I was quietly running F Company, 5th Special Forces (Airborne), Lai Khe, in what had been South Vietnam, when Bull Simon called on the scrambler phone to ask if I wanted to get killed.
Naturally, I accepted immediately.
At the time—April 1969—I was simultaneously the youngest lieutenant colonel in the Army, and at the absolute bottom of said Army's shit list.
Both events came from the same cause:
I had been John F. Kennedy's favorite Green Beret.
Naturally, when Kennedy's hand-picked successor, Hubert Humphrey, got his head handed to him by Nelson Rockefeller in the '68 elections, and Kennedy was sent off in disgrace to Hyannisport, I was doomed. If I'd had a brain, I would've quietly arranged a nice soft assignment, teaching ROTC at a women's college maybe, until my time ran out, then found an honest job mugging drunks somewhere.
Instead, I volunteered to go back to Vietnam, back into the nightmare that wouldn't end until we pulled out, hollowly proclaiming "victory," in 1987.
All of this deserves a bit of explanation.
In 1963, I was a comfortable junior at Georgetown, majoring in international relations.
I probably shouldn't have gone to Georgetown at all, because it developed a taste for politics in me, without adding the ability to compromise and equivocate any good politician or statesman must have.
Like most Americans, I'd heard Kennedy's immortal "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country" speech, and determined my place of service would be in the State Department.
My father, a career officer who'd gone to work for "State," actually the CIA, after being badly wounded during the Korean War, snorted in dismay. He considered State, in his words, "a bunch of worthless pussies who couldn't find their dick with both hands and a White Paper."
But the Army wasn't for me. I somehow thought I was above marching from here to there with mud up my ass.
Then Kennedy went to Dallas, in November 1963. Three men hired by extreme rightist H. L. Hunt and a cabal of his equally crazed Texan cronies tried to assassinate him, almost succeeded, and my world changed.
Suddenly, pushing red-ribboned papers around the world didn't do anything for me. In spite of Hunt's giving the right wing a bad name, the Republicans were stupid enough to nominate ultraconservative Senator Barry Goldwater, and Kennedy was returned to office in the biggest margin in US history.
They say that he believed he then had a mandate from Heaven, as the Chinese say, and could do whatever he chose.
In 1964, I graduated from Georgetown, and immediately joined the Army.
That was just in time for Kennedy to overreact to the intelligence disaster in the Gulf of Tonkin, and subsequent pinpricks against US "advisors" in South Vietnam, just as he'd overreacted to Berlin, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Dominican nonsense.
But this time, he didn't get away with it.
A Brigade Landing Team of Marines went ashore in Da Nang, Special Forces were built up throughout the country, and a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division was sent to Bien Hoa as a fire brigade.
I barely noticed.
I was one of a herd of young warriors, sure there was about to be a war, a real war, and we wouldn't get to Vietnam before the gooks were hammered into oblivion.
It's interesting to note that less than ten members of my Officer's Candidate School class are still alive.
The war did wait on us.
I finished OCS, got my butter bars as a second lieutenant, and went to Jump School and Ranger School.
Kennedy announced the reformation of Rangers as full units, companies, then a full battalion, based at Fort Benning. I got assigned there as soon as I got my tab.
Now there was a full-scale troop buildup, throughout the Army.
"Everyone" knew what was coming.
Everyone except the rulers of North and South Vietnam.
The Marine base at Da Nang was hit hard, with over five hundred casualties, and that was it for Kennedy.
Plans for the invasion of North Vietnam went on the front burner.
There were leaks, of course, and diplomats from various nations came and went at the White House.
But Kennedy and his saber-rattling team would not listen to any calls for reason, for caution, for moderation, not until "the Communists are taught their proper lesson," as his brother Robert said.
We trained, and trained, and trained, and then, in endless shuttles of civilian 707s, we went to Vietnam, endless rows of tents, and more waiting for the Word.
I was a first lieutenant, executive officer of Bravo Company, First Ranger Battalion (Airborne) when the C130s finally loaded sticks of jumpers at Ton Son Nhut Airfield, outside Saigon, and droned north for the invasion of North Vietnam in May of 1965.
We kept well out to sea, as if keeping a secret, past the demilitarized zone, and then the huge formation of planes, escorted by flight after flight of fighters, were off the coast of North Vietnam.
None of my Rangers even pretended sleep, not even those who'd seen combat in other wars.
This was it, this was the big one, this is where we would stop pissy-assing around and break it off in Ho Chi Minh's butt.
Just below Haiphong Harbor, the formation split. Elements of the 101st were to jump into Haiphong and secure the harbor for the Marine landing teams headed toward shore.
The rest of us, Rangers and 82nd Airborne, went toward Hanoi, North Vietnam's capital.
My company, and two others, had been given a rather grim mission. We were to jump into almost the middle of Hanoi, just south of Ho Tay Lake. Our target was only known as a "military district," and no one really knew how many regulars of the Democratic Republic's army we'd face.
After we'd subdued these regulars, we were to head west, along the lakeside boulevard, and support other Rangers attacking North Vietnam's capitol building. We hoped to catch Ho Chi Minh and other governmental leaders at home, which, our briefers said, would end the war in a single masterstroke.
It didn't work out like that.
"Stand up," the jumpmaster shouted, and doors on either side of the C130's ramp came open.
"Hook up," and our static lines were clipped to the lines, clips facing inward.
We shuffled forward, stumbling under almost a hundred pounds of weapons and gear.
"Make equipment check."
"Sound off for equipment check."
The light next to the door was bright red.
Outside, it was a gray dawn, and below us was Hanoi, gray, sprinkled with lakes. I hoped to hell I wouldn't land in one.
"Stand in the door."
We were as ready as ready could be. Men were pressing hard against my back. We were to go out as tight and fast as we could, to keep the stick from being scattered all over the city below.
"Ready . . . "
The jumpmaster listened to his headphones, then straightened.
"GO!!"
He slapped me on the shoulder, and I was out into the slipstream, hands on my reserve, head bowed. The blast took and spun me, and I was falling. The static line came taught, yanked my backpack open, and the chute deployed. It cracked me like a whip, and I jolted hard.
I looked up, saw all those lovely unblown panels of my parachute perfectly deployed.
To one side of me was the huge Red River, in front and to my left, West Lake.
They'd dropped us right on target.
