FINDING JESUS, AND EB HOGUE'S KNIFE

Finding Jesus, and Eb Hogue's Knife

     We were living in a little rented house on Conklin Avenue in Grants Pass. Darrell and I met a kid named Eugene Wright, who was my age and lived a few houses up the street. He'd come around trying to sell Cloverine Brand Salve, some allpurpose ointment that magazine ads said you could sell door to door and make a lot of money. It came in tins the size of a snuff can. He didn't sell many. 

     Something had happened to Eugene's parents; there was some reason they couldn't raise him. He lived with his grandparents, the Hogues. He was an only child, a chubby kid who wasn't very strong. He'd been labeled a sissy, and took a lot of shit from other kids. He was very religious. 

     He and I became friends for a while. He didn't do much that I liked, like playing football or baseball, but he did read books, so we had that in common. He talked a lot about Jesus. I got bored with that, but everybody said it was the truth so I figured it must be so. He worked at converting Darrell and me. I remembered a time in Pasco when I'd asked, "Mom, is there a real God 'n' Jesus?" She'd just said, "Yes, dear," as if I'd asked if the sky were blue. I wanted more of an answer, but none came.

     Mom had been praying a lot more lately. It was pretty much in the air we breathed. In the small towns where we'd always lived, whenever somebody was born or died or got married, the seriousness of the occasion meant that it was a religious one. Heads would bow, some old man would pray out loud, and you had to be still. 

     Eugene kept after us to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as our personal savior. He warned that we'd go to Hell if we didn't, and we knew he was right because everybody else said the same thing. The difference was that most people only said that if you asked them, and Eugene said it without being asked. Darrell and I shrugged and said, Well, guess we better do it, sure don't want to go to Hell. (Back then, you always capitalized nouns like heaven and hell and any pronoun or adjective that referred to God or Jesus.) 

     So one time when Eugene was talking about Jesus we asked him how you went about doing this.

     "It's easy," he said. We'd need a special place, one that was sort of secret and private. We were at his house. He led us out back to a shed that had a partial attic and we all climbed up there and knelt down, which we'd have had to do anyway because there wasn't space under the roof to stand. This was perfect, Eugene said, because Jesus didn't care where you accepted Him as long as you did it, and He could see everywhere, so you didn't have to be in church. (Pretty good, seeing through walls. Wish I could do that.... I imagined myself walking down Conklin Avenue watching women bathe.) Darrell and I hoped Eugene was right; we didn't want to go around thinking we were saved and then end up in Hell because we'd gone about it wrong. 

     So we knelt on the boards in that shed's attic and Eugene Wright asked us if we accepted Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, and we said we did, and we all bowed our heads and Eugene said a prayer and that was that. We were Christians. Eugene was excited. Lots of preachers don't do that good, he said, getting two in one week.

    Some time later Ebenezer Hogue, Eugene's grandfather, put a .22 rifle to his head and killed himself in their living room. Eugene and his grandmother couldn't bear to stay in that house, so they moved a short distance away. Mom rented their house. She let us see the bloodstain on the wooden floor once, then put a rug over it and we moved in. It was the best house we'd ever lived in, with a back yard big enough for a vegetable garden. We’d learned in school that Indians had taught the Pilgrims to plant corn and beans in the same hills so the beans climbed the cornstalks. I planted ours the same way, and sure enough I didn't have to put in poles for the beans to climb. 

     Eugene gave me a hunting knife that had been his grandfather's. He didn't want to keep it because it saddened him, and he wasn't a hunter anyway. It was pretty old, with a small brass hilt. It had had a handle of two pieces of some early plastic, one riveted to either side of the tang. One side had fallen off. It had a crude sheath that Eb had made. He'd told Eugene it was the Indian kind. (The old man had told Eugene about seeing real wild Indians as a boy. When Eugene retold the story to me, I was so thrilled I could see a file of dusky figures, moving among the trees like a warm breeze, disappearing over a ridge.) The sheath had leather covering the blade but also wrapping around most of the handle. That way you didn't need a keeper strap, which brush could unsnap anyway when you walked through it, plucking out the knife without your even knowing it. Plus you didn't have to unsnap anything to draw the knife; you just grabbed the top of the handle and pulled it out. The hunting knife I carry to this day has a sheath I made the same way. 

