The Angel

The Ranger unit loaded up into an M-35 truck to head out on patrol. It was 1425 local, and they were scheduled to roll out at 1430 hours. They had three outposts to check on and were expecting to be gone about four hours. Sergeant Prince was in the passenger seat, as leader of the unit, with his driver and four soldiers in the back of the truck.

This wasn’t their first patrol, and it was easy to become complacent after making the same run day after day for a few weeks with no enemy contact. They were always armed to the teeth, both individually and at the squad level, but over the last several weeks, they had yet to even hear about, much less shoot at any opposition forces. The only casualty they had experienced was the previous driver, Corporal Sherrod, being hit by a sniper while on his way to the mess hall for breakfast. He’d been sent to Okinawa for treatment, and they hadn’t heard yet if he’d be back.

Despite their official roles as non-combatants, and only in Vietnam to train local forces, they were far from operating in their official roles. They were conducting missions well into Cambodia and hadn’t trained anyone. Their job was disruption of supplies moving on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which moved material from the northern reaches of Vietnam to the south.

***

“Hey Sarge,” Corporal John Kowalski said to his Sergeant, “what are you gonna do when you get back home? You gonna marry that girl a’ yours?”

Prince laughed a little before answering his driver, “Hell yeah, Corporal. I’d be an idiot not to. But we’ve only been here a few weeks… it might be a little early to be talking about going home.” After answering the Private, Prince was looking out the window of the bouncing truck.

“This is new,” Kowalski said as they approached a crater in the middle of the road. “If I hit that, the truck is likely to get busted up.” Before Bill could say something about just running through the middle to the new driver, the Corporal veered off to the right side of the road, skirting around to the side of the crater, avoiding the worst of the damage on the road.

“Stop!” Sergeant Prince started to say, just as the men felt the truck rise, hitting a mine with the left rear tire. The concussion from the explosion thrust the driver’s side of the truck into the air and violently tossed the heavy cargo truck onto its passenger side. Kowalski slammed into Prince and the Sergeant landed in the broken glass and torn sheet metal that had been his door. The Private was unconscious and the Sergeant was stunned and disoriented as pain lit his right side.

“Kowalski?” he yelled as he started to regain awareness of what was around him.

He pushed the other man off of him and looked out through the shattered windshield of the truck. The sounds outside were muffled, probably because of the explosion, he thought, but he very distinctly heard a woman’s soft voice through the ringing in his ears.

Bill, you have to get moving. Get out of the truck and get under cover, she said. He could see a figure at the edge of the jungle, fifty yards away. She was looking back and forth between him and back into the jungle. They’re coming. You have to get moving. Quickly!

He grabbed his rifle from the rack against the dashboard of the truck and cleared the glass from the bottom half of the windshield and then from the top half. He crawled through and then dragged Kowalski from the cab of the big truck. When he tried to stand, he couldn’t support any weight with his right leg. And his right arm hung limply by his side.

“Murdock!” he shouted as he hopped around the top of the cab headed for the back of the truck. He needed to check on the rest of his small squad. Murdock had the backup radio in the back of the truck.

As he made his way around the cab, the rest of his squad came into view. The four men were all sprawled out on the ground. Twenty to thirty feet from the truck. They were piled unceremoniously with the cargo they’d been carrying. Some of them were on top of crates, others partially under the crates.

Get them to the other side of the truck, Bill, the others are coming through the jungle. They’ll be here any second.

“But I have to call for an evac. We won’t be missed for a while,” he said to the figure.

You have to come back to me, My Love. And you can’t do that unless you get to cover.

He felt something hitting his face and then saw bursts of splinters coming from the wooden crates that had spilled out of the truck. Without thinking, he dropped to the ground, knowing it must be NVA fire. He hadn’t heard it though. He leaned around the side of the crate he was behind and could see movement and muzzle flashes in the jungle. A few feet away, the M60 machine gun that had been mounted in the back of the truck was laying on the ground.

Prince snagged the end of the barrel with his hand and pulled the gun back toward his cover. The belt dragged behind it. There were several ammo boxes laying around, but all were out of reach except the attached belt. Sitting on the ground, feeling a bit dizzy, he checked over the weapon to make sure it was ready to fire. After running through all the checks, he leaned around the crate and lit up the edge of the jungle. He kept watch on his belt to make sure he didn’t fire through all of it.

Then he jumped up and limped his way around to the bottom side of the truck… the side facing away from where the fire had come from. Prince looked around to see if there was any better cover around, but only saw the exposed road and more jungle. They might be able to find cover in the jungle, but there could also be more danger than safety there.

