Sand in the Wind (33 page)

“Put a new battery in your radio.”

“Yeah, okay.
  
.
 
.
 
. Wait a minute! I don’t have a radio.”

“You what?”

“Bravo has it.” The platoon had three radios. Milton kept his and the other two were rotated among the three squads.

“You dumb cocksucker! Didn’t you get it back from them?”

“Nobody told me to.”

“Oh, I forgot you wouldn’t have enough brains to think of that yourself.”

Kovacs stood up, Payne still looking at him. “It wasn’t my fault.”

Kovacs’s foot flew into Payne’s thigh with enough force to lift him up and knock him on his side. “
Sorry,
I guess it was
my
fault.”

Kramer shook his head when he got the news. “I should have told him.”

“Any other radioman would have known. He just didn’t want to hump it.”

“I should have made sure anyway.
  
.
 
.
 
. Finding the company isn’t gonna be easy.” He turned to Milton. “Try a new battery.”

“I just changed it last night.”

“Was it working all right before you changed it?”

“I think so. It just seemed weak.”

“Do you have another one?”

“No, I only brought one extra. Do you think we might be in some sort of a valley?”

Kramer pulled out his map and studied it. “We’re practically on a plateau. We should be getting something.”

“You can bet Payne doesn’t have one.” Kovacs turned to Harmon. “Tell Payne to get his ass over here.” Payne walked towards them hesitantly. “No chance you’ve got a spare battery, is there?”

Payne’s face lit up. “Yeah, I got one.”

“Congratulations. Get it over here.”

Milton put in the new battery as soon as it was brought over. “Well, at least now we know it’s not the battery.”

“Maybe it’s the handset. Did you bring a spare?”

“Yes sir, already tried it.”

“Keep fucking around with it. We’re gonna stay here another hour anyway.”

The hour went by slowly. When it had passed, Kovacs got the men on their feet; and he and Harmon put them in the order they wanted them. Before they moved out, Kramer checked with Milton again. “Anything yet?”

“Nothing.”

“No use giving our position away with the whip antenna. Put on the tape.” Milton broke down the long antenna and replaced it with the short one. “Pass the word to move-out.”

They headed back down the mountains bearing forty-five degrees to their left. Bolton walked the point, his feet sinking deeply into the soft mulch of decaying leaves. Harmon walked behind him with the compass, calling out different objects for Bolton to guide on. Harmon had to concentrate. He couldn’t see very far and it wasn’t easy. ‘Vectors,’ he thought. ‘Practice, it’ll take practice.’ Lost in concentration, Harmon was looking down at his compass when the damp heavy air exploded with bursts of rifle fire and the sucking sound of three loud TWAPS.

Harmon dove to the ground. Bolton flew backwards and crashed down upon him. A trace of black disappeared into the brush. Shoving Bolton’s gangling leg out of his way, Harmon emptied a magazine at the fleeing Viet Cong. A second’s silence brought a hollow gurgling sound. He squirmed around towards Bolton and turned him on his back. Wide, vacant eyes stared up at him. The gurgling sound became louder, interspersed with coughs. Blood, it had never seemed so red before, covered Bolton’s chest, and a steady stream of it drooled from the corner of his mouth. Harmon ripped open his shirt as Bolton gave out an anguished moan. His body convulsed with hacking coughs, spitting blood into Harmon’s face, wheezing, more blood bubbling from the wounds that ran across his chest in an almost straight line. The firing resumed as Harmon fumbled to take the plastic wrapping off his bandage. He pressed the dressing on one of the wounds. It was hopeless. “CORPSMAN UP! CORPSMAN UP!” he screamed above the rifle fire. But he had to keep trying. The plastic wrapper from the bandage lay at his knee. He grabbed it, then the cellophane off his cigarettes. “CORPSMAN UP! CORPSMAN UP!” The wounds had to be kept airtight. His blood-smeared hands refused to move fast enough. He tried futilely to hold all three makeshift bandages in place while Bolton convulsed with coughs and bullets flew inches over their bodies. “CORPSMAN UP! CORPSMAN UP!”

