Last Man Out (20 page)

Suddenly an automatic weapon opened up on the company to our left front. Everyone dropped to the ground. I looked at Spencer and lit a cigarette. It was 0915, and I noted from my map that we were at the coordinates XT 637177. For no particular reason I made a dot at that location on my map.

To our front, perhaps five hundred meters away, we heard a couple of shots fired, then a pause before a tremendous blast. The violent sound of a dozen automatic weapons followed the blast. Grenades went off, followed by sustained bursts of fire.

Peterson’s platoon!

Breathlessly I scrambled back to Spencer’s radio and tuned it to the battalion frequency.

Up ahead the grenades went off one after another—boom, boom, boom, boom—amid the continuing small-arms fire.

I recognized Pete’s platoon sergeant talking on the radio, “They’re on both sides, all around us, no place to go.”

He went off the air. I started to get up. The battle continued in front with no letup.

Why wasn’t Peterson on the radio?

The platoon sergeant came back on. “Almost every man’s hit. I ain’t got no one. Give us some fire. Help us! Give us some fire! Give us …”

I stood up. Pete was in trouble. His platoon was pinned down. Someone came back on the radio. “This is the 1st Squad leader. We’re almost wiped out. The radio operator’s dead, the
platoon sergeant’s been shot in the head, the lieutenant’s dead. Help us! God give us some help!”

Yelling for the men to get ready to move out, I crashed through the bushes to the trail where Woolley was listening to the radio. I told him I had to go help Pete.

“Okay,” Woolley said. “Let me coordinate with Battalion.”

I had taken the captain’s arm as I talked and was pushing him along the trail. We had passed other men in his company headquarters group and were now well ahead of even the two platoons on either side. He and I were leading the company down the trail. I kept looking off to the right front, where the firing was still heavy. There had been no letup since the first blast. Hand grenades, M-79s, automatic rifles, machine guns.

With one hand still on Woolley’s elbow I turned around to his radio operator and yelled angrily for him to catch up. “Come on, goddammit, I got to go!”

Then the whole world exploded.

A mine went off beside the trail, midway back in the company headquarters group. Shrapnel flew by my head.

“Goddammit to hell, goddammit!” I dropped to one knee and was still looking back at the blast as dirt and debris fell around me. I was intent on getting to Peterson—all this struck me as just another delay.

The firing was still intense in front. Dust continued to settle as I looked back and tried to spot the radio operator. I thought it might have been a mortar round, short.

Then, out of the dust, Beck walked up with blood streaming from his ears. Bratcher, who had blood oozing out of his fatigue jacket near his shoulder, was behind him. They had followed me over to talk with Woolley and been caught in the blast.

I turned and saw several other soldiers, dead or wounded, lying along the trail. A round zinged down the trail over our heads. Bratcher and Beck, both in slight shock, quickly regained their wits and dived to the side of the trail.

Some men from Duckett’s platoon started firing.

Goss, the company medic, was still on the trail lying on his back, his fatigue jacket shredded from shrapnel. He was laboring for breath, his eyes open wide as if in surprise.

I knelt beside him and yelled for another medic. I took a bandage
off my belt, opened it, and tried to remember what to do with a chest wound. Put the plastic from the packing next to the wound, I thought, when Bratcher yelled from the bushes, “The man’s dead, Lieutenant! Get off the fucking trail!”

“He ain’t dead!” I yelled as I placed the bandage on his chest.

“He ain’t breathing no more,” Bratcher said right above me.

Dirt and dust were settling on Goss’s eyes, but he was not blinking. He stared vacantly off in the distance, his mouth open. I knew by the smell that his bowels had emptied as his body relaxed in death.

“Get off the trail, Lieutenant,” Bratcher insisted.

I stood up and turned to look at the radio operator, who was lying half on and half off the trail. A bullet zipped by in front of me. Out of the corner of my eye, up the trail, I saw a VC rise up out of a hole.

