“Damn, I wish the Doc was here,” Rhodes whispered, and looked at his watch. “Lieutenant, you hang in there. You’re going to make it. We just got to get our boys in here.”
Tommy McKay lay in the brush next to the tree where he had propped Jimmy Sanchez and draped some brush over him. Rhodes lay across from the platoon commander, covered as well.
“What if I took a look-see out west of the rally point and tried to work my way back north?” McKay asked Paul Rhodes. “I might be able to find Baby Huey and Doc.”
“Bad idea, sir,” Rhodes whispered back. “You’d run into the trouble that has them sitting tight. Doc Hamilton has lots of grass time and is not lost. Even Baby Huey has his shit wired pretty well, too, for a new guy. They went underground because the enemy probably overtook them. I’m willing to gamble that unless we hear gunfire from over yonder, they’ll get here. So will the others.”
“We’ve got to do something pretty soon, or Lieutenant Sanchez, you know,” McKay said, and looked at his friend, who now had his eyes closed, panting for air. “He’s got to see a doctor pretty quick.”
“We’ll head out of here before daylight, with or without Doc and Sneed,” Rhodes said. “They know the drill. They’ll know we’ve beat feet out of here and headed back to Con Thien on foot. They’ll head there, too, if it gets close to morning. It’s only a little more than six hours by foot, if we hump hard.”
“Why not go now?” McKay asked, still looking at Sanchez.
“Huey and Doc could show up any second,” Rhodes said, feeling on the side of his Alice pack and pulling out a canteen of water. “We get a decent signal here with the PRC twenty-five. Once Sneed makes the call, we can have choppers picking us up inside half an hour.”
“Of course, you’re right,” McKay said, reaching to the side of his utility belt and pulling out one of his two canteens. “But worst case, we walk six hours. I hate to think about Lieutenant Sanchez having to endure that ordeal.”
“Odds are he won’t have to,” Rhodes said, putting his water bottle back. “Price and Bennett and Sanders, they’re all good leaders, good recon Marines. So’re Doc and Baby Huey. They’ll get here.”
“Hungry?” McKay said to the staff sergeant, taking a flat can of cheese and another of crackers from his ass pack fastened to the center of his utility belt, and started knifing the spread open with his John Wayne P7 that he had strung on his dog-tag chain, along with two Danish coins he had as mementoes from a trip he had taken with his father and uncle to Jutland the year he graduated from law school, fishing for brown trout in streams near Viborg.
The strong, sharp smell of the hot Velveeta from the can made Paul Rhodes’s head snap at attention. Carried on the slight breeze from the southwest, an alert NVA patrol might notice it.
He had heard the stories of the Viet Cong and NVA sniffing out Americans hiding in an ambush. Some of the old salt Marines had sworn as fact to him that even without a westerner wearing cologne or deodorant, their Asian enemy easily smelled an American in the bush, simply from an apparently distinctive Occidental body odor. Something to do with high fat and red meat protein diets.
For that reason, Rhodes and many members of his platoon ate a great deal of Vietnamese food, such as rice and bean sprouts with small portions of fish or chicken, and minimized their intake of fats and red meat. Whether or not the scuttlebutt had a basis of truth, it seemed sensible to him.
If he smelled the cheese upwind of where McKay now spread it across a cracker, then anyone downwind would smell it, too.
“Sir,” Rhodes whispered, “try to finish that cheese and cracker snack pretty quick. Then bury the cans. That shit stinks to high heaven, and Charlie can smell it downwind if he’s nearby.”
Tommy McKay’s stomach growled and rumbled as he now hurriedly jammed the small meal in his mouth and gulped water from his canteen.
“Sorry,” he said, digging a hole with his K-Bar knife and stuffing the empty but smelly cans into it and covering them.
Sergeant Lionel McCoy, a small-framed, sinewy Marine whose very black skin lay like a shadow beneath the green camouflage streaks he had smeared on his face and hands, looked squarely at Staff Sergeant Rhodes, and motioned his hand and arm up and down, close to the ground. Then he formed a fist with his thumb pointed downward.
Rhodes and the other Marines lying in an arch past him flattened in their hides. The staff sergeant looked at McKay, and motioned his hand toward the ground and showed him a thumbs down.
The lawyer lieutenant’s mind raced through his memory of hand and arm signals, and the signs for take cover, enemy present suddenly flashed clear for him. He took a last look at Jimmy Sanchez and then slowly and deliberately closed the brush around his friend.
