As soon as the wounded were on board, the ambulance took off, making the best possible speed. Bannon walked over to the first sergeant and Folk as they watched the ambulance disappear in the darkness. When he closed up on them, Harrert asked about Uleski. Before answering, Bannon turned toward the M-113. He could hear the XO talking on the radio to battalion, sending up the SITREP, line by line. Uleski would be all right. Bannon then told Harrert to search the area for dead and to get a dog tag from each of the bodies, if he could find one. Folk was sent over to the ITV with the damaged launcher to see if it could be driven. As they turned to their tasks, Bannon walked back to 66.
Ortelli was walking around the tank, checking the suspension and tracks. Every now and then he would stop and look closer at an end connector or pull out a clump of mud to check a bolt. When he was satisfied that the bolt was tight, he would go to the next one. Kelp was perched in the commander's cupola, manning the machine gun and monitoring the radio.
His eyes followed the first sergeant as he went about his grim task. When Kelp saw Bannon approach, he turned his head back to the east, watching the dark hill across the valley.
Bannon hadn't realized how tired he was until he tried to climb onto 66. He fell backwards when his first boost failed to get him on the tank's fender. He rested for a moment, one foot on the ground, one foot in the step loop, and both hands on the hand grip.
With a hop and a pull, he managed to pull his body up. He stood on the fender pondering his next move for a moment. Decisions were becoming hard to make. He moved over to the turret and sat on the gun mantel with both feet on the main gun. He was dead tired, physically and mentally. So much had happened since the morning. His world and the world of every man in the Team had changed. They hadn't budged an inch from where they had been, but the scene before him now was foreign and strange. It was all too much for a tired brain to take in. The Team commander let his mind go blank as he sat there perched over the 105mm cannon of 66.
Folk startled him. For a moment Bannon lost his balance and almost toppled off the gun mantel. He had fallen asleep. The fearful day had finally ended, and it was dark. The short nap only accentuated his exhaustion. The ITV that had burned was still glowing red, with small fires consuming the last of its rubber. Through the trees he could see smashed Soviet vehicles still burning. Some were like the ITV, red and glowing. Others were still fully involved, yellow flames licking at dense black clouds of smoke rising in the still night air. The shattered and skewed trees and tree trunks added to the unnatural scene.
"Captain Bannon, the battalion commander wants to see you." First Sgt.
Harrert was standing on the ground in front of the tank looking up. They looked at each other while Bannon collected his thoughts. "Are you OK, Captain?"
"Yeah. Yeah, I'm OK. Give me a minute to get my shit together. Where is the Old Man?"
"He said he's back down where you last saw each other. He wasn't sure how to get in here and didn't want to throw a track finding a way in."
"Are you finished here, Sergeant?"
"Yes, sir. The other ITV was still running. Newell is going to drive it down to the maintenance collection point. We'll turn it over to the infantry there. 55 is still operational. The only real damage was to the antennas. We replaced them with the spares we carry around and made a radio check. 55's good to go." "And bodies?"
"Folk and I moved them over out of the way and covered them with 55's tarp. The location has been reported to S-1. There's nothing more for us to do here. "
Harrert's last comment was more like fatherly advice than a statement of fact. He was right, of course. The hilltop had been a dumb place to put a position. It took three men killed to convince Bannon of that. He had no desire to invest any more here.
He stood on the front slope of the tank and stretched, then, squatting down closer to the first sergeant, he told him to pass word on to the XO to move 55 over to the 2nd Platoon position. Harrert was to follow the XO over. Once there, the first sergeant was to pick up the XO and the 2nd Platoon leader in the PC and bring them over to 66's position to the right of 3rd Platoon. A runner would go for the 3rd and Mech Platoon leaders. No doubt there would be some new information to pass out once he had finished with the battalion commander. There might even be a change of mission. Even if there weren't he still wanted to gather the leadership and assess the impact of the first day's battle on them and their platoons. The 66 pulled out of the old headquarters position, carefully picking its way through the debris until they reached the logging trail. Once on the trail it only took a couple of minutes to reach their former position. They did not pull all the way up to the berm this time but stayed back in the woods about ten meters. The other tanks had also pulled back just far enough so that they could still observe their sectors without being readily visible to the other people across the valley. The battalion commander was waiting as 66 pulled in. Bannon had been right on both counts. Colonel Reynolds was there to provide an update on the big picture and give him an order for a new mission.
Colonel Reynolds had just come from brigade. Rather than pull all the team commanders back to the battalion CP, he was making the rounds and passing the word out himself.
Besides, Bannon suspected that Reynolds wanted to gauge the impact of the first day's battle on his team commanders just as Bannon wanted to do with his platoon leaders.
The first item covered was a rundown on the battalion's current situation. Team Yankee had been the only team to engage the enemy within the battalion task force. For a moment, Bannon wondered why the colonel bothered to provide him that brilliant flash of the obvious.
Team Bravo had been badly mauled by artillery, losing five of its ten PCs, two of the four ITVs that had been with them, and one of the four 1st Platoon tanks Team Yankee had attached to them. The destroyed tank had taken a direct hit on the top of the turret. The armor on a tank can't be thick everywhere and the top is about as thin as it gets. None of 12's crew survived. Of the remaining three tanks, one had lost a road wheel and hub but had been recovered and would be back up by midnight. Because of the losses, the trauma of being under artillery for so long, and the loss of its commander, Team Bravo had been pulled out of the lane. D company, the battalion reserve, had moved up to replace Bravo, to give them a chance to regroup.
C company, to the left of Team Yankee, had had an easy day. They hadn't seen a Russian all day and had not received any artillery fire. The battalion commander told Bannon that the C company commander and his men were chomping at the bit, waiting for a chance to have a whack at the Reds. In a dry and even voice Bannon told the battalion commander that if the gentlemen in C company were so fired up for action, they were welcome to Team Yankee's position, including the bodies. The cold, cutting remark caught Reynolds off guard.
He stared at Bannon for a moment, then let the matter drop, moving on to the battalion's new mission.
In the colonel's PC, Bannon received his new orders. On the wall of the PC was a map showing the brigade's sector.
The battalion task force was on the brigade's left flank. First Brigade, to the north, had received the main Soviet attack and had lost considerable ground. The attack against the battalion had been a supporting attack. Bannon thought about that for a moment. The Team's fight had been a sideshow, unimportant in the big picture. As that thought rattled around in his mind, he felt like screaming. Here the Team had put its collective ass on the line, fought a superior foe twice, and had three men killed and five wounded in an unimportant sideshow. His ego and pride could not accept that. What was he going to tell Lorriet's mother when he wrote her? "Dear Mrs. Lorriet, your son was killed in a nameless, insignificant sideshow. Better luck next time." He began to feel angry.