I had reached a point where nothing was making much sense. I had been absorbed in moving out to help Pete—and then the mine blast and Goss dying and the radio operator lying dead and rounds coming down the trail. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion as adrenaline surges overloaded my mind. Trying to focus on each separate event, I saw things in flashes, as if my surroundings were illuminated by a strobe light. The VC was still coming out of the hole. I started to turn and look at him, but then I thought about Pete and getting to him and I looked down at Goss and I turned back to see the radio operator’s feet lying out on the trail and I started yelling at myself: Think!

Think! Think!

Another round whizzed by in front of me. I turned back around so that, for a fleeting moment, I was looking up the trail. Then I clearly saw the VC standing up in the hole near a ditch and aiming his rifle at me. Bratcher was in the bushes beside the trail, and I dived toward him. I saw the muzzle flash from the VC’s gun.

A searing pain in my buttocks brought me to my senses. In mid-dive, I knew that I had been shot. Bratcher grabbed me by my fatigue jacket and pulled me into the bushes while Duckett’s men opened fire down the trail.

A medic crawled up. Bratcher said he was okay; the medic should look after me. Lying on my stomach I took some deep
breaths, pulled off my web gear, and undid my belt. When I pushed my pants down I felt blood collecting between my legs.

Woolley knelt down beside me. “We’re going to move out, Jimmy, and try to get to Pete’s platoon. I’ve called a medevac. You’re going to be all right. Sergeant Rome will take your platoon.” There were heavier mortar explosions now, in the distance to the front of us.

“Get to Pete. Hurry,” I said as I looked up.

The medic worked on my buttocks. I could not see what he was doing, but he moved off soon without a word and started treating other wounded, including Bratcher and Beck. I felt weak as the adrenaline faded. My butt felt like a knife had been plunged into it.

Later, the less badly wounded in my ragged group carried the more seriously wounded to the edge of the field and went back for the dead. Beck carried Goss in his arms.

In time a medevac helicopter landed near our purple smoke. It was almost completely loaded with other casualties when it landed and could only take the two most seriously wounded from our group. Bratcher and I were the last to leave, with the dead, a couple of hours later. As we lifted off, we saw rows of men in body bags by the edge of the field, close to where Peterson’s platoon had been hit. I knew that Peterson was in one and I felt like crying.

At a medevac clearing station, Maj. Gen. Jonathan O. Seaman, commander of the 1st Division, came through and passed out Purple Hearts to us. Later, at what must have been the most impersonal, the most insensitive aid station in Vietnam, I had my wound cleaned and stitched. Beck and Bratcher had their wounds treated and were discharged to return to the battalion base camp. I was admitted to the convalescent tent next to the operating room.

The next morning I was aware of the trucks before I opened my eyes. Air brakes hissed as the tractor trailers came to a stop. When the trucks started out again, they whined in first gear and then, after a pause, more whining as the driver shifted into second.

I shared the tent with six men who were talking amongst
themselves, undisturbed by the trucks. The sides to the tent were raised and only the mosquito netting was between me, lying on a cot in the corner, and a busy intersection of two dirt roads. Heavy olive-drab transfer trucks were passing, one after another, throwing up billowing clouds of dust. It was barely past sunrise and I was already covered by a thin layer of dirt.

“Get used to it, man,” said one of the soldiers from the other end. “It goes with the territory here. But look on the bright side, it’s better than the fucking field, right?”

I lay on my stomach most of the day and thought about Peterson. I remembered when we first met in OCS, Pete’s exhausted face during the eleventh-week run when he kept saying, “We’re going to make it, we’re going to make it, we’re going to make it,” and then a few days later when Pete’s friend scared us into thinking Pete was going to be paneled. I could see Pete’s shock as the man came to our door and just stood there. For days thereafter we said, “Oh no, Mr. Death, get away from our door. Get away!” Other memories flashed through my mind—our nights drinking in that honky-tonk bar in Junction City, laughing together, racing our sports cars over the prairies of Nebraska, sitting on the top deck of the USNS
Mann
on the way to Vietnam, talking about the past, wondering about the future. Ours had been a rich, robust, and trusting bond. He was my best friend, ever. Now he was dead.

Then I thought about the insurance policy, and not sending in my change-of-beneficiary form. I felt tremendous guilt. Pete had been so trusting and I had been such a heel. “Pete,” I said under my breath, “I promise to you, wherever you are, that when I get that check, that I’m sending it to your Momma. Please forgive me.”