     It wasn't a pretty knife, but it was mine. I didn't like that it was missing part of the handle until one day when I was throwing it in the front yard. Most hunting knives are heavier on the handle end, making it harder to control how they turn in the air, thus harder to stick. Having half its handle missing gave Eb's knife a nice balance. 

     I practiced. There was a tree in our front yard that was big enough that I could hit it every time, and its bark was soft and even, so the knife would stick easily when I could make it hit point first. I became a kid zen knifethrower. I would spend hours a day standing back from that tree, throwing the knife, retrieving it from the tree or wherever it had bounced to, walking back, throwing it again. 

     It was a matter of grip, release, and distance. It worked best to grip the knife by the blade and throw it overhand so the knife made a half turn and arrived at the tree point first. Once I saw the principle involved, I chose a favorite grip, the one with most of the blade in my hand, and settled in at the distance from the tree where that grip would give me a nice half turn and stick in the bark. I threw and retrieved and threw and retrieved. After a few days I could stick it almost every time at my chosen distance. I began to throw harder, and that changed things for a while but when I found the right combination it became even more consistent. Then I chose a spot in the bark for a smaller target, and before long I could throw the knife hard, stick it most of the time, and often very near that spot. Then I no longer seemed to be throwing the knife; it just flowed out of me as I let it go.

CRATER LAKE

Crater Lake

       A few days after high school graduation in 1961, I got a summer job as busboy in the cafeteria at Crater Lake National Park. The concession company hired mostly college students to work in the cafeteria and lodge. Mr. and Mrs. Griffin, the owners, felt that all those bright young faces were good for business. And we were cheap labor, willing to work six or seven days a week. A majority of the students hired were girls, because most of the jobs had to do with waitressing, maid service, and operating souvenir stands. 

     So there were a lot of pretty, unattached females around. I was eighteen, but still hadn't had much experience with girls. I'd always been really shy around them. Scared might be more like it. But now I was going to college, I had scholarships, I had a job, I was out on my own. This would be my big chance.

     There were two sisters on the staff, so near in age that they often were mistaken for twins. I fell in love with the older sister. She would be a senior in the fall, which made her three years older than me, a huge gap. I didn't care. I thought she was beautiful, but in a relaxed sort of way, with a low, easy laugh that said she didn't take her looks as seriously as many women do, didn't want to taunt you with her beauty. 

     It wasn't hard to get acquainted, on an Ohhello, Iknowwhoyouare basis. All the staff ate in the cafeteria where I bused tables. Employees ate in our own section, and were supposed to bus their own dishes. But we would always cruise the section with our buscarts anyway, to banter with the others. Sometimes if we weren't too busy we'd do somebody a favor, if they were stuck at the end of one of the tables against the wall, and get them a dessert or whatever from the food counter. We had some stature because we controlled the music, and they'd have to ask us if they wanted to hear a certain song. The Ray Conniff Singers were big then, and we all had our favorites. "Harbor Lights" was one of mine. It spoke of parting, of a love more frustrated than realized. Maybe that's what attracted me, the longing to go down to the harbor and depart, in the dark amid strange sounds and smells, for unknown parts of the world, connected to, but not bound by, a love at home. And maybe, after some odyssey that left you scarred but whole, you'd come back and she'd still be there for you. 

     When my secret love would come in I'd think of something to get her to notice me, like making sure the place she wanted to sit was clean. Without crowding her, I'd eavesdrop if she and her friends got to talking about music they liked, and I'd go over and play something I'd heard her mention. If she noticed and smiled in my direction, I'd clean tables like a whirlwind the rest of the day.          

     Sometimes we'd have to stay after closing, clear the cafeteria, and scrub and wax the floor. We’d be lucky if we got done by midnight. Mr. Griffin would give each of us a chit for a meal in the main lodge's dining room for that chore, since it was extra work. Those meals were pretty snazzy - tablecloths, real silverware, wineglasses, the works - and expensive. And there weren't a lot of the chits around. So any guy with a couple of them in his pocket was considered pretty good date material. 

