Jungle Rules (12 page)

“Incoming! Incoming!” Carter screamed and ran toward the back of the barracks, where the two new officers’ bunks sat across the center aisle from his. “Get out! Get out! Incoming rockets!”

Jon Kirkwood stopped his loud snoring and raised his head, hearing the commotion. He immediately looked across his cubicle at Terry O’Connor’s empty bunk.

“Terry, where’d you go?” Kirkwood called, straining his sleepy eyes to see in the darkness.

Michael Carter looked at the empty bunk, too, and stopped yelling for the moment.

“Oh, yeah,” Kirkwood said. “He kept waking me up, complaining about the snoring. I think he went up to the second deck to sleep, out of earshot.”

“No time to look for him,” Carter suddenly screamed, again resuming his panic. “We’ve got to get to the bunker right now!”

“Let me get my pants on,” Kirkwood said, reaching up to the wall locker door and grabbing the back of his trousers hanging on it.

“No time!” Carter yelled, pulling the pants from Kirkwood’s grasp. “They’re shooting 122s at us. Didn’t you hear the first volley?”

“No, I was sleeping,” Kirkwood said, now grabbing his steel helmet off the top of his wall locker and slipping on his flak jacket.

“Come on, Jon, run for it!” Carter shouted, now jogging back toward the door and the stairs to the second deck. “Run to the bunker, and I will get Terry.”

With the sleep finally clearing his head, sudden panic took hold of Jon Kirkwood and sent him dashing hard, clomping in his untied boots, his white skivvy shorts flapping in the wake of air he stirred from his strides. The steel helmet bobbed on his head, and the flak jacked slapped his sides as he passed the stairs for the second deck and came face to face with the double screen doors. The inwardly opening screen doors.

Kirkwood never lost a step as he burst through the entrance, sending the wooden frames that held the screens in place flying in pieces and the wire mesh falling in a limp wad that tangled under his feet. The mess sent the captain tumbling in a somersault that landed him flat on his back atop the remnants of the barracks screen doors.

Buck Taylor put his foot on Kirkwood’s chest when the panicked Marine tried to bound to his feet. Then the lawyer saw the ring of cheery faces surrounding him, and he began to hear the laughter.

Seconds later, Terry O’Connor came charging out the destroyed barracks entrance, sucking wind as he ran barefoot, and wearing only his white skivvy shorts and T-shirt. From nowhere a foot and leg emerged from the sidelines and caught the captain just above the ankles. Seeing his friend sprawled on the walkway atop the remains of the splintered screen doors, O’Connor angled his fall to the side and slid across the dew-soaked grass.

“Here, this will cool you off, open your hatch,” Taylor said to Kirkwood, still holding his foot on the captain’s chest and now draining a can of beer into Jon’s mouth.

Kirkwood jumped to his feet, coughing and spewing beer. Then Wayne Ebberhardt offered Terry O’Connor a hand, helping him to his feet, too.

“Hilarious!” Kirkwood said, catching his breath and kicking his way out of the pile of rubbish that used to be the barracks doors. “I’m glad you guys got a good laugh. What is it, 2:00 AM?”

“About that. Maybe later. Who knows. I’m too shit-faced to care,” Carter said, and laughed in a high-pitched chirp. “Now you have officially joined our tribe.”

Terry O’Connor kicked mud and sod from his naked feet, and pulled his brown-and green-streaked, wet T-shirt and shorts from his skin as he stepped on the better-feeling, smooth surface of the concrete porch.

“I’m not paying a cent toward fixing that door,” O’Connor said, looking at Kirkwood and then laughing, too.

Jon Kirkwood never laughed, but did take a fresh beer from Buck Taylor’s latest six-pack, popped it open, and drained the can down his throat in one chug a lug series of gulps.

At just a few minutes past four o’clock in the morning, several barrages of 122-millimeter Katusha rockets crashed on Da Nang Air Base. One of the salvos exploded on the bunkers across the road from First MAW Law’s officer barracks, where all but three of the two buildings’ inhabitants had sought shelter. While the sirens had sounded, and Marines shouted the alarm as they ran for cover, Terry O’Connor and Jon Kirkwood stayed on their bunks out of hardheaded rebelliousness. A drunken Michael Carter lay his rack, too, not from any act of stubbornness or defiance, but because throughout the commotion he never heard a thing.

