PROLOGUE
Memorial Day, 1970     WE GO BACK! WE GO BACK! NO GO THAT WAY! Boo Koo
NVA! Boo Koo NVA!” Trang shook his head, “No!”
Transferring the M-16 to his left hand, he raised his right
hand to just above his waist, palm out and vigorously shook the hand
back and forth in a blurred stop sign.
    Rusky had never seen Trang so unnerved. Was Trang sweating?, as
he had never seen Trang sweat. The whites of Trang’s Asian eyes
appeared to be bulging out of their sockets as a single bead of sweat
trickled down his camouflaged cheek.
    When the team of Rangers suddenly emerged from the dark, dense,
thorny brush, they unexpectedly discovered a camp nestled between
the “V’ formed by two divergent trails. Like ghosts, they slipped back
into the brush and silently waited in the eerie stillness as they observed
their surroundings for over an hour. Then the team leader sent Rusky
and Trang to get a more precise estimation of the base. The two men
barely crept inside the perimeter of the camp when Trang insisted
they go back.
    “The north trail is the way to go,” said The Mad Swede, ignoring
his Kit Carson Scout. “It’s clear the fuckers went that way when they
left this base.”
    “No! I no go. You dien cai dau. This tee tee camp. Many big camps
with boo koo NVA that way. They come back. We die! Di di mau!”
    “Listen to Trang, boss.” Even Rusky’s whisper sounded peculiar
due to his accent. “There’s no evidence this camp was deserted in a
hurry or because of us. Looks to me, boss, like they’ll be back.”
“I don’t know,” mused The Mad Swede.
    “Just because it’s Memorial Day doesn’t mean we should go and
get ourselves whacked,” Rusky continued. “I agree with Trang. If we
go that way or even if we stay here, we’re gonna get into some deep
Kim chi. Remember, they dropped us so far into Cambodia that we
got no arty support. I don’t know about you, boss, but I’d like to be
around to celebrate Memorial Day in The World next year.”
    “Alright, fuck it!” retorted The Mad Swede. “But we’re gonna have
to booby trap this base before we leave. Shortround, set up a defensive
position and watch our ass on that trail to the left. Hilltopper, take
your M-60 and set up where you have a good view up that northern
trail. Rusky, you fucking stay here with BJ on the radio, but take your
claymores out of your pack. Trang, you and I are gonna rig some
explosives for when those fuckers get back.”
    The team leader’s decision did not appease Trang, who continued
to glance at the northern trail where Hilltopper was setting up the
machine gun. Like a prospector with his beast of burden stealing into
a rival’s claim, the diminutive scout led the massive American into
the deserted base camp of eleven empty hooch. Trang was careful not
to disturb anything that would announce their presence. Silently, he
went to work hiding grenades primed to explode as a result of pressure
or movement associated with normal activities. Next, Trang carefully
placed, aimed and camouflaged the claymore mines. After that he spent
precious time stretching out and hiding the trip wires that would
detonate the mines. All the while he worked, he furtively stole glances
toward the northern trail and kept alert to any telltale noise or smell.
After an hour and a half of painstakingly careful effort, Trang turned
to The Mad Swede, who held even more munitions.
    “We go now. All done. Boo Koo NVA come soon. We go now.”
    “Yeah, Trang, we fucking go now,” said The Mad Swede as he
silently signaled for the team to reassemble at the radio with BJ and
Rusky. As the two men retraced their steps out of the camp, Trang
meticulously erased any evidence of their retreat.
    “I called in the location of this gook base camp to X-ray when I
made the last commo check,” said Rusky. “I also alerted them that we
may need some gun ships before the night is over.”
    “We go now! Di di mau! We go!”
    “Fucking-A, Trang.” The Mad Swede was easily annoyed. “We’re
not humpin’ that trail. Get a hold of yourself. We’re going due south
up the goddamn mountain…shit…these shitty vines are thick and
dirty. Christ…it’s gonna take us a long time to get clear of this fucking
area, and it’s already late! Rusky, take point. Trang, you take slack so
you can clean up our tracks. Rusky, in about two hours, before it gets
dark, look for a place to hole up in for the night.”
    It was well over an hour before they reached the summit, which
was less than two hundred meters from the enemy’s bivouac camp.
Through a small clearing was revealed the Srepok River far below
meandering through the distant valley that led towards Viet Nam.
    The luscious, deep green forest blanketed the earth farther than the
unassisted eye could view in the twilight sun and unlike the exfoliated
scars of its neighbor, the Cambodian jungle was vibrant and
harmonious with nature and, so far, unblemished by man’s war.
    However, the six Rangers had not the time, the energy nor the
inclination to notice the natural beauty surrounding them.
    KABOOM!
    “Claymore,” said Rusky. “Listen. You can hear them.”
    “Chet bat dac ky tu; chet treo. Chet mét cach vinh quang. GI, you die tonight! Caca dau!” The meaning of the distant screams and curses reached their intended audience.
