P. O. W. (4 page)

“You sure?”

“Yes… I must be having a slight touch of fever… malaria.” McDonald tried smiling and failed. He covered the attempt by placing
his fork in his mouth. The other sergeant gave him a strange look. There was nothing on the fork.

The vision came back the instant the man left. He could feel the blood soaking through his sweat-stained jacket. An army ant
ran across his face and stopped next to his nose before deciding that he was too big to haul back to the main body of ants.
He blinked his eyes, unable to move. The sound of a small snake sliding over the bamboo leaves reached him, and then the loud
noise of the machine gun drowned out the jungle sounds. The weapon was close to where he lay on the jungle floor. He guessed
that it was within a hundred meters. The last burst from the antiaircraft machine gun was answered by a blast of intense heat.
McDonald felt the wave of extremely hot air pass over him, and then the heat was sucked back in the direction it had come
from. A fast mover had dropped a napalm bomb on the machine gun position.

The jungle became quiet. He liked it. It was better than having to listen to the NVA searching for him or the Chinese machine
gun. He liked the quiet better. The first scream reached him only seconds after the explosion, but in his confused state of
mind it seemed like minutes, or maybe a couple of centuries. The NVA gun crew was being roasted alive from the napalm that
had stuck to their clothes and skin. He lay under the bamboo and thought about the sound of the screams and decided that he
liked it. They had had no mercy for the South Vietnamese prisoners of war.

McDonald blinked. He felt the fork dig into his lower lip. He had missed his mouth.

The Project Cherry assault team had reached the edge of the prisoner-of-war camp and was under intense ground fire. McDonald
knew that he couldn’t hesitate or the NVA would kill their POWs before allowing for them to be repatriated by the team. A
light machine gun opened fire to his left, and he gave the command to take it out of action with an LAW missile. His forty-man
team was extremely well trained. A slight hand movement from him would send a squad of men maneuvering instantly. He had spent
three months training day and night with the prisoner snatch team, and they were good; they were the best.

McDonald had no way of knowing the NVA had moved a battalion of regulars to a night rest site a few hundred meters away from
the NVA POW camp. His team was destroying the camp guards, and they were within a few feet of the South Vietnamese POWs when
the first assault hit his flank and stopped his progress cold. The Project Cherry group fought valiantly to the man. There
was no quarter asked, nor was any given. McDonald’s vision became even clearer as he recalled running through the center of
the POW camp with the remaining seven men from his team. He saw again for the hundred billionth time the row of South Vietnamese
prisoners tied to the horizontal narrow wooden planks that had been propped up off the ground with small homemade bamboo sawhorses.
The prisoners’ arms had been stretched out over their heads and chained to the planks. A hole had been cut through each one
of the planks where the POW’s buttocks were located. McDonald could see from the large piles of feces piled under the planks,
that some of the prisoners had been chained to their wooden bed boards for quite a while. The NVA guards had cut each one
of the POWs’ throats.

McDonald and his men had run directly into the NVA company that had taken up a blocking position. He had been hit five times,
by an AK-47 firing a short burst. The seven commandos had fallen like cut wheat. None of them had had a chance to even fire
their weapons. McDonald had taken a round through both cheeks that missed his jaws and teeth. The massive bleeding from the
wound had made it look as if half of his head had been blown off and had saved him from a coup-de-grace round from the NVA
officer’s pistol. The other seven commandos weren’t so lucky. McDonald could hear each one of the rounds thud against flesh
as he lay on the ground slowly bleeding to death. The NVA officer barked a command, and the blocking troops formed a skirmish
line and moved off to sweep through the camp for other survivors.

McDonald had dropped his fork and was staring directly at the side of the mess-hall wall. His vision totally possessed him.
The NCO who had stopped by his table earlier had kept his eye on the senior sergeant and could see that the soldier was having
some kind of mental problem. McDonald was highly respected in the Recondo School, and the sergeant didn’t want whatever was
happening to the senior NCO to go too far. He left his seat and headed toward the commandant’s office for help.

