Last Man Out (19 page)

I turned the bayonet around and stuck the point between the trapdoor and the base. Stooping over the hole, Beck had the flashlight and pistol inches above the knife. I lifted the door slightly and Beck moved the flashlight forward to shine in the crack. Lifting the door wider, I rose up on my elbows to look down inside.

The room below was narrow and long, three times the size of the tunnel and filled with olive drab boxes. I saw a pool of blood on some clothes at the end of the flashlight beam.

There was no VC. I was suddenly angry. Relieved, but angry.

“Lieutenant, my back is killing me. Let’s do something,” Beck said.

Taking the flashlight from him, I lifted the door all the way and bent down into the room. The blood trail went to the end of the room. Bloody handprints were on the rear wall. I figured the VC had made his way up the wall to the hold above.

I dropped into the room and could almost stand up. Old carbines and mortar tubes were stacked in one corner. I told Beck to go back and get Fernandez and a couple more men because we were going to clear all the stuff out of the room. When Beck dropped the door, I suddenly realized that I didn’t have a weapon. I opened the door and told him to leave the pistol. I left the door open and went back to the other end of the room. As I suspected, there was a trapdoor in the ceiling above the bloodstains. Aiming
the flashlight at the door, I eased it open with the barrel of my pistol.

There was nothing but more tunnel on the other side. I opened the door completely and stood up. With my head up through the door opening, I shined the light down the tunnel. It went to a dead end, but I thought I could see openings off to each side.

Fernandez soon appeared, and I sent him down the tunnel after the VC. He went reluctantly.

Beck joined me in the lower room, and we began to hand out items to Lyons, who was waiting in the tunnel above. They included medical supplies, textbooks, mine parts, clothing—civilian and military—ammo, weapons, maps, letters, pots, and pans. The room was the supply cache for a VC cell. On the side of one wall in the dirt was a square area that had been hardened with water and some cementlike agent and contained several lines of Vietnamese writing and a small American flag. I had Beck write the Vietnamese as best he could.

When the tunnel rat returned, he said he had gone down the tunnel to the dead end, taken a right, and followed the blood trail until the tunnel got so small he couldn’t go any farther. The tunnel that led off to the left continued to what appeared to be a cave-in.

Still no VC.

Back aboveground, I leaned against the wall of the hole under the shelter and breathed deeply. The moon was full and the night was surprisingly bright. Bratcher and Spencer were nearby. Spencer handed me a cup of coffee, and, hiding the match in my cupped hands, I lit a cigarette. The pile of material from the underground room lay in the middle of the hole. Occasional rounds whistled overhead.

I called Woolley to report that we had lost the VC down a tunnel but, in chasing him, had come across a small VC supply cache. We were being probed, but I thought we could hold our own until sunrise. No casualties—we were hungry and tired, but okay.

When I finished my report, I leaned back against the dirt pit wall.

Bratcher pointed at the spider hole in the corner and asked, “Do you want us to wake you up if any VC come out of that hole tonight, or do you just want to sleep through it?”

More rounds zinged overhead.

Kiss my bejesus, I thought. Will this ever end? I was so tired that it was difficult to focus on the problem with the hole, but it was clear, once Bratcher mentioned it, that the tunnel was unprotected and the VC could come in during the night and attack us from the inside out. It would be hard to find all the men and move away from the shelter in the dark. The easiest thing would be to protect the hole.

I looked at it in the corner and thought that, at any second, a VC could jump out like a jack-in-the-box and start shooting. I noticed that Spencer and Bratcher held their weapons pointed toward the hole.

More rounds zinged overhead. I borrowed Spencer’s bayonet, took a couple of grenades off my web gear, picked up some tape and a trip-flare kit, and went down the hole feet first. After crawling to the trapdoor at the end of the tunnel, I banged on the door with the handle of the bayonet before opening it, but I saw no signs that anyone had been there since we had left. I shut the door again and drove one bayonet into the ground on one side of the door. Repeated attempts to get the other bayonet into the ground on the other side failed, so I impaled the blade on the bottom of the doorframe. I taped the grenades to the bayonets, attached the wire from the trip-flare kit in the ring of one grenade, and ran it across the trapdoor to the ring of the other grenade. My shoulders were tired when I finished. I laid my arms on the tunnel floor and then brought them back to cushion my head. I closed my eyes and was drifting off to sleep when I heard more gunfire above.

I looked at my booby trap, knowing that I hadn’t straightened out the safety pins. If I hit that wire after I straightened the pins, I was dead, because I couldn’t back out of this tunnel in time. Carefully thinking through every movement before I made it, I straightened the two pins and moved my hands back in front of me. Slowly I backed out of the tunnel and joined Bratcher and Spencer.

We were probed for the next few hours. Sometime after midnight the firing stopped. Then, about 0200, VC opened up from all sides. I thought they were attacking and called in mortar
flares. A tracer round hit the straw roof of the smaller shelter and it started to burn.

The mortar flares went off. Woolley asked if I wanted mortar rounds fired around my position. I said yes, but I wondered if he and the mortar crew had our exact position plotted. Within minutes mortar rounds began crashing around us. We stopped firing and hugged the ground.

When the mortars stopped, there was no more fire from the VC. I called the company commander and thanked him. He said a relief column would be out to us at first light. Around 0500 the first rays of the morning sun began to seep into the jungle, and it was light by 0530. From across the hole under the shelter, Spencer said, “Hell of a night.”

I told Bratcher that I wanted us up and moving soon. If each man carried some items, we could take everything we had brought out of the underground room.

