INCOMING LUCK

A Story by Willys Watson

INCOMING LUCK

A Short Story By Willys Watson

The jeep was parked on a small bluff overlooking the barbed-wire perimeter of the easternmost part of the base. Outside the fence line the Corps Of Engineers had cleared all vegetation going out fifty yards. From the clearing outwards the foliage gradually increased until, perhaps eighty yards out, it could rightfully be called jungle and it was from somewhere in that general location that the three mortar rounds had been fired at the base.

The three men sitting in the jeep were Security Police, the only combat trained squadron the Air Force had at their command and they were assigned to one of the first-responder mobile patrol teams that were dispatched to the perimeter as soon as the incoming alarm was sounded.

"We’ve been sitting here over an hour, right?" Hank asked softly while sitting on the small rear bench directly behind the mounted M-60. "That’s it for the night, right?"

You getting bored, newbie?" Chuck responded from the driver’s seat and, when Hank quickly shook his head no, Chuck replied, "If you mean they’ve shot their allotted wad, yeah. But our protocol requires us being sure and I’m pretty sure we’re sure that’s it for the night."

"That’s about all they can do for now after that disastrous Tet Offensive. Shoot up a few rounds now and then just to piss us off," Doc suggested.

"The Intel officer jokingly calls them nuisance attacks, like some kind of psych war thing to keep us stressed out and sleepless at night. Thing is, the short-timers not on duty have gotten so used to them by now they just go right back to sleep when the clear is sounded," Chuck added.

"But don’t think they’re not out there all night watching, waiting and studying our defensive responses so they don’t make the same mistakes again," Doc cautioned their less experienced partner. "Anyway, these amateurs rarely hit anything worth hitting and, until those Chinese trained N.V.A. commies can bring down more regulars to augment the V.C. ranks, we’re pretty safe for now.

"You may not be bored but I’m bored and I’m now I’m getting hungry," Chuck complained.

"Dude, when are you not ever either?" Doc chided him.

"Moot point, smartass," Chuck smirked as he slowly backed the vehicle onto the dirt road that circumvented the base’s large perimeter.

With the jeep parked a few feet from the edge of a four foot tall sandbagged wall the team sat on the ground behind the barrier as Chuck started to make a Boonie Stove from an empty tin can. While Doc and Hank waited Doc noticed Hank fondling a letter in his fatigue shirt pocket.

"Your folks finally getting over you being a serious artist who went off to art school?" Doc enquired.

"Not really, but they’ve backed off these days because they’re worried about their boy coming home in a body bag," Hank admitted with a hint of frustration, then he looked at Chuck. "Doc knows, but I guess I haven’t told you, Serge, but I’ve got all these jazzmen in our family tree and they all think I was born to blow a horn because it’s in my blood."

"Not all black folks are natural born musicians or jocks," Chuck stated as he lit a Heat Tab to quickly warm the meat that came with his C-rations.

"You got that right ‘cause I suck at both, but at least I can hold my own with a brush in my hand, right?"

"I’ve seen your sketches and you’ve got the talent and, yep, stereotyping sucks," Doc agreed.

"Don’t I know it," Chuck butted in. "Bad enough I was the only Jewish kid in school and had to deal with snide remarks and innuendos from some of those kids all year but later when I told my counselor I wanted to major in journalism she looked at me like I was breaking my poor mother’s heart for not wanting to become a doctor or attorney."

"Speaking of breaking farts, what is that putrid smelling s**t you’re heating up," Doc jokingly demanded to know.

"My new favorite! Chopped eggs and ham."

"Ain’t very kosher, is it?" Hank teased him.

"You better watch your mouth, you uppity Van Gogh wannabe, if you wanna keep your ear," Chuck retorted. "And I doubt seriously if Moses ever had to eat C-rats." Then he aimed a barb at Doc. "But, Hank, it’s okay to get on that country hick’s case about his Texas twang. That’s not stereotyping, but stating the obvious affliction those local yokels down there get infected with."

"That’s his excuse, huh?"

"What’s obvious is someone doesn’t know the variations of stereotyping," Doc countered.

"Methinks y’all doth protest too much," Chuck snickered.

"And an a*s by any other name still smells just as bad as that s**t you’re stuffing your face with."