McDonald had crawled away from the pile of dead commandos toward a thick clump of bamboo. Escape was all that he could think
about. If he had been functioning with a normal mind, he would have given up, but after seeing what the NVA had done to the
POWs, he knew that he had to try to escape before they returned and discovered that he was still alive. The bamboo leaves
on the ground felt cool to his touch in the shade. He piled as many leaves as he could scrape up against his body without
moving too much. His left arm didn’t work, and even though he had told his body that he wanted to get on his feet, nothing
responded as it should have. McDonald spent a couple of minutes trying to reach the transponder attached to his web gear and
pushed the rubber-coated switch. A signal was instantly emitted and brought a near-instant reaction.

A battalion of infantry had been placed on standby alert in case the Project Cherry team ran into a larger force than they
could handle. The signal from McDonald’s transponder had been prearranged. A flight of gunships was circling nearby and began
their attack pattern. Three flights of F-4 jets that had been on call to the FAC pilot began their attack. The first infantry
company was already loaded and waiting on their slicks for the command to go. Everything was automatic, responding to the
signal from the transponder. McDonald had told the command center that his force was lost and that they should attack his
location. And so the battle changed for the third time that day. The NVA battalion was encircled and destroyed almost to the
man. McDonald was found by one of the companies in its search of the POW camp for NVA survivors. Even though the Project Cherry
team had been wiped out, with McDonald being the only survivor, the end results of the battle looked very impressive on paper:
62 friendly troops killed in action, 21 POWs murdered, and 51 friendly troops wounded, against 423 North Vietnamese killed
and no wounded.

“Sergeant McDonald?”

He heard his name being called from far away and ignored it.

“Sergeant McDonald?” The school commandant reached over and gently shook the master sergeant’s shoulder.

He blinked and his eyes focused.

“I need to talk with you over in my office after supper.” The lieutenant colonel grinned when he saw that the sergeant was
all right. “Can you make it in, say, fifteen minutes?”

McDonald wiped the sweat off his face. “Yes sir…” He blinked again. “I feel like shit.”

“It may be a fever coming back.”

“Yeah… a fever.” McDonald got to his feet and felt his legs flex and then hold. He was back again. The dark cells in his brain
closed their doors. The room became bright, and he was functioning once more. “Oh… sir!”

“Yes?” The colonel stopped.

“I’ll take that assignment.” McDonald licked his lips. His mouth was dry.

“Good! I can’t think of a more qualified man to lead a prisoner snatch operation.” The commandant’s voice lowered. “You read
the message and understand what must be done?” Anger underscored each word. “And my being a black officer makes it even that
much more important.… I might sound selfish, but that motherfu—” He swallowed the cussword. “That
traitor
has got to be either eliminated or captured!”

“I could care less about Mohammed James.” McDonald picked up his tray. “It’s the boy, Spencer Barnett, I care about.”

“Whatever your reason for going… just remember, you have anything you want for support. Just name it.”

“Thanks, sir.”

“Come on… we’ve got a lot to talk about before you leave for Da Nang, where you’ll be assembling your team….”

*   *   *

Woods heard the person approaching from his rear. He sat looking out over the barbed wire. Time was supposed to make the hurt
go away, but it was getting worse every day; he knew he was going crazy.

“David… yo!”

Woods recognized his sergeant’s voice but still sat looking out over the perimeter.

“We’ve got a mission!” Amason tried sounding cheerful. “We’re going to get our asses away from this RAMF shit!”

Woods spoke a single word through his teeth: “Where?”

“How about…” Arnason let the suspense build. “Let’s say the A Shau?”

Woods whirled around on his sandbag seat. “When?”

“Would tomorrow morning be early enough for you?” Arnason knew what Woods was thinking, but he didn’t care. This was the first
time since they had returned from the mission on which Barnett had been taken prisoner that Woods showed any sign of being
alive.

“Tonight!”

“Sorry, you’ll have to wait.” Arnason shook his head. “And would you believe that we’re going back to the
exact
location?”

Woods frowned. “Why?” He became instantly suspicious.