“They smelled the cheese,” McKay told himself in his mind. “My fault. All my fault! A lawyer has no business out here. Now I’m going to get some of these guys killed, along with my buddy.”
Shafts of moonlight splashed among the black shadows beneath the trees and among the low-growing bushes and weeds where the eight reconnaissance Marines, McKay, and Sanchez lay hidden. To their front an open field barely fifty yards in diameter offered space only large enough to land a single helicopter. When the platoon commander picked this site as his primary rally point, he considered that in a pinch, a chopper could drop in and fly out quickly. His primary landing zone, a five-acre meadow, lay just beyond another small rise to their south.
While he lay still, his eyes searching the shadows, McKay’s mind pictured the map. He saw the small, solid plot with RPT written by it in red grease pencil, and halfway down the adjoining thousand-meter grid square just below Tango, he envisioned the red circle with LZO written in its center. Sanchez had made him study the map section, every mark, every label. He glanced up at Staff Sergeant Rhodes and smiled just as a North Vietnamese soldier fell face down between them, his head nearly cut off.
Sergeant McCoy had done his quiet knifework on the now dead man, apparently a scout, part of a larger, nearby patrol.
McKay’s heart pounded. He had never seen McCoy move, but somehow now he stood, hugging the backside of a tree as he watched two more NVA soldiers enter the moonlit meadow and work their way along the edges. Suddenly, from behind the trees, two more of McCoy’s Mamba section took the pair of intruders from behind and silently cut their throats to their spines, and pulled the dead men into the shadows and underbrush.
Across the small clearing, from its southwest side, several more figures emerged into the moonlight for an instant, but immediately disappeared into the black cover provided by the trees and bushes. McKay wrapped his left hand around the fore end of his rifle, and his right hand around his K-BAR knife, ready to cut a throat or shoot his way through the enemy.
He looked ahead at Staff Sergeant Rhodes, but the man had disappeared. Only the body of the NVA scout lay there now.
“Anyone here?” Doc Hamilton whispered as he nearly stepped on the dead man next to McKay.
“Only us chickens,” Staff Sergeant Rhodes answered, stepping from behind a tree, his knife in his hand, and then wrapping both arms around the navy hospital corpsman. “Where’s Baby Huey and that radio?”
“Right behind me,” Doc Hamilton whispered, and looked over his shoulder to see Lance Corporal Sneed embraced by Sergeant McCoy.
“You had three enemy scouts traveling with you,” Rhodes whispered. “McCoy and his team took them out just ahead of you guys.”
“That’s okay. We’ve got a dozen Marines behind us,” Hamilton said, smiling. “When we met up with our guys, we had just sat through watching forty or fifty NVA walking over the top of us, almost two clicks due north of us, off the west side of that big clearing. They’re crisscrossing this terrain with a vengeance. Once Bobby and I got behind the bad guys, we hi-diddle-diddled,
di-di-mao,
on a bearing due west. Figured we would skirt the area wide, and enter the RP from the south. That’s when we met up with Sanders and Bennett and Price and their teams. So we’re all here.”
“Let’s call Shark Bait to Red Rider ASAP. We need some artillery fire missions, a reaction company, and a med-evac pretty pronto,” Rhodes said, pulling branches away from Lieutenant Sanchez.
“Bobby already made the call. We did it once we got onto enough high ground to get a signal out,” Hamilton said, now looking at Sanchez’s eyes and feeling his cold skin. “Sneed asked for immediate withdrawal of our platoon, with one serious WIA. As far as any fire missions, that’s your call to make.”
Tommy McKay squatted next to Jimmy Sanchez, Doc Hamilton, and Paul Rhodes as the corpsman examined the wounded platoon commander.
“He’s unconscious or damned near it. Not hardly responsive,” Hamilton said, listening to the fading heartbeats of Jimmy Sanchez.
“We need to
hiako
on over to the LZ,” Rhodes said, and then looked at McKay. “You’re in charge, Lieutenant. What’s your plan? I’ll tell you if it’s any good.”
“Glad you asked, Sergeant,” T. D. McKay whispered back without blinking. “According to Doc, we’ve got two platoons of NVA swarming on our north end, and we need to get into position for the incoming helicopters, just beyond that little knoll half a click south of us.”
“My observations exactly,” Rhodes said.