Somehow, Fields got the word to come forward. He scrambled frantically along the ground on his hands and knees. Just as he got past Chalice, he actually heard Harmon’s yells for help. Instinctively, Fields shot to his feet. At the same instant a chicom grenade exploded a few inches from his ear, knocking him — limbs flying aimlessly — against a large tree. Chalice, firing blindly in the direction of the incoming rounds, felt a dull thud as Fields’s helmet landed on top of his flak jacket. Another chicom exploded towards the head of the column, followed by one exploding harmlessly in the brush behind them.

There was silence.

The men on both sides of Chalice lay motionless. He slowly turned his head and saw Fields’s lifeless body propped feet in the air against a tree. Chalice hesitated, hoping someone else would go over to it. No one did. He began to crawl over. A helmet lay in his path, one side crushed and peppered with holes. Chalice reached out and picked it up. His hand felt wet. He looked down at the helmet and saw his fingers pressing a large piece of scalp against its side. Fragments of skull and brain lay in the bottom of it. Chalice’s nostrils filled with the stench of death, a stench that existed only in his mind. His stomach tightened in spasms as the helmet fell from his hand. Hamilton crawled over to what remained of Fields.

Kramer sat up, feeling helpless and inadequate. “Keep trying on that radio,” he told Milton in an excited voice, at the same time thinking, ‘Is anybody dead?’ Seeing Kovacs already headed towards the front of the column, he called after him, “Find out if anybody’s wounded.”

Hamilton, kneeling next to Fields’s body, shook his head as Kovacs rushed by. Ten yards further up, he came upon Harmon leaning over Bolton — a pair of stunned eyes staring down at a pair of vacant ones. Kovacs kneeled at Bolton’s head. “Dead?” Harmon nodded. He noticed Harmon’s blood-soaked clothes. “You hit?” Harmon shook his head. Kovacs placed his hand on Harmon’s shoulder as he stood up. “We’ll be getting out of here in a few seconds. Be ready.” He headed back down the column checking for other casualties. As he approached Kramer, Milton was still trying to raise the company on the radio. “Fields and Bolton are finished, Roads and Childs got nicked by some shrapnel.”

“Bolton too? I already saw Fields. Listen, I think we better get out of here right now.”

“You
know
it.”

Kramer suddenly remembered the bodies. “What about Fields and Bolton?”

“Better take ’em the way they are. No time now.” Turning around, Kovacs told Payne, “Pass the word to get ready to move-out.”

Hamilton and Chalice stripped Fields of his medical gear and passed it down the column. Roads rushed forward to help Harmon with Bolton, but when Harmon stood up he fell back down in pain. He hadn’t realized a chicom had ripped off the heel of one of his boots, taking a hunk of flesh with it.

“
Move-out,
fast!” Kramer shouted.

Roads threw Bolton over his shoulder. Forsythe rushed past them to take the point. By the time Kovacs reached him, Harmon had made it to his feet and was limping slowly forward. Without stopping, Kovacs grabbed Harmon’s arm and pulled it over his shoulder, half carrying him down the trail.

The squad had been moving at a frantic pace for ten minutes when Chalice, who was carrying Fields’s legs, tripped. Jerked backwards, Hamilton fell down. Kramer tripped over Chalice, barely managing to keep his balance. As Chalice tried to get up, he again fell down. “Hold it up,” Kramer called forward. “This should be far enough,” he gasped to Kovacs, and they both dropped to their knees.

The entire squad sat exhausted, trying to catch their breaths. Kramer ordered security positions at both the front and rear of the column. Kovacs told Payne to cut down four saplings to use as stretcher poles. Roads sat emptying a canteen on his shoulder trying to wash away the excrement that had discharged on him from Bolton’s corpse. Harmon limped over to the body with a poncho to wrap it in. Kramer and Kovacs looked over the map. “We’re about here, and the rendezvous point is here.” Kramer ran his finger between the two points. “This canopy is gonna make things harder, but we should be able to find our way. We’ll keep angling off at forty-five degrees until we hit this stream here, then we’ll try and figure out our position and a new heading from there. No point in sending up a flare now, is there?”

“Not much,” Kovacs agreed. “Probably never make it through the canopy.
  
.
 
.
 
. Charlie’d be the only one to see it.”

“You think we’re doing the right thing heading for the rendezvous point instead of straight down?”

“That’s what I’d do. Most of the men ran out of chow last night. The bodies and Harmon will slow us down plenty if we try it by ourselves.
  
