CUE: The Ballad of Davy Crockett, THE WELLINGTONS
A hand shook me awake. The darkness seemed thicker than usual as I rubbed the fatigue from my eyes. The wages of so many nights on ambush were beginning to take their toll on us all, and that night, on me in particular. The hand shook me again, and the wheezing whisper of Dennis Kinney let me know that this was not a dream, or at least if it was, it was a part of the same nightmare we all were sharing.
“Stoney.” The sound of my name brought me around a bit faster. “We're moving.”
The realization of Kinney's words sunk in and caused me to sit bolt upright in the darkness. Moving an ambush after it was already set was tantamount to suicide. If the VC didn't already know where you were, the thrashing around of nine, night-blind guys through the underbrush should draw the attention of anything that was within earshot.
I crawled out into the darkness to retrieve my Claymore mines. The others on the ambush were doing the same thing, making a sort of hushed rustling in the leafy undergrowth. It was actually very quiet, when you consider that nine guys were crawling around on their stomachs, trying not to make much noise and keeping as low as possible while retrieving and packing their equipment. It was relatively hushed, and yet every sound in the darkness raised the hair on the back of my neck. Soon we were packed and standing in a ragged line, feeling extremely naked in the gloom. Lieutenant Phillips came down the line until he reached the spot where I stood. Lester and I were usually the last ones on the end of the line of travel. It was our responsibility to keep a lookout behind us as we moved through the bush. On this night, I was alone in that duty. Lester was not there for some reason. Phillips looked beyond me into the darkened woods and then tugged at my sleeve. He leaned close and whispered the kind of thing no one wants to hear on a black night in Vietnam.
“Battalion says that there is huge movement about two clicks up ahead of us. They want us to go have a look.”
I wanted to blurt out, “Are they nuts?” What actually came out was, “You're kidding,” and I swallowed pretty hard when he said, “No.” He slapped me on the back and turned to go but came back and whispered that I should keep a pace count. I nodded dumbly and began, once again, to think of all the reasons I really should not have been there.
For those uneducated in the strange and wonderful ways of the US Army, some explanation might be helpful. In this not-so-atypical example of true army procedure, some guys back at the base camp had gotten a report, from who knows what or whom, that there was a rather large group of enemy soldiers moving along the edge of the Michelin rubber plantation under the cover of darkness. Our little nine-man ambush patrol was the closest American contingent to this reported enemy line of march. This being the case, and the army thinking like it thinks, we were ordered to pick up in the middle of the night, find our way through the rubber trees for two thousand yards or better, and eyeball this force. We were to make our way along unknown ground, in pitch black night, being silent as death and trying not to run into any enemy ambushes or stumbling into the very troops we were supposed to be sneaking up on. I was not elated as I began to calculate our chances for success. This was not the first time we had been sent to scope out a larger enemy force, and it left me with the definite impression we were considered expendable by someone.
As we began a careful advance into the deeper darkness of the rubber trees, I looked behind us and then began the tedious task of keeping a pace count of our journey, all the time wishing that Lester Lorig was there. It was he who usually kept the pace count with me and was amazingly accurate under many a dire circumstance. Between the two of us, we could generally be fairly close when it came to measuring distance. This night, I was counting alone.
The pace count is one of those amazingly bright army schemes in which, in this case, a man is supposed to know how long his stride is and be able to translate that into the distance he has traveled by foot. This technique is taught on army bases, which have many a rough terrain to practice on. The only things they don't include in such training are really dark nights, filled with booby traps, land mines, people who'd like to shoot you, and guys like me who were filled with just plain old-fashioned fear. When you add that into the mix, the accuracy of the pace count becomes mythical at best and nonsensical most of the time.
We moved out through the darkness and I began to count. Almost immediately, Kinney fell over a log directly in front of me, and I stepped on his hand. He whispered obscenities and punched me hard on the right knee, then struggled to his feet and followed after the dim shadows that marched on ahead of us. I limped after him, trying to remember where I had left off in the pace count.
Some three hundred yards later, everybody fell on their faces in the leaf-covered ground under the rubber trees and held their breath. In the distance, a light could be seen bobbing through the regimented stand of trees. We lay silently, watching as the light seemed to float through the darkness with an unsteady pace. It seemed as if it was headed straight for us. Each man brought his weapon to bear and waited for what would come. I fingered the trigger of the tommy gun and thought to myself that the light ahead of us must be the beam of a small flashlight in the hand of someone unaware that we were even in the vicinity. It must have been that, for just as suddenly as it had appeared, the light vanished. It vanished as if extinguished on purpose, to hide the position of its bearer. The rubber trees were once again bathed in perfect darkness, and we lay on the ground, waiting and watching for whoever might have held the light. When we were fairly certain that no one was in front of our line of march, we rose and started out again. I had completely forgotten where I was in the pace count, so I estimated and started up again. I was positive it didn't make any difference.
As the group drew closer to the intended target of our march, the ground grew less and less hospitable. We lurched over fallen trees and stumbled into sunken ditches filled with water. We tripped over tree roots and were slapped in the face by low-hanging branches that were invisible in the blackness. It was at this point that I remembered a sergeant's parable that said the most dangerous thing in a combat zone was a second lieutenant with a map and a compass. On this night, with young Lieutenant Phillips leading us bravely through the darkness, I was hoping that parables were not always right.
We stopped three more times in anticipation of discovery by enemy ambush patrols. Each time was a false alarm, and each time when we started forward again, I was more and more confused about the pace count. Finally we stopped and stood quietly under the rubber trees. Lieutenant Phillips came back to me and inquired about the distance we had traveled. I had to say something, so I just made it up. I told him that the hardstand road we were seeking should be about a hundred yards ahead. The truth was that I had no idea how far we had to go. An even stranger truth is that we walked one hundred ragged paces and stepped right on that paved road, exactly where I said it would be.
No one was more surprised than I was. The lieutenant came back and told me what an outstanding pace count I had made, under amazingly hard conditions. We set up in the bushes just south of the road and watched until morning. We never saw a soul. The whole thing had been for nothing, but the story about my amazing pace count made its way around the company. Rumor had it that I was the illegitimate son of Davy Crockett, who could follow a mouse trail across the Grand Canyon on a dark night. It was all pretty stupid when you remember that I had no idea how far we had really come that night. Les Lorig knew better, but it is to his credit that he never gave me up. He just made sure that his pace counts were always right when we had to count together. It got us where we were going and saved my unearned reputation as a frontiersman.