Above droned other planes, and the sky was full of parachutes. Parachutes and the greasy smoke of antiaircraft fire. I saw a 130 get hit, go into a bank, streaming paratroopers, and crash into the middle of a housing area. A missile flashed up, was gone, and a pair of jets dove down toward its launch site.
We'd been dropped low, only eight hundred feet, to give the enemy gunners as little time to shoot as possible.
Below me, the ground loomed up, brick walks, and, thank God, a bit of grass.
I slapped the release on my GP bag, full of ammo for one of my machine gunners, and it dropped to the end of the line.
I came in hard, rolled as I'd been taught, and came to my feet, dumping my chute, harness and reserve.
I had my newly issued M16 cradled in my arms, and carried a Light Antitank Weapon, the so-called "cardboard bazooka."
Plus a Randall knife strapped to my leg and a somewhat unauthorized Bill Jordan Special, a cut-down, modified Ruger .44 Magnum pistol.
And I still felt naked, hearing the snap-crack of rifle fire, and the chatter of machine guns.
There were other troops landing, some slamming in hard on the bricks, and someone shouted pain.
A machine gun chattered, and green tracer spat across the open area, too close to me.
They'd told us to save the LAWs for "hard targets," which I'd decided would be anyone shooting at me.
I cracked it open, aimed at the barracks the MG fire was coming from, and squeezed down on the firing mechanism.
Nothing happened.
I cursed the damnably unreliable LAW, just as someone rolled up to the window and flipped a grenade in.
There was a blast, and the window blew out, and the machine gun stopped firing.
I was shouting orders, and my noncoms were screaming, and we were on some kind of line, charging the barracks, smashing into them, killing anything that moved.
I don't remember anyone trying to surrender.
If they did, they weren't likely to be lucky.
Not that day.
Troopships with armor and legs—non-airborne troops—were supposed to be coming up the thirty-five miles from Haiphong to reinforce and quickly relieve us. Both Rangers and paratroops are intended as shock troops—go in, hit hard, take casualties, and then get out.
It didn't work that way.
We fought from that military area for two days as troops in mass, then scattered determined elements kept coming in at us.
It turned out we'd been facing Ho Chi Minh's personal security element, about a battalion—five hundred men—strong. All that saved our young asses is these Regulars were a bit out of practice, and that we'd surprised them.
The Rangers at the Palace fared even worse, getting almost obliterated. Ho Chi Minh and the other members of the hierarchy were long gone when the palace finally fell, nothing more than a mass of rubble.
The problem was, nobody had figured the Viets would fight so hard. It took two days to take Haiphong and clear the Red River. The resistance was the same sort Americans would have made if someone invaded the Chesapeake River and made for Washington.
By the time elements of the First Infantry Division arrived, our company of 250 men was down to 75 effectives, and I was company commander.
We weren't relieved, but ordered to swing toward the river, and help the 82nd take the Old Town, which was very strongly defended.
The People's Army was waiting for us.
The fighting was now the ugliest of all: urban warfare, with civilians trapped in the middle.
The bloodlust was gone from us all, and we tried to make sure we were only killing soldiers.
But that wasn't always possible. The Viets fought hard, holding positions to the last man, almost never surrendering. Hanoi was starting to look like pictures I'd seen of Berlin at the end of WWII.
It may have been a week, it may have been two, but finally we were slowly pushing the Viets back into the Red River.
Then the remnants of a regular battalion struck, trying to head west, for Hanoi's outskirts. I'd gotten some replacements, but had taken more casualties. I had about eighty soldiers when they hit us.
They pushed a wedge between two of my platoons. I called for air support, but, in the smoke and drizzle, none of the fast movers could get in.
A colonel was on my PRC25, saying we had to hold.
But we couldn't, and I felt we were about to break.
Even Rangers can't hold forever.
But I remember we now had artillery support, air-lifted 105s.
The Viets were on top of us, and my only option was to call in fire on our own positions.
We had a few seconds to find cover; the Viets had none as the rounds screeched into the dusty, rubbled street we fought from.
The third volley got me, lifting me and punching me through a shop wall.
I landed on something soft, realized I was hit but still alive, and stumbled out.
Here and there, tattered, dust-covered, bearded, staring, my men came out of the shatter.
They looked god-awful . . . but they still had their weapons, and still were fighting.
It was the Viets' turn to hesitate, then break, going back, in stumbling runs, the way they'd come.
I made sure they were retreating before I allowed myself to look at my shattered leg, my torn chest and arm, saw a tank with a white star on its turret rumble toward me, decided I'd done enough for one day, and went down.
I don't know who put the Viets' banner across my chest as they carried my stretcher to a waiting medevac chopper. I think I'd like to kick his ass, for that was one of the biggest causes of my future troubles. All I had was the banner, and, all bullets expended, my .44 Magnum.
I went out to a hospital ship, where amazingly nobody stole either my flag or pistol, and then to Camp Zama in Japan, then back to Walter Reed, where they started putting me back together.
The war wasn't going well, and "Sam Richardson's Last Stand" was just what the media, and the American public wanted.
There were already thirty thousand dead, twice that wounded, and Kennedy was forced to call up the reserves.
They wanted me to take the Congressional. I refused. I'd met men who'd won that medal and knew damned well I'd done nothing but what I was supposed to be doing, and that's not what they give that little necklace for.
They were getting me ready for my third operation at Walter Reed, and I was already anesthetic-silly when the President of the United States came calling.
In swept Kennedy, flanked by more generals than I'd seen pictures of in the Pentagon, plus, of course, a scattering of press types.
I guess I did something dumb, like try to sit up at attention. I was in the presence of one of my heroes, and a real legend.
"Relax, Major," Kennedy said, with that famous grin that'd brought him who knows how many votes.
"Uh, sir, It's 'lieutenant.'"
"Not anymore. You were made captain while you were still on the ground in Hanoi, and I just took the liberty of jumping you up a grade."
I may have moaned, thinking how that would play with my fellow officers. Kennedy must've thought I was in pain.
"Maybe this'll make you feel better," he said, holding out a hand without looking back. A general put a box in it, then another. He gave me the Distinguished Service Cross, which is just below the Medal of Honor, and a Purple Heart.
I stammered thanks.
Kennedy moved beside me, let the photogs have their shots.
