Jungle Rules (21 page)

“We ain’t leaving you,” McCoy said, and looked at both the staff sergeant and the lieutenant without any expression on his gaunt, dark face.

While the two sergeants spoke, Tommy McKay had studied the platoon commander’s sectional chart of the patrol area that he took from Jimmy Sanchez’s map pouch.

“What about artillery?” McKay asked, looking at Rhodes and McCoy.

“What about it?” the staff sergeant responded.

“Lieutenant Sanchez has several on-call targets marked here on his map, including this rally point,” McKay said.

“Security will probably have a few sixty-mike-mike mortars, but I don’t want to sit between them and Charlie if they decide to lob a few. Furthermore, I’d rather have my ass someplace else besides here if you decided to launch a major fire mission into this rally point,” Rhodes said. “We get a bunch of enemy congregated here, though, and then call it as a target, we get in desperate straits, it might buy us the time we need to get into the LZ and aboard the choppers. The pilots sure as hell won’t like the idea of inbound artillery, though.”

“Coming from where?” McKay asked.

“Twelfth Marine Regiment has units scattered all along Highway Nine. Plus, they’re augmented by a whole shitload of army batteries, from outfits like the Fortieth, Forty-fourth, the Ninety-fourth, Twenty-ninth and the Sixty-fifth artillery regiments, just to name a few off the top of my head. Damned bunch of army artillery up here,” Rhodes said. “Pretty much any direction you want except north of us. That’s Charlie on the other side of the DMZ with his long-range one-thirties and one-fifty-twos. We’ve got friendly artillery at the Rock Pile, southwest of us, but those guns will interfere with the choppers’ flight pattern. Besides, a short round could take out the LZ. Camp Carroll’s due south of us, but the same story with the helicopters as the Rock Pile. Only thing we can get outside our flight pattern that might keep the LZ out of play would have to come from the batteries based to the east of us at Con Thien.”

“So we have an artillery option if we can use it?” McKay asked, folding the map and putting it back in the pouch.

“Correct, sir,” Rhodes answered. Then he took the lieutenant by the arm and said, “Last resort, though. Think about this: It took us eight hours to hump that distance, and we move fast, so those guns aren’t exactly next door. The farther out from the fire base, the greater the room for error. Half a minute of angle off at their end could drop a round on us. You call Tango as your target, then LZ Oscar could catch an errant round if someone doesn’t line up the numbers exactly square. Inside a five-hundred-meter circle, I’d say, which includes the north tree line at the landing zone, is danger-close.”

“But it is an option,” McKay said.

“Yes, sir, it is. And don’t be afraid to use it, if we need it,” Rhodes said. “We’ll definitely call in a pattern on Tango and Oscar when we depart the area.”

“Sergeant McCoy,” McKay said, now looking at the second senior NCO, “you got it? On my signal, on-call target echo-zulu-six.”

“Yes, sir, on your signal,” McCoy said.

“Launch a Willy Peter spotter round first,” McKay added. “I’ll give you adjustments if needed. Once the round hits the pocket, I’ll give you a fire-for-effect order. Have them lay a spread two hundred yards right and left of target center. By the time it hits, I plan to be running across the LZ.”

McCoy smiled and nodded approvingly.

“Sir, excuse me,” Lance Corporal Sneed said, taking McKay by the arm. “Your call sign. In command and signal, you didn’t tell us your call sign. Something easy, we can remember.”

T. D. McKay thought for a moment. Football terms flashed through his mind, but then he considered that most of the reconnaissance Marines knew him only as that lawyer from Da Nang. He looked at Sneed and smiled.

“How about, ‘Law Dog’?” McKay said.

 
STEALTHILY MANEUVERING THE five hundred meters south from Rally Point Tango to the landing zone in less than twenty minutes, seventeen of the twenty-four men on the reconnaissance patrol now lay hidden with their unconscious and barely breathing platoon commander. They disbursed among the trees along the far southern edge of the meadow designated on their maps as LZ Oscar. Already the sounds of whirling chopper wings beating through the still night air began to echo across the moonlit hills around the rally point and the nearby landing zone.

