Red Ice

Before I could give any commands, an excited Vietnamese voice, one of theirs, broke the silence. The subsequent burst of AK-47 fire made any prompting of the grenadiers to begin their long sprint down the plank ways entirely unnecessary. They tossed two concussion grenades into each hut, slowing only as they approached the last pair of shelters.

“They’re here, here outside the end hooches. Corpsman! Mister Frazer!” one grenadier with a beard bellowed as they both attacked the last two huts, which had begun to return fire.

We were moving swiftly but cautiously behind the grenadiers. There was no telling what might be in a hut and it was no use everyone getting killed if one hut turned out to be a mortar factory. The files moved forward to spray down their assigned huts, but it was clear a number of the survivors of the grenade attack had left their huts by cutting back exits through the woven walls. These VC were returning fire from all around the camp. Puckins, with his bowlegged gait, and I, trying to run sideways, began to slog down the ditch to the POWs like a pair of Aqueduct mudders on glue-factory day.

From out of nowhere, a moon-faced Viet bowled into me and, before I could take a swipe at him with my rifle butt, he was gone. He lingered in my mind’s eye—rifle without magazine, wearing a blue-checked scarf the VC and Khmer Rouge sometimes wore to transform civilian clothes into a uniform, and padding through the mud like a charging rogue elephant. One other thing stuck in my mind—his haunting gold-flecked grin. It could only have been a grimace, but it struck me that way nevertheless. I turned and proceeded down the ditch.

One POW was shackled to a tree out in the open, and the other was in a tiger cage wrapped in mosquito netting. The shackled one was moving unevenly. His eyes were wild and large with excitement. They were in sharp contrast to his slack, emaciated body. Insect-bite welts covered his blue-green skin like a rash.

“Sergeant Henson… United States… Army…,” he croaked weakly. “Zero four three….”

The initial digits of his serial number made me catch my breath; they matched mine. Henson and 1 were from the same New England state. Would I look like that someday? Just looking at him made my stomach churn. He looked less than human and I could tell he was fading fast. We had to get him out of here fast.

AK fire flickered the leaves to the left of my head as if to underscore my thoughts.

“The major… in the cage…. Help him.” He gulped, it seemed to help. “He was shackled out here like I was just now… without netting… for a week. Got to help him….”

Henson began to repeat himself and tilt his head at odd angles. Puckins cut the lock off the tiger cage with bolt cutters, but the major hadn’t moved in all this time.

“Corpsman! Corpsman!”

The corpsman, a young Hawaiian, rushed to us, then the cage. Running his hands along the major’s body, he’d stop at different points. Finally the corpsman sighed, tugged off the major’s dog tags, and handed them to me. Instantly he was off to where he was more needed.

“Pull out! Let’s get the hell out of here. Let’s go!” I yelled, taking a quick count of the platoon. “Wickersham, Serrano is going to need cover fire on rear security.”

Puckins took Henson and lifted him like a tired child over his shoulder.

Henson began to sob. “No, no, I couldn’t stop them.”

The glisten of tears streaked up Henson’s inverted face. He was a good NCO and accepted responsibility out of habit—any responsibility, all responsibility. A hard habit to break.

The withdrawal was no more confused than most. We slipped back to the sampans, keeping a watchful eye upstream. The firefight was increasing in intensity. Muzzle flashes resembled popping flashbulbs. The intermixture of red and green tracer fire lent the camp a festive air. One hut was burning.

Our chief petty officer, a black grenadier with a shaved head and an ebony earring, signaled over the din that we hadn’t lost a man, though there were some wounded. We then began to work the sampans downstream as planned.

Ackert… and regional generals… and whiz kids… be damned. Warm satisfaction was radiating from this op like heat from a wood stove. Henson was going home and we were going to start him on his way.

The reaction force from the main camp could be heard coming downstream after us. They were firing alarm shots and I could hear their sampans bumping into each other in the eagerness of pursuit.

From the rearmost sampan, Puckins and I stretched booby-trap wire across the river just below the water’s surface, the wire was arranged to trigger several claymore mines from the virtually impassable brush on each bank. While we worked, Sergeant Henson lay in the waist of the boat dozing fitfully. Another sampan stayed abreast of us as a lookout. The claymores would provide a little breathing room.