The Generals Read Online Free PDF

Two, and the first V came in for a landing simultaneously. The first chopper landed far from the H-pad, because it was going to be on the ground for a while, and didn’t want to block other flights any more than it had to.
    The first chopper to land carried the commanding officer of the First Special Forces Group, a tall, erect, very handsome bull colonel. Had he been sent over by Central Casting, a producer shooting a military film would have rejected him for being too young, too handsome, and too articulate to be a Green Beret colonel.
    Blissfully unaware of the incongruity, he jumped out of the helicopter with a World War I Model 1897 Winchester 12-gauge trench gun in one hand and a leather attaché case in the other. These accoutrements were less strange than they at first appeared. There was paperwork to be accomplished here, and it simply made sense to bring the attaché case holding the paper; the case served as an efficient portable desk. And there had been no improvement since World War I in a shotgun firing 00-buck shot as an up-close people killer.
    The first chopper also disgorged two physicians and four medics. The doctors wore the caduceus of the Army Medical Corps on their collar points, but not the Red Cross brassard of the noncombatant. Given the option of wearing the brassard and placing their faith in the willingness of the Vietcong to adhere to the provisions of the Geneva convention, or not wearing it and going armed, they had opted to be armed, one of them with an issue .45-caliber pistol, the other with a Ruger Super Blackhawk single-action .44 Magnum revolver.
    The medics immediately started looking for wounded. The other two Hueys unloaded Green Berets, some of whom started moving through the carnage, and others to unload supplies—food, ammunition, stretchers, and a collapsible radio antenna—from the helicopters. When the supplies had been unloaded, two Berets started erecting the antenna, and the others picked up stretchers and went looking for the medics.
    Colonel C. David Mennen took a quick professional look around the carnage and quickly concluded Foo Two had taken a clobbering. There was very little left of what had once been the command post, and Staff Sergeant Craig, a bloody bandage covering his mouth, was almost frenziedly digging in its rubble. At least, he thought, he would not that night have to write a letter beginning, “Dear Craig, I thought you would like to know what I have learned about how your cousin died.”
    It was tough writing those letters to strangers, infinitely tougher when they had to be written to friends, and soldier friends, who would be unimpressed with the phrases about “inspiring his fellow soldiers” and “in the highest traditions of the service.”
    The kid looked shook, and the wound looked nasty, but he was alive, and if he also looked a little hysterical, so what.
    Colonel Mennen walked through the rubble and carnage, searching for whoever had taken charge. He found bodies covered with shelter halves and blankets, but no Americans. Then he walked to the Huey in which he had arrived. It had been turned into sort of an emergency aid station, with one of the doctors and two of the medics providing immediate attention to the most seriously wounded, the majority of whom were the dependents of the ARVN troops.
    “What about our wounded?” he asked.
    “Two,” the doctor replied, looking up from his repair of the ugly compound fracture of a small boy’s leg. “One took some small-caliber fire in the chest; it missed the vitals, or he wouldn’t be alive. The other one took some superficial flesh wounds, but I think there’s internal damage. They’re both on their way out of here.”
    “That’s all?”
    “Four known dead, and almost certainly the CO died in the CP.”
    Colonel Mennen did the arithmetic. Four KIA plus one probable KIA was five, two evacuated was seven. Staff Sergeant Craig was eight.
    “We’re missing one,” he said.
    “The kid