"Plus," he said, "when you get better, I want you as one of my aides."
I managed a "yessir," then events got to me, and my mind went away.
The papers, of course, loved it:
Prexy Names Richardson
To Personal Staff
Last Stand Hero to
Advise Kennedy
And so forth.
I was recuping well, and my father came to see me.
"Congratulations, I suppose."
"I didn't know what else to do, sir."
"No," he agreed. "Not much you can do when the gods reach out. But you might be in for some problems."
"I've already gotten some grief," I told him, "from some of my friends."
"That, too," my father said. "But I was thinking more of something I learned a long time ago. If you like the circus, don't sit so close you can smell the elephant shit."
I didn't understand, not for some months. By the time I did, it was too late.
I hated Washington. Going to Georgetown, which supposedly educates you in the realities of power, I should have known better. But I didn't. The only people who went there wanted something. Preferably for nothing.
I can't remember anyone who fulfilled Kennedy's orders to "ask not . . ." All the bastards did was ask . . . and take.
And the Kennedy brothers were no different than anyone else.
I saw, very quickly, that mad gleam of power in JFK's eyes, and realized he would do anything to keep or increase his authority.
I also despised his personal morality. Kennedy, it was said truly, would fuck a snake if someone held its head. He had no qualms about cheating on his wife, at any moment of the day or night if he could find a hall closet to slip his latest bimbo into.
He lied to the people of America, justifying it with "When the time is right, they'll be told. But not yet." Which meant, as far as he was concerned, never.
His brother the attorney general was even worse, keeping his own overweening ambition concealed in the pretense that all he wanted to do was help his brother.
I never forgot what my father told me, that one of Robert Kennedy's first jobs was as one of the unutterably evil Senator McCarthy's lawyers.
I was, indeed, too close to the elephant.
I applied for a transfer back to the real Army several times, but was always refused. Kennedy said he "needed me."
I should have known I was his token war hero, especially after he called me into his office, and told me I was headed for Fort Bragg.
"For what, sir?"
"Since the Green Berets are mine, I think it would be a good idea to have one around me."
"But—"
"On your way, soldier."
And so I went. And found something wonderful.
I'd deliberately chosen paratroops, and then Rangers, not because I wanted the little tabs and devices on my uniform, but because I wanted to be a warrior among warriors.
In Special Forces, I found warriors far more dangerous, more qualified, than I could have dreamed of.
They treated me, naturally, as just another White House dickhead.
I kept my mouth shut, and soldiered hard.
I wanted approval from these men, and I didn't get it.
But I returned to Washington with my beret, and a determination to get myself back to Vietnam, in any capacity so long as it was with SF.
The progress of the war helped.
It was not going well at all.
We held Hanoi, just like we held all of the other major cities in North and South Vietnam. But what of it?
Ho Chi Minh, his Communist party, and his army sank into the marsh of the countryside. Ho went back up the Red River, back into the mountains on the Chinese border, just as he'd done when the French tried to hold his country after WWII.
From there, he fought his war.
We garrisoned the cities, and tried to hold the roads.
And the Communists fought back. Not "fairly," as if there's such a thing in war.
But from the ditch, from the jungle, always at our back.
When we got arrogant, or careless, his Regulars, or the main force Viet Cong in the south, or even the local guerrillas, would appear, strike hard, and vanish.
Enraged, we struck back, bombing villages we thought were "hostile," or even declaring entire districts free-fire zones. If those areas weren't hostile before the helicopter gunships or the B52s or the fighter-bombers came over, they certainly were afterward. To ensure the people we were supposedly helping fight Communism hated our guts, we sent through battalions of legs, who thought any gook was a Commie, and probably deserved to be dead.
The puppet government we supported in Saigon was only interested in looting and control. Their best troops, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam paratroops and Rangers were used as palace guards.
Kennedy seethed, increased the draft, and had, by 1967, over a million Americans in country.
And the war raged on.
University students protested the war, and these protests were slapped down by Attorney General Kennedy. He made the famous statement that "protest in a time of trouble is treason," and the prisons filled up with middle-class Americans, who were given the option of jail or the military.
The pretense Kennedy maintained that he actually gave a damn about civil rights was shattered, and cities exploded into riots. His vice president, Senator Johnson (D.-Texas) snarled, saying Kennedy had promised to build a better society, and instead was wasting his, the party's, and the country's substance in a country no one could find on a map.
Kennedy ignored him, and so Johnson and Kennedy finished their terms not on speaking terms, and Johnson wasn't given the traditional chance at the presidency, but rather that hoggish toady, Hubert Humphrey.
As the 1968 elections neared, the always-sophisticated Communists mounted a scattered offensive in cities across Vietnam. The offensive failed, but Kennedy insisted on further increasing the draft, and sending another million men overseas.
That was enough for the voters. The extreme conservative Republicans were ignored by their party for a change, and the Republicans ran moderate Nelson Rockefeller, who destroyed the Democrats.
Naturally, one of the first things Rockefeller did after taking office was to put the draft into high gear, and send another million men into the war.
But that was in his first one hundred days, when it's very hard for a president to do anything wrong in the public and media's eyes.
One of Kennedy's last acts, before he left office, was to jump me again in the promotion lists to lieutenant colonel.
That would further destroy my chances of just fitting back into the Army.
But I stayed in, and pulled a few strings.
I figured if I could get back to Vietnam, not only would I maybe be helping my country, but I could save my career by staying well out of sight.
The C Team of 5th Special Forces, named F Company, I ended up in charge of was at Lai Khe, a few hundred heroes who did everything from advising the ARVNs, to pulling intelligence missions up to the border, running A Team camps in the middle of nowhere, to all the other strange missions the Green Hats got.
If I thought being in the elite would keep me from this time of troubles my country and Army were going through, I was quite wrong.
The tour of duty had been increased to two years, over the previous eighteen months, so soldiers weren't constantly rediscovering fire. These draftee and non-special operations soldiers spent their time either huddling in the oversized, overcivilized base camps, or else timorously sweeping the jungle. Every now and again, a column of US soldiers would encounter, generally on their terms, the Viets. There'd be a brisk firefight, or sometimes a knock-down brawl, and then the Viets would vanish back into the bush, into the mountains, leaving us to lick our wounds.