     I saved up two chits and gathered my courage. Normally I wouldn't have had the nerve. She was so beautiful, so grownup - so... well, womanly. But I was feeling like pretty hot stuff. The way that happened was I'd gotten a day off, and since I liked to run, I'd jogged the ten miles around the rim to where the trail went down to the boat docks, and got a ride around the lake on one of the launches operated by a Coast Guard vet for the park concession owners. It was a great day, and when I got back up to the rim it was still before noon. What the hell, I thought, and took a right turn instead of a left. That would take me the rest of the way around the rim, instead of the short way back: a day's run/walk of roughly thirty-six miles instead of twenty. 

     It was wonderful for a while. I'd had lunch and water down at the lake. I was on top of the world, jogging along at 7,000 feet, on a bright day, topping a ridge where the road was a bridge leading right up into the lone white cumulus cloud anointing the blue of the rest of the sky. That lasted a few more miles, then reality set in. 

     Several kids from the staff were hanging out in the lobby of the lodge when I stumbled in, well after dark - feet blistered, badly sunburned, woozy from dehydration and electrolyte depletion. They just gawked at how fried I was. There was quite a buzz about it for a while, about how it was a crazy thing to do, but great that I could pull it off. I was a temporary star in our galaxy.

     I wrapped my newly bolstered confidence around me and went up and asked that dream woman if she'd like to have dinner with me in the lodge dining room. I had two chits. Got 'em for waxing the cafeteria floor, I told her as I proudly offered her the fruits of my hard work. 

     She looked at me for a moment - rather a longer moment for me than for her, I think. I will never forget her look. She smiled. It was, as always with her, a genuine smile. She seemed pleased, and a little surprised, that I had asked. She even seemed to like me, but, I began to sense, in a kid brother sort of way. To this day, I think of the word "bemused" when I recall her look. 

     "No thanks, Dean," she said. "But really, thanks for asking." Damn. The usual class: no phony excuses, just... No, thanks.

     Harold Lawrence, the boat crew chief, had a special presence among us. He was older, all of twenty-six or so. He'd been in the Coast Guard; he'd been around. He drove boats for a living, entrusted with people's lives out on waters that could get dangerously rough, while the rest of us drove buscarts and sold souvenirs. Ashore, he loved his fun, and could kick-start a party by walking into a room. He also carried a certain edge; there was a detectable aura of danger about him at times.

     Women especially seemed to notice him. He wore sunglasses with lenses that curved around to the side to protect the eyes from sunlight glancing off the water, but he still had faint crow's feet at the corners of his eyes, enough to make him look salty but not old. He was always sunburned, and his dark blond hair was bleached and blown about by the wind whenever he came in off the lake.

     I had a pretty serious run-in with Harold. He was sitting in the employee section of the cafeteria, regaling younger workers with some story. He had a few beers aboard; he was feeling his oats and enjoying his status as star of the current show. 

     I came by with my buscart. Harold turned and told me to go get him something from the kitchen. Didn't ask me. Told me. 

     "I'm a busboy, not a waiter, Harold," I said. "Get it yourself." 

     The party was over in an instant. Harold sat and looked at me a long moment. He let that dangerous part of him that we'd only seen hints of come right out through his face. He lifted his chin at me. 

     "Go get it," he said. 

     "No," I said. 

     Everyone just stared at us, staying clear of the sparks. I stood there in front of him, as resolute as I was scared. Still skewering me with his eyes, he finally understood that, however badly I might come out of it, I was ready to go the distance rather than have him order me about like that. He let it drop. Sometime later, he apologized to me, in front of some of the same people who'd been there when it happened. I thought that showed real class.

     Some time after that, and after I had asked the woman for a date to the lodge dining room, I was walking along the hall in the first floor of the lodge, and happened to look in through the door of the cocktail lounge, that exotic place forbidden to eighteen-year-olds like me. She and Harold were sitting opposite each other at a small table, their elbows almost touching. They didn't see me stop for a moment. They didn't see anyone but each other. They weren't all moony and romantic; they were just two intense adults interested in each other. In fact, I thought that she took Harold with a grain of salt, that though she found him interesting, she seemed to have a boundary in place that wouldn't let him too close for too long. Still, I would have given anything, or done anything, to have her look at me the way she looked at him.

