as the cannon barrel moved left and then down, probing the air. Broker experienced one of those acoustic shadows he’d read about. A roaring battle was winding down all around him but he could clearly hear the hollow shouts coming from the interior of the tank. Happy shouts of the victors.
Helpless, pinned in the rubble, his rifle crushed, his radio broken, out of grenades, Broker watched the guy looking out the hatch engage in a spirited discussion with his crew mates about how best to squash this most stupid of long-nosed foreign dummies.
And then, through eyes teared to glue by brick dust and sweat, young Phil Broker witnessed a scene from a 1950s newsreel out of Budapest. A gaunt figure in dusty American olive drab sprinted up and across the rubble. He clutched a smoking wine bottle cocked back in his right hand.
At first the North Vietnamese tanker laughed at this puny intruder but then very quickly he popped back into his steel shell as Lt. Col. Cyrus LaPorte came straight in at a dead run, let out a chilling rebel yell as he hurled the Molotov.
Broker watched the bottle arc gracefully through the congested air and splash into flame against the side of the T-54. He inhaled an explosive rush of basic American gumption and gasoline.
The flames jump-started a machine gunner in the tank, who went seriously to work. LaPorte danced for a moment, in very uncolonel-like glee for a fortyish West Pointer, as rounds sprayed the loose bricks around his feet, drawing the fire away from Broker.
Then the turret cannon poked in LaPorte’s direction. That’s when Major Pryce’s square body appeared over a collapsed wall thirty meters away with a LAW on his shoulder. The back blast raised a cloud of smoke and dust. The antitank round slammed into the T-54. A tread cracked off. The tank wallowed, stymied in the debris. Pryce waved to LaPorte, tossed off the LAW canister, and swung his M-16 from his shoulder to cover the burning tank. LaPorte unslung his rifle and scanned the smoking concrete wasteland for NVA infantry.
And Staff Sergeant Tarantuna, Adonis-tall and athletic, weighted down with his bag of explosives, broke through the smoke, running in tandem with a short wiry South Vietnamese in tiger-stripe fatigues.
Broker heard human sounds chorus quickly to a shriek inside the burning tank. The hatch flipped open. A boil of oily smoke obscured his line of sight. Pryce’s rifle squeezed off laconic semi-automatic rounds.
But then Sergeant “Tuna” and Colonel Trin were scrambling across the rubble and kneeling next to him. Tuna grinned as he heaved his bag off his shoulder. “I say fuck him. He’s just a brown bar lieutenant.”
“He’s got the radio,” said Trin, also wearing a deranged blood sport grin.
“Radio’s busted,” croaked Broker, who was newer to this war business than they were and who definitely wasn’t grinning. He’d been thrown to these wolves in a little town named Dong Ha up on the DMZ before the offensive. About two weeks after he arrived he looked through the mist on Good Friday morning and saw thousands of NVA and hundreds of tanks coming straight at him. They had been coming nonstop for a month.
“Then fuck him,” said Trin in the perfect unaccented English he’d acquired as an undergraduate in America.
“Actually,” said Tuna, “we figured you’d had it after we got split up. But you know Mama Pryce and Trin here, they insisted we come back to look for you.”
But Broker was awed, far gone in distracted shock, watching LaPorte. The colonel danced a tight little victory jig in front of the burning tank and shook his fists at the smoke-stained sky. “All my life I wanted to do this. Nail a fucking Russian tank with a gas bottle. I feel like a fucking…Hungarian.”
“Where the hell you get the Molotov, Cyrus?” yelled Pryce.
“Over there, some collapsed hooch. There was a can of gas and a wine bottle. So I shredded a battle dressing for a wick. Worked like a dream.” A triumphant grin knifed across LaPorte’s lean Creole face. The whole front had collapsed, a rout was in progress. LaPorte was smiling.
Then, his local celebration spent, he swung his pale eyes to where Broker was entombed in cement. “Area’s crawling with NVA. How bad is it?” he yelled.
Tuna studied the slab of concrete angling down over Broker. “Looks to me like he’s got a ton of cement pinning his legs.”
