Then enemy mortar rounds began to drop on them. Hale yelled orders into the handset, calling on platoons that no longer existed and commanders who were dead.
Good cover over there in that ditch, Jackson thought. Hide behind that bamboo. We’re fucking exposed.
Jackson wanted to turn around and run back into the jungle. Find Light. Go to the city.
But Jackson had no other choice but to follow Hale past the huts. One was on fire. Suddenly two soldiers only an arm’s length in front of them were cut down by a burst of AK-47 fire. Jackson could see the bullets hit, the impacts spraying water off the men’s uniforms and the sun forming rainbows in the spray for a brief instant. Then they were in a ditch, Hale lying beside him. Jackson gasped for breath and raised his head to watch, but all he could see was a burning hut and a dead American soldier lying on his side curled up like he had lain down to sleep in the sun. Most of the soldier’s back was missing, the muscles and ribs visible.
I’ll look like that, Jackson thought and tried to force the thought of his own death out of his mind.
Jackson began to shake and gulp air.
Why not me? Jackson thought. Tom Light’s not here. Luck. Nothing but fucking luck.
“Goddammit, keep ’em moving,” Hale shouted into the handset to a platoon from Alpha that was still trapped back up on the mountain. “Keep ’em spread out. Don’t bunch up.”
“They’re up on the mountain,” a lieutenant said.
“Why aren’t they down here? They’ll all get a court martial!” Hale screamed.
Someone silenced the enemy rifleman with a grenade launcher.
“Not much resistance,” Hale said to a sergeant. “Few strays in the village getting some Yard pussy.”
They passed the village, the battalion spread out through the scrub. So far the resistance they had met was not that of soft base camp troops. Even single men had stood and fought until they were killed. And the battalion was taking casualties.
Then a pair of Phantoms appeared, dropping down into the valley with a great roar. For an instant they seemed frozen over the valley as Jackson looked at their markings and the pilots under their canopies. The ground shook from the impact of 250-pound bombs, and Jackson pressed his body close to the earth. Suddenly they were gone, kicking in their afterburners with a roar and climbing almost straight up into some scattered patches of cloud that were beginning to move in. They made three passes, dropping bombs and napalm in the field and at the foot of the mountain where the main bunkers were located. Jackson was close enough to the napalm drop to feel the heat from it. Everyone cheered. Jackson yelled too. He wanted the Phantoms to cover the valley with napalm, fry the dinks.
Hale talked to the pilots on the radio. They complained that the NVA had placed the bunkers at a place against the mountain that made it difficult for the planes to negotiate the narrow valley and drop bombs on them. They made a final run and were gone.
Under the cover of the airstrike, they pressed on to the creek and forded it. Jackson had been wondering when the helicopter gunships would show up and a medevac for the wounded, but now blue-black storm clouds had blocked out the sun, and pieces of cloud had dropped down into the valley. Soon they would be fighting in the rain. He imagined flying out of the valley on a chopper. If only one came, Hale would end up on it and he would go too as Hale’s RTO.
“Hold off,” he said softly to himself. “Give us two hours.”
Forward Air Control called and told Hale they would have to withdraw the fighters because of the bad weather that was moving in. No choppers would be coming unless the weather improved.
Jackson wondered how it would be if Tom Light could really do it. Light walking about after the battle, raising dead soldiers with a touch of his hand. Crazy, Jackson thought. Fucking crazy. You’ve been lucky so far. Maybe it was never Tom Light at all. Just luck.
Then they met their first real resistance. At least a platoon of NVA were dug in. Leander brought his mortars in on them but as soon as the rounds stopped, the guns out of ammunition, the enemy was firing again. The NVA mortars at the bunkers were now getting their range.
Under the direction of the lieutenants they sidestepped the pocket of resistance. Now instead of standing and fighting until they were killed, the enemy began to fall back.
“Goddamn they’re falling apart,” Hale shouted into the handset. “Try to take that fucking general alive.”
Jackson had never seen Hale so excited. But Hale was careful to direct the battle from the safety of a ruined bunker, the overhead cover blown off by a 250-pound bomb leaving only a pit, the grass around it burned black from a napalm strike. Part of a sandbag wall was still in place. The charred bodies of the dead NVA had been frozen by the napalm in the positions they had died and looked like grotesque mannequins. The smell was very bad. Troops directly to their front began firing LAWs at the bunkers.
“Kill ’em, kill ’em, kill ’em,” Jackson repeated over and over.
Suddenly they began taking light machine gun fire from both flanks. The gunners were in no hurry. They took their time, making sure every inch of the field was covered. Mortars followed. Jackson crouched against the clay wall of the pit while he listened to Hale scream at his commanders.
No one will ever find our bodies, Jackson thought. The jungle will eat us. We’ll rot. In a week there’ll be nothing left. Light! Where the fuck are you?
Now the rain fell harder and thicker clouds moved in, making it impossible for Jackson to see more than a few feet. Figures ran up out of the clouds, and a lieutenant dropped into the bunker beside them.
“Goddamn double envelopment,” the lieutenant said. “Center collapsed and sucked us in. Trick’s older than the fucking world. There’s a goddamn brigade in here. We need an air strike so we can break out.”
Hale got back on the radio and began trying to contact Charlie and Alpha. But he received no reply.
“Dead, wasted,” the lieutenant said.
Then one by one and in small groups the remainder of the battalion found their way to the pit and formed a perimeter around it. The man with the frag wrapped in green tape was there, the frag now almost the size of a softball from the extra tape wrapped around it. Then Labouf and Reynolds & Raymond jumped into the pit. Short-timer still rode on Raymond’s shoulder. Everyone else had dropped their ruck, but Labouf still wore his.
Labouf looked quickly around him and said, “Alabama, let’s get out of here.”
“How? They got us surrounded,” Jackson said, willing to listen to anyone’s plan for escape, no matter how crazy.
“They won’t get my money,” Labouf said.
Jackson then knew Labouf had no plan.
“All the money man’s got is money,” Raymond said.
Leander jumped into the pit beside Hale.
“Where’s your fucking battalion, Major?” Leander asked, the pith helmet strapped tight under his chin.
Hale had lost one of his silver eagles. He sat in the mud at the bottom of the pit with his back to the wall.
“You better get rid of that dink helmet before somebody shoots you by mistake,” Hale said.
“Fucking Major Hale. Got my men wasted so he could make colonel.”
But Hale had stopped listening to Leander. He was looking at his map.
Instead of firing his M-16, Reynolds played it and sang, “I want to take you home, I won’t do you no harm/You’ve got to be all mine. Foxy Lady.”
Leander loaded a new magazine into his M-16 and began to fire over the side of the bunker.