comrade's chemical protective suit and tore away the T-shirt to get at the wound. A quick check showed that the wounded man had taken two rounds in his left shoulder. The wound was painful and bloody, but wouldn't be fatal.
When they were satisfied that their friend was in good hands, they reported to Polgar. The soldier who had been wounded was the point man for the group. They had cleared out the ground floor of this particular house and found nothing. It was when the point man had started up the stairs to check out the second floor that the shooting had started. The first volley hit the point man, sending him tumbling back down the stairs. The two men ran up to help him, one man dragging away the wounded point man, the other throwing a grenade onto the second floor to cover their withdrawal. None of the men had seen anyone or anything.
By this time a squad leader and two other teams had gathered around the PC. Polgar directed the squad leader and one of the teams to circle around back and cover the rear of the house in case someone tried to slip out. He ordered another team to stay with the PC to cover the front of the building. They were also to be prepared to reinforce the team that would clear the house. He would personally lead the two men who had first entered the house back in to deal with the unseen enemy.
After getting a rundown on the layout of the ground floor, the three-man assault party moved back to the front door. As before, two men, one of them Polgar, stationed themselves on either side of the door. This time, however, the third man leaned over and threw a grenade into the opened door. As soon as the grenade went off, Polgar and the man across from him went charging into the house, guns leveled and blazing away. Once inside, the men sought the nearest cover available and waited to see what happened. When nothing happened, Polgar signaled for the third man to enter and cover him as he approached the stairs. He slowly began to climb the stairs, always peering up to see over onto the second floor. When he was halfway up the stairs, Polgar halted, took a grenade off of his web gear, pulled the pin, and threw it into the room at the head of the stairs. As soon as this grenade detonated, he charged to the top of the stairs, taking two steps at a time and firing as he went. Once he reached the head of the stairs, he threw himself into the room where he had thrown the grenade and, as before, sought cover.
Just as Polgar began to get up, a yell to halt came from his men outside. This was followed by the sound of two M 16s firing in the rear of the building. In an instant he realized that the people they were looking for in the house had tried to slip out through the rear and had been caught by the team sent to the back of the house. As the other two men with him came up the stairs and began to check out the other rooms on the second floor, Polgar went to a window overlooking the rear of the house and peered out.
In the small yard, two of his men were standing over the body of a young German boy, sprawled in a small flower bed, bleeding from several wounds. An AK rifle was still in his lifeless hand. For a moment it reminded Polgar of a similar scene in Vietnam some fifteen years earlier. One of his first fire fights had involved a VC unit that consisted mainly of fourteen- and fifteen-year-old boys. That experience had been a rude introduction to war, one that often haunted his dreams. He knew what his men were experiencing. 'Is he dead?'
One of the soldiers standing over the body looked up and saw Polgar looking down. 'Yeah.
He wouldn't stop when I yelled to him to halt. Kind of young to be running around shooting at people, Sarge.'
'Just remember, Patterson, that sorry piece of trash was old enough to put two holes in McGill and would have done the same to you if he had had the chance.'
Patterson looked at his platoon sergeant for a moment, then down at the dead German boy.
After another moment of reflection, he reached down, picked up the AK, and went around to the front to continue the house-by-house search.
Polgarfs report on the Mech Platoon's contact didn't really surprise Bannon. His only regret was the discovery that the town was populated by a lone fanatic who couldn't have hurt the Team. The price of a casualty hadn't been worth the results.
Impatient and anxious to find out how much longer they were going to sit there, Bannon dismounted and walked over to the battalion S-3's track to find out what Jordan's best guess was. His PC was nestled in a large hedgerow that separated two fields. The troop door on the back ramp was open as was the cargo hatch on top. Bannon stopped at the door and saw Major Jordan seated across from his radios, arms folded and chin resting on his chest. He appeared to be sleeping.
'Must be nice to have a cushy staff job where you can take a nap three times a day.'
