.
breathe.
Rounds were striking the water everywhere. Ed reached a berm in front of him and shoved his M-60 up on top of the berm out of the muck so he could return fire. A hundred thoughts were racing through his mind while crawling in the muck under the incoming tracer rounds above him.
They trained him for this situation; only this time, instructors were not firing the weapons. These men were trying to kill him and everybody with him. He remembered the ambush seemed to occur in slow motion in his head.
His basic training at Fort Ord, California, kept running through his mind. They were doing a live fire exercise crawling under barbed wire on their backs. The instructors were firing live machine gun rounds over their bodies while popping smoke to add to the stress. They kept yelling.
“Don’t panic. Think about what you’re doing. Don’t panic!”
Ed wasn’t feeling panic; he was pissed off. He didn’t like being shot at and not able to return fire.
Ed turned his M-60 on the berm toward the incoming rounds. He placed a hundred-round belt in the gun, straightened the ammo belt out and closed the receiver’s lid on the gun. Looking at the green tracers coming from the hedgerow, Ed remembered thinking the scene looked like green laser beams of light coming from the trees toward them.
Forty-five seconds passed from the initial opening volley of automatic weapon fire toward first squad before they could return fire. The rice paddy became alive with automatic weapons returning fire into the hedgerow. Now there were hundreds of red tracers streaming back into the tree line toward the VC.
Everybody in the paddy returned fire. Robert crawled up to the berm on Ed’s right side, ten feet away. Ed was firing his M-60 at the beam of green light coming from the tree line when Corky, one of Ed’s ammo bearers crawled up next to him. Corky removed a belt of ammo off his shoulder preparing the new belt for Ed.
Robert was launching M-79 grenades into the hedge. His grenade launcher looked like a fat break action shotgun, functioning the same way, only with a much shorter barrel, delivering a larger 40 mm grenade that exploded on impact.
Robert was a good shot with his grenade launcher. Ed watched him fire two rounds earlier that day at a couple of palm trees across a clearing while they were taking a break. The trees were fifty yards from them. Both trees were hit midsection, blowing the trunks in half. He had no problem placing his rounds where he wanted them.
The squad continued firing into the hedgerow. Hundreds of rounds riddled the tree line. Robert sent a dozen grenades into the hedgerow, each explosion caused the tree line to light up giving the men a temporary live silhouette to shoot at.
Sergeant Waters yelled in the darkness for the men to cease fire. The squad’s gunfire died off.
It became silent for several minutes. There was no return fire coming from the hedgerow. Sergeant Waters ordered the squad to move forward to secure the tree line.
The squad’s dog handler and K-9 were both killed in the opening volley of fire in the ambush.
There were no sounds of movement coming from Charlie. Charlie was dead or gone.
After the ambush was over and the tree line was secured, Sergeant Waters radioed for a chopper to evacuate the soldier and his K-9.
You could hear the helicopters approaching. Sergeant Waters took off his helmet and turned it upside down. He activated his strobe light and placed it inside his helmet so the choppers could see their location without the strobe light illuminating the area for Charlie.
As the chopper approached the rice paddy, it hovered a few feet off the water, while four men carried the dog handler to the aircraft. Men grabbed the dog, carrying him to the chopper.
They laid the K-9 on the floor of the ship beside his handler while the chopper hovered, waiting to load. A cobra gunship circled above them, providing cover for the men and the chopper in the open rice paddy. The chopper lifted off, clearing the landing site. The cobra made a couple more orbits over the area. Sergeant Waters advised the gunship they were pulling out returning to Crockett.
The next morning, First Platoon returned to the ambush site checking the area for bodies. They found pieces of bloody clothing and two Chinese hand grenades left behind in the grass. Blood covered the grass and bushes. There were no bodies. Charlie had taken their dead or wounded with them.
Ed and several other men set up a perimeter along the tree line, while Sergeant Waters checked for hidden bunkers or anything left behind. Ed and Robert talked about the ambush. Ed asked Robert if last night’s ambush was routine or unusual.
“I’ve been here four months, last night was my third ambush. Two were at night. One was during the day. They don’t happen that often. But once is enough for me!”
Robert laughed telling Ed, after they got back to the firebase last night, he told Sergeant Waters, “He didn’t want to play anymore, and he was catching the next bus out of town!”
Sergeant Waters told Robert, “Save him a seat!”
Robert said, “One thing I know for sure. You don’t have to worry about the bullet that has your name on it. You never hear it coming. The ones marked ‘To Whom It May Concern,’ are the ones to worry about! They don’t care who they kill!”
During the next few days, Ed became acquainted with more men in his squad. Robert was six feet four inches, one hundred sixty-five pounds bean pole. He always smiled, bordering on laughter. His familiar Southern draw caught Ed’s attention when he first arrived at firebase Crockett.
Robert and Ed became instant friends. They were both assigned to first squad. Robert was born in a small town in Florida near Connersville. It was near another small town where Ed’s mother was born, called Plant City, Florida. Ed’s mother was one of sixteen brothers and sisters all raised on a farm in Plant City.
Ed’s grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins all had the same recognizable Southern drawl. At the end of World War II Ed’s dad, raised in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, met his mother while working in the Plant City area. They married and moved to California and started a family.
Every year as far back as Ed could remember, his parents made their yearly trek to Plant City with him and his little sister in tow to spend a week celebrating his grandfather’s birthday. The commonality Ed and Robert had with families living in small towns in Florida. Both of them living on opposite ends of the country, meeting in a place like Vietnam was reason enough to form a bond. Robert was four years older than Ed and been in Vietnam four months longer than Ed.
Robert was an old-timer, by the new guys’ standards. Robert took Ed under his wing and taught him about the country. Things like snakes, Punji pits, hidden bunkers. Basics needed to survive in that hellhole.
Another country boy Ed meant in first platoon with Robert was Arlie. He was raised in Alabama. married to a country girl named Sheila. Arlie talked with the same thick southern drawl. His speech was slow and laid back, like Roberts. Sometimes he’d take the listener down a dirt road telling his story. But you would have enjoyed the trip.
November 1968, Ed had been in Vietnam four months. Robert and Arlie were in their eighth month in Vietnam, on the downhill slide of their one-year tour, getting closer to the day they would go home to the real world.
For two months, it was quiet. They conducted several night time ambush patrols. They patrolled daily, searching the villages for hidden or buried weapons and tunnels.
They found weapons and three VC hiding in an underground room dug in the floor of a hut. An occasional small cache of weapons or a hiding VC became routine.
November 30, the First Platoon left a small village after coming up empty during their search.
They headed to the next village to search. November was the dry season in South Vietnam. The rice paddies were drying up, making it much easier to walk patrol without fighting the mud and water.
The platoon received several replacements, for men injured by booby traps.
During