Last Man Out (18 page)

A small clearing was behind the thicket, and a three-foot-high dirt berm ran out of the jungle along the east side of the field. Spencer was coming up the column to walk behind me. King was turning around as he walked and asked me what the hell a berm was doing coming out of the jungle like that, when an automatic weapon opened up from our right. Rounds zinged between King and me.

Everyone hit the ground. Manuel was carrying the machine gun, and I yelled at him to start shooting. Short bursts of fire continued to come at us from over the berm. We crawled forward.
Bratcher was at the end of the patrol. As I reached the berm I yelled for him to move out, flanking whoever was firing to the right; we’d cover him.

Bratcher yelled for Sgt. Ollie Taylor Jr. to follow him. I told Manuel to bring the machine gun to the top of the berm. He stood up and fired from the hip. The rest of us slung our guns over the top and fired.

Beck fired his M-79 grenade launcher. The round hit an overhanging tree limb, bounced back, and landed squarely in his lap. Beck screamed, expecting the grenade to go off.

Bratcher was maneuvering in from the right. He yelled for us to stop firing. He and Taylor advanced, firing as they went. Bratcher yelled, “We got him! I saw him go down.”

As I was waving the men over the berm, King turned to look at Beck. His mouth open and eyes wide, Beck was staring at the grenade in his lap.

“You lucky motherfucker,” King said scornfully. “The round has to travel fifteen yards to arm itself. It didn’t go fifteen yards. It ain’t armed. It ain’t going off. Pick it up and put it on the ground beside you.”

From the other side of the berm we could see that the firing had come from beneath a couple of shelters, each just four posts holding up palm-frond roofing and no sides. Bratcher and Taylor were moving in from our right, and the rest of us came straight in, with Manuel occasionally firing the machine gun.

We saw that the ground under the roof of the larger shelter had been excavated, leaving a pit perhaps five feet deep by fifteen feet wide by twenty feet long. A trench led from the main shelter to a similar pit under the smaller one.

Expecting to see the VC lying in the bottom of the hole, we covered the last few feet very slowly, guns at the ready.

Behind us, Beck still hadn’t moved and was telling King, “Maybe, maybe, maybe the round’s only gone fourteen yards and something. Maybe I pick it up and, and, and, that’s enough.” He was trying not to breathe hard for fear of disturbing the round lying on his stomach. He took short breaths and talked as he exhaled.

“Help me, Sergeant, help me move it.” Beck looked up at King. “Nope,” King said, leaning against the berm. “You can do it as
well as I can. You either slap it off and roll out of the way quick, or you reach down very carefully and lift it off.”

“Tell the lieutenant to come here,” Beck said.

King looked over the berm in my direction. I was easing up to the shelter. The sun was almost down, and it was hard to see into the hole. Bratcher and Taylor reached the edge first.

“He’s gone, the son of a bitch, down a fucking hole,” Bratcher said.

A pool of blood lay next to the forward edge of the hole under the main shelter. An AK-47 assault rifle was nearby amid some empty casings and dark green cotton pouches holding AK-47 magazines. A blood trail led over to a spider hole in the corner, like the drain in a sink. Taylor, standing by the smaller shelter, said he saw another spider hole there.

“He’s down in that hole, probably down in a little room between these two shelters. Wounded. Without his gun,” I said.

The radio on Spencer’s back squawked as Woolley asked what all the firing was about. From the far side of the berm I heard King call out, “Lieutenant, you got a minute?”

I told Spencer to tell Woolley that we wounded a VC and that we were going to try and ferret him out of a hole. Didn’t know how long it was going to take.

King called again, insistently, “Lieutenant.”

I told Bratcher to see what King wanted and told De Leon and Ayers to move out to a guard position near the small field. After sending some other men to protect our other flank, I walked over to the smaller shelter, where Taylor was shining his flashlight down the spider hole. It led down and away. We tied a small piece of nylon cord to the flashlight and lowered it down the hole.

Meanwhile, Bratcher had walked back to the berm. King nodded toward Beck, who was sitting awkwardly with the M-79 grenade round in his lap and a sick look on his face.

“Lift it off, Beck,” Bratcher said firmly. Like King, he saw no value in putting two men at risk.

