Last Man Out (29 page)

Ahead, I saw the incline and the marshy area as the lead chopper landed in the clearing by the marsh. The lead vehicles of Task Force Dragoon were on the road to our left. Some were on fire. In the distance I could see flames from the snout of a Zippo spray the roadside with a hellish flame. In the jungle, napalm had burned long black splotches along the north side of the road. Some trees stood naked.

Amid more explosions and more fireballs we began to hear the clatter and heavy thumping of machine guns. Tracers from some of the tanks were still streaking into the woods.

Men from the lead choppers raced for the wood line. Several fell. People were moving about hurriedly on the road. It was hard to tell whose side they were on. For a fleeting second it appeared that most of them were Vietnamese running across the road from the south. We were landing in the middle of the battlefield.

On the ground seconds later, I lay down until the helicopter lifted off, then moved under its skids to join the command group running through the waist-high grass for the trees. I could see the turret to the lead tank off to the side, near the marsh. It was at a crazy angle. The tracks on the tank were blown askew.

Panton had a simple map of the area between Checkpoints Tom and Dick in his hand and was plotting the locations of the companies with a grease pencil. I walked past him and joined Dunn, who was staring into the woods.

The area smelled like spent gunpowder and burnt wet weeds. Bushes were burning everywhere. Suddenly to our right, a Vietnamese got up and started running through the woods. By the time Bob and I got our rifles up, other men in the battalion had cut him down. He was dressed in olive-green fatigues but did not appear to have a weapon.

Haldane came up behind us and told us to move out. Most of the battalion was on the ground. I took the point for the command group as we moved cautiously by the burned-out area on the tree line into dark jungle. We could see sunlight ahead where napalm had burned through the foliage, and I headed in that direction.

Firing continued all around us. Occasionally a round zinged overhead. Slow-moving, heavily armed, prop-driven Skyraider aircraft came on station, and Haldane asked the company commanders to have each platoon throw smoke to identify their forward positions. He told them to hold up until we got a fix from the forward air controller (FAC).

Company C was beside the road, Company B was beside them to our left, and Company A was to our right. The lead elements of Company B suddenly began firing. Grenades went off. The commander came on the radio and said they had run into Vietnamese.

Some walking wounded from Company A had approached our group and were being treated by the head corpsman when the FAC came on the air and said that he had our smoke. We were even with the cav unit at the head of the convoy, more or less on line. He told us to hold up for five minutes while the Skyraiders worked the area in front of us. General DePuy came on and said four minutes—we had to move on.

The ponderous Skyraiders came from behind us. Suddenly
their firing drowned out everything else around us. Then, off in the distance, we heard other explosions and the ground shook.

The Skyraiders’ fire cut down whole trees. One wave of two planes was followed by another wave and another.

General DePuy was on the radio yelling for us to move out, mop up.

Haldane passed the order.

Another bomb went off somewhere in the distance and the ground shook again.

Company B sent a gravely wounded man on a poncho stretcher to our area. Haldane told the two soldiers carrying the stretcher to stay with us, take point for the command group, and move out. We left the wounded man behind with the head medic. Haldane told the corpsman to make it to the road with his wounded when he got him patched up.

Company C called in to report they were stepping over Vietnamese dead. Did Haldane want a body count? Haldane said he wanted the company to move ahead.

About this time the two soldiers leading our group stopped in their tracks. Haldane asked loudly, over the din of noise around us, what the delay was about. I told him I’d check and I moved up by the men. They were looking down at a ravine that went straight across our front. It looked like a dried-up river. Beside us, Alpha Company came on the radio to report the ravine.

Down in the bottom was a trail—a “superhighway” through the forest that the ambushers were certainly planning to use as an escape route away from the road. I sent the two men across. As they reached the bottom, an automatic weapon opened up from the left and the lead man recoiled from a hit, but he gathered himself, dived to the side, and hid behind a log.