    “We go fast now! Boo koo NVA!” Normally, an implacable
Trang was comfortable with the excruciatingly deliberate pace that
allowed him to straighten any bent twigs and cover their tracks.
However, ever since they had begun their climb, he had been imploring
them to speed up.
    “Fuck! Trang’s right. We’ve got less than an hour of light to get as
far away as we can. Let’s go!” The Mad Swede urged.
    The descent through the thorny vines and moss-covered rocky
surfaces was every bit as difficult as the climbing had been. In varying
degrees, the men were all suffering from heat exhaustion, fatigue and
thirst, but the real, unabashed fear exhibited by their normally intrepid
scout, drove them on.
    After they had traversed another hundred and fifty meters, The
Mad Swede stopped them. “Shortround, go ahead at least fifty meters
with Rusky and find a place for us to hide. Hilltopper, you and Trang
set up some claymores with trip wires. Make sure you fucking spread
them way out. BJ, how’s our commo?”
    “Commo is five by. No birds in the air right now.”
    “That means it’ll take at least an hour for them to get us any air
support. Fuck! I should have scrambled them when the claymore
blew,” The Mad Swede censured himself.
    “Think we need it, Swede? Trang was talking about us dying. He
said they were yelling that they knew we were out here and that they
were going to find and kill us,” BJ said.
    “BJ, when it turns dark, you won’t be able to see your goddamn
hand pressed against your nose. Nothing but fucking insects will
bother us tonight. Pass me the goddamn handset,” said an impatient,
yet worried Swede.
    BLAMM!
    “What was that?” BJ asked.
    The Mad Swede responded tersely, “One of the grenades Trang
set. Too bad all of ‘em didn’t explode.”
    “X-ray, this is Foul Tip Two Four.” The team leader said urgently
as he depressed the squelch button on the radio handset. “Scramble
gunships. No contact. I say again. No contact. Unknown number of
unfriendly set off surprise packages we left for them. Scramble to
coordinates previously sent. How copy? Over.”
    “Foul Tip Two Four, this is X-ray. Lima Charlie. Stand by. Over.”
    Since the twilight blurred outlines and tricked their vision, the
two men strained to hear any foreign sound that might be muffled by
the leafy layers of the jungle. Occasionally, they detected a distinctive
high pitch that emanated from a distant Vietnamese yell. Also they
heard a closer sound of a disturbed bush and silently prayed it was
from one of their own or a small forest critter. More than forty minutes
passed before the familiar sound of the radio interrupted their
purposeful watch.
    “Foul Tip Two Four, this is X-ray. Over.”
    “This is Two Four. Over.”
    “Foul Tip Two Four, this is X-ray. Be advised a flock of six Intruder
helicopters are near your Alpha Oscar. They are fully armed and
anxious to go hunting. You should be able to hear them any minute.
Over”
    “Roger, X-ray. Let them know that Foul Tip Two Four is more than
three hundred Mikes south of unfriendly base. Out.”
    Above the canopy of the jungle, the green earth basked in the
amber hues of the setting sun. Below the canopy, darkening shadows
quickly devoured the receding shade.
    “Hey, boss,” whispered Rusky, who had reappeared with
Shortround, “we found a spot with large boulders surrounded by thick,
thorny bushes. It’s perfect and nobody would want to go through there.
Hey! Choppers. I hear choppers!”
    “Yeah, gunnies from the 281st are gonna fuck up our neighbors.”
    Hilltopper with Trang, whose trained eyes still revealed
considerable fear, joined the reassembled team.
    “Good, we’re all here,” said their team leader. “Rusky, take us
there before it gets too damn dark to see anything. When we get settled
for the night, maybe the Intruders will provide us with a display of
Memorial Day fireworks.”
    The team hoisted their individual rucksacks onto their backs and
silently fell into line behind Rusky, who strode with renewed
confidence. They had barely gone twenty meters before the forced
quiet of their stealth was shattered by the distant roar of hell from
above being visited upon the ground inhabitants, who fired back their
fury into the heavens. The unmistakable brap sound of the miniguns
meant the gunships were hot. The huge amount of distinctive
“popping” sounds of the AK-47s meant the gunships also received a
hot reception.
    “I feel like fucking cheering,” said BJ.
    “Shut the fuck up and keep going. Go!” the team leader
commanded.
    When the team finally reached its objective, each man had to crawl
through a ten-foot expanse of thorny bushes to reach the interior
fortress of rock boulders. Hilltopper struggled the most with the
burden of his M-60. Unable to pull his bandana free from the vines
that had ripped it from his head, he finally hacked it loose with his Kbar
and buried it on the spot. The crown of thorns was worthless to
him.
    For the next half hour, the cacophony of ferocious battle they had
orchestrated blasted around them. Missiles whistled, rockets
swooshed, rifles popped, large caliber weapons in the air and on the
ground rattled, and the constant cymbal clapping of explosions
thundered, nearly always drowning out high-pitched screams…nearly
always.
