Roop

15 Pages 3656 Words

I'll always remember Sudden. That was the nickname the men had tacked onto the muscled giant that wielded the M60 in my unit. "Sudden" was short for "Sudden Death."
And I'll always remember the first time I saw Sudden in action.

I was a new, green Lieutenant assigned to Vietnam. Back then, the Army didn't try to develop any esprit de corp; men were rotated frequently before any friendships developed. Consequently, my men were a group of strangers united only by the need to survive. They were eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds with the eyes of old men. We were stationed near the Plateau du Darlac, South Vietnam. My first real assignment was to check a tiny hamlet, Dien Hoa. Army Intelligence believed the Viet Cong were operating from Dien Hoa. Our job was to determine if that was correct.

We rode an olive-drab chopper. The whooping blades of the helicopter give us a little respite from the relentless heat of 'Nam; the blades cut the thick, humid air and pushed a breeze downward over the passenger compartment.

Soon, we circled the LZ. The LZ looked cold. There's only one way to find out if it is really cold, I thought as I double checked my M16. If no one zapped us when we entered, it was cold. If they did, it wasn't.

"Lock and load," I yelled.

The olive-drab helicopter circled low and slowed down until it almost hovered four feet from the ground. The door gunner mashed the spade grips on his .30 caliber M60 machine gun. The gun spewed bullets, its belt marching the ammunition into the gun over a Budwiser can, the container added to the mechanism to prevent jamming.

It was time to jump off the skids while we skimmed above the surface of the lush, green valley. My stomach felt like it was turning wrong-side-out inside my abdomen.

We dropped into the elephant grass, stumbling under heavy packs and the weight of ammo and weapons. I vaguely wondered about snakes and hoped my groan upon hitting the ground was drowned ...