Last Patrol

Staff Sergeant Mike "Pugsley" Riordan was nervous; he had that itchy feeling at the nape of his neck, the feeling of caterpillars crawling across his skin, that told him something bad was about to happen.



It was the second day of Recon Team Hatchet's five day mission to patrol the southern end of the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the area of Laos near the tri-border area with Cambodia and Vietnam, and Pugsley and his twelve-man team had seen no signs of the North Vietnamese infiltrators they'd been told should be in the area. He had less than a month left on his one year tour before going back to Fort Bragg where he would be an instructor in the Special Forces training course, and this was his last mission as One-Zero, or team leader. He'd lost count of the number of such cross border missions he'd led since coming to the base in Ban Me Thuot in South Vietnam's central highlands, but it was the first time he'd been on the ground for more than twenty-four hours without coming into contact with enemy forces. It didn't feel right.



As usual, he was second in line, with one of his Montagnards on point and the team's second in command, Staff Sergeant Jim "Bulldog" Kelly bringing up the rear.



"Nuong," he said in a quiet voice to the bowlegged native who was about ten yards in front of him. "Hold up for a minute." He raised his right hand in a signal for the rest of the patrol to stop.



The men had been tramping through the thick growth for six hours, so they were all glad for the chance to take a break. Everyone except Pugsley melted into the undergrowth that lined the trail they'd been following, hunkering down for cover, but keeping wary eyes all around them for any signs of an enemy ambush, which was an all too common problem for their teams.



Pugsley scanned up and down the trail, but could see nothing but the unending grey-green of the thick foliage that draped over it, blocking out the direct sunlight and leaving nothing but dappled shadows; no sounds but the chittering of the insects that made their nights a living hell of bites and scratches. He began walking back along the trail, stopping only to pat Lek, the tall Montagnard who was his radio operator, on the shoulder and motion for him to stay put. When he reached the end of the line, he slipped into the bushes and knelt near Kelly.



"What's up, Pug?" The freckle-faced redhead from Ohio asked. "Why we stopping?"



Pugsley rubbed his dark brown chin, then removed his boonie hat and ran his hands through his tightly curled, closely cut hair. His brown eyes had a look of concern.



"I don't know, Bulldog," he said. "Something don't seem right. We been out here almost two days, and ain't seen a sign of Charlie. Don't that strike you as strange?"



"Now that you mention it, it is weird," the redhead said. "Usually they're crawling all over us as soon as we leave the LZ."

"Suppose to be a regiment coming through here. But, I haven't seen a sign of a soul."



Bulldog smiled. "Maybe Charlie heard this was your last patrol and decided to make it a cakewalk for you."



"Yeah," Pugsley countered. "And, maybe my girl friend back in Baltimore been faithful to me the whole year I been here. Naw, something ain't right about this. I got me a strange feeling."



"Man, I wish you hadn't said that. I know you got a sense '˜bout these things, and when you worry, it plumb scares me silly. What you wanta do?"



"Well, we got three more days," Pugsley said. "I reckon we just keep on trucking '˜till we get to the extraction point, and hope I'm just being a sissy '˜bout things."



"Sounds like a plan to me," Bulldog said.



Pugsley slowly eased back onto the trail and started back toward his point man. He had walked two paces past the radio operator and was raising his hand to signal the patrol to resume movement when the first shell landed.



Nuong, the point man, was just standing up from his position beside the trail when there was a bright light, followed by the '˜crump' sound made by an RPG. The little Montagnard was thrown backwards into the brush, his arms splayed out like the figure on the cross Pugsley had seen in the church back in his neighborhood when he attended Mass with his parents and younger brother. Almost simultaneously, he heard a '˜crump' sound to his rear, and the scream of one of the Montagnards whose legs had been ripped and torn by the shrapnel from the blast.



Suddenly, the almost quiet chirping of the jungle became a cacophony of explosions and screams as shells began landing all along the trail and the '˜zing' of shells from AK-47s began tearing through the bushes. Pugsley couldn't make himself heard over the noise, so he signaled with his hands for his team to beat it back into the undergrowth for cover and form a defensive perimeter, while at the same time, diving into the brush himself.



Once under cover, Pugsley crawled toward his radio man, but when he got to where Lek lay sprawled back against a tree, he discovered that a shell had mangled the radio and torn away a large part of the man's upper torso. Grabbing the webbing across what was left of Lek's shoulder, he dragged the corpse further into the brush.



Experienced in the bush, it was only a matter of minutes before what was left of the team; they'd been unable to get to Nuong; assembled in a depression ringed by towering trees draped with vines and brush. Nuong and Lek; and Pugsley assumed the point man had been killed by the blast, were the only deaths. Bulldog had a scratch on his freckled cheek where a piece of shrapnel had ripped through, but not too deeply, and one of the other Montagnards had a piece of metal protruding from his thigh, but it hadn't hit a blood vessel and wasn't bleeding too badly.



"Holy crap," Bulldog said. "Where did that come from?"



The explosions had stopped, but they could hear the crashing sounds of bodies moving through the jungle, and the occasional muted sound of Vietnamese as the enemy fanned out to search for them.



"Danged if I know," Pugsley said. "But, from the amount of firing I figure there's at least a reinforced company out there."



"What do we do now?"



Pugsley looked around. Nine sets of weary eyes looked back at him. Team Hatchet had been in tight spots before, but never like this.



"Heck," he said. "We're cut off from our LZ; the radio's busted, so we can't call for emergency extraction, and HQ don't expect to hear from us for another two hours."



"In other words," Bulldog said. "We're in deep kimchi."



"That about sums it up. Guess the only thing we can do is take as many of them with us as we can." He looked around at the grim faces. "Check your ammo, and make every shot count."



The surviving team members moved shoulder to shoulder back against the largest tree, using it to cover their backs, and hunkered down against the dark earth, their weapons forming a deadly semi-circle in the direction from which the sounds of enemy pursuit were coming closer and closer.



There was no time for prayers or regrets. This was what they'd been trained to do.