Jungle Rules (18 page)

Jon Kirkwood stood and peered through the binoculars, studying the bushes and trees several hundred yards beyond the area cleared of vegetation and other cover outside the wire.

“Anything moving?” O’Connor said, now sighting down his rifle, and checking the right and left limiting stakes that designated the zone of responsibility that his rifle covered on his side of the fighting position.

“Nothing moving, just bushes,” Kirkwood said, taking the binoculars from his eyes and looking at O’Connor checking his field of fire. Then he located the wooden stake on the right side of his position and laid his rifle in the center between it and the middle stake.

“Remember the last time we did this?” O’Connor said, smiling. “Cold as a son of a bitch. Remember? Not half bad here, though, considering the end of November and all. Gotta still be around sixty-five or seventy degrees at night. Not that bad.”

“Well, that was the Basic School, and we had no one shooting live ammunition at us,” Kirkwood said, looking out the binoculars again, searching the tree lines for movement.

“Remember how it started snowing that night, and we had water up past our shins? That truly was the shits,” O’Connor said, looking over the top of his M14, checking his sight adjustments to be sure the major had properly moved his to a 200-yard battle zero, like he had done Kirkwood’s rifle, and had shown the two lawyers how to double-check them.

“This isn’t Quantico, Terry,” Kirkwood said, working the focusing ring on the binoculars to bring a fuzzy object into sharp definition. “We’re not playing some sort of game in the Virginia woods either.”

“We didn’t play games then,” O’Connor said, defending his nostalgia. “I took it damned serious. I knew we’d be in Vietnam soon enough.”

“I didn’t mean a game like that,” Kirkwood said, still turning the knob, trying to sharpen the distorted image. “I meant that was just training. Not for real. This, my friend, is as real as life gets.”

“We’re not going to see shit, anyway,” O’Connor said, now laying over the top of his rifle, staring into the orange-lit night. The attack at the opposite end of the base had subsided to sporadic popping of rifle fire and an intermittent mortar explosion. “It’s all dying down.”

“We have a friendly patrol out there, among those trees?” Kirkwood said, fussing with the focus ring on the binoculars. “I see one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Eight people just ran past that open spot!”

“Here, give me those binoculars,” O’Connor said, grabbing the field glasses and now looking straight out from the bunker.

“Goose, Goose, I got eight bodies running across a gap in the trees about three or four hundred yards straight out from our position!” Kirkwood spoke on the field phone.

Just as he had made the report, Terry O’Connor dropped the binoculars on the parapet shelf in front of him and opened fire with his M14.

“Tell Goose we got sappers running toward the wire!” O’Connor yelled as he emptied his magazine and snapped in a second one.

Just as his rifle had fired, King Rat, Elvis, and Henry opened fire from their hole, chopping grazing fire across the frontal area with the machine gun and their two M16 rifles.

Behind the trees ahead of them, five hundred yards away, the telltale flashes of mortars flickered as they belched several rounds toward the Americans. In a few seconds, the earth churned and exploded all around the five Marines.

On two small rises to their right and left, other machine guns opened fire, cutting across the wide, barren flats before the wire. As the automatic weapons churned across the wasteland, more enemy mortars rained onto the two flanking machine gun nests.

“Keep shooting!” Kirkwood yelled at O’Connor, who had ducked below the parapet of the fighting hole when a sixty-millimeter round exploded a few feet from his side of their sandbagged nest. “They’re trying to suppress our fire with the mortars so they can overrun us.”

“Something’s wrong over there with King Rat and the boys,” O’Connor said, noticing that now only one rifle fired sporadically from that position. “Keep shooting man, I gotta go take a look. We need that machine gun to stop the sappers.”

Terry O’Connor rolled out the back of the small bunker and raced the twenty yards to the next hole on his belly. As he got closer, he could see smoke rolling out of a jumble of sandbags and broken lumber.

“Jon, keep shooting!” O’Connor yelled, climbing around the debris and pulling it from the hole. “They got hit bad over here!”

In the bottom of the hole, Henry lay moaning, blinded from the mortar blast. King Rat had fallen limp on top of the machine gun. Elvis had taken shrapnel across the right side of his face and neck. His skin, wet with blood, was speckled with black. He alone managed to fire his rifle.