    By now, darkness had completely engulfed the dense forest all
around them. The small clearing above the soldier’s fortress of large
boulders, allowed some starlight to lessen the blackness of their
immediate position.
    The Mad Swede took the handset from BJ and then informed his
men of the transmission. “X-ray says that Wolfpack found three fucking
large enemy base-camps not far from the small one we spotted. They
said there were hundreds of enemy with all kinds of shit. Two of their
birds were badly damaged and one crewman shot…X-ray doesn’t
know how badly. Anyway, they fucking dumped all their payload on
those fuckers.”
    “We should call for an extraction,” interjected Hilltopper.
    “No can do.”
    “Why not?” BJ interrupted. “We should get the fuck out of here!”
    “The Old Man made an agreement with the chopper command.
No more night extractions.”
    “That’s horseshit. Major Holden would never leave us out here
with our dicks waving in the breeze,” insisted BJ.
    “That’s right. If necessary, they’ll provide us gunships and flares
all night long,” assured The Mad Swede.
    “Then why wouldn’t they just pull us the fuck out?” asked BJ.
    “Because it’s too fucking dangerous,” said The Mad Swede. “The
last night exfill was just outside of Phan Thiet. When light from the
flares went out, a chopper’s rotor hit a fucking tree or the ground.
Anyway, it crashed, killing three of the crew and a Ranger. So, no more
fucking night extractions! We’ll get pulled out at first light. Till then,
those fuckers don’t know where we are, so just stay cool.”
    “This bad. NVA come. This very bad,” insisted Trang.
    “Trang, I don’t want to hear any more of your shit. You’ve been
spooked this whole mission. Let’s all just cool it now,” ordered their
leader.
    Noise from the distant enemy camp continued unabated until well
past midnight and none of the Rangers expected or intended to sleep
that night. Without any prompting by their team leader, they each
kept a vigilant ear for any potential warning sound.
    Thump…Thump…Thump…Thump. Though distant, that sound
was unmistakable.
    “Mortars,” whispered Rusky.
    CARUMP! CARUMP! CARUMP! CARUMP!” They couldn’t tell
where the explosions landed, only that they sounded as if they were
all around them.
    “X-ray, this is Foul Tip Two Four. Scramble Spooky and Shadow.
We are being probed by mortar fire. Over.”
    “Foul Tip Two Four, this is X-ray. Roger. Over.”
    Off and on over the next half hour, the maddening THUMP of the
mortar being fired interjected renewed apprehension. The resulting
CARUMP explosions always sounded closer and louder.
    “Foul Tip Two Four, this is X-ray. Be advised that Spooky and
Shadow with SLAR are heading your way. Over.”
    “X-ray, this is Foul Tip Two Four. Roger. Out.”
    The Side Looking Airborne Radar could locate and pinpoint the
enemy better than daylight observation. This allowed the Spooky
gunship to obliterate the enemy because of its ability to concentrate a
heavy dose of defensive fire into a surgically determined area.
Suddenly, the heavens erupted again. The shouts and cries of the
approaching enemy being raked by the venomous fire from Spooky
sounded ominously closer than did the earlier distant screams evoked
by the Intruder Wolfpack gunships.
    The Spooky pilot circled slowly as three, multibarreled 7-62mm
machine guns fired 18,000 rounds per minute from the door and two
windows in the port side of the passenger compartment. The aircraft
was called “Puff” because it resembled a dragon overhead with flames
billowing from its guns.
    “It’s ‘Puff the Magic Dragon,’ that’s awesome, boss!” exclaimed
an excited Rusky.
    “The new version of Puff is called ‘Spooky,’ Rusky,” corrected the
team leader. “Thank God…fucking just in time, too!”
    The hellish racket of war ended as abruptly as it had begun after a
raucous fifteen minutes. Evidently, it was long enough to forestall any
further southern excursions toward the hiding Rangers.
In the early morning twilight, two Intruder Bandit slicks each
pulled out three relieved Rangers on a McGuire rig. Two sister sets of
Wolfpack gunships covered their extraction. There were no friendly
injured.

* * *

    At about the same time that the Rangers were being lifted by rope
to safety, in an eleven hour earlier time zone, two hundred champagne
glasses were being lifted in a toast to newlyweds, 2LT Joseph Dunn
and his bride, Marie.
    The Memorial Day wedding could not have been scheduled on a
more beautiful day. The sun shining brightly in a sky over West Point,
was unblemished by even a cloud. The reception was held in the Main
Ballroom of the Thayer Hotel. At one end, a wall of glass windows
overlooked the Hudson River, which meandered from the pristine,
forested mountains of the New York highlands to flow past the manmade jungle known as New York City.
    “A toast,” announced the best man, 2LT Matt Wheeler. “May Joe
and Marie enjoy a life filled with love, happiness and many children,
and may Joe spend his next year with a terrific unit and come home
safely to us so he can enjoy making all those beautiful children!”