Perfect Night For Leeches - Part 2

A cluster of Marines escorted me to the road, surrounding me for security, trudging through the deep sand like a green caterpillar bristling with weapons. In the back of a jeep two young Vietnamese girls with a little of their intestines peeking out lay on their backs. No other wounds were visible, so I guessed they’d gotten eviscerated from the concussion they had caused by setting off a mine under the now burned-out truck. They’d come from a nearby village, probably Binh Ky, where they had likely fled after their deed, nefarious or heroic a matter of viewpoint. I motioned to the hospital, just up a the road about a click or so, and sent them on their way. Not for me to judge.

Anyway, at least Pappy dressed for the occasion.

The racket kept up all night, like a long, boring argument: the chatter of M-16s and staccato of a pair of M-60 machine guns responding to the rattling AK-47s, punctuated with explosions. Pappy didn’t come back until morning.

With morning, an oversized VC flag flew above the Chin Strap, overlooking all the American installations. Before we got Pappy back, we got a bunch of wounded Montagnards loaded into a six-by, MIKE forces from the Fifth Special Forces camp just up the road, on the beach at the foot of the Chin Strap, inside the secure perimeter this side of the Marble Mountains.

Pappy showed up with his ambulance full of wounded Americans while we stood watching the brand new Cobra helicopter gunships work out on the mountain with rockets and machine guns, supporting the scrappy little Montagnards landed on the rocky, tree lined outer surface of the cave-riddled outcropping to root out the remaining sappers who had made a mess of their base camp.

Pappy grinned ear to ear while he told me about his adventure with the famed Green Berets. At the gate the guards stood firing into their own compound, telling him he couldn’t get inside. He went anyway, the driver braving fire as they headed for the dispensary to find an Army medic amazed to see a Navy Corpsman, unarmed and without any protective gear, as though he wasn’t really playing the game, show up at his door. He stayed inside, but suited Pappy and the driver up with the proper padding, gave them M-16s and sent them out.

Pappy laughed and said there were gooks everywhere, throwing satchel charges at everything. He found it riotously funny the Green Beret’s CO had been killed in the Command Bunker. Pappy hid and watched the war.

I remembered the CIA agent who’d come into our care out of Dong Ha, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, loafers and wool slacks, carrying a snub nosed .38 we checked into the armory for him. Glowing in the dark with jaundice, he’d been medevaced down with the crowd of refugees after the routing of the camp. He complained about the Green Berets at Lang Vei. They were tough he said, those Green Berets, but they were shitty soldiers, posting no guards, not running patrols. The NVA had snuck up on them, they said, in tanks. He’d laughed.

So here they were fucking up again, their base camp overrun inside a secure area, the assaulting sappers placing an enemy flag on the highest point around.

They fought on the Chin Strap all morning, the gunships blasting away in support of the Montagnards, more of whom were carried down to our triage. We all stayed on, this being mass casualties, but it was Pappy who had the best time.

When I looked in on him in pre-op he was bent over a wounded American with a tiny shrapnel wound on his back shoulder. Pappy labored over the wound, cutting away dead skin, debriding the black speck into the shape of a football so it would close properly. Whenever I went back up the little hill to pre-op I found him there, still cutting, the debridement growing. Finally, it was the size and shape of a flattened toy football. He winked at me.

Later he told me the wounded man was a Green Beret officer, arrogant as hell. The officer asked the doctor if he would be able to make R&R in Hawaii to meet his wife in two weeks. The doctor said certainly, it was only a small wound. Pappy saw to it he earned his Purple Heart, missing that date, ending up medevacked to Japan instead.

We cleaned out the remaining wounded from triage by noon or so. The VC flag came down an hour after the sun came up, but wounded Montagnards came in all day. Not so many of them they needed us to stay on, so I left to drink a few beers and sleep while Pappy hunted more wounds requiring debridement.

It turned out that the Green Beanies, as he called them, had put him and the ambulance driver up for Bronze Stars. Wise enough to know Pappy had likely hidden out while the battle raged, the Navy rejected the citation, though the motive owed more to politics than justice since the driver got his.

Anyway, the next night dragged on eventless. I found myself wishing for more leeches, settling instead for pinochle played on a makeshift table of two sawhorses topped by a blood-stained old piece of wood that served as a cardiac board. We played with the risk of interruption, always resenting the arrival of any cardiac arrest who would dare disturb our game.

• << TEX Home
• 1
• Page 2
• 3
• Next >>