Tommy Touchdown McKay crossed the more than three hundred-yard-wide clearing, carrying his 165-pound best friend, in less than sixty seconds. Although they lost sight of him as he dashed into the forest, the North Vietnamese never stopped firing. Overhead and all around, bullets snapped through the branches, popped through the brush, and burst into the ground, but none hit T. D. McKay or Jimmy Sanchez.
“YOU REMEMBER HOW to load one of these things?” Terry O’Connor said breathlessly as he pushed the M60 machine gun into the fighting hole and then helped Elvis to crawl inside the shelter.
“I’m kind of busy,” Jon Kirkwood answered, firing his M14 at more than a dozen enemy soldiers who now ran toward the barbed-wire fence and coiled razor wire barrier that stood less than a hundred yards in front of him.
“Push down on that latch, there, sir,” Elvis said, pointing to a catch on the side of the machine gun. “This deal here pops up, then you just lay the belt with the first round right here, and then slam her down. Pull the charging handle and cut loose.”
“Watch out for hot brass, Jon,” Terry O’Connor grunted as he shoved the snout of the machine gun over the parapet and began chopping down small men dressed in sandals and black pajamas who now ran at the wire, throwing bags of short-fused explosives at the barrier.
One after another, the Viet Cong guerrillas ran their suicide charges, hurling their satchels at the fence, trying to blow open a breach through which the North Vietnamese soldiers attacking behind them could infiltrate the camp and destroy the stores of ammunition and fuel that the Americans kept here. As each wave of sappers broke across the open ground, Terry O’Connor chopped them down with the machine gun.
With their automatic weapon now speaking terms that the enemy could understand, Jon Kirkwood focused his M14’s work on uniformed soldiers who moved through the gaps in the trees, seeming to direct the charges and mortar barrage.
“Cut off the head, the snake dies,” the dark-haired lawyer spoke as he put round after round into the dodging shapes of what he regarded as North Vietnamese officers.
Elvis, with his one good eye, took aim with the M14 that Terry O’Connor had used until he got his hands on the M60. He picked targets that the machine gun had missed.
Overhead, the Seventh Marines’ eighty-one-millimeter mortar sections had rained high explosives and Willy Peter white phosphorus projectiles down the stacks of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong firing the mortars and rockets into the camp. The counterbattery rapidly took effect and soon silenced the enemy tubes, enabling the Marines who defended the line to focus their fire most effectively against the sappers and raiders.
Before Major Jack Hembee and a hundred Marine grunts could swarm the gap where the two lawyers and three enlisted Marines fought the overwhelming enemy force, the trio of men left standing had managed to turn back the tide.
“Evening, Major Danger,” Elvis said, smiling at Jack Hembee as the operations officer put his head inside the backdoor of the fighting hole.
All along the flank now, dozens of Marines from the reaction force that accompanied the major set up hasty firing positions and began shooting at the fleeing enemy. The mortars kept pushing the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong units farther out, and soon the Eleventh Marines artillery began launching their salvos at them.
“You’re no worse for wear here,” Hembee said in a relaxed voice. “How about Rat and Henry?”
“They’re over yonder, sir,” Elvis said, climbing out of the fighting hole and hustling toward the neighboring bunker where he had left his two buddies. “We took a sixty in the window. Blew shit out of everything. Rat got the bad end of it. Henry got it in both eyes. Sir, I gotta check on my two boys.”
“I’ll go with you,” Hembee said, and followed Elvis to the neighboring hole, where two Marines and a corpsman had already put a wrap around Henry’s eyes and had King Rat lying on the ground with his knees elevated.
Behind Major Danger and Elvis, Jon Kirkwood and Terry O’Connor joined them in a squat by the exploded fighting hole, watching King Rat and Henry getting first aid. Marines from the reaction force had moved them out of the supplementary position and had taken over the watch.
“What do we do now?” Kirkwood asked the major.
“I’ve got a busy night still,” Hembee said. “Be nice to catch these guys. So we’ll be working on that for a while, anyway. You two might hit the rack, though. Elvis needs a patch job, and I’m afraid my other two house mice are out of commission, but Goose can show you where to lay your heads.”
“Sir, you don’t mind we catch some sleep?” O’Connor said, half embarrassed, since the major had work left to do. “I don’t think Jon and I have shut our eyes more than four or five hours since we left California on Wednesday.”
