Storiesonline.net ------- Silver Wings by Joe J Copyright© 2008 by Joe J ------- Description: The early morning sunlight glinted blindingly off the silver wings of the huge jet as it cleaved a path toward the sun. Fittingly, the light reflected off the jet's wings poured through the small window next to me and lit up the silver paratrooper badge on my chest. I was headed home from a grueling combat tour; back to the loving arms of my beautiful wife... Codes: MF rom hist Mil ------- ------- Edited By Dream-Girl Note from Jake Rivers: This is my fifth semi-annual "invitational." The initial one was based on the Statler Brother's song, "This Bed of Rose's." The second used the Marty Robbins El Paso trilogy: "El Paso" "El Paso City " and "Faleena." The third had stories based on the various versions of "Maggie May" or "Maggie Mae." The fourth invitational was based on any Country & Western song. The current invitational is based on any song written or performed by Merle Haggard. Regards, Jake ------- Chapter 1 The early morning sunlight glinted blindingly off the silver wings of the huge jet as it cleaved a path toward the sun. Fittingly, the light reflected off the jet's wings poured through the small window next to me and lit up the silver paratrooper badge on my chest. I smiled as the drone of the engines subtly changed pitch and the nose of the Air Force C-141 transport dipped downward. The pilot was throttling back and shedding altitude. That meant he was starting his approach into Pope Air Force Base. Pope was adjacent to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, my ultimate destination. I was coming home after an intense combat tour in the Republic of Vietnam; back to the loving arms of my beautiful wife and sweet daughter. The trip home had been excellent, even though we were flying on a cargo plane. There were about two dozen of us returnees on it, mostly Army and Marines, with a couple of Squids and one Zoomie, all of us in dress uniforms. We even had a civilian on the plane, an older gent dressed casually in tan trousers and a light blue Filipino type shirt. I didn't figure out his function until we landed. The rest of the aircraft was occupied by cargo lashed to shiny aluminum 463L pallets, locked into the rail and roller system on the aircraft deck. I ended up sitting next to the civilian. He was a kind and friendly man named Michael something or other, I never did catch his last name. He insisted on me calling him Mike anyway. Mike asked me about myself, and before you know it, he was listening attentively as I told him my story... ------- We were high school sweethearts, and we were the couple that no one could understand being together. Megan Stedman was pretty and popular; she was the sweet girl-next-door. She taught Sunday school and sang in the church choir. At school, she was on the pep squad and the A-B honor roll. Everyone loved her. Everything Megan was, I was not. I was shy, introverted and a loner. I was one of the most intelligent students in the school, yet my grades were mediocre. If a subject interested me, I did okay in it, if not, I did just enough to squeak by. I was the classic underachiever; never living up to my potential. I was Jody (is capable of doing much better work) Jamison to every teacher I ever had. Listen, that day early in our sophomore year when she sat down next to me in the lunchroom, I was just as shocked as the rest of the Robert E. Lee High School student body. I sat there like a lump, pretending my bologna sandwich was the focus of my universe. "Ignoring me is not going to work, Jody Jamison," she said firmly. Yes, Megan knew who I was, because in a school with only five hundred students, it was hard to be invisible, no matter how hard I tried. I raise my head and looked at her, my face in its normal neutral mask. "Hello Megan, what do you want?" I responded curtly. She regarded me steadily with those indescribably deep blue eyes for a second, then smiled warmly. "That's better. Do you realize that we've been in the same geometry class for three weeks, and those are the first words you've ever said to me? That's okay, though, because we're talking now." Well, actually Megan was doing all the talking, but I was suddenly focused on her every word. It took me months to actually believe that Megan really was attracted to me, but it only took me a second to fall in love with her. Megan's story, to anyone who wants to hear it, is that when she saw me sitting there that day, something told her that I was the man she was going to marry. Since she knew it was unlikely I'd ever approach her, she took matters in her own hands. Megan didn't try to change me, but her presence in my life did move me more toward what people considered normal. Our relationship worked then, and works now, because Megan keeps us on the right path. I don't mean that she runs my life or anything like that. I just have enough common sense to leave anything requiring interpersonal skills up to her. I can't think of a single thing she ever suggested that wasn't good for me in the long run. Megan's parents weren't as convinced of my potential as Megan was. Still, they trusted their daughter and let us date. I liked her folks, although her father intimidated me somewhat. Megan's dad was a State Police captain. Every time I walked in the Stedmans' front door, the first thing I saw was the captain's Sam Brown belt hanging on the coat rack. Tucked in the holster of his belt was this huge Smith & Wesson .357 magnum revolver. Stedman would always make a point of glancing at that pistol when he briefed me on when to have Megan home, or what he considered good conduct on my part. He never had a problem making his point to me. I lived with my grandmother, Alice Jamison, because my mother died when I was seven and my father couldn't, or wouldn't, raise me. He moved out to California and started another family about the time I turned twelve. I flat out refused to go live with them because I wasn't about to leave my grandmother. To this day, I think she is the finest person who ever drew a breath. Most everyone who met her felt the same way. Granny loved Megan from the first time I introduced them. The two of them seem to have some ESP connection when it comes to me. Granny would pick out a shirt for me, saying that Megan would like it, and Megan would rave about the shirt when I wore it. Things like that happened too often to be a coincidence. Megan's parents even treated me better after they met Granny J. We graduated from high school in June of 1961, but we had to wait until I turned eighteen in November before we could marry. By then, I was working for the Georgia Power Company as an apprentice lineman. I scored high on the power company's aptitude test and Megan's dad put in a good word for me so they hired me, even though I was only seventeen. On our wedding night, Megan Claire and Jody Lee Jamison invented making love. Oh sure, folks before us were doing something like it, but it was impossible for anyone to have ever done anything that felt as good or was as intense as when we did it. We were virgins when we tumbled into bed in our motel room in Palmdale, Florida, but thanks to a lot of reading and fooling around, we had a very good idea of what it took to remedy that. Had it not been for the very sweet woman who owned the small beach-front motel worrying about us, we probably would have stayed in our room making love until we starved to dead. The January after our wedding, Megan started college at Valdosta State. I had promised her parents that I would not prevent her from going to college, since they were willing to pay her tuition. We rented a little place in town and settled into married bliss. I worked, she went to school, and we were incredibly happy. Megan excelled in college and graduated in June of 1965. At about the same time, I completed the apprenticeship program and received my journeyman's card from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Instead of an apprentice lineman, I was now a full fledged transmission line electrician and making good money. I wasn't crazy about my job, but I worked hard at it to put food on the table and a roof over my wife's pretty brunette head. Megan's degree was in Early Childhood Education. There was a shortage of teachers then, so she had job offers even before she graduated. We had the world by the tail and our lives looked set. We were even talking about starting a family, when a little thing named Vietnam reared its ugly head. In July, my draft status changed and I lost my marriage exemption. The Selective Service Board switched to war time criteria so that married men were now eligible for the draft. My birth date had been drawn early in the December, 1964 draft lottery, so it was only a matter of time before I received my induction notice. After a long heart to heart talk with my wife, and with some advice from my father-in-law, I enlisted in the Army on the first of August. My reporting date was August fifteenth. My reasons for enlisting were more practical than patriotic, as I felt that by enlisting, I'd have a better chance of controlling the duty I ended up with. I was not trying to avoid combat duty, but if I ended up in a frontline unit, I wanted to be something besides cannon fodder. I chose the Army because the sergeant at the recruiting station was honest and straight forward, and that impressed the hell out of me. I realize that's not the greatest of reasons for a decision that big, but it was reason enough for me. I gave my notice to my employer on the day after I enlisted, and my supervisor graciously waived the two week notice clause of my employment contract. The business agent down at the union hall told me I would continue to earn seniority while I was in the Army, as long as I kept my dues current. For those two weeks between enlisting and shipping out, Megan and I spent every moment together. The situation made our relationship stronger instead of putting stress on it. That's mostly Megan's fault, because she refused to have any negative thoughts about what I was doing. When it came to backing her man, Megan Jamison was Grizzly Bear fierce. As for me, there wasn't a hound dog in South Georgia half as loyal. Megan drove me down to the Greyhound station at noon on August fifteenth. Both of us tried to be brave for the other. We clung together desperately as the bus's driver and passengers waited patiently for me to board. Four hours later I was in Jacksonville. I spent the night at a contract hotel and at six the following morning, I was on a dark blue Navy bus headed to the Military Enlistment Processing Station. I spent the early morning taking the vocational aptitude test. In the afternoon, it was the physical exam, followed by a session with the guidance counselor. The guidance sergeant looked at the results of the tests and glanced up at me. "These are some of the highest ASVAB scores I've ever seen, Jemison. You are qualified for any job in the Army. A month ago, I could have offered you twenty career fields to choose from, but today that's down to three. So what'll it be Jody, Infantry, Armor or Field Artillery?" The sergeant handed me a job description of all three and I quickly eliminated humping cannon shells or being cooped up in a tank. 'So much for enlisting to get a better job', I thought, as I signed on the dotted line for a three year hitch as a light weapons infantryman. I took the oath of enlistment and was herded with about fifty other guys out to a waiting Continental Trailways chartered bus. A sergeant took roll call and when he was satisfied everyone was on board, we hit the road in a cloud of black diesel smoke. We stopped at a road side HoJos in Waycross, Georgia, for supper, then motored through the night westward to Fort Benning. I made acquaintance with a few of the men on the bus as we rolled through the Georgia night. We were a Heinz 57 group of blacks, whites, rich, poor, volunteers and draftees. Most of the fellows on that bus ended up in the same basic training company as me; about a quarter of them in my platoon. As soon as I departed for basic training, Megan moved our possessions into storage and herself back home with her parents, so we could cut down on our expenses. Megan and I were savers; we squeezed our money tightly so we'd have some of it for the future. On the day after Labor Day, she started teaching second grade at the Azalea Avenue Elementary School there in Valdosta. While I was in training, Megan and I wrote each other at least every other day. I called home every Sunday evening. We missed each other so badly that it physically hurt. During basic training, I discovered that I had an aptitude for the military and that I actually enjoyed being in it. I was a squad leader after a week and the Platoon Guide after two. The Platoon Guide was the trainee acting sergeant in charge of the platoon when the drill sergeants weren't around. I was honor graduate for my company and was promoted to Private PV2. Megan drove up from Valdosta for my graduation. My first sergeant, a WWII veteran named John J. Stubbs, arranged for me to spend the night with Megan before I shipped out to Fort Gordon, Georgia for Infantry Advanced Individual Training. My sweet and friendly wife had some sort of magical ability that turned gruff old noncoms into reasonable human beings. Oh yeah, and while I was in basic training, I volunteered for jump school, mainly because my drill sergeant was a paratrooper and he was cool as hell. Sergeant First Class Dahl convinced me that a leg (a non-airborne soldier) was the lowest form of life in the universe. "I'd rather have a whore for a sister, than a leg for a brother," he once told me. The Infantry Training Brigade at Fort Gordon was located in an isolated section of the post named Camp Crocket. Camp Crocket was a collection of Quonset huts set in company rows. Each Quonset hut housed half a platoon. There were two battalions in the brigade and four companies in each battalion. Every week, one company started training and one company graduated. Camp Crocket was unique, in that every soldier in training there was destined for jump school and then Vietnam. We infantry guys were persona non grata around Fort Gordon proper, so we were confined to Camp Crocket for all eight weeks we were there. We weren't even allowed to go to church, instead some chaplain held a nondenominational service in our mess hall. With no distractions, I applied myself conscientiously to my training, ever heedful of the cadres' oft-repeated maxim, "If you don't learn this, you will die in Vietnam." I made a radical change of plans during the third week of AIT. It came about because five of us from my company were called to the dayroom to receive a pitch from a tandem of Special Forces recruiters. Both men were dressed in dress greens, their trouser legs bloused into the top of spit-shined Cochran paratrooper boots, and their green berets worn at a rakish angle. The senior of the two men, a Sergeant First Class named McLemore, sported a chest full of awards and decorations and a hook where his left hand should have been. He looked us over for a minute and heaved a disappointed sigh. "Is this all of them?" McLemore asked the drill sergeant who had rounded us up. The sergeant nodded affirmatively and McLemore turned his attention back to us. "I was hoping for a better turn out, but I guess you five are it for tonight. You are here because of your test scores, physical ability and the recommendation of your company cadre. I'm not here to sell you anything, so if at any point you want to leave, don't let the door hit you in the ass." Two guys took him up on the offer and beat feet. McLemore watched them go, then turned back to the three of us remaining. He gave us a wolfish smile and started talking again. "I am not going to blow smoke up your ass with some rah-rah speech, that's not our style. What I am going to do is offer you the opportunity to attempt something that only five percent of those who try actually accomplish..." There was more, but I think you get the drift. In the end, one other guy and I ended up taking the five hour Special Forces written test the following Sunday afternoon. The test was the most difficult I'd ever seen, because it did not test anything I had ever learned. Instead, it tested problem-solving ability and adaptability to strange situations. I was proud as hell I passed the test, even if it was by only the slightest of margins. I told Megan about volunteering for Special Forces the same Sunday night that I took the test. Meggie didn't know beans about the green berets, but she told me to go for it anyway. We were both that way about supporting one another. I learned a lot in the Army, but I learned the concept of unstinting loyalty from my wife. Megan stood by me regardless of whether I was right, wrong or indifferent. In week four of AIT, I competed for, and won, Brigade Soldier of the Quarter. In week five, I competed for the same award at post level. At the post level, I competed against soldiers from the other training units at Fort Gordon, namely the pukes from the Signal School and the pretty-boy prima donnas from the Military Police School. To everyone's surprise, my own especially, I won. I was the first Camp Crocket soldier to ever win the award. The Brigade Commander was happy enough with me that I was promoted to Private First Class. He also gave me a letter of recommendation for Officer Candidate School. I was proud as hell sewing those mosquito wings onto my uniform sleeves, but I shrugged off the idea of OCS. Three quarters of the way through AIT, we stopped training and were sent home for Christmas. Just like that, every trainee on the base was moved out on the seventeen and eighteenth of December to return to duty on the fourth of January. It was a huge cluster-fuck the Army called Exodus. Each trainee received a round trip ticket and a flying-fifty (fifty dollar advance pay), then away we went. Thank God all I had to do was travel a hundred and fifty miles. Megan started her two week Christmas school holiday on the twenty-second. For those two weeks, I don't think we were ever further than a few inches apart. My in-laws were great to me, even though I think Megan and I embarrassed them with our public displays of affection. We split the holidays between their house and Granny Jamison's place to give them a break. Granny made sure we had plenty of time to fool around when we stayed with her, then teased us unmercifully about it. I caught a bus from the Greyhound Station on Sunday morning, January Second, 1966. I came back to Camp Crocket a day early so I could make sure my platoon was squared away when training started Tuesday morning. I hadn't been ordered to return early, but as the Platoon Guide, I figured it was my job to do regardless. We spent our final full week of AIT on a field training exercise (FTX) that ended in a live fire assault on a pretend Vietcong camp. Then we spent four days squaring away our gear and the company's equipment for the next bunch to use. On Wednesday, we had an early morning dress greens inspection, then a brief graduation ceremony. It was mid-week and I'd just been home, so Megan didn't make the trip. As soon as the graduation ended, we lined up alphabetically outside the dayroom to receive our orders and another advance on our pay. Pay had been a hot topic for our evening bitch sessions in the barracks lately when we found out the price of our tickets home for Christmas had been collected from our January pay. It was pretty comical when we all had to stand in the pay line for an hour just so they could hand us a pay voucher that was stamped "No Pay Due". A private made $90.60 a month back then, and a PV2 made $99.10. Out of that princely sum, Uncle Sam took taxes, social security, laundry and the dollar a month the first sergeant coerced us into donating to the Army Emergency Relief and Red Cross, so we all started the new year owing the Army money. Some wag observed that it was all a plot to keep us in the Army longer. As soon as Mort Adams, the first man in line, stepped out of the orderly room, the suspense was over for everyone in the company, except two of us. Mort's orders cleared up any confusion he might have had as to what he was doing for the next fifteen months. It was jump school, a thirty day leave, then assignment to the 173d Parachute Infantry Regiment, Republic of Vietnam. "At least we are staying together, boys, because Top told me that everyone's orders are the same, except for Jody and Steve's," Mort said. I made some friends there at Camp Crocket, but they were all transitory. By that I mean after jump school, they were all going in a different direction than me. The exception to that rule was Steve Pleturski, the other guy who signed up for Special Forces. Steve and I decided to stick together throughout our training to help each other out. He ended up becoming the best friend I ever had. Pleturski was about my polar opposite when it came to backgrounds, personalities and looks. He was loud, outgoing, and boisterous to my reserved and quiet. While I worked hard at being a good soldier, Steve did it effortlessly. I am a little taller than average at five-eleven and weight one-eighty. Steve was six-two, two-ten. I have brown hair and eyes. Steve's hair was a sandy blonde and his eyes a porcelain blue. I was nondescript looking, I thought, while he was handsome, with a ready smile that drew women to him like bees to pollen. Steve was a Yankee from the big city of Chicago while I was a country boy from the Deep South. As soon as I finished drawing my advanced pay, the first sergeant pulled me aside and took me to the company commander's office. I reported to the CO, he returned my salute, and then nodded to the first shirt. Top moved up next to my right side and whipped out a knife about the size of a machete. "I'm sorry Jamison, but there seems to have been some problem with your promotion to PFC," the CO said as the first sergeant sawed my stripe off with that pig sticker. I gulped but kept my face as impassive as I could. "Yes sir," I replied. "So you won't need those skeeter wings any more, I'm afraid," the captain said. Then he paused for a few seconds as the top kick moved to my left side and sliced off that stripe. Then he continued, "But you will need these." I looked on uncomprehendingly as he handed the first sergeant a set of corporal chevrons. The first sergeant took up the narrative. "The top ten percent of graduating trainees get promoted and since you were our number one graduate, you were in that number. The problem was the earlier promotion you received for Soldier of the Quarter. I talked to the Brigade Sergeant Major about it and we agreed that you deserved E4. The sergeant major called his counterpart at the jump school at Fort Benning and worked out making you a corporal until you graduate the Airborne Course and depart Benning. During the first week there, when the new arrivals provide KPs and details for the students in training, you will be the noncommissioned officer in charge of our troopers. When you leave Benning you will be laterally appointed a spec four." A corporal and specialist four were the same pay grade, the difference in the ranks was that a corporal held a leadership position. I almost soiled my skivvies when the first sergeant pinned the new stripes to my sleeve. ------- Chapter 2 Jump School was a thoroughly unpleasant experience. I think the Army outdid itself in selecting the toughest and meanest SOBs alive to fill the ranks of the Airborne Course cadre. From the minute I arrived, until the day I left, those guys were up my ass like a pine cone suppository. The CO and first sergeant back at Camp Crocket hadn't done me any favors by making me a corporal, because the promotion made me the senior man in my class during detail week. As such, the cadre expected me to keep track of the two hundred plus guys that had reported with me. During that week, we performed all the duties required to keep the school operating so the airborne students didn't miss any training. We did KP, drove trucks and pulled guard duty or anything else that needed doing. I must have done a million pushups that week, as I was held responsible for every fuck up, right along with the sad sack who did the deed. If Joe Shit the Rag man was late for KP, Corporal Jody ended up right beside him pushing Georgia. The cadre really enjoyed raking a new corporal over the coals. Army officers and NCOs, plus men from the other services, started arriving on Thursday of that week. That didn't mean much to me though, because until Sunday evening, I was still nominally in charge of the slugs in the enlisted men's barracks. We were the low men on the totem pole until Monday morning when training started and the next bunch took over the details. I was thankful when a Captain assumed the position of class leader and I dropped down to squad leader. Ten men were much easier to keep track of than two hundred. The technical aspect of the training we received was not that challenging, but the physical training and harassment made up for that lack in spades. From the first formation until graduation, we ran everywhere we went. Woe be unto your non-airborne qualified ass if some cadre sergeant caught you walking. If we weren't running it was because some cadre sergeant had us in the front leaning rest position doing pushups. "Drop and give me twenty," was the jump school mantra. The first week of actual training was called Ground Week. During Ground Week, we learned all about the brand new model T-10 parachute, how to properly exit the door of an aircraft in flight, how to steer the parachute and how to do a parachute landing fall (PLF) once our sorry asses hit the ground. Ground week was home of the thirty-four foot mock door tower. At the thirty-four foot tower we practiced and were graded on our exit technique. You jumped out the door wearing a parachute harness hooked to a cable that was anchored on a berm two hundred feet away. An instructor unhooked you when you hit the berm then you double timed back to the tower to be critiqued by one of the cadre. If the instructor didn't like your exit, He made you a rope man. The rope man had the job of pulling the trolley assembly and harness back to the tower. It was hard as hell getting the assembly close enough to the door so the instructor didn't have to lean out to grab it. I had nightmares for a week about someone screaming, "Take up the slack rope man, then drop and give me fifty." The second week was Tower Week, where our lives revolved around the two hundred and fifty foot parachute towers that were the most prominent landmark on Fort Benning. The three towers were spaced a couple of hundred yards apart in the middle of a huge field. Each tower had four arms sprouting out of their top like a giant plus sign. The tower gave us would be troopers a chance to fall to earth under a deployed canopy without having to actually jump out of a plane. The tower had my undivided attention because they put me in a parachute, hooked the deployed canopy into a cup-shaped metal frame work and hoisted me up dangling under the frame. When the framework reached the top of the tower, they left me hanging there for what seemed like hours before releasing me. Two hundred and fifty feet was a long way down for a country boy who'd never been in a building taller than three stories. The cadre sergeant in charge of Tower Week was particularly adept at making us miserable. His name was Horace Bechtel, and he had been a paratrooper since there had been an airborne. Sergeant First Class Bechtel was small, wiry and as mean as a water moccasin. He set the tone for week two when we formed up for PT on Monday morning. "I don't like my Mama because she's a leg," he said. "So you can bet I don't like none of your candy asses from the get go. Do us both a favor and quit now, so I don't have to run you off." After we did fifteen repetitions of the daily dozen, Bechtel formed us up for our morning run. I was pretty happy about him leading the run, because he looked as if he was about a hundred years old. I figured he'd be lucky to make it half way around the two mile track that circled the towers. I changed my tune when we started our second lap and he looked fresh as a daisy while running backwards, grinning evilly and singing cadence. By the time he double-timed us over to the mess hall, we were dog tired and eight guys had quit, all before six-thirty in the morning. I sucked it up and gutted it out, which is pretty much the only way you can make it through those first two weeks. I heard all kinds of rationales for the harassment we had heaped on us, but I never have figured out if all the bullshit actually made us better soldiers. The third week of the Airborne Course is Jump Week. During that last week, every trooper has to make five jumps, including one with combat equipment. We jumped from twin engine, twin tail-boomed C-119 cargo planes. The C-119 was an excellent jump platform because there was no fuselage behind the troop doors to bang into if your exit was weak. My first jump was also my first flight in an airplane, so I was more nervous about taking off in the plane than I was about jumping out of it. As it happened, I took off in fifteen airplanes before I ever landed in one. For our final jump, we didn't actually use combat equipment; instead, the Weapons & Individual Equipment Containers we jumped were pre-made around a rectangular ammo crate with a couple of sand bags in it. The WEIC (wick) container was an OD canvass affair that would hold about a hundred pounds of equipment. The containers hooked to the same 'D' rings on the parachute harness that the reserve parachute fastened to. The WEIC had a big red knob at the top that when pulled, released the container so that it hung beneath you on a fifteen foot lowering line. The container was uncomfortable to wear and seemed to weigh a ton by the time we waddled onto the airplane. All my jumps were successful, in that I walked away from each of them. In fact, we only had a couple of casualties during the week, both broken legs from bad PLFs. For me, jumping out of an airplane in flight was neither exciting nor scary. I think it's that way for most guys, because you are so focused on doing what you were taught, you don't have time to think about anything else. Of course, after riding around in the cramped and bucking plane wearing all that heavy uncomfortable gear made the task of unassing the plane something to look forward to. We had our graduation from the Airborne Course right on the drop zone after our fifth jump. We formed up as soon as everyone was on the ground and the commander of the course pinned our silver parachutist badges to our shirts. I thought it was cool as hell that we didn't have to put on our class 'A's and march around like we did in basic and AIT. I was not the honor grad for our class; that title went to a West Point lieutenant who thought he was Audie Murphy reincarnated. That a shave tail from West Point was top man in our class pissed off SFC Bechtel even worse than usual. For some reason, Bechtel hated West Pointers. He subtly let that fact be known during the wing pinning ceremony. Bechtel's job during graduation was to follow behind the commander and give each of us the two clips that held the badge to our shirts. He was third