The Generals Read Online Free PDF Page B

with the bloody mouth told me Charley made off with the operations sergeant.”
    “Goddamn!” Colonel Mennen said. If there was anything worse than getting killed or wounded, it was winding up a prisoner of Charley. When they weren’t amusing themselves tormenting prisoners in their cages, they were marching them around showing them off to Vietnamese peasants.
    “How is he?”
    He was privately shamed with his awareness that his concern for Staff Sergeant Craig was less based on his welfare than on his availability.
    “According to the commo guy, the one who took the small arms fire, he was a regular John Wayne. The others got blown away almost as soon as it started, which left him in charge. All but one of the ARVN officers got blown away, too, so he ran the show. According to the commo guy, he saved everybody’s ass with his mortars. They were inside the wire twice, he said.”
    “I was asking about his condition,” Colonel Mennen said.
    “I haven’t looked at him,” the doctor said, and gestured toward the small boy on the helicopter’s seat. “Not as bad as these people. He’s walking around.”
    Colonel Mennen nodded and walked away from the helicopter and climbed Bunker Hill. That had taken a real clobbering. A real clobbering. There were mortar fragments all over. You didn’t see many fragments unless there had been a hell of a lot of fire. The ground, in places, was literally covered with fired 7.62-mm cases from the M-60s. There were several bodies not yet covered, because no one had been up here yet. And the ground was littered with ammo cases, so many that the defenders of Bunker Hill had been forced to throw them over the sandbag wall to have room to move around.
    He entered the covered passageways. There was uncased mortar ammunition, some stacked neatly, and some loosely strewn on the ground. He made his way to the interior. A Coleman lantern was still hissing. There were two bodies on the floor, their faces covered with field jackets.
    He carefully turned off the Coleman lantern and made his way in darkness back outside. He looked down at the carnage, spotted the place where Charley had come over the wire. You could walk on the bodies, he thought. It was going to be a hell of a job just cleaning them up.
    The unmarked landing pads were now busy, flying in ARVN and American replacements, and flying out first the wounded and then the dead. Vietcong casualties were being evacuated as their medical condition gave them priority, in the judgment of the doctors. ARVN and American dead would be placed in rubberized body bags for later evacuation. Dead Vietcong would be taken down the hill and buried in a mass grave. Colonel Mennen realized he would have to airlift in a burial detail; there were too many bodies to expect the replacements to bury them.
    The smell of burned human flesh was both permeating and nauseating, but it was the napalm, more than anything else, which had saved Foo Two from falling. Courage and coolness was one thing, odds of nine to one another. No matter how good the kid had been with his mortars, no matter how many thousands of rounds he had fired from his machine guns, Charley would have taken this place without the Air Force’s rockets and napalm.
    Colonel Mennen spotted Staff Sergeant Craig. He was standing by what had been the CP, a look of horror on his face, watching Green Berets free the crushed body of the detachment commander.
    Mennen climbed down from Bunker Hill and walked over to him. Craig looked but did not salute.
    “How are you, son?” Mennen said. “You did one hell of a job here.”
    “Charley took Petrofski,” Craig said. “I saw it, but I couldn’t stop it. I thought about blowing him away, too.”
    Green Berets knew fear As a general rule of thumb, Colonel Mennen believed they could control it better than lesser mortals, but they were, almost to a man, terrified of becoming a Vietcong prisoner. There were often pacts between them, one Beret solemnly