Hembee laughed.
“I know how you feel,” the major said. “Seems that way to me, too, and I’ve been here ten months. You boys catch some Zs. We’ll get you up and fed before that chopper hits the deck mañana. Get you on your way to see your clients at Chu Lai.”
“Sure you don’t mind?” Kirkwood said, blinking his tired eyes.
“Not at all, I insist,” Hembee said, stuffing more tobacco in his jaw. “Care for a bedtime chew, Terry?”
“I’ll take a rain check on that, Major Danger,” O’Connor answered with a smile. Then he looked at the operations officer and the debris and havoc that surrounded him. “I think I figured out why they call you that.”
Hembee smiled. “Shit does seem to happen, doesn’t it.”
Elvis looked at the two lawyers with his one good eye while the corpsman wrapped a battle dressing over the bad one. He cracked a wide smile, glancing up at the major, and nodded.
“JIMMY, YOU STILL with me, partner?” T. D. McKay said to the wounded lieutenant as he gently slid his best friend off his shoulders and laid him on the ground.
Sanchez raised his hand to let his buddy know he had held on to consciousness, but when he tried to talk he could only whisper. He felt as though a truck had parked on his chest. No matter how hard he pulled with his lungs, he could hardly get air inside them.
“Relax, buddy,” McKay said, propping Sanchez up with his back against a tree, trying to see if the upright position would ease his breathing. “We’re at the rally point. I don’t see anyone else, though.”
“Quit talking so loud,” a voice came from behind McKay, and he turned, surprised, to see Staff Sergeant Paul Rhodes, his black-framed glasses taped across their nose bridge. “That Lieutenant Sanchez you got there, wounded?”
“Yeah. He took three hits in the back. I think they got his lungs. He can’t breathe very well,” McKay spoke in quiet breaths. “We thought it was the Viper team coming back to us. Caught Jimmy off guard. We took down all but two of the enemy patrol, though. Those guys may be dead or wounded, too. I unloaded a magazine right at them, not twenty feet away. The damned NVA wore flop hats a lot like ours. Silhouettes in the dark. How could we tell?”
“Shit happens when you go slack. Nobody else hit?” Rhodes whispered.
“Not in our group,” McKay answered. “You just get here?”
“Just ahead of you,” Rhodes spoke in a voice no louder than his breathing. “We heard you breaking timber after that gunplay, sounded like an elephant stampede, so we took cover. Mamba team got here first. Sergeant McCoy set them out as security with my guys. Eight of us, and you make nine. Rattler, Bushmaster, and Viper haven’t shown their faces yet. Where’s Doc and Baby Huey?”
“Baby Huey?” McKay asked.
“Sneed, the radio guy,” Rhodes said.
“He and Doc skirted around that big clearing back about a mile,” McKay said in short breaths. “I had hoped choppers would already be inbound, so I cut across.”
“You mean that you cut across that wide clearing about two clicks north of us?” Rhodes whispered, raising his eyebrows.
Sanchez bobbed his head trying to talk, and began shaking his finger at McKay. Staff Sergeant Rhodes put his head close to Sanchez’s lips and listened.
“Lieutenant says I am to whip your ignorant ass for crossing that clearing like you did, when he told you to go around it,” Rhodes said, and offered McKay a smile. “Dumb stunt, sir. In fact, borderline insane. Besides making yourself an easy target in this bright moonlight, we had that spot circled on our maps as a confirmed danger area. We spotted it about four or five days ago, the last time we were out here. Charlie’s got it rigged with all sorts of interesting items, like mines, booby traps, and punji pits. They’ll do that to a likely landing site, hoping to catch a helicopter full of Marines setting down, and blow the shit out of them. They’ll hose a few rounds at incoming choppers, so that when our guys offload, they’ll hit the ground running and trip booby traps or dive on punji stakes, you know, sharpened bamboo. Sails right through your boot, your body, you name it. I’d like to know how you made it through there without blowing yourselves up.”
“I ran like hell, straight across,” McKay said, now feeling his stomach tie in a knot. “No wonder those NVA that shot at me didn’t give chase. I looked back once, when I got in the trees, and they still stood there in a bunch, blasting away.”