in line behind the commander and the course sergeant major. When it was his turn to drop the clips in the lieutenant's hand, Bechtel stopped and acted as if he was straightening the wings on the man's shirt. In reality, he used his thumbs to push the sharp points of the pins into the hapless LTs skin. When the second louie yelped in pain, Bechtel gave him his most evil grin. "Oops, sorry about that sir," he said insincerely. Megan did not attend the graduation. She wanted to, but I nixed the idea, because I didn't want her sitting in the bleachers if I had a malfunction and splattered myself across the DZ. I called Megan every night we jumped that week to let her know I was alright, so she wouldn't worry. We had the rest of Friday and all of Saturday to get our shit together and clean the barracks before we moved out Sunday morning. Except for a weekly supervised trip to the PX, that day and a half was our only time off for the four weeks we'd spent at Benning. My buddy Steve and I hot-footed it over to the PX as soon as we returned from the DZ. We each bought a pair of the coveted Cochran Jump Boots and glider patches to sew onto our flat garrison caps. The glider patch was a two inch round patch with a parachute and a WWII assault glider embroidered on it. Back at the barracks, we spit shined our new boots and sewed the glider patches on our caps. Steve sewed a silver dollar behind his glider patch, because some cadre sergeant told him it was a paratrooper tradition. The sergeant said that everyone knew you were a real trooper when you threw your hat on the bar and that dollar clanged. I didn't follow suit, because I didn't trust the source of the information. For all I knew, we'd get busted to private for unauthorized equipment or some such during our first inspection as paratroopers in class A's. When our boots were like glass and our caps squared away, we put on our summer greens and headed to town. Steve was taking me bar hopping for the first time in my life. Steve could not believe that I had never been 'pub crawling' as he called it, but I wasn't much of a drinker and spent all of my time with my wife. He said taking the little lady out once a week didn't count, even though Megan and I sometimes went to a tavern for a couple of beers. We were a couple of sharp looking soldiers with our new jump wings pinned to the left breast of our green jackets above our National Defense Service Medals, and our trouser legs bloused into the top of our spit shined jump boots. We also wore our blue infantry fourragère looped over our left shoulder to let everyone know we were proud airborne infantrymen. We weren't the only newly minted paratroopers looking for a beer that night, but most of our classmates weren't twenty-one, so they could only drink on post at the EM Club. I was twenty-two and Steve was a year older than me. We caught the post shuttle bus to the front gate and walked over to the taxicab stand right outside the gate. We hopped into the first cab in line. The cab driver looked up at us in the read view mirror. "Where to Gents?" he asked. "Somewhere with hot women and cold beer," Steve replied. The driver barked out a laugh and shifted the cab into gear. "I know just the place," the cabbie chortled. The place he knew was across the Chattahoochee River in Phenix City, Alabama. I was a little nervous, because Phenix City had a bad reputation even down in Valdosta. Anything went in Phenix City, including gambling and prostitution. In nineteen forty when George Patton commanded Fort Benning, he threatened to take his tanks across the river and level the place. In nineteen fifty-five, the governor of Alabama had to call in the National Guard to clean up the town. After the guardsmen departed, Phenix City wasn't as bad, but it was still a rough and tumble town. The cabbie turned down a street right over the bridge and slid to a stop in front of a neon honky-tonk named the Drop Zone Lounge. I paid the man and over Steve's objections, asked him to come back for us in a couple of hours. The lounge was everything Steve asked for and then some. We were no sooner through the door, when two women grabbed our arms and dragged us to a table. The women were Korean and spoke a fractured version of English that Steve seemed to understand. The Drop Zone had about twenty tables in it, and about half of those were occupied by a pair of bargirls. It cost five dollars an hour to sit at one of the tables with them. In addition, you were expected to buy them over priced drinks and pay them a dollar for dancing with you. Even if I hadn't been married, I was too frugal to spend my money that way. Steve paid for the table and I reluctantly ponied up a five spot so 'Kim', the bargirl who attached herself to me, could order a 'champagne cocktail' for her and a beer for me. Steve and I watched as the women went to the far end of the bar to get our drinks. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the bartender serving them was SFC Bechtel in civilian clothes. I pointed him out to Steve. "That evil little son-of-a-bitch won't even let us drink in peace," he carped indignantly. I laughed and stood up. "I'm going to go say hello to him. I figure he'll talk to me now that I'm not a leg anymore," I said. Steve waved his hand and grunted his acknowledgement but stayed in his seat. He wanted nothing to do with the man who had dogged his ass for two weeks. I was hoping like hell that Bechtel was in the mood to talk so I could make my escape from the table. It turned out that Bechtel was a completely different person away from his duties at jump school. He pulled two draft beers from the tap and called out something in Korean to a young woman who was also tending bar. She smiled and nodded as he joined me on the other side of the bar. "You must have a good boss if you can stop work and have a beer with your patrons," I remarked. He laughed and took a big gulp of his Pabst Blue Ribbon. "That's my old lady over there. We bought this place six months ago, but she runs it mostly. I'll retire and help her more when the Army tries to send me somewhere else. The women out there are all Korean like her, and are, or once were, married to GIs from Fort Benning. By ten o'clock, this place will be filled with horny GIs looking to get lucky. For the right price, some of them will, but we don't have a part in that. We run an honest place here, and I look out for soldiers." I bought the next round and asked him about the three small gold stars I'd noticed on his jump wings. He told me they were for combat jumps he made in World War Two and Korea. He had some fascinating stories of those olden days that were funny as hell. For my part, I told him about Megan and how much in love we were. He toasted me on that and said it was the same for him and his Susie. "I met her when I was stationed over there in fifty-eight. She was a working girl and a lot younger than me, but somehow we clicked and here we are. She is one forever more smart woman when it comes to a dollar, so I figure in a couple of years we'll be right well off." He dug out his wallet and proudly showed me a picture of a couple of cute kids. "Hell, we even have a couple of crumb snatchers at home." I was in uncharted territory when Susie slid the third frosty mug across the bar to me, because until then, two beers had been my limit. I nursed it as we talked for another half hour. I carried that same beer with me back to Steve's table when the crowd picked up enough that Bechtel had to go back to work. Steve had solved my problem with the bargirls by deciding that he could handle them both. Since Steve had plenty of money, the women were all for it. They had moved their chairs so they were each snuggled up to him and he had an arm over each of their shoulders. He smirked at me when I sat down across from him. "If you snooze, you lose," he said jovially. I toasted him with my raised half-finished mug of beer. "That's the story of my life," I said mock sadly. "But remember what got you here before you do anything stupid." Steve Pleturski was a heck of a guy and a good soldier, but had he not been caught messing around with the wife of one of his father's business associates, he'd still be a college student in Chicago. Steve was caught in the man's bed naked as a jaybird, so it was hard to claim he was there to clean the pool. When the angry husband crashed through the door armed with a Ben Hogan signature pitching wedge, Steve dove out the window — the second floor window. Steve claimed that the twenty foot drop to the ground is what convinced him to become a paratrooper so he'd be trained if it ever happened again. To save the family embarrassment and Steve's head from becoming a driving range, his sister drove him to the recruiting office over in Jolliet. Thankfully, his family was rich and Steve always had plenty of money, which made his self imposed exile easier to take. The woman Steve was caught with turned out to hold the family purse strings, so nothing happened to her. In fact, she was still hot for young Steve's body and made no bones about it. She sent him outrageously sexy letters and glossy nude pictures of herself in suggestive poses that he had taped to the inside of his wall locker for all of us to enjoy. Steve caught my meaning. He shrugged and grinned as he held up both girls' left hand, as if the absence of a ring meant something. "They are single," he said, "and small enough that I figure I'll need both of them." I sat with Steve and his new friends, Kim and Lee, until the taxi driver came back for us. I did finish my third beer by then, and Steve stood me my fourth. It sat untouched on the table in front of me. Steve declined to go back to Benning with me. Instead, he hugged the girls tighter and told me he'd see me tomorrow. He'd slammed down about twice as much brew as me, but it didn't seem to faze him. I had a last word with Bechtel before I left. He assured me Steve was in safe hands. "Those are a couple of wild girls, but I'll have Susie talk to them. Old Pleturski will be tired, broke and happy about it, next time you see him, just the way a young paratrooper ought to be," Bechtel promised. Sure enough, the next day about three in the afternoon, Steve came wandering into my room. The Navy petty officer I had shared it with was already on his way back to Norfolk. Steve did look tuckered out, but his uniform was squared away and he was grinning like a jackass. He plopped down on the empty bunk and heaved a contented sigh. "I think I'm in love," he said, right before he passed out. Steve went back to the Drop Zone Lounge Saturday night. I begged out of going and tried to get him to stay in the barracks also. He just laughed and told me to quit worrying. "Our passes don't end until ten tomorrow morning, and I'll be back well before then," he assured me. "I'm all packed and ready to go so no sweat, GI." In spite of my reservations about the wisdom of what he was doing, I had to laugh at his imitation of the sing-song English of Kim and Lee. The next morning I was in a near panic when it turned 9:45 and Steve was still gone. I dragged our duffle bags out onto the company street, in case he showed up at the last minute. At five till ten, a Thunderbird convertible screeched up in front of the orderly room and Steve hopped out of it. As everyone standing around the barracks applauded, Steve hurriedly kissed the two small women in the car and sprinted into the building to sign in from pass. As he dashed away Lee stood up on the passenger seat in her minidress and go-go boots. "You come back soon Baby-san, you number one GI and I love you too many," she yelled. ------- The difference between the Special Forces Qualification Course and the other Army schools I attended was like night and day. The instructors at the Q course did not supervise us every minute; instead, they told us what we needed to do and left us to get it done. I arrived at the Special Forces School as a spec four, and there were a number of NCOs in our class, so for once, I was just one of the guys. That made me happy because it left me time to absorb the fast paced instruction. Steve and I lucked out and ended up in the same four-man room with two guys from Hawaii. One of the guys was a Japanese-American named Greg Tomatsu. Greg was some sort of Jujitsu champion in Hawaii, and for a little guy, he was one bad dude. Greg was a combat engineer. The other Hawaiian was this very large Samoan medic with the unlikely name of Pookie Ramos. Pookie was about six-six and weighed at least two-hundred and fifty pounds. He was strong as an ox and as quick as a cat, but he was about the nicest guy I've ever met. The four of us became good friends and helped each other throughout the course. We were all on the same detachment for the first phase of our training. Since we all had different strengths and weaknesses, we made good teammates. Phase one of the SFQC consisted of a couple of weeks of classroom lectures about the organization, history, and missions of Special Forces. We were also introduced to the A-team concept via a dog and pony show in which a team from the 7th Special Forces Group briefed us both in English and Spanish and demonstrated some of their skills. We were all impressed as hell by those guys and more motivated than ever to join their ranks. After the classroom portion was over, we conducted a night combat equipment jump into Camp McCall, the Special Forces training area adjacent to Fort Bragg. It was my first ever night jump and the first time I'd jumped with exposed equipment. It didn't help things a bit that in addition to the seventy-five pound mountain style rucksack I had dangling between my legs, they strapped an old WWII A-6 air-cooled machine gun across the top of my reserve. The A-6 made me wider than the door of the C-123 we were jumping, so they put me first in line, turned me slightly sideways and when the green light came on, booted my ass out the door. As a result of my less than textbook exit, my risers (the four fabric straps to which the suspension lines that held the canopy to the harness were attached) were twisted down to the back of my neck. I frantically bicycled my legs and tugged the risers apart so I could at least look up and see if I had a good canopy over my head. I finally untangled myself about a hundred feet above the DZ. When I saw how close I was to the ground, I jerked the quick release and dropped my rucksack, then prepared to do that good PLF I'd been practicing. I hit the ground like a ton of shit because I didn't have time to turn myself into the wind and I was swinging back and forth from my exertions to untangle my risers. Luckily, I landed feet, ass and head in some soft sand. Unluckily, a wind gust prevented my canopy from collapsing, and I suddenly found myself being dragged backwards across the DZ. I reached up and pulled one of the quick releases on my canopy like we'd been taught just as I slid onto the hard packed dirt road that ran across the DZ. It was definitely not my night because the section of road I slid onto was right in front of the Drop Zone Safety Officer and his detail. I heard a yell and glass breaking as the riser I'd release whipped backwards. I laid there for a second, gathering my wits when a very pissed off man in a green beret loomed over me. I almost crapped my pants when I recognized him as Master Sergeant Travis, the NCOIC of Phase One. "On your feet and secure that canopy before it does any more damage, Meathead," he yelled. I jumped up as if I had a spring up my ass. "Clear Sergeant, Airborne!" I yelled as I yanked off my harness and dashed over to grab the two inch nylon loop at the apex of my canopy. I was about to have a stroke as I shook the canopy out and started rigger rolling it under Travis's baleful glare. It only got worse when he spit out a wad of Redman at my feet and proceeded to give me the ass chewing of my life. Travis was from Boston and had a thick Massachusetts accent. His voice grated on my brain like fingernails on a chalk board. I don't think Travis had much love for southerners either, because he started calling me Opie the first time he heard my accent. Of course every one in the world jumped on the unwanted nickname because I guess I slightly resembled Opie Taylor on the Andy Griffith Show. Now that's all anyone called me. "I should have known it was your hillbilly ass, Opie. From start to finish, that was the worst fuck-up I've seen in fifteen years on jump status. There are WACs down at post headquarters that could have done better. To top it off, you broke the windshield of the school commandant's brand new jeep and the old man loves that thing. I knew you needed watching boy and I'm going to give you my full attention from now on. You are going to get a statement of charges for that windshield, and every time I look at you I better see nothing but assholes and elbows, got it?" I humbly acknowledged that I did and quickly grabbed all my gear and staggered over to the parachute turn-in truck, the laughter of the DZ party making my ears burn from embarrassment. It was only thirty minutes into the first night of a two week survival and patrolling exercise that determined if we moved forward to the next phase of training, and I was already in deep doo-doo. ------- Chapter 3 I soldiered my butt off the remainder of those two weeks, carrying my share of the load and then some. The survival training was as much about surviving without sleep as it was about food. The cadre made us move every night to a new area, recon a target and conduct some sort of offensive operation. The success of those operations determined if you ate the next day, because a case of 'C' rations or some other food stuff waited at each target. If the cadre thought your attack or ambush was good enough, you received the loot. If they didn't approve, you got the finger as they drove off. It was barely the start of spring, so there wasn't a lot of foraging for chow that we could do. Still, I religiously set out a few loop snares every time we stopped for the night. We had yet to catch anything, but at least the cadre knew we were diligently trying. On our second target, our team leader cooked up a diabolical ambush that damn near wrecked the deuce and a half the opposing forces were using as a rolling target. The cadre sergeant on the truck was impressed enough that he threw us down a couple of live chickens, ten pounds of rice and two empty number ten cans. Greg Tomatsu, our unofficial team chef, made some fine chicken and rice soup. We each had a canteen cup of the stuff and still had enough left for each of us to fill a canteen. By the tenth day, our asses were starting to drag. Besides covering a couple of hundred miles during our frequent moves, we were getting less than three hours of sleep a night. On night eleven, we conducted a raid on a bridge complete with simulated explosives to drop the span into the creek it crossed. We carried out the mission without a hitch and swarmed onto the bridge to collect our reward. We were perpetually hungry by then, burning four thousand calories a day and lucky if we took in half that. The smaller guys like Greg Tomatsu were especially suffering, because they had no reserves. When we reached the middle of the bridge, we all groaned in anticipation when we saw the twenty pound bag of potatoes, the two bunches of carrots and the two big fat rabbits. The two big fat, flop-eared, cute and friendly bunny rabbits that had obviously been lovingly hand-raised. We all felt bad for the bunnies, but we were also happily looking forward to them starring in a stew come the next afternoon. It was all good until our fearless leader gave Pookie Ramos the job of carrying the rabbits and their collapsible wire cages when we beat feet off the bridge. We headed to our last overnight camp in a very good mood. Tomorrow night we would link up with another team, conduct a raid on a radio tower, then escape and evade back to the McCall Drop Zone. If we made it to the DZ without being captured by the OPFOR (opposing forces) by ten AM on day fourteen, we would move on to the next phase of training. Getting caught or arriving late meant you either volunteered to do the entire two weeks again or you headed on up the street to the 82nd Airborne Division. We arrived at our over night hidey-hole about two in the morning. Even though I had squat to show for it so far, I stubbornly moved into the woods and set a couple of snares that I carefully baited with some 'C' ration peanut butter. When I crept back into our camp, I found big Pookie laying on his sleeping bag with both rabbits snuggled up to him. The team leader and team sergeant were kneeling beside him in animated conversation. I had a bad feeling about what was going on when I saw the look on Pookie's face. I arrived just in time to hear him whisper angrily. "You are going to have to fight me to get these rabbits, sir. We can do without meat for one day, and I'll carry the gear of anyone who is too weak to make it." As luck would have it, our team leader was a JAG captain who would be headed to the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center as soon as he graduated. Being a lawyer, Captain Jones didn't order people about just because he could, especially when it might lead to getting his ass stomped by a big angry Samoan. Instead, he knew how to negotiate and lead by consensus. He called us all together and laid it out for us. "The rabbits get a reprieve until 1500 hours tomorrow afternoon. Those of you who want them to live, better find something to put in the pot in their place. Because, gentlemen, tomorrow at seventeen hundred, I'm eating stew made from some dead mammal before I spend all night evading those OPFOR idiots." I am happy to say that I was the reason the bunnies didn't end up in the stew pot. They got their reprieve because a huge possum caught himself in one of my snares. The thing had to have been four feet long from his nose to his rat-like tail. He wasn't real fat, but he weighed at least ten pounds or so. A possum is not the tastiest of animals, but I'd eaten one in my youth, and it hadn't killed me. The one I ate was one I shot with my 22 rifle when I was a kid. My grandmother had a strict policy that I had to eat anything I shot, so I dragged it home and she cooked it up. It was greasy and gamy, but I ate it anyway. If I hadn't, my rifle would have been history. "A man who would kill one of God's creatures just for meanness or sport doesn't need a gun, Junebug," Granny once told me. Granny sure didn't have to worry about this big old possum, because not a spec of him was going to waste. My teammates were less excited about the possum than I thought they'd be. My teammates who weren't from the city were from out west or Hawaii, where there aren't any possums, so most of them didn't know what it was and thought I'd brought home a giant rat for supper. I finally grew tired of all the arguing they were doing and spoke up. Since I was the quietest guy on the team, me speaking up got their attention. "Listen, we are supposed to be training to be Green Berets, guys who regular soldiers call snake eaters, yet you are turning your nose up at perfectly good food. We are in survival training and you want to eat some kid's Easter bunny, instead of something we caught ourselves. How's that going to look to the evaluators when they drop by this afternoon?" There was some serious grumbling about it, but in the end, we cooked up some possum stew. Remembering how Granny cooked it, I boiled the critter for half an hour, poured off the liquid and then boiled it again in salted water. After the second boiling, we cut him up in small chunks and threw him in fresh water with the carrots and potatoes from our raid. We weren't permitted to bring food out with us, but condiments were allowed, so I had garlic powder, Steve had black pepper and Pookie had Tabasco Sauce. A good slug of each went into the pot. We soon had three number ten cans of stew bubbling away. Mister Opossum had been stewing for a couple of hours when Master Sergeant Travis and two of the other cadre brought us our operations order for the link up mission. Captain Jones, feeling cocky at us being nearly finished with the exercise, asked them to stay for supper. Knowing we had the rabbits, and smelling the garlic and pepper, the sergeants were thinking hasenpfeffer, so they readily agreed. The look on Travis's face when he chomped down on that first bite of possum was worth everything I'd suffered over the last two weeks. My teammates were acting as if the stew was actually tasty, so the three instructors grimly finished their portions. Captain Jones made a production out of draining his canteen cup and saluting me with it. "Very tasty, Specialist Jamison," he said. As soon as Travis and the other sergeants departed, we all had a good laugh about the meal. Putting the cadre on the spot like that boosted our morale, and we breezed through the next thirty-six hours. We were the first team to make it back to the assembly area and were rewarded with a hot breakfast and a chance to lounge around while the rest of the teams came straggling in. While we were lazing around in the shade, Travis and the Sergeant First Class who had been our grader for the exercise came by and debriefed us. With a pointed look at me, Travis said that after a rocky start, the team had done well and he was advancing us to Phase Two. After he congratulated us, he pulled me aside. "What did you feed me last night, Opie? I'm still burping it up that shit this morning." I decided I'd better answer him honestly. "Possum stew," I said. He grunted and looked at me sharply. "What happened to the rabbits?" he asked suspiciously. I figured Travis thought we'd been eating rabbit stew while he was choking on the possum, so I set him straight. "Pookie let them go after we caught the possum. We decided that since the possum walked into my snare, we'd eat what we caught." Travis surprised me by laughing and shaking his head. "You idiots are just crazy enough to make good operators," he said. A third of the people who jumped into Camp McCall with us did not pass Phase One. Some of those were recycled back to a later class, but most of them ended up in the 82nd airborne Division. Our team was the only one with all twelve members advancing. ------- Phase Two was where we learned our individual specialties. Since Steve and I were both Infantrymen, we attended the light and heavy weapons course. We parted ways with our roommates the Sunday after we arrived back from Camp McCall. Greg Tomatsu was staying at Bragg for the demo man course, but would be in a different company than us. Pookie was headed to Fort Sam Houston for the Special Forces Medic course. Steve and I moved two buildings down the street and once again roomed together. We were in another four man room, but by some quirk, no one was assigned to share it with us. We had a three week delay before our training started, so we were farmed out to the Special Warfare Center as post support soldiers. What that meant was that every morning after PT and breakfast, we were marched down to the back of the headquarters building, where a sergeant sent us off on some detail. We did everything from mow grass to unload beer kegs at the NCO Club. The detail pool was called the slave market, because of the way NCOs needing detail soldiers picked us out of formation. The details were no problem, but the lack of doing anything interesting was. With nothing to occupy my mind, all I did was think about Megan. By then it was early April and I hadn't seen my wife since Christmas. The separation was driving us both crazy. We made plans for her to come up and visit when school broke for the summer, but that was still two long months away. My buddy Steve solved our dilemma the very next Friday evening. We were in the barracks, just back from our details, when a guy popped into our room and told Steve some woman wanted to talk to him on the pay phone by the dayroom. Steve was only gone for a few minutes; when he returned, his smile was the biggest I'd ever seen on him. "Put on your civvies, Jody," he said, "because we are going out to dinner." Steve wouldn't give me any more information than that, so I shrugged and threw on some slacks and my nicest shirt. We had been standing out in front of the barracks for about ten minutes, when a sporty dark blue 65 GTO pulled up in front of us. The door of the car swung open and a well-dressed, statuesque woman stepped out. The woman was taller than me in her heels, and there wasn't an uncurvy place on her body. I gawked as Steve swept her up in his arms and laid a smooch on her that raised the air temperature ten degrees. When they broke their clinch, the woman stepped back and looked at Steve adoringly. "I missed you, Baby," she purred. Steve took her hand and turned her slightly to face me. "Roxanne, this is my friend Jody. Jody, meet Roxanne Fuller." Roxanne held out her manicured hand, I took it and mumbled out a greeting as I tried manfully to keep my eyes on hers. I recognized the tall redhead, because she was the woman in the pictures Steve had taped to the inside of his wall locker. She looked just as luscious with clothes on as she did in the cheesecake photos. Steve said Roxanne was in her mid thirties, but she looked much younger than that. She smiled wickedly as she held my hand. "Steven has told me all about you, Jody. He said you were a great admirer of the photographs I sent him." I turned four different shades of red, embarrassed beyond belief. Steve laughed and took Roxanne's hand from mine. "Stop teasing him and let's find a place to eat." We ate dinner at a very nice steak house on Bragg Boulevard, right outside Fayetteville. During the meal, I learned that the GTO was Steve's and Roxanne had brought it down for him. She was staying the weekend with Steve, then taking the train to New York for the spring fashion shows. Roxanne was a terrific person; she was funny and down to earth, despite her obvious wealth. Roxanne's feelings for Steve were as obvious as her wealth, and I could tell he had feelings for her. I think the high point of the evening was when Roxanne told Steve she had filed for a divorce from her much older husband. I know it bothered Steve that she was in a loveless marriage that revolved around money. Steve told me I could borrow his car, and he goaded me into seeing the first sergeant about a three day pass. I was honest with Top, and he surprised me by giving me a pass and wishing me luck. I found that SF guys were always willing to help a fellow trooper connect with his woman, because they had all been in the same boat at one time or another. I called Megan that night and we excitedly made plans to meet in Atlanta on the following Friday. We picked Atlanta, because it was a five hour trip for each of us. I signed out on pass at five AM Friday morning, and aimed that GTO towards Atlanta. It took all my self restraint to drive the speed limit, but I was respectful of Steve's property. I drove into the parking lot of our rendezvous Comfort Inn at a quarter after ten. My heart soared when I saw Meggie's 63 Impala already parked in front of the motel office. Our little weekend getaway was even better than our honeymoon had been. I guess it's true that absence makes the heart grow fonder. I am positive that we did not spend a second of that weekend when