“Ok, Bill, get ahold of yourself,” he said out loud. “Let’s establish our priorities.”

He was still dizzy and dazed from the explosion, but it was obvious that he was also the only one moving around. He needed to get his squad behind some cover… that was his first priority. After that, he needed to make sure he had a defensible position. Finally, he needed to find a way to communicate that they needed help.

As he went back around the truck, he started to hear the bullets striking the truck. He saw one of the crates was marked as carrying M-79 Grenade Launchers, and another held the grenades. Sergeant Prince grabbed the handle on one end of each of the crates and pulled them around the truck. He knew that if he could knock out the enemy forces nearby, he might have some time to secure his position.

He quickly tore into the two crates and loaded up several of the launchers with grenades. Leaning around the back of the truck, he launched a pair of grenades into the jungle, about thirty yards from each other. When he lurched back around the truck toward his men, he didn’t encounter any more enemy fire for the moment.

“Murdock, can you hear me?” he said as he reached the first man. Murdock had been pinned under the crate with the grenade launchers. There was no response as Bill grabbed his jacket and dragged him back around the truck, sitting on the ground and pulling the man with his good arm and then pushing himself with his good leg.

He limped around to the front again. “Kowalski!” he shouted at his driver, still laid out on the ground where he had left him. He stirred and opened his eyes, looking at Bill with confusion written across his face.

As he grabbed his jacket to drag him to Murdock’s position, Kowalski asked, “can’t I skip school today, Dad?”

“No John… You have a big day ahead of you,” he replied off-hand, pulling the Corporal after him.

Bill Prince glanced down at his watch. Five minutes had elapsed since the last time he had looked at it… when Kowalski was asking him if he was going to marry Christina. Christina… Had that been her standing at the edge of the jungle? He asked himself.

He moved around the back of the truck again, and then heard her voice, Hurry, Bill. You don’t have much time. He saw two of his men draped across various gear that had been tossed out of the truck as it had flopped onto its side. First, he grabbed the medic, Jones. He could see that his leg was badly broken and there was a trickle of blood coming from one of his ears. He looked down at his own leg seeing it also broken and realized that was why he couldn’t support weight with it.

On the next trip, he grabbed the medic’s bag and tossed it over the truck, hoping it wouldn’t hit one of the men he’d already dragged back there.

“Sarge?” Private Woods said quietly as Prince approached.

“Yeah, Hollis, I gochta. Can you move?”

“No, Sarge,” came the quiet reply. But he did seem to move one of his arms. Prince grabbed his jacket and started the long drag back around the truck again.

A moment later he returned for the last man, Private Hunter. Hunter was pinned under several boxes and crates of supplies. When Bill turned him over, there was a pool of blood under his nose and running down the side of his head from his ears. Hunter had been sitting at the back of the bed, right over the tire that had hit the mine.

After what seemed like hours, but had only been a few minutes, Bill had arranged the other five men, as well as a several crates around the crater that had been in the road. On one side was the truck, shielding them from the Jungle to the north. He had a clear view east and west, and there had been no shots fired from the jungle to the south. Only Private Woods had regained consciousness, and he was in and out.

Bill’s pain was immense. He was having a hard time concentrating on what his next step should be, but he rigged a makeshift mount for the M60 to cover their side of the truck. He also loaded up a few more grenades into the launchers. Finally, he opened some of the ammo crates so that he could reload.

Then it was time to wait.

They’re just inside the woods on the other side of the truck, Bill, he heard the mysterious voice tell him. It sounded just like Christina, but she was half a world away. Help will come, hold on, My Love, she finished.

Bill leaned around the back edge of the truck and started firing grenades into the jungle, spacing them ten to twenty yards apart. He could faintly hear the screams of men as they died in the explosions… his hearing was starting to come back. He ducked back around the truck and dropped to the ground. His vision was starting to close in on him. The pain from his leg and arm were immense, and if he pushed himself too hard, he thought he might pass out. But he also knew that if he didn’t push himself, he would probably die.

The radio was destroyed, and he wondered how long it would be before someone came to find them. They wouldn’t be noticed as being late for another half an hour, maybe longer. But then, it could take an hour after that for someone to find them.

This is part of a larger story, which is part of a series. Bill Prince is a major characters in the Dixon-Prince series of books. This story is part of a novella called the Angel, in a collection called Who, What, When, Why? available on Amazon.

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