“I’m sure they didn’t quit on you. Bet they took the loop around right on the heels of Huey and Doc,” Rhodes said softly, now checking his watch. “We could sure use that long-range radio right now to get a medevac in here for the lieutenant. He’s looking awfully punk. These little fox-mike walkie-talkies work good close up, but are worthless as a brick trying to talk to anyone outside a few miles. Maybe an airplane might hear us, if he had his VHF tuned to our frequency. Sure need to get the lieutenant some help, though. Doc give him anything?”
“Morphine,” McKay said, and pointed to an M drawn in blood on Sanchez’s forehead. “He also plugged the bullet holes.”
“Until Sneed gets here with Doc, all we can do is hang tight,” Rhodes said.
“SSSSH,” DOC HAMILTON mouthed to Bobby Sneed. Somewhere behind them a man coughed. Quietly, the corpsman and the Marine crawled into bushes and sat, holding their breaths, waiting to see if the cough belonged to anyone they knew.
One by one, North Vietnamese soldiers drifted past them, working in a fan, hoping to intercept the trail left by McKay carrying Sanchez. The men wore no helmets; most of them patrolled bareheaded, a few had on soft caps or flop hats. Most of the guerrillas wore high-topped canvas sneakers, while a few sported sandals. They moved through the forest with the assuredness of seasoned commandos.
Bobby Sneed had seen little combat, but Doc Hamilton had already finished his first thirteen-month tour in Vietnam in 1966, with First Force Reconnaissance Company, and less than a year later had returned for another voluntary tour, now into his third month with Third Reconnaissance Battalion.
Seeing the enemy soldiers left his heart jumping. He had the platoon’s radio operator at his side, along with the unit’s only viable means of communications beyond the hills that surrounded them. The forests now teamed with NVA prowling all around the two men. With his lungs most likely collapsed and unknown internal bleeding, the hospital corpsman first class, equivalent to a Marine staff sergeant, knew that Lieutenant Sanchez could not likely survive more than a few more hours without the aid of a field hospital and surgeon. Somehow he had to get help to Rally Point Tango.
One kilometer west of where Doc Hamilton and Lance Corporal Bobby Sneed huddled among thick bushes, watching North Vietnamese reconnaissance commandos circulating through the forest trying to find the track left by the Americans they had encountered, Corporal Lynn Sanders and his Viper Marines had traversed west and picked up Corporal Floyd Bennett and his Rattler team. The eight Marines now converged on a path they speculated that Corporal Kenny Price and his Bushmaster recon section most likely had taken. They hoped to consolidate their force to twelve guns, in case the enemy found them, too.
The two western teams and Sanders with the command section’s forward recon team had heard both the first brief firefight and then later the volleys of machine gun and rifle fire. Judging from the locations of the skirmishes, they suspected that the lieutenant and his command element, and possibly another of the teams from the eastern side of their reconnaissance fan, had come under fire, with the enemy perhaps now in pursuit of them. For that reason they had silenced their radios, complying with the platoon’s standing operating procedures.
Now adjusting their route to follow a wide arc to the rally point, instead of a direct bearing, they hoped to move into the site from the southwest. The new track reduced their risk of encountering the enemy force they placed, judging from the direction and sounds of the gunfire, approximately two or three kilometers north of Tango.
Given the distance and terrain that the Marines had to cover in their vector away from the firefight, and considering the threat presented by the two enemy platoons patrolling the area, likely now in pursuit of their cohorts with possibly an unknown number of reinforcements joining the chase, Corporal Sanders, a twenty-year-old lad from Enid, Oklahoma, the senior noncommissioned officer in the group of eight Marines, estimated that with luck they might arrive at Rally Point Tango in approximately three hours. None of the Marines knew that their platoon commander’s life rested in this precarious balance of time.
“BABY HUEY AND Doc either missed the rally point or had to sit tight someplace,” Paul Rhodes muttered in quiet breaths, rubbing the dark green tape flat on the broken nose bridge of his Marine Corps-issued black plastic framed glasses. He checked the rubber strap attached to the earpieces that held the spectacles tight on his face and looked at T. D. McKay, and then at Jimmy Sanchez. “You still with us, sir?”
First Lieutenant Sanchez blinked his eyes at the staff sergeant, and tried to raise his hand but managed only a slight movement. His desperate gasps had shallowed to desperate wheezes.