We certainly weren't losing the war . . . but more important, we weren't winning it, either. I wondered what would have happened if Bobby Kennedy hadn't used the draft and punitive federal legislation to kill any semblance of a peace movement, like the US had during the so-called Philippine Insurrection.
For many people, their tour in Vietnam was nothing more than sweaty boredom, never seeing the enemy, and only encountering him . . . or her . . . when a convoy they happened to be riding on was ambushed, or a friend on perimeter guard was sniped, or what they read in Stars & Stripes, the service newspaper.
I met Arthur "Bull" Simons in a rather strange way. He was running the supersecret Study and Observations Group, with the rank of a one-star general. Special Forces never got a lot of rank allocated, enlisted or commissioned, even when they were Kennedy's darlings. It wasn't until the escalation that Simons saw his star, the only one he'd ever get. At the time, the head of all Green Berets was a one-star, Bill Yarborough, and, again, it took the buildup before he got a second one.
Simons was a legend. He'd been described once as the "only soldier who actually hates people." Maybe he did, but he also took damned good care of his crews, as they ran illegal crossborder reconnaissance into Cambodia, Laos, and even, I was told, into China itself.
He was about as frightening a man to look at as you could imagine—a bit under six feet, about two hundred pounds, built like a boulder. His face was lined, hard, and he had a nose like a hawk.
He'd been a Ranger in WWII in the Pacific, active in clandestine warfare after that.
Naturally, when he came down to Lai Khe, wanting to personally oversee a rather special mission I still don't know the details of into Cambodia, he hated my guts. I was not only one of the "pussies" who'd swarmed into SF looking for that trick combat patch on the right sleeve, a beret, and some war stories, but a political bastard as well.
I kept my mouth shut and did everything he wanted.
His team, actually three recon teams slammed together, went across the border, and the shit closed in on them.
They were trapped, about twenty klicks into Cambodia, in the area known as the Parrot's Beak. Simons wanted gunships and liftouts to save them.
Somehow the US ambassador to Cambodia heard about their plight, and ordered nothing could be done to embarrass the US. His order was echoed by the general commanding III Corps, my personal boss. Simons's men were to be abandoned to escape and evade on their own. Which meant die in place.
I took a deep breath and ordered my own helicopter resources into the air, went across the airstrip to the local gunship company, who owed me, and got their B-model gunships in the air.
As I gave the orders, for the first time in a long time, maybe since Hanoi, I felt a great weight lift. The hell with orders, the hell with the chain of command, and the hell with my career. I was finally doing something that was right.
I ordered my Mike Force, evil Chinese mercenaries called Nungs you could absolutely trust, unlike the ARVN Special Forces and army, to insert and get the SOG people out. I pulled on my combat harness, threw some magazines for my old Schmeisser machine pistol into a pack, and went with them.
It was hot, it was heavy, it was bloody, and it isn't the story I'm trying to tell.
By the next dawn, we brought out all of Bull Simons's thugs. Four were dead, but we extracted the bodies, and all of our own casualties, including the Nungs.
Simons brought his command and control Huey down on the strip at Lai Khe as I landed and stumbled out, wanting only a beer, to make sure my wounded were taken care of, eighteen hours sleep, and finding out what little of my career was left.
He got out of his bird, and I saluted him.
He looked me up and down, not even a smile on his face.
"I guess I was wrong," was all he said, and he went back to his ship and headed back for Nha Trang, one of SOG's headquarters.
Somehow, maybe because the SOG mission was most secret, and approved at "the highest levels," I stayed a light colonel, in charge of my unit, and nobody said anything. If there was a distinct chill when I went to III Corps headquarters in Saigon, what of it? Special Forces were never the favorites of the Regular legs.
Time passed, and I was relatively content. I wasn't doing anything to win the war in particular, but I wasn't losing it, either, unlike some others.
Things continued to get worse, culminating with a sapper raid against the Republic's palace in Saigon that managed to not only kill a host of ARVNs and civilians, but the serving president and prime minister of South Vietnam as well.
President Rockefeller had the unpleasurable experience of approving General Duong Van "Big" Minh as emergency head of state. Big Minh had served once before, proven his incompetence, and been set aside. But he was, I guess, to the powers in Washington, the only game in town.
Three weeks after the echoes of the Saigon catastrophe were dying, I got the call from up north, from Hanoi, from Bull Simons.
"You looking for action?"
"Always, sir," I said.
"Then grab your shit and get up here. I've got a hot one that'll prob'ly get us both massacred, and I could use a light colonel to run my reaction force."
"Doing what, sir?" I asked.
"Not even on a scrambler, Richardson."
"What about my company?"
"Turn it over to your exec. It's approved, upstairs. Way, way upstairs. You'll be on TDY for at least two months. Or maybe forever."
He told me where to report. I packed a duffle bag full of my favorite weapons, two bottles of Johnny Walker, and a couple changes of socks, and grabbed the first flight down to Saigon, then from Ton Son Nhut north to Hanoi.
I reported to a certain room in the airport terminal, and an unmarked jeep took me, and three other Special Forces types Simon had volunteered, into the city.
Hanoi was not only a city in ruins, with the only new construction either the slap-up pressed-beer-can shacks the Vietnamese entrepreneurs specialized in, or military prefabs.
The people looked at us coldly, then away. Even the beggar kids stuck out their hands without a grin, without any chatter, as if we owed them.
Everyone knew us for the enemy.
I felt with a shiver we didn't belong here and never would.
The jeep took us to the Metropole Hotel. That had once been the hotel for the elite, back when the French were here. Now it was a safe house for CIA and other disreputable sorts like Special Forces.
Simons was waiting to brief us.
The mission was quite simple: Intelligence had somehow—I wasn't told how—found out where Ho Chi Minh, his main general, Vo Nguyen Giap, and the main command structure of the Communists were.
Bull Simons proposed to take a fifty-man team in after them.
"Assassination?"
"Don't ever use that word," he said, and there wasn't a smile on his face or voice. "We're to take Uncle Ho into custody. If he resists . . ." Simons shrugged his massive shoulders.
"Can I ask who approved this? Just out of curiosity, sir?"
"No," Simons said. "You can't. But I'll tell you there isn't any higher authority for us. And that doesn't mean Westy, either."
There were only two men above General William C. Westmoreland, Commanding General of all US Forces in Vietnam, Admiral Harry Felt, in Hawaii . . .