Company B soldiers were behind the Vietnamese gun. They threw grenades into the position and two Vietnamese soldiers were blown partially out. The other Bravo Company soldier in the ravine got across and up the other side. The command group followed. The remaining medic helped the first man up and treated his wound. Down the ravine, some of our soldiers were investigating the Vietnamese blown out of the machine gun position and yelled up to us that one of them was still alive. Haldane told them to take him to the road.

Charlie Company continued to report that it was coming across a lot of bodies and taking some prisoners. Haldane told them also to move the POWs to the road.

Firing picked up as we approached the heart of the ambush, where the bulk of the Vietnamese had been hiding as they waited to be used as porters to carry the supplies back to Cambodia. Rounds continued to zing over our heads.

Alpha Company reported that it was wading through the carnage left by one of the Skyraiders that had hit a Vietnamese group broadside with its .50-caliber machine guns. I heard Duckett say that it was a Philadelphia mess. Spencer was on the air and said that Bratcher and my old platoon were coming across individuals and pairs of VC trying to make their way north away from the ambush.

The small-arms fire subsided and two more men from Company B came our way with a soldier on a stretcher. Their charge—only a boy, a small, youngish eighteen—looked up at me and said he didn’t want to die.

“Hell, man, I can’t see where you’re wounded,” I said.

He pulled up his fatigue jacket, and I could see a small bullet hole near his navel. There wasn’t much blood outside, but it was clear that he had extensive internal bleeding. His skin was bloated around the bullet wound.

Haldane walked up. The boy continued to say over and over again that he didn’t want to die. He was going into shock.

“Gut shot,” I said to Haldane. “He’ll die unless we get him to a medic soon.”

“We don’t have any,” Haldane said.

I suggested that we could send the litter detail to the road, but Haldane said the men with the stretcher were needed where they were. He told me to get the man to the road, find a radio, and tell him what was happening out there.

“Rog,” I said.

Haldane directed the two Bravo Company men to return to their unit and told Dunn to move out on point. I stood beside the boy on the stretcher and watched the battalion group follow Dunn.

Firing was picking up, some of it coming from our rear.

At the end of the battalion group, an Air Force forward observer
came along with his radio operator and another soldier who had fallen in with us. I reached out and grabbed the soldier as he walked by and called out to the Air Force officer.

“Hey, I’ve got a man here that has to get to the road. I got me a man here to take one end of the stretcher. Can I borrow your radio operator for the other end?”

The Air Force officer, who had not been in Vietnam very long, looked confused. “What about the radio?” he asked.

“You carry it,” I said flatly.

“Okay,” he said.

I helped the radio operator take off the PRC-25 and put it on the back of the officer. The battalion group had moved ahead, and, still adjusting the radio, the officer quickly followed.

Too soon, we were alone. Motioning the soldier to the front of the stretcher and the radio operator to the rear, I began moving toward the road with my M-16 at port arms.

The boy on the stretcher continued to cry out. After a half-dozen steps I went back to the stretcher, bent down on one knee, grabbed the boy by the chin, and said, “Shut the fuck up. Moaning don’t help. It gets on my nerves. And it gives our position away. We’re all alone, fellow. Shut up, and I’ll get you out of here.” I twisted his chin back and forth and smiled.

We went on, but had to stop every few feet to listen. We were standing still at one point when I saw someone dart between some bushes to my right front. I extended a hand back and motioned for the litter detail to drop to the ground. Putting the gun to my shoulder, I aimed at the bushes. A Vietnamese with an AK-47 in his hand came from behind a tree. He was looking away from me and heading toward the ravine. As he started to break into a trot, I had a clear shot and fired a short burst of rounds. The Vietnamese fell backward and disappeared into the undergrowth.

I suspected that there would be other Vietnamese ahead, so I turned and started toward the ravine. The two men with the stretcher followed me.

Nearing the ravine, I saw where the battalion CP group had climbed up the side. I knew that off to my right would be the machine gun position destroyed by Company B. Small-arms fire zipped over our heads from below.