“Rat, Henry, you guys need to sit tight,” O’Connor said. “Jon’s got help coming pronto. Meanwhile, Elvis, we need that machine gun. Help me get it over to the other hole.”

“Rat might be dead,” Elvis said as he pulled the limp body from atop the machine gun and shoved it out to O’Connor.

“Nothing we can do right now except pray,” O’Connor told Elvis, pulling the heavy weapon to his side and grabbing two cans of belted ammunition for it. “Can you help me drag the rest of the ammo with the gun? We’ll move it to our hole; that way Charlie may leave these guys alone.”

“Yes, sir, I just can’t hear very good and I can only see out my left eye, but I can hump ammo for you,” Elvis said, climbing out of the debris of the fighting hole with three cans of ammunition in his clutches.

“Rat! You and Henry lay quiet! Help’s coming!” O’Connor shouted down in the hole.

“Yeah, man, we cool,” a voice from the bottom answered.

 
DOC HAMILTON SAW the movement first and nudged Jimmy Sanchez, who, seeing the silhouette figure easing toward him, sat up from where he had lain and waved.

“Viper made good time off that hill,” Sanchez said, turning back toward where Tommy McKay and Doc Hamilton lay on their bellies next to their radioman, Lance Corporal Sneed.

Suddenly four other silhouettes broke through the thick undergrowth, and Doc Hamilton reached for Jimmy Sanchez, who still sat up with his back turned toward the oncoming dark figures. Before he could pull the lieutenant down, a burst of rifle fire snapped at them, throwing the reconnaissance platoon commander on his face.

As soon as he saw the muzzle flash from the enemy’s weapon, Tommy the Touchdown McKay opened fire with his AR15, sending his first bullet into the head of the man who had just shot his best friend. Bobby Sneed took out two of the four other North Vietnamese soldiers who attacked from behind the leader whom McKay had killed. The remaining two fell back as the lawyer lieutenant emptied his rifle’s magazine at them.

“Shit, man,” Jimmy Sanchez said, coughing blood and gasping for air as he began to writhe on the ground. “I’m lung-shot.”

“We’ll have to carry him,” Doc Hamilton said. “Can’t do much for him sitting here. We’ve gotta get him on a med-evac chopper as fast as we can.”

McKay looked at Sanchez, feeling his heart tie up in his chest as his friend gasped to breathe, trying to talk but only able to mouthe a few words as Doc Hamilton dosed him with morphine, and with a bloody finger drew an M on the lieutenant’s forehead. Then the corpsman turned the officer on his stomach, and pulled up his blouse and T-shirt. Finding the three entries made by the bullets, he rolled wads of gauze bandages tight and stuffed them into the holes, plugging them so that air no longer sucked through the wounds.

“That’s the best I can do for now, Snake Man,” Doc Hamilton told the lieutenant as he eased him on his back and sat him up. “Plugging the holes should help you pull in air a little easier. I know it’s not a fix. You’re just going to have to deal with getting shallow breaths until the folks at Charlie Med can take care of you.”

“Jimmy,” T. D. said, “you know that gunfire’s going to draw the rest of those NVA patrols, just like shit draws flies. We’ve got to get the hell out of Dodge right now. Me and Doc’s going to lift you to your feet, and we’re going to
di di mao
.”

Sanchez nodded his head and gritted his teeth as his college classmate and the platoon corpsman lifted him to his feet and draped his arms over their shoulders.

“Grab his shit,” McKay told Lance Corporal Sneed, who had already begun calling Ninth Marines combat command and operations center.

“Red Rider, Red Rider, Snake Charmer, flash-flash, shark bait, repeat, shark bait. Kilo-zero, whiskey-one, actual, med-evac lifeguard, Lima-Zulu-Oscar,” Sneed repeated again and again, but heard no response as he lugged his two backpacked radios and now the rifle and map case of his platoon commander, in addition to his own weapon and canteen belt. His coded message that he continued to repeat, with the key words, shark bait, alerted Ninth Marines operations and command center that the reconnaissance platoon had engaged the enemy, compromising their presence, and was now on the run to their primary rally point and its associated landing zone for emergency extraction. His additional information advised that the platoon had zero members killed, one man wounded, the commander, and that he suffered life-threatening wounds and needed immediate medical evacuation at Landing Zone Oscar.

“Only a couple of clicks past this little ridge, partner,” McKay told Sanchez as the wounded lieutenant tried to help the two Marines carrying him by kicking his legs, trying to run with them.