we were not touching, regardless of what we were doing. As you can imagine, we spent considerable time in bed. After all, we were young and healthy, and we have always been very active sexually. Before I enlisted, three days was the longest we'd ever gone without making love; now we were going months. The men I worked with at Georgia Power teased me that the longer we were married, the less frequent we'd want sex. Actually the opposite happened, because the more sex we had, the more we seemed to want. That was easily explained from my point of view, because quite simply, I thought Megan was the most beautiful and sexy woman who ever lived. Megan was five and a half feet tall, and weighed around a buck and a quarter. She wasn't huge up top, but her medium sized breasts were perfectly formed, and sat proudly on her chest. Her waist was narrow, her hips womanly and her legs were shapely and strong. She had thick, wavy medium brown hair with natural auburn highlights and those amazing big blue eyes. Her nose was straight and fit her face and her lips were full and almost always smiling. Yes, the packaging was nice, but it was what was inside that was even more beautiful. Megan was sweet and caring, but she also had an inner strength that made her no one's pushover. It took some doing to get on Meggie's bad side, but once she was wound up, she was hell on wheels. She also had a wicked sense of humor that complimented mine perfectly. When the two of us were on a roll, we cracked people up. Megan is the social one in our relationship. I don't think she's ever met a person who didn't become her friend. I have always felt that I was holding her back, because I was quiet and reserved around most folks, but she insists that just the opposite is true. According to her, my love gives her the stability and courage she needs to be herself. I mentioned earlier that Megan and I were virgins when we married, so we are each other's only lover. I guess some people would think that means our lovemaking is plain and uninspired. The people who think that miss the mark by a mile, because we are adventurous and open-minded. I think it helped that Megan was a very sensual woman. Even when I was a sexual neophyte, it was no trouble for me to make her orgasm. Megan was loud when she was in the throes of passion. That fact has caused us a few embarrassing moments, especially when we visited her parents. But that's a price we gladly pay for all the enjoyment. Megan loves it that I don't try to keep her quiet; as for me, I wouldn't have it any other way. In between fantastic bouts of sexual gymnastics, Megan and I discussed the future. When she told me she was spending the summer in Fayetteville, I was tickled to death. "Find me a place to live, Honey, then find out what you have to do to stay there with me," she directed. It was tough for both of us when we departed the motel at noon on Sunday, but we were buoyed by the idea of being together again in less than two months. Right before we left, Megan gave me a manila envelope about the size of a sheet of paper. "Here are a few pictures for you to decorate your wall locker with so you don't have to look at Steve's. Don't look at them until you are back in your room," she said. Traffic was light, so I made it back to the barracks by five in the afternoon. Steve was lying on his bunk, reading a science fiction novel when I walked into our room. He took one look at my face and burst out laughing. "Seeing that goofy grin tells me someone had a good time this weekend," he said. I nodded and threw my AWOL bag into my wall locker. Then I handed Steve the coffee can of toll house cookies Megan made him and the thank you card she sent. While Steve was reading the card and stuffing a cookie in his face, I sat down on my bunk and open the envelope of pictures. My jaw dropped to the floor when I pulled out the first eight by ten photograph, because in it, Megan was leaning against a door jamb, wearing a long white, barely opaque nightgown with a plunging neckline. Her long luxurious hair was draped across her left breast. The photograph suggested much, but showed little. It was sexy as hell. In the second photo, Megan was wearing a short plaid skirt, red halter top, high heels and saucy smile. ------- The weapons course was actually a lot of fun. For the six week light weapons section of the training, we received classroom instruction on a host of U.S. and foreign weapons, then went out to the range and fired them. I have always been a good shot with a rifle, but during the training I discovered that I was damned good with a pistol also. One of our instructors, a Sergeant First Class named Mayfield, took an interest in my ability and gave me some coaching in snap-shooting, or what he called point and shoot. It wasn't a skill I'd likely need, unless I was in a duel, but I became good enough to score as well as most of my classmates who were taking aimed shots. After the first of May, Steve and I began apartment hunting. Steve wasn't along just to help me; instead, he was looking for a place for himself as well. I guess he and Roxanne had the same talk Megan and I did. Roxanne's divorce would be final at the end of May, and she was moving down the day after the gavel fell. I figured with the money Steve and Roxanne had available, that we would be looking at different properties, but that wasn't the case. Steve said they wanted furnished, short term and close to Bragg, just like us. On Sunday of our second week, we found what we were looking for in the form of a fourplex owned by a retired Special Forces major. The available apartments were side by side and one was an end unit. The end unit's master bedroom was on the outside wall, so we wouldn't disturb Steve and Roxanne when Megan got a little loud. Major Hanes had built five of the four unit apartment buildings about five miles south of Fort Bragg out on Yadkin Road, and furnished them with the basics. His normal tenants were officers attending courses at the Special Warfare School, but he was happy to take our money after we agreed to his long list of dos and don'ts. Hanes ran a tight ship and his rental agreement read like the rules we had to follow living in the barracks. I liked the idea that there wouldn't be any loud parties or obnoxious drunks to deal with, and readily signed the agreement. I even only frowned a little writing out the seven hundred and fifty dollar check for first, last and security deposit. I thought two fifty a month for rent was steep, but it was within our budget. Steve saw my frown and chuckled. He thought my frugality was a stitch. "It's only money, Cheap Charlie," he said, "and you can't take it with you." I thought getting permission to live off post would be a major hassle, so I was pleasantly surprised when the first sergeant didn't even blink at my request. As a matter of fact, he authorized me to receive the basic allowance for quarters that married men living off base drew, and even signed off on separate rations for me. I walked out of his office all smiles because not only would I be living off base with Megan; I'd be drawing an extra hundred and thirty dollars a month to do it with. True, I'd have to pay to eat in the mess hall, but I figured that would only cost five dollars a week at most, since breakfast was a quarter and lunch was fifty cents. Top gave me a stern lecture about living off base being a privilege that he'd revoke in a heartbeat if I fucked up, told me I could not move out of the barracks until I had a telephone and then sent me on my way. I was excited as hell and couldn't wait to call and give the news to Megan. With all my pay and allowances, I was now making just over three hundred dollars a month. Since I had basically paid three months rent in advance, we wouldn't have to dip any further into our savings to make ends meet while Megan was up for the summer. It was different for Steve, because he was single. He was granted permission to live off post, but he had to maintain his place in the barracks also. He did not receive the extra pay and allowances, but money wasn't a problem for him and Roxanne. School ended for Megan on the second of June and two days later she drove up to Fayetteville. Her parents followed her up in his big dodge pickup truck loaded with what Megan and her mother felt we needed to set up house. Her parents planned on staying for a couple of days to see the sights, so we offered them our second bedroom. Mister Stedman laughingly declined the offer. "We'll get a motel room so you two can get reacquainted. Besides, I'm tired and need my rest, and if we stayed here, Megan's screeching would keep us awake all night." Newly single Roxanne drove down from Chicago two days later. By then, Steve and I had started the heavy weapons course and were spending a lot of time out on the mortar range, so Megan helped Roxie settle in. It took about twenty minutes for the two women to become best friends. You'd think that strange, considering the women's backgrounds, but like I said, that was Megan's nature. She immediately found the common ground between them. Roxanne was also likeable and not nearly as flamboyant as she appeared. Roxie told Megan that falling in love with Steve had driven her a little crazy, and being separated from him made her even worse. Steve and I completed phase two in the middle of July. We changed companies again and went back to the slave market until our class filled. Our luck held and we ended up on the same team again, me as the light weapons leader and Steve as the heavy weapons man. We started phase three the second week of August. Our new first sergeant let us continue to live off post. About that time, Megan sat me down and informed me that she was not going back to Valdosta and her teaching job there. Instead, she'd applied for a position teaching at the elementary school about three miles from our apartment. Doing that was a big gamble on her part, because when I graduated from the Q course in a couple of months, there was no telling where I'd be assigned. It was entirely possible we'd end up having to relocate. Regardless of the gamble, I was happy as hell that she was staying. Phase three was all about guerilla warfare and training and leading indigenous soldiers, the primary mission of Special Forces. We also received a good dose of counter insurgency training, modeled on the conflict in Vietnam. After four weeks in the classroom and local training areas, we were placed into isolation and prepared for our final training mission — a two week FTX in the mountains of western North Carolina in the Pisgah National Forest. The exercise was cool, because the SF instructors up there had recruited some of the local folks to portray both supporters of the insurgency and citizens loyal to the government in power. We completed our missions and avoided capture, so on the tenth of October, 1966, we graduated and became full fledged Special Forces soldiers. Right before the graduation parade, Steve and I were promoted to staff sergeant. Since the lowest rank on a Special Forces team was sergeant, enlisted men who completed the course were automatically promoted to that rank. As an incentive, the top ten percent of each class was promoted to staff sergeant. Both Steve and I made the Commandant's List, so Megan and Roxanne got to pin on our new staff sergeant chevrons with its one rocker. To add icing on the cake, I was assigned to C Company of the 3rd Special Forces Group, which was located right there on good old Fort Bragg. Steve and I didn't go to the same group, but he was staying at Bragg as well. He was assigned to a team in A Company of the 7th Group. Life was good! ------- Chapter 4 On the night that Steve and I graduated from the Special Forces Qualification course, we took our women out to celebrate. Roxanne was in charge of the evening, and insisted that we dress up. So I put on my all purpose, wedding, funeral and baptismal JC Penney suit. Megan, however, broke out a brand new little black dress that showed a hint of delicious cleavage and ended just above her knees. She also wore smoky silk hose and a pair of three inch patent leather pumps. She had her hair in a sophisticated French braid and a little make up to highlight her beautiful eyes. Snuggled just at the top of her cleavage was the gold heart locket I gave her the night of our senior prom. "Wow!" Mister Eloquent exclaimed when she walked into the living room. Megan giggled and took my arm in hers. "It's a special night, Jody, so Roxie helped me pick out a new outfit for it." Roxanne's dress was similar to Megan's, except it was green and lower cut. Of course the low cut thing might have been just a result of her large breasts stretching the fabric. Roxie wore green often, because it matched her eyes and set off her flaming red hair. Steve was wearing an obviously custom tailored Brooks Brother's suit. I felt like the ugly duckling in my three year old Jacques Penne off-the-rack special. We piled into Roxanne's snazzy new wine-colored Bonneville and headed out. We were like teenagers in that car. Steve was driving with Roxie sitting as close to him as she could get, his arm slung casually over her shoulder. Megan and I were in the back; close enough together that a sheet of newspaper wouldn't fit between us. We had been on the road for about five minutes when Megan giggled and pointed to Steve's arm. I chuckled myself when I saw his elbow moving, it was patently obvious what was going on up front. With a devilish grin, Megan took my hand and put it on her thigh. I squeezed her supple flesh and tried to torment Steve. "You loose something up there Buddy?" I asked. Roxie giggled and answered for him. "Yeah, but he found it already." With Roxanne in charge of the evening, I wasn't that surprised when we pulled up in front of a swanky country club. The place even had valet parking. The only other place I'd been where someone parked your car was the Valdosta Memorial Funeral Home. The place was even fancier on the inside, with gilded trim, fragile looking French furniture and crystal chandeliers. The dining room was just as impressive as the lobby, I noticed, as the snooty Maître d' with the fake British accent led us to our table. I guess I looked a little pale when I saw the prices on the wine list, because Roxanne gave me a smile and patted my hand. "The evening is taken care of, Jody. It's my graduation present to all of us." The sommelier, (I learned that word that night) brought out a bottle of chateau something or other that was fifty bucks a pop according to the wine list. He poured us all a glass, but before we could pick them up, Steve slid off his chair, took a knee and grabbed Roxie's hand. "Roxanne Fuller, will you marry me?" he said smooth as silk. Roxie didn't look a bit surprised as she nodded her head yes. When Steve started to slide the ring on her finger, she stopped him. "You know how I am about you Steven, if you put that on me, I'll kill you before I give it back," she said, her tone as serious as a heart attack. "I wouldn't have it any other way," Steve replied as he slipped the ring onto her finger. There was some applause from the surrounding tables as Steve hopped back into his chair and kissed his future wife. I stood up and proposed a toast. "May you two be as happy as us," I said as I looked at my smiling wife. We clinked glasses, took a sip, and I sat down. To my surprise, Megan stood up and held up her glass. "I have a toast of my own," she said. I looked at her in confusion as she and Roxie exchanged grins. "I toast my husband's timely promotion..." When she paused, we all raised our glasses. I was blushing at being called out in public, when she continued. " ... because we are going to need the money next April when I have this baby," she finished. I swear that my vision blurred around the edges as the blood rushed out of my head. I think I blacked out for a second, because suddenly Megan grabbed my arm. "Easy Honey, here ... take a sip of your drink." I nodded dumbly and took a sip of champagne. My head cleared quickly and I set down the glass and just looked at Megan in awe. She giggled, leaned forward and kissed me. "I told you it was a special occasion, Hubby Bear; I just didn't tell you all the reasons it was special," she said. Steve cleared his throat as I was grinning goofily and staring into Meggie's big blue peepers. He was smirking when I looked over at him. "I wish I had my camera, because you looked like you had been poleaxed," he said. I could only nod my head, because that was exactly how I felt. Roxie immediately wiped the smirk off his face. "Don't look so smug, Big Boy, because you are in the same boat, and twins run in my family." Needless to say, it turned out to be a hell of a celebration. And it was all cooked up by my innocent little Wifey. Steve confided to me that he was going to propose to Roxanne as soon as we graduated. I passed that tidbit along to Megan and swore her to secrecy. Two days later, a tearful Roxanne told Megan that she was pregnant. Roxanne and Steve didn't use any protection, because Roxie thought she was barren, now she was scared to tell Steve about her condition, because she didn't want him to feel trapped into marrying her. Megan quickly told a very relieved Roxanne about Steve's forthcoming proposal, that's why she hadn't been that surprised by it. A week later, Megan, who neglected to tell me that she had stopped taking her birth control pills, found out she was also in a family way. She relayed the good news to Roxie, and then she cooked up our evening of surprises. ------- I was assigned to the 3rd Special Forces Group for the next fourteen months. I ended up on Operational Detachment A-331 when the only weapons man on it retired. It was some serious stroke of luck that I ended up on that team. I was the youngest of the seven enlisted men and one officer on A-331. All of the other enlisted men were long serving senior NCOs waiting to retire. The first lieutenant who served as team leader was a Reservist recently called up from the Individual Ready Reserve. The lieutenant was unhappy about being back on active duty, so our team sergeant didn't have to do much convincing for the man to find other things to do rather than train with us. My teammates were about the greatest, but craziest bunch of guys I've ever met. As soon as I arrived on the team, they took me under their wings and made me part of the craziness. The ringleader of the bunch of Looney Tunes of which I was now a part was Lyin' Ryan Ragan. Master Sergeant Ragan was our team sergeant, and the biggest bullshit artist to ever don a green beret. Lyin' Ryan could talk his way out of (or into) anything. MSG Regan had five kids scattered among three ex-wives. All three of his exes lived in or around Fayetteville, and all three claimed that they still loved him, they just couldn't live with him. I know from personal experience that if he called one of them, they dropped what they were doing, happy to be at his beck and call. The way he worked people was some sort of weird magic. I mean he'd sit down and start talking and you plainly knew that every word out of his mouth was a complete fabrication. Then suddenly you aren't so sure he is lying, and your head starts nodding up and down. By the time he stands up, you have your wallet out, giving him your last twenty dollars so one of his kids can have open heart surgery. As good as Ryan was with tweaking us guys, he was twice as effective with women. He could walk into a bar and within half an hour leave with the prettiest woman there. That might have been explainable if he was handsome to go along with his gift of gab, but the truth was that he was an average looking guy with thinning hair. He also wore black framed army issue glasses with lenses as thick as the bottom of a coke bottle. If he looked directly at the sun, those lenses would burn a hole through the back of his head. We had another character on our team named Jerry Smeltzer, who everyone called Squirrel. SFC Smeltzer was a demo man who spent three years in Vietnam at some remote A-Camp. Undoubtedly that assignment was a mind altering event, because Smeltzer was absolutely, certifiably crazy, which is how he earned his nickname. I liked the hell out of Squirrel, but at the same time, he scared the shit out of me. Squirrel did not even go to the latrine without a pistol and knife, and he played around with explosives as if they were Play-Doh. Squirrel was a bachelor and lived in a mobile home out in Spring Lake, a small town on the opposite side of Bragg from Fayetteville. I only visited his trailer one time. I never went back after he proudly showed me a bedroom packed from floor to ceiling with explosives he'd smuggled off the demolition range. Jesus, he must have had a ton of C-4, composition B and TNT stashed in there. Like I said, the older guys on the team took me under their wings and taught me what being a Special Forces soldier was all about. At the same time, their spouses latched on to Megan. I learned from those guys what it really meant to be part of a team. We did everything together, whether it was cleaning the latrine of our team house or conducting morning sick call at the Shangri-La Bar in Fayetteville. We did sick call at the Shangri-La at least twice a week. Our normal work day started with first call at 0630. After our accountability formation, we took PT then headed over to the mess hall for breakfast. After breakfast, we'd mosey over to the team room to shower and change into our duty uniforms. At 0830, we stood work call formation outside the Company orderly room. After the sergeant major passed out any information he had, he released us to our team sergeants. The team sergeants then conducted the activities listed on the weekly training schedule they made. If our training schedule listed 'area studies' from 0900-1200, we were headed for the Shangri-La, which conveniently opened at 0900. To cover his ass if someone wanted to check our training, he typed 'Team Roam' instead of 'Team Room' for the class location. Ryan was as slick as snot on a door knob. We frequented the Shangri-La, because the widow who owned the joint was lobbying for the position as the next Missus Ryan Ragan. The owner was a robust German woman named Greta, whose Special Forces husband had died when his parachute cigarette rolled on him during a routine jump. The fellows and I would shoot pool, drink twenty-five cent beer, and bullshit while Greta dragged Ryan back to her office. The weird thing about all this was we actually did do area studies while we were at the Shangri-La, here is how that worked: Every Special Forces Group has a geographical part of the world as their operational area. The operational area of the 3rd Special Forces Group was Africa. The group's operational area was carved up and each team specialized in a slice. ODA-331's slice was the country of Liberia. Our team had about a dozen thick three-ring binders full of information about Liberia, two of them were classified, but all the rest were from open sources collected over the last five years. We never went to the Shangri-La without one of the unclassified binders. While Ryan was fostering German-American cultural relations with the zaftig Greta, Preacher Hinson read aloud from the binder and quizzed the rest of us about what he read. It was probably the most effective training environment ever devised. I can still regurgitate facts about the country that would impress a native Liberian. Preacher Hinson (his given name was Glenn) was our senior commo man, and a deacon at the First Church of the Nazarene. He didn't drink, smoke, cuss or chase women, but he never refused to go anywhere with the team because of his beliefs. In return, no one on the team even slighted him because of his convictions. When Preacher saw 'area studies' on the training schedule, he'd borrow the Church of the Nazarene's twelve passenger van so he could drive us all to and from the Shangri-La. He was the shepherd and we were his misguided flock. I don't mean to imply that all we did as a team was fuck off, because that wasn't the case. As a matter of fact the guys went out of their way to pass on to me some of their combined hundred plus years of experience. Practicing patrolling with six guys who had a thousand real patrols between them beat the hell out of stumbling around with some other privates like we did in Infantry training. They even had to teach me how to wear my gear correctly so I didn't sound like a herd of cows coming through the woods. Where in Infantry training we tied off any loose straps and wrapped our mess gear in our spare socks, on ODA-331 every keeper, strap and flap was carefully secured with tape. It took me jumping and jiggling for a solid hour before they were satisfied we found peep. Besides learning from my teammates, I benefited from being on 331 in one other important way — I went to a lot of schools. That happened because when we received a quota for some course or school, none of the older guys wanted to go, so I was sent by default. I attended a locksmith course to learn to pick locks, an Air Force load master course on how to cross load cargo on a plane, and even a one week school on how to drive an Army ten ton truck pulling a forty foot trailer. They even sent me to the jump master course, even though I only had twelve jumps under my belt. Things on the home front were even better than they were at work. Megan really enjoyed teaching at her new school, and she love being around my teammates and their families. Being pregnant made her even more beautiful, and she glowed with contentment, despite the trials and tribulations of pregnancy. Not only that, but the hormonal boost of pregnancy kicked up her libido a couple of notches. There were times when she jumped me before I had both feet across the threshold. Poor, poor pitiful me, right? We still lived next door to and were best friends with Steve and Roxanne Pleturski. I thought Steve and Roxie would by a house once Steve was assigned to the 7th Group, but they passed on that idea. Steve was not staying past the three years we were committed to after SF training, so they didn't see any point in making an extra move. Another surprise to me was Roxanne taking a job as a library assistant at the school where Megan taught. I guess it made sense though, because Roxanne loved children and she did have a degree in English Literature from Vassar. We were all sitting around the team room doing some maintenance on our team gear when the phone rang. The date was Tuesday, April 4, 1967. Ryan answered the phone, said a few words, then called my name. "Opie, it's Megan for you," he said. I jumped up and snatched the phone out of his hand. "Are you okay, Baby?" I asked worriedly. "I'm fine, Jody," she said soothingly, "but I don't think your child wants to wait until the 19th. I'm at the school in the nurse's office; do you think you can come get me?" I hung up the phone and looked at Ryan in a panic. "The baby's coming, I need to go pick up Meggie," I stammered. Ryan took charge. "Squirrel, you drive him so he doesn't kill himself. Doc, you go with them, just in case. The rest of us will meet you at Womack." Doc was Jim Wilson, our team medic, Womack was Womack Army Hospital. I felt much better having the Doc along, because I trusted his medical expertise more than any diploma-holding sawbones I'd ever met. Doc grabbed his M-4 aid bag, flipped open a pouch and handed me a pill. "What's this?" I asked. "Thorazine," he replied. "Take it now because I'm not getting in a car with more than one crazy person." I gulped the pill dry, then we dashed out the door, jumped into Squirrel's pristine '60 Chevy station wagon and roared away. I don't think there was a traffic law on the books that Squirrel didn't break on that fifteen minute trip. Squirrel Smeltzer thought my wife walked on water. She was like a daughter to him, and she was about the only person besides MSG Ragan that Squirrel paid any heed to, so his sense of urgency matched mine. We must have been quite a sight as Squirrel and I burst into the school and sprinted to the nurse's office. Megan was lying on a bed when we came zooming in. She looked up at us and smiled sweetly. "Every thing's fine Hubby Bear, so calm down. And Jerry, it's so sweet that you came too. Will you grab my bag over there while Jody walks me out?" Just like that, Meggie defused our panic, of course by then, the Thorazine was also kicking in, and that might have helped some. Squirrel nodded and scooped up the bag she had packed and stashed at the school, just in case. The Boy Scouts could have taken lessons from Miss Megan. I helped her up and we walked sedately out to Squirrel's wagon. It was all Meggie could do to keep me from carrying her. Squirrel pulled his vehicle up to the emergency room doors and we all climbed out. We paraded through the door with Megan holding my arm and Squirrel clutching her overnight bag. As soon as the automatic doors started to swoosh shut behind us, Megan's water broke. The Thorazine had fully kicked in by then, and I was as mellow as a midwife when that happened. Squirrel was another story though, because when he saw the sudden pool of liquid at Megan's feet, his face blanched and he swayed unsteadily. Doc grabbed the bag from him and stood him up straight. "Go park your car and come back," he ordered. As Squirrel reeled his way back out the door, a medic arrived with a wheel chair. Megan gratefully sat down in the chair and the medic whisked her through the ER towards an elevator. Doc handed me the bag and I scurried after them. When we reached the second floor Obstetrics ward, the medic aimed me towards the waiting room. I gave Megan a quick kiss and she squeezed my hand. "We'll see you in a little while," she said reassuringly. When I arrived in the waiting room, Ryan, Preacher and Jesse Poole, our junior demo man, were already there waiting for me. Jesse Poole was only a buck sergeant, even though he'd been in the army nineteen years. In the field, Jesse was about the finest combat engineer alive, but in garrison he was a complete screw up. He was a buck sergeant, because he blew out the front wall of the Circus Lounge in the middle of the night with a two pound block of C-4. He was miffed at the Circus because the bouncers there threw him out one night before he had the chance to check out their new topless dancer ... a dancer who purportedly had three breasts. Jesse beat the civilian charges, but the Army got him for misappropriating the explosives. He was only reduced one rank, because he used Lyin' Ryan as his advocate instead of some JAG officer. Fifteen minutes later, a much healthier looking Squirrel Smeltzer came strolling in with Doc Wilson. Squirrel handed me a box of cigars with 'it's a girl' printed on the wrapper in pink ink, and Doc handed me a box that read 'it's a boy' in blue. They were covering all the bases. Because we were nominally supposed to be training, Ryan called in to the orderly room and made a change to our training schedule. We were, he declared, forgoing equipment maintenance in order to receive some medical cross training in OB/GYN. By then, nothing could bother me, as for the first time in my life, chemicals coursing through my blood stream had me floating about two inches off the floor. Doc Wilson made a production out of checking my pupils and vital signs as I babbled