It’s late in the evening and I am in the Recon Club. I am way beyond redemption. “We are so very few,” a line from King Hank comes back to me, the speech that Henry gives to his dispirited and outnumbered troops and peers of the land. They are fleeing before the French, a “retrograde action” as they say in the military, a fighting withdrawal. He and his army pause next to an obscure French village. They are weak from lack of food because the French Dauphin has ordered that the countryside be laid to waste, so there is no forage to be had for man or horse. His men suffer from dysentery to the point that some of his Irish foot soldiers will fight naked from the waist that day. They must stand and fight, or be cut to pieces by the swelling army of the French. Weighed down with baggage and loot, Henry turns to face his adversaries. It is St. Crispin’s day and he begins his speech with “We few, we happy few. We band of brothers…” That is us, “we band of brothers,” peers in a horrible dance with death.
The club is our private place. It’s where we keep our grip, and if you are an outsider, you do not come here, regardless of rank. Everyone here is Recon or Hatchet Force, and everyone has paid his dues, or is paying his dues, in that small little world that is ours alone. We have guests that we bring in, like the pilots that fly our air packages; they are welcome because they are like us, different, but like us. Other project guys drift through from time to time, but if you’re not invited don’t come here. You can die here and you can definitely get hurt here. We do it to each other. The rules are simple, but we often get too jagged or someone says the wrong thing, and then it is face-off time.
This is also where we come to mourn. This is where you get your wake, your send off into the shade. As you ride Charon’s boat across the river Styx, this band of iron-hard men, who are your closest living relatives, will gather here and drown your memory.
Oh, the Army will send your earthly remains back and they will, if possible, make the carcass look presentable. This is done out of courtesy and respect. There will be an honor guard and a trumpeter, and the honor guard will hand your closest kin the folded American flag that drapes the coffin, fire the salute before the mechanics of burial come, then fill the hole and place the headstone over the cold dead thing that was once you.
Here at the Recon Club you are remembered, remembered by men that will talk all night and relive all your ribald antics, your amazing balls, your supreme fuck ups, your smallest kindnesses. This is done out of love. They will curse you; they will regale your exploits with sharp wit, and they will openly cry for you with no shame, because you were one of them. You were special and now you are gone.
The club is not the most swank place on the compound. The officers have a club up at the other end, and there is a senior NCO club for the staff. The hatchet companies have their own hootch reserved for drinking. But officer or enlisted, if you are on a team, this is where you drink, play cards or shoot pool with your brother misfits. There is an abundance of alcohol. You can also get burgers here and fries, chili, that sort of thing.
The club manager is usually some shot up recon type who is either convalescing or is too injured to run anymore. There is a lot of money that flows through here, so it has to be one of us. None of us would even think of cheating the guys, money-wise. We have the best booze, the best of everything, even a slush fund so that if you ever get an R and R you can get a money assist if you are broke.
Certain teams run together, like Habu and Crusader and Indigo, and Python and Mamba. The One-Zeroes and One-Ones are inseparable. Mac and I are like that. If you make the mistake of going after Mac I will kill you with no question, no hesitation, no thinking it over. He is my twin, the other half of my being.
We spend a lot of time comparing notes about tactics, both ours and theirs. New things, like if you run into trackers, are they Indian, Yards, and how many? What did they do when you fish hooked? Did they pick up on it? Everything about the situation in the targets gets gone over here. It’s kind of like a think tank except about half the tank is loaded up on something, and we all are armed. Pistols, sawed off shotguns, knives, mini grenades, you name it, it’s here. It is normally loud, and depending on how many teams are out, it is usually packed.
Tonight we are holding a wake. Two teams have been virtually wiped out. Only one American and a couple of the Yards survived on one team, and a couple of members on the Bright Light that shot their way in to rescue them are down as well. The second team is gone, not a trace. They came up, gave a “team okay” after they got off the LZ, then zip, nothing for four days, no emergency radio, no distress codes, nada. They are gone, swallowed up, fini, dead.
We know that the NVA have standing orders to “impact interrogate” us if we are captured and then to execute us immediately afterward. They prefer to kill you in some horrible way to encourage the morale of their own troops. We are hurting them and tying up manpower; we are the ghosts who walk, the boogeymen.
The teams that went down were friends. The team that disappeared consisted of old guys, guys with their second tour up here. Their numbers were up, they ran into something new or unique. They were not careless or sloppy men. Worse yet, it happened in the northern A Shau and we all run it, so we are trying to piece together what happened. But there is not enough info. They just vanished.