Beck’s hand shook slightly as it moved slowly to the round. When he lifted it with two fingers, the head of the round rotated downward. Beck opened his mouth as wide as he could, as though he were going to yell, but he didn’t drop the round. Moving it slowly to his right and then toward the ground, he
rolled out of the way as he set it down. Quickly he got to his feet and looked down at the small metal ball.

“You son of a bitch. You goddamned son of a bitch. You nasty little son of a bitch,” he kept repeating as he climbed over the berm. Beck borrowed Patrick’s M-16 and went back to the berm. He fired most of a clip of ammo at the M-79 round until he finally set it off.

Thinking we were being probed or attacked, I turtled my neck and started to jump into the pit when Bratcher said, “No problem. It’s just ‘Bad News’ Beck.”

Spencer had finished sending the radio message to Woolley and was looking down the spider hole under the main shelter. He mentioned that he could see the light from Taylor’s flashlight shining at the bottom of the hole. Woolley came back on the radio and said that battalion wanted us to take the man alive. They wanted a prisoner. I told him we’d do what we could.

Convinced that a dying VC was beneath us, I told Fernandez that it was time for his starring role again, to get a pistol, and to get ready for a trip down the mine shaft.

Fernandez did not take it well. He was angry and mumbled in Spanish under his breath. I told him I was sorry, but he was the smallest and had to go. He pretended to not understand me.

By now the sunlight was almost completely gone. I told Bratcher to ensure that the men were set up in good guard positions all around the shelters. As I went under the small shelter, we started to receive small-arms fire from across the field.

We ducked down. Looking closely at the spider hole, Fernandez started saying, “No, no, no.”

Sitting with my back against the side of the larger hole, I was suddenly very tired. I wanted to be back with the battalion, eating my C rations and maybe drinking a cup of coffee. I did not want to be beside the entrance to that hole that led to God knows where. We knew only that at least one wounded VC soldier was down there.

We received more probing rounds from the area near the plane and then some rounds to our front, from deep in the jungle. The VC were all around us.

I grabbed Fernandez by the collar of his fatigue jacket and told him not to get me angry. He kept saying, “No, no, no.”

Finally I said, “Ah shit.” I told Spencer to throw a grenade down the hole under the large shelter, and I took a grenade off my web gear, pulled the pin, and dropped it down the other hole where I was standing. It wasn’t necessarily going to give us a live prisoner, like battalion wanted, but my reluctant Puerto Rican tunnel rat wasn’t going down the hole until we did something.

The grenades went off with muffled thuds. We lowered Taylor’s flashlight down the hole again, and Spencer said he could see the light shining dimly from the other area.

I looked at Fernandez and said, “Okay, friend. Time to go to work. Go down the hole.”

He gave me a long, angry look. Then he took off his web gear, retrieved Taylor’s flashlight, checked the magazine in his pistol, crossed himself, and crawled over to the spider hole. After looking inside it for several moments, he went over the edge and was quickly gone, head first.

Almost immediately Spencer said that he could see the tunnel rat’s light. I kept expecting to hear a shot.

Fernandez popped back up near me. He said something I couldn’t understand and then disappeared down the hole again. Within a minute he appeared in the spider hole under the large shelter where Bratcher and Spencer were sitting.

Occasionally bullets whistled through the shelters from all sides. They made startlingly loud sounds when they crashed through the palm fronds.

I crawled over to Spencer, who was holding a flashlight as Fernandez began drawing a diagram in the dirt of what he had seen underground. The spider hole under the small shelter was connected to the spider hole in the large area, and from there the tunnel led away to the west. The blood trail led down this tunnel. Fernandez said the tunnel curved and he had not been able to see how far it went, but there was a lot of blood in there.

The VC probably had sat near the spider hole, perhaps to bandage his wound. He had probably been there when we were talking with Woolley. Maybe he had stayed until we first dropped the flashlight down the hole. Even now he could be right around the edge of the bend.

I told Bratcher that I was going down. About then Beck came
crawling up to the shelter and asked if we had gotten the VC in the hole. I told Bratcher that Beck would go with me. Beck said okay.