on about how me and Megan were having a baby. I think everyone would have jumped out the window, had not Preacher poured three cups of coffee down my throat to sober me up enough so I'd shut up. A nurse peeked her head into the waiting room every hour or so to tell me that Megan was in labor but doing fine. The rest of the time, we all took turns pacing the floor. I was blessed to have such great teammates. By five o'clock, the waiting room was pretty much filled to capacity as Steve and Roxanne and some of the team wives showed up to offer their support. A few minutes before six, a doctor walked into the waiting room. He looked around in confusion at all the people there. "Jamison?" he asked the room. I held up my hand like one of Megan's second graders. He saw me and smiled. "Congratulations Sergeant, it's a girl. Mother and daughter are both fine and you can go in and see them now. I'm afraid the rest of you will have to wait a few minutes until we have the baby cleaned up and in the nursery." I shook some hands and kissed some cheeks, then hustled over to the nurse's station. The duty nurse pointed to room 203, so I changed course and headed that way. Megan looked tired but happy as she held our swaddled daughter and daubed at her with a warm cloth. I kissed Megan's cheek and looked at the precious bundle in her arms. "Isn't she beautiful?" Meggie asked in awe. "She's perfect," I said as I tried not to cry. We named our little girl Shelby Lynn, but she will always be Shelly to me. ------- My life was about as perfect as it could be for the next eight months. I enjoyed being a father and participating in raising our baby. Poopy diapers did not bother me, nor did getting up in the middle of the night with her. Megan was, of course, as good at being a mother as she was at everything else. For the first six months, she nursed Shelly. She stopped reluctantly when Shelby's doctor recommended it. Megan was sad about the loss of that bit of closeness and she was unhappy that her boobs, which now almost rivaled Roxanne's, would be going away. I kept my feelings on that subject to myself. Speaking of Roxanne, a week after Shelly was born, she delivered Steven Laurence Pleturski, Junior. Megan and I were the baby's godparents and the Pleturskis were Shelly's. A couple of months after Shelby's birth, I went on my first deployment, a three week trip to Liberia to help train the Monrovian Battalion of the Liberian Army on counter insurgency and foreign internal defense. The Monrovian Battalion was the elite unit of the Liberian Army. I enjoyed the trip and the work, but I sure missed my little family. During the last week of September, almost exactly one year after graduating from the Q Course, Command Sergeant Major Ashton, the senior enlisted man of C Company, 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne), sent word down to the team house for me to report to him ASAP. I walked the block and a half up to the company headquarters, trying to figure out what I had done so I'd know how much of my ass Ashton was going to take. CSM Ashton scared the shit out of me and everyone else in the company. I trudged into the orderly room and one of the clerks sent me right in to Ashton's office. Ashton looked up when he saw me and pointed to a chair next to his desk. I sat down and he pulled this big ledger out of his bottom desk drawer. He flipped a few pages as I sat there cringing. CSM Ashton was like Santa Claus, checking in his book to see if I had been naughty or nice. According to Lyin' Ryan Ragan, the No-No Book was divided into two columns, one for atta-boys and one for aw-shits. He said it took ten atta-boys to erase one aw-shit. One aw-shit not covered by atta boys got your ass chewed; two got a boot hung in it. Once when I was Charge of Quarters (CQ), a second lieutenant, whose balls Ashton had in a death grip, offered me a hundred dollars to steal that book for him. I wouldn't have done it for a thousand. Ashton found my page, silently read over it, then snapped the book shut and put it away. It was the most effective way I've ever seen to put whomever you were interviewing at a disadvantage. "We received an alert notification for you this morning, Sergeant Jamison. Congratulations, you have won a thirteen month all expense paid vacation to sunny Southeast Asia," he said completely out of the blue. ------- Chapter 5 I left the sergeant major's office to head back to my team room. One of the clerks stopped me and handed me a single sheet of paper. "Tough luck, man," he said sympathetically. I acknowledged his remark with an absentminded nod as I read the document: Notification of Pending Reassignment / Permanent Change of Station for: Jamison, Jody L. RA14269268, SSG, MOSC 11B3S, C Co, 3rd SFG(A), 1st SF Ft Bragg, NC Unit of assignment: HQ, 5th SFG(A), 1st SF RVN Reporting date: 15 Jan 1968. Special Instructions: SM will attend the eight week XVIIIth Airborne Corp limited fluency Vietnamese language course prior to PCS. I looked up at the still hovering clerk and asked him a question. "This says I have to attend language school, when does that happen?" "The sergeant major called over there as soon as this came in and raised hell until they agreed to let you in week after next. He did that so you could have a full thirty days leave before you shipped out." I wandered back down the company street to our team house, my mind racing a thousand miles an hour. I knew this day might come, and had discussed the possibility with Megan. We'd made some contingency plans, and had even consulted with Megan's parents about me pulling a hardship or combat tour. Of course Mom and Dad Stedman thought that Megan and Shelby belonged in Valdosta if I was deployed. Megan, though, was not sure about that. Megan liked being the woman of her own house and doing things her way. I stopped my wool gathering when I arrived at our team room and found everyone waiting on me. I looked at them all inquisitively. "Ashton called and gave me a heads up," Ryan explained. I tried out a grin. "Yep, looks like I won't be the team cherry any more," I joked. The old vets called me cherry boy sometimes, because I was the only one on the team who had never been in combat. My joke didn't fall totally flat as it drew a couple of sniggers. Then Ryan opened his mouth again and I found out what good friends I'd made here. "I can probably get you out of going, Opie. I know Missus Alexander at the SF assignments branch, and since your orders aren't cut yet, I might be able to persuade her to flag your alert..." Before he could say anything else, Squirrel jumped in. "Tell her I volunteer to go in his place, that ought to make it easier. Megan and the baby need him here more than we need him there." Both men looked at me for an answer. I was speechless for a few seconds as I contemplated what they were offering. It was a great idea with only one problem ... it wasn't right. "Thanks guys, but they picked me, so it's mine to do. But listen, I'll be around for three more months and I sure wouldn't mind if you guys taught me what you thought I needed to know over there." Ryan sent me home so I could give the news to Megan. I wasn't real keen on the idea of telling her, but I always tried to be straight up with her. Honesty was a biggie in our relationship. I called out, "Honey, I'm home," as soon as I walked through the door. Megan came out of the kitchen with an arm full of smiling, gurgling, chubby cheeked Shelby. Megan suspected something as soon as she saw my face. "What happened?" "I've been alerted; I'm shipping out." "Nam?" she asked. I nodded. "When?" "After the first of the year. I have two months of language school and a month of leave." She nodded and handed me the baby. Shelby cooed and grabbed my finger with a happy smile. I bounced her in my arms a little and she made another happy noise. Shelby was Daddy's girl. I shifted Shelby so I could cradle her in the crook of my left arm, and wrapped my right around my wife. "At least we'll be together for Christmas," Meggie said as she burrowed herself under my arm. Of course, that wasn't the end of our discussing my deployment. I told her about Ryan's offer to get me out of going, and how I'd turned it down. She actually smiled at that. "They know you well enough by now to know you wouldn't do that, but it was nice of them to offer. You need to invite Jerry over for Sunday Dinner, and I'll fix him some country fried steak," she said. Megan had a huge heart and an ability to see the good in everyone. She was especially fond of Squirrel Smeltzer, because she said all his weirdness was a mask he wore to hide a tormented soul. I wasn't so sure about that, but Squirrel sure was a different person around Megan and Shelby. As hard as it was to believe, Squirrel Smeltzer, the man with a gun in one boot and a knife in the other, was the only person, other than her mother and Roxanne, who Megan trusted to babysit Shelby. I almost had a heart attack the first time she told me she'd asked him to watch Shelby so we could go out. Megan brushed off my arguments that Squirrel would probably make Shelly a doll out of C-4 or a necklace out of detonating cord. Why would she want a man who fricasseed his next-door neighbor's poodle because the yapping annoyed him, babysitting our precious daughter? My fears were put to rest when Squirrel turned up that first time with this attractive but stern looking woman with him. It turns out the woman was an Army nurse who worked at Womack at the well baby clinic. Squirrel had hired the woman to teach him how to take care of Shelby. ------- Language school was only five hours a day, a morning session from 0900-1130, and an afternoon session from 1230-1500. That schedule allowed me to take PT and have breakfast with my team in the morning. For a bunch of guys waiting around to retire, my teammates were surprisingly gung-ho about PT, and after I was alerted for Vietnam, they became even more serious about it. Everyone agreed that stamina was what I needed to train towards, so we did less airborne shuffle and more walking/running with a fifty pound rucksack. Well, at least my ruck weighed fifty pounds; everyone else's looked suspiciously light. For an hour and a half, three afternoons a week, the old guys held 'keep Jody alive' training. I learned how to be a sneaky, deadly son of a bitch at the hands of masters of the craft. Squirrel taught me about booby traps, both how to make them and how to recognize and avoid them. Ryan taught me about the tactics the Vietcong and their North Vietnamese masters used, and Preacher Hinson taught me how to conduct myself in the jungle. Doc Wilson gave me emergency medical training geared towards survival. Megan almost fainted the first time I proudly showed her the ten stitches I used to close a Squirrel-administered cut on my arm. I completed the language course at the end of November. I tested out at level two in both speaking and reading. I didn't speak as if I was a native, but I could communicate. S-2/R-2 was also good enough to qualify me for language proficiency pay, a welcomed extra twenty-five dollars a month. My pay and allowance now totaled about five hundred dollars a month before taxes. I took leave all the month of December of 1967 and the first three days of January 1968. On January fourth, those silver wings of the KC-135 tanker took me away. Leaving Megan and Shelby was hard on me, but I was comforted that I had done everything possible to make sure my family was taken care of while I was away. Megan put on a brave face, but she was clearly worried about me. In the end, Megan decided to stay in Fayetteville with the support network that Roxanne, Steve, my old team and their wives provided. She also planned on resuming her teaching career when the next school year started. She said the teaching would keep her busy and help the time go faster for her. I flew from Pope to McChord Air Force Base in Washington State, and caught a shuttle bus over to Fort Lewis. I checked into the overseas processing station and did those things I needed to do for deployment. I flew out of McChord on a chartered DC-7 on January the sixth, stylishly attired in my brand new issue jungle fatigues and lug soled jungle boots. We lost a day traveling west across the International Date Line, and landed in Can Rahn Bay, Republic of Vietnam on the eighth. Cam Rahn Bay was a beautiful place, with its white sandy beaches and lush vegetation. The base housed the replacement depot, rest and recreation center and a large military hospital. Everywhere I looked, there were GI studiously avoiding acting like soldiers. A harried looking specialist five herded us into a formation. We stood in six ranks on yellow lines painted on a large asphalt pad, our duffle bags at our feet. I had gravitated towards the only other two Special Forces guys on the plane, and was standing next to them. The two sergeants, both SFCs, were here on their second tour and knew the ropes. They pretty much ignored the specialist five clerk calling names and told me to do the same. "The SF liaison will be over here for us any minute now; we are only twenty miles from the 5th Group headquarters in Nha Trang, so we don't have to put up with this bullshit," the younger of the two, a commo man named Purvis said. Sure enough, about then, a deuce and a half pulled up, and a SF master sergeant hopped out of the cab. The clerk noticed the master sergeant and stopped calling names. "Personnel with assignments to the 5th Special Forces fall out and see Master Sergeant McHenry." Six people did, including Purvis, SFC Goode, a couple of PFCs, one spec four and yours truly. Goode was the other returning Special Forces guy. The enlisted men were support soldiers, two cooks and a supply clerk. When we reached the truck, McHenry checked off our names, took a set of our orders from us and told us to jump in the back of the truck. Two guys were already in the back of the truck, both wearing load-bearing equipment and both armed with M-16s. When we climbed in the back, one of the men gave each of us a Korean War vintage M-1 Carbine or an M-14 and three magazines of ammo. The bed of the deuce and a half had a layer of filled sandbags on the floor and sandbags were stacked up along the side rails. The troop seats had been removed so we sat on the floor. The staff sergeant that handed out the weapons briefed us as we roared off. "As soon as we are out the gate, lock and load. This area is supposed to be secure, but Charlie still takes a potshot at passing traffic once and a while, so keep your head down." We made it to Nah Trang without incident; the staff sergeant collected the weapons, and McHenry led us to the group headquarters where we needed to sign in. I was bent over a clerk's desk, filling out a form when someone grabbed me in a bear hug and gave me a sloppy kiss on the cheek. "Opie, how they hanging, brah?" asked my assailant, Staff Sergeant Pookie Ramos. I was happy as hell to see Pookie, and we jabbered like school girls while I filled out my emergency data card and a few other documents. As soon as I finished the last item on the in processing checklist, the personnel guy shuffled the pages together and put them in a folder, before addressing me again. "Okay Sarge, that's it for me. You arrived at a good time, because I need to fill a vacancy here at group headquarters. I'm going to send you over to talk to the S-3 sergeant major to see if you are who he's looking for." Pookie and I parted ways, with a plan to meet up at the NCO club at 1800. He was only at the headquarters for a couple of days, picking up medical supplies for his unit. I secured directions to the Tactical Operations Center which was where the S-3 was located, and walked a short block over to it. I guess it was old home week, because the S-3 sergeant major was the newly promoted Roger Travis, the man who had been the NCOIC of phase one at the Q course. Travis recognized me right away. "Ain't no possum hunting in these here parts, Opie," he said in probably the worst imitation of a southern drawl ever attempted. Travis thought I would do fine in the vacancy he had. I asked to be assigned to an A-team instead. "I don't need an operations guy (graduate of the Special Forces Operations and Intelligence Course), Jamison, I need a grunt to courier classified documents out to the field. That's a good job for a shake and bake rookie, it'll keep you out of trouble." 'Shake and bake' was a derisive term for NCOs who were promoted as a result of a school, instead of serving the time normally required for the rank. Travis's opinion of me hadn't risen much since I was in phase one. I left his office and presented the assignments clerk Travis's okay. He was happy he'd filled a vacancy. "How long am I stuck here doing this?" I asked. The clerk was taken aback by my question. "Hey man, this is a good gig, you get to spend time down in Saigon, and you ain't in the field humping a rucksack. The only way you are getting out of here before you go back to the world is if, after six months, you extend your tour to a year and a half and ask for another job," he replied. From the personnel section at group headquarters, I tromped over to the orderly room of Headquarters Company, my new unit for administration and control. All the members of the group staff were assigned to Headquarters Company. The first sergeant was out that day, so the clerk signed me in and assigned me a hooch space, so I'd have a place to spend the night. I walked over to the new digs that I would be sharing with the other courier. I dropped my duffle bag and made up my bunk with the linen folded neatly at the foot of the bed. I checked my watch. It was only 1715, so I flopped down on the bunk and pulled the magazine I snagged from a stack in the orderly room out of my cargo pocket. The magazine was titled The Green Beret, and was published by the 5th Group. Reading about the goings on in the A-Camps scattered throughout the country did not make me a bit happier about my new job. Pookie was already sitting at a table, taking a long pull off a can of Budweiser when I walked into the NCO Club at 1755. I joined him at his table, flagged down one of the cute Vietnamese waitresses, ordered us both a Bud and filled Pookie in on my new assignment. He looked as confused as the personnel specialist when I expressed my displeasure with the job. "Jeez, Brah, even with Travis over there, that is a primo assignment," he said. I shook my head negatively. "I didn't train my ass off for the last two years to be Travis's go-fer. I want to do what I was trained for, and I think I have enough skill that I would be an asset to a team. Why can't someone who needs a break from the field be Travis' errand boy?" Pookie laughed and held up his hands in mock surrender. "Hey, don't take it out on me, Opie; you're the one who fed Travis that suck-ass possum." Then Pookie dropped his grin and leaned towards me. "If you are serious about wanting to be somewhere else, I'll talk to my boss when I get back. He's coming down here next week to try to recruit a few people anyway." Pookie's idea sounded good, except that I didn't know what kind of unit he was in. I'd hate to have pissed off Travis, just to end up driving an ambulance or something. When I expressed that thought to Pookie, he snorted out a laugh. "I'm in one of the SOG special projects, Jody, and it is the real Sneaky Pete deal. If you get assigned there, your chances of riding in an ambulance as a patient are about a thousand times better than you driving one. Are you sure you want to be involved in that?" SOG was short for 'Studies and Observations Group. I knew about SOG, because Squirrel Smeltzer had been in it. He was part of a unit called Project Delta. Although Squirrel never discussed specifics about Delta, he did say that their job was to lead a bunch of native mountain tribesmen in dealing maximum misery on the Vietcong's sorry asses. I wasn't trying to be John Wayne, but I figured if I had to be here anyway, I wouldn't mind a job like that. ------- It was two weeks before I met Pookie's boss. By then, I'd given up on ever hearing from him. By the time he got around to talking to me, I had resigned myself to the crappy job Travis stuck me with. My duties were even worse than I'd suspected, because as I travel to different camps delivering classified maps, operation orders and cryptographic keylists, I received a tantalizing glimpse of what I was missing. When I wasn't traveling, the job was even worse, because just as I feared, I became the S-3 errand boy. I did everything from pick up people at the airfield to fetching toilet paper from the supply room. I had just returned from driving the Assistant S-3 out to the airfield, when the Command Sergeant Major sent for me. "Now what?" I wondered as I hustled to boss man's office. CSM Mattox waved me right in when I knocked on his door, then told me to have a seat. I plopped down in a comfortable upholstered chair and took a quick look around the room. Mattox looked as if he were the poster boy for Special Forces. He was fit, crew cut and looked sharp in his uniform. The other man, a master sergeant who according to his name tag was named Walsh, could have been Maddox's taller brother. Maddox was also eyeballing me while I was checking out his office. "This is the first time I've ever laid eyes on you, Sergeant Jamison, and you already have me in a bind," Maddox growled. "You just fell off the banana boat, and yet here is my friend Billy asking me if he can interview you for an assignment to SOG. If I let you go, it will put my Operations Sergeant Major's skivvies in a bunch. Can you explain to me why I would want to do that just so you can go play John Wayne?" I took a breath and launched into the speech I'd practiced in my mind dozens of times. "I'm not trying to be a hero, Sergeant Major; all I want is to do the job I'm trained to do. I might not be some old seasoned vet, but I am a good weapons man, and I know how to work as part of a team. The slot I'm filling now isn't even a Special Forces job; any private with a security clearance can do what I'm doing now. Why not let him, and send me somewhere so I can do what I'm trained for?" CSM Maddox ended up agreeing with me and sent me off to talk to Master Sergeant Walsh in private. Walsh was quite a guy, he was as gung-ho as anyone I'd ever met. "I checked up on you, Jamison. I pulled your 201 file and contacted your last team sergeant. I was surprised as hell it was Ryan Ragan. Me and Lyin' Ryan go way back. He said you were a good man and that you were well prepared for what we do. That is good enough for me. I need a reliable man with good judgment and good in the woods. The job is junior man on a recon team made up of three Americans and six Montengards. You want it, it's yours." I wanted it. I don't know how he did it, but by noon the next day, MSG Walsh and I were on a C-7 Caribou, headed towards the central highlands. We landed at the air base at Pleiku (pronounced play-coo) City. Pleiku had a sprawling military complex named Camp Holloway, which included the headquarters and one brigade of the 4th Infantry Division. Waiting off the apron at the end of the taxiway was a jeep with a 50 Caliber machine gun mounted on it, and a deuce and a half without the canvass. Standing beside the vehicles was Pookie Ramos, two other Americans, and half a dozen small dark men in camouflage uniforms. Every person standing there was armed to the teeth and wearing full web gear. After a bear hug greeting, Pookie did the introductions. "Jody, this is your one-zero, Fred Armitage. Fred this is Jody Jamison, my bud from the Q-course I was telling you about." MSG Walsh had given me a general briefing on how things worked with the recon teams, so I knew that the one-zero was the American team leader, his Montagnard counterpart was the zero-one. American team members were designated with a numeral one a dash and a second number sequentially higher than the team leader's. Thus, as the third American on the team, I was the one-two. The indigenous troops were designated the same way with a zero first, thus the newest Montagnard was the zero-six. Staff Sergeant Fred Armitage was not much taller than the small indigenous troopers, but he was much stockier. Armitage was also much older than the rest of us, if his grey hair and wrinkled visage were any indication. He stuck his hand out with a big smile. "Welcome to RT Montana, Jody. This is our one-one, Rick Pierpont." Pierpont was a First Lieutenant, so I snapped him a salute. He haphazardly returned it and shook my hand. "Don't make a habit out of that saluting shit, Jody. It's like drawing a target on my back. And call me Rick, unless some brass is around." After Rick and I shook hands, Fred introduced me to the rest of the team. "Jody this is Bo, our zero-one and this is Kip, the zero-two and our interpreter. These other outstanding warriors are Kai, Lum, Thue and Bing." The Montagnards all shook my hand and took a stab at saying my name. Jody came out of their mouths as a drawn out Jo-Dee but it was close enough that it worked for me. I was ushered into the back of the truck, where Rick handed me a short-barreled, collapsing-stock CAR-15 and a set of web gear. Rick hopped into the passenger seat of the truck and five of the Montagnards climbed in the back. Pookie was driving the gun jeep with Walsh as his passenger, and the last member of our team hanging onto the handles on the back of the 50 cal. Fred eyed me owlishly as we stood behind the truck. "Can you drive one of these things, Jody?" he asked hopefully. I nodded. "I'm licensed to drive anything up to a ten ton," I replied. "Alright!" he exclaimed. "Jump in and follow Ramos, stay about twenty yards behind him." I nodded, climbed up into the cab, fired up the big diesel engine and away we went. ... And just like that I was a member of Recon Team (RT) Montana, no questions about my experience, no comments about being an instant NCO ... Of course, I learned later that the team's ready acceptance was tempered by the fact that if I didn't meet Fred's standards or fit in, I would be gone as quickly as I arrived. The Recon One-Zero had the absolute last word on who stayed and who left on his team. I followed Pookie out of the air base and through Pleiku onto a paved road that was marked as Highway 14. We took the road north for an hour or so until we arrived at a small military camp that straddled the highway. Pookie turned into the portion of the camp on the left side of the road, but Rick directed me to turn right. Rick told me the right side of the camp was the Recon Company, helipad and Tactical Operations Center, everything else was across the road. The camp was named Forward Operating Base Two, and my new unit was Command and Control Central. We were part of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam — Studies and Observation Group, better known as MACV-SOG. We three Americans shared a hooch and the Montagnards shared another. Our hooch was also our team room. Fred and Rick got me set up with everything I needed by the end of the day, and as dusk fell, I found myself sitting with the rest of the team on top of the three bunkers we were responsible for that formed part of the camp's defenses. The camp was on high alert, because Tet, the Chinese New Year, was only a couple of days away and the latest Intel was that Charlie had something planned for the holiday. In front of our bunkers was a hundred yard deep strip of concertina wire, triple apron barbed wire and barded wire tangle foot. Salted through out the defensive wire were claymore mines, trip-wire booby-traps and fifty-five gallon drums of fogas. Fogas was a deadly homemade napalm composed of diesel fuel and powdered laundry detergent. The activating triggers for the fogas and claymores were inside the bunkers. I shared my two hour guard shift with Kip the interpreter. I enjoyed talking to Kip and he was genuinely interested in talking to me. The Montagnards, I discovered, were a fun loving and genial bunch of guys. The next day, we ran a local patrol around the perimeter of the camp. The patrol was partly school for me, but it also served the purpose of checking to make sure the Viet Cong weren't massing near the camp in preparation for an attack. I was amazed at the basic load of ammunition, grenades and claymore mines we took with us. We practiced immediate action drills as we patrolled, and I started learning team procedures. I was damned impressed with the skills of my teammates. And I was happy as hell that I had lucked onto a team that good. We were about two klicks east of the camp when Bing, the Montagnard point man, found fresh tracks on a small trail. Fred guessed from the signs that at least a squad had passed this way in the last twenty four hours. Fred called in the discovery, then quickly set us up in an L-shaped ambush. If Mister Charlie came that way tonight, he was in for a rude surprise. ------- Chapter 6 Fred kept me beside him when he set up the ambush to make sure the radio I carried was at hand if he needed it. Of course, I'm sure he also had me with him so I wouldn't get myself in trouble during my first night in the field and possibly my first firefight. When it was midnight and nothing had happened, Fred pulled us back a couple of hundred meters and we set up in a perimeter in a couple of large shell craters. After calling in our new location to the TOC, Fred divided us up into two man teams and called it a night. One person on each two man team stayed awake while the other slept. I was sort of disappointed when the Viet Cong didn't come traipsing down the trail that night. We moved out again at first light and swept the rest of the Recon side of the perimeter. We were back inside the compound by nine-thirty, just in time to watch a dump truck jettison a load of sand right behind our bunkers. My dreams of calling it an early day and hitting the rack ended when the Recon Company first sergeant flagged down Fred and called him over to the orderly room. Fred came back out of the orderly room in a couple of minutes, and sent me and two of the Yards to the supply room for empty sandbags. "Top wants two more layers of sandbags on top of the bunkers before night fall," he explained. So instead of snoozing on my bunk, I ended up operating a D-handled shovel, filling sandbags. After fifteen minutes on the shovel, Rick switched places with me. I grabbed a filled bag in each hand and lugged them around the end of our first bunker then down the line to the last one. Walking around to the front of the bunkers where they were lowest to the ground made it easier to heave the filled bags onto the roof. I was showing off for the Yards on my fifth trip around the bunker by carrying two filled bags on each shoulder as if they weighed nothing. As usually happens to show offs, I scuffed my jungle boot in the dirt in front of the center bunker and tripped over one of the claymore firing wires. The only thing that prevented me from falling on my ass was the wire breaking and sweeping forward, wrapped around my foot. Fred saw me hopping to keep my balance and shot me a quizzical look as the Yards laughed hysterically. "I tripped on one of the claymore firing wires and broke it, Boss," I said apologetically. Fred nodded and jumped off the top of the bunker, landing right beside me. He grabbed the wire tugging on it until he was