Part 12 (1/2)

Several men were still pinned down in the killing zone. To get them back, Lieutenant Skrzysowski, immobile in the trench, worked his radio to keep the arty on target while Sergeant First Cla.s.s Mathis moved among their positions to organize suppressive fires. Under this cover, the men in the killing zone made it back one at a time. Sometime later, after Delta One's casualties had been moved rearward to Delta Three's LZ, several GIs from the reserve platoon dropped into the forward trench and told Skrzysowski that they had orders from Black Death 6 to get him on a medevac, too. They carried him back in a poncho, and then hefted him aboard the C&C Huey-which landed despite the latest mortar attack. Skrzysowski was the only casualty on board. It had been two hours since he'd been hit.

Smoke hung in the air from the mortar explosions, as did the smell of gunpowder. The day was scorching hot, the noise of gunfire constant. Sergeant First Cla.s.s Mathis was in constant motion, checking the platoon positions with his radioman, c.o.x, crawling behind him on his hands and raw knees. The NVA fire over their heads sounded to c.o.x like angry hornets, and he made sure to keep his radio antenna pulled down. Mathis and c.o.x discovered three troopers who had found sanctuary in a bomb crater two or three hedgerows back. They refused to budge. Everyone else was doing his job, to include scared, sweat-soaked c.o.x, who at one point ended up feeding ammo belts into an M60 whose gunner blazed away like mad. When dirt started popping up behind them, c.o.x thought a trooper to their rear was firing wild. He suddenly realized that the NVA sniper on the left flank had zeroed in on the M60, and he and the gunner scrambled to a new position along their hedgerow. They resumed firing.

Fifteen minutes after Black Death ran into trouble on the left flank, Captain Leach and Charlie Tiger were engaged on the right by three NVA in an observation post on the near side of the contested clearing. Charlie Tiger GIs killed the NVA with grenades, then Leach's popular first sergeant, forty-two-year-old Sfc. William R. Brooks, of Morriltown, Arkansas, pulled an AK-47 from the enemy trench and held it up to show the captain. At that moment, Brooks was nailed in the forehead and killed instantly as heavy fire erupted from the NVA positions on the other side of the clearing. Charlie Tiger was at the last hedgerow with Lieutenant Hieb and Charlie One on the right flank, and Staff Sergeant Goad, the acting commander of Charlie Two, on the left. Charlie Three, led by 1st Lt. Dale W. Musser, who had been on an administrative run to the rear when the battle began two days earlier, brought up the rear. Musser was an excellent platoon leader, but Leach had him in reserve for the same reason he'd earlier sent him to the rear: Musser was furious about the b.o.o.by-trap death of Lieutenant Dunlap of Delta Company. Leach explained that he'd ”yanked Musser's a.s.s out of there to give him time to cool down, but he was still smarting. He was so mad that I was afraid he'd pull a John Wayne. I didn't want him to get killed, so I put him back in reserve.”

In the first moments of the engagement, Captain Leach, who wore a helmet and flak jacket and was swinging a CARI5, had to kick a couple of GIs in the a.s.s for having hunkered down out of harm's way. ”Start firing your G.o.dd.a.m.n weapons!” he shouted. ”And don't fire on automatic-fire on semi or you'll just eat up all your ammo, and we don't know what the f.u.c.k's in there!”

”When a firefight starts, it's pandemonium,” recalled Captain Leach. ”If you can get your guys just to return fire, you're doing well. We had guys who never fired their weapons. When a soldier takes fire, the first thing he does is take cover. If you can get that kid to get his G.o.dd.a.m.n weapon up there and just fire in the right direction, you got it made.”

Having crawled forward to a mound, Captain Leach started pumping away with his CAR 15-until it jammed. He was enraged He was also receiving plunging fire from an NVA whose location he could not figure out. Lieutenant Hieb spotted the NVA in one of the surviving hootches and shouted, ”Hey, they're Marines' down at you from the rafters!”

”Shoot that sonofab.i.t.c.h because he's going to kill me!” screamed Leach.

The position was silenced with a LAW, but the fire continued from other entrenched, invisible enemy positions.

