Collateral Damage A Matt Royal Mystery - By H. Terrell Griffin Page 0,12
the distinctive whomp whomp of a chopper. The enemy didn’t have helicopters, so it was one of ours. Doc set me on the ground and stood, waving, trying to get the pilot’s attention. The radio on the ground next to me came alive.
“Squatter six. This is Birddog four.”
I picked up the radio. “Squatter Six.”
“What’s your name?”
I knew the pilot was making sure that we weren’t enemy soldiers trying to lure him close enough for a shot with a rocket-propelled grenade that could bring him down. “Matt Royal,” I said.
“Hometown?”
That wasn’t information found on the dog tags and was another layer of security for the pilot. “Sanford, Florida,” I said.
“What do you want to be when you grow up, son?”
“Fuck you, Flyboy. Get down here. We sure do need a ride home.”
He laughed. “There’s a shitpot load of Charlies on your six coming out of that tree line. They’re moving fast. They must know you’re out here.”
“Yeah, we saw them,” I said. “They’re about five hundred yards behind us.”
“I’ve called in a fast mover. He’s due in less than two minutes. Drop smoke on my say-so. As soon as he makes his pass, I’ll set down right where you are. Be ready to load quick. I don’t want to wait around.”
“Roger that.”
Seconds passed and then I saw it on the horizon, angling down, moving fast, the twin intakes of the F-4 Phantom barely visible in the distance, the ordinance slung under his wings menacing.
“Smoke,” rattled the radio.
I threw a smoke grenade toward the advancing VC. Its red trail would mark us, so that the F-4 jock wouldn’t plaster the good guys with whatever he was carrying. The jet was moving over us not two hundred feet up, the sound of the straining engines roaring around us, the sound of death to the VC who were turning and running back toward the tree line.
I saw canisters drop from the plane and then a terrible roar as fire engulfed the struggling troops. I hoped they were the ones who had tortured Ronnie Easton, that their deaths would be as painful, if much quicker, than Ronnie’s.
The jet pulled up and began a two-hundred-seventy-degree turn, coming back across the scattering troops. The pilot dropped more canisters, this time between the fleeing VC and the tree line. They were caught between the lines of fire, the heat blast warming the air around Doc and me. I could hear the men screaming, terrible screams of pain, not unlike those of Ronnie Easton. I chose to believe that we were taking out the same men who’d killed him. Maybe we were.
The smell of gasoline wafted over us, the residue of the burning na-palm. The F-4 did a barrel roll just above us, waggled his wings, and climbed into the waiting sky, gone in an instant.
I watched the Huey descend at a sharp angle. The red cross on the white background was clearly visible on its nose. A med-evac. I don’t know why they wore those crosses. Charlie didn’t cut them any slack because of it.
Doc loaded me onto the chopper and crawled in. We were taken directly to a field hospital where the medics found a clean, if painful, wound, no fractures. They promised I’d be back in shape in a couple of weeks. Just as we landed, the pilot told us that he’d heard on his radio net that our team had been safely extracted with no casualties. I breathed a sigh of relief.
Doc went back to our base camp to wait for the team’s return, and I was shipped to Saigon to an army general hospital and spent three weeks recuperating. Jimbo Merryman caught a chopper ride down to visit for a day and assured me that the team was doing fine. They had been pulled from regular patrols and were getting a little downtime themselves back at the base camp. Two of the guys had flown out to Hawaii for R & R, relaxation and recreation, which meant they’d drink a lot and find women willing to trade a bit of their virtue for stories of soldiers at war.
I returned to the unit to find it intact, except for Doc, who’d been transferred into some extra secretive unit that had no name. We’d heard rumors about it, but no one actually knew any specifics. I never saw him again, until that July morning on Longboat Key when I opened my front door and found him standing on my stoop.