holding the loose end. "These things don't break that easily, Jody, it looks like someone intentionally cut this," he said, pointing to the squared off end of the wire. Fred made a quick check of the dozen or so firing wires and found over half of them cut and two of them actually turned around so they were pointing at the bunker. He told us to keep working, and hustled over to the Recon Company headquarters. He was back in ten minutes with Sergeant First Class Donnelly, the company first sergeant. Donnelly surveyed the situation and sent me and Rick to round up all the recon men still in the compound, and send them to the company headquarters. That afternoon, every team not in the field checked their wires and found much the same as we had. Donnelly had us keep quiet about what we found and went to meet with the camp commander. Everyone knew that someone either in the Vietnamese Security Company or some locals working around the camp had sabotaged our defenses; the trouble was that if we made a stink about it, we'd loose any tactical advantage we could make of their attempted treachery. The cut wires were a sure tip off that the rumors of a Tet attack were probably true. Consequently, we were ready for Charlie that last night of January, as all of the recon teams not in the field were in their bunkers. I was in the left most of our three bunkers with Kip, the interpreter, and our point man Bing. Unfortunately, it wasn't only the Viet Cong who showed up that night. In addition to the VC, a hard-core North Vietnamese Army regiment, which had slipped across the border from their sanctuary in Laos, hit our camp at two in the morning. The NVA started us off with a thirty minute barrage of B-40 rocket and mortar bombs, with a few rocket propelled grenades (RPGs) thrown in for good measure. The rocket and mortar barrage was nerve wrackingly scary, because you could hear the incoming rounds, but didn't have a clue where they were going to land. As I sat huddled in the corner of the center bunker, dirt raining down on my head with each near miss, I silently thanked Donnelly for insisting on the extra layers of sand bags. A few sappers managed to creep up to the wire and blow a couple of gaps in the outer triple apron barbed wire fence around 0230. Black pajama clad VC came boiling through the gaps in the fence. They came in teams of threes and fours, each team with a wooden assault ladder. They were lit up clearly by the illumination rounds our mortar crews were firing every minute or two. The mortar men never missed a beat, even with the incoming rockets and mortar rounds dropping all around them. The M-60 machine guns in every third bunker put a deadly cross fire in the gaps, but Charlie still kept coming and by then, more sappers had hit in three different places. While the M-60s were concentrating on the breaches in the outer perimeter, we fired up the men darting the hundred feet between the outer and second barrier. The second barrier was made up of concertina wire, the rolls stacked three tall and two deep. We fired aimed, three to five round bursts of full automatic fire, but the zigzagging, bent-over VC were elusive targets. The hundred feet between barriers was liberally salted with small anti-personnel mines called 'toe poppers', but not many of them were exploding. By the time that first wave reached the concertina wire, over half of them were still on their feet. The men carrying the assault ladders stood them up where there were sags in the concertina barricade created by mortar rounds and rockets. Amazingly, the VC managed to stand about a dozen of the ladders across my narrow field of vision. Through all this, the mortar barrage never let up, but most of the big 122mm rockets were pounding the other side of the camp. Just when I thought we had the attack stopped, we started receiving RPG rounds that were targeting our bunkers. The RPGs were meant to keep our heads down while the khaki-clad NVA soldiers exploited the gaps the VC made in our defenses. Before we could blink, about a hundred VC and NVA were swarming across the ladder bridges. Enemy in the second wire was our cue to blow the first set of claymores, so I grabbed the far-left clacker and squeezed it forcefully. My claymore exploding joined about half a dozen others, and the resulting spray of steel pellets downed a good quarter of the attackers. By the time we blew our first claymores, a third wave of commies was there to exploit gaps that were appearing in the concertina obstacle. I was reaching for the clacker to fire a second claymore, when an RPG rocket hit the left front corner of our bunker. Even though I was on the other side of the bunker, the blast wave, hot sand and some shrapnel knocked me down to my knees and disoriented me for a few seconds. I shook my head and cleared it, then jumped to my feet. Kip was getting to his feet also, but Bing, who was closest to the blast, was still down. I told Kip to take care of Bing, and I reassumed my position in the firing port of the bunker. When I peeked out, I was just in time to see another wave of khaki pour through the almost completely destroyed outer fence. They charged across the open area, despite the machine gun fire raking their ranks, and plunged pell-mell through the gaps in the concertina. Many more of the NVA than I thought possible had survived the claymores and machine guns. Once through the concertina, they took cover behind their fallen comrades' bodies, and lobbed grenades and satchel charges into the tangle foot barbed wire that formed the third ring of our defenses. The teams in the bunkers rewarded them with a fusillade of 40mm rounds from M-79 grenade launchers. After two salvos of 40mm, the Viet Minh decided that it was better to hit the wire than it was to be sitting ducks. They rose up in mass and assaulted towards us. It was the last official act for most of them, as the jellied diesel fuel 'foogas' and the last line of claymore either set them on fire or cut them to ribbons. Probably no more than fifty of them escaped the carnage. By first light, we were clearing the wire and making hasty repairs and setting out fresh claymores in case of a repeat performance. It had been a lopsided battle, but Recon Company still suffered some casualties. Two Montagnards were killed and four seriously injured. We also had two Americans injured bad enough to medivac to Pleiku. In return, we killed or captured over three hundred NVA, and more than a hundred VC. The S-2 found out that the Recon Company compound had been the night's primary target. The rockets and mortar fire on the other side of the camp was to keep reinforcements at bay. Finding the claymores active had been a big unpleasant surprise for the bad guys. Among the dead and wounded were three members of the security company. Those men not only cut the firing wire, but had also surreptitiously marked clear lanes through the anti-personnel mines. After all the excitement died down, a medic on one of the other teams checked out my slight shrapnel wounds, and pronounced them too inconsequential to matter. Bing, our point man was a little worse off, but nothing that required medivac. Fred gave him a couple of days off to get over the headache being knocked out gave him, but that was about it. I was happy that I'd been able to do my job, despite the fear that I felt during the attack, and my teammates seemed satisfied that I would be able to hold my own. I was surprised that next morning, when a flock of helicopters landed over in the other side of camp and started loading up troops. "What's going on?" I asked Fred. "RT Missouri found a high-speed trail right on the border. It's probably how the NVA infiltrated. Two hatchet platoons are going in to block the trail and try to finish these guys off," he replied. The Hatchet Company was an American-led force of Montagnards that conducted platoon and company-sized operations to exploit what recon teams found, and to attempt to rescue recon teams that got into trouble. They were heavily armed, well trained and fierce. Later that morning, some of the same helicopters brought back the team that found the trail, and I participated in a recon ritual where every recon man in the compound greets the returning team at the helipad with cold beer and congratulations for making it back. ------- My narrative to good old Mike hit a snag at this point, because my assignment was classified and I couldn't share certain details of what I'd done. When I told him that, he smiled and nodded. "You were in Command and Control Central, Jody. I know all about that unit. I know, for instance, that you ran recon along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Southern Laos and Northern Cambodia." I looked around to make sure we weren't being over heard before I replied. No one seemed to be paying us any attention as we sat on a cargo pallet halfway between the ramp and the troop seats. "How did you know that?" I asked. "Part of my job," he replied. "Heck, I've even been out with a few of the teams." I didn't see how Mike, slightly over weight and not a young man, could have accomplished that, but I instinctively knew it was true. I gave him an acknowledging nod and got on with my story... ------- The team we met was exhausted from being chased by the bad guys for two days. They took the beers gratefully and trudged towards their team room. The mortars and rockets had flattened a couple of team rooms, but theirs was relatively untouched. For the next seven days, we trained hard to integrate me into the team. We practiced immediate action drills (IADs) until our actions were automatic. The IADs were designed to let us break contact and get away if we ran into NVA soldiers. We walked through the exercises and went through them full speed without firing our weapons. Once we had the maneuvers down, we practiced them live fire until Fred was satisfied. Then we ran through the IADs again, this time changing positions in the formation so we could do each other's job. I appreciated Fred being a tough taskmaster, because the better we were when we hit the ground, the better our chances of survival. On the eighth day, we walked out of the camp and ran a two day local patrol. We did everything as if we were deep in enemy territory. When we returned, I thought we were ready for anything, but Fred decided we needed one more practice, so he volunteered us for a patrol around Dak Pek, a Special Forces A-Camp that sat right on the Laotian border way up country. The camp was under a siege of sort, receiving harassing mortar fire. Every night for the last two weeks, twelve rounds fell on the camp. The rounds were spaced throughout the night to keep the beleaguered SF men from sleeping soundly. The camp commander had asked our big boss for some help in finding the shooters that were making their lives miserable as they tried to recover from almost being overrun during Tet. Our commander put out the word asking for a team to volunteer, and Fred jumped on the opportunity. We flew up to Dak Pek on two CH-34 helicopters early the next morning. The CH-34 was a piston-driven single door aircraft from the 1950s. The helicopters belonged to SOG, and were flown by Vietnamese Air Force pilots. They were painted a plain OD without any markings to identify them as U.S. or Vietnamese. They were FOB2's primary insertion aircraft. As soon as we landed, Fred had a quick conference with the camp commander. Fred wanted to insert us into the jungle west of the camp, and was quizzing the American captain on potential DZ locations. Fred figured that by inserting one ridgeline over from the mountain south and west of Dak Pek, we would catch the mortar crews unawares by coming at them from the wrong direction. He herded us back onto the helicopters and we flew off. Ten minutes later, the Kingbee dropped like a rock into the LZ. The pilot flared out at the last minute to hover five feet above the ground, and I hopped out the door in Fred's shadow. Within two minutes, the entire team was on the ground and hustling off the LZ into the edge of the jungle. Fred radioed the camp that we were safely on the ground then moved us out. We moved through the jungle like wisps of smoke, each step measured and deliberate while constantly looking around us. Fred positioned himself the second man back from the point, I was the second man behind him, and Rick walked drag, erasing the signs of our passage as he scanned our back trail for trackers. Fred's insistence on training like we fought paid immediate dividends for me because by then, I was used to the heat, humidity and the seventy five pounds of gears lashed to me. My combat load included the PRC-25 radio, a spare battery, twenty magazines of ammo on my web gear and twenty in my rucksack, five fragmentation grenades, one smoke grenade, one riot control gas grenade, one white phosphorous grenade, a forty-five pistol with two spare clips and a claymore mine. I also carried two canteens of water on my web gear, and a two quart collapsible canteen on my ruck, and five indigenous ration dehydrated rice packets stuffed in my ruck and cargo pockets. We moved stealthily over the top of the hill and set up for the night on the military crest on the side facing the camp. As soon as the mortars started lobbing rounds, we were going to maneuver towards them and try to put ourselves in a position to ambush them when they moved out the next morning. Moving to a different location daily was how the dinks kept from being caught in counter fire from the camp. We found some thick undergrowth for our RON and crawled into it just as darkness swiftly fell. We barely had time to get comfortable when we heard movement and low voices downhill to our right front. Fred nudged me and grinned wolfishly. "We set up damned near right on top of them, Opie, call that in to the camp, then we'll sneak down there for a closer look." I called the camp and then we hunkered down and rested for the upcoming festivities. We were all happy as hell that we wouldn't have to make a long night movement. The three-quarter moon was up high enough by ten that night to slightly lighten the jungle when Fred moved us out. Creeping and mostly crawling, it took us an hour to cover about two hundred meters. Fred stopped us about fifty meters upslope from the voices. We dropped our rucksacks and formed a defensive perimeter, while Fred and Rick slithered down the hill to put an eyeball on the mortars. The two men were gone fewer than five minutes before our quarry lobbed their first round towards Dak Pek. Fred and Rick returned about forty-five minutes later. Fred sat down beside me and whispered into my ear what they'd seen. He said there were two 82 mm mortars and fifteen guys in a small clearing right below us. "These guys are really careless, so we are going to take them tonight while they are distracted firing into the camp. We'll split into two teams and start the attack with you and Rick throwing grenades to take out the tubes and crews. The rest of us will fire up their security detail. We'll take the sights, blow up the tubes and ammo, then beat-feet down the mountain and back to the camp," he whispered. It took Fred over an hour to personally move us forward one at a time and put us in position. At 0100hrs, Fred tapped me on the head; my signal to throw my first grenade. I was both scared and excited as I raised up on one knee, pulled the pin and chunked the baseball-shaped M-26 grenade at the base of the mortar about thirty meters in front of me. I hit the dirt and covered my head as soon as I flung the grenade, so I didn't see it land. The grenade exploded with a krumph; two seconds later, Ricks exploded too. I was on my knees, tossing a second frag as the rest of the troops were firing up the area. In the end, we assaulted right through the small camp and took out ten of the mortar crew members. The others disappeared into the brush. Fred set me the task of pulling the sights off the mortars and piling the tubes on top of the six cases of ammo for them. My hands were shaking like a leaf from adrenalin and fear, but I managed to yank the sights in only a minute or so. Fred put a claymore with a thirty minute time fuse on the pile of tubes and cases, then he booby-trapped the claymore. We retrieved our rucksacks and hauled ass downhill back towards Dak Pek. It took the rest of the night and most of the next day for us to cover the five kilometers to the camp, because RT Montana never traveled in a straight line. Fred changed our line of march every few hundred meters to keep us from walking into an ambush, and at least once every two hours we looped around and laid an ambush of our own on our back trail. We also moved cautiously, every step planned, deliberate and precise. We constantly scanned around us, the muzzles of our weapons automatically following our eyes. Moving the way we did took my total concentration; it would take two more missions before the techniques became instinctive. We made it back to Dak Pek around three in the afternoon. The guys in the camp met us with cold beer and slaps on the back. Fred had me dig the mortar sights out of my ruck, and we presented them to the camp commander. Fred sent the Yards off to a bunker so they could grab some Zs while we three Americans discussed the patrol. "You done good, Opie, even if you did get a little carried away with that first grenade," Fred said. I blushed and nodded, embarrassed that my first adrenalin-fueled toss had sailed ten meters past my target. Luckily, my second try was right on the money. "I was scared shitless," I admitted sheepishly. Fred smiled and slapped me on the back. "Join the club, son," he said, "because I was too. A healthy dose of fear will keep you from doing something stupid, as long as you don't panic." ------- When we arrived back at the FOB, Fred went to the TOC and reported RT Montana as mission ready. On paper, Recon Company had twenty teams, but in reality only about half that number were ever mission ready. The one-zero was the only person who could declare a team mission ready. While was there at the TOC, he briefed the ops officer on our trip to Dak Pek. Fred felt that there must be a large ammo cache somewhere within a day's march of where we took out the mortars. How else, he reasoned, could the mortar crews have had the ammo to fire at the camp every single night? Fred figured that the extra men with the crews must have trekked some where fairly close every few days to replenish their ammo. The ops officer called in the S-2 (Intelligence Officer) and before you know it, RT Montana had a mission. We were to locate the suspected ammo cache, report its location and call in an air strike on it. We made a plan and briefed it back to the FOB Commander and his staff two days later. The big boss approved Fred's plan and agreed to Fred's request for us to be inserted five days later on February Twenty-second. The day after we returned, we went to the range and fired up all the ammunition we had carried to Dak Pet, doing live-fire immediate action drills. Fred was superstitious about carrying the same ammo into the field twice. After our day on the range, we took a couple of well-deserved days off. We lazed around the camp during the day and spent the evenings at the club drinking beer and bull-shitting. During those two days, I met more of the members of Recon Company and learned some of the lore surrounding SOG and the Special Operations Augmentation that ran recon for them. There were three SOAs: our unit C&C Central, C&C North up in Hue and C&C South down in Ban Me Thuot. I was in awe of some of the recon one-zeros, because they were some of the badest asses ever to put on a uniform. Two days before our insertion, Fred went up with one of our Forward Air Controllers to do a visual recon of our target. He and the FAC scouted out an insertion LZ inside Vietnam, about two klicks from the Laotian border and not far from where we took out the mortar battery. On the day before insertion, we squared away our gear. Fred checked out each man, American and Yard to make sure our gear was secure, complete and quiet. Later in the afternoon, we Americans went to the orderly room and turned in our wallets, dog tags and ID cards. On cross border operations, we could not carry anything that identified us as Americans soldiers. If we were captured, the government would disavow any knowledge of us or our mission. Early on the morning of the twenty-second, we flew up to our launch site at Dak To. Dak To was a hilltop artillery fire base north of Kontum, and close to the Laotian border. There were also refueling and rearming facilities for the helicopters there. Since we were inserting inside Vietnam, we were going in by UH-1 Huey helicopters flown by Americans. At eight in the morning, the launch officer declared the mission a go, so we mounted up and took off. Although it only took two Hueys to carry our nine-man team, there were six aircraft in our formation. We had two Cobra gunships escorting us, and two empty Hueys flying chase, in case our insertion helicopters developed in-flight problems. Thirty minutes later, we were on the ground and moving into the jungle, headed for Laos. For three days, we snuck through the triple canopy and didn't see a thing. We were now five kilometers inside Laos. Just when I thought we might have hit a dry hole, Bing, our point man, halted us and motioned Fred forward. We had run into a high-speed trail that wasn't listed on our intel enhanced map, which meant that we were the first to find it. The trail ran roughly east west and was right in line with Dak Pek. We turned east and paralleled the trail for another day. We had to stop twice and fade deeper into the jungle when we heard foot traffic on the trail. On our fifth day out, we finally found our target. It was a large bunker complex so skillfully camouflaged, it was hard to see even from the ground. We radioed in our find, then surveiled the bunker complex for a day, taking pictures and making sketches. Fred estimated that the bunkers supported a battalion sized unit. At the end of the day, we moved five hundred meters due south and called in an airstrike and an exfiltration. As our dedicated FAC, all of whom were code named "Covey", directed a pair of F-4s in bombing the hell out of the complex, a couple of Kingbees slipped in and picked us up. It had been a text book perfect mission and according to Covey, the bombing produced over twenty large secondary explosions, indicating we'd found a good target. "This job isn't so bad," I thought to myself. Famous last words for sure. ------- Chapter 7 RT Montana stood down for a week after our successful mission on target Hotel-Seven. The stand-down was SOP for every team after every mission. The seven days allowed you to unwind from the stress that came with running reconnaissance behind enemy lines. Fred released our Montagnards on a five day pass back to their village, and us three Americans headed down to Nha Trang to sample the good life. Nha Trang was a bustling city right on the South China Sea. It had a busy port that was one of the primary entry points for US military supplies and equipment. Nha Trang also had some pristine white sand beaches just north of the port complex. We stayed at a small hotel near one of the beaches, instead of at the Special Forces compound. We did that because Fred and Rick didn't want to have anything to do with the Army while we were away from camp. I protested that I didn't have the money for living large and splurging on a hotel room. Fred laughed and Rick slapped me on the back. "No worries, Opie, it's my treat," Rick said. Then his expression turned serious. "Listen, Jody, I respect how you are about your family, but money is never, ever a problem for me. If you need something, it won't be a problem for you either ... understand?" I didn't, but I nodded my head yes anyway. After all, even though he was an officer and single, he still didn't make enough money to burn it. Later that night, Fred told me what Rick really meant. We had a very good meal in a French restaurant, then headed over to a local joint that featured a loud jukebox and scantily-clad Go-Go dancers. Rick went up to fetch us a few bottles of a not too bad Vietnamese beer called Ba Muoi Ba (33). I was reaching for my wallet to throw in for the beer, when Fred leaned over and held my arm. "Let Rick buy the booze and anything else he feels like. The Pierponts are rolling in the dough, and from what I gather, Rick is the favorite son and heir apparent. I think Rick is in Nam to show his family he has a set of balls. They'd probably shit if they knew what he was really doing over here." True to Fred's word, Rick insisted on paying for everything, including 'Saigon Teas' for three of the dancers who joined us at Fred's instigation. Soon enough, we only needed four chairs at our table, because Fred and Rick each had one of the skimpily clad cuties sitting in their laps. When I told the girl who sat next to me that I wasn't playing around, she seemed offended. "You Cheap Charlie then," she huffed as she rose from her chair. Rick caught her arm as she walked by him and whispered something in her ear. The girl's angry face broke into a sunny smile; she nodded her head and plopped back down in her seat. "You lucky GI, Cheap Charlie. Your friend pay me to suck you-fuck you all night long." I returned her infectious smile and shook my head. "No can do," I said. Then I switched to Vietnamese and told her why. Her bar name was Suzie; Su-Lin was her real name. I called her by the latter, just to reinforce that, regardless what Rick paid for, there would be no hanky-panky. Su-Lin liked me calling her by her real name, and she liked me speaking to her in her own language. Those little things helped her forget for a while that she was a bar girl instead of the nursing student she wanted to be. I was incredulous when she told me she was only sixteen. Until six months ago, she had been that nursing student at a local teaching hospital. Then her father, an honest and effective regional police captain, had been kidnapped and summarily executed by the Viet Cong. Now she was the sole supporter of her mother and younger siblings. Su-Lin and I became friends, once she figured out that I wasn't trying to work her for a freebee. For the next three days, she was my tour guide to the real Vietnam. I met her family, and as had Su-Lin, we became friends when they figured out friendship was all I was seeking. We returned to FOB Two on the fifth day. Our little road trip served its purpose of expunging some of the stress out of us. We burned out more of it with a trip to the PX in Pleiku. We went to the PX as a team, three Americans escorted by six small, fierce, heavily armed highland tribesmen. Needless to say, everyone, Vietnamese and American alike, gave us a wide berth. I bought a resupply of legal pads and large envelopes at the PX. I wrote Megan at least two letters a week. In return, she wrote me at least as often. Her letters were precious to me. She often sent me pictures of herself and our daughter Shelby. Roxie was her unofficial photographer, so some of the pictures were quite revealing. I had a collage of the pictures she'd sent me scotch-taped to the door of my wall locker, along with the sentimental Valentine's Day card she sent me. The irony of those innocent pictures on the door of where I stored my weapons of war was not lost on me. ------- On our first morning back to duty, Fred ambled over to the Tactical Operations Center and picked up our next mission. He returned fifteen minutes later with the mission packet. "We are running with the big dogs now, girls," he said. "Our target is Kilo-Nine, right on the main part of the trail." Fred took the map out of the packet and spread it on our card table. He pointed to an area out lined in red. The target area was eight grid squares long and six wide. There was an identical rectangle drawn to the North of our target. "The Intel weenies think the NVA 802d Transportation Regiment displaced down to this general area from up north. RT Alabama is inserting into the northern area the day after we hit the ground. Their mission is the same as ours, search for the 802d and try to snatch a prisoner." RT Alabama was one of the elite three or four teams that drew the toughest missions. The one-zero of RT Alabama was Joe Webber. Crazy Joe Webber was a real gunslinger, and his exploits both in and out of the field were legendary. Where most one-zeros lived the recon mantra of 'break contact, continue mission', Crazy Joe would just as often stand and fight it out. We studied the mission folder all morning, mostly bouncing around ideas on how to snatch an enemy soldier and how to avoid the counter-recon units known to be deployed with major regimental headquarters. The counter-recon units were a real threat, because they knew how we operated and had taken out a number of good teams using that knowledge. The counter-recon units used tracker dogs, surveilled likely landing zones and patrolled their area of responsibility aggressively. Taking all that into account, Fred and Rick started listing equipment and munitions we'd need that I studiously wrote down in the pocket sized note book Fred insisted we all carry. From item one, it was an eye-opening list. Number one was a couple of packets of cyanide and number two was six ounces of riot control agent OC (pepper spray) in powder form, along with three each one-quarter pound blocks of TNT. The cyanide would be sprinkled over some meat that Rick would carry in a sandwich baggie. If we were being tracked by dogs, he'd toss some of the meat on our back trail. The OC powder went into empty insect repellent bottles. Two of the bottles would be taped to each quarter pound block of TNT. A thirty second time pencil would fuse the explosives. If the meat didn't get rid of the dogs, Rick would activate one of the TNT bombs and drop it on the trail. When the TNT exploded, it would spread powdered OC over a large area. One good sniff of the OC would put a dog out of commission for days. Fred's concoctions might not win him many friends down at the ASPCA, but the alternative was letting the dogs lead the NVA right to us. Fred also wanted us to carry a second claymore, our protective masks (gas masks) and ten additional magazines of 5.56 ammo. I groaned when I realized that my rucksack and LBE (load bearing equipment) would now weigh about ninety pounds. We trained for a week before the mission. We rehearsed our IAD's again, but mostly we concentrated on setting up a deliberate ambush and capturing a prisoner. I wore my ruck packed with the extra weight during the training. It was a back-breaking load at first, but by the end of the week, I was use to it. Our plan was to spend four days looking for the 802d. If we didn't locate the regimental headquarters, we would find an extraction LZ near the trail. We would then set up a deliberate ambush within a klick of a serviceable LZ and wait for a small group of NVA to walk into our ambush. We would shoot the hell out of all the NVA except for the last man in the formation. Rick was responsible for wounding the last man. Once the man was down, Bing and Kai would grab the guy and all of us would haul ass to the extraction LZ. Rick was in charge of the snatch, because he had a match-grade, accurized M1911.45 pistol and he was a dead shot with it. We rehearsed using a squad from the Hatchet force as aggressors. When we could carry out the ambush and snatch in under two minutes, Fred informed the TOC that we were ready to launch. Walker also announced that RT Alabama was ready, so the TOC green lighted our insertion for three days later, St Patrick's Day, March 17, 1968. We spent the night of the sixteenth at Dak To and inserted across the fence into Laos early the next morning. The LZ Fred had selected was about seven miles from the Ho Chi Minh Trail and outside our target area. Fred was a master of finding remote landing zones just big enough for a helicopter. Fred said a long walk was better than landing in the middle of trouble. Fred was talking about the surveillance the NFA used on likely LZs. We hustled off the LZ, moved about fifty meters into the jungle and set up a perimeter. Fred waited ten minutes and when all was still quiet, he gestured for me to hand him the radio handset. "Team OK," Fred whispered into the handset, "but keep the gunships in the area for another fifteen, just in case." Fred handed me back the handset and shot the compass azimuth he had plotted for the first leg of our movement. Bing led us off at a brisk pace. Our first priority was to put some distance between us and the LZ, in case the helicopter activity attracted the bad guys' attention. We moved a thousand meters in an hour, with Rick and two of the yards erasing our back trail. In those thousand meters, we waded up two streams to make it tougher for tracker dogs to follow us. After a thousand meters, we looped back a hundred yards and set up a hasty ambush on our back trail. We hunkered down for an hour before Fred was convinced we had inserted undetected. For the rest of the day, we zigged and zagged through the jungle in a broken indirect route towards our objective. Fred had us crawl in to a thick stand of bamboo at night fall. We were all bone tired, but we were within a mile of the trail, and as far as we knew, the NVA did not have a clue that we were in their midst. Recon teams picked the worst possible places for their RONs (remain over night) because comfort took a back seat to security. We put out claymores, then Fred encrypted a situation report and I called it into Leghorn. Leghorn was a mountain top radio relay site in Cambodia, accessible only by helicopter. When we were across the border, we only had two means of communications. During the day we had radio with Covey, the Forward Air Controller in a small airplane that flew constantly back and forth between the teams on the ground. Riding with the FAC was a recon guy called a Covey Rider. It was comforting for us to know that someone who understood what it was like on the ground was with the Air Force FAC. At night, we had Leghorn. Leghorn did not have access to air assets to come to our aid like Covey, so a good hidey-hole at night was imperative. We moved out at the butt-crack of dawn the next morning. Our movement was slower and more cautious as we snuck up to the major north-south roadway. