We nodded. They started loading up. The two wounded were unconscious, torn and bloody and gray.
One of the dead had had his right leg blown off with his pants. I didn’t see the other body yet.
Some journalistic instinct struck me and I took a couple of quick pictures as the wounded were carried toward us. I got one shot of a grunt carrying a severed foot when I realized what I was doing. I stopped. It seemed like the ultimate violation of privacy. I never took another picture of wounded or dead.
I was twisted around in my seat, watching them load, directing Reacher through the intercom. The man that had lost his leg had also lost his balls. He lay naked on his back with the ragged stump of his leg pointing out the side door. A clump of dirt had stuck on the end of the splintered bone. My eyes shifted away from his groin, then back. Only the torn skin from his scrotum remained. Riker looked sick. I don’t know what I looked like. I told Reacher to move him back from the door. He could fall out. The scurrying grunts tossed a foot-filled boot onto the cargo deck. Blood seeped through the torn wool sock at the top of the boot. The medic pushed it under the sling seat.
I turned around and saw a confused-looking private walking through the swirling smoke with the head of someone he knew held by the hair.
“A head? Do we have to carry a head?” I asked Riker.
The kid looked at us, and Riker nodded. He tossed it inside with the other parts. The medic looked away as he pushed the bloody head under the seat. His heel kicked the nose.
“We can’t find his body. I don’t think we should stay to look for it. Is his head enough?” a grunt yelled.
“Absolutely. Plenty. Let’s go,” Riker answered.
I flew toward Pleiku as fast as the Huey could go. Reacher called from the pocket that “One-Leg” was sliding toward the edge of the deck. I had him tell the medic, who put his foot on One-Leg’s bloody groin. That kept him from sliding out, but the torn skin of the stump flapped in the wind, spraying blood along the outside of the ship and all over Reacher as he sat behind his machine gun.
A grunt was crying. One of the wounded, his friend, had just died. The other was just barely alive. I wanted to fly at a thousand miles an hour.
Riker called ahead so we could land at Camp Holloway without delay. We went by the tower like a flash and landed on the red cross near the newly set-up hospital tent. The stretcher bearers ran out to unload the cargo.
I could see that they had been busy lately. There was a pile of American bodies outside the hospital tent.
The other wounded man died.
We had lost the race.
The stretcher bearers’ technique was to cross the cadaver’s arms and then, with a twist, flip it off the deck onto the waiting stretcher. I watched as two specialists unloaded One-Leg. They dropped him in a grotesque heap on the canvas. The sun glinted off a gold band on his left hand. The specialists were laughing. About what, I don’t know. Maybe they were so accustomed to their job that they thought this was hilarious. Maybe it was nervous laughter. Regardless, their nonchalance was too much for me. I jumped out and made them stop before they got to the tent. I braced them on the spot and yelled and yelled and yelled.
“Okay, a company from the First of the Seventh [1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, a First Cav unit] is trapped here,” Shaker pointed to a spot between the Ia Drang River and the Chu Pong massif on the big map in our briefing tent. “Charlie has them completely pinned down. The grunts say that Charlie can’t overrun them, but they have some bad wounded to get out.” Shaker paused a moment while he checked his notes. “I’m going to take five ships out tonight. There’s no moon, so the darkness will be our cover.” He stopped to suck on another cigarette. He smoked even more than me. Chain smoking made him look nervous, but I don’t think he was. I think he was so intense because he was the only black platoon leader in our battalion. He took another puff and began reading the names of the crews and their ship numbers. I didn’t listen too carefully because I knew that Riker and I were going to sit this one out tonight and get some rest. Then I heard, “… and Riker and Mason in eight-seven-nine.”
“What?” Riker exclaimed. Shaker seemed not to notice.
Shaker looked at his watch. “It’s 1730 now. Eat some chow and be on the flight line ready to crank at 2000 hours.” He turned to leave, but stopped. “Those of you not on the mission tonight will stay in the company area on standby.” As he left, the crowd broke up, and I heard rumblings of disappointment about having to hang around. Apparently there were some good bars in Pleiku.
Riker looked as unhappy as I felt. It seemed that our earlier debriefing had fallen on deaf ears. We had got back from our marathon mission with Grunt Six just two hours before. Shaker knew we had already put in eight hours of flight time today and twenty hours the day before. What was he trying to do, kill us?
“No, I’m not trying to kill you.” I had caught up with Shaker on a sidewalk in the adviser compound. “Mason, you’re new to our unit and fresh out of flight school, and I’m responsible for your training. You need all the night flying you can get.”
“But—”
“You got some sleep last night, right?”
“Yes.”
“So be ready to go at 2000 hours.” He left before I could even get started. I wanted to tell him how miserable I felt, how tired I was. But I got angry instead.
Fresh out of flight school, my ass! I said to myself as I walked back to the mess tent. Need night time, hey? Want to see if I can hack it? Well, let’s just see if I can hack it! I now had a goal that superseded survival.
The NVA allowed us to land without opposition. They even waited for the crew chiefs and gunners to get out to load the wounded. When they were sure we were on the ground and busy, they opened up. The thing that saved us was the moonless night. As I sat in the cockpit, I remember not being able to see the two Hueys in front of me at all. All our position lights were off. The only light was the faint-red glow of our own instrument panel-until Charlie started shooting. Bright-red tracers streamed in from the dark tree line at the front. They couldn’t see us, so they sprayed the whole LZ indiscriminately. The grunts scattered and started firing back.
Shaker yelled, “Yellow flight, take off!” Then he went. He didn’t realize that his crew chief was still outside trying to get to another wounded grunt. Stranded, the crew chief was going to be a grunt for a few hours.
We had got four on board before Shaker yelled. The two ships behind us were empty.
We took off single file into the tracers. The NVA were firing at our noise, and they were hitting. From where I sat, it looked pretty bad. I was on the controls and veered quickly left and right as I took off, thinking I could actually dodge the bullets. As I dodged, the world became distant. There was no sound. The burning red globes streamed past me. I banked hard to the left as soon as I saw the dim horizon, and the red death left me and licked up, looking for the others.
The sound came back and I heard the chatter on the radio. Four of the five ships had been hit. We were the exception. Amazingly, no one had been hurt.
There were still eight wounded to get out back at the LZ, along with Shaker’s crew chief.
We flew back to Pleiku and dropped off the wounded. En route, Shaker instructed two ships to join him on the return flight. Riker and I were chosen to try our luck again.
Back over the LZ an hour later, Shaker was told by the grunts that the LZ was too hot, so he elected to land about two miles away and wait.
I remember being so keyed up with adrenaline that I wanted to go back in, regardless. I even thought Shaker was chicken.