More trucks hissed and whined outside and dust continued to settle on my bed. The men joked and talked loudly among themselves at the other end of the tent.

I felt so terribly lonely.

I recalled how Pete and I had silently shared the sorrow of Patrick’s death a few days before, how we had walked alongside each other as my platoon headed back toward the perimeter, and the pain in his face later that same day when he came back in with his dead. The last time I saw him he was lifting his M-16 in the air as his platoon went out of sight to recon in front.

Every word I had heard over the radio when I switched it to the battalion frequency came back to me. Pete’s platoon was wiped out. “The lieutenant’s dead,” the platoon sergeant had said. The platoon sergeant, himself to die within minutes, had eulogized my best friend with the noise of battle in the background: “The lieutenant’s dead.” Pete was so proud of his commission. Maybe it was the way he would have wanted to go, but for me, I had never felt such sorrow.

I tried to write a letter to his parents that day, but it was blubbering nonsense. I crumpled it up and threw it toward the trucks outside.

That night after supper the medic came down the aisle of cots. He was humming and had a gigantic needle in his hand. “Needle time, Parker, show me your fanny.”

I reacted angrily, without thinking, telling the medic to stick the needle up his own ass.

The man walked away but soon returned with a medical corps major.

“Specialist Wallace says that you are very uncooperative,” the major said with a frown, “that you refused to let him give you your tetracycline shot. It is not helpful if you act like a child. You can understand that, can’t you? We won’t stand for any more outbursts. We have too much to do to hold the hands of everyone here.”

He was right, of course. After he left the medic jabbed me with the needle and I yelled.

About midmorning the next day Terry Mulcay, the battalion headquarters company commander, walked in. I yelled out a greeting, happy to see a familiar face.

He sat on a nearby cot and handed me some mail. He told me the battalion had secured the area around Cu Chi before being replaced at night by the 25th Division. Some VC had popped up in the middle of the substitution of forces and fired off a couple of rounds. The 25th Division, new to Nam, returned fire with everything they had. It was a helluva show outside Cu Chi that night, he said.

Our battalion was now located in a defensive position near the Cambodian border. It had taken heavy casualties, and he named some of the men killed. I waited for Peterson’s name but sensed
that Mulcay would name Peterson last, out of respect for our friendship, or so he could offer his personal condolences.

He didn’t mention Pete.

“Pete? Pete wasn’t killed?” I asked incredulously.

“Nope,” he said.

I knew before the word was completely out of his mouth that Pete was alive. Happiness surged through me—incredible joy. Peterson, that son of a bitch, wasn’t dead. He was alive. That son of a bitch!

“He was one of the first ones hit in his platoon,” Mulcay said. “Took a round in his right shoulder. It knocked him back, and as he was spinning around, he took another round in the same shoulder from behind. The first one took out most of his shoulder bone, and the one in the back took out a lot of meat and muscle, but he’s okay. He’s going to live. I just saw him in the 93d Field Hospital. He’s heading back to the States tomorrow or the next day. No more war for him.”

Peterson was alive. That son of a bitch.

Later that morning on the way back from the latrine, I shuffled down to a Jeep ambulance parked in the shade at the rear of the tent. Behind the wheel, Private First Class “Richardson” [alias] was reading a
Playboy
magazine.

“Howyoudoing?” I said in my best “good ol’boy” tone.

The driver looked first at my face and then down at my gown.

“Okay,” he said.

“Where’s the 93d Field Hospital?”

“It’s about twenty-five miles from here. Nice, very nice-looking nurses there. Round-eyed beauties. Got me some lady friends over there. Why?”

I said, “I got a friend there, too, who’s heading back to the States tomorrow. We’ve gone through a lot together.”

Richardson continued to look at me.

“No problem in driving over? You can just get on the road and go? Can you go there, Mr. Richardson?” I asked.

“Well, you’re supposed to have an armed escort. When we’re carrying people back and forth, we get an MP (military police) detail to come along, but it’s no problem. Only once in a blue moon does anyone ever get shot at.”

“What do you think about us going, you and I, over to the 93d? Who you got to ask? You got to ask anybody, Private Richardson?”