Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [86]
“Jesus.”
“The major, the major's hit.”
“Get down. There's another one in there!”
“The colonel's hit!”
“Is that sonuvabitch still in there?”
“Yeah, we'll get him.”
“Get a frag. Get a goddamned frag. We'll blow that bastard outta there!”
Sergeant Major Horn rushed over before anyone had his face out of the dirt. Everyone was stunned, and four GIs had been peppered with shrapnel. Major Franks's foot was practically blown off, and the colonel– Starry–was down too. My God, not him! A wave of shame hit Horn that another man who'd spent twenty-four of his forty-two years in uniform would have understood. During the Tet Offensive, he'd been standing beside Colonel MacFarlane when the incumbent Blackhorse CO was shot and seriously wounded, and only weeks later Horn had managed to crawl with a shoulder injury from the downed command ship while the new CO, Colonel Holder, died in the fire. Now Colonel Starry was also bleeding in the dust, and Sergeant Major Horn was ashamed that he was not.2
“You gotta piece a, you gotta hole there.”
“I do?”
“Yeah, just ti-ti.”
“Well, fuck me.”
Starry stood back up, his crewcut sweaty, blood on his face, blood on his olive-drab undershirt, and he barked angrily, “I saw that cocksucker come out of there.”
A medic got a bandage around one of the grunts, saying, “… oh, it's just a lot of blood. It's not too bad.” Sterba the reporter had gone flat at the blast, but with a flak jacket just loaned to him by a track crew and a helmet given him by Marines on the DMZ months earlier, he jumped back up to photograph the scene. His tape recorder was still running. Sterba focused his camera on a GI with dusty blond hair who lay on his stomach on a stretcher a few feet away. The kid stared back into the lens. A black medic was on his knees beside him, bent low as he filled out the casualty tag, chest tucked against his knees. “Goddamn, it hurts!” The medic's flak jacket was unzipped and a peace medallion hung from his neck. “Shhhhh, you're gonna be okay.” “Man, the major's really fucked up. How's the colonel?” Someone helped Starry get a pin back in his grenade. “Multiple frags, lots of blood, not bad. Surface stuff.”
“Watch out for that dud round.”
The lone NVA was still holed up, and one angry grunt bellowed amid the chaos, “Hasn't anyone got a fucking grenade? 'll kill that bastard. Hasn't anybody got one goddamn grenade?”
Someone did, and after the muffled explosion, a trooper went into the bunker to drag out the diehard. He had an arm and a leg blown off, and a medic quickly went to work on him. Nearby, the other prisoner lay gasping in the dirt; an older sergeant stood above him, tears on his face, screaming and shaking and kicking the man in the groin.
“Medevac on the way!”
Colored smoke blew across the sod strip, and the first ship into the ready-made LZ was the 11th ACR Command & Control Huey. Colonel Starry had a dozen grenade fragments down his face and side, the worst wound being in his stomach, which he'd exposed by violating his own policy and removing his flak jacket. Previously, he had stood up to argue with the medics that he didn't need to be medevacked, but his protests had ended when someone pointed to his stomach, where his blood was darkening his undershirt in a steady trickle. Sergeant Major Horn, who looked like a boxer, helped Colonel Starry into the Huey, while others slid in Major Franks's litter. Franks was out of it, as much from the pain of a bone-shattered heel as from the medic's morphine. Starry was also fading out. Horn grabbed the canvas seat across from him, and was stricken to realize that the colonel with the right stuff was sitting back and staring blankly at him, one hand on his stomach, one reaching up to absently rub his ears. Starry's eardrums had been burst by the blast concussion.
The pilot took them out at treetop level and, from his seat, Sergeant Major Horn puckered helplessly as tracers burned past the cabin door like glowing orange golf balls.3
After machine-gunning the mob in the rubber trees east