“The brass want us to destroy the sensors we put in along the trail.”

“Destroy them!” Woods started breathing hard. “Destroy them after what it
cost
to put them in?”

“The brass have their reasons, David….
We obey orders
!” Arnason hesitated and then added, “Besides, it gives us a chance to go back and search the area again….”

“Yes.” Woods spoke the word with so much emotion that the sound almost took shape and could be seen hanging in the dusty air.

The weather was perfect. It was as if some unseen force had smiled on the mission the First Cavalry Division’s recon team
had been assigned. The valley was sparkling in the sunlight, and there wasn’t a trace of the deadly fog that had been there
during their first mission in the A Shau. Arnason and Woods weren’t fooled by the tranquil, lush green foliage; they knew
that death lived down under the trees.

A platoon of gunships prepped the area that they were inserting with rockets and then banked to the north end of the valley
to wait for a flight of fast movers to drop their loads of five-hundred-pound bombs. Woods could see the tiny L-19, which
carried the forward air controller, bounce in the strong updrafts coming from the valley floor. The Special Forces A-camp
sat like a boil in the southern end of the green, NVA-controlled valley.

Arnason scooted forward until his legs were hanging out of the open doors of the helicopter. He tried scanning the skies for
Puff the Magic Dragon, an AC-47 fixed-wing aircraft that had been modified to fire miniguns out of its port windows. The aircraft
could stay on station almost forever, giving a tremendous hail of fire to locations on the ground. The aircraft had also been
equipped to drop flares, but it was the firepower Arnason wanted in case they ran into trouble. He couldn’t see the plane,
but he was sure that it was circling nearby. He felt much better going in this time, compared with their last walk-in mission.
He had a lot of support, and the mission was going to be a quick one. The team had only to locate the six sensors, destroy
them, and be extracted. He didn’t plan on being on the ground more than an hour.

The copilot beckoned that they were getting lined up to approach the landing zone that had been created by dropping five-hundred-pound
bombs with thirty-six-inch-long fuses attached to them so that the blast would level trees and underbrush. It worked well
for small one- or two-aircraft LZs.

Arnason recognized the familiar finger of rock sticking out from the side of the mountain where they had spent the night during
their first mission. He felt a shiver ripple down his back, but it was too late to stop now. Sergeant Lee San Ko leaned forward
on his side of the Huey and located the LZ; he tapped Simpson, who jumped at the touch, and pointed down. Woods was ready:
he had his CAR-15 slung over his shoulder with the thirty-round magazine inserted. He was hoping the landing zone would be
hot; he needed to kill some NVA soldiers to release the hate that had built up inside of him.

The chopper touched the side of the mountain, and the team bailed out. Arnason knew exactly where he was within seconds of
touching the ground and gave hand signals to direct his team until the choppers pulled away. The Air Force jets were working
over the mountainside a thousand meters to the north.

She growled. The cave protected her from the bomb blasts, but she didn’t like the extremely loud noise so close to her. The
sound in the distance had always meant plenty of food, but so close to her cave it made her angry. She turned her head to
one side and roared her anger. A cloud of dust rolled into the wide opening as if in answer to her growl. She coughed and
swatted at the fine particles of gray dust the bombs had created outside of her den. She felt the movement within her womb
and rolled more to one side to allow her unborn cubs to adjust their positions within her. One of the bombs landing outside
of her cave dispersed the rib cage and skull from a human skeleton against the low cliff that ran from the thick jungle up
the path to the entrance of her private domain. A GI dog tag flew through the air and lodged itself in a crack. It sparkled
in the sunlight, and if you could read English, a short message could be read as to the owner.

FILLMORE

BILLY-BOB

371420265

O NEG

PENTECOSTAL

The loud noise from the bombs stopped as suddenly as it had started. She stood and hobbled to the entrance of her cave. The
dust had settled, and the bright sunlight sparkled off her beautiful striped hide, all except for the large black spot on
her hip that had been burned. She would have been a fantastic trophy for any big-game hunter, weighing in at over 780 pounds,
an enormous weight for an Asian tiger.