     That fall, I entered Oregon State University as a freshman in engineering. I got good grades, my scholarships were renewed, and I was re-hired the following summer, 1962, for my old job at Crater Lake.

     By midsummer I was restless. Crater Lake was a beautiful place, but busing tables wasn't the most adventuresome way to spend a summer. And Oregon State began to seem a less attractive place to go back to. I liked the engineering classes, but there were no women in them, just a bunch of guys like me with glasses and 24-scale loglog split bamboo slide rules. Besides, I had a yen to study foreign languages, or poetry; something that had less to do with things and more with humans. I decided to collect my pay, buy a good bicycle, ride around the Western states with the most beautiful mountains and rivers, and find a new college.     

     The kids on the staff threw a party for me, with a cake that said "Happy Bicycling Dean". I rode down into northern California to visit a buddy in Yreka, then headed back across Oregon to visit my mother in Pasco, just across the line in Washington. My older brother Lance had settled back there after his Army hitch; Mom had taken Darrell and moved back there to be near Lance and his wife and the grandkids, after I graduated from high school.

     South of Lapine, Oregon, the railroad tracks crossed the highway at a sharp angle. My front tire caught in the groove beside one rail; the bike and I went down hard. One crank was bent so badly the bike was unrideable. I went to the library in Bend while I was waiting for a Greyhound to take me and my busted bike to Spokane, up in Washington near the Idaho line. I found a reference book of colleges and universities, and went through all the listings in mountain states, and culled out the ones with strong liberal arts programs. Colorado College sounded best.

     When my bike was fixed, I pedaled east out of Spokane, crossing the Idaho panhandle in a day. That night, I slept in a campground at the base of the long climb to the summit, which was the Montana state line. The next morning I started the long grind, switchback after switchback of steep mountain highway, all in the lowest gears of the 10-speed Raleigh. A freight train was making the same climb, and often the tracks came close to the highway. The engineer and I began to wave to each other; got to be pretty good buddies, in fact. It turned out that the mechanics of his engine and the mechanics of my engine yielded the same average speed all the way up that mountain. So we developed a sign language, encouraging one another, then making fun of the one who momentarily fell behind. This went on for half a day. 

     Finally that freight train and I rolled onto the summit, crossing the Idaho/Montana line together. The engineer leaned out and gave a halfwave, halfsalute, and I was gone. Mileposts, the second hand on my watch, and a brain that was still number-happy from engineering classes, said I was making fifty miles an hour down into the St. Regis River valley. I made it beyond Kalispell, where I got so many flat tires that I couldn't keep moving. Money was running low, and at this rate I'd never make it to Colorado College in time to start school in the fall. I got on a train for Colorado Springs.

     The college was just what I was looking for. The campus was beautiful, the Rockies behind it were beautiful. They studied English and poetry and philosophy and all that good stuff. And there were girls all over the place. But it was a private college, and much more expensive than I could afford. Transfer students couldn't get scholarships in their first year. You had to pay your own way for that year, and if you did well enough, you could apply for scholarships.

     I'd been thinking about getting my military obligation out of the way anyway. I'd rather have gone to college, but didn't have the money to do it the way I wanted to. I told the admissions officer I'd just get the service out of the way, and see him in three or four years. "Fine," he said. I could almost hear "yeah, right" under his breath.

ROY ROGERS

Roy Rogers

     The summer when I was eight, and Darrell turned six, Mom took the us on a train trip to visit her sister and brother-in-law, our Aunt Bessie and Uncle Lank Hickman, near where they'd all grown up in the Ozarks of southwestern Missouri.

     When we got back to our apartment at 32C Navy Homes, our dad had moved out. There was no sign of him except two or three empty brown beer bottles. For some time Mom had been telling Darrell and me that Dad was worthless, and she pointed out the beer bottles as proof. I didn't know what was going on between them at the time, but after I was grown I figured that she had told him to be gone by the time we got back.