Walt, the One-Zero, had been an old and experienced hand. I say “old” because he was in his early forties. This is a young man’s game, you don’t find old guys running on the ground. There are a few like Billy, the sergeant major, but he is an exception. I liked Walt. He had been a quiet, deliberate man and we both liked woodworking. I had trained as a cabinet maker before I joined the military. He had a woodworking shop back home in North Carolina. We used to talk about working with wood, the smell of the shop, what the wood felt like when you sanded and shaped it, how it felt like a living thing and creating things from it was clean and honest, a good thing. The Lord Jesus was a carpenter who took to saving souls, and we took to dispatching them, an odd parable.
There is a group of us sitting around sharing information about what we’d heard about their disappearance, and listening to Roger, the One-Zero of Mamba, who had been the Bright Light designee. Roger had been in the TOC when the team inserted and had listened to their exchanges with Covey. They got off the LZ, moved about a klick, and set up their RON. Covey came back up in the morning and flew over the target area, but got no radio transmission from the team.
Covey had flown the long axis and gunned his engines to let them know he was up and listening for them. If their radio had been down they all carried emergency radios, so someone should have come up on the air. If they had been jumped in their RON and all were dead, even the NVA would have tried to get on one of the radios to try to make us believe that they were one of the Yards, in hopes of luring in a Bright Light. This losing an entire team was weird. It only reinforces my heebie-jeebies about running out of Phu Bai. The place has a jinx on it. Better to go to Quang Tri, even if it’s hotter targets.
The other team and their Bright Light had also launched out of Phu Bai. They had run the southern end of the A Shau, with a plan to establish a defensive position on an old fire base where they could watch the truck and river traffic at the junction of the trail and the river. They had gone in heavy and had gotten set up, reinforcing the decaying sand bag revetments, and tying them together into a hilltop fortification.
Old fire bases were perfect for static positions. These were the leftovers from the division-sized movements a couple of years ago, and were on prominent hilltops with steep slopes. Usually they were built around a battery of 155mm or 105mm howitzers. The trenches and bunkers were old and falling in, but if you had enough daylight you could work feverishly and make them into something that ten or twelve of you could defend. More importantly, you could go in with a mortar and heavy machine guns, which would give you some punch if it came down to a fight.
The choppers had dropped the team off all right. They secured the hilltop and the extra birds brought in additional equipment: sandbags, mortar, mortar ammunition, a .50 caliber machine gun and plenty of ammo for it, plus a couple of 60mms with even more ammo for them. They spent the next two hours working to tack a perimeter in, to get the mortar set up, and to put the ammo for it under cover. As they worked, the weather started to sock in, with heavy ground mist and rain covering the valley floor.
The thing about this type of mission is that the NVA knows you are there, no sneaking and peeking about it. As long as you are on top of that hill, anything moving in your area of observation is choke-pointed. The hope is that you get some air assets in and work them over. If that doesn’t work, when they come to kick your asses off the hill they have to mass and you kill a bunch. Then the idea is to pull out, destroying the mortar and anything of value that you can’t shag in a hurry to the birds. Not real sophisticated but it works. We have been having some success with it ever since Captain Psycho Butler and Les Chapman chewed up about half a thousand of Uncle Ho’s children with the same tactics. You have to admire the dynamic duo. They are, at least, innovative.
The team had used the Butler tactics. Slightly after dark they started getting probed and caught a squad moving into the few bunkers they were not occupying, those that were part of the old perimeter the artillery unit had constructed. They called Moonbeam and asked for a Spectre on station, but before it could get there the weather really turned nasty and they were in deep trouble. They were getting pressed by at least a battalion, and the NVA had started dropping mortars on the top of the hill. They had obviously registered the hilltop because everything was hitting the mark. The first or second barrage had taken away their 292 antenna so the team was only able to talk to Covey on the whip, and the atmospherics were screwing that up. Around 0200 the team started dropping flares from the 81mm they took with them and the mist below them started to clear. They saw company sized elements moving into position, so they started working Spectre on them when another barrage came in and wiped out the mortar and about half the team. At that point they couldn’t hold the perimeter so they tightened up and got to the high ground.
By morning everyone is wounded. Two of the three Americans are dead, and the only reason they haven’t been overrun is that Spectre has made their hilltop the only safe place for a two kilometer circle. Daylight and the weather breaks and they are able to get fast movers in along with the Bright Light. The hilltop looks like some cat clawed it up. There are dead NVA mixed right in with the team.