"Well, they don’t exactly offer us grits and hog jowls in these units, do they, Jethro?"

"And you ever try eating okra? That s**t is rabbit food, man!" Hank added to the punch line.

They playfully exchanged giving each other the middle finger.

"What was it like," Hank wondered aloud after a long silence.

"What was what like, Brother Hank?" Doc asked, wanting clarification.

"You know," Hank answered as he gestured towards the old, heavily fortified French built cement bunker perhaps twenty yards down the road from where they were sitting. "Both you guys were there at the fence line fighting off those waves of Cong."

"I really don’t remember, man, because it happened so quickly," Doc mumbled.

"Mr. Henry Hawkins, if you’re lucky you’ll never have to find out," Chuck earnestly told him.

"Yeah, I know that s**t. But, you know, just in case it happens it helps to know what to expect. And who should I ask but you guys because you’re heros to us cherries."

"Man, we ain’t heros, Hank. We were just doing what we were trained to do," Doc exclaimed modestly. ‘And it was only that one fire fight that one time, okay?"

"One that lasted most the night and we’ve heard you guys were outnumbered something like twenty to one."

"More like fifteen to one from the body count and they had poor intel and really didn’t expect so much resistance from a bunch of cops, okay?"

"Heros to me are those grunts out in the boonies who face possible death damn near every day," Chuck replied, then took his first bite from the heated meal.

"Still, it took some courage to hang in there, right?"

"That’s not something I ever thought about," Doc confessed modestly.

"I don’t know if courage is the right word. It’s more like doing the right thing when lives are at stake. Most men just instinctively do this in war," Chuck stressed to the rookie. "And besides, there are folks back in the real world who risk their own lives all the time to save others and just did it because it seemed like the right thing to do."

"Chuck is right, which ain’t very often," Doc stated, then watched his old team mate react with another obscene gesture.

"If you want to know how I handled it I just shut out the emotional part of my brain and focused on what had to be done like we were trained," Chuck offered to Hank after taking another bite.

"You weren’t..."

"Scared? Probably scared shitless if I took the time to think about it, which you just can’t do at the time. Only fools don’t get scared, but you just have to learn to bury that emotion until you’ve safe back at the hut where you can freak out privately."

"If I remember right, ol’ buddy, you got s**t faced drunk when we finally got off-duty." Doc reminded him.

"And well-deserved, though I only remembered the hangover."

"Good thing you forget trying to sing opera because you suck at it," Doc laughed, then addressed Hank, "And it helps me to calculate the law of averages. I’ve been here six months now and since Tet we’ve have had something like thirty five or so mortar attacks on this big a*s base, usually no more that five or six rounds fired in a week, and how many casualties have we suffered in those six months? Four servicemen out of over two thousand and that one civilian out of maybe two hundred of them on base. Those are odds I can live with."

"I’ll drink to the law of averages," Chuck suggested, then faced Hank. "But our esteemed hick sitting there on his boney a*s doesn’t drink enough it get drunk and doesn’t even smoke weed. As best as I can tell his only vices are smoking his pipe tobacco and saving his dick for his girlfriend back home. You do you indulge, Mr. Artiste with an ‘e’, don’t you?"

"Well, don’t most serious artists?"

"Good enough for a drinking buddy," Chuck decided as he stared at his partially eaten meal, tossing it to the ground and announcing, "I’m not in the mood for this government approved crap tonight."

"I hope you’re not worried about the dying part," Chuck, after he rising to his feet, sincerely questioned his rookie team member.

"I’m not worried about dying, really, but just wanted to know what to expect. Anyway, if it’s my time to pass it’s my time and I just place my fate in the hands of my Lord."

"Oh, Lord. You mean ‘the’ Lord?"

"Chuck, leave it alone," Doc warned his atheist friend.

"Yes, my Lord," Hank answered proudly. "I put my trust in Him."

"Lot’s of luck there, dude!" Chuck responded with barely muted sarcasm. "Personally I don’t believe in anything that can’t be proven."

"Odd words coming from a guy trying to survive a war. I mean, I always heard there aren’t any atheists in foxholes."

"That is the most overused cliche in the world and I don’t see any foxholes around here, do you? But, man, I’m open minded and will gladly convert the moment you prove there is a god," Chuck challenged Hank.