Taking off my web gear and steel pot, I took the flashlight and pistol from Fernandez. I crawled to the spider hole and shined the flashlight down. It was about four or five feet to the floor of the tunnel. I could see the opening on one side back to the small shelter and, on the other side, the opening as it went down and away.

I went over the side head first and caught myself with my hands on the bottom. Shining the flashlight down the tunnel, I could see the blood trailing out of sight around the bend. I came back out of the hole and went in feet first. Going down to my knees, with my feet back inside the tunnel toward the small shelter, I bent down and into the tunnel. I was suddenly enclosed in a solid earthen tomb. Sounds from above were muted. I felt as though I were in another dimension. Everything was quiet, cool, and very confined. With the blood trail and bend ahead, I faced the real prospect of a deadly, subterranean confrontation at any moment. Holding my finger on the trigger of the pistol in one hand and the flashlight in the other, I crawled slowly forward. Beck landed with a thud behind me and clawed ahead quickly until one of his hands grabbed one of my feet.

When I came to the bend I inched around it, pistol first. I expected to see the wounded VC at any moment, but about thirty feet ahead the tunnel came to an abrupt end.

There was no VC in sight.

I lay down and looked at the end of the tunnel. It looked as if people had maneuvered around the area often, coming and going, their bodies wearing off the loose dirt and rounding out the sides. My first thought was that a hole at the end led up and out—the tunnel must be an escape route away from the shelters. Once I reached the end, I might find myself coming out of the tunnel into a nest of VC, or coming out near one of our guard positions and being shot by my own men.

“Where da’ fuck did he go?” Beck said behind me.

“I think up and away,” I said as I got back to my hands and knees and inched farther down the tunnel.

The air was stuffy. I could smell my own body odor and Beck’s. I did not like the confinement and wished as I inched
along that I had not invited Beck. He blocked any escape and seemed to close off the tunnel behind me. As I moved along my world became smaller and smaller.

Every few feet, I stopped crawling and lay down to study the tunnel end. As I came closer I saw that there was no hole going up. The end was a round circle, with no opening at the top. On the floor I saw what looked like a toilet seat, but it proved to be a hinged door.

“No,” I said to Beck, “I don’t think he went up and away, I think he went down.”

I continued to look at the trapdoor, in the hope of divining a course of action that was safe. Why a door? What was underneath? Was it filled with VC? Was it booby-trapped? In the flashlight beam it looked liked the gate to hell. I wished I had more air to breathe.

“What are we going to do?” Beck asked.

The trapdoor was covered with bloody fingerprints, and smeared blood was on the front of the wooden base. Our wounded VC had indeed gone through. The blood was not dry, he was only minutes ahead of us. I felt very close to my prey.

“Beck,” I said, turning to look at the burly soldier behind me, “I’m going to turn on my side, and you’re going to crawl by me. There’s a trapdoor in front, at the end of this tunnel. I think you can stand over it. You’re going to take the pistol and the flashlight and I’m going to open that door. You shine that light in and be prepared to shoot.”

“Okay,” Beck said with his usual cheerful willingness.

I turned on my side and Beck squeezed by on his hands and knees. When he got close to my outstretched hands, I handed him the flashlight, but I said I’d hold the pistol to cover him until he was in place. It was a well-intended idea; however, when Beck passed by me, all I could see was his butt. I would have little chance to fire around him if any VC suddenly appeared out of the hole.

When Beck reached the end of the tunnel, he came slowly to his feet. His back was against the top of the rounded-out area overhead, he was standing with his feet on either side of the door. There was a small handle on the top of it.

“You want me to pull it open?” Beck asked.

For a fleeting second I thought about telling Beck to come on, we were going back up. We were still alive, but we might die if we opened that door. My face was only inches from the wet blood.

“No,” I said. “Here, you hold the pistol. I’m going to open the door with my bayonet. You keep that flashlight and gun pointed inside.”

Lying on my stomach, I got the bayonet off my belt and extended the blade forward. On second thought, I turned the bayonet so I was holding the blade and tapped the handle on the door to see if the tapping in the eerie quiet would draw fire. Nothing. Nobody home. Sweat dropped from Beck’s face. Above us, we heard more small-arms fire, a few single rounds as the VC probed and then the return fire from the platoon.