I didn't think God spent much time on the battlefield, but there were those who went over to one of the waiting chaplains for prayer or confession.
And then we were in the air, and headed back toward land and Uncle Ho.
Some of us pretended unconcern, and faked dozing.
The cover for the Jollies was they were making a border flight, keeping well enough away from the line to prevent diplomatic complaints. If all went well, they'd follow the border to its intersection with the Red River, well to the west of our planned LZ, and back down the river to Hanoi.
The first bird aborted after only twenty minutes of flight, turning back toward the carriers.
All this I found out after the mission was over.
Just after we lost the Giant, we fueled from a pair of specially modified C130s.
Then the Giant's loadmaster went down the line, signaling five minutes to go.
The three HH53s carrying our raiders dipped toward the ground, and the loadmaster slid the door open.
Outside reared heavily jungled mountains, with a few narrow valleys with tiny rivers running through them. Once, twice, I saw cleared jungle near a mountain top, and a scatter of huts and fields.
Then we were going in, and over the wind rush and the roar of the engines I could hear weapons being loaded.
The LZ was an abandoned rice paddy, just ahead.
The pilots flared their ships, without bringing them down to leave marks that could be seen later.
We were on our feet, packed as closely together as any jump formation, shuffling forward, and then out the door.
I bent my knees, squelched into mud, and then was moving, staggering under almost eighty pounds of pack and weapons, away from the 53, and going down on one knee into a perimeter.
The three helicopters lifted away, to rejoin the others. With any luck the dropoff wouldn't have been seen by any Viet watchers, nor the slight change in engine noise noticed.
The birds were gone, and my ears stopped ringing, and again I was caught up in the silence of the jungle.
We waited for another few minutes, and then we could hear bird noises, monkey chatter.
Nobody started shitting, shouting, or shooting, so we'd evidently inserted without being seen.
Without needing any words, we formed up in two columns, and started north, following a creek that tumbled, chuckling, through a wide ravine.
It was deadly hot, the height of the dry season. Everyone managed to «slip» into the creek as we climbed, and some even to fill their canteens.
At the front were our Montagnards. With them were Shriver and Davidson, unquestionably the best point men we had.
The columns went up the ravine to a high pass. We could see, to our right, Tra Linh, so our pilots had put us down where they should've.
We went down the mountain's far side, and on through jungle until the word… hand signals, not even whispers… came back to where I was at the head of my reaction force that we'd found the road.
We moved away from it half a klick back into jungle, found a deer trail, and headed west.
It's almost impossible to describe jungle movement to someone who hasn't seen and done it.
The pace is incredibly careful-as slow as two hundred meters a day, slower if you're anticipating contact. That's a step a minute.
If you're on point, you're watching ahead of you, your eyes flickering to the side, then in front and down, looking for boobytraps.
You make sure there's no wait-a-bit vines with their thorns to hold you back, no red ants lurking in those bright green trees to cascade down the back of your neck or, worse, into your moustache if you're vain enough to wear one.
Your foot comes up, moves forward, comes down, toes and ball of the foot first. Weight is put on very slowly, and if, God forbid, there should be any movement, you're ready to leap back and go flat before that mine can detonate.
Slowly you put your full weight down, eyes moving back and forth.
If you see, hear, sense nothing, you lift your other foot, and bring it forward, taking another step, making sure you didn't drag any brush with you that could leave marks.
Behind you was your slack man, watching for something you might miss. Sometimes he carried a grenade launcher, loaded with antipersonnel darts, or a machine gun. Somewhere back of him would be a man with a compass, since the maps were antique and wrong at best.
You couldn't walk point very long, so you'd rotate back, to slack, and the march would continue.
Of course, you never, ever used a road, a human trail, or used machetes to cut your way along. All of those were deathtraps for the inexperienced or lazy.
We moved fairly quickly, about a kilometer an hour, using animal trails when we could.
At the end of the column, behind my reaction force, were the tailgunners-men most skilled in fieldcraft, with Bob Howard in charge, making sure we left almost no evidence of our passage.
Grunts learned to move quietly enough, in small enough units, to occasionally surprise the enemy.
Special Forces prided themselves on being able to move so quietly they surprised monkeys.
Our column moved under a bird dozing on a limb, that didn't wake up with a squawk until half a dozen troopers had gone by.
One problem we had was the number of men on the operation. Fifty, as infantrymen had discovered, was enough to get in big trouble if a decent-sized enemy force, a company or stronger, discovered you. Conversely, it's hard for fifty to move through the jungle without being discovered.
But that was the only option Bull Simons thought was possible.
As we moved, we passed a low knoll. It was pointed out, and that would be our RV… where, if we were hit at our RON-remain overnight-position, we'd try to reform.
We moved on.
In deep jungle and high mountains, day vanishes in an instant. The sun was just starting to vanish when word came down the column, pointing left, to where a hill rose. We went on about another few hundred meters, then arced back.
We took positions, by teams, on that hill. We'd bypassed it initially to make sure we weren't being followed.
We weren't, and so we found fighting positions, in teams around the hill.
My team laid out its immediate reaction drill, in case we were hit during the night, and put out claymore mines. These were small wedge-shaped chunks of plastic that could be either command-detonated, as were ours, or set with trip wires to blast some six hundred steel pellets straight out when tripped. It was stamped front toward enemy, just in case it had been issued to an utter dummy.
A troop found me, just as I was contemplating my rice, about to make dinner, and told me the Bull wanted to see me.
I followed him to just below the hillcrest, where Simons had set up his command post.
Simons told me, and the other team leaders, what he wanted, in his grating whisper, which I swear carried as far as the average drill sergeant's bellow.
The next day, after midday meal, my reaction force was to take point. Simons thought we'd reach the approximately north-south road that led to the caves about that time, cross it somewhere below the hamlet of Ha Quang, and then, when we reached a tiny river about a klick beyond, turn north to the caves.
When we closed on the caves, Simons's attack element would flank us to the east, and then strike the caves as we found targets.
If they were able to «seize» Ho Chi Minh, or any other of the Communist hierarchy, they'd fall back through us, I'd engage whatever Viet forces were in pursuit, then break contact and we'd take that disused road until things felt dangerous, then move into the jungle back toward our DZ.
It sounded nice, simple, and workable.
But it didn't work out that way.
It almost never does in combat.
Simons had just finished when one of his radiomen slithered over.