Without moving a muscle or opening his eyes, Jordan replied, 'Bannon, someday when you grow up, and I trust you will, you'll appreciate the fact that we old folks need to conserve our energy.'
'Oh, is that what you call it? Conserving energy? Back home we call it sleep. '
'Shit, don't they teach you treadheads anything at Fort Knox?' 'Sure they do, Major. And someday, when Infantry Branch clears you to use words with more than one syllable, I'll tell you all about it.' 'I'm sure there's a reason you came over here other than to harass me, Bannon. Hopefully, it has to do with that shooting in the town you haven't reported to me yet.'
'That was a small affair. Some hyped-up commie highschool kid wanted to play Rambo. He wounded one of Sergeant Polgar's men and got his ass blown away. So far, that's all we've come across. What I really came over here for is to find out when we're going to get this circus moving again. If it's going to be awhile, I want permission to move up onto the high ground to the northeast where we can get under some cover. I'm not thrilled about sitting out here trying to hide my tanks behind these damned bushes.' 'I expect we'll be moving soon.
The brigade commander just got off the radio with Colonel Reynolds. Colonel Brunn was all over the Old Man. Told him that if he couldn't get this battalion moving, brigade was prepared to pass the I st of the 4th through us to continue the attack.' 'Sir, pardon me if I seem like an underachiever, but, if the brigade commander wants to let the I st of the 4th take the lead, that's fine by me. I could get into playing second team for awhile.' 'You don't understand, Bannon. Colonel Brunn damned near relieved Reynolds after the Hill 214 debacle. The only reason he didn't was because there didn't happen to be any spare lieutenant colonels lying around at the time. If the battalion screws the pooch on this operation, the Old Man is gone. The battalion has to succeed.'
'Well, sir, between you, me, and that dumb bush your track is trying to hide in, even if what you say is true, I have no intention of taking any undue risks simply to save someone's reputation. Colonel Reynolds is a good officer and a great guy, but his reputation isn't worth a single unnecessary casualty in Team Yankee.'
'I don't think we need to worry about that. The colonel is too much of a professional to do anything dumb simply to save face.'
'God, I hope you're right, sir.'
They turned to covering the next move. The air cavalry had come across some trucks and reconnaissance vehicles as they roamed out to the front. They scattered the trucks and destroyed the recon vehicles. Unfortunately, the cavalry scouts could not tell if they were Polish or belonged to someone else. A scout helicopter had tried to land near one of the destroyed vehicles to check this out but had drawn fire from an unseen enemy. Not being able to obtain this information and confident that the front would be clear for awhile, Major Jordan requested that the air cav troop shift over to the east and cover the battalion's right flank. The brigade S-3 replied that he would look into that.
Colonel Reynolds, having monitored the reports from the air cav troop, called Jordan on the battalion net and ordered him to get Team Yankee on the move again but at a slower pace.
He informed the Major that the rest of the battalion would be moving out momentarily and would be able to catch up provided Team Yankee didn't get carried away again. Major Jordan looked at Bannon, grinned, and told the colonel that he would keep the tankers in check. As soon as the transmission ended, Jordan asked if Bannon had any questions. He replied in the negative; he was to get moving but keep it slow. With that, he went back to 66 and prepared to move the Team.
Orders to stop clearing the town came none too soon as far as Sergeant Polgar was concerned. The house- to-house search was getting old. He didn't want to lose any more of his people to some runny-nosed commie who had not even begun to shave yet. Besides, this kind of work was hard. When he had charged the stairs and thrown himself into the room in the house where the sniper had been, he had landed flat on his chest, forgetting there were still grenades hanging on his web gear. The force of the fall had knocked the wind out of him, and the grenades had dug into his chest. He could feel the bruises forming. As the tracks pulled out of town and headed back to the Team, he decided that he was getting too old to be running around playing John Wayne. In the future, he was going to leave the gung-ho stuff to the young kids in his platoon. He also decided that in the next war, he was going to
