Decision time. I said, “Okay, we’ve got to leave these guys for a body recovery detail. Strip the bodies, and let’s get moving.”
There wasn’t a lot of enthusiastic movement until finally Sergeant Dawson stood and said, “You heard the lieutenant. Move it!”
Everyone got up slowly, heads and eyes darting around like cornered prey. The men stripped the bodies of the two dead radio operators, removing anything that could be of use to the enemy: rifles, ammo, canteens, dog tags, rations, compasses, boots, rucksacks, and so forth.
Dawson asked me, “How about the radios?”
“Let’s take them,” I replied. “Maybe we can make one good radio out of two.”
We moved quickly out of the deforested area and into a thick growth of bamboo that offered some concealment, but gave us away by the movement of the tall, leafy shoots as we macheteed and moved our way through.
We spent the night in the bamboo, forming a defensive perimeter, and we allowed ourselves the belief that we’d shaken the sniper.
A few of the guys tried to make one live radio out of two dead ones, but the guys who knew about radios were six kilometers back and not in a position to help.
By dawn, we’d given up on the radios, and we buried them with our entrenching tools so as not to give anything up to the enemy.
We hadn’t been able to call in our situation report during the night, so now our boss, Colonel Hayes, also known as Royal Duck Six, knew that his patrol, known as Black Weasel, had a problem. A radio problem, he was thinking, or maybe a got-captured problem, or a got-killed problem. These things happen with long-range recon patrols. One minute you’re there, and the next you’re gone forever.
We saddled up and moved toward the grid coordinates on the map that was Rendezvous Alpha.
We got out of the bamboo and into a nice thick growth of forest. We came to a rocky stream that we had to cross and we halted. Streambeds are like shooting galleries. Dawson volunteered to go first, and he bolted across the knee-high stream and scrambled up the opposite bank, dropping into a prone firing position, sweeping his M-16 rifle up and down the stream.
Two riflemen, Smitty and Johnson, went next and made it to the far side. Next, the medic, Garcia, carrying his big medical bag on his back, charged through the stream and was helped up by the other guys. The guy who carried the grenade launcher, Beatty, took a deep breath and moved so fast I thought he was walking on water. Another rifleman, Andolotti, waited five seconds, then ran so fast he almost caught up with Beatty.
Markowitz and I were left on the stream bank, and I said to him, “Your call.”
He smiled and said to me, “He’s waiting for you, Lieutenant. Your call.”
I replied, “I’ll bring up the rear. Good luck.”
Markowitz said, “See you on the other side.” He charged into the stream and about halfway across, he slipped and fell. I waited for him to get up and get going, but he didn’t seem able to get his footing. Then I saw the water turning dark around him. He fell again and lay there, submerged, but still moving.
“Sniper!”
Garcia, the medic, and I charged simultaneously from opposite stream banks toward Markowitz. The guys on the far bank opened up with automatic weapon fire, raking and blasting the tree lines up and down the stream.
Garcia and I reached Markowitz at the same time, and we each grabbed an arm and dragged him as we ran toward the far bank. I glanced at the wounded man and saw white frothy blood running from his mouth.
We were about four meters from the trees growing along the bank when Markowitz’s wrist jerked out of my hand. I turned and saw Garcia lying faceup in the rocky stream, a huge gaping hole in the left side of his head, meaning an exit wound, meaning the shot had come from the right.
I dropped face-first into the stream and scrambled to a small rock that gave me a little cover if I got real small.
I looked upstream in the direction the shot had come from, not expecting to see anything, but there, on a jutting bend in the stream about a hundred meters away, was a black-clad guy kneeling among the rocks. I stared, and the guy seemed to be staring back. From where my men were in the scrub brush, they couldn’t see what I could see from the stream.
Slowly, I took my field glasses from their case and focused on the guy. He didn’t seem to have a rifle, which was good, and he was wearing the traditional Vietnamese black silk pajamas. I focused in tighter and saw that it wasn’t a guy; it was a woman with long black hair. A young woman, maybe early twenties, with high cheekbones and big unblinking eyes, looking right at me.