Charlie Tiger responded in kind. ”We pounded the s.h.i.+t out of 'Em,” said Leach. Helix 1-5 ordered several more Skyhawk strikes, which utilized napalm and five-hundred-pound high-drag bombs. Each pa.s.s was made from a different direction so as to give the NVA less opportunity to organize the effective antiaircraft fire they had the day before. When the FAC departed to refuel and rearm with marking rockets, the arty was turned back on. ”With all that s.h.i.+t rolling in, the sound level must have been a hundred-and-fifty decibels,” said Private Harp of Charlie One. ”I mean your ears hurt.” Like every other man, Harp had found a piece of cover-in his case beside Pope, their machine gunner-and he poured fire across that clearing. They had no specific targets. Harp probably went through seventy-five magazines with his M16. ”The receiver group on my rifle got so hot I could hardly hold the d.a.m.n thing. The whole palm of my hand was blistered. The barrel was pouring off white smoke, and I used three bottles of LSA to keep the bolt from freezing up.” Pope's M60 consumed ammo with equal vigor, and Harp ran back several times during the fight to get M16 bandoliers for himself and extra machine-gun ammo for Pope. ”Pope's gun literally glowed red from time to time. He burned out the barrel and had to start using his spare.” Harp was scared, hungry, and thirsty. He had run out of water the day before, and he was wobbly in the unrelenting, lip-cracking heat of the day. ”All that kept me going was on one of my trips to the CP for ammo I fell in a sh.e.l.l hole with a little green water. I stuck my canteen down in the sandy mud and got about one-third of a canteen of something that was mostly water. Put six iodine tablets in it, shook it up, and tried to chug-a-lug the s.h.i.+t as fast as I could in the hopes that I wouldn't taste it too much.”

At 1325, Lieutenant Colonel Snyder went airborne over the battle in his C&C Huey. Thirty-five minutes later, Helix 1-7 arrived on station to control the seventh air strike of the day. It lasted twenty-five minutes. Under the cover of the snake 'n' nape and automatic cannons, Captain Leach sent Lieutenant Hieb and two squads low-crawling across the right side of the clearing, where enemy fire was minimal. If they could blast out a foothold on the other side, they might break the stalemate.

Captain Leach, meanwhile, got on the horn with Black Death 6, whose fires seemed to be straying toward Hieb's a.s.sault. ”You gotta watch your fire to your right flank. You got to keep it in front of you because we got those guys up there.” The fire was not adequately s.h.i.+fted. Leach, who had already secured an M16 from a medic, shrugged into the harness of one of his RTOs' radios-he wanted to move fast without his command group in tow-and started toward Black Death 6 on his hands and knees. His pucker factor was up, but he made it into Humphries's crater and began pointing out exactly where Delta's troops should not fire. Leach and Humphries were still talking when a rocket-propelled grenade crashed into the crater some thirty meters to their right, wounding several noncoms who were firing from that position.

In the continuing cacophony, one of Humphries's medics, Sp4 Rollin D. Davis, twenty, of Grand Junction, Iowa, was killed. Captain Leach radioed ahead before crawling back to the berm where he had left his command group. Lieutenant Hieb called on the company net: He had reached the enemy side of the clearing but was under a ma.s.sive amount of fire and could make no headway. Leach ordered Hieb to pull back, then asked Helix 1-7 to bring in the tac air to help the two squads break contact. Hieb popped smoke as instructed. Leach, after giving the FAC an azimuth, direction of fire, et cetera, said to him, ”Okay, you're going to be dropping it twenty meters right in front of 'Em, so you got got to do it right.” to do it right.”

It was 1604. Lieutenant Hieb, wanting to cover the withdrawal with his CAR 15, sprinted by himself toward the next hedgerow. He stepped in a hole on his way across and fell heavily with his pack, knocking the wind out of himself. He jumped into a thicket of bamboo. The first Phantom made its strafing run a safe distance away, but fhen Hieb, whose ruck was hopelessly tangled in the bamboo, looked up to see the next jet lining up for a run right at his forward location. He couldn't pull his ruck loose, so he frantically shrugged out of it and left it suspended in the bamboo as he sprinted away. The Phantom released its napalm canisters. Expertly applied, they sucked the oxygen from the air as they drove the NVA to the bottom of their holes, allowing Hieb's platoon to crawl back without casualties. All that was later found of the lieutenant's rucksack were a few little melted bits of the aluminum frame.

