Blood in the Hills by Charles W. Sasser & Charles W. Sasser

Author:Charles W. Sasser & Charles W. Sasser [Maras, Robert & Sasser, Charles W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2017-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Three

Dog Biscuits

Due to infrequent resupply, we still drew water from the scummy shell crater. After a mid-afternoon mortar shelling, I left Tony on watch while I grabbed our canteens—“No leeches this time, Maras”—and scuttled across the top of the explosion-riddled knob to the pond. Magilla, Jacubowski, and Gunny Janzen were at the watering hole on the same errand. Instead of kneeling at the water as usual to fill up, the three stood eyeing the crater with open revulsion. I approached cautiously.

“Holy—!” That was as far as I got.

We had been drinking from the pond—only to discover now that it served as a grave for dead gooks. Not just one, but three of them. What we figured was that an aerial bomb or one of the big 175s from Leatherneck Square must have landed right on top of an NVA fighting position, burying its occupants at the bottom of the crater. Rain came down and filled the depression. After a few days, the corpses produced gases and had now floated to the surface. They were all face down, with their backs humped out of the water and covered in a green-scum crust. Pieces of rotted flesh slewing off the corpses left greasy rings in the algae. Jacubowski retched from the overpowering stench and fled back to his hole with his canteens empty.

“It’s all protein,” Gunny remarked with tired sarcasm.

Pollution of the pond made resupply more critical than ever and made us almost entirely dependent on helicopters as a lifeline. Chopper pilots had big balls. Hell, their balls had balls. CH-46 Sea Knight medevacs and smaller Sikorsky UH-34s varied their routes to stay unpredictable and avoid enemy antiaircraft fire from guns studded on valley walls along Route 9 that led into the Khe Sanh area. They chopped about and snaked into our stronghold from various approaches to fool the gooks. But there were only so many ways in. Each arriving flight became a magnet for NVA guns. Aircraft arrived with windows shot out, bullet holes punched in cowlings, hydraulic fluid leaking.

Those nervy flight crews won our undying admiration and gratitude. We might go hungry and thirsty, but we knew they’d deliver as soon as they could make it through. You had to believe that if you were wounded, somebody would come get you and fly you to an aid station where you had a chance. Medevacs were our angels out of the sky who made valiant efforts to reach our hills through hell and brimstone and sometimes through zero-degree visibility because of fog and rain and darkness.

A chopper had about thirty seconds to get in, offload supplies and mail, pick up casualties and perhaps outgoing mail, and get back out again before enemy mortar rounds began falling. Coming in one morning with fresh water and supplies, a chopper suddenly appeared running hot with tracers cutting the air all around as it air-skidded onto a tiny makeshift LZ on a 45-degree slope near the pond. While its wheels hovered a few

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