"And I’ll quit believing there is a God if you can prove He doesn’t exist," Doc offered with what he hoped would end their argument.

"Easy enough to prove," Chuck claimed impulsively.

With surprise boarding on amazement Hank and Doc watched him climb into the back of the jeep, reach into his pocket, pull out a cigarette lighter and hold it as high in the air as his arm could reach.

"God, you suck!" Chuck chuckled and, when he received no visible reaction from the Almighty, he flipped open the Zippo and ignited it’s flame, shouting loudly into the night sky, "Give me your best shot."

Before he could even finish, from the dense foliage, a least a half-dozen sniper rounds were fired in his direction and Chuck instantly dove onto the safety of the ground behind the sandbag wall. When he hit the dirt belly first Doc laughed at the irony.

"You just proved my point, Serge." Hank proclaimed as Chuck dusted himself off.

"Bullshit," Chuck protested. "If there were a god one of those rounds would’ve taken me out."

‘Nope. God saved your sorry a*s to redeem your a*s." Hank lectured him.

"Will you loonies shut your goddamn mouths!" Jack, a K-9 handler on patrol near the outer perimeter, called out to them. As soon as he did several sniper rounds whizzed by him and Jack hit the ground for cover, pulling his dog down to safety.

"You can thank your god they’re not marksmen," Chuck whispered to Hank.

"I already have."

"Sat 4! Sat 4! Can you hear me, Doc? Over," came the voice of Johnny, the night dispatcher, over the walkie-talkie sitting in the jeep’s passenger seat.

Doc scrambled to the vehicle, grabbed the Motorola and rushed back behind the sandbag wall.

"Yeah, I’m here," Doc returned to call.

"We just got a report of incoming sniper fire. Can you verify?" Johnny needed to know.

"Yeah, Long John. Perhaps ten rounds, including tracers. They came from about seventy yards out, nearly due east of our position."

"Can you get us an exact fix so we can send up some Spooky birds?"

"Of course. Give me a couple of minutes and go ahead and send the crews up," Doc assured him with confidence. "We’ll have the location by the time they’re airborne."

Chuck ran to the jeep and grabbed his M-16 with the mounted infrared scope and rushed back to the sandbag wall, then asked Doc, "What now, Einstein? You wanna run around as a decoy?"

"Just aim that puppy in their direction and let us figure out the rest," Doc instructed him.

While Doc was searching around for something to create enough light Hank snatched the empty cardboard C-ration case and offered it to him. Doc lit the box on fire and tossed it over the wall towards the barbed wire fence. As expected, the flaming box attracted a burst of sniper rounds.

"Poor dumb b******s trying to be martyrs, I guess?" Doc lamented as they all focused on the source of the sniper fire.

"Or too stupid to know they just gave away their location," Chuck added and, when Doc handed him the walkie-talkie, he reported in while he kept looking through the lens of the scope. "Yeah, Long John, we’re got a damn good fix.

After giving the dispatcher the approximate location Chuck joined his team mates as they sat, leaning against the wall, and waited for the C-47 gun ships to arrive.

"Where were we? Oh, yeah! God and foxholes, right?" Chuck mentioned to Hank, in a safely lowered voice, to restart their conversation.

"Stop it now!" Doc commanded them both before Hank could respond. "I may be just a simple unedumacated bumpkin but both your arguments are impotent as far as I’m concerned." When they started to object Doc waived them off as he continued, "I’m inclined to give credence to what is unproven. It still exists until it is either proved or disproved."

"You’re using a Schröödinger's Cat defense?" Chuck wanted to know.

"Something like that, yes! As it stands now you’re both right at the same time."

"What the hell does some German dude’s cat got to do with proving anything?" Hank pleaded.

"I’ll help us both figure that out when we get back to our Quonset hut and have gone through at least a six pack," Chuck said to him.

After their shift was over Chuck pulled in front of their hut as the sun was rising and they were greeted by a typewritten note taped to the door from the company clerk telling them that their company commanding officer wanted to see all three of them A.S.A.P.

"Well, hell, guess our frat brother philosophy party has to wait," Chuck replied while stating the obvious.

"Understated, my friend," Doc corrected him. "And damn, but I’ve gotten so damn used to these sergeant’s strips on my arms."

