Oliver answered. “You didn’t see the fountain of tracers streaming up at us?”
“I only saw the rocket come at us,” O’Connor said.
“I didn’t see anything but our rounds going down,” Kirkwood added.
“Take my word for it, guys,” Oliver said, “they hosed us pretty good. I have two bullet holes in the windshield, and a third ding in the glass between Billy boy’s feet and mine. When we get on the ground, we’ll look for leaks. Hopefully, we just got a few fresh vents in the skin.”
“Didn’t hardly seem real,” Kirkwood said, sitting back down, but not dangling his feet outside the door, crossing them under himself instead.
“Never does, sir,” Dixon said, pinning a fresh belt of ammo into the M60 machine gun. “Only after it’s over and you think about it a little while does it ever get a grip on you.”
CHALKY ORANGE DUST billowed from the expeditionary airfield runway matting as the Marine UH1E Huey set down at the Fire Support Base Ross helicopter landing zone and refueling station, twenty minutes after the firefight. Guiding the chopper from the ground, a Marine wearing a hooded gas mask stood at the forward edge of the immense LZ made of steel planks crisscrossed with a series of two-inch- and four-inch-diameter holes. Two other hooded Marines holding on to man-size fire extinguishers mounted between two-foot-tall spoked steel wheels crouched at the front corners of the acre of metal decking.
Just as Toby Dixon stepped from the Huey and moved to his station at the side of the aircraft, a Marine major and a captain came running to the pilot’s side window. Behind them a crew of six men ran to the chopper’s opposite side and began hurriedly unlatching the tie-down straps on the wooden crate, and then dragged it out the open door.
“Captain!” the major shouted as the men worked, pulling the cargo off the helicopter landing pad. “I’ve got eight wounded, three in bad shape, just a few clicks east of us. Army can’t help us. First Air Cav has its birds tied up west of here. Medevac helicopters from Marble Mountain will take half an hour to get to our guys, and you can be there in five mikes. You can have them at Charlie Med in the time it takes the two medevac choppers to get to their location. It might mean saving some lives.”
“Jump in and guide me to them,” Oliver said.
“My alpha, Captain Brown here, will go with you,” the major said. “I’ll radio ahead and get you cleared.”
“Dixon, we dripping anywhere?” the pilot called to the crew chief.
After squatting to take a quick look under the chopper, and then above it, and along the tail section, the staff sergeant answered the captain, “Looks dry. No warning lights?”
“Not a one. I think we’re intact. Jump back aboard and get on your gun,” Oliver said. “Picking up eight, I’ll need some room, so you two lawyers bail out for now. I’ll pick you up back here once I get these wounded men to Charlie Med. You can grab some chow with these guys while you wait.”
Kirkwood and O’Connor only had time to unlatch their gunner’s belts from their waists and jump off the aircraft before it cleared the deck and sped away from them, leaving the two captains in a filthy cloud, still holding the M14 rifles and wearing the headsets that Dixon had issued them.
“Major Jack Hembee,” the darkly tanned and weathered infantry operations officer said to Terry O’Connor and Jon Kirkwood as they followed the crew of Marines dragging the big wooden box from the landing site toward a line of heavily fortified bunkers and general-purpose tents with all of the wall flaps rolled up. As he said his name, the major put out his hand, rough and covered with thick calluses, and both lawyers took turns giving it a shake.
Nearby and in the distance, covering the fire base’s two low hills, other rows of tents and hard-backed sea huts that Marines called hooches stood among a maze of bunkers and sandbagged emplacements ensconcing the two composite batteries of 105- and 155-millimeter howitzers based at LZ Ross from the Eleventh Marine Regiment, and a dozen or more 81-millimeter mortar positions from the Seventh Marine Regiment. Among the short barrels of the howitzers stood two long snouts jutting from a pair of eight-inch cannons capable of shooting quarter-ton projectiles more than thirty miles. Snuggled within the pattern of medium- and long-range artillery pieces, several M48 battle tanks sat in the shade of camouflage netting with their hatches open and Marines lounging near them. Along the perimeter of coiled razor wire and barbed-wire fencing stood half a dozen wooden observation towers fifty feet tall. For the two newcomers, the widespread fire-support base looked as much like a prison as it did a combat outpost.
“Welcome to LZ Ross,” the major said, walking briskly to get away from the cloud of dust stirred by the departing helicopter.
“We’re with wing legal,” O’Connor offered nervously, trying to break friendly ice with the infantry officer, whose leathery look and tough demeanor had him intimidated. “On our way to Chu Lai to visit with clients.”
“Hopefully, this won’t delay you gentlemen much more than an hour,” the major said, pulling a handful of chewing tobacco from a red-and-white striped pouch and stuffing the tobacco in his mouth. “Chew?”
“No, thanks,” Kirkwood said.
“Don’t mind if I do, sir,” O’Connor said, and took a wad of the dark brown, sugary leaves and pushed them inside his cheek. The spicy tobacco immediately began to tingle and burn the soft tissue of the lawyer’s mouth and caused saliva to gush.
“I didn’t know you chewed,” Kirkwood said.
“First time for everything,” O’Connor said and spit.
“LIEUTENANT SANCHEZ, DON’T you guys want to take me and a machine-gun section and a mortar or two along with you?” a shirtless Marine standing atop a pile of dirt called to the reconnaissance platoon leader striding in the center of a string of twenty-three camouflage-clad men, First Lieutenant T. D. McKay walking among them.
“Staff Sergeant Pettigrew, I’d love to have you coming along, but I think you’re better off filling those sandbags,” First Lieutenant Jimmy Sanchez said, stopping to talk to the staff noncommissioned officer while his platoon from Third Reconnaissance Battalion ambled their way past him, spread at intervals thirty feet apart. “Besides, I hear that the beer fairy landed this morning, and I’m sure your guys wouldn’t want to miss all of the doings this evening.”
“Right on, sir,” Ken Pettigrew said, “I heard that, too. Hey, you guys catch my song on the radio this morning?”
“Sure did,” Sanchez said. “Had it blasting in the tents when my best bud here, Lieutenant Tommy McKay, blew in, riding aboard that beer-laden puddle jumper that landed out there on the cow trail.”
“Yeah, I flew in with the beer fairy,” McKay said, walking behind the unit’s navy hospital corpsman and approaching the spot where the reconnaissance platoon commander now stood. “Along with my skinny ass, Lobo Gunn hauled in two hundred pounds of hamburger meat, and a dozen cases of Budweiser for you guys. Had a hell of a time taking off with that load, and then landing on that piss-poor excuse of a road you’ve got here, instead of at the airfield, had me pretty puckered, too. My fearless pilot didn’t want the hassle of finding somebody to haul the beef and brews that last bit of yardage, so he set down right here, on your doorstep.”
“I wondered why all the hubbub down there when you guys landed,” Pettigrew said, leaning on a long-handled shovel by a perimeter bunker where his men dug the fighting trenches deeper and put the dirt inside the green mesh bags, building a wall along the ditch with them. “I thought somebody had got shot up or something, so you made a forced landing. Then I heard you had just delivered some burgers and beer. Pretty crazy. Where’d you guys find the loose goodies?”