And President Nelson Rockefeller.
I knew enough, maybe more than I should.
Simons moved us from the safe house to a villa outside Hanoi, while the fifty men trickled in.
I wondered if the Bull had gone quite mad picking me, for the men that came in were true legends: men like Dick Meadows, who'd snatched more prisoners with his recon teams than most American line battalions; Jerry "Mad Dog" Shriver, a man with the coldest eyes in the world, who seldom changed his clothes, and slept with a suppressed greasegun on his chest; David "Babysan" Davidson, who looked just like his nickname, who'd spent one out of five days of his life in Vietnam; Bob Howard, the most decorated soldier in all of America's history; supersniper John Plaster, others.
I complained to Simons that maybe I was out of my league, and he gave me a wintry smile.
"Look at it this way, Richardson. I need me somebody who won't go pulling an Audie Murphy, and will cover my ass, or my flanks, and not go yodeling forward like a Custer."
"Thanks, sir. I think."
I thought that if this mission were a disaster, it would be years before Special Forces would be able to rebuild its strength.
But failure wasn't on the agenda.
And then there were fifty of us. All of us were Americans, except for ten hand-picked Montagnards, Rhades. All of them had served in our camps for years, and were as trusted as any roundeye.
NOFORN, as it was said. No foreigners, who might just have loose lips or, as we'd found on occasion, those whose real loyalties were with Ho Chi Minh.
We got some details on where we would be going: a big cave complex, very, very near the Chinese border.
"So there'll be no room for fuckups," Simons said cheerfully. "If you happen to go and get killed, try to look like a dead gook."
He still didn't tell us the name of the caves, or their exact location.
We trained hard, and fast, for everyone knew of operations that had great intelligence and looked good, but by the time people quit farting around and went to the field, the bad guys were long gone.
We couldn't find, or build, a duplicate of our target, so we concentrated on just learning how the others operated, how they thought, since none of us were familiar with the others' style.
That meant running patrols, big patrols, sweeping south of Hanoi. There were more than enough Viets in the jungles and paddies to make the training most realistic. We took half a dozen casualties in firefights, inflicted far more. Replacements came in, and we kept training.
We would fight in ten-man teams, another new thing, and so we practiced fire and maneuver, again and again and again.
Others built satchel and link charges, and everyone spent a lot of time on our improvised ranges, going through immediate-action drills to counter an ambush, firing everything from pistols to the two little 60mm mortars we'd take in as our artillery.
We would, if the shit hit the fan, be able to call in Air Force and Navy fast movers, fighter-bombers, but we were, Simons said, out of range of "real" artillery. "Except for the bad guys, of course," he added.
There was a problem with insertion—if we flew out of Hanoi, every Viet who could look up would report our half dozen helicopters.
Simons decided we'd go in by sea. He got big HH53 Sikorskys and their pilots, from the Air Force. "Twice our minimum requirement," he told me. "Fucking choppers break a lot."
When we got the go, we'd fly out to waiting carriers off Haiphong, the carriers would steam to a certain point, and we'd take off again. The HH53s, normally used for rescue purposes, were fitted for midair refueling. We'd refuel, go in on foot from a landing zone. The choppers would return to the carriers.
When . . . if . . . we made contact, they'd immediately take off from the ships and fly in to a certain point, refuel, and then come get us.
"Which means we could be on the ground getting killed for a while," Meadows said.
"You have a problem with that, Captain?" Simons demanded.
"Not at all, boss," Meadows said. "Just trying to figure out how many magazines to take."
And then the bad things started happening.
I was very glad I was out in the bush, running up and down and back and forth. When I creaked back in, there was a message to report to Colonel Simons. Immediately. Which meant before a shower, a beer, or even a balls-scratch.
"You are very damned lucky, Colonel," he growled.
"Why so, sir?"
"Because you've been out there in the tules for a while, so you can't be the rat-fink."
"I beg your pardon, sir?"
"Somebody's leaked," Simons said, and explained.
Somebody had talked at the wrong time and in the wrong place.
William C. Westmoreland had shown up in Hanoi, expressing interest in how "his" Special Forces were doing. Worse, also interested and in Vietnam on a "fact-finding mission," were two hard right-wing Republican politicos: Richard Nixon, who'd somehow avoided disgrace in the aftermath of the Kennedy attempted assassination; and John Connolly, once a Democrat, who'd milked the fact that he'd been in the limo with Kennedy in Dallas as far as he could, then jumped parties, looking for a national office.
Neither of them, I knew, was to be trusted in the slightest.
I supposed the ticket, in three years, would be Richard Nixon for president, Connolly for veep. They were smoking funny cigarettes—America doesn't elect losers, like Nixon was after Kennedy won in 1960, and everyone distrusts a fence-jumper, figuring a man who'll sell his own out once will do it again, if it benefits him.
But if President Rockefeller had ordered Ho Chi Minh's assassination, which was very definitely against presidential policy (in spite of Kennedy's obsession with Fidel Castro), that would make good fodder for the Republican Right.
Especially if it failed.
"Not me, boss," I said, getting only a little pissed. That sort of directness was just Simons's way.
"No shiteedah, Richardson," the Bull snarled. "I just wanted you to know what's going on . . . and not tell anyone, and I mean anyone. We got enough to worry about.
"We'll be going in in seventy-two hours. The operations order'll be available tomorrow morning.
"We're under a complete security hold. No MARS calls, no in-country phone calls, no visits, no visitors, and any last letters will be censored and not in the mail until we're in the boonies."
I left, wondering what kind of war it was where the commander of all in-country troops wasn't told about an operation. All wars are political, of course. But this one was too damned much like that for my liking.
But it was the only one I had.
We cleaned already spotless weaponry, sharpened already razor-edged knives, and wrote those last letters.
The basic weapon we carried was the CAR15, the stubby-barreled version of the M16. There'd been argument, finally settled by the Bull, on whether we should carry CARs or AK47s. The issues were reliability, lightness, ease of resupply, and so on and so forth. Simons had said we'd go for the CARs, because when somebody popped a cap, everyone would know whether it was a black or white hat.
I didn't get involved in the argument. I knew better than to try to lug my Schmeisser. It was a good weapon, but it did fire 9mm pistol rounds, which are pissing in the wind in a real firefight.