“I can wiggle my legs,” Broker said hopefully. “It’s like I’m stuck.”
“How is he?” yelled Pryce, jogging up to the knot of kneeling soldiers.
“He’s stuck,” crowed Tuna as he spread out gobs of plastic explosive, primer cord, and detonators with blinding dexterity, his brown eyes checking the slab, the angles, the position of Broker’s trapped legs.
“He’s stuck?” LaPorte laughed like he was delivering a punch line to a really old joke. “Check that out.” He pointed through a cloud of smoke. South of the ruined town a flight of American Hueys rocked through the air, dodging small arms fire on their landing approach.
“Last American choppers that’ll ever be seen in Quang Tri Province,” observed Pryce philosophically.
“You can still make it to the landing zone,” said Trin grimly. “I’ll stay with Phil.”
And Broker watched the three older Americans refuse to dignify Trin’s suggestion with a verbal response. They wouldn’t leave him. Or Trin. Tuna bent and fussed with his explosives. The others stood guard. There was a nervous moment when some infantrymen came tumbling over the rubble. Trin’s men. The only organized resistance left in the town.
LaPorte, Pryce, Tuna, and Broker were all that was left of the advisory team assigned to the South Vietnamese regiment commanded by Nguyen Van Trin.
Now the American advisors were being airlifted, leaving the South Vietnamese to survive as best they could. There was still time for LaPorte, Pryce, and Tuna to make it out.
“Can you do it, Jimmy?” asked LaPorte.
Tuna gnawed his lip. “It’s a tricky one.” He jammed small lumps of explosive at one end of the slab, squinting at the configuration.
“Jesus,” muttered Broker.
Pryce put a steady hand on his shoulder. “We’ll get you out, son.” Then he removed a French fag from the gold cigarette case he always carried in his chest pocket, lit it, and stuck it in Broker’s lips.
Fighting in the ruined town they had all acquired a sidelong nervous aspect-heads constantly rotating, eyes sliding to the edges of their sockets. Broker had come to think of them as three stern uncles. LaPorte being the brilliant one and Pryce the older, wiser, steady one. Tuna was the dark indispensable joker, with a bag full of magic, who would give you a hot foot.
And Trin was the strangest man Broker had ever met.
“Okay,” said Tuna. “Now, after the bang, this hunk of shit is going to levitate two feet in the air on this end, turn ninety degrees on the fulcrum of the other end, and fall to earth three feet from your right boot.”
“Right,” said Broker in a shaky voice because they had all taken off their flak vests and were packing them around his face and torso and crotch.
“Young man,” LaPorte encouraged, “if you had a hard on, Jimmy could blow your left testicle past your dick without disturbing it and put it through the hole Pryce punched in the side of that tank.”
“Absolutely,” grinned Jimmy Tuna. “But we will all step back a few paces and watch from a safe distance.”
So what do you do when you have time to watch yourself die. You lick your dry caked lips and you whisper the Lord’s Prayer, except when you see the snaky hiss chase down the det cord fuse you shut your eyes and scream…
The shock put both of Broker’s legs to sleep. When the smoke cleared the huge piece of cement was exactly where Jimmy said it would be. Broker reached. His testicles were still attached.
“Now what?” asked Major Pryce as he and LaPorte lifted a dazed Broker and dragged him along, one of his arms over each of their shoulders. Trin’s men threw an infantry screen around them as they plodded toward a column of refugees and retreating ARVN soldiers.
“What have we got left, Trin?” asked LaPorte.
“A battalion, plus all the stragglers we can round up,” said Trin.
“There’s some time. The fuckers are consolidating after taking the town. We have to mount a rear guard so these refugees can get south to Hue City,” said LaPorte. In the distance they all saw the flight of helicopters take to the air, lifting out the American advisors. “Pussies,” sneered LaPorte softly.
Trin had his map out. Strung between LaPorte and Pryce, Broker watched them decide on a chokepoint: a bridge on a river a mile south of the town. And that’s exactly what they did. For twenty-four mad hours they held