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was not one single road. Instead, it was a complex network of roads, high speed trails and foot paths. The major axis of the system was north-south, with numerous branches running east into Vietnam, and a few roads and trails that led into the interior of Laos. The North Vietnamese and their Pathet Lao allies exerted complete control over western Laos. There were probably thirty thousand NVA permanently stationed along the trail. The only challenges to their control were the few dozen SOG recon teams, only five or six of which were on the ground at any one time. At a few minutes after eight, we stopped and listened intently to the radio as RT Alabama was inserted. We breathed a sigh of relief when we heard 'team OK' and continued our mission. We reached a well-concealed one-lane truck road near noon. The road snaked its way beneath the triple canopy jungle, completely invisible from above. This was my first glimpse of a part of the trail capable of truck traffic, and I was less than impressed. To me, it looked like any of the dozens of old logging roads I'd seen when I worked as a linesman for Georgia Power. It was hard to believe that this was the main avenue for resupplying half a million soldiers. We skirted the edge of the trail using the slow silent movement technique that was becoming natural to me. Although my steps seemed slow as molasses, I was constantly looking around me, I was learning to be 'situationally aware'; automatically scanning for answers to questions like: Where was the closest cover? Which direction would I run if we had to beat feet? Where did the jungle offer some cover and concealment as I moved? We slinked along for maybe seven hundred meters before Bing, the point man, signaled for us to stop. We dropped to one knee, alternately facing left and right, as Rick and Kai watched our back trail. Bing motioned Fred forward and the two of them crept silently towards the edge of the trail. We stayed frozen in place and alert to every sound for the forty minutes Fred and Bing were gone. When Fred returned, he walked back to Rick's position. He tapped me on the shoulder as he passed and motioned for me to follow him. When we reached Rick, we huddled our heads together. "There is a commie work detail up around the corner a few hundred meters from here. We are going to watch them to see what they are up to," Fred whispered. There were ten khaki-clad soldiers and eighteen laborers in the familiar black pajamas and conical straw hats. The laborers were manning shovels and pick mattocks, while the soldiers hacked down vegetation with axes and machetes. They were busy hacking a turnout off the side of the road. The area they were working in was under deep canopy where no sunlight ever reached. A turnout was a spot where trucks going one way could pull over to allow a vehicle traveling in the opposite direction to pass. The turn outs kept traffic flowing in both directions on the single lane road. We observed the workers for a few minutes and Fred snapped some photographs, then we pulled back into the jungle for a powwow. Running into the work party this early in the mission had been an incredible stroke of luck, as they might lead us straight to the regimental headquarters. On the other hand, the work detail might be part of a small unit that was stationed along the trail to maintain it. After some discussion, Fred decided that it wouldn't be a waste of a day to follow the work detail back to where they came from. We spread out about two hundred meters above them and settled in for the afternoon. When they moved out somewhere around five, we were right behind them, shadowing them from up on the hillside. We had to move faster than our normal deliberate pace to keep them in sight, but thankfully, the work detail was tired enough not to be in any big hurry. The NVA soldiers turned off the road onto a path on the side opposite us. Fred spread us out again, then he and Bing crawled down to the edge of the road for a closer look at where the work detail had turned. The two were gone for a much shorter period this time. Fred moved us further up the hillside away from the road then put us in a tight perimeter. Fred took Rick and me aside and told us how he planned on crossing the road so we could reconnoiter the area the work detail disappeared into. We had a drill for crossing a danger area, but Fred did not want to cross the road any where close to where the soldiers entered the jungle. The NVA were sure to have security out, even if it was minimal here in what they considered their back yard. We back tracked five hundred meters and found a place to hole up for a few hours. At ten o'clock in the coal black night, we moved down to the edge of the road. Using our IAD for crossing a danger area, Fred sent two men rushing across the road. The two men split up and checked the other side for a hundred meters up and down the road and two hundred meters into the jungle. When they were satisfied no one was over there, they came back and gave Fred the all clear signal. Fred then gave the go sign and we all jumped to our feet and rushed across the road. From jungle to jungle, we were probably exposed for fewer than ten seconds. We moved due east across the small flat valley the road meandered through. We weren't more than a couple of hundred meters off the road when we heard the distinctive sound of diesel engines firing up. At least three trucks rumbled onto the road and drove past us headed south. We moved up the ridgeline on the east side of the valley and found us a tangle of vegetation to crawl into for our RON. Fred and I encrypted a Sitrep that included the trucks, and I radioed it to Leghorn before dropping into an exhausted sleep. We were up and moving the next morning as soon as Covey was on station. We were at our sneaky best as we homed in on the area where the trucks had started. Fred figured it was probably a truck park instead of the regimental base camp, but it would make a nice target for the Air Force anyway. The truck parks along the trail were heavily camouflaged jungle clearings where the trucks hid during the day. The trucks moved almost exclusively under the cover of darkness. About an hour and a half later, our string of luck ran out, when we walked right up on an expertly conceal NVA two man outpost. The NVA were as startled as we were when we appeared as if by magic right in front of them. Before they could react, Bing hosed them down. Bing's burst of 5.56 MM alerted the next OP located about seventy-five meters behind the first, and the guards in it lit the jungle up with AK rounds. Fred initiated our break contact IAD, and we peeled off, heading back the way we'd come. Bullets whizzed overhead like angry hornets as I knelt down and emptied my magazine, firing full auto. When my bolt locked to the rear, I rapidly reloaded then stood up and followed Fred's retreating form. By the time the volume of fire from what ever we'd run into increased enough to be effective, we were long gone. We ran along our back trail for about a hundred meters then Fred had us veer left so we could put distance between us, whatever we'd run into, and the road. After another labored hundred meters, we slowed to a quick but cautious pace. As soon as we weren't running, Fred pointed at me then pointed up in the air. I nodded, unclipped the handset off my web gear and keyed the mic. "Covey, Kilo-Nine is evading after contact," I said as calmly as I could. "Roger, Kilo-Nine, we are headed your way," the Covey Rider replied. We hustled the three hundred meters across the narrow valley then climbed straight up the hillside for a hundred more before Fred called a halt. We took up a defensive position facing downhill and listened for any pursuit. It was thankfully quiet down in the valley. Fred waved me and Rick over to him and briefed us on what he suspected. "No one chasing us makes me think that we walked up on the perimeter of a truck park with no combat troops. That will change as soon as they contact their headquarters. We need to be well away from here before they can get a search organized. We'll move north and have Covey call in an airstrike on that truck park. Maybe we'll get lucky and hit something." Fred sent Rick and a few of the Yards up hill to leave a false trail, then we turned north and paralleled the road, moving our stealthiest. Fred called the coordinates of the truck park to Covey as we snuck along. Thirty minutes later, a pair of F-100s screamed down the valley and unloaded a crap load of napalm and cluster bombs behind us. Fred kept us moving for another seven hours without a break. By the time we crawled into our RON, my legs felt as if they were made of rubber and my rucksack weighed a ton. We had covered about two and a half klicks during the move. We constantly changed direction and looped back twice, so we were actually only a kilometer or less from where we'd made contact. We were at the north end of the valley and the valley floor narrowed considerably. It was an active night for truck traffic on the road somewhere below us. We counted at least a dozen headed south and half that many going north. The next morning, we moved down hill to find the trail again. We didn't have to go far to find it, because it was at the base of the ridge we were on, not three hundred meters below us. It was no wonder the trucks had sounded so close. We moved out of the valley over a ridgeline into a second valley that was wider than the one we left. From our map study, Fred thought this area was our best bet for finding the 802d in this AO. We crossed the road again that night and spent the next two days dodging enemy patrols. There was a lot of NVA activity in the valley, but besides a few long houses and another truck park, we didn't find much. RT Alabama was having about the same luck we were, as far as finding anything. However, they had been in heavy contact twice, and had to evade for a full day and night to shake trackers. On day five, Covey told us to find a place to hide because Crazy Joe was about to attempt a POW snatch, and had already called for an extraction. He was cutting his mission short, because he had a wounded American and the team was running low on munitions. It would have been foolish for us to risk getting into trouble when everyone was concentrating on pulling Alabama out, so we found us a hidey-hole up on the ridge and waited. All three of us Americans huddled around the radio. We could hear Covey's side of any air to ground traffic, so we had a good idea of what was happening as RT Alabama's exfil turned into a gigantic mess. Webber and his team ambushed a small patrol and actually had a prisoner in hand when they made a dash for their extraction LZ. The trouble was that a full company of NVA regulars was ten minutes behind the patrol Webber ambushed, and before you could say spit, the company was hot on RT Alabama's heels. Webber made it to the LZ and set up a hasty defense with the helicopter inbound, twenty minutes away. The first Kingbee flared into the LZ as two gunships chewed up the jungle around the beleaguered team. The CH-34 was about twenty feet above the LZ when an RPG round blew it out of the air. It took two hours of nonstop airstrikes and gunship runs before the team could finally be extracted. We found out later that Alabama's prisoner was killed during one of the NVA attacks. The team's One-one was also KIA, as were two of their Montagnards and all three VNAF crewmen of the shot down Kingbee. When we called in our Sitrep that night, we received orders to stay on the ground two more days, and to continue reconnoitering to the north, on into what had been Alabama's target area. The brainiacs back in the puzzle palace decided that Alabama must have been close to something to garner all that attention. Fred moved us back across the road to the west side at 0400 the next morning, because the terrain was better for us to maneuver. We cautiously moved through the jungle, knowing that with Alabama out of the field, the dinks would now concentrate on us. Sure enough, we made contact with a squad-sized NVA patrol later that morning. We fired them up and sent them running back down the mountain. That contact was the first time I took an aimed shot at an enemy soldier. I didn't hesitate or even think about it as I fixed my sights on him and sent him to meet his maker. We were in contact again that afternoon, as the increasingly heavy enemy activity forced us to loop further west. For the next twenty-four hours, we dodged patrols and twice shook off trackers. Fred was masterful in the way he anticipated and stayed ahead of our pursuers. By early morning on the seventh day, Fred had had enough, so we set up a mechanical ambush with the extra claymores we'd brought with us. Half of an NVA platoon obligingly walked into the kill zone less than an hour later. We ambushed the patrol to bring all the searchers into this area, so we could change direction and get behind them. As soon as we blew the claymores, we put out booby-traps, using Rick's TNT and pepper powder concoctions attached to trip wires, and snuck away heading south. We hustled southwest for a couple of klicks, found a suitable LZ and called for an extraction. I realized as I sat in the door of the helicopter headed back to Dak To, that I was one lucky son of a bitch to be on Fred's team. Even though we were being chased by probably a battalion of hardcore NVA regulars, Fred had calmly out-foxed them repeatedly. We'd taken out at least thirty of them without a scratch among us, and Fred called in an airstrike that left them with a lap full of napalm as a parting gift. We hadn't found the 802d, but we had narrowed the search area down to about five grid squares for the next team they sent. I think that I finally proved that I belonged on the team while we were out there in Kilo-Nine. Yeah, I was scared out of my gourd most of the time, but I kept my composure and did my job. ------- Chapter 8 After our mission to Kilo-Nine, we spent another five days down in Nha Trang, lazing around on the beach. We went back to the same hotel and frequented the same go-go club as before. Fred and Rick liked the places, and both of them had steady girls at the club. I was still the married fifth wheel, but I did my best not to be a party-pooper. Su-Lin was a big help in that regard, as she was my cover, and Rick's largess made the nights she spent in my company easy money. On this trip, I had photographs of Megan and Shelby to show Su-Lin. She made a fuss over my daughter and insisted on buying a small Jade Buddha necklace for her that she had blessed by the monks at a Buddhist Temple. Su-Lin also helped me find a good deal on an Opal ring for Megan's twenty-fifth birthday. Let me tell you, that little girl could haggle! I was almost embarrassed by the price she harangued the poor jeweler into accepting. I teased her about it once we were outside the shop. "You can't call me Cheap Charlie anymore, after what I just witnessed," I said. She laughed and slapped my arm playfully. "You still big Cheap Charlie, but you okay anyway," she said in her cutely accented English. I did not look down on Su-Lin for what she did for a living. To my mind, she was doing what she had to do to support her family. In her situation, I wouldn't have blinked once before doing the same thing. What I did feel bad about was her being so young and having to give up her dream of becoming a nurse. Su-Lin was a reminder for me that not all the victims of war were combatants. Big changes came about as soon as we returned to duty. The biggest was Rick leaving our team to take over as one-zero of RT Washington. I moved up to one-one, but there were no replacements available, so I was still stuck with humping the radio. Our stand-down ended on a Thursday. On the following Sunday, we flew up to Dak To with our gear to spend a week pulling Bright Light duty. Bright Light duty meant we were the forward deployed quick reaction search and rescue team for both downed aircraft and recon teams in trouble over in southern Laos and northern Cambodia. Since the code name for a rescue mission was 'Bright Light', the stand-by team was known as the Bright Light team. Bright Light duty was rotated among the mission ready recon teams. Our quarters at Dak To were three bunkers next to the helicopter pad at the southern end of the camp's runway. Part of our job at Dak To was to help rearm and refuel helicopters working with teams across the fence. We were also integrated into the security scheme, because our bunkers were part of the camp's perimeter. Thankfully, we had a quiet week at Dak To, our main excitement was sending off two teams that were inserting in relatively quiet targets around the tri-border area just across the border. Both teams were on bomb damage assessment missions after B-52 strikes. BDA's were short one and two day missions to check out how much real damage the bombs actually did. While we were at Dak To, Fred talked a Huey pilot into letting us practice extracting on 'strings'. Strings were ropes tossed out of a hovering helicopter that we hooked onto with snap links. Strings were used for extractions from areas in which the helicopter couldn't land. We had special harnesses called STABO rigs that we wore to support our weight. We also practiced rappelling into an LZ to small to land on. Free rappelling from a helicopter wearing a sixty pound rucksack was my definition of the exact opposite of fun. And while I was dangling under the helicopter flying a couple of thousand feet above the jungle at eighty miles an hour, all I could think about was how well I'd put on my STABO rig and how old was the rope I was hanging from. I was not looking forward to using either technique on a real mission. RT Alaska flew in and relieved us on Easter morning, the 14th of April. That day was my one hundredth in country. One hundred down, three hundred to go. On Monday morning, Fred made the ritual trip down to the TOC to pick up our next mission. He was back in thirty minutes with a target folder and looking none too happy. I gave him a raised eyebrow look as he tossed the folder onto the card table with a snort. "We drew a Psyops mission," he said disgustedly. "And not only that, but we have to take the new assistant S-3 with us." Pysops was Army speak for Psychological Operations, and the new assistant S-3 was an arrogant spit-and-polish Captain named Kress. Fred stomped around for a minute more, then took a calming breath. "The S-3 told me we have to include Kress in on our mission planning, but I want us both on the same sheet of music first." I nodded my understanding as Fred took out the warning order and map. "Our target is Hotel-Eleven. It is about five klicks west of where we found the bunkers In Hotel-Eight. RT Missouri found a good sized cache site with three bunkers full of rice, ammo and medical supplies. We are tasked with visiting the cache and dropping off some Pole Bean." He saw my confused look and explained. "Pole Bean is doctored ammunition that explodes when Charlie tries to use it. The SOG brass down in Saigon thinks that fucking with their ammo will make Charlie lose confidence in it. We are supposed to hump in ten rigged 82 MM mortar rounds and a dozen magazines of 7.62. We go in on day one, find the cache and rig it during the next two and exfil on day four. The S-3 says it's a piece of cake with minimal bad guys in the area. That's why he's sending Captain Kress along. The old man wants the TOC officers to spend at least one mission on the ground to see how we operate. He thinks doing that will make them do a better job of selecting targets." Fred did not sound as if he was buying any of it. And if Fred didn't like it, I damned sure didn't, because I had total trust in Fred's judgment. Fred sent me to track down the captain. When I returned with Kress, Fred was sitting at the card table with the map spread out in front of him. Fred did not stand up when we came into the team room, which didn't sit well with the by-the-book Captain Kress. I sighed inwardly as Fred coolly appraised Kress. I hated the idea of being in the middle of a 'who has the biggest dick' contest. Thankfully, Fred defused the situation by standing up and sticking out his hand. "Welcome aboard Captain," Fred said cordially, "ready to run some recon?" When the Captain nodded and took a seat, I knew that the Colonel Acton, the FOB Commander, must have laid down the law to Kress. Acton knew where his bread was buttered, and that certainly wasn't with the rear echelon planners over at the TOC. The colonel knew he could find a new assistant S-3 with a thirty second phone call, but there were probably only two dozen men in Vietnam who could take a team a hundred miles into enemy territory with any hope of coming back out. Fred was respectful but firm as he told Kress how things worked on RT Montana, and what was expected of the captain. "This is my team, Captain, and we do things my way. You are free to offer any suggestions you want right up until I make my decision. After that, you need to shut up, pick up your rucksack and move out. On this team, rank doesn't count, your position on the team does. Because he has more experience, Opie is my one-one and second in command. You are the one-two and would normally hump the PRC-25, but I'm leaving the radio with Opie." Kress looked unhappy about everything Fred said, but he nodded his head in understanding and we got down to the business of planning the mission. The next morning, Kress fell in with us for first call and PT and he ate with Fred and me at the messhall. After breakfast, we formed up in patrol order and walked out to the range. Fred put Kress in front of me in the order of march and we walked through a couple of IADs. Kress acted as if he was bored by the drill, but demonstrated that he at least knew what was expected of him. The following day, Fred went on his aerial recon and left me in charge of issuing our basic load of ammo, grenades, claymores and rations. I also helped Kress rig his web gear and ruck so it didn't jingle. When Fred returned, we finalized our plan and rehearsed our brief-back. When Fred was satisfied Kress and I had the plan down pat, he walked over to the TOC and declared us ready to brief the commander. The S-3 scheduled our brief-back for the next morning, and tentatively scheduled our insertion for the day after. Colonel Acton approved our plan after quizzing Kress on parts of it. Fred inspected everyone's gear that afternoon, and distributed the doctored mortar rounds and AK ammo. Captain Kress didn't look happy that he ended up with three mortar rounds, but he didn't say anything. Kress became quieter the nearer we came to our launch window. That bothered me, so the first chance I had, I expressed my concern to Fred. "Yeah," he acknowledged, "I noticed that too. Keep an eye on him Jody, because I don't trust that dickhead for a second." Captain Lance Kress was a West Point graduate and was quick to let you know that his father was a Major General commanding an armored division in Germany. He was on a tour extension after serving with the Americal Division down in Chu Li. Kress wasn't Special Forces qualified, but as a staff officer, he really didn't need to be. We all figured he was in SOG strictly to have it on his resume when the promotion board for majors convened. According to Rick Pierpont, even the other officers detested the guy. Kress was fidgety during our insertion and slow off the helicopter when we hit the LZ. He finally made an ungainly exit when Bo, our zero-one nudged him out the door. Fred came in on the second Kingbee, and we all dashed into the edge of the jungle. Fred radioed in the team okay and the helicopters roared off back towards Dak To. Kress was a little wild-eyed, but he fell into his place in the formation, and off we went. We had barely covered five hundred meters before we ran smack into a platoon of Viet Cong headed towards the LZ we just left. We didn't know it at the time, but a VC battalion had recently crossed over into this area to relax and regroup after three months of hard fighting against the 4th Infantry Division. It was their cache that RT Missouri had discovered. So much for the S-3's piece of cake. Bing started our break contact IAD and dashed back down the line. When Kress saw Bing hauling ass in the opposite direction, he panicked and followed the point man. After I expended my nineteen rounds towards the VC, I dashed back down our back trail and caught up with the team. When I arrived, Fred and Kress were in a heated conversation while the Yards milled around uneasily. As soon as I trotted up, Kress spun towards me. "Call for an extraction Jamison, I'm declaring a Prairie Fire," Kress whispered stridently. Prairie Fire was the code word teams used to declare an emergency that required their immediate extraction. When a team declared a Prairie Fire, it meant they were about to be over run. A Prairie Fire emergency brought out the Bright Light team and the Hatchet Force, along with every aircraft within a hundred miles. I hesitated and glanced over at Fred. Fred shook his head negatively. Kress saw me look at Fred and grabbed my arm. "Don't look at him, Sergeant, I'm the senior man here," he hissed. I was uncomfortable about disobeying a direct order, but Fred was my team leader, not Kress. I pulled my arm out of his grip and shook my head. When I looked over at Fred again, he had his Car 15 leveled at Kress's chest. "Take his weapon, Opie," Fred whispered calmly. I snatched the M-16 out of Kress's hands and Fred poked him in the ribs with the flash-suppressor of his Car-15. "We are moving out, Captain, and I suggest you keep up, or we'll leave you here," Fred said. The entire fiasco with Kress lasted less than a minute, and we were on our way again before the VC could get their shit together to give chase. I called in the contact as soon as we started moving. Charlie didn't appear too eager to challenge us after our display of fire power, so we shook them easily. We made a wide loop around the cache's location and crawled into an RON about a thousand meters north of it. The next morning, Covey was overhead bright and early with some instructions for us, based on our Sitrep from the night before. The TOC wanted to know why the VC were suddenly occupying an area that had been empty ten days ago. The S-2 had the theory that Charlie was there for the cache, but they wanted us to verify that. The problem with that scenario was that the VC knew we were in the area. Covey had the cure for that, however, and later in the afternoon, he rode herd on a fake extraction from a LZ about two clicks further from the cache than the infil LZ. We laid low until the ruse had been run, then we started creeping towards the cache. Captain Kress had started acting like he had good sense when we hit the RON the night before. Fred accepted his apology and gave him back his shooting iron. He was still okay the next morning, so Fred put him in the formation between Kip the interpreter and Lum, one of our grenadiers. Lum had loaded his M-79 with a shotgun round and was watching Kress like a hawk. We crept down towards the cache location until we were within five hundred meters; then we spread out until we were about twenty meters apart and found a concealed position to lie in. When we were in place, Fred and Bing sniper-crawled towards the cache. Three agonizingly long hours later, Bing and Fred came low-crawling back up the hill. Fred found Kress and me, and briefed us on what he'd found. "There must be at least three hundred VC down there, and they are planning on staying a while. They have already built a couple of additional bunkers and a couple of dozen bamboo huts." We stayed where we were while Fred passed the news up to Covey for relay to the TOC. Thirty minutes later, Covey had a return message from the TOC. The TOC wanted us to pull back about two thousand meters and secure an LZ we would find there. Colonel Acton was sending a Hatchet Company to deal with the VC. We snuck back over the ridgeline and then hustled down into a small valley. We found a place to hide overnight, and the next morning we located the LZ. The LZ was a marshy, elephant grass covered clearing along side a sluggish stream. The area around the LZ was too open for a recon team to use for infiltration, but