Other basic weapons were the M79 grenade launcher and cut-down Chinese RPD machineguns (called by them the Type 56). We went with the RPD because it could be lightened far more than the standard M60, and was more reliable than the SEAL's favorite Stoner.
The three snipers on the team carried accurized, semiauto scoped M14s, less accurate than the normal M70 Winchester bolt-action rifles, but capable of delivering a higher rate of fire, which Simons considered important, since he hoped to gun down Viet bigwigs in clumps.
Other than that, we carried a grabbag of 12-gauge pump shotguns, personal handguns, grenades, and explosives. Plus everyone carried at least one LAW.
I was carrying enough crap already, but added an old-fashioned suppressed High Standard .22 automatic to my pack. Other people, especially Jerry Shriver, also carried silenced pieces.
Our commo was one AN/PRC-77 per team, but the radios would only be used when we were closing in, or if we ran into trouble or on extraction. The US didn't believe those little brown bastards in the jungle could intercept, let alone read, transmissions, and ignored ambushes that proved things different.
But we knew better, having learned that the hard way. So we'd keep radio silence as long as we could.
For an emergency, we also carried search and recovery radios, small transistorized units used to bring in pickup.
Our weaponry may have varied, but the rest of our equipment was standard. For ammo pouches, we used canteen carriers, which would lug more magazines than the issue items. In our rucks, we carried changes of socks, and standard patrol rations, which was a pack of Minute rice, coupled with yummy add-ons like pilchards, Hong Kong crabs, strange-looking canned meat, and other items you had to be a while in the jungle to appreciate.
Instead of wearing any sort of camouflage fatigues, we wore standard fatigues we'd blotch-sprayed with flat black paint, a standard SOG modification. On our feet were normal jungle boots, and we wore floppy hats.
The 'Yards wore black pajamas and Cong hats, enough to fool any enemy we encountered for hopefully one magazine blast.
We assembled in midafternoon of the third day, ready to go.
Simons's briefing was fairly short.
He showed us the target, and there were mutters of dismay. It was, indeed, just on the Vietnam-China border, and was called Hang Pac Bo. In peacetime, if there was ever going to be anything such in this part of the world, it might have been a tourist attraction.
Flanking the map were huge aerial photo blowups.
"Don't fuck up and wiggle north," Simons said. "We don't need to be meeting any Chinese." He smiled as much as he ever did, nodded at Meadows. "Dick's already made enough enemies on that side of the border."
The contour lines on the big map were close together. We were going to be humping some steep mountains, as predicted.
Simons issued every man a map, and we studied them as he went on.
"We'll insert here," Simons said, tapping the big map. "Just on the far side of this little village called Tra Linh. It looks like there's some kind of secondary east-west road here, that leads close to the caves. We'll keep south of that road . . . if it even exists . . . and move to the far side of this road, here that goes into this other little village, Ha Quang.
"Call it two days march.
"Assuming, which is a big assumption, we aren't blown by then, we'll then slide our way to the caves and look for trouble.
"We chanced an overflight of the caves with a drone a week ago, and it looks like there's at least two companies of NVA Regulars on guard. We'll try to move through them, or, failing that, beat the shit out of them hard, then go after Uncle Ho."
Mad Dog Shriver snorted.
"They'll hear us coming, boss. There's no way we'll be able to sneak into Ho Chi Minh's bedroom without somebody blowin' reveille. Best we just think about kicking their ass out of the way from the get-go."
"You're probably right," Simons said.
"But you gotta have dreams, Jerry," somebody said, and everyone laughed.
"If we go in the shitter," Simons said, "I mean really in the shitter, we'll try to break contact and reassemble somewhere down here, around Na Giang, although that might not be possible, and we'll pick an alternate Romeo Pappa en route.
"If we absolutely go in the shitter, and have to run like hell, we'll break up and exfiltrate, and then there'll be a pickup over here, in Cao Bang. If things go that bad, there'll be a couple of companies of Marines go in and take the airstrip there, and wait for survivors.
"Or maybe not. We'll play things by ear, depending on how they go.
"Again, don't exfiltrate into China unless you have to. The Agency isn't worth shit getting people out of there, like we all know. I think there's still a few OSS guys stuck in Yunnan somewhere."
Again, there was laughter.
"That's it," Simons said. "Everything else is SOP, like we rehearsed it. We'll know more, have more on the ground.
"You've got the rest of the day to look at these photos. I've outlined what I think the route maybe should be. Anybody with better ideas . . . see me in my office.
"Oh yeah. Some romantic damned fool gave the operation the code name of Eastern Sunrise."
A few people groaned.
We spent the rest of the day memorizing the photos. It looked steep, unoccupied, and grim.
But that was the sort of thing we were paid to do.
Nobody had any better ideas than the Bull, so the next day, we assembled our gear, made final checks as three Jolly Green Giants came in, and boarded.
The flight down the Red River to the sea was quiet. None of us were brooding, but rather intent on what we'd do on the ground, how we'd move, and such.
We landed on the carriers off Haiphong, and Air Force service people swarmed the Jolly Green Giants, giving them final servicing. There were four more already aboard ship, our backups and cover.
The ships steamed north for a few hours.
The ship's PA system went off: "All Sunrise raiders . . . all Sunrise raiders . . . man your birds for takeoff. Man your birds for takeoff. And . . . good luck and God go with you."
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.
"Sunrise Control, sir."
Simons took the handpiece, listened.
"Sunrise Six, this is Sunrise Control," the tinny voice said. "No skinny for you. Report, over."
Simons used squelch code, clicking his handset button twice. That meant "Received, over." Three would have meant "In contact, shut up, they're close."
"Sunrise Control, out."
Neat and clean, the way things are supposed to be.
It was getting dark when I found my way back to my position.
I unhooked my harness, put on mosquito lotion, wistfully thought of being able to take off my boots, and set my M16 in front of me.
Then I mixed my Minute rice with water in the pouch, opened a can of something by feel, dumped it in the rice. I dosed everything with Tabasco, unquestionably one of the few secret weapons the US had in that war.
It turned out to be the famous mystery meat.
Men who'd gone through the Royal Tracking School in Malaysia swore it was orangutan. But there weren't any of the big apes in Vietnam.
Others said it was local monkey.