At 1617, the ninth air strike plastered Nhi Ha. Meanwhile, the C&C Huey, without the colonel, conducted medevacs and ammo drops in Delta Three's LZ. The Huey came in low and hot each time, with cover fire courtesy of the wounded Sergeant See, who still had two men left in his machine-gun squad, plus a half-dozen anonymous GIs who'd also been detailed to work the landing zone. They fired in the general direction of that invisible, dug-in sniper in the burial mounds on the left flank. The NVA was about a hundred meters away. Every time somebody moved, he fired. After one ammo drop, See, who'd run out to haul the stuff off the open LZ, ended up pinned down behind six cases of machine-gun bullets.

”G.o.dd.a.m.nit!” he screamed at his pickup squad, which was not returning fire. ”Give me some cover fire, I gotta get out of here!”

The GIs did not raise their heads from their holes. The sniper ceased fire on his own accord. Sergeant See, who was furious, got only apathetic looks from the anonymous GIs as he shouted at them about their inaction. They weren't fools. They didn't intend to die in this stupid war.

These GIs were not alone in their att.i.tude. Two men were medevacked during the day with combat fatigue, including a grunt who was so hysterical that it took several men to load him yelling and screaming onto the Huey. The other man crawled back to the LZ quietly and on his own, still wearing his helmet and web gear and dragging his M16. He was crying, ”I can't take it....I can't take it....” The man was a Regular Army sergeant first cla.s.s. See was shocked, and then angry. ”He was the type of guy who was supposed to be hard-core,” See said later. ”After all the c.r.a.p we'd been given by E-7s during our training about how to be a role model-here's this guy who just became a coward. Everyone wanted to climb on a helo and say the h.e.l.l with it, but we had a job to do and that's the way it was.”

At 1830, the C&C Huey was. .h.i.t by the NVA sniper while it lifted up from the LZ. The pilot lost control of the tail boom, which swung wildly from side to side as the Huey smacked back down on the ground. Sergeant See, who had rolled away from the descending chopper, was joined in a flash behind the cover of his earthen berm by the chopper crew. They were understandably shook up. The first thing they wanted to know was whether the grunts had any extra steel helmets for them. ”No, we don't,” See said with an inward smile at how uptight the airmen were. Within ten minutes, another Huey bounced in and out of the LZ to take aboard the downed crew while the grunts fired away at the burial mounds.

Although few NVA had been seen, fifty-seven were reported killed. Lieutenant Colonel Snyder had several conversations with Captain Leach about what the NVA had in Nhi Ha. Leach kept telling him that they were up against at least a full-strength company, but Snyder replied that it was ”not nearly that many,” and that they seemed large in number only ”because they're so well dug in they can move back and forth.” On that they could agree. Their arty and tac air weren't doing any good against the enemy entrenchments. Finally, at dusk, after nearly nine hours of stalemate, Leach said to Snyder, ”Hey, listen, I don't know how to attack this G.o.dd.a.m.n thing any way but going right up the center. Now, we'll go again if you want us to go.”

Two Gimlets had already been killed that day, and thirteen more wounded. Lieutenant Colonel Snyder did not believe that a frontal a.s.sault could be successful ”at any reasonable cost of casualties.” He told Leach to ”pull back to the laager position. We're going to pound it some more with artillery and air.”

A tenth and final air strike was brought in at 1920 by Helix 1-5 to help Charlie and Delta break contact. But as the two companies leap-frogged back through Nhi Ha by fire teams, the NVA pursued them to the edge of the ville. Red and green tracers crisscrossed in the smoky dusk as troops fired and ran, then fired and ran again. Pandemonium reigned. When they reached the laager, Private c.o.x was approached by a buddy who exclaimed, ”Jesus Christ, c.o.x, I almost shot you! As we were giving cover fire, you ran right into my sights. Why I stopped pulling the trigger at that time I'll never know-but you came that close to getting shot!”

It was another long night in the three-company laager. At 0352, shortly after the enemy probed the perimeter with AK-47 fire and grenades, a Charlie Tiger listening post lobbed a few grenades of their own at two NVA who were visible in the paddy around the laager. The NVA went down as if dead, and the LP pulled back on order. At 0405, two more enemy soldiers walked right into Charlie's line. Specifically, they walked up to Sp4 Bill Dixon of Charlie Two, who was in a three-man position with Privates Fulcher and Fletcher, who were half-asleep behind a paddy dike. Dixon, awake and on watch, was sitting with his M79 when the two NVA, who must have been lost, appeared before him as silhouettes. One knelt down to start speaking to him in Vietnamese. Dixon, who had a shotgun load in his grenade launcher, shot the man in the head at point-blank range. While the other NVA spun away to run, Dixon slapped his hand on Fulcher who, startled awake, had instantly and automatically put his hand on his M16 rifle. ”Stay down-there's another gook out there yet!” shouted Dixon.