     Mom had custody of us, and Darrell and I got letters from our dad from Darrington, the little logging town he'd moved to in the opposite corner of the state. He was working there as a millwright in a sawmill.

     Later that year Dad asked in one of his letters what Darrell and I wanted for Christmas. He said we should pick something pretty good. He seemed to want to make up for not being with us. We got out the "wish book," the Sears, Roebuck catalog. 

     Mom, always trying to make ends meet, said we should ask for something practical, like school clothes. We of course went straight to the toy section, and were soon hunched over the open catalogue (as it was spelled in those days), excitedly speculating about which of the cowboy toys we thought Dad could afford. 

     There they were, the cowboy sets. Boy, were they something. There was Gene Autry stuff and Roy Rogers stuff. We discussed the merits. Gene Autry was good, all right. But Roy Rogers... well. Two guns.

     That was it, of course. We had to have the guns. You could play cowboys without the rest of the stuff, but the guns were the heart of the matter. We wouldn't have to hold sticks in our hands and pretend any more. We'd have real toy guns. 

     We wrote Dad a letter. We made sure to thank him for such a nice offer, and said we were glad he had a good job where he was living now. We hoped it wouldn't be too much to ask, but we'd each like a gun set - Gene Autry for Darrell, Roy Rogers for me. I explained to Darrell that that was because I was older. Besides, I was writing the letter. I also wrote that we didn't really need all that other stuff-  the incredibly beautiful singing cowboy outfits like Roy wore in the pictures right there in the catalogue. It would be nice, of course. But we understood that they cost a lot. So we didn't really need them. Honest, Dad.      

     We waited, a child's eternity. Our hopes waned. Maybe there'd be one cap pistol, anyway. We'd have to take turns. We'd stick it in our belts, maybe get a holster later.

     The box came. It was so big Darrell and I both could have crawled into it. It was all there: the onegun holster set, the twogun holster set, two cowboy hats with strings so your hat could get knocked off your head by the wind, or by cowboy scuffles, and you wouldn't lose it. There were fringed cowboy shirts with the yokes a contrasting color. There were cowboy pants - kinda dressy for real cowboys, we thought - and vinyl gauntlets that we soon discarded because we couldn't see what they were for and because we didn't see even Roy wearing them in the pictures. There was a dressy cowboy belt to hold up the dressy cowboy pants. There were no cowboy boots, but there were "leggings" you could stuff your pantlegs into that sort of looked like the top of a cowboy boot.

     The costume stuff from that giant Christmas box - the dressy pants, the fringed shirts - was soon left behind when we went out to play. The other boys had looked at us funny when we showed up in them. Pretty soon, we'd just grab the guns and holsters and go.

"YOU'RE TOO LATE."

   "You're too late."

(Note: In this chapter, I’ve used “BULLRUSH” as the call sign of the battalion I was working with. BULLRUSH was indeed one of the infantry battalions based in the same 1st Marine Division Command Post as my outfit, Direct Air Support Center, at Chu Lai. What I don’t know is whether it was the same battalion we were working with during the events described in this chapter. I’ve used it here because it was one of the battalion call signs we used in that place at that time.)

     We were on watch in the Direct Air Support Center at Chu Lai. There were two or three enlisted men under me, radio operators and air traffic controllers. There was a watch officer, in this case a Lieutenant who kept his nose in a book "so I can stay out of Corporal Metcalf's hair while he runs the DASC." We were the air traffic control shop for the First Marine Division: we coordinated and dispatched helicopters on courier flights, trooplifts, medevacs, gunship missions, and whatever else they did; and also sent out our own jets - A4 Skyhawks, F4 Phantoms, and F8 Crusaders - on air strikes either by themselves or in support of Marine infantry units in the area. 

     A situation had been developing before I came on watch. A few kilometers from us, a Marine rifle platoon was surrounded by a superior number of Viet Cong. In the early part of our 4 hour watch, neither side had yet gotten the upper hand. But the VC ring around the platoon tightened, and things sounded grim. I was talking directly with the platoon commander’s radio operator, and I could feel the heightening tension in his voice. I could also hear rifle and automatic weapons fire and grenades going off when he keyed his mike to talk to me. 

