New Title 1

The Preserve
© 2004 by Patrick Lestewka

Cover art © 2004 Erik Wilson

This digital edition March 2011 ©Necro Publications

Book design & typesetting:

David G. Barnett

Fat Cat Graphic Design

www.fatcatgraphicdesign.com

Assistant editors:

Amanda Baird, John Everson, Jeff Funk, C. Dennis Moore

A Necro Publication

5139 Maxon Ter.

Sanford, FL 32771

www.necropublications.com

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DEDICATION:

To my Grandfather, Charles

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

Thanks to Bob "Pegleg" Strauss and my father for their diligent editing, and to Dave Barnett for taking a chance.

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I was eighteen years old. And I was like your typical young American boy. A virgin. I had strong religious beliefs… My religious upbringing was, God was good. Everything good was what God wanted. Y’know, evil was the Devil’s way.

But evil didn’t enter it till Vietnam. I mean real evil. I wasn’t prepared for it at all…

It was all evil. All evil. I was all evil. Where before, I wasn’t. I look back, I look back today, and I’m horrified at what I turned into. What I was. What it did. I just look at it like it was somebody else. I really do.

It was somebody else.

— Unidentified Vietnam Veteran

Achilles in Vietnam
, Jonathan Shay

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I.

Magnificent Seven

(1967)

War Zone D, South Vietnam

July 15th, 1967. 12:05 hours.

Flanked by a pair of Cobra gunships, the Huey banked around a broccoli-topped mountainside. A cool rotor wash blew through the open cab, tugging at the soldiers’ fatigues. Seven men were packed into the nylon mesh seats like so many lethal sardines: the Mobile Guerilla Force, A-303 Blackjack, the blackest of Black Ops units.

Or, as Top Brass dubbed them, the “Magnificent Seven.”

The Huey dropped to two hundred feet, into a valley between the green and purple mountain peaks. Triple-canopy jungle unfurled in five shades of green below the Huey’s armor-plated hull. The foliage broke and the chopper dropped into the Dong-Nai river basin, the river’s brown water scalloped by its whirring blades. The door gunner, all of eighteen, sat impassively behind his M60 machine gun. A pair of Wayfarer sunglasses set on the bridge of his nose reflected a doubled image of the noonday sun, twin fiery discs burning outwards from the smoked lenses. Sam the Sham’s voice pumped out of the cab speakers.

Lil’ Red Riding Hood, I don’t think little big girls should, Go walking in those spooky old woods alone…

The dustoff was two klicks off, an alternate pickup zone and hotter than a motherfuck. A 9th Infantry paratrooper unit on Long Range Patrol had been pinned in position by a patrolling platoon of heavily-armed NVA. The LuRPS had been taking heavy fire for hours, Charlie on them like stink on shit. Intel reported half the unit dead and a lot more wounded. Nobody knew if it was a job for Recon or Graves Registration.

The Blackjack insert team leader, Sergeant Jerome “Oddy” Grant, scanned the six faces staring back at him. He saw no fear or anxiety, only readiness.

Six men, aged nineteen to twenty-three. A year ago they’d been high school seniors and college sophomores and grainbelt farmhands, bank tellers and foundry workers. Two were married, three had steady girlfriends. Five children between them. Most had car loans and mortgage payments, performed volunteer work, attended church on Sundays. In a basement or rec room in six middle-class households scattered across America you would find walls hung with photographs of these men as swaddled infants and gap-toothed grade-schoolers, later as high school football slotbacks and basketball point guards. More recent snapshots show them as robed and mortarboard-bedecked college grads, or fathers dangling infants on their knees. In these same six houses lived the families who missed them, the mothers and fathers, wives and children who prayed nightly for the swift, safe return of their sons.

The pilot barked, “One minute to drop-off.”

The exercise was known as an
out-and-in
: Charlie knew there was going to be an extraction but wasn’t expecting an insertion on the same flight. The unit would drop in, load any wounded onto the chopper, secure a perimeter, and mount a counter-attack. Intel was murky as to the number of Charlies in the vicinity. Maybe only a few units. Then again, maybe enough to pack the cheap seats at Shea Stadium.

“Huey’s gonna buzz us in right on top of them!” Oddy’s voice rose above the rotor wash. “We’re coming in hot, dump and run, throttle wide open!”

“Bust ’em up!” Daniel “Zippo” Coles bellowed, fingering the trigger of his LPO-50 flame-thrower.

“Bust ’em open!” Alex “Slash” Trimball hollered. The son of a sharecropper, Trimball’s barracks cot at Ho-Ngoc-Tao was lined with nine neon dashboard Jesus sculptures. His tongue was black from the Benzedrine tabs he’d been chewing.

You’re everything a big bad wolf could want…

The dustoff came into view. The Cobras laid down suppressor fire, strafing the jungle. The Huey pilot brought the bird down to fifteen feet and the men tossed lengths of jute cord from the cab, clipping on and rappelling to the ground. The door gunner laid down a line of cover fire, feet braced on the chopper’s landing strut, M60 kicking against his chest. Spent 7.62mm longjacket casings glanced off the bulkhead and skidplates, pinwheeling, falling, reflecting brilliant yellow sunlight filtering through a bank of thin afternoon clouds.

Oddy signaled to the pilot, who tugged on the steering yoke and guided the chopper to a landing site some seven-hundred yards distant, beyond the range of Charlie’s mortars. As the Huey rose into the cobalt-blue sky, the young door gunner kept firing and firing, M60 barrel glowing white from the heat. His mouth was wide open and he may have been screaming but his voice could not be heard above the gunfire and scything chopper blades.

“Scatter!” Oddy shouted. “Get these boys up and out of here!”

The men broke apart and pursued separate tangents through wind-tossed whorls of elephant grass. Their tiger-striped fatigues, made from high-tensile parachute nylon, blended with the tropical foliage seamlessly; the soldiers melted into the vegetation.

They reconnoitered two-hundred yards distant, in a circle of tamped grass where the LuRPS were pinned down. The site was partially ringed by a thicket of mangroves, trunks shattered by RPG missiles, branches splintered from AK-47 rounds. In several places the grass and earth had been blown apart in deep craters where mortar rounds had detonated. Beyond the mangroves lay a field of elephant grass pocketed with cypress thickets. The field was perhaps eight-hundred yards long, terminating at a dense glade of breadfruit, cinnamon, and palmetto trees. The sun beat down like a superheated fist, the humidity so intense it felt as though every breath was drawn through boiled fleece.

The 9th was in rough shape. A freckle-faced kid resembling a young Richard Chamberlain squirted blood from his femoral artery. Another man with Lieutenant’s chevrons nursed a sucking chest wound, eyes bugged out and glassy; he screamed for someone named “Davey.” A black kid lay on a bed of crushed banana leaves
sans
right leg, chest pin-cushioned with so many morphine syrettes he resembled some freakish sort of hedgehog. All three were in shock, their faces ashen, beyond the realm of pain.

A whey-faced medic was slicked to the elbows in blood with his hands buried deep in the belly of a dead Marine. He jerked his wrists up hard, dislodging a jagged star of mortar-shell from the dead man’s ribcage. He hurled it into the grass and said, “It’s gonna be okay, Hollywood,” then rooted through his medical ruck for the Granulex blood coagulant. “I’ll have you back on your feet
toot sweet
.” He sprayed Granulex along the raw edges of the wound while the gutshot Lieutenant wailed on and on: “Davey! Davey!
Daaa
–vey!”