I looked at the spider hole in the corner and thought about the two-grenade booby trap over the door. I could leave them there, but the VC would certainly get the grenades when they came back and eventually use them against us.

I told Bratcher and Spencer that I was going to get the grenades and picked up a pistol and flashlight. Down in the tunnel, I saw that the wire between the two safety pins had been bent upward. During the night someone from below had pushed the door up but stopped before the wire across the top pulled out either of the pins.

I smiled to myself, but I was suddenly unsure how to bend the safety pins back. One of the safety pins was slightly out of the detonator. I backed out of the tunnel and asked Bratcher for the pliers he carried to crimp claymore detonators. They had wire cutters on one end.

Back in the tunnel, I crawled to the trapdoor and caught my breath before reaching up and cutting the wire between the safety pins. Then, one at a time, I bent the pins back. I was backing down the tunnel when I heard small-arms fire from above. It started slowly, then a full battle erupted. I backed out furiously and was almost to the spider hole when I heard Bratcher yelling for everyone to hold their fire.

Coming out of the hole, I saw Bratcher running off to the side
with Spencer on his heels. I heard loud, frenzied talking in the bush ahead of them.

Castro was yelling, “Ah shit, man! Shit! Shit!”

I recognized Peterson’s voice yelling for the medic and telling his men to spread out. Wondering why Peterson was there, I rushed forward.

Ten or fifteen feet from the shelters, Castro was holding Private Patrick in his arms. Patrick had been shot in the chest and shoulder. The medic was on his knees. Patrick’s arms were lying loosely at his sides, his eyes roaming around the faces of the men standing above him. Castro helped open his fatigue jacket. Blood was gushing from a number of holes, and his eyes started to lose their focus. Castro yelled for him to hold on and told the medic to hurry. Patrick coughed, and blood came out of his mouth. I dropped to my knees beside him.

“Goddammit, don’t you die, Patrick! Don’t you die! Don’t give up!” I said, helping to rip open his shirt.

Blood was everywhere. Patrick closed his eyes and his head rolled to the side, and he died.

We stopped what we were doing. The medic shook his head, took a deep breath, and stood up.

Castro was still holding Patrick and rocking back and forth on his heels. Then Castro laid him down on the ground. I stood up and looked at Pete. His eyes were moist. He had his hands out with the palms up.

“I left as soon as I could this morning to get here and help you,” Pete said. “Colonel wouldn’t let me come last night.” He paused. “Patrick must have fallen asleep, lying here in these bushes. He fired at my point man. Just jerked up and started firing. He and my point man just fired at each other. I’m sorry.”

I looked down at Patrick, then at each man who stood around him in slight shock—Castro, Bratcher, Spencer, Beck, Pete’s point man, and Pete. I was tired; it took a while for me to understand what happened. Then, more quickly, I sought some meaning. I couldn’t yell at Pete or his point man. It certainly wasn’t their fault, nor was it Patrick’s. I felt a mindless rage, like I wanted to cry and scream at the same time.

“Goddammit,” I heard myself say as random thoughts drifted through the fog of my mind. Death is so ugly. War is so unfair.
Why Patrick? What’s the use? Who’s to blame? No answers. My mind turned numb.

Without comment, we built a stretcher out of ponchos and bamboo and gently rolled Patrick’s body onto it.

Pete’s platoon would stay in the area and try to pin down the VC who had attacked us during the night. As I began to walk away with my platoon, Pete fell in beside me and we walked along together for a short distance. We didn’t look at each other or talk. I was exhausted. Pete didn’t know what to say. He stopped and I walked on.

  NINE  

We delivered Patrick’s body to Spec-5 Heyekiah Goss Jr., the company medic, and then slept most of the day under shady makeshift shelters. Soon after I awoke, Pete’s recon platoon returned to the battalion perimeter with the bodies of two of his men killed during the day.

A hot meal, cold beer, and mail came in by helicopter late in the afternoon and the platoon slept through the night. The following morning, 15 January, the battalion swept toward a village west of our bivouac site that was suspected of harboring VC. Alpha Company’s route was just inside a wood line by a large open rice field. The company would follow a small trail, with Duckett’s former platoon on the left and mine on the right. Ernst’s platoon, commanded by Arthur, would ride on armored personnel carriers and bring up the rear in reserve.

To contain the VC, several units were moving on the village from different directions. As we were getting on line that morning and preparing to move out, Pete’s platoon moved by on my right to reconnoiter ahead of our advancing line. When Pete and I saw each other, we smiled and nodded our heads. Pete looked tired. He raised his M-16 up in the air and then went out of sight.

As Alpha Company moved out, gunships passed overhead and buzzed the tree line by the rice field. Random artillery rounds landed across the field. We heard occasional bursts of gunfire around us as the men fired into suspicious bushes and tufts of bamboo. In my platoon, Ayers was at the front of one file, Beck led another, and Sergeant Rome was off on the right.

Far to our left across the field, Charlie Company was pinned down by fire from a VC machine gun bunker. Arthur was ordered over to help. The VC gun crew retreated when they heard his
APC tracks coming through the jungle. After sweeping the area, Arthur was ordered back behind us again as reserve and he fell in somewhere to our rear. We overheard Woolley talking with him by radio. According to the coordinates that Arthur gave, he should have been directly behind us, but no one could hear any noise from the tracks. Woolley was walking down the path that separated Duckett’s old platoon from mine. His point man spotted a trip wire running across the trail. We slowed down while the company first sergeant cleared the brush around the wire. When he found it led to a flare, we moved out again. Woolley went back to the radio and began talking with Arthur again. Duckett’s platoon encountered some heavy brushes, and Beck yelled for us to slow down so we would stay on line.