Another Man's Moccasins

They were wearing black pajamas and flat hats and stood there with gleaming AK-47s. One of the bushes toward the back held a Soviet-made RPG grenade launcher and gestured for the others to help him haul a light machine gun that Hoang’s body must have hit when it had been thrown from the jeep.

I raised the .45 as the closest soldier, the one with the RPG, began screaming. I fired, and he slumped backward into a sitting position, the bush camouflage falling to his side. I ran toward the others. It was a dicey proposition, but the range on the Colt was useless against the AKs unless I could get in close. I ran forward as the next bush swung his weapon toward me. I blocked the barrel by grabbing the fore stock, and he fired into the hillside. I pressed the .45 into his midriff, pulled the trigger, and held on to his gun as he fell away.

A spray of gunfire ripped up from the ditch, and I fell to the side of the man I’d just shot, yanked the automatic rifle up, and took a bead on the VC soldier who was shooting. The kick was a little harder than an M16, or maybe it was just the uncomfortable wooden stock, but the other fellow dropped anyway, and I lit up a few more VC as the rest disappeared into the high grass.

Do what you’re trained to do and you might get out of this alive. Make the right decisions as if your life depended on them, because it does. Hesitate and you hesitate forever.

I lay there trying not to focus on the multitude of ways I could’ve died in the last few minutes and listened to the pounding in the back of my head instead. I stretched my jaw muscles and looked down the road where the sappers and Viet Cong squad had been headed. I knew we weren’t very far from the west gate of the air base, but the few hooches in the area appeared deserted and there were no civilians on the highway, which was something I’d never seen before. It was then that I noticed the wreckage of an M48 tank. There were bodies sticking out from all the hatches, and it was obvious that the machine was out of action. Beyond it was an M113 armored personnel carrier—the battle-taxi must have run into the back of the Patton when it’d gotten shelled—and there was another body slumped over the .50 caliber machine gun at its commander seat.

Farther down the line, I could see more wreckage where a few more of the APCs had been likewise shelled and were out of commission. Along with the remaining tank, five vehicles were herringboned off the road and firing into an old textile manufacturing building to the west.

It was obvious what had happened. With boots and saddles, the cavalry force must have been dispatched from further north, possibly from Cu Chi, in defense of Tan Son Nhut, and been dry-gulched on Highway 1.

A buddy who had been at the Fort Knox armor training school said they’d shown them what a real firefight was supposed to look like in a display known only as the Mad Minute, but where the tank and machine-gun fire was directed at a target in the display, here and now the thousands of green tracers that were lighting up the quasi-darkness were traveling toward me.

A few streaming bolts of fire from a bazooka caromed off a billboard at the roadside until one found a trajectory that hit the armored personnel carrier that had been the source of the nearest friendly fire. It blew to pieces with a thundering shudder.

A few of the Viet Cong squad that had been disguised as bushes were now throwing hand grenades over the arch of the highway about a hundred yards away. I was unfamiliar with the AK-47, but I finally found the single-shot switch and aimed at the nearest VC. My shot was a little low and to the right, but he fell and the grenade he held exploded, taking him and the two men nearest him.

I stepped back into the bamboo for cover, counted five seconds, then leaned back out and fired again. I had a clean miss on the next, and he began running the other way to join another squad that had come out of the civilian hooches.

There were hundreds of them.

I started rethinking my tactics and thought that perhaps I should try to find somebody on my side who wasn’t dead. With a glance at Hoang’s body, I struggled to get up the embankment to the burnt-outM48. The footing was pretty good, and I got to one of the dirt berms that had blocked the road. A few enemy rounds ricocheted off the surface. I took some deep breaths and slid around to the east behind another dirt pile to get to the personnel carrier’s forward track. The driver was the closest, and it was obvious that he was dead. I glanced up at the commander’s cupola and could see that he was dead, too. I decided to check the next APC.