“Ah, shit,” I said as I dived for the ground. Vietnamese were in the ravine, but they did not attack. They had probably fired and run, I thought as I lay there. After a few minutes I got up in a crouch, came back around the stretcher, and started off again straight toward the road.

Near where I had shot the Vietnamese, I saw movement in the bushes ahead. Whoever was there was moving awkwardly. Far to my front, a Vietnamese moved out into a small clearing. He was carrying another man on his back. Although I could barely make out the pair, I knew that both men were Vietnamese and the shirt of the one being carried was bloody. As they went out of sight, I could see his head roll around as if he were dead or unconscious.

More Vietnamese appeared to the right. Three or four, I couldn’t tell. Jesus, I thought as I dropped to the ground again, I’m making my way across the migration route of the whole North Vietnamese nation.

Do I stand up and shoot or let them pass?

The boy behind me moaned. I began to sweat. I listened. There was firing in the distance. I strained to hear what was happening in front of me. Two or three minutes went by. The boy moaned again.

I got to my knees. There was no one around. Where the fuck had they gone? The men behind me picked up the stretcher and waited in a crouch. Walking along, I looked quickly from one side to another. Where were they?

Suddenly, through a bamboo thicket ahead, I could see a Vietnamese standing, as if he were waiting for us. I stopped and went to one knee. Then, off to my left, the three men whom I had seen earlier bolted for the ravine. We had been hiding from each other. None of us had fired out of separate fear of not knowing exactly what we were up against—two opposing three-man groups, avoiding each other on a spent battlefield.

Except that the man ahead had not moved. I waited for him to turn and join the others, but he stayed his ground. Finally I was afraid of waiting any longer. With sweat dropping in my eyes, I fired toward him and fell forward. Lying on the ground, I wiped my face with my sleeve and waited. There were sounds all around me, but I could not identify any as belonging to the man
ahead. I came back up to my knee and stared straight ahead. The man was still there. He was dead, I realized, hung up on some vines. He had been dead before I fired.

We moved by the thicket, past the dead man, then through a burned-out area, through more jungle, and finally onto the edge of the road. At a distance of about two city blocks down the road I saw the lead cavalry elements of the convoy. In front of me were trucks. Some of them were burning.

Men were standing around near the cav vehicles. Wounded and dead littered the shoulders of the road. We climbed up to the road and walked toward the cav vehicles. We passed a truck with the driver hanging out of the half-open door. The next truck was untouched. Off to the side, a patch of woods had been burned by napalm and a cluster of burnt Vietnamese corpses lay in a ditch. A truck was half in and half out of a crater near the first Quarterhorse vehicle, an ACAV. Quarterhorse troopers were in the process of removing some of their dead still draped over the top of it. Many had tanker goggles pulled down to their necks, their bulletproof vests hanging open. Two tanks at the lead were maneuvering in the road. As we approached someone yelled for them to stop because there could be more mines.

I could see a medevac helicopter taking off from the road near the incline past the marsh, and we walked in that direction. Black smoke, with the putrid smell of burning flesh, swirled from some of the burning vehicles.

The lead tank, off to the side of the road, was out of commission. Smoke was coming from an open turret near the front.

A Quarterhorse trooper with a radio was at the very head of the column. Some helicopters were landing in the field where we had first come in. I told the man with the radio that I needed to call for a dust-off. Without waiting for an answer, I reached down and turned to the right frequency, gave my position, and requested a medevac. A medevac chopper came on the air. He was in the area and coming down. I threw smoke and within a matter of minutes the helicopter was on the ground. We put the young boy aboard.

I went back to the radio and called the colonel to tell him that the action was in front of him. The battle back here was over. As I
was talking, photographers were coming up the bank from helicopters in the landing zone. They were taking pictures of everything. I moved off to the side as they clustered around the lead Quarterhorse vehicles. When they moved on, I walked over to the lead tank to look for Slippery Clunker Six.

I turned a complete circle as I looked at everyone standing around. There was no one familiar. A tanker walked by.

“Where’s Sergeant Bretschneider?” I asked.