secured by us, it was an ideal spot to land a hundred-man company. We scouted around the marsh in two inward-spiraling loops, and didn't find anything or anyone. We advised Covey that the area was clear, and he told us that the helicopters were twenty minutes out. Sure enough, twenty five minutes later, four cobra gunships swooped over the mountain to our west and right behind them lumbered five Kingbees and two chase Hueys. The Kingbees dropped into the valley two at a time and disgorged their cargo. I could not believe the number of Yards packed into each of the choppers, it was like watching the clowns exit that little car they had at the circus. Pokie Ramos hopped off the third helicopter and was all business as he formed up his platoon and moved them into the jungle. After a hurried conference between Fred and the American captain that commanded the Hatchet Force, RT Montana led the way back towards the VC camp. Even though the Hatchet Force soldiers exercised good noise discipline, to us they sounded like a herd of stampeding buffalo. I had a good chuckle when a much more relaxed and focused Captain Kress commented on that. Kress was mimicking the way I moved almost perfectly. We took a meal break about a klick from the encampment a little after high noon. After eating, our team and Pokie's platoon split off from the Hatchet Force and headed around the camp. We were going to be a blocking force to keep the VC from escaping in that direction. We made it to our designated area in about an hour without being detected or challenged, but we heard two separate fire fights erupt behind us. Pokie put his platoon on line about five hundred meters from the camp with us anchoring the left flank, and called his status into his commander. His boss said for us to keep our heads down, because he was calling in an airstrike. Ten minutes later, Covey flew over and fired a couple of white phosphorous rockets. The rockets knifed through the jungle canopy, exploding a hundred meters north of the VC camp. The Hatchet Force commander reported that to Covey. With the smoke from the Willie Pete as a reference point, the zoomies rolled in a minute later. It was nerve-wracking to hear the jets screaming towards us, jettisoning their deadly cargo, because the triple canopy jungle kept us from seeing where the bombs were going. I mean we were only five hundred meters from the camp, and five hundred meters wasn't that big an error for a fast mover. All I could do about it was screw my eyeballs shut, put my hands over my ears and hug the ground. The rippling concussion of the bombs bounced me around on the ground as shrapnel and displaced dirt peppered the foliage above me. None of the bombs were dangerously close, but a five hundred pound piece of ordnance still tosses hunks of metal a long way. The two jets dropped four bombs each; thankfully all of them were HE. The thought of napalm splashing around in the tree tops scared the hell out of me. I think part of my fear of napalm came from this song the recon guys sang when they were drunk at the club. It was to the tune of Camp Town Races and went like this: Your son just died in Vietnam, doo-dah, doo-dah, He got hit with a napalm bomb, oh doo-dah day. Gonna burn all night, gonna burn all day, The only thing that didn't burn was his green beret. There were about six stanzas to that little ditty, but I'm sure you get the drift. As soon as Covey called all clear from the bomb run, we jumped to our feet, dressed our line and started towards the camp. I glanced over at the captain to see how he was handling things. He seemed to be fine, as he had his war face on and his weapon at the ready. We advanced towards the camp at a good pace, the well trained Hatchet Platoon and our Yards keeping the line dressed and maintaining their intervals. Kress and I were at the far left flank of the line formation. Fred was behind us to control our movement; while Pokie and another NCO I'd never met did the same for the Hatchet troops. Fred called RT Montana to a halt after we'd covered about three hundred meters. When we stopped, the entire formation followed suit to keep the line dressed. Fred walked over and had a short conference with Pokie, then walked back to join the captain and me. "Hey Lance, how they hanging?" Fred asked. Captain Kress grinned and grabbed his crotch. "They're hanging low, Fred. I misplaced them yesterday, but you and Opie helped me find 'em," Kress replied. Fred looked at Kress for a few seconds then smiled and stuck out his hand. "Good deal," Fred said, "next mission you carry the radio." Kress shook Fred's hand and grinned. Fred had stopped us at the top of a small natural terrace on the side of the hill. Below us, the jungle vegetation was sparse at ground level, because the canopy overhead was so thick. We had twenty-five to fifty meters of clear field of fire in front of us. We all found a little cover and concealment and waited. Pokie brought one of his machine guns down to our flank, and then he and Fred walked the line, putting the Yards in two-man positions. Just as I was wondering what was holding up the attack by the rest of the Hatchet Company, all hell broke loose in front of us, as the other two platoons hit the camp with everything they had. Before I could wonder about the small amount of return fire from the camp, about a hundred VC came boiling up the hill in front of us. We held our fire until Pokie blew a loud blast on his whistle, then shot the hell out of the poor schmucks coming up the hill, and tossed a few grenades down on them for good measure. Those we didn't drop parted around us like a wave hitting a rock and continued running pell-mell up the hill. The assault force cleared the camp while we provided security, then we moved down to join them. The assault force had one Yard KIA and three wounded. Pokie's platoon and our team came through the engagement unscratched. Amazingly, the ammo bunker was undamaged, so we pulled out ten cases of 82MM mortar ammo and salted a Pole Bean round in each. We scattered the AK magazines and the cases with the rigged mortar rounds in the edge of the jungle, then emplaced a couple of claymores on 30 minute time pencils to blow the bunker. We were out of the area in fewer than twenty minutes, leaving at least a hundred dead VC, and leaving with two slightly wounded prisoners. The prisoners were not NVA so there was no reward for capturing them, but they still might know something useful. We spent the night on a hilltop with the Hatchet Company, happy to finally sleep in a comfortable place. The next morning, the Hatchet guys cut and blasted an LZ right there on top of that hill, and we extracted as pretty as you please. Neither Fred nor I ever mentioned Captain Kress' little breakdown, and to his credit, Kress changed his attitude about the 'undisciplined rabble' that ran recon. He never did accompany us to the woods again, but he did fill in for the one-two on RT Iowa once, and by all accounts, he did a good job. Our stand-down was different without Rick's money, but we still managed to have a good time, thanks to Fred's girlfriend and Su-Lin. We shared a double room at the hotel to save money. That worked because I traveled around with Su Lin and her younger sisters during the day, while Fred entertained his girl Kim in our room. In the evenings they made sure we drank cheap at the bar where they worked. When we returned to the FOB, we received a new temporary addition to our team. His name was Glenn Parmiteir. He was an experienced recon man from Command and Control South, who needed a change of scenery after getting into a drunken brawl with the camp sergeant major down there. He was only with us for one mission so Fred could pass judgment on his ability to be a one-zero at our FOB. Glenn went with us on a mission to tap a phone line RT Indiana had found in target area Juliet-Four. Fred let Glenn run the team most of the time, and the guy was pretty damned good. We found the phone cable after a two day search, and tapped into it using wires that had sewing machine needles soldered to one end. The other end of the wires plugged into a small battery powered, voice activated, reel to reel tape recorder. We hung around undetected for two days, until both of the tapes we brought were full. We set up on a nearby high speed trail while we waited and took pictures of everyone and everything that passed by. Oh yeah, and we took some John Wayne hero pictures of each other and the yards. We exfilled after six days without ever breaking a hard sweat. Glenn ended up as the one-zero of RT Arizona. Glenn was good in the woods, but he was a drunken asshole in camp. The little excursion to Juliet-Four and the stand down afterward took us to early June. I had been in country for almost five months by then, and had four trips across the fence to my credit. I was an experienced recon man now, only one mission away from the five it took to be considered an old hand. Once you passed the magic five mission mark, no one said a word if you opted out of recon. I had no plans of leaving as long as Fred was around, but I'd leave in a New York minute if I was stuck on a team with a shithead for a one-zero. I was a good one-one, but I was honest enough with myself to know that I wasn't one-zero material. The successful one-zeros had an innate ability to coolly and quickly make superior decisions under even the worst sort of pressure. I could keep my head and do my job, but I'd never be able to think on my feet like Fred. We didn't receive a new mission when we got back, because the monsoon season was on us and missions were stacking up because of the weather. After a week of doing whatever training Fred could devise, we were still third in line. We took that weekend off. So on Sunday morning, I was sitting in our room writing a letter to Megan, when Fred burst through the door. "Rick's team just declared a Prairie Fire and the Bright Light team is socked in at Dak To, so a Hatchet Platoon is going in for them. They have room for us on their choppers." I jumped off my bed, shrugged on my web gear, grabbed my CAR-15 and followed Fred out the door without saying a word. ------- Chapter 9 We trotted over to the helicopter pad and reported to the Hatchet Platoon Sergeant, SFC Davis. Davis shook hands with us and put us with a group of six Yards. "I need you two on the second bird so I'll have at least one American on each helicopter. "Shoe will be on the third, and Smithy will ride drag. As soon as you unass the chopper, move out twenty meters to the rear and take up a defensive positions from six to nine o'clock." 'Shoe' was Gary Shumate and 'Smithy' was TJ Smith; both were staff sergeants assigned to the Hatchet Company. Willie Davis was a straight arrow NCO on his second tour at FOB-2. He'd run recon his first tour. Willie was also from Valdosta, although he seldom visited there anymore. "Too many bigots down there," he explained to me over a beer at the club one night. Remembering the turmoil the town went through when schools were desegregated, I couldn't argue with him about it. The Recon first sergeant came out to the helicopter pad as we were watching a string of Hueys break through the clouds and swoop down in front of us. Surprisingly, Top had his web gear and his CAR-15. It was surprising to see him set to go with us, because as far as I knew, he was banned from going to the field because he had been put in for the Medal of Honor. The muckity-mucks down in Saigon didn't want a potential MOH war hero killed before he received his award. SFC Harland saw us gawking and shrugged. "Down-graded to a DSC, so I'm a free man and that used to be my team," he explained. Fred looked dubious, but didn't argue. Six UH-I 'Huey' helicopters from Pleiku touched down in front of us as four Cobra gunships circled over head. The Hatchet platoon piled on the first four choppers and a SF medic named Mitchell and SFC Harland hopped onto one of the chase birds. As soon as we boarded the Huey, the door gunner handed Fred a set of earphones with a boom mike so he could talk to the pilot and listen to radio traffic from the Covey flying support for Rick's team. Fred relayed the pertinent points to me, and none of the news was good. Rick was in target area Juliet-Eleven, running a bomb damage assessment mission following a massive B-52 strike. Not fifteen minutes after inserting that morning, Rick found out the thousand tons of bombs the big lumbering bombers dropped didn't do anything but rearrange the jungle, because the NVA were snug in their tunnel complexes. They came out in great numbers, though, to greet Rick and the boys on RT Washington. Now Rick and his team were in a world of hurt, hunkered down in a bomb crater with hundreds of NVA trying to encircle them. The team had two KIAs, every man on the team had been hit at least once, and they were running low on ammunition. The only thing keeping them from being overrun was a small break in the weather that allowed Covey to get close air support to them. The weather was forecast to close in again by mid afternoon, so we had less than two hours to get them out of there. Forty minutes later, the helicopter formation dropped through a break in the clouds and sped along at treetop level. We popped up over a ridge and before us loomed an area about six klicks long and two wide, that was as cratered as the face of the moon. About two thirds of the way down the length of the devastation, and off to the west side of it, an A1E Sky Raider was making a bomb run. That was our target, as the pilots nosed down into the valley. Covey reported only sporadic small arms fire around the two chopper LZ he'd picked out two hundred meters behind the beleaguered team, so the lead helicopter with Willie Davis on it and ours peeled off and dropped towards the LZ. The two Hueys flew in fast and flared at the last minute to minimize exposure to ground fire. We were about ten feet above the ground when a couple of 12.7MM Dushka machine guns opened up on us. Willie's bird suddenly dropped like a stone and flipped on its side, the rotor blades digging into the muddy ground. We were luckier, as our pilot reacted by pulling pitch and pouring on the power. As we lurched forward, Fred slapped my arm and jumped out. Like an idiot, I followed him. The rain-soaked ground cushioned our impact, but the fifteen foot drop still jolted me. By the time I got to my feet, Fred was running towards the downed chopper. When we arrived at the crash, Willie and most of his boys had crawled out of the wreckage and were busy pulling out the pilots and other wounded. Tracer trails gave away the heavy machineguns' location, and a pair of Cobras was firing them up with their miniguns. Although some of them were pretty beat up, everyone on Willie's ship survived the crash. We helped Willie get the air crew and two injured Yards into a bomb crater. Willie had things under control, so Fred pulled out his URC-10 survival radio and called Covey. "Tell Pretty-boy that Pigpen and Opie are coming in on his six, and not to shoot us." Covey rogered and told Fred to stand by. A minute later, his was back on the air. "Pretty-boy said wilco and asked what took you so long?" Heartened that Rick was at least in good enough shape to make a joke, Fred and I jumped out of Davis' crater. Bent over at the waist and zigzagging like drunken sailors, we hauled ass towards Rick's position. Without the weight of my rucksack and fueled by fear and adrenalin, Bob Hayes couldn't have kept up with me as I sprinted. I dived over the lip of Rick's crater and two seconds later, Fred tumbled in after me. We were both still gasping for breath when we crawled over to where Rick, his one-two and two yards were crouching. The bodies of his one-one and three Yards were laid out on the floor of the crater behind them. Each crouching man had a couple of magazines stacked on the rim of the crater in front of them, and the one-two had two grenades. Rick was in bad shape, he'd lost a lot of blood from a sucking chest wound and a shattered femur. He still managed a weak smile as he shook our hands. Fred and I had just finished redistributing our ammo among Rick and his men, when the NVA launched a furious platoon-sized assault. I guess the commies were making one last push to wipe out RT Washington before the air support drove them off. It was touch and go for a few minutes, but we managed to hold them off, and the A1s and Cobras finally pushed the bad guys back. When it was quiet in front of us, Fred and I started doing what we could for the wounded. Every American running recon carried a bag of blood volume expander taped to the yoke of their web gear with OD green hundred-mile-an-hour tape. The Ringer Lactate bags had an IV set up with a fourteen gauge needle attached to it with surgical tubing. It was Ironic that just five weeks ago when Rick was still on the team, we had practice starting an IV on each other. Fred started the IV on Rick as I sealed off the entrance wound to his chest. The remaining helicopters finally swooped in and inserted the rest of the Hatchet platoon and in minutes Willie Davis and his boys had set up a perimeter around Rick's last-stand crater. Mitch took over the Medic duties, while SFC Harland called in the second chase helicopter. The first chase ship had dropped off Doc Mitchell and Harland, then flew off with the downed crew and the other wounded from the crash. The chase ship pilot sat his bird down on a flat spot twenty five meters away and we loaded RT Washington aboard it. Like the good one-zero he was, Rick refused to get on the bird until the rest of his team, including his dead, were aboard. It was not until Rick was in the air that I noticed my side was throbbing and covered in blood. I guess a ricochet or a piece of shrapnel had laid open a four inch long gash in my side just below my last rib. Mitch slapped a pressure dressing on the furrow and told me he'd stitch me up back at the FOB dispensary. Forty-five minutes later, Mitch and Pokie sewed me up good as new with twenty tiny sutures that a plastic surgeon would have envied. Then they took me to the club for some liquid pain medication of the bourbon and Coke variety. On the Thursday after Rick's Prairie Fire, we borrowed the messhall's deuce and a half and drove down to Pleiku to visit Rick. Rick was in for a long rehab because of his shattered femur, and was being medievaced the next day to the Dover Air Force Base Hospital, right near his family home in Delaware. Rick was flying high on the pain meds when we visited him, so he was by turn cheery and maudlin as we talked. We finally drew a mission at the end of that week. It was a straight reconnoiter and surveillance job along a newly discovered truck road located in target area Hotel-Six, leading up to the border near the Special Forces camp and the artillery fire support base at Ben Het. Being in the field during the monsoons sucked, because we stayed wet all five days we were on the ground. For the first time, we were in an AO where we could receive artillery support from the newly-installed 175MM heavy artillery battery at Ben Het. Those big guns had a range of about thirty-five kilometers, and were accurate to boot. Fred took advantage of that on our last night in the field, when he called in H&I (harass and interdict) fire on a convoy we heard moving on the road. It was cumbersome relaying our call for fire through Leghorn, but we managed. We were disappointed that we hadn't hit anything when we checked the next morning, but I'll bet those truck drivers shit a brick when they heard those one hundred and fifty pound projectiles exploding around them. We opted not to stand down after Hotel-Six, because Fred extended his tour for the fourth time and was going on a thirty day leave starting July 15th. I was going to take my two week mid tour R&R starting the twentieth. Since our Bright Light rotation was scheduled for the end of July, Fred worked a swap with Crazy Joe Webber. We flew up to Dak To on Sunday morning, 30 June 1968. The late and short monsoon season was ending, and I was happy to see it go. The end of the monsoons meant an increase in activity at FOB 2, and we saw three teams off on missions that week. The end of the rainy season also meant that the Air Force was more active. More air activity meant more planes either crashing from mechanical problems or shot down by increasingly effective NVA anti-aircraft fire. We launched twice after downed pilots. One of those times, four of us rappelled into a site with an active emergency radio from an F-100 pilot who ejected when his engine flamed out. The pilot had a broken leg, so someone had to go get him. Fred, Bing, Bo and I were those someones. We found the pilot after a thirty minute search and all of us left the area on the jungle penetrator of an air rescue Jolly Green Giant dispatched from Thailand. We flew off one other time after another F-100 pilot, but this one's radio never came on and we couldn't locate the crash site. It was hard not to notice that those F-100s fell out of the sky with alarming regularity. After our week at Dak To, we were the recon company chore boys for a week. We pulled every detail in the camp, from riding shotgun on the truck that took garbage to the dump, to fetching supplies from Pleiku for the messhall and club. It was on one of the club runs that I participated in hijacking a tractor-trailer load of liquor. The genius behind the liquor heist was our club manager, Sergeant First Class Orville T. (Beer Belly) Pearson. Pearson was an SF commo man by training, but he was so good at procuring things outside of normal channels, that he always ended up in supply. Pearson was an expert conman and flimflam artist. Beer Belly's cons were so brazen, it was almost impossible not to fall for them. I ended up participating in the liquor scam, because I had a license for a ten-ton tractor. Pearson first borrowed a tractor and a forty-foot flat bed trailer from a drinking buddy of his at the big 4th Infantry Division fire base (Fire Base Mary Lou) just down the road from FOB-2. I drove the truck and trailer back to the FOB, where Pearson stenciled new bumper numbers on both the truck and trailer. The next morning, Fred and I were dressed in neatly-pressed jungle fatigues with 4th Infantry Division patches on them, and wearing baseball caps as we thundered down Highway 19 in the ten-ton, headed towards Pleiku. Beer Belly Pearson was in front of us in a borrowed radio jeep that also had new bumper numbers. Pokie Ramos, dressed the same as Fred and me, was driving the jeep. As soon as we were out of sight from the FOB, Pearson pinned on the gold oak leaves of a major. When we reached the sprawling Air Force base at Pleiku, Pearson led us straight to the joint services Class Six supply warehouses. Class Six supplies are health and comfort items. Liquor, beer and cigarettes are Class Six items. We pulled up to the gate of the razor wire-topped ten-foot chain link fence that surrounded the warehouses. Pearson jumped out of his jeep carrying a clip board, and looking as officious as only a major can. A minute later, the gate swung open and the gate guard waved us through. Pearson, a half-chewed cigar clinched in his jaw, returned the guard's snappy salute as if he were George Patton. We parked in front of a big overhead door. Pearson flagged down a fork lift operator and handed him a counterfeit requisition form. The Private First Class on the fork took the form, saluted Pearson, and roared off. Half an hour later, Fred and I covered our load with a big piece of OD canvass and secured everything with cargo straps. On the trailer were six pallets of Budweiser, two pallets of Early Times Bourbon, one each of Smirnoff's Vodka and Johnny Walker Scotch, and the pièce de résistance, a pallet of Salem Menthol cigarettes ... the favorite smoke of Vietnamese women. I was nervous as a hooker at a Baptist tent revival, and was itching to get out of there, so you can imagine my disbelief when Beer Belly Pearson stopped at the gate and started talking to the guard. The guard nodded and Pearson reached behind him and picked up an ammo can off the floor of the jeep. He opened the can and pulled a folded up North Vietnamese flag out of it. The flag was dirty, slightly ragged and covered in blood. The guard's eyes lit up and he reached for his wallet. Fred gave a snort of laughter as the kid handed Pearson a wad of script. I looked at Fred inquisitively as I stirred the long shifter into first and eased off on the clutch. "A mamasan in the ville makes those flags for Pearson by the dozen. He stomps them in the mud, pours chicken blood on them, and makes a killing selling them to REMFs (rear-echelon-mother-fuckers) as genuine combat souvenirs. Beer Belly is going to leave Vietnam a very rich man," Fred explained. That night during a drunken celebration at the club, I was elected to the Recon Bar board of directors. The Recon Bar was a private operation outside of the normal military NCO Club System. As such, the only oversight it was subject to was from the board of directors. That was plenty enough though, because the board was composed of twenty or so veteran recon men, probably the most potentially dangerous group of people on the planet. To be on the board you had to have at least five missions across the fence, be on a recon team and be elected by your peers. To me, it was one hell of an honor. After I was accepted by the other board members, they took me into the One-Zero lounge, the veterans' inner sanctum, where they congregated once a week to discuss the latest missions they'd run, and swap tips and techniques that worked. A lot of useful knowledge changed hands at those meetings. After we had been in the lounge for about an hour and a half, Fred staggered to his feet and raised his glass in a toast. This night we were all drinking vodka and grapefruit juice, because the club had a glut of each and were selling the tart cocktails for fifteen cents a pop. When everyone had their glass in the air, Fred took the floor. "Gentleman," says drunkenly loquacious Fred, "our boy Opie is going on R&R in a couple of weeks. He's meeting his beautiful bride in Hawaii for a ten day mission deep behind friendly lines..." Fred had to pause to let the hooting and hollering die down. " ... You also know that our boy Opie is a straight arrow, so you won't be surprised when I tell you he ain't been laid in six months. Hell, he's so straight, I haven't even heard him choking his chicken in the hooch, although, come to think of it, he takes a lot of midnight showers..." And on it went, with Fred roasting me like those Friar Club things where all those comedians get together and talk shit about one of them. Fred covered how cheap I was, and he poked fun at my accent. He spilled the beans about me getting excited and throwing the hand grenade over Charlie's heads during my first combat mission, he lampooned my dislike of flying on strings, and he mimicked my nervousness about flying unsecured in the door of a helicopter. By the time he finished, the other guys and I were laughing so hard we were crying. ------- I took Fred over to the airstrip in Kontum on the tenth, and hung around until he was safely on the C-130 bound for Saigon. Fred was spending his leave in country instead of going back to the world. "I'll see you in a month," I said. "Don't count on it," he replied, "because it's kind of a tradition that I come back late." That was why Fred was still a Staff Sergeant, even though he'd been in the Army long enough to have had KP duty at the Last Supper. Fred would go somewhere on leave every year and stay until he felt like coming back. The commander and sergeant major would make a big production of pulling him from consideration for promotion to Sergeant First Class, give him a suspended bust and send him back to his beloved team. On the day I left for R&R, Beer Belly Pearson volunteered to drive me to the airfield. When I hopped out of the jeep to shake his hand, he slapped five hundred dollars worth of money orders into my palm. When I looked at him questioningly, he explained. "Op fund 69, Opie, profit from the club we keep in a slush fund for R&Rs, so you grunts can get laid." Well I was fairly certain I was getting laid regardless, but the money would come in handy, because all I had in my AWOL bag was a can of Kiwi shoe polish, spit-shine rag, shaving kit, a pair of jeans, a Valdosta State t-shirt and a spare pair of clean skivvies. ------- On the morning of Monday, 22 July 1968, I stepped off the crew stairs of an Air Force KC-135 tanker onto the tarmac of Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii. I squinted at the brightness of the sun for a second or two before sliding my Rayban aviator shades onto my mug. As soon as my shades were in place, I broke into a smile. I had every reason in the world to be smiling, because the first thing I saw was my beautiful Megan running towards me from the flight operations building. My heart jumped into my throat when I saw her running towards me in that red print sundress, her corn silk blond hair streaming behind her. I think the picture of her that day is burned into my brain housing group for all time. Megan was at the flight operations center waiting on me, thanks to the tankers crew chief. The crew chief, a friendly older man from Dothan, Alabama, had the pilot radio the air control tower to call Megan at the guest house when we were an hour out. I ran and met Megan halfway. I had just enough time to drop my AWOL bag and catch her as she launched herself against me, her slender arms around my neck, and her shapely legs around my waist. She laughed as I spun her around, the leap and catch a game we'd played hundreds of times before. The next nine days were the best of my life, as Megan and I reconnected. We were inseparable as we tried to wring the zest out of every minute we had together. We had long sessions of sweet tender love-making, sandwiched between bouts of frenetic sex. And we talked and laughed and made crazy plans for the future. The only moment of awkwardness came as we stood beside the bed for the first time in six months and shed our clothes. We were both nervously shy, me because of the freshly healed gash in my side, Megan because she'd gained five pounds. Megan did zero in on my new scar; she traced it with her finger tips and asked me how it happened. I answered her truthfully; I didn't lie to Megan about anything. But I did make light of the incident, telling her the story as if being in a firefight was a rare occurrence. Megan wanted to know all about my assignment. I answered her indirectly, omitting anything classified. Of course that left mostly funny stories about Fred and the other characters in the camp. Megan also teased me about Su-Lin, and chided me for being so frugal. Megan wasn't jealous or worried about Su-Lin, she knew me too well for that. "Spend some money on yourself and that poor girl, Jody. With your allotment check and my salary, we have plenty of money. You don't need to send every cent you make home like you do." Megan filled me in on the latest happenings among my old teammates. It made me sad that my old team had fragmented shortly after my deployment. Preacher Hinson and Doc Wilson had both retired, and Ryan Ragan had made the sergeant majors list and moved over to the 7th Group. Jerry (Squirrel) Smeltzer was trying to