“We can’t fight well and carry a wounded man, so we need to send Lieutenant Sanchez with Doc Hamilton and two-thirds of the platoon, along with either you or Sergeant McCoy in charge, on over to the landing zone and sit tight on the fringe, like we did here.”
“Yes, sir,” Rhodes said.
“You know what a rearguard withdrawal is, don’t you?” McKay asked the staff sergeant.
“A-firm-a-titty,” Rhodes said. “We drift around to the other side of the rally point, set up a base of fire. Engage the advancing point of the enemy here, where we choose. Get them focused on our guns, and then we fire and maneuver backward to the landing zone. Right?”
“My idea exactly, Sergeant,” McKay said, showing his white teeth through his green face. “We basically act as decoys here, engage them in a fight, maneuver toward the LZ while the choppers land, get our Marines aboard, and depart. Ideally, we get on the last bird out.”
“You’re in charge, sir. Care to issue the order?” Rhodes said, and signaled the platoon’s sergeant and three corporals to gather around the lawyer-lieutenant and him.
“We turn on the VHF radios?” Corporal Sanders asked after McKay issued his five-paragraph order, following the Basic School format verbatim: detailing by category situation, mission, execution, action, command, and signal.
“Might as well,” Staff Sergeant Rhodes answered. “Turn them on, but don’t key up unless you have to, and not until after the shooting starts.”
Tommy McKay looked at the group of serious-faced Marines. Except for Paul Rhodes, McCoy, and Doc Hamilton, all of the men were barely twenty years old. McKay himself wasn’t even thirty yet, but felt like an old man compared to them.
“You need to know that I’ll give up my life for any one of you men, just like Lieutenant Sanchez would,” McKay said to the small gathering of platoon leaders. “I expect you to give me something in return for that commitment. Your faith in me as a Marine, and your obedience to my orders.”
Tommy McKay looked at each man and continued, “We have three frogs inbound right now. Hopefully they’ll have a security force aboard to back us up, because that LZ is going to get hot fast. When those 46’s get ready to launch out of here, you be on them. Doc, you make sure that Lieutenant Sanchez gets on the first one.
“Listen carefully: Do not wait for me. I repeat: Do not wait for me. Don’t think about what’s going on with us out here. As soon as those birds hit the deck and drop their ramps, you hustle your asses aboard and don’t look back.
“Staff Sergeant Rhodes, Corporal Sanders, and his Viper team have volunteered to fight the rear guard with me. We’re going to be shooting and running. We don’t need anyone holding us up. Clear? When we hit the LZ, all hell will be breaking loose like a tidal wave on our backs. Count on it. We’ll jump aboard that last frog out. At least that’s the plan.”
“Don’t make me have to be getting on that frog and then find myself twiddling my thumbs, waiting on any of you heroes to get aboard. You had better be there ahead of me. That’s all I’ve got to say about that,” Rhodes added gruffly.
As the team leaders departed the briefing circle, the staff sergeant took aside Lionel McCoy and Bobby Sneed.
“Get the lieutenant and as many of the boys as you can on the first frog out of here,” Rhodes said, “It’s going to get ugly.”
Then he looked at Lieutenant McKay for approval as he continued to speak: “You and Baby Huey hang back, make sure everybody else is aboard, and then get on the last bird. I want the radioman next to you so you can keep on top of communications with us, and with Red Rider. You’re the relay.
“Both the lieutenant and I will have walkie-talkies, along with Corporal Sanders, who’s got his own, and one of his boys who took Bushmaster’s radio, call them Viper One and Viper Two.
“Make sure that the security team from those choppers and the pilots all know we are out there. We’re going to come barreling into the LZ with guns ablazing, our hair on fire, and lots of company jumping up our asses. No doubt you’ll hear us shooting long before you see us. Don’t let that spook anybody. Make sure the security teams know we’ll be coming in shooting, but the other way. I don’t want to be dodging their bullets along with the NVA’s, too.
“Try to hold the chopper on the ground until we get there, but don’t get yourselves overrun. Charlie hits the circle first, you’re going to boogie. Got that?
“We’ll do our damnedest to get aboard. I sure as shit don’t want to walk home. We may be dragging wounded or dead, too. I damned sure ain’t leaving anybody, either. Just do the best you can for us. Got it?”
Tommy McKay nodded his approval, and Sergeant McCoy gave Staff Sergeant Rhodes a hug.