I had two totally contradictory thoughts: This was the sniper; this couldn’t be the sniper. Just to be on the safe side, I unslung my rifle, but before I got it into a firing position, she shook her head and stood. I could now see a rifle in her hand, a long gun, probably a Russian Draganov sniper rifle, mounted with a telescopic lens.
I stared at her through my field glasses, and I knew if I moved myself or my rifle, that Draganov would be in both her hands, and I’d be dead. She had the range, as Markowitz or Garcia would attest to if they could, and she damned sure knew how to shoot.
The guys on the stream bank were still firing blindly, and through the fire I could hear them yelling at me, “Come on, Lieutenant! Get out of there! We got to get the hell out of here! Come on, come on!”
I looked one more time at the woman standing on the high bend in the stream, and she seemed very nonchalant. Maybe she was disappointed that we weren’t much of a challenge to her.
I stared at her. She held up her hand with four fingers extended, then clenched her fist and pointed at me. My blood ran cold. She turned and disappeared into the brush behind her.
I jumped to my feet and ran through the stream and up the muddy bank, pulled along by outstretched hands into the brush.
I gasped, “Sniper! I saw her! Upstream. Let’s go!” I began running on a path parallel to the winding stream toward where I’d last seen her.
Dawson ran up behind me and jerked me back by my rucksack. He said in a loud whisper, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I saw her! It’s a woman! She’s upstream. About a hundred meters.”
The other four guys caught up to us, and I explained quickly what I’d seen. I must have sounded a little nuts or something because they kept shooting glances at each other. Finally, they got it.
As I said, they’re pros, and a pro’s instinct for survival doesn’t mean running away; it means running toward what’s trying to kill you so you can kill it first.
In any case, we needed to run because we’d given away our positions with all that firing, and we were deep in enemy territory, so when you fire, you’ve got to get the hell away fast.
No one likes leaving dead guys behind, but this wasn’t regular combat stuff where you recover dead and wounded at all costs; this was long-range recon and getting left behind is definitely a possibility.
We ran about a hundred meters along the path, and Andolotti called out, “We could be running right into an ambush.”
Dawson replied through heavy breaths, “I’d rather do that than get picked off later. Move it!”
We came to the bend in the stream, and I ran out to the edge of the bank where I saw a brass cartridge sparkling in the sunlight. I picked it up and saw it was a 7.62 millimeter, most probably from a Draganov. I didn’t need evidence, but somehow finding the cartridge made me more certain that I hadn’t been hallucinating. I put the cartridge in my pocket.
We moved quickly back to the path, where we saw a few footprints in the damp soil. Reluctantly, but with the knowledge that it was her or us, we pressed on.
We moved at a half trot for about an hour, but by then, we knew we weren’t going to find her. She would find us.
We’d been moving away from Rendezvous Alpha, which we could make in the three days left before our dawn rendezvous time, if nothing went wrong.
You never go back on the trail you took in, so we headed into the woods and chopped our way through brush until we intersected a trail that headed in the general direction we needed to go.
We moved as quickly as we could, but the heat and fatigue, and fifty pounds of gear, was slowing us down.
We took a few minutes’ break every hour and pushed on until dusk, not saying much, but I’m sure everyone, myself included, was thinking about why the lady hadn’t blown me out of the water. I had a few answers to that, and it had less to do with a sudden feeling of compassion on her part and more to do with fucking with our heads.
The sun had sunk into Laos, and the enemy moves at night. We heard trucks and tanks rumbling somewhere to our right, then heard men chatting and laughing not far away. If I’d had a radio, I would have called in artillery on them. Actually, if I’d had a radio, I would have called in choppers to get us the hell out of there right after Muller and Landon got hit. But the lady had left us mute and deaf to the outside world.
We moved more quickly away from the enemy troop movements and about an hour later, we found a small hill covered with tall elephant grass where we set up a defensive perimeter, for what it was worth. We were six lightly armed guys, surrounded by massive numbers of enemy troops. Plus, one sniper, who knew we were there, but who wanted to keep us for herself.
We ate some dehydrated rations reconstituted in their pouches with tepid canteen water. No one said much.