     The VC tightened the ring again, and it became clear that the infantryman's greatest fear was staring them in the face: they were in imminent danger of being overrun.

     The only thing that had prevented this all along had been artillery. Now, whoever was adjusting artillery fire for that platoon - he must have been a real ace - walked the impacting rounds in closer and closer to his own men until everybody in the fight, Marines and VC, was pinned down by the artillery. The platoon commander had hoped this would break up the attack and send the VC fleeing, but instead it produced an awful stalemate, one of a kind that was to recur often during the coming years of war: the VC tightened their ring even further, to the point where the artillery couldn't be brought any closer without hitting our own men. The fact that they were dug in was the only thing preventing that now.

     So a few miles from where we sat in an air conditioned bubble, two concentric rings of desperate young men were hugging the planet as hot metal ripped the ground and air around them. Grenades were being rolled into foxholes, sometimes with enough time left on the fuses to throw them back, sometimes not. I began to hear screams on the radio. 

     "Landshark Alpha, this is Bravo two six...I need an emergency medevac, NOW, HURRY! over." The radio operator was screaming at me: "He's my best friend, for God's sake! He's bleedin' bad! He's gonna die! GET..ME..A..MEDEVAC! ..MEDEVAC!..NOW!..OVER!" The sheer will in that man's voice comes back to me, even now, across the years.

     Fluttery things happened in my stomach, along my spine. Everyone in the DASC had heard that, and we knew that by now, that grunt battalion's entire chain of command, including the battalion commander himself, was monitoring our net.

     "Two six, Landshark...." I was shaving call signs now; seconds could mean lives. Anyone else using this net, having heard what we'd just heard, would shift their traffic to another frequency and give us the air. "Roger your request emergency medevac. Hang on. Out." I wanted to try to comfort the guy somehow, but comfort takes time, and comfort wasn't what he wanted. He wanted a helicopter to come out of the sky and carry his bleeding friend to a hospital. He wanted that and nothing else in the whole world, and I was the only one he could ask for it. 

     While all this was developing, I'd felt the presence of the infantry battalion commander. I hadn't talked to him yet, but orders coming out from him had been few, succinct, and had obviously come from a cool head who cared deeply about his men but wasn't about to panic and lose one or two helicopters and half a dozen men trying to save one. 

     I got on another radio and called the battalion's call sign. The Man himself came on: "Landshark Alpha, this is Six Actual. I heard. You may not, I repeat, you may not send in a medevac at this time. The artillery fire is continuous, and must remain so or those men will be overrun. The bird would just be shot down by our own artillery. Repeat that back to me. Over."

     I repeated it. 

     Then: "Sir?"

     "Go."

     "I have a medevac bird with a gunship escort ready on the airstrip, engines running. Can I get them in the air and have them circle near the platoon, so they can drop in if there's an opening? Over."

     "Some of those arty rounds have proximity fuses. They could knock the birds out of the air on their way to the target. Over."

     He hadn't told me to shut up. He knew I was trying to find a way. He didn't think there was one. But he wanted for there to be one, I guess even worse than I did. He would write the letter to the next of kin of guys who got killed, not me.      

     "Sir, I’ve been a Forward Observer for both artillery and naval gunfire. I have a radio on the arty net. I can plot the position of the guns on our board, and we already have the platoon's coordinates plotted. I can plot the trajectory of the artillery rounds, including their maximum altitude. I know what the guns will do, and what the fuses will do. I can keep the birds near the platoon, and still clear of the artillery. I know how to do that, sir. I will take responsibility for it. And the air crews want to do it, sir. They know the drill, and they've all volunteered...." 

     I left the mike keyed without speaking for half a breath, then changed my tone from that of a Corporal speaking to a Lieutenant Colonel to one of two Marines speaking to one another in combat, just trying to find a way: "...they're Marines, too."

     It was a stupid, insubordinate thing to say to an officer who had been working with Marine pilots for the better part of twenty years. But it touched him, I could tell. That was the beautiful thing about the Marine Corps: a Lieutenant Colonel, even a General - the good ones, anyway - was a Marine first and an officer second, so that what bound us together was stronger than what separated us. In combat, anyway.