Chapter 4

“HERE, SKIPPER, PUT this on,” the tall, black Marine staff sergeant told Terry O’Connor. The helicopter crew chief had the name Toby Dixon embossed in gold beneath combat aircrew wings on the leather patch above the left breast pocket of his flight suit. He handed the lawyer a heavy, four-inch-wide nylon web belt that buckled in front with a large, metal latch riveted to a thick, six-inch-square piece of leather. Double-sewn to the center of the back, the apparatus had a two-inch-wide, six-foot-long adjustable strap that dangled in a pile on the ground and had a hook looped on the end of the tether with a spring-loaded safety catch that locked shut.

“What’s this?” O’Connor said to the sergeant, who now handed Jon Kirkwood a similar-looking harness.

“Gunner’s belt,” the staff sergeant said, pulling from a metal box two green plastic headsets, each with a boom microphone extending from a bracket fastened to the right earpiece.

“Why do we need these?” Kirkwood asked, fastening the wide belt around his waist and pulling the leather adjustment tabs on either side of the buckle, drawing it tight around his middle.

“So you won’t fall out,” the crew chief said, handing each of the two captains a headset. “That long strap locks into the tie-down rings on the cargo deck. That way, if we get into some shit, you can maneuver around
without involving yourselves in some short-term sky diving, if you know what I mean. You might dangle, but you won’t splatter. I’ll get your headsets hooked up to the intercom and the gunner’s belts secured to the deck for you once we get aboard. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.”

“We’re just catching a lift to Chu Lai,” Kirkwood said, now helping O’Connor get his waist cinch tightened. “Can’t we just use the seat belts?”

“If we had any seats,” the staff sergeant said and laughed. “Mostly the grunts just pile in and sit on the floor, letting their feet hang out the sides with their rifles pointed between their toes. They don’t wear shit. Since you guys are newbees, Captain Oliver, our pilot, told me to put gunner’s belts on you two, in case we gotta dodge a few bullets.”

“You’re flying us over enemy territory en route to Chu Lai?” Kirkwood said, now feeling a lump tightening in his throat. He looked at O’Connor, who smiled wide. “Terry, this is no fucking joke, is it?”

“Hey, pal, I got here when you did. I had no chance to pull any pranks,” O’Connor said, snugging the gunner’s belt higher on his waist so it didn’t interfere with his Colt .45 pistol hanging in its holster off his right hip.

“You didn’t hear all about that shit, sir, when you went through orientation on Okinawa, before you shipped to Da Nang?” the staff sergeant said, helping Kirkwood and O’Connor get settled on the metal floor of the UH1E Huey utility helicopter.

“We only left Norton Air Force Base on Wednesday,” Kirkwood replied. “As soon as we got to Okinawa, we got on a plane to Da Nang. Hell, we never got to sleep or even take a shower, much less go to any orientation briefings.”

“Anyplace here can net you an enemy round,” the staff sergeant said, snapping the tie-down straps from their gunner’s belts to the cargo rings set in the chopper’s floor panels. Then he looked at Terry O’Connor, who still worried with the adjustment of his sidearm. “Sir, you won’t need that .45 at all, unless we get shot down and you survive the crash. We get in the shit, you’re gonna open up with the two M14 rifles I’m fixing to hand to you.”

The crew chief then flipped open the lid to a long, wooden box tied into the right rear cargo area, at the foot of one of the chopper’s auxiliary fuel bladders. From it he drew out the two rifles and a large metal can of .30-caliber belted ammunition and set it between Kirkwood’s legs.

“Hang on to those rounds for me, sir,” the staff sergeant said, and pulled out an M60 machine gun and handed it to O’Connor. “Hold that up high for me when I stand in the door and pull down on those rubber straps. Once I got it hooked, then you can let go and it’ll just hang in place. Then we’ll feed a belt of that ammo up to it.”

“You boys doing okay?” a voice spoke from the other side of the helicopter.

“That’s Captain Jeff Oliver and First Lieutenant Bill Perry,” Staff Sergeant Dixon said, pointing through the chopper’s open cargo area, which had its center occupied by a large wooden crate, forcing any passengers to ride sitting on the outside edge of the floor.