The NVA fired his AK-47 as he escaped. When Fulcher exclaimed, ”What the h.e.l.l's going on?” Dixon answered urgently, ”I shot one!”

”Where?” asked Fulcher.

”Right there.”

”Right where!” where!”

”Right there!” there!”

The first illumination round went up then, and Fulcher was shocked to see a nearly decapitated NVA soldier lying within an arm's length of them. Brains were splattered all over Fulcher's rucksack, and he barked, ”What the h.e.l.l' dja let him get that close for?”

Specialist Dixon had not been taken completely by surprise. He had heard the NVA speaking in m.u.f.fled, definitely non-English tones as they'd approached, but he had a.s.sumed that it was the two Puerto Rican GIs in the position to their right who usually conversed in Spanish. The dead man wore black shorts and a gray fatigue s.h.i.+rt. Because he carried binoculars and a brand-new AK-47 with white parachute silk over the barrel, it was conjectured that the man had been an artillery spotter, probably a lieutenant.

Captain Leach, who had some hard words about the one that got away, took the AK-47 to replace his jammed-up CAR 15 and used it during the remainder of the DMZ operation. Afterward it was presented to the Helix FACs as a thank-you and ended up on a plaque in their Chu Lai club. Meanwhile, artillery ilium was being fired. The troops could hear the ascent of each round and then the pop, and they watched each flare sway on its parachute in its slow, smoke-trailing descent. The flares were timed so that as one hit the ground and went out, another would burst above them. If the timing was off, the plunge into darkness was instant and total. Private Fulcher, for one, would shudder at the thought of NVA rus.h.i.+ng toward them. ”But then another flare would pop and it'd still be blank out across the paddies. It was great having the lights on, as we used to say.”

Alpha Annihilated

AT 0655 0655 ON ON S SUNDAY, 5 MAY 1968, 1968, TWO TWO USAF FACs USAF FACs AR ARrived on station to coordinate the preparatory air strikes for the 3-21st Infantry's fourth a.s.sault on Nhi Ha. This time, two-thousand-pound bombs were to be used. The suggestion to employ such heavy ordnance had come the previous evening when Lieutenant Colonel Snyder had spoken by radio with a frustrated FAC who said, ”Let me lay on a couple of sorties tomorrow with two-thousand-pound fuse-delays. They'll penetrate the ground before they explode. The ground shock is tremendous. If there's anybody left in those dugouts then, it'll do 'Em in.”

Lieutenant Colonel Snyder had been enthusiastic about the idea. He had not suggested it himself because he had been unaware that such munitions were available. The FAC went on to advise him that if they used the two-thousand-pounders the men closest to the enemy positions would have to pull back as a safety precaution.

By 0715, Captain Corrigan's B/3-21, the company closest to Nhi Ha, had withdrawn approximately five hundred meters south of Lam Xuan West. Captain Leach and his three-company task force remained in their well-entrenched laager six hundred meters east of Nhi Ha. Snyder went airborne in his C&C Huey. When the two-thousand-pounders plunged into the hamlet, he had a ringside view of the spectacular subsurface explosions that erupted mushroomlike with much smoke and dirt. The effect was most dramatic at ground level. Even at a safe distance, it was like being in an earthquake. Foxholes seemed to sway and move as the shock wave rolled through, and metal fragments rained down to bounce off a helmet or two. The last bomb fell at 0930, and the ground a.s.sault commenced ten minutes later with Captain Leach and Charlie Company advancing toward Nhi Ha behind the artillery prep. Captain Osborn and Alpha moved out behind Charlie Tiger. It took twenty minutes to reach Nhi Ha, then ten more minutes to cautiously cross the first hundred meters inside the ville. At that point, Charlie halted and Alpha leapfrogged past to continue the a.s.sault up to the clearing that was the hamlet's no-man's-land. Despite the obvious destruction caused by the blockbusters, one lieutenant said later that ”no one was optimistic that this was going to be a picnic.”