Hugging the terrain, three Marine Corps CH-46D Sea Knight helicopters dispatched from Con Thien with a thirty-six-man security force, split on the first and last birds, closed on LZ Oscar. The sounds of the inbound choppers’ engines singing as their twin-rotor blades thumped through the air immediately captured the attention of the two now reinforced platoons of North Vietnamese soldiers. The noise drew them due south, at a full-out run from their cross-hatched search for the briefly encountered enemy north of Tango, and sent them to intercept the trio of aircrafts as they landed.

As the point of the enemy force broke through the north-side tree line at Rally Point Tango, several of the men tripping over the three dead scouts, Tommy McKay opened fire with his carbine from the south side of the clearing. Staff Sergeant Paul Rhodes and Corporal Lynn Sanders and his three Viper cohorts sent lead flying, too, as the first wave of NVA emerged into the open. Under the sudden hail of bullets, the enemy soldiers immediately fell behind cover where their three dead scouts lay, and returned the volley.

McKay had paired his men into three elements. He and Rhodes lay in the first position, centered, employing a frontal enfilade against the NVA, while Sanders and his three Marines made up the second and third units. The Viper team leader and his partner engaged the enemy in a left oblique class of fire as his other two Vipers took up a right oblique position. With the NVA now halted in a fight, each two-man section began to fall back fifty yards a jump, one pair at a time, while the other two teams provided covering fire for the displacing third, leapfrogging backward.

As they moved rearward, and their shooting became somewhat obscured by the forest, the North Vietnamese platoons began to advance forward, flowing around Tango’s small clearing, also using fire-and-movement tactics.

“Law Dog, Law Dog, Snake Charmer, choppers on the ground, security team out,” Baby Huey reported on his radio.

“Law Dog, copy,” McKay said, fumbling with the bricklike handheld device and then stuffing it back inside the front of his blouse when he finished his response.

“Just reach in your shirt and key the talk button twice! You don’t have to take it out and say anything!” Staff Sergeant Rhodes shouted to McKay while continuing to lay grazing cover fire for Sanders and his men as they moved, and seeing the lieutenant juggling the radio. “Sneed will hear it and know you copy.”

McKay gave the staff sergeant a thumbs-up sign and then sprang to his feet and ran fifty yards rearward as Sanders and his men now provided the cover.

In the distance, three hundred yards in front of him, the forest seemed to come alive with the silhouettes of running men, dashing from cover to cover, firing as they ran. Muzzle flashes among the dark shadows of the undergrowth surrounding Rally Point Tango sparkled like sequins on black velvet. McKay quickly realized that many more than fifty North Vietnamese soldiers now pursued them.

“Fire mission!” McKay screamed in the handheld radio. “One Willy Peter, on-call target, echo-zulu-six.”

“Roger, Law Dog,” McCoy responded, “fire mission, one Willy Peter, on-call target, echo-zulu-six.”

As McCoy repeated back the instructions, Lance Corporal Sneed relayed the fire mission to Red Rider, who had the Twelfth Marines fire-control liaison at his side. In seconds, the single shot launched out of the muzzle of a 175-millimeter howitzer.

For Tommy McKay, the minute it took for the fire mission to return with delivery seemed like a lifetime. Then from his right he heard the unmistakable oscillating rumble of the artillery projectile traveling inbound, sounding to him like an old diesel truck gearing down at the top of a steep grade.

Suddenly, like a blinding, bright fountain of fire, the white phosphorus sprang from the thundering impact, dead center in the rally point’s clearing.

“Fire for effect!” McKay shouted as he kept firing his rifle at the swarms of Communist soldiers diving for cover.

As he issued the order, McCoy and Baby Huey responded and relayed to Red Rider. In a few seconds, the 175-millimeter howitzer battery came alive with their opening salvo of half a dozen high-velocity explosive rounds launching toward Rally Point Tango.