     I heard a hint of relief in his voice, even a touch of brotherly gratitude for my help in carrying his load: "Landshark Alpha, Six Actual. You may proceed. You may put the birds in the air, on standby. Their location is your responsibility. You will keep me informed about everything you do. And you will not, repeat, will not, lift the artillery fire or send the birds into that landing zone without personal clearance from me. Over." 

     "Wilco, sir." Will comply. Left unsaid was what we both knew, that a Corporal can't relieve a Lieutenant Colonel of responsibility for anything.

     All this took a lot less time to do than to tell. A few seconds on another radio got the medevac chopper and its gunship escort into the air and vectored to a position aloft where they could see the besieged platoon but were clear of the artillery's trajectory.

     I got back on the horn to the platoon's radio operator. "Two six, Landshark Alpha. Medevac bird and gunship escort are in the air. But I have direct orders from your own battalion commander not to lift the artillery around you. He will lift it if the situation allows. Until that happens, the birds are on standby, circling near you...I'm sorry, man. That's the best I can do."

     "...you...God...FUCK! MEDEVAC...you gotta...I'm holdin' 'im, he's bleedin' all over me, you gotta...." He was sobbing and screaming and pleading all at once, blaming me, the only person he could blame, for what the world was doing to him.

     "Stand by, Two Six." Pathetic words. At that moment I wanted only two things in the world. The first was to be able to say to him, “Here comes your help: your friend will be safe now.” Since I couldn't say that, I wanted to be there with him. I sincerely felt that I would rather have shared the danger than be blamed for not relieving it.

     "Bullrush Six Actual, Landshark Alpha, over."

     "Six Actual, go."

     "Sir, can I replace the arty with air strikes? If I can, I think we can get those birds down to that platoon."

     "The VC are thirty meters outside that perimeter. Our people will be overrun within a minute if that artillery lifts."

     "Not if there's no gap between arty and air, sir."

     "How will you keep from shooting your own birds out of the sky?"

     "Timing, Sir. It would have to be an instantaneous handoff. I can get my birds in position so they can be strafing within a few seconds of the last arty rounds."

     "Set it up, then talk to me again. You may not do this without my clearance. Out."

     "Uh, sir?"

     "Yes."

     "Sir, this can only work if I can work directly with arty. They would have to cease fire directly at my command. If we have to wait for two or three radio transmissions, there'll be too long a gap."

     "That's right. Good. I will give that order. Set it up. Check with me. Out."

     The platoon had already taken several casualties when I inherited the situation, but they had all been wounds that weren't immediately life threatening. The radio operator's buddy was the first to be critically wounded. By now, casualties were mounting in number and gravity. The stalemate was shifting in favor of the VC; if things kept on this way until nightfall, what the VC couldn't accomplish by frontal assault would happen by attrition. In the face of that, a risk now was less risky than a couple of hours ago. Or even one hour ago.

     The table in front of me was piled with radio remote consoles, microphones with their cords snaking in all directions, and the handsets of EE8 field telephones. The Lieutenant had long since put down his book, and had taken direct control of all the missions in progress besides the one I was working on. He had been listening as I spoke with the battalion commander. Knowing he was responsible for everything I did, I looked a question at him. He nodded. 

     I would begin by organizing the aircraft, giving the Colonel time to notify the arty battery that I would be giving the command to check fire. I swept the desk clear of anything but what was necessary for this mission, unplugged the microphones, unsnarled their cables, plugged them back in with their cables in neat parallel lines across the desk from the consoles to me, mikes resting on the forward edge of the desk. There was one mike for choppers, one for jets, one for artillery, one for the pinned-down platoon's radio operator, one for the battalion commander. If I got my wires crossed - if I said the wrong word to the wrong party, I could get a lot of the wrong people killed. It went without saying that by saying the right thing to the right party, I would get a lot of the right people killed. That was what we were there for.

