Last Man Out (30 page)

He nodded toward a body bag lying on the bank. A short distance away were five more bags. Some cavalry soldiers brought over another body bag and laid it beside the rest.

Shit, I said under my breath. Don’t think about it. I sat down, suddenly realizing how tired I was. The adrenaline was draining away. I lit a cigarette and looked at my hands. No shake. I looked back at Slippery Clunker Six’s body bag. Don’t agonize, I said again to myself, and I stared at the body bag without reflection. I noticed all of its lumps and its smell and I remembered Slippery Clunker Six eating pâté and reciting poetry. I had heard his voice just within the past hour on the radio. I put all those thoughts together, slowly, and put them in a basket at the back of my mind.

More wounded were coming along the road. I got up and started to walk down the line. The photographers were ahead of me. Up ahead, a soldier was bringing a Vietnamese prisoner in our direction. As they came by one of the burning tanks, a photographer moved around for a good angle. The soldier was Moubry.

I avoided the supply officer as he posed for the photographers, and continued down the line past the burned-out trucks, trying to get even with my battalion in the woods.

By nightfall the 1st of the 28th had swept the wood line along the north side of the road. It pulled back to the road and then down near the area where we had come in on the helicopters. The 1st/16th and the 1st/18th Infantry Battalions had been put in blocking positions near the Cambodian border. They continued to report that Vietnamese mainline forces were straggling toward them all afternoon and night.

The next day we watched minesweeping teams clear the road above the incline. Tank recovery vehicles were still hauling out the tracks damaged or destroyed by the ambush.

“Peppy” visited the troops and congratulated everyone for a damn good operation. A total of 240 Vietnamese had been killed. Our casualties had been light, twenty-four killed in action. We got ’em ten to one. Slippery Clunker Six would have been proud.

I could almost see him smile and say, “There you go.”

By nightfall of the second day the road had been cleared and the convoy headed on toward Minh Thanh.

We were lifted out the next morning. As usual, Dunn and I were to be the last ones out. The battalion had the same helicopters assigned to it that had been used in the heli-assault, but some had mechanical problems and others had suffered battle damage. Fewer than thirty helicopters showed up for the move.

When they left, Dunn and I had an oddball collection of fifty men around the LZ. The road was deserted. Although the 1st/16th, augmented with cav, was going to stay around and help bury the dead Vietnamese, they were on the other side of the forest. Enemy soldiers—some wounded and some looking for wounded—were still around us.

Two helicopters that had just dropped off supplies to the 1st/16th arrived and took out twenty men. We were down to thirty men scattered around the LZ and we pulled them in close. It was quiet. Alert, Dunn and I sat by our radios in the shade near the edge of the field. We strained to see into the forest.

Three partially filled helicopters came in about thirty minutes later and we began moving out the last of the men. Two loaded and left. As the last helicopter was loading, Bob and I were standing by the radio. We indicated that we were the last two by holding up two fingers and pointing to one another. The kicker shook his head and waved the palm of his hand back and forth to say, “No more.”

I picked up the radio and talked with the pilot. “We’re the last two people here,” I said.

“Sorry,” he said, his voice shaking from the vibration of the helicopter. “Maxed out. Other helicopters in the area. We’ll get you soon.”

“Shit,” I said to Dunn and turned back to look into the woods. I tried to focus on the shadows inside but, for some reason, the noise of the helicopter behind me made it more difficult. I told
Dunn that it was coming down to this. I had been alone in this “enchanted forest,” as the late great Slippery Clunker Six had called it, once before, and here we were again. Dunn didn’t respond. I continued to squint into the woods.

When I gradually turned my head in Dunn’s direction, he wasn’t there. He was high-stepping toward the helicopter in an exaggerated effort to move quietly. The kicker was holding up one finger, as if they could take one more.

“Jesus Christ!” I said. I picked up the PRC-25, sprinted by Dunn, and dived into the helicopter. He was laughing so hard he couldn’t keep up. When he got to the helicopter he climbed aboard, even though the kicker was telling him he couldn’t get on. Sitting on the floor beside me, he was still laughing as we took off.

  THIRTEEN  

We were back in the base camp for only two days before deploying to Bear Cat, southeast of Saigon near the Mekong Delta.

Duckett was able to get to Saigon once. He learned that our seats had been confirmed on Air Force One on 13 and 14 September.

We received a letter from Pete. His convalescence was continuing successfully, and he had orders to Fort Ord. He said that he had had indirect contact with an old OCS buddy who was working in the Pentagon. He had asked his buddy to try to get Dunn and me assigned to Ord as well, but he added that it was a very long shot. Fort Ord on the Monterey Peninsula of California was one of the U.S. Army’s most sought after posts.

I was promoted to first lieutenant. The same day, I received orders for my next assignment, Fort Ord, California. Dunn also received orders to Fort Ord.

Colonel Haldane’s replacement arrived. Two first lieutenants, who had arrived in the battalion as replacement platoon leaders several weeks earlier, were assigned to take Dunn’s position and mine. We had a two-week overlap. Seemed awfully easy, they said about our jobs.

The new battalion commander was an uncommunicative, sullen man. After Haldane left, Panton was offering advice on means of reacting to a VC contact when the commander became angry. He told Panton that it was his battalion, and he would decide what needed to be done.

On 1 September 1966, I asked the angry colonel if Dunn and I could go back to the base camp at Phuoc Vinh to tie up some loose ends before we left. “Yeah,” he said, without further comment.