Cynics thought it was the infamous "monkey meat" the Foreign Legion ate in the '50s that some cost-conscious quartermaster had gotten his hands on.
I knew it wasn't water buffalo, since I ate that fairly regularly.
Gourmets had no place in the Green Berets.
I ate without thinking about what I was doing, leaned back against my pack, and went to sleep.
My team was within hand's reach of me.
Simons, feeling confident, had ordered only a one-third alert, which gave everyone a good night's sleep, off and on.
I stood last watch, together with Staff Sergeant Jenkins. Before dawn, we tapped everyone awake, took quiet shits if we had to, packed anything we'd taken out of our rucks, ate more rice and whatever, brushed our teeth, and were ready to rock and roll.
By daylight, we were moving off the hill.
Simons's estimate was right. Around midday, we reached the north-south road. It was a little too well tended to make anyone happy. Point elements went across, then everyone went down and tried to think like a bush, as a squealing noise and rumble approached.
It was a Russian PT76 tank, with its hatches unbuttoned, but its crew looking very, very alert.
It went on past, and came back fifteen minutes later.
It was just then the thought came: America, like France, had been accused, quite correctly, of taking these "gooks" less than seriously. That was one of the biggest complaints Special Forces had about the regular Army.
Yet here we were, attempting to assassinate a head of state, with nothing more than fifty crazies with machine guns. Would we have tried to kill Stalin, Hitler, de Gaulle with such a pissant force? Of course not. We would've dropped the entire 82nd Airborne in their laps.
Talk about contempt for the enemy . . .
I forced the thought away. We were too close, too hot, to allow any negatives. And besides, it was far too late.
We crossed the road, then crept north.
The jungle was thick, uncut, and the land was rough, mountainous.
My map said we were close, very very close, when the signal came back down the line: "Richardson up."
I moved past my crouched men to the Montagnards, who were on line along a ridge crest.
Babysan Davidson beckoned to me, and I slid up beside him.
He pointed, and I used a bush to peer downslope.
Below me were the caves.
And what looked like the entire Vietnamese Communist party leadership.
Here and there were the entrances to the caves. Hidden under trees or carefully camouflaged were low huts. The grounds were as immaculate as the White House, yet still clearly jungle. No overflight using conventional visuals would have seen anything.
There were guards here and there and, in front of one cave, another parked tank.
There were Soviet jeeps, and several antiaircraft guns.
The day was hot and still.
I chanced binoculars and saw, below me, dignified men walking about. It could have been the steps of the Capitol Building on a sleepy summer day, with senators and representatives digesting their lunch, and planning speeches.
And now we would kill them all.
I slid back in line, brought my troops up, and chanced using my radio.
"Sunrise Six Actual Up."
Simons crawled up a few minutes later, his bodyguard and radiomen behind him.
Babysan waved him to the crestline, showed him what I'd seen.
Simons came back, with one of the few smiles on his face I ever saw.
His plan was going perfectly.
He picked up the handset, whispered commands into it.
Behind me, men started moving toward the flank.
Then Babysan started waving furiously at me. I crawled up, Simons behind me. He was pointing, miming binoculars.
I found my bush, looked through it in the direction Davidson was pointing.
I saw Satan, or anyway the man most Americans thought was his embodiment.
It was a frail old man with a long, wispy beard, being helped by an aide, in deep conversation with two much younger men. Trailing the three were a host of aides.
Ho Chi Minh.
Our target was right there in front of us, no more than two hundred meters away.
Simons was beside me, hissing into his radio, "Snipers up! Goddammit, snipers up!"
And then the shit hit the fan.
Bull Simons's other radio, on command net, crackled, "Sunrise Six, Sunrise Six, this is Charlie Golf. Approaching your area. Request sitrep, over."
Watching Bull Simons try to keep from exploding in all directions might have been funny.
Somewhere else, not here.
"Who in the roaring blazing fuck is Charlie Fucking Golf?" he managed.
I had no idea, and then we heard the roar of a helicopter.
A HH53 blazed overhead. Not one of the dirty, flat green Giants that we had, but a finely waxed, gleaming machine that was fit to carry presidents.
I knew the bird. I'd seen it in Saigon.
It was General William C. Westmoreland, Commanding General, MAC-V's own chopper. And now I knew who Charlie Golf was. Commanding General. Someone must've picked it as a call sign we might recognize.
Simons ran off a string of obscenities. The radio droned back, blithely.
"Sunrise Six, this is Charlie Golf. Pop smoke at your location, and prepare a Lima Zulu. Over."
We were about to kill Ho Chi Minh, and this stupid frigging Westmoreland wanted to do a white-glove inspection or something.
It actually wasn't quite as stupid as it sounds, as I found out, years later. It took that long for things to be declassified, because of what a disaster that day was.
Even the declassified data is spotty, but it seems that someone in Washington talked about some kind of supersecret, ultraclassified mission being planned.
Richard Nixon and John Connolly, who I correctly thought were planning a run at the presidency in 1972, decided now was the occasion to get in on the act, either critically if it failed, or in bed with it if we succeeded.
Evidently they did not know exactly what President Rockefeller had ordered. By the time I investigated it was clear the mission had been planned by the CIA, and ordered directly by Rockefeller, bypassing all conventional lines of command.
Westmoreland, not knowing what was going on up north, and getting angrier by the minute at being bypassed, flew to Hanoi with the two politicians and, by relentless grilling, found out where our team was headed and its mission.
I don't know if he would have ordered us to stop, or what made him fly north from Hanoi, especially with Connolly and Nixon. Evidently he didn't know exactly where Ho Chi Minh was supposed to be, or anything more than the area we were moving in.
No one knows, even, who ordered smoke, and a landing zone cut. It might have been an overzealous staff officer, listening to, most likely, Connolly.
Westmoreland was too professional . . . I think . . . for that, and Nixon too cagey. Not to mention cowardly.
Regardless, we lay on that hilltop, frozen in shock.
The Viets below us weren't.
That summer calm was shattered, as if someone had pitched a rock into a hornet's nest.
Alarms rang, and troops began doubling here and there.
Two men had Ho Chi Minh by the arms, and were hurrying him to the shelter of a cave.
I have no idea where the snipers were.
But someone had to do something.
I slid my LAW off my chest, remembering its total unreliability, pulled the pin and slid the tube forward. The iron sight flipped up automatically, and I aimed.