"Me, too," Chuck complained while staring at the sergeant’s strips on his own right arm.

"Quit whining, you big baby! I’m the NCO in change and if an a*s gets fried it’ll be my a*s," Doc countered.

"You really think..." Hank started to say.

"Just trust your Lord and, for God’s sake, trust me even more and don’t offer any information not asked for," Chuck told him. "You being a good Christian, we’ll do the lying for you."

Lt. Colonel Newbury had been their squadron commanding officer for longer than Chuck and Doc had been stationed at the base and he was well-respected by the military and security police serving under his command.

Still, all three of the team members were rightfully ill at ease standing in front of his desk and were taken by surprise when the colonel stood and shook their hands after the customary salutes.

"I read the Sit-Rep as soon as I got to the office this morning and I’ll come to the point because I know your guys must be bone tired. I just want to know which one of you to thank for taking the initiative to flush out that sniper hole?" Colonel Newbury calmly enquired without a hint of possible recrimination. When Doc and Chuck looked at each other for a few seconds without replying, the colonel continued, "I appreciate your modesty but the details of your actions were not all that clear in the morning report."

"Well, Sir, Sergeant Steiner came up with the idea first, I suppose, when he though he detected body movement while using the starlight scope and tried to draw their attention with the flame from his Zippo. But the flame wasn’t bright enough so I grabbed the flashlight from the jeep but it didn’t seem to work. So I was looking around for something brighter to use when Airman Hawkins handed me an empty C-ration box and suggested we set that on fire," Doc stated in a somewhat embellished version of the story.

"Very clever. Reminds me of that old Sergeant York movie where he used a turkey call to flush out the Germans. But what you did was a bit risky, wasn’t it?" The colonel suggested and waited for a plausible reaction.

"We took precautions, Sir. The Zippo was sat on top of the sandbag wall and when that didn’t work, we tried the flashlight, sitting it on the wall and then we tossed the lit box over the wall towards the fence, always staying clear of their likely target, which would have been the light," Chuck declared, augmenting Doc’s story.

"Thank you for clarifying that, Sergeant Steiner. And what about in the report where Airman Sanders, the K-9 sentry closest to you, heard someone shouting?" Did you hear someone shouting?"

"That was me, Sir, just making sure we got their attention," Chuck confessed, hoping their C.O. would accept it as a valid reason.

"And it worked, gentlemen. It certainly did! And I appreciate your modest account of what went down," Colonel Newbury admitted with a sly smile. "As you both must know, the Army has swept those areas before looking for hidden entrenchments but came up empty. But your tactic worked when the sweeps didn’t."

"Thank you, Sir," Sergeant Steiner responded.

"But to the point, you both know I’m rotating back to the states in two weeks, right, sergeants?" Colonel Newbury asked after a long silence where he had seemed deep in thought considering how to respond to their account of the story. When Doc and Chuck nodded their heads yes the colonel continued, "Well, I’m just letting you know all three of you gentlemen will be receiving deserved accommodations on your record because you all contributed. And you’re dismissed."

When they returned their commanding officer’s salute and had reached the office door the colonel called out to them and they turned around to face him.

"Because I won’t likely see you airmen in here again before I head home let me offer some sound advice. From my experience I’ve learned that being astutely aware of the trending circumstances is usually preferable to being lucky, understand?" When they all nodded yes the colonel amended the statement with an emphasized point, "I want you airman to board that Freedom Bird alive, so keep staying alert. That’s all for now."

Yes, Sir," Doc acknowledged him with a salute, then the three of them left his office.

"He didn’t buy the story, did he?" Hank quizzed his team members as they ambled back towards their hut.

"Nope, not in a heartbeat," Chuck assured him.

"Then why..."

"One of two reasons, I suppose. Before going home to the wife and kids, either Colonel Newbury didn’t want to deal some messy paperwork that would be hard to explain or he just let it all slide, perhaps out of respect to us old timers because of that damn Tet," Doc pondered aloud.

"Oh, you’re just trying to be bumpkin astute to show off," Chuck kidded him.

"Maybe so, you cretin, but as my dear ol’ rustic hillbilly Pappy is fond of saying, ‘Blind luck doesn’t come around every day so never take it for granted."