“Everybody run!” McKay then screamed over his radio, his voice so loud that all five of the reconnaissance Marines heard him clearly without needing their walkie-talkies.

This time, as the six Marines ran the last two hundred yards, shooting as they fled, the time from the fire mission’s call to the first wave of impacts seemed nearly instantaneous. Behind them the world came alight with the flashes of the exploding artillery projectiles, and rumbled as the earth shook under their feet. Hot air and smoke washed over the fleeing Americans like a sudden desert wind, and it seemed to the half-dozen warriors as they ran that the incoming rounds impacted at their heels.

Before the second salvo had reached the target area, the exhilarated Marines dashed from the tree line into the open meadow of the landing zone, where one twin-rotor Sea Knight helicopter sat with its blades spinning, bouncing on its wheels. On its down-tilted rear ramp, a Marine in a bush hat stood next to another in a white aviator helmet, both men waving at these last six to hurry aboard.

 
SWEAT DRENCHED T. D. McKay as he fell in the red nylon webbing of the passenger bench that hung along the wall of the shuddering helicopter as it flew south and then banked to the east. The lawyer looked out the ramp and saw Landing Zone Oscar now come alight with incoming artillery. Then he stood up and looked along the seating made of crisscrossed straps tied to tubular aluminum rails. He counted eight Marines who wore steel helmets, and seven Marines wearing bush hats, one with a backpack radio piled at his feet. He looked for Sergeant McCoy and sat next to him.

“You got them on the first chopper out, right?” McKay asked the sergeant.

“Everybody got out of the zone, sir,” McCoy said, and then looked down at the metal floor under his feet.

Tommy McKay truly felt alive. In his chest he felt a rush similar to the one he last recalled feeling as he had run a touchdown in the Cotton Bowl. The exhilaration did feel good.

“Lieutenant Sanchez,” McKay then asked. “Doc got him aboard that first chopper okay?”

Lionel McCoy kept looking at the floor between his toes.

“Sergeant, what about the lieutenant?” McKay demanded. His heart suddenly pounded, not from exhilaration, but from panic.

“Sir, he died in the LZ,” McCoy finally said, his lips quivering and his eyes filling with tears.

Chapter 6

“AIN’T ANY QUEER INDIANS
”

JON KIRKWOOD AND Terry O’Connor looked at the handwritten letters that Major Jack Hembee had given them as they climbed aboard the Huey helicopter that now flew the pair of wayward lawyers to Chu Lai on Sunday morning. True to his word, the operations officer had awakened the duo early, fed them a breakfast of scrambled eggs from a can, and had put the two misplaced Marines on the day’s first chopper out of LZ Ross. Both of the lawyers wore the green plastic headsets clamped over their ears, and the M14 rifles from their first Huey ride held between their knees as they sat on the gray nylon bench seat that ran across the aircraft’s rear bulkhead.

In the letters, Major Danger had certified as witness that both officers had sustained combat with the enemy and had exchanged fire, thus warranting them the highly esteemed Marine Corps Combat Action Ribbon. Hembee had added in the letters that each of the two captains had displayed great courage under fire, demonstrated undaunted leadership, and had made a significant contribution toward repelling a determined enemy.

“I’m going to mention you both in my dispatches,” Jack Hembee had told them as he shook each of their hands and slapped them across their backs. Neither of the pair had any idea of what the operations officer had
meant by his parting words, mentioning them in his dispatches. O’Connor had suggested to Kirkwood that it had a classical, old-style military ring and that he felt honored by the comment.

“That can be a double-edged sword,” Kirkwood said as the two lawyers walked from the flight line at Chu Lai, now searching for a ride or directions to military police headquarters and the holding facility, nicknamed the Chu Lai Cage, where their clients waited for them.

“Jon, if someone handed you a sack full of candy you’d complain about tooth decay,” O’Connor responded, walking alongside his friend, both carrying the M14 rifles in one hand and the green plastic headsets in the other, making their way toward a group of buildings in front of which flew the American flag.