The Bright Light was able to get the survivors out, then bag the others and lift them out as well. They blew up the .50 caliber machine gun with a thermite grenade, but they said it was no good anyway because the barrel was burned out and shrapnel had sliced through the receiver. Then the Bright Light started taking fire from what they thought was a Chinese recoilless rifle and heavy mortars, so they backed off. It was a bad mission, just too many folks and bad weather. They have caught on to what we are up to, so now when they see us moving in, they immediately come to kick our asses.
We talk with Tubby, who has been up to the hospital and talked to the surviving American, to get a clearer picture of what happened. The kid is going home; his right hand is severed at the wrist and he has lots of shrapnel wounds, plus two AK rounds in him. He is lucky to be alive.
Apparently, the surviving Yards drew back to where he was and they made a last ditch stand at his position. They got tucked in as best they could and he told the fast movers to lay it right on top of them. That broke the back of the last assault.
Wesley comes in. He is down from flying Covey and has a mini grenade in his left hand. “Hey, you heroes!” he shouts. He lifts up the grenade and the spoon flies off as he rolls it across the floor. There is instant panic and shock. Eight of us are trying to hide behind the same cigarette pack. Murphy runs into the john. One of the other guys has grabbed the chaplain, who had come to console us, and is using him for a shield. Five seconds go by. No explosion. We all start to get up. Someone has found the grenade, the pin and spoon still in place. The evil little shit had palmed another and flipped it so you heard that distinct “pling” when it hit the floor. Everyone stares at Wesley. He stares right back and yells, “You want to live forever? I can hear you ladies crying and weeping all the way over in Recon Company! Let’s get drunk and send those guys off right!”
The place goes back to an even higher level of hubbub. He’s right. They would do the same for us. We are all now creatures of the moment, but they will live with us forever, so they aren’t dead. The chaplain is pissed, aghast that he was used as a shield. He finally gets too annoying and someone shoves a pistol in his nose and escorts him to the door, telling him to go back up on the hill and pray for souls that want redemption. I think it’s Jimmie Reeves; he always gets poetic when he has a gun up your nose. He also has a reputation for being a redneck, mean drunk with a hair trigger. The sky pilot flees off into the night, his duty done.
Jimmy Johnson is playing pool and trying to use an M-67 baseball grenade as a cue ball. He is telling some new kid it’s only fair since in Mississippi he is known far and wide as the best pool player in the land, so he has to use a grenade as a four to one handicap. He can’t hit shit with the grenade because the spoon gets in the way. Someone suggests he cut the spoon down. There is always some technical whiz. The kid looks like he wants to be somewhere else. You either hang or you quickly find out what your tolerance for insanity is. The club manager comes out, walks over and picks up the grenade off the table and yells that is enough grenade shit in the club. “You guys wanna play with your ‘go boom boom’ toys, take ’em outside.”
There is a huddled conference about going back and getting some M-79’s and loading up some CS rounds to lob a few into the POW camp to the north of us. There are about 1500 NVA and VC POWs there and occasionally we drop a few gas rounds on them so they don’t get too fat. More importantly, there are MPs there who are our natural enemies, like lions and hyenas—they are the hyenas.
We have recruited a few of the POWs as strikers. We have one on Habu. He used to be a Sapper Company Commander with the NVA. He is Bru, and testament to the fact that tribal loyalties are deeper than all the political indoctrination you can imagine.
The POW camp idea is rejected and instead we contemplate going by Gonorrhea Gulch and lobbing a few in amongst the warren of thieves and junkies just to make them miserable. I am getting really jagged and the Green Hornet I took an hour ago isn’t working. I decide to slip out and go over to the little peoples’ hootch.
I stumble through Recon Company. It is beautiful out. I walk down past the Yard barracks and go out to the bunker line facing the beach. There are two Bru from the Security Company in one of the bunkers with the watchtower on top. They see me and I walk over and lean up against the tower, letting myself drop to sitting.
The moon reflects on the waters of the bay and I am content to watch it ripple into shore like some silver- fringed, rolling blanket. I drift off into a dreamlike state thinking of wood and working with my hands. I hear more figures come up and there is an exchange of Bru, then gentle hands helping me up and carrying me. It’s four of the little people. The Bru on the bunker had sent one of their number back to the team hootch and gotten Cuman. They told him that Trung Si Nick was out on the wall and needed to be looked after. He sent the team for me. They carry me back to their barracks and deposit me in a hammock, where I will spend the night. One of them will go over and find Mac and tell him where I am. I am safe here; they all smile and take turns patting me on the arm, then go back to their card game. The place smells like home to me. They are cooking something; they are always cooking something. I drift off to sleep, listening to them talk as they play some kind of poker game where the loser has to wear a helmet. The warm feeling of home compresses time and angst into a sphere that shrouds my dreams.