“Sir, don’t do that,” Doc Hamilton said, now breathing hard. “Your lungs are full of blood. You can’t get enough air to support yourself as it is. Relax, sir, let us carry you.”

Moonlight flashed through the tree branches overhead as the three Marines ran, carrying the fourth. Ahead of them a broad clearing loomed, more than three football fields wide, scattered with low bushes and palmettos in the waist-high grass.

“Go around! Go around! Danger area!” Sanchez gasped. “Too dangerous!”

“What do you think, Doc?” McKay asked the corpsman. Both men knew that time meant everything for Sanchez’s survival.

“We start moving in the open, with this moonlight, anyone can see us. No cover out there,” Hamilton said, catching his breath.

“Why not call the choppers into this place?” McKay then asked.

“Lots of times these places get pretty boggy, might not be a good LZ. The lieutenant saw it on his map but chose not to use it as a rally point or a landing site. I’m sure he had his reasons,” the corpsman said. “What do you think, Sneed?”

“I’ve jumped on a Huey in a rice paddy before. No big deal. Can’t be much worse,” the radioman said. “Problem is, I ain’t got any signal down here. Nothing we can call out on. Rally Point Tango has good reception, on that little hilltop, can’t be more than another kilometer or two, just over that next rise. If Red Rider heard any of my Maydays when I called them right after we got hit, they’ll have choppers and a reaction force inbound to us.”

“All our teams have already headed to Tango anyway,” Hamilton added. “They’ll be on the run to the rally point, radios off, after hearing the shooting.”

“Okay. You guys skirt the clearing. Stay under cover. I’ll take Lieutenant Sanchez and cut straight across,” Mckay then said, streams of sweat streaking the smeared camouflage paint on his face. “I think I can move faster with him across my shoulders than trying to do this three-legged foot race with him in the middle. Grit your teeth, Jimmy. You’re going for a ride.”

The stockily built McKay with his tree-trunk legs squatted under Sanchez, and bent the lieutenant across his shoulders. When he stood up, he gave Doc Hamilton and Lance Corporal Sneed a nod and then took off jogging.

“Try to keep me in sight, but don’t stop for anything,” Tommy McKay called out. “Run like hell. Meet me at Tango.”

Sweat poured off Tommy McKay’s body, soaking his clothes as he ran. He tried not to think of the North Vietnamese patrols now searching for them. He tried not to think of how easily the NVA could pick off him and his best friend in the broad moonlight as he dashed across the wide clearing. He tried not to think of the bogs and quicksand, the sinkholes and the booby traps that possibly lay in his path as he ran. He tried not to think of those things, but he did. He thought of them all. He ran ahead anyway. His best friend lay dying across his shoulders.

“Hang on, partner,” McKay said as he pumped his legs. “We’re coming to the other side. Easy as pie. Another touchdown at the Cotton Bowl.”

Just as he thought he had the clearing behind him, and could see the forest’s edge standing less than a hundred yards away, loud snaps and pops cracked through the air, and the ground suddenly burst with geyserlike plumes of dirt and debris all around him.

“Hang on, buddy. Hang on!” the former Texas Longhorn football star turned Marine lawyer and unauthorized grunt told his best friend as he reached into his heart and shifted his legs and his stamina to another, more powerful gear. Digging deep inside himself, far beyond any point he had ever before gone, at a depth that Tommy McKay had never known even existed within himself, he tapped into the root of the fire that had all of his life made him a champion: a source of strength that now released a whole new man within himself. This newfound energy sent his legs pumping harder and faster than he had ever before pushed them.

At the edge of the clearing where McKay had begun his dash for his best friend’s life, a full rifle platoon of North Vietnamese soldiers emerged. They had begun their pursuit at the onset of the shooting, and found the easily followed trail within minutes. Seeing the silhouette of the Marine running across the clearing with his comrade draped across his shoulders, the Communist troops began firing at the fleeing target. Like deer hunters with buck fever, they excitedly yanked and cranked rounds all around T. D. McKay and Jimmy Sanchez.

“O God, please help me,” McKay prayed as he ran. “I know Mama talks to You every day about me, and I don’t talk to You nearly enough, but please, dear Jesus, please be with me tonight. Keep their bullets wide, and keep my buddy alive. If You can just do that for us, I can do the rest.”