I squeezed down on the firing mechanism, and nothing happened.
The sights were off that small man, only a few meters from safety. I started to correct, and the goddamned LAW fired.
The rocket, wisping smoke, shot out and down, passing over Ho Chi Minh's head by at least two meters, and struck a commo truck thirty meters distant. It exploded, and the truck bucked and burst into flames, just as Ho Chi Minh and his entourage vanished into safety.
I was staring down, almost in tears at my miss, and so I didn't see Westmoreland's helicopter sweep overhead, not one hundred meters off the deck, no doubt drawn by the smoke which the pilot might have thought was our ordered marker.
Some people said it was an SA-2 missile that was launched, which I doubt, given its range requirements for arming. More likely it was a heavy machine gun or maybe even a lucky shot with an RPG.
Whatever, something took the big Sikorsky through the canopy, and exploded. The helicopter bucked, rolled on its side, and dropped. About ten meters above the ground, an explosion boiled through its fuselage, then it struck, and another explosion sent bits of aluminum and . . . other things . . . through the air.
Simons, quicker than us all, was on his feet.
"All right," he shouted, and I think his voice carried across the nearby border. "India Alpha. Shoot their dicks off, then we're moving out. By teams!"
Down below, a pair of PT76s rumbled into life.
Three LAWS spat from the flank, hitting them in their lightly armored sides. Two exploded, the other boiled smoke, and spun to a halt.
We fell back, down the hill.
"To the road," Simons shouted. "The hell with being careful!"
We obeyed, shooting as we moved. We were undoubtedly doomed, but the reflexes of our training took over.
We went down the road, almost to that hamlet of Ha Quang.
Mortars thudded, and people went down. If they still moved, someone had them back on their feet, and carried them. Medics tried to treat them as we moved.
If they were dead, they were abandoned, with sometimes a grenade, its pin out, tucked under them as a hasty boobytrap.
Just before the village, Simons was standing at the junction of that almost road.
"Down this way," he ordered.
I stopped my reaction force there, spread them out.
"Goddamit, Richardson—"
"Move your ass, sir," I shouted. "I've got my orders."
A momentary grin came and went, then he grabbed his handpiece, was calling for our lift ships.
I counted twenty-five men running past me, leapfrogging their way. There were ten men with me.
Babyface and Mad Dog Shriver hurtled past, behind their Montagnards.
A solid wave of infantry boiled down the road, and machine gunners opened up. One of the gunners grunted, flopped over, and I had his RPD.
The Viet infantry was hesitating.
M79s thunked, and grenades exploded in their midst.
I put a drum from the RPD into the mass, and they broke and ran.
Then we were moving, following the others toward safety.
Artillery slammed in somewhere, obviously being fired blind.
A mortar team came around a bend, spotted us, and ducked into cover.
One of the 60 gunners dropped four mortar rounds on top of them, and that was something we didn't have to worry about.
We were moving fast, but not fast enough.
The Viets were closing, and now their mortars were killing and wounding men around me.
Simons was shouting something on the radio, and a mortar thunked in, I swear next to him. Simons flung his hands up, fell, and my heart stopped. If he was dead . . .
One of his radiomen was down as well, and then Simons, drooling blood from his limp arm and shrapnel wounds on his face, staggered to his feet.
Dick Meadows was there, and somehow had the enormous Bull over his shoulder, and the main column was moving back.
We held as long as we could, men going down, wounded men barely able to stand shooting back, then we retreated.
Shriver was beside me, a bloodstained grin on his face.
"Gonna be a hell of a last stand, won't it, sir?"
I hoped I managed a smile back, then a round spanged into my RPD, and it was dead.
I grabbed an M16, saw a pair of Viets no more than a hundred meters away, shot them down.
I heard Shriver shouting to me, and saw him, with his Montagnards, crouched around a pile of logs, an ideal position.
There were ten of us who stumbled to the position.
Viets came up the road, and were shot down.
A wave of them came out of the brush, and were gunned down.
I called for us to fall back again, and we were up.
A machine gun chattered, and two of the 'Yards dropped. Bob Howard grinned, waved at me, moved back, after the others.
Then there was a shouting mass of Viets on us, and I had my Randall in one hand, my pistol in the other.
I slashed one Viet's throat, pushed him into another, shot him in the chest.
I saw Jerry Shriver snap-shoot two men, then he went down. A moment later, a grinning, shouting Viet stood, holding his blood-dripping head.
I shot him in the face, and then one of the Montagnards chattered an RPD burst into the knot, somehow missing his fellows and us.
We were moving again, and I was throwing grenades.
A bullet hit me in the upper chest, but I could still run.
Time blurred, and I cursed my pistol for being empty, threw it at an oncoming Viet, and someone else shot him.
Then there wasn't anybody to shoot, and behind me I heard the roar of helicopters.
Our Jolly Greens, against orders, didn't come in at the LZ near Tra Linh and wait, but came looking for us.
Then the birds were on the ground, and Jenkins was helping me aboard and we were airborne.
Twenty-four of us made it back to Hanoi, all of us wounded.
It was the greatest disaster in Special Forces history.
We mourned our dead, while the rest of the Army mourned Westmoreland, and America mourned Connolly and Nixon.
For a time, the operation was an utter secret, and various lies were told about how the commander of all forces in Vietnam had gotten killed.
But Senator Teddy Kennedy, who'd never been thought of as the soldier's friend, stood tall in the Senate, demanding an explanation and medals for what he called "America's finest warriors."
I don't know about myself, but I knew damned well he spoke the truth about the others.
More Congressional Medals of Honor, sixteen, were hastily given out than in any other battle in American history. Bull Simons, Dick Meadows, Bob Howard and others got theirs at the White House. Babysan Davidson, Mad Dog Shriver and others received theirs posthumously.
I also got one, which I again felt I didn't deserve.
But this time, I accepted the award.
The war dragged on.
Ho Chi Minh died that fall, mostly of old age, and it made our mission seem senseless, since Vo Nguyen Giap and Pham Van Dong replaced him with never a lost step.
Our mission was an utter catastrophe.
Study and Observations Group never recovered from the loss, and was broken up. Nor did Special Forces ever really recover, in my opinion.
But I'll never be able to remember that day without hearing a whisper from Shakespeare:
"And gentlemen . . . now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us . . ."