The Return: A Novel of Vietnam by Sasser Charles W

Author:Sasser, Charles W. [Sasser, Charles W.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780970750716
Publisher: AWOC.COM Publishing
Published: 2001-03-02T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

My Third Herd Platoon was still at PPB Cougar the night TET began and Pete had his fight at the hotel in Dong Tam. The Christmas ambush on Widow Maker Lane had left me another five men short and left the outfit “lower than whale shit,” as Daniels the machine gunner put it. Colonel Hackman and Captain Bruton the Crouton ordered replacements trucked out. FNGS, fucking new guys, so scared they reminded me of grade-schoolers walking through a graveyard on Halloween night. Naturally, they had already heard all the horror stories about the ambush. Bugs Wortham buddied up with them, since he was still pretty much cherry himself, but the “old timers,” meaning anyone who had been in-country at least three months, derived perverse pleasure in tormenting them with war stories.

“Fu-uck,” sneered Mad Dog Carter, scowling at the fresh meat as they huddled wide-eyed inside our giant mud crayfish berm. “You little pissants really think you can take the place of real Hard Core boonirats like Donatelli and Sgt. Richardson?”

Pineapple the Hawaiian was the worst offender. He mesmerized and terrorized them with exaggerated accounts of Mangrum getting his head blown off on the LZ and of Fortes getting his mangled leg caught underneath the overturned Jeep during the Widow Maker Lane bushwhacking, trapping him in the open under heavy enemy fire. Only a finger-thick flap of skin and flesh kept him attached to his leg and therefore trapped. In raw desperation he ripped out his K-Bar knife and cut himself free of it.

“Like an animal chews off its own foot to get out of a trap,” Mad Dog leered.

To Daniels the seer, the platoon’s recent ill fortune seemed an omen of even more bad luck ahead. “I can smell it comin,” he predicted. “I feel locusts and drought and plague.”

Sgt. Holtzauer wanted none of that. “Keep it the fuck to yourself, Daniels.”

Daniels spat and turned loose his voodoo eye. “I can smell it,” he insisted.

During the early hours of 30 January, division radio net suddenly placed all field units on full alert, At Cougar, we learned details of the cease-fire offensive from listening to Armed Forces Radio Network on our transistor radios. Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin or the Beatles would be interrupted by an announcer gravely broadcasting how VC were busting out of the woodwork all over South Vietnam.

“I told you,” Daniels chortled. “I told you!”

TET seemed to drive Colonel Hackman into a frenzy of action. He was determined not to let the enemy take over his AO. He set 4th Battalion to leapfrogging like crazed toads, hopping and jumping here and there and everywhere, trying to fix the bad guys and fuck ’em over. Drive them to bay and make them fight since it seemed that was what they wanted to do.

At dawn, Third Platoon received radio orders to abandon Cougar and return to FSB Savage. The Hard Core was being tasked with relieving the town of Dong Tam. Third humped four klicks across swamp and through jungle to reach Highway 4, where APCs, armored personnel carriers, were supposed to meet us.

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