.
 
.
 
. Getting a chopper in won’t be any problem once we hit the company and get hold of a radio.”

“
If
we hit the company,” Kramer mumbled.

“They should be there.”

“I hate to depend on Trippitt; besides, they might have heard the ambush.”

“Sounds are tricky up here. Even if they heard it, they wouldn’t be sure where it was coming from.”

“We can get fucked no matter what we do. Better move-out as soon as we get the stretchers made.”

Kramer stood watching as his men spread two ponchos on the ground and placed the poles on top of them. They worked with an almost detached quickness while folding the ponchos over the bodies and poles. Only now did Kramer grasp the reality of the deaths, the first of his men to die. He asked himself what he had done wrong, knowing there was  nothing — feeling guilt and at the same time knowing he was free of it. He felt as if, in his own struggle for life or death or whatever he was struggling for or against, he had needlessly involved others, others who had died in his place, not by accident, but by his own hand.

The squad moved out at a fast pace. Roads took it upon himself to help Harmon. Forsythe walked the point, Childs using the compass to direct him. Although there was no trail, the compass needle led them along a surprisingly easy path. Forsythe was able to follow descending ridgelines most of the morning, only rarely leading the men uphill. At twelve o’clock Kramer halted the squad for a half hour break. He was looking at his map when Kovacs asked, “Any idea where we are?”

Kramer shook his head. “I’m hoping we’ll hit that stream by three. It’s only about four klicks from there.”

Kovacs pointed to a place on the map. “I’d guess we’re about here.”

“I hope you’re right. If you are, we should meet the company by five.”

“There goes resupply.”

“I know. Tell the men to save any food they’ve got.”

“Doubt they have much. If they did, they’d be eating it now. I’ll tell them anyway.”

Soon after they started moving again, Forsythe had to use his machete to cut a path almost a kilometer in length. This slowed their pace considerably. An hour later he again had to use the machete. The blisters on his hands quickly burst, leaving them painfully raw. After a few minutes of practically no progress, Childs came forward to take the machete and the point. An hour of hacking through the brush exhausted him, so Forsythe called up Payne. Payne tired in a few minutes, and Childs noticed he was merely pushing his way forward without following any set course. After reminding him a few times, Childs gave up and again took the point himself. Forsythe called back for someone to spell them and Tony 5 came forward.

Tony’s arms swung back and forth rhythmically as he slashed the brush. The pace increased considerably, never slackening. The undergrowth gradually thinned, making the use of the machete unnecessary. It continued that way for a couple of kilometers before again thickening. Tony never once looked back for relief, and Childs was amazed at his stamina. The only sign of fatigue was his switching of hands more often.

He was finally about to pass the machete to someone else when a faint sound caught his ear. A few moments later the other members of the squad also heard it. There had been very little talking, but now a steady murmur ran back and forth along the line — was it water or just the wind rushing through the trees? As the sound grew louder, Tony’s strength returned. He used the machete ever more furiously than before. The sound continued to increase and the air took on a cool freshness not felt since the operation had begun. Finally, the machete sliced a large opening in the wall of brush revealing a crystal-clear stream slashing its way down to the valley.

Tony opened his hand to drop the machete. It peeled slowly away from his skin and fell to the ground. He kneeled and lowered his hands into the stream, moving his fingers as the soothing water rushed through them. Forsythe, Childs, and Payne did the same.

Childs asked Payne, “What the fuck are
you
doing?”

“My hands are sore.”

“From what?”

As soon as Kramer reached the stream, he took out his map and studied it while the rest of the men dropped their packs and waded in. Kovacs saw him and walked back over, his body dripping with water. “Figure out where we are?”

“I think so. That fall back there makes it pretty easy.” He pointed to a spot on the map.

“Not as far down as I thought we were.”

“No, but we did a pretty good job considering. We’re a little over four klicks above the company and about thirty degrees to the side. Let’s see, we can follow the edge of this stream till we hit this ridge, follow it, cross this valley, and the next ridge will take us right there.”

“How long do you think it will take?” Kovacs asked.

“Two, three hours.”

“How much daylight we got left?”

Kramer checked his watch and shook his head. “Less than two hours. I dunno.”

“We can’t take a chance on approaching them in the dark,
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
not without a radio.”