One of the corpsmen hadn’t made it. For some reason, the majority of the explosion had blown to the left and had taken him with it. The rotors, the engine, or just the sheer ferocity of the blast had caught him, and he lay there in three pieces. The other was crawling through the burning oil and was screaming. At least I assumed he was screaming since his mouth was open.
I got to the man, picked him up by the front of his flak jacket, and leveraged him onto one of my muddy knees. I grabbed again and got a better hold of him as his face rolled up toward mine. “Don’t leave me.”
I lifted Quincy Morton from Detroit, Michigan, put Hoang over my shoulder, and turned, starting toward the trench again. The smoke enveloped everything, and it was as if we disappeared. I slogged forward into the darkness; the heat pressed against my back like a steam iron, and the weight of the two bodies slowed me down to a crawl in the mud that collected under my combat boots.
I remembered the blocking sleds at USC and the grueling two-a-days under the California sun, squared my shoulders, put my head down, and pulled.
I had taken a good seven steps when somebody ran into me. He bounced off and must have fallen to the ground, so I released the swabo corpsman only for a second to try and help whoever had fallen, but the swabo misinterpreted the movement and grabbed my arm just as I saw the barrel of the AK-47 rising up and into my face. It didn’t matter. I didn’t have my rifle.
He fired, the cicada sound of the machine gun coming unwound as I fell with the whistling rush of the bullets flying beside me; I came down on him hard and could feel him trying to get the automatic loose from under me, but I’d yanked a hand free and could feel his throat. Everything was wet, and we slithered there against each other.
He was kicking, but the weight of all three of us didn’t allow for much movement. I tightened my grip on his larynx and felt the cartilage begin to give as his voice box collapsed and pressed into the air cavity of his esophagus. I couldn’t hear anything since the explosion, but I could imagine that I could still hear the spittle. He must have gargled like a baby working itself up for a full-blooded scream.
It never came.
He wasn’t moving and wasn’t breathing, but I still wasn’t sure if he was dead.
I lay there on top of him, retching, coughing, and finally vomiting.
I spit and cleared my mouth and felt for the two men who lay beside me, feeling the corpsman’s hands grabbing my arm. I got to my knees and then my feet, picked them up again, and staggered forward into the smothering rain. I gathered momentum, realizing that if we stayed out there in the open for much longer, we were dead.
The NVA had overrun the garrison and were headed for the wire; we were only a few steps ahead of them. I could feel my boots digging into the goose-shit ground, and what adrenaline I had left propelled me as we blew through the swirls of the remaining smoke-and mist-clogged night.
I continued to push off with each stride growing just a little bit longer, and with the mantra I will not die like this... I will not die like this... I will not die like this....
Men rose up ahead, but I didn’t have time to fight them all so I just continued on, blasting forward and taking them with me. The biggest was at point and tried to shrug down like a running back looking for a hole in the line, but I was too much weight with the two bodies I carried and took him as I lost my footing and carried us over the edge of a flat world.
We fell, and I could finally hear the weapons firing around me and the curse words, thankfully, in English. I opened my eyes but could only see the reddish rainwater that filtered between the stacks of soggy sandbags and Henry. He was cradling his brow with blood fil-tering through his fingers as he laughed and shook his head with that bitter secret-survivor smile.
He spoke out of the side of his mouth as he fired the CAR-16 over the lip of the trench, the flame from the 5.56’s barrel extending from the black metal like the eyes of some deflated jack-o’-lantern. The blood was still seeping from his head where I’d hit him, when he looked at me.
“When I said run till you reach something, I did not mean me.”
She tossed part of a crust to Dog, who was sitting in the hallway to my left. We watched as the beast took the baked dough and swallowed it in two bites.
“Because it’s your turn, and there isn’t anybody else.” She didn’t look satisfied with my answer, but she was relatively happy that I’d brought dinner before I headed back to the ranch to check on Cady.