retire, but the chief head-shrinker at Ft. Bragg was leery about foisting Squirrel out off on an unsuspecting civilian populace. Right now, the Army had Squirrel in something called 'project transition', a program that taught civilian job skills to combat trained soldiers. Squirrel was taking an apprentice welding course at Fayetteville Technical College to prepare him for civilian life. I had serious reservations about how well the civilian world was prepared for him. We did not come out of our room for ten hours that first day together. And when we finally did venture outside, it was a hurried trip to the flight-line cafeteria for a bite to eat. We were as bad as we were on our honeymoon, except we were at least smart enough to eat. We simply could not get enough of each other. We ventured out the next morning around ten, and walked over to the Base Exchange. I cashed in a money order and Megan helped me pick out two 'Aloha' shirts, a couple of pairs of shorts and some sandals that were just fancy flip flops. Oh yeah, and we bought me a baggie surfer type bathing suit. Megan also picked up some beach supplies. We took our loot back to our room and changed for a trip to Waikiki Beach. The base had a bus that ran into Honolulu every thirty minutes. We hopped on the bus and the driver let us off right on a beach approach. Megan and I fell in love with the beach and spent much of our time there. We were Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster in that scene in 'From Here to Eternity'. Like I said, it was the best nine days of my life. On our last night together, Megan and I talked late into the night. I was worried about her having to spend another six months stuck with taking care of everything. And she was worried that my worrying about her would distract me from taking care of myself. "Stay focused on your job, Jody," she said softly as I held her close. "Do whatever it takes so you can come back to me." That was damned good advice. Megan's serene inner strength kept our parting from ruining our time together. Oh we clung together as if we were drowning when I saw her off, but her calm conviction that we'd be together again soon reassured me. I probably ruined a few peoples' image of big bad Special Forces soldiers that day, as she held me while I tried to keep from crying. ------- True to his word, Fred was ten days late returning from leave. Fred proudly told me that he and Kim the go-go dancer were now man and wife, and that he was taking her back to the states with him after this extension. "You and I will be leaving here at about the same time, Opie. I'm putting in my retirement papers as soon as I hit Bragg, then Kim and I are going to open a pawn shop and make beautiful babies." That sounded like a hell of a plan to me. I had been training with the team while we waited for our fearless leader, so we were good-to-go when he finally showed up. Fred worked with us for two days, then had our status changed to mission ready. The very next day, we drew a target. The target we drew was our first one in Cambodia since I joined the team. The Cambodian area of operations was code named 'Salem House'; the Salem House target we drew was November-One. November-One was just south of the Laotian border and about twenty-five miles from Vietnam. With so many teams on the ground, a covey wasn't available to take Fred on a visual recon of the target and insertion area. Fred was not very enthused about the target or the mission, because we were being sent in to a target in which RT New York, the last team in that area, had disappeared after reporting heavy contact with counter-recon trackers. Another reason for his unhappiness was that close air support from the Air Force was forbidden in Cambodia. Prince Sihanouk declared that there were no North Vietnamese in his neutral country, so the Americans had nothing to bomb. If a team was in trouble, the only air support they were going to get was from helicopter gunships. Based on all that, Fred elected to insert into Laos and cross into Cambodia. Doing that added two days to the mission, and caused us to add an extra ten klicks of movement, but it allowed us to have air support for that critical first day. That turned out to be a typically excellent decision on Fred's part, because trackers were on us within minutes of the helicopters flying away from the insertion LZ. ------- Chapter 10 We were only a few hundred meters from the LZ when we heard trackers behind us looking for our trail. We could tell they were in the search mode, because they were in a line formation, clacking bamboo sticks together to keep the line dressed. Fred veered us to the left and almost walked right into a platoon of NVA that were moving up to joint the chase. As we cut back in the opposite direction, Fred had a hurried few words with me. "This smells like a trap, Jody, they were on us too quick for it to have been an accident. More than one platoon after us means this is a company sized operation, so there are two more platoons out there somewhere. Get Covey on the horn; tell him to find us an LZ and bring in some air. Have him turn the choppers around at Dak To and send them back for us pronto, I'm pulling the plug on this fiasco." I nodded and unclipped the handset from my web gear. Fred wasn't one to abort a mission over some bullshit little thing, so if he was worried, we had stepped in it big time. I passed the message up to Covey. Our Covey rider was a big, rawboned former recon man named Jessie Caraway. Caraway was a hillbilly from West Virginia, aptly nicknamed 'Country'. Country rogered my message and told me to stand by. He was back on the radio in a few minutes. "The only LZ close to you is about three klicks northeast of where you inserted. Estimate ninety mikes on the chopper turn-around, and no can do with tac air right now. Everything in the air is up north on a Bright Light for a downed F-4. Hillsborough says they have a pair of Sandies (A-1-Es) on the way to refuel in Thailand, but the turn-around is about the same as the helicopters. Looks like you are on your own for a while." Hillsborough was the code name for the Air Force C-130 that orbited over Laos as a flying command post. Hillsborough had the final say on air operations, so we were shit out of luck for at least another hour or two. I trotted forward to give Fred the news. We were walking a quicker pace than normal, trying to put some distance on that pursuit, but still covering our trail the best we could. The enemy troops were about three hundred meters behind us now, and spread across a wide front. The incessant clacking of their bamboo sticks was making us all nervous. When I told Fred about the lack of air support, he just nodded, but he looked thoughtful about the LZ situation. I thought Fred would be relieved that we were within three kilometers of an LZ, but my mind just didn't work on the same frequency as his. "This don't smell right, Jody. What do you want to bet that the rest of this company is waiting for us between here and that LZ? They split the company and put two platoons on each LZ, then the bunch whose LZ gets landed on herds whoever landed towards the other group." I saw no reason to doubt Fred's analysis, so we were between the proverbial rock and hard place. We could not make a ninety degree turn, because the commies were spread out too far for us to slip by then, and we had a force ten times the size of ours in front of and behind us. We might evade them by moving diagonally but that would put us further in bad guy country and allow them to reinforce. It was scary as hell to think that right now was probably as good as things were going to get. Fred was maddeningly calm as he looked down at his watch. "Let's go, we have at least an hour and a half to kill. We are going to move slow and I don't want to leave a sign we've been this way," he said. We crept for another thirty minutes, covering five hundred meters at the most. We crossed a small creek and started up the other hill, when Fred suddenly called us to a halt. I walked up to him to see what was going on. "This is a good place to turn things around," he said before I could ask him anything. "They will probably stop before they hit the creek, to make sure they stay dressed when they cross. When they stop, we are going to attack right through them and haul ass back to the LZ we inserted on. If we have any luck, we will only have two platoons to deal with before the choppers can get here." It was incredible too me that Fred could think up something as unexpected and boldly calculated as that while we had been running for our lives. Fred put us down in a wedge-shape formation about twenty five meters up the hill. Fred would initiate the attack, and we'd all jump up and follow him. The ten minutes we lay there waiting for the NVA soldiers had to be the longest in my life. My adrenalin was spiked so high I could feel my heart try to jump out of my chest. It took every fiber of self control I had to lay still. Just as Fred suspected, a team of two soldiers stopped on the far bank of the stream. One soldier had his AK-47 at the ready, while the other was clacking the bamboo sticks one against another. Three more pairs that were in our field of vision arrived a few seconds later. They were well spread out and were maintaining their line fastidiously. After about a minute, a whistle trilled two blasts somewhere off to our left, and the men seemed to step forward in unison. Fred waited until the pair in front of him was in the middle of the knee-deep stream before he jumped up and greased them with a couple of controlled bursts. The rest of us leapt to our feet and did the same to the unlucky NVA soldiers near us. Then we all dashed across the creek, going right through the gap we'd blasted in their line. After a few heartbeats of dead silence, we started receiving fire from both sides as we sprinted up the hillside. We couldn't return the fire, for fear of hitting one another as we wove our way up the hill. We were about half way up, when my tail-gunner partner, Kai cried out as two AK slugs thumped into his side. Kai was alive when I reached him, but blood was spurting out of his side faster than I thought possible. I yelled out and Lum, the closest man to me, hollered something in his own language. In seconds, Lum and Kip the interpreter were carrying Kai's weapon and rucksack, while I was dog-trotting with his limp body over my right shoulder. Up ahead, Fred had his own problems, as a round had caught Bing through his left knee. He was alive and conscious, but he couldn't walk. Bo and Thue were supporting Bing between them, hustling up the hill. The firing started dying out when we disappeared into some thicker jungle, but we could hear noncoms and officers yelling to organize a pursuit. My lungs were on fire and my legs felt like lead by the time we reached the top of the hill. The adrenal rush that had been propelling me was fading, and I was starting to tire when we crested the ridge line and called a halt. I gently laid Kai down on the ground and Lum dropped the dead man's rucksack. I didn't feel any better that everyone else was gasping for breath also. Fred and Bo walked over to where I was sitting and Bo knelt down to examine Kai. Once he confirmed Kai was dead, he called Kip over and the two of them redistributed Kai's ammo among the remaining combat effective Montagnards. While they were busy, Fred flopped down next to me, took a pull from his canteen and handed it to me. "Bringing Kai's body out is the right thing to do, Jody, but you are going to have to slow those guys down by yourself so the rest of us can get to the LZ. Delay them any way you can, but don't be a hero. Fight smart, fall back when you have to, and don't let them encircle you." I nodded and stood up. I took off my rucksack, but I pulled a claymore out of it and stuffed a half dozen magazines into my shirt before I headed back to the top of the hill. As I left, Fred was calling in a contact and status report to Covey. Fred did not declare a Prairie Fire, because we were still moving and trying to dictate the action. The NVA force had regrouped and I could hear them carefully moving up the hill in front of me. I dashed forward for about thirty yards and emplaced the claymore in the middle of a patch of two foot tall ferns to camouflage it, and sighted it directly down the hill. I played out the firing wire behind me, covering the wire the best I could with dirt and leaves. I high-crawled twenty meters, and put a big-assed tree between me, the claymore and the NVA. I also pulled out a couple of grenades, flipped the safety clip off the spoon, straightened the bent wire on the safety pin, and laid them beside me. Then hugging the ground at the base of the tree, I stuck my head out just far enough to watch down slope. About five minutes later, I spotted the NVA point man moving cautiously up the hill. He was about twenty meters to the left of my claymore, so I let him go and tracked him with my peripheral vision. I wasn't going to waste the claymore for one man. The point squad was maybe twenty-five meters behind the point man. They were in a staggered column of twos, with about five meters between men. I detonated the claymore when most of the squad was in the fifty meter kill zone, then chucked a grenade at the point man. As soon as I saw him go down, I heaved the second grenade down the hill, then jumped up and sprinted over the top of the hill. I stopped twice more to fire up the NVA platoons, but they were wary now and spread way the hell out again. They made themselves less of a target that way, but they slowed down to almost a crawl. I managed to milk the trip back to the LZ for almost forty-five minutes. Fred was happy to see me when I sprinted the last fifty meters to the LZ, and slapped me on the back as I sat there huffing and puffing. "Good job, Opie! Covey says the Cobras are fifteen minutes out and the slicks and A-1's thirty out." That was the best news I'd heard since my R&R. I found some cover and took my place in the perimeter, six fresh magazines of death and destruction stacked by my right hand. Fred had already set out a pair of claymores. The LZ was a ragged, sloping jungle clearing about thirty meters in diameter, about a third of the way up a hill. It was encircled by a twenty meter band of fifteen to twenty-five foot tall young trees. Three and four foot tall elephant grass covered the cleared area of the LZ. The jungle was sparse single canopy down to the bottom of the hill, but thick and verdant upslope. The ground around the center of the clearing undulated unnaturally in a couple of places. When Fred brought me back my rucksack, I asked him about the strange LZ to keep my mind off the angry fifty to eighty NVA soldiers we could hear coming down the other hillside. "This clearing doesn't seem natural, Fred. Who do you think made it?" Fred shrugged and replied, "If I had to guess, I'd say it was a crash site from the French-Indo-China war. I think the plane slatted down right here and set the jungle on fire. The wind probably blew the fire mostly down hill." Before I could respond, the radio broke squelch and Country Caraway's voice filled the speaker. "November-One this is Covey; we see some movement to your south. It looks like a couple of squads moving west, trying to flank you. The Cobras are five minutes out, so hang tough down there." I was on the upslope portion of our small perimeter and was peering intently into the jungle, when a RPG round swooshed over my head and exploded about fifteen meters to my right. Right after the RPG warhead exploded, a couple of AKs opened up to our left. I ignored what was happening over there and kept my eyes moving as I scanned the area up the hill. Sure enough, I caught a few darting movements back in the edge of the thicker jungle. I had a hunch that the NVA were massing on the high ground above us, and that the shooting from the left was just to occupy us until they were positioned to attack. Thankfully, the cavalry in the form of a pair of fully armed Cobras galloped up just then, and I had Covey vector one of them at the massing troops. By the time the Hueys arrived, the LZ was as quiet as when we landed. I made a trip to the dispensary as soon as we returned to FOB, and had Doc Mitchell remove a couple of RPG fragments that were just under the skin of my right thigh. As soon as he was done, I showered and headed to the club. I attended my first informal after actions meeting at the club that night, as we veterans discussed the new tactics the NVA were employing. The aggressive anti-recon units were making already tough missions virtually impossible. We were making them pay a steep price for their efforts, but the NVA didn't seem to mind sacrificing fifty to a hundred men just to get one of us. And the sacrifice was paying off for them right now, as we had lost two teams on the ground, and had four other American KIAs in the last month. We were down to eight effective teams, and it took six weeks to get a new team up and running. A big part of the problem was that we ran the same targets time after time, because the trail was fixed in place and it was our only area of interest. At each target, there were only so many suitable LZs, so Charlie could pretty much watch them all and know the minute we hit the ground. To counter that, we were doing more mock insertions; fake landings on one LZ while the team sneaks into another. We also inserted behind air strikes and B-52 missions while the NVA had their heads down. We took Kai's body to his village the day after we returned. It was only my second visit to the cluster of long houses on stilts that made up the village. It was a sad and somber affair as Kip translated Fred's account of what happen to Kai, and extolled his bravery. Fred recruited us a new American as soon as we returned to duty from stand-down. Fred snagged the guy out of the commo bunker and he was as an unlikely choice for recon as you could find. The new guy wasn't even Special Forces qualified; instead, he was a speedy-four radio-teletype operator on loan from the group signal company. His name was Jim Whitcomb, but he looked so much like Fred, he could have been his son, so I nicknamed him 'Junebug'. Junebug was what folks in my neck of the woods called boys named after their father. The resemblance between Fred and Junebug was uncanny, and the more time that Junebug spent with us, the more he sounded and acted like Fred. I knew that Jimmy Whitcomb was going to be a good one right off the bat. He was gung-ho and soaked up what we taught him like a sponge. I had no qualms about handing over the radio to him. While we were training Jimmy, we also tried out a new zero-four to replace Kai. Fred had hired him from the Yard village. The guy had been on the Mike Force running in-country recon, so he had experience. He fit in with us and passed muster with Bo, so we kept him. Bing would be laid up for a while, but his leg wounds weren't severe enough to keep him from returning, so we didn't hire a replacement for him. Instead, we moved Lum to point and operated with five Yards instead of six. With Jimmy on the team now, that was no hardship. We drew a mission as soon as Fred changed our status to mission ready. Our target was Hotel-Seven, another close to the border AO. Fred made it a ten day mission by having us walk in from the A Camp at Dak Pek. Whatever intel SOG had received that made them curious about Hotel-Seven proved to be right on, because the place was crawling with activity. We found so much we were having to radio in three sitreps a day. After four days, we were suddenly pulled back across the border and told to stand by. The next morning, a dozen B-52s carpet-bombed the area back to the Stone Age. The contrails from the big bombers were still fading when Covey sent us back in to do a BDA. The bombs being dropped since Rick's failed mission were delay fused, so the big thousand pounders exploded after they'd burrowed into the ground. The delayed fuse bombs were much more effective on dug in targets, but made navigating around the craters a chore. We snuck around for a day, and found nothing and saw no one, it was eerie how quiet it was, compared to the activity of three days ago. We headed back to Dak Pek on day seven. All I could think about by then was a hot shower and a cold beer. We were about five klicks from Dak Pek when we spied a VC patrol moving not very quietly through the jungle. Rather than firing them up, Fred decided that we should be the stalkers for once. He put Bo, an excellent tracker, with Lum the point man, and off we went. The patrol led us right to their bivouac site, a little bunker complex with a couple of bamboo and palm frond sleeping hooches. Since we were within the effective range of the 81MM mortars at the Dak Pek A Camp, Fred called a fire mission and taught Junebug how to adjust indirect fire. Junebug gleefully walked the mortar rounds right into the bivouac, as a very surprised bunch of Charlies hid in the bunkers. We probably could have overrun the bivouac, but Fred reasoned that the guys at Dak Pek could clean up their own trash. FOB-2 was back up to twelve operational teams by the first of October, and the pace of operations picked up. We were getting three and four day missions now, because with all the bad guys after us over there, that's about the max a team could survive. The Fob was launching three teams a week, so we naturally fell into a four week cycle. We had a week of mission prep, the week of the mission, a week of stand down and a week of Bright Light or some other duty. Our next mission came the second week of October, and just for grins, Fred told me I was the one-zero for it. The mission was a straight area recon in target Kilo-Two, a target on the northern edge of FOB-2's area of operations. Surprisingly, I wasn't nervous about leading the team, because I knew Fred would be there to keep me from committing some huge fuck-up. And I guess luck was with us, because I got us in and out in one piece. We even managed to take some nice low-light photographs of a couple of Chicom tracked command vehicles tucked under some elaborate camouflage. We did make contact with a small patrol on the third day, but we called in a ton of air and used the cover of a napalm inferno to escape. When we returned from our stand down, it was the second week of November, and I was a 'two digit midget', a soldier with fewer than a hundred days left in country. I ran my tenth and, although I didn't know it at the time, final mission across the fence on the week of Thanksgiving. It was a nasty going away present, because we drew trackers the second day, and had to E&E for thirty-six hours straight before we could get pulled out on strings. When we arrived back at the FOB, my reassignment orders were waiting, and were they ever good news! I was granted a thirty day 'drop', so my new DEROS was 5 Jan 1969. Fred Armitage did not get a drop. As a matter of fact, he extended for another six months, because the paperwork for his wife Kim to immigrate to the United States was still being processed. Fred was happy for me though, and so was Junebug. Fred elevated Junebug to one-one and stuck me with the radio again, but all we did the first three weeks of December was pull one week of Bright Light duty. The Monday after we returned from Dak To, the sergeant major called me in to his office for a chat. "You've done a good job for us here, Sergeant Jamison," he said, "and the commander and I appreciate it, so we managed to pull a few strings for you to get you home for Christmas. Here are your clearance papers; you are due in Nha Trang in two days." I was speechless as he shoved the paperwork into my hand. I was excited as hell about being home for Christmas, but sad about leaving behind some of the best friends I'd ever made. Out-processing took all of thirty minutes as I cleared the supply room, dispensary and orderly room. On my last day at FOB-2, I squared away my field gear for my eventual replacement and packed my duffle bag. I had very little that I'd accumulated, so I would be traveling light. That night, my buds threw me one forevermore raucous going away party that lasted until two in the morning. Everyone on the compound was there and the booze was flowing like the Mekong River. The next morning at 0700, they poured my still drunken ass on a C-130 and threw my duffle bag in behind me. I fell asleep on the whistle stop flight as it stopped at two outlying A Camps and the Air Base at Da Nang, finally waking up when the crew chief shook me and told me end of the line. I stumbled off the plane with a splitting headache and a mouth that tasted like the bottom of a birdcage. I caught a ride over to 5th Group headquarters and signed into the transit billets. Forty-five minutes later, I was showered, shaved and in a clean uniform, standing in front of Command Sergeant Major Mattox. Mattox waved me to a chair while he finished a telephone conversation that involved a lot of ass-chewing. When the conversation ended, Mattox looked at his watch, then hopped out of his chair. "Come on, Jamison, I want a beer, and you look like you need some hair of the dog that bit you." We walked over to the NCO club and Mattox led me to a table in a quiet corner. He ordered a Bud, but seltzer water was all my stomach would agree too. The sergeant major laughed when I blanched at the offer of a drink. Then he turned serious and leaned across the table. "Listen, Opie, I haven't heard anything but good about you from our folks in the projects. You made my decision to send you up there look like a stroke of genius. So when Sergeant Major Bliss asked if I could do something for you, I said yes in a heartbeat. And it just so happens that helping you out is probably going to make me look good again. Here is what you'll be doing..." ------- I took a breath, looked at my odd traveling companion, and then pointed at the pallets locked into the C-141 rail system. Each pallet had two, flag draped aluminum coffins lashed to it. "So here I am, Mike, escorting fallen soldiers home. It is sobering to realize that if not for the Grace of God, I could as easily have been in one of those things." Mike gave me a gentle smile and put his hand on my shoulder. "I'll tell you right now, Jody, it was absolutely the Grace of God, but it was grace you earned by how you have lived your life. And it's grace Megan earned too." I wanted to ask him how he could be so sure of something like that, but the crew chief interrupted us. "We are about to drop the ramp, Sergeant, so you need to get ready." I nodded and thanked him, surprised that I had been so engrossed in my conversation with Mike that I hadn't felt us stop moving. I made my excuses to Mike, shrugged into my Summer Green coat, put on my beret, and pulled on the white dress gloves I'd been issued at the same time I'd received these spiffy tailored Summer Greens. When the ramp was completely lowered, I walked down it and stopped three paces in front of the Marine Captain in charge of the pall bearer detail. I snapped him a salute and reported. "Sir, I place in your custody the mortal remains of twenty-four fallen comrades, their final mission completed." He returned my salute and replied, "Thank you Sergeant, you are dismissed." I stepped to the left in marching, and moved over to the graves registration NCO waiting off to the side. I handed him the manifest for the twenty-four casualties and shook his out stretched hand. "Welcome home," he said with a smile, "now go see your family, they are waiting in the hanger for you." ------- Epilogue I found this story in a footlocker my husband, Jody Lee Jemison, had stored in our attic. Sadly, my precious Jody was killed in 1988. He died in a convenience store parking lot while preventing a couple of gang members from carjacking a woman with a small infant. Jody lost his life the same way he lived it, he did what was right and didn't worry much about the personal consequences. Many a soldier lost a good friend when Jody was taken from us. The Special Forces Chapel was overflowing with them at his funeral. Of course, there were others whose lives Jody touched at the funeral as well. One of them was Su-Lin Carlson, the chief surgical nurse at a teaching hospital in Richmond, Virginia. Jody worked for three years to get Su-Lin and her sisters out of Vietnam. And our children, Shelby Jane and Jason, lost an irreplaceable role model. Shelby is a senior at the Duke University now, majoring in marine biology. Jason is a second year plebe at West Point. Jason received his appointment to the US Army Military Academy from Senator Richard Pierpont of Delaware. Steve and Roxie Pleturski and their four kids flew down from Chicago to help me through Jody's funeral. Roxie is still my best friend, even though we only see each other a couple of times a year. Steve went back to college, completed his degree, and went on to law school. Roxie is a stay at home mom and civic volunteer. She is on the board of half the charities in Chicago. Jerry 'Squirrel' Smeltzer was devastated by Jody's death. Jody was like a son to Jerry, and Jerry's emotional health had always been precarious. Jerry disappeared after the funeral and next thing we knew, he was arrested for blowing up a bar frequented by members of the gang to which Jody's killers belonged. Jerry refused any defense based on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, so he is serving five to ten years in a federal prison in Kentucky. Fred Armitage also took Jody's death hard; he couldn't get over the fact that Jody survived a year in recon, only to die at the hands of a street punk. Fred and his wife Kim owned a couple of pawn shops, and used car lots right outside the front gate of Fort Bragg. They are the proud parents of three over achieving geniuses, all aiming towards medical school. Except for cleaning up some spelling mistakes and explaining a few military terms, Jody's tale is exactly as he wrote it. I must say that I considered editing out the parts about me and our personal life, but in the end, I left it as it was. After all, If Jody thought it was important enough to put on paper, who am I to change his words? Most of what he wrote about Vietnam was news to me, because Jody never talked about anything having to do with what he actually did over there. I do know that in typical Jody fashion, he understated his own accomplishments in his accounts. Jody was a highly decorated soldier when he returned, having been awarded the Silver Star and three other medals for valor, to go along with three purple hearts. Oh yes, and I guess this story would not be complete without mentioning 'Mike', the person Jody supposedly told this story to. I say 'supposedly', because Jody never could decide whether the man really existed, or if he was a hallucination. Either way though, Jody swears he finally figured out the man was Saint Michael, the patron saint of paratroopers. Jody firmly believed that Saint Michael was there to make sure he wasn't one of the men in the coffins ... and the only reason Mike had for doing that was the strength of the love Jody and I shared. Call me crazy, but looking back on it, I now believe that too... Megan Jamison Valdosta, Georgia June, 1991 ------- The End ------- Posted: 2008-12-15 Last Modified: 2009-03-13 / 01:30:08 pm ------- http://storiesonline.net/ -------