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By Root 595 0

gave his men nicknames like the Butcher Platoon—was more in tune with Howard, who was called the Skull because he shaved his head. After Carrier lost five men in the bunker complex, Carrier pushed hard and bumped into two NVA platoons on the run. He gave pursuit with revenge in mind, and stumbled over a gut-shot North Vietnamese soldier. The battalion commander—Howard’s predecessor—was overhead in his C&C and radioed Charlie Company to secure an LZ to medevac the wounded prisoner. Carrier argued, “Aw shit, sir, this dink’s going to be dead in ten minutes, and we’ve still got a chance to catch his buddies!” Carrier’s Kit Carson Scout ended the argument by shooting the NVA in the head, and Charlie Company continued their hunt. Howard liked such aggressiveness, especially when it racked up the numbers. Lieutenant Shurtz was, by comparison, a husky, crew-cut ROTC graduate from Iowa who—only twelve days in command—came across as an earnest, green kid. His troops liked him, but they had not seen enough of him in combat to respect him.

In what was Shurtz’s first real firefight, Alpha Company had just been humping out of the LZ when the point squad was machine-gunned. Lieutenant Tynan sent PFC Goodwin back down the trail with another squad. Randy Grove crawled as close as he dared to that first NVA bunker and kept the NVA’s heads down with his M16 while Goodwin fired his M16 from a crouch and hollered directions. The rest of the men began dragging the wounded and the heat casualties back down the path.

A machine gun squad was fed in to help them. It was under PFC Robert Kruch, and if Goodwin thought his squad was the best in the company, Kruch thought his might be the worst. Kruch—who was drafted during his final term in college, and who was antiwar but curious—had been in the bush all of three weeks. He was in charge of five even newer men only because the real squad leader had, in his opinion, shammed his way out; he was a short-timer who, sensing what was about to happen, claimed to be sick. He had been medevacked the day before.

Kruch’s squad had been in the last helo lift; in the confusion generated by the downed helicopter—it was impossible to determine the source of enemy fire in the racket—he and his two riflemen jumped behind a dike and became separated from their machine gun team. They finally scrambled into the banana trees, then hustled down the trail to help get the casualties back. They found their gun team holed up in a cluster of trees, the machine gunner firing his M60 into the green tangle. There was a shout to pull back. The machine gunner—who had previously bragged about being an enforcer in a Chicago street gang—was visibly shaken. As they got up to go, he grabbed the M60 barrel and burned his hand. Back at the LZ, he told Kruch he had to see a medic. Kruch never saw him again.

Mack and Anderson were lying on the trail, and the grunts clustered around them. Kruch knew Mack; he was from a different platoon, but when you’re new and scared shitless you latch onto buddies. Mack reminded him of one of his younger brothers. The kid’s chest was blown open; you could see the heart beating. A medic crouched beside him, “C’mon, man, hang on, a chopper’s coming!” Mack turned ashen very quickly, then just stopped breathing. Kruch vomitted into the brush along the footpath.

Captain Carrier was on the chopper pad at LZ Center when the medevacs and battalion command ship landed. Among those lifted out of Alpha Company’s perimeter were four heat casualties. They lay like statues in the LZ. Lieutenant Colonel Howard eyed them suspiciously; Alpha had flown into the valley, but Bravo, which had humped in, didn’t have any heat medevacs. The battalion had an unscientific method to sort out malingerers: a dousing of ice water on a genuine heat casualty would have no effect, but a faker couldn’t help but flinch.

With satisfaction, Carrier watched as Howard had a bucket of water fetched and poured it across the men himself. They jerked painfully. All four of the malingerers were black, and Howard was black, and he turned on them