CHAPTER THIRTEEN
NORTH VIETNAM/ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA-1971
The pony team had been double-timing since the river, hours before, slowing only where the jungle was too dense to permit the pace. They stopped every hour for five minutes to rest and rehydrate; even with their superior conditioning the men could not go on forever in the heavy humidity of the monsoon season.
A few days earlier, Carl had been at Fort Bragg when a sergeant roused him from a deep sleep. He’d been loaded into a jet and flown to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, where he had joined up with Neil Carpenter, an electronics expert, and boarded a plane bound for Nha Ha, the Special Forces base in Okinawa. Carl had never been on a real mission, and he was buzzing with energy by the time they landed. At Nha Ha, he learned that he was going to be part of a team that would be inserted into North Vietnam to recover special electronics equipment from a downed navy plane. The plane they were searching for had been located by heat-seeking radar in a low, undulating, sparsely populated section of the North Vietnamese jungle fifteen miles from the nearest navigable entry route, a river tributary. Visual reconnaissance had been impossible because the canopy was triple-thick and fifty to sixty feet high. Not even the sun penetrated in many spots.
There were eight men on the team: Carl, Carpenter, five Green Berets they had picked up in Da Nang, and Captain Molineaux, the team leader. All the men except Carl had combat experience and were experts in jungle warfare, but Molineaux stood out. He was a little taller than Carl but seemed to tower over him. Where Carl was a bundle of nerves, Molineaux showed none. He spoke softly when he briefed the team in a Quonset hut in Da Nang shortly before the choppers lifted them out, and his calm demeanor never changed during the mission.
The choppers dropped the team as close to the river as the helicopter pilots dared. There was a mad dash through the jungle, then a silent vigil at the river until a navy gunboat materialized out of the mist. The boat ferried the team upriver to the opposite shore, then they were moving again, double-time. By the time the gunboat disappeared around a bend in the narrow tributary the team was lost in the thick undergrowth.
They had to move fast. The flybys that had located the downed plane had also recorded heavy troop movement in the area. For all they knew, the Vietnamese were looking for the same plane at the same time. Molineaux said that it was imperative to retrieve or destroy the electronics gear. No one asked why, and Carl never learned what the equipment did, though he wondered about it from time to time.
The team had one advantage over the enemy troops. Before bailing out, the pilot had set off a homing device that broadcast a signal over a top-secret band. Molineaux carried a triangulation device that picked up the signal. They could use it to make a beeline to the plane while the North Vietnamese would have to comb the entire area.
There were no trails leading from the river, and the men were forced to hack their way through the jungle with machetes. No one spoke. All communication was carried on with hand signals. The humidity sapped their strength. Sudden downpours were often thick enough to drench them and hide the nearby forest behind a curtain of water.
The ground rose gradually from the river. After two hours, the undergrowth began to thin. During the hour that followed, the team skirted small bands of Montagnard tribesmen who lived on the hillsides in bamboo huts. In these areas game trails made travel easier, but the men had to be on the lookout for booby traps and ambush sites.
The last rest period had been almost an hour before. Carl knew that it was counterproductive to think about resting, but he couldn’t help it. The pace was grueling and the rest periods didn’t produce much rest. The need to be constantly alert kept everyone tense. Carl had drawn the job of babysitting the electronics expert, the only person on the mission who was not expendable. They were moving forward in a blinding downpour that made Carpenter appear to be jogging behind a shower curtain, and Carl had to speed up to keep him in sight. Almost as soon as he did, Carpenter stopped and dropped to one knee. Carl stepped in front of his charge, M-16 at the ready, and one of the other men moved in behind Carpenter.
Senders, the Green Beret in front of Carpenter, materialized out of the rain and jogged up the trail coming back to join them. McFee, the point man, and Captain Molineaux soon followed him. Molineaux signaled them off the trail and knelt under cover of a sky-high tree’s thick foliage. The rain still fell but the roof of leaves thinned the downpour. Settles, Morales, and Shartel, who was bringing up the rear, joined the others.
“McFee spotted the pilot,” Molineaux whispered. Carl thought they could shout at the top of their lungs without anyone hearing them in this deluge, but he noticed that Molineaux never took chances. “We’re close, so stay on your toes. We’ll regroup at our last rest point if we get split up. You’ll wait fifteen minutes and no more before going straight back to the river. You all know the primary and secondary pickup points. If you miss the boat you’re on your own. Understood?”
Everyone nodded. Molineaux stood and they followed. He hadn’t said another word about the pilot, and Carl found out why a few minutes later. The rain had not let up and he was concentrating on the trail, the trees, and the brush ahead when Carpenter slowed and looked up. Carl followed his gaze through the dark green foliage until he spotted the pilot swaying back and forth in the upper branches like a marionette. His parachute had snagged on the numerous thick limbs. A sharp-tipped branch had speared through his armpit, puncturing an artery. As he passed under the body, Carl thought about the man hanging far above the ground, bleeding to death. He hoped that the shock of the fall had killed him. He didn’t look back after he was past the body. The need to be alert focused all his energy on staying alive, and the pilot was soon forgotten.
They found the plane half an hour later. It had skidded along the ground for a few hundred yards after crashing, creating a small clearing. Parts of the plane were strewn through the trees, but the fuselage was on the ground, tilted at an angle with the nose embedded in the foliage.
“We’re going to do this very quietly and very quickly,” Molineaux ordered before sending four men into the jungle to establish observation posts. Senders set up his M-79 grenade launcher near the plane. Carpenter climbed inside and Molineaux followed him. Carl and Senders watched the jungle.
Carl could hear Carpenter working inside the plane. He worried that anyone close by would also hear the electronics expert and he wondered how long it would take Carpenter to accomplish his task. Carl caught himself. He could not think about anything but the jungle. He had to concentrate-only he was so tired.
They had not yet encountered the enemy, so the mission was no different from the many exhausting training exercises. Carl hoped things would stay that way: fast in, fast out, and no casualties. Still, a part of him wanted to meet the enemy so he could test himself in combat. He knew that was stupid. Action was glamorous in the movies. In real life, men lost arms, legs, or their lives. The men on this team were combat veterans who had been involved in the personal combat peculiar to the Special Forces. They had killed hand to hand. Yet none of them had told a war story. Maybe their war was too grim and provided the stuff of deep, unsettling dreams instead of the romanticized war stories that a man might talk about stateside over a beer. Even so, a part of Carl wanted to know how he would stack up.
Fifteen minutes after Carpenter and Molineaux had entered the fuselage Settles whistled a prearranged signal and appeared in the clearing. Molineaux stepped down from the plane and conferred with Settles in whispers. Settles disappeared into the jungle, and Molineaux walked back to the plane and told Carpenter to speed it up. Then he began attaching booby traps and thermite grenades with timing devices to the plane. Moments before Carpenter jumped down from the fuselage, Settles reappeared with the other guards. Molineaux told them that there were enemy soldiers in the vicinity. They started double-timing toward the river.
The sun was setting, and Molineaux wanted to cover as much ground as he could before it got dark. Occasionally, Carl heard Vietnamese soldiers calling to each other in the jungle. That worried him. If he could hear the soldiers, they were close; and if they weren’t bothering to keep their presence hidden, the force was probably large.
An hour out, they heard a series of dull whumps. The dense forest had muffled the sound of the plane exploding. No one broke pace. The Vietnamese now knew that enemy soldiers were in the area. Once they found
