CUE: Take It Easy, THE EAGLES
“Five Four Whiskey,…Five Four Whiskey,…Niner Four Oscar.”
The scratchy voice in the headset was calling us. It was the voice of battalion command, identified by an ever-changing numerical signature that I had to keep up with. It was a part of the price one paid to step back from the line of battle. I hit the transmission switch and spoke into the microphone.
“Five Four Whiskey,…go.”
The faceless voice began a litany of lengthy messages about resupply and other mundane details having to do with the daily life of the company. The messages came often and were important, yet I now remember very few of them. Only the voices remain in my memory. I still wonder how the men on the other end of such transmissions managed to pick my words out from the roar of the track motors.
On this afternoon, we were moving along a dirt road in the direction of a village that had been the site of some recent Viet Cong activity. We stopped along the road for Captain Meilstrup to confer with his platoon commanders and to call in resupply for the coming night. While we were stopped, the 2nd Platoon sent out a number of men as pickets on the flank so we would not be sitting ducks for an enemy patrol.
I could hear voices calling from the cover of the underbrush just to our left, and soon the radio crackled in my ear, asking for Lieutenant Phillips. I handed my headset down to him, and Phillips spoke a few terse words into the radio. He handed the headset back up to me and returned to the circle of officers who were gathered in front of the command track. The words they exchanged provoked action. The whole group walked off into the bushes, and before long the radio buzzed in my ear once again with an odd request.
“Stoney, come out here.”
To ask a gunner to leave the track was an unusual request, but it was Meilstrup's voice, so I picked up the tommy gun and climbed down. As I started off in the direction the others had taken, the thought occurred to me that I was once again a soldier on the ground, making my way through the bushes. Things hadn't changed so much after all.
As I drew close to the group of officers and picket troops, they were all looking at something on the ground. When I was close enough, I could see that the object of their attention was a fresh pile of human waste. Someone had been at this spot, relieving himself pretty recently. Our Vietnamese scout, a former Viet Cong who had surrendered and then volunteered his services to the Americans, was pointing at the ground and babbling in broken English to anyone who would listen. Meilstrup looked up and motioned for me to come closer. He pushed his glasses back up on his nose, which was a habit that I came to understand as a sign of irritation. His voice was flat and command-like, without emotion, as he spoke to me.
“Phillips here says you're a tracker.”
I looked over at Phillips and suddenly realized that my bogus reputation as the last of the frontiersmen was about to fall apart. Phillips pointed down at the pile of human excrement and then to a slight impression in the grass next to it.
“What do you think, cowboy?”
Captain Meilstrup could not hide the tinge of challenge in his voice as I stepped over to look at the still-soft pile of poop.
My heart eased a little when I noticed that there was a clear trail in the grass that led up to the spot in question and then away in the direction parallel to the path of our tracks. Even a novice hunter knows that men make tracks in the grass pushing the stems down in the direction they are walking. I knew at once that whoever this was, he had moved off in the same direction we were going.
“How many?”
Meilstrup's question was short and to the point. I told him these tracks were made by one individual.
“You mean this guy is all by himself?”
The question was as much a test as a query. The intense gaze coming from behind the captain's lenses bore testimony to that. I stammered my answer.
“These tracks were made by only one. There is no telling how many more might be waiting down there where he's heading.”
I pointed in the direction the trail led, and suddenly the scout erupted in a loud babble of broken English accompanied by wild gesturing in the opposite direction from that which I had indicated. Meilstrup looked at me and then at Phillips with a withering glance. His words were cold and yet blistering at the same time.
“It seems our scout disagrees. He says they were moving that way. You can go back to the track, Stoney.”
As I turned and started making my way through the underbrush, I could hear Phillips's voice stammering a protest and Meilstrup's cutting him off in short order.
“This man is a trained scout who has lived here all his life. I think I'll take his word over some Texas brushpopper.”
When we were saddled up and moving again, I expected the captain to be aggravated with me, but he didn't indicate that at all. It had simply been one of the many command decisions of the day, and he was satisfied, at least for the moment. As it turned out, we did not move more than a few hundred yards down that trail when the VC opened a close ambush attack on us. They were exactly where I had indicated they were going.
The fighting was fierce. Rocket-propelled grenades came from the underbrush, and the crack of AK-47s could be heard all around us. The line troops bailed off and maneuvered toward the enemy. The tracks turned and supported the ground troops with .50-caliber machine-gun fire. As quickly as it had begun, it ended. We had no bodies to show for the engagement except our own. Hal Greer from the Two Zero track was wounded seriously and died after he was dusted off.
When we had moved on and circled up for the night, Captain Meilstrup asked me to find the scout. Though I looked for him, he was nowhere to be found. We never saw him again. He simply disappeared into the Vietnamese countryside. We never discovered whether he was simply mistaken in his determination of which way the enemy was moving or setting us up for an attack. From that day forward, I cannot remember the captain ever asking for or listening to an opinion from one of the Vietnamese scouts. He did, from time to time, casually ask me what I thought about such things. I think he suspected that my frontier reputation was a bit exaggerated, but he asked just the same.
The incident along the trail that cost us Hal Greer was never mentioned again. When we received word by radio that Greer had bought the farm, the first sergeant asked me to go over and give the news to the 2nd Platoon. It was uncomfortable. They took the news as always, with quiet resignation, and then offered me a cold soda from the ice chest on the Two Zero track. There was a noticeable difference in their interaction with me that night. They were friendly, and we were still comrades who had shared much, but it was obvious I was no longer a member of that close family. I had taken a step away from them, and already the ranks had closed behind me. As I walked back to the command track, I felt a tinge of loneliness that I have found hard to put into words until this moment. A chapter of my life had drawn to a close.