Kirkwood and O’Connor both turned and waved to the helicopter’s pilot and copilot and then offered thumbs-up signals.

“Toby, lets get rolling,” the chopper pilot said, climbing in the left front seat, strapping himself in place, and plugging in his communications wire that dangled out of the back of his helmet.

“You guys hear me okay?” the pilot then added, now speaking through the headsets that Kirkwood and O’Connor wore, and through the crew chief’s helmet phones. Tethered by a long coil of wire plugged into a gray metal control box overhead in the center of the helicopter’s cargo area, Dixon also had connected Kirkwood’s and O’Connor’s lines from their headsets to the same communications terminal.

“Five by five,” the staff sergeant spoke as he walked to the side of the helicopter, the black wire leading from his helmet coiled in his left hand. Once at his station, where he had eye contact with the pilot and a good view of the entire helicopter, he began rotating his right hand over his head, signaling Captain Oliver to start turning the blades and firing the chopper’s turbine engine.

Terry O’Connor found the talk button for his microphone dangling against his chest on the wire that connected him to the overhead communications box. He then fastened the device to his shirt with the metal spring clip made on its back, and pressed the button.

“Roger, wilco, five by five,” O’Connor said and laughed. “Kirkwood, can you hear me?”

“Yes!” the lawyer replied, shouting over the drone of the Huey’s engine, now fired and spinning the rotor blade overhead, shaking the aircraft as it gained speed.

“If you’ll push that button hanging in the middle of your chest, you won’t have to yell,” O’Connor said, pointing to the control device dangling on Kirkwood’s wire.

“I keep forgetting that lawyer captains are like second lieutenants,” Captain Oliver said, and laughed over the intercom. “This your first chopper ride?”

“We rode in them at TBS,” O’Connor said, pushing the button. “Never had any headsets, though. Just rode in the belly of the beast and looked out the windows.”

“First time in a Huey, though,” Kirkwood said, finding his talk button and clipping it to his shirt. “We only rode in the troop transport helicopters, CH-34s and 46s.”

As the skids lifted from the concrete flight line, Staff Sergeant Dixon stepped on the rail, and sat on the edge of the doorway beneath the M60 machine gun. A few feet above the ground, Oliver tilted the aircraft’s nose down, lifting its tail high, and sped forward, slowly gaining altitude and barely clearing the buildings just past Da Nang Air Base’s perimeter fences. Gaining only a few more feet of altitude, seeming to hug the treetops, the captain set the Huey’s power to its cruise airspeed, leaving the world in a green blur beneath Kirkwood’s and O’Connor’s feet.

“Amazing! I love it,” O’Connor said, holding tight to the M14 rifle that the crew chief had given him, and looking out at the vista of rice paddies and thatched-roof huts that suddenly appeared beneath the racing aircraft as it left the cityscape of Da Nang and entered the countryside.

“See the iron bridge crossing the river to the left?” Captain Oliver called on the intercom. “Then to the right of it, at our eleven o’clock, that big orange and green mountain with all the roads and crap around it?”

“Sure, I see it,” Kirkwood said, holding fast to his rifle and sitting between O’Connor on his left and Staff Sergeant Dixon standing behind the machine gun on his right.

“Tallyho the iron bridge and the mountain,” O’Connor said and laughed. “I always wanted to say that. Tallyho. That’s pilot talk.”

“Roger that,” Oliver said and laughed. “That’s Hill 55, home plate for the Seventh Marine Regiment. Straight south and just a tad west is Fire Support Base Ross, or as we call it, LZ Ross. It’s a combat outpost on two low knolls in the middle of the Que Son Valley, between LZ Baldy to the east and LZ Ryder due west of it. Eleventh Marines has a mix of artillery batteries there, along with a fair-sized infantry task force detached from two battalions out of the Seventh Marines, not quite a regimental landing team but larger than a battalion landing team. They also have some elements from the First Tank Battalion and a few other supporting arms, along with a helicopter refueling station. Oh, and the army has some units from the First Cavalry Division there, too. So it’s a pretty active plot on the map. We gotta set down there and drop off this box. Then we chop east to Chu Lai and get you guys to your destination. Should make it before noon chow.”