     The original medevac chopper and its gunship escort had long since run low on fuel and been replaced. I replaced those again, with freshly fueled aircraft, and sent up another pair of gunships, orbiting them above the medevac birds. We used the word "angels" to denote altitude; "angels ten" meant ten thousand feet. I scrambled a pair of A4 jets with a full load of strafe and rockets aboard, then put a series of similar pairs on standby, to take off at regular intervals so they could replace the attacking pair on station as soon as they were out of ordnance. The pilots, talking with one another, would set their own timing so there'd be no gap over the target. I got on the horn with the artillery battery. The Colonel had talked to them. I told all these people, the cannoncockers, the air crews, exactly what the plan was. Everyone understood that timing was everything: if there was a gap, the grunts would be overrun. If there was an overlap, our artillery would be shooting down our own aircraft, and they would be crashing into one another above the platoon's position, killing more of our own people.  

     "Bullrush Six Actual, Landshark Alpha, over."

     "Six Actual, go."

     "Sir, everybody's ready. All the pilots know the plan. It looks good up there. Over."

     When two radios were near the limit of their operation range, all you got was the basic content of the communication, if that. But the battalion commander was just down the road; communication was 5 by 5: loud and clear. So the Colonel's deep breath was audible before he spoke: "Okay, Landshark. Do it."

     The arty people told me their Time of Flight, the number of seconds between the firing of the guns to the  projectiles’ impact on target. I told that number to the A4 pilots; I think it was seven or eight seconds. Artillery and I agreed that their next fire mission would be the last. 

     I remembered one time in 1964 when my section of naval gunfire spotters were doing crosstraining as Forward Air Controllers in Japan, working with Marine jet pilots. They had wanted to show us just what they could do, if things ever got really tight. It was risky, but wildly effective. My section had been set up on a low hillock in the foothills near the base of Mount Fuji. We'd asked one pilot what was the most coverage he could put on a target in an emergency. "That'd be what we call 'gear down, flaps down, low and slow'," he said. "Like this." He rolled in, landing gear down and flaps at their steepest angle to slow the aircraft and increase its time on target. He just missed clipping our radio antenna; I remember pressing the side of my face into the dirt, and still clearly seeing the pilot’s face and helmet as he passed. The thundering presence of the aircraft alone was enough to keep an enemy's head pinned down. 

     "Can you give me gear down, flaps down, low and slow?" I asked the A4 flight leader. "That will probably get you into some ground fire," I added. Dumb, I said to myself. The pilot knows there's a war on.

     "Yoooobetcha, Landshark. Say when."

     "Shot," arty said to me, meaning the last mission had just left the guns. "Shot," I said to the A4 pilots. We'd set them up so they could begin their run-in just before the artillery rounds landed. The first bird was strafing along one side of the platoon's perimeter within seconds of the final artillery impact. As soon as he passed beyond the target, he pulled up sharply to clear the way for his wingman, coming behind him, to strafe a line along the opposite side of the perimeter. Several flights of A4s tore up the ground around the infantry with 20mm cannon fire and rockets; we added 250-pound bomb runs at a little greater distance, once the pilots got close looks at our guys and their guys on the ground.     

     Time for the second shift. I said "stop" into one microphone; "go" into another. The A4s pulled away as a series of Huey helicopter gunships, which had been circling directly above the area, dropped down to strafe. Their machine guns were less powerful, but they had the advantage of being able to bank in a tight circle, and completely ring the platoon with fire. We had the gunships stacked up to follow one another in as they ran low on ammo, so there was never more than a few seconds without intense fire being put on the ground. 

     The other reason for switching to gunships was that, by tightly circling the platoon (which jets couldn't do), they left the sky open above it. I now had the medevac chopper move into position directly above the center of the platoon's position. There was no way for it to approach from the side. The pilot said he could drop her straight down. 

     "Bravo Two Six, this is Landshark Alpha. Get your emergency ready. Here comes your bird, straight down from above you." Nothing in my life had ever felt so good as saying that.

     Two Six keyed his mike, but waited a long moment to speak. The panic was gone, replaced by a calm, bitter voice: "You're too late." 

     Nothing in my life had ever felt so bad as hearing that. I still hear it.