I went by to see Woolley, who had been transferred recently to brigade headquarters. He showed me his recommendation to
battalion that I receive the Bronze Star with V award. He said that I had set the standard in the company. After our first contact on the perimeter at the base camp, he knew that I was a first-rate soldier, he said. He thought that I was a natural and, under fire, I had a voice as calm and cool as lemonade on a hot summer day. I thanked him and said that his comments were a very high compliment to me because I respected his judgment. I saluted and we shook hands, but I didn’t tell him that, during our first contact, I had been caught in my hammock like a monkey in a cage.

Bratcher, Spencer, King, Beck, and Manuel were still around, and each expected to receive DEROS orders any day. None of them wanted to go on operations.

“Beck,” I said, smiling. “What’d you get? Three, four Purple Hearts? You have a death wish here or something?”

Beck stood as tall as he could, raising his head high on his shoulders. “I told you early on I’d make you proud. Plus you said one time that you could
will
victory. On the boat coming over, you said that. And that’s what I’ve believed in. That’s what I was doing. I weren’t backing down from no little slant-eyed dink. Fuck ’em. Here I am, take your best shot.”

Beck had wanted this war. He had bribed his way into the Big Red One when he was released from the brig at Fort Leavenworth. A lesser man would have accepted a dishonorable discharge and gone on with life. Beck, a throwback to proud gun-toting frontiersmen out of the Wild West, had set about to restore his honor. In doing that, he proved to be a helluva soldier. A helluva American. And I told him as much.

Leaving the platoon area after saying my good-byes, I had my arms around Bratcher and Spencer and we took a few steps together. As I took my arms down to walk away, Spencer reached up and ruffled my short hair. Smiling, he said, “The man.”

Duckett said he was leaving for the base camp on 9 September. We confirmed where we would meet, either at the base camp or, if that didn’t work out, at the BOQ in Bangkok. Get the women and children off the streets. Watch out Europe. Here we come.

Dunn and I went back to Phuoc Vinh on different helicopters. The one I was on skimmed the trees the whole way. I was looking out the front between the two pilots. Power lines appeared to come up across our front and head straight toward us. The pilot
waited until the last moment, it seemed, to go over, and then we were back at treetop level. We almost skimmed the sides of large trees sticking up above the rest.

After landing at Phuoc Vinh, I leaned into the cockpit near the helmet of the pilot and asked him if Dunn had put them up to this wild trip.

“What?” he said. “Who?”

“Never mind,” I said and walked to the base camp.

I wrote letters, separated my personal items into giveaways, throwaways, and take-aways, turned in my equipment, and hung around with Dunn for the next few days. On 8 September, I told Bob good-bye and said I’d see him at Fort Ord. Carrying my Hong Kong clothes in a Phuoc Vinh bag, I left the battalion for the last time. I took a scheduled flight to Saigon but then bummed helicopter rides out to Vung Tau, an in-country R&R site. I stayed in a cheap hotel away from other military people and spent most of my time lying on the beach, trying to get rid of my infantryman’s tan, reading, or looking out across the South China Sea, with bottles of local beer buried in the sand beside me. For most of two days I didn’t talk with anyone.

Occasionally I would think about the jungle sweeps, the firefights, the tunnels of Cu Chi, the dead and dying on the spent battlefield along the Minh Thanh road, and I would take a deep breath to relieve the tension in my stomach.

I remembered the bar with the nude painting and the toilet seat and Dunn’s initiation and Crash Burke and Fred Astaire, and I would smile.

I thought about my deep devotion to the men with whom I had served and the circumstances that caused some of their deaths. Staring out across the water, I took the clear images of Patrick, McCoy, Ayers, and Castro out of the baskets where I had them stored in the back of my mind and I examined them. Not searching for answers why, because Dunn was right, there is imponderable morality to war. I just looked at the images calmly, detached. But I also felt a deep sense of loss, because I loved them in a way only soldiers at war can know. Going through the outer perimeter of our base camp on night combat patrol, as I chambered a round in my weapon, I knew that it was not me against the dangers out there in the dark jungle, it was the platoon against what lay
ahead. A fraternal bonding, based on mission, fear, and survival, tied us together. My platoon—Patrick, Bratcher, Ayers, Lyons, Castro—was my only chance of survival. When I went to sleep in the jungle, I gave my life to Spencer to protect till I woke. And in firefights I faced live bullets, dodged grenades, moved ahead, because the platoon expected it. We had an obligation to one another. To fight. To die, even.

For a soldier, war is a proposition of doing your duty to your unit and surviving if you can. And winning.

I had won, I had survived.

That beach—Vung Tau—was where I had arrived a year earlier. To my right was the area where the band had been playing from the flatbed truck, where my platoon, confused, had collected around me in the surf. We had come there to fight and we did, out there, behind me in the jungle. And I was back, ready to go home. That’s all there was to it.

On 11 September, I bummed a ride to Saigon. I checked into the Out-processing Administration Section on the following afternoon. I had dinner alone at the local officers club and was back in my assigned Quonset hut by early evening. A group of soldiers, who had just arrived in-country, had gathered in a corner. They were talking loudly while a tape recorder played at high volume. Two of them were playing cards and sharing a strange-looking and strange-smelling cigarette. After complaints about their noise, an officer asked them to turn down the tape recorder, but none of them looked up or moved. The officer was unable to determine who owned the recorder, and he left. The soldiers gleefully went through a hand-slapping, elbow-knocking, chest-thumping routine. Their raucous behavior continued until a group of MPs arrived and threatened them with the brig unless they knocked off the noise.