365 Days by Ronald J. Glasser Read Free Book Online Page B

There was not one corpsman left standing. The 101st had to CA in medics from two other companies, and by nine that night, every one of them, too, had been killed or wounded.
    Graham was eighteen years old when a tracer round skidded off his flack vest and triggered a grenade in his webbing. He struggled for a moment to pull it off and then, according to the other medic working with him, he jumped out of the aid station, and kept running, with the grenade bouncing against his chest until it went off.
    Pierson, nineteen, was at the rear of his squad when the buried 105 blew. He hit the ground with everyone else, but when the explosion wasn’t followed up with small arms fire, he got up and began running toward the settling dust. The smell of cordite still stung the air. Three troopers had been blown off the track. One had the whole bottom half of his body sheared off; the second lay crumpled against a tree, a huge gaping hole in the very center of his chest; the third, half of his bottom jaw blown off, lay flapping around on the ground, blood gushing out of his neck and spilling into what was left of his mouth.
    Pierson wrestled him quiet. While the rest of the squad hurried by, he took out his knife and, grabbing the protruding piece of jaw bone, forced back the soldier’s head and calmly cut open his throat, then punched a hole into the windpipe. A sputtering of blood and foam came out through the incision, and as his breathing eased, the soldier quieted.
    There was another explosion up ahead and the rattling of small arms fire. Taking an endotracheal tube out of his kit, Pierson slipped it in through the incision and threaded it down into the soldier’s lungs, listened for the normal inward and outward hiss of air, then reached for the morphine. One of the troopers who had come up from a trailing squad was checking the other bodies. “Hey, Doc,” he said, “these two are dead.” Without looking up, Pierson shoved the needle deep into the soldier’s arm and drove the plunger smoothly down the barrel of the syringe.
    Webb had been in Nam only three days when he got into his first fire fight. The 3rd Platoon working out ahead had killed three dinks near a bridge. A few hundred meters farther they found a small arms cache with four AK-50’s, a couple of RPD’s, and a Smirnov attack rifle. They waited for the rest of the company and then they all moved out through the waist-high grass. You could feel trouble coming; up and down the line the troopers switched their weapons to automatic and shifted their rucksacks so they could drop them more easily. The machine gunners began carrying their weapons at port arms instead of across their shoulders. The grenaders loaded their M-79’s with cannister rounds. Up ahead, fifty meters away, was a thick tree line. The only sound was the company moving through the grass and an occasional tinkle of loose gear. Webb was walking with the Sergeant.
    “Thirty meters,” the Sergeant said softly. “We’ll get hit inside of thirty meters.”
    “Sooner,” a trooper offered drily. Twenty meters farther the firing began. Even as he hit the ground, Webb saw three figures tumble over in front of him. Within seconds the whole field was exploding. Automatic fire cracked and snapped through the dry grass. An RPD hidden off to the right began firing and caught a squad trying to move off that way. Two other machine guns opened up on the left. Seeing where they were falling, the gooks began skipping rounds into them.
    Behind and overhead, Webb could hear the gunships thumping their way toward them. The VC stopped firing as the first loach, small and agile, swept in over their heads. A moment later a cobra swung in. Everybody was popping smoke grenades. Webb got to his knees and, seeing a trooper dragging a body toward a nearby rise, shook off his rucksack. Taking his helmet off and leaving it on the ground with his M-16, he got to his feet and began running toward them with his aid kit. He made