By 1040, two of Alpha's platoons, expending ammunition freely as they reconned by fire, had low-crawled across the clearing without contact. Joined shortly by Charlie, both companies proceeded to sweep the western half of Nhi Ha. The troops were alert and cautious as they walked through the rubble. When an NVA soldier in a spiderhole tried to raise his AK-47 through his overhead cover, a sergeant in Charlie Tiger reached down and jerked the weapon out of the man's hands before dispatching him with a burst from his M16. There were no other live NVA visible. At 1132, after a lot of grenades had been wasted on a lot of empty entrenchments, Leach reported to Snyder that Nhi Ha had been secured. Along the way, the three bodies that Charlie Tiger had left behind three days earlier were recovered. ”They were totally destroyed,” recalled Lieutenant Smith of Alpha Annihilator. ”It was one of those times that you swallow real hard because if you don't you're going to throw up. Some people did.” The bodies had swollen and turned black, and the stench was terrible. Their bloated faces were unrecognizable. Their mouths were frozen open in death. Flies covered them, and their wounds were alive with maggots. ”G.o.d, I hate f.u.c.king maggots,” said Private Harp, who helped to gingerly place the torn-up remains into body bags. ”Somebody grabbed one by his pistol belt, and the body broke in half. The bones in his rib cage popped out. I didn't know whether to puke, cry, or hide, so instead I just went back to work. You just kind of disconnect and do what you have to do. It wasn't really me picking up that mangled mess, it was me watching me. I was just an observer to someone else's nightmare.”

Thanks to tac air and the blockbusters, Nhi Ha looked like Hiros.h.i.+ma. Lieutenant Colonel Snyder instructed Captain Leach to hold the village with Charlie Tiger and Captain Os-born's Alpha Annihilator, which would remain in his task force and under his command. Captain Humphries's Delta Company was detached and ordered to occupy Lam Xuan East as the battalion reserve. Captain Corrigan's Bravo Company, never part of the task force, reoccupied Lam Xuan West. Sections of 81mm mortars from HHC/3-21 were attached to both Leach and Corrigan, and resupply was carried out during the afternoon. Water, always in short supply, was obtained from bomb craters. Nhi Ha smelled of death, and there were plenty of small, stiff enemy corpses to be seen as the troops began selecting their positions and digging in. There were NVA who'd been burned black by napalm, and NVA whose heads had been removed standing up in caved-in, chest-deep trenches. A grunt described one of the more memorable corpses, which was found ”down in a bomb crater about thirty feet deep. He was floating in the water and had turned the same putrid green color as the water. The body was swollen to about twice normal size. Looked like something from a Hollywood horror movie-I mean the guy did not look real.”

The official body count was forty-four. To celebrate the victory, Major Yurchak, the S3, had the bell removed from the village's Catholic church in the western half of Nhi Ha. ”That'll be our war booty-whenever the Third of the Twenty-first has a reunion, we'll ring the bell!”

The bell, which bore the raised inscription NHI-HA-1925, made it back to FSB Center but was subsequently donated to an orphanage in Tarn Ky. Meanwhile, Captain Leach christened his patrol base in Nhi Ha ”Force Tiger.” Leach set Charlie Company in along the northern half of the perimeter and gave Alpha the southern half. As the men dug in they were subjected to sniper fire, which slowed the process as GIs knelt to use their E-tools instead of standing up to dig. Although many of the NVA entrenchments were still intact, the GIs did not use them because, as one grunt put it, ”the little man would have known exactly where to put his incoming.” Because of the threat of enemy artillery fire, timber and masonry from the hamlet's blown-down buildings were used to reinforce foxholes and provide overhead cover. One trooper joked to the new guys in his platoon, who were taking turns digging in, ”No s.h.i.+ft for me-give me that shovel! I've been here longer than some of you guys, and I know enough that I like my hole in the ground real well. One of my favorite things when I'm getting shot at is a hole!”

The NVA did not sh.e.l.l Nhi Ha during Force Tiger's first night there, but it was a long, hairy night nonetheless-especially for the fire-team-sized listening posts that the two companies established after dark for early warning. The LPs were set up in bomb craters. Each had a starlight scope, as well as a sack of hand grenades and an M79 to cover their withdrawal if detected by the NVA. At 2205 on 5 May, the first sighting was made east of Nhi Ha: seventeen NVA moving south across the paddies and sand dunes two klicks away. Artillery fire was worked along their route. Thirty minutes later, a company of NVA, two hundred strong, was spotted two klicks to the west on the other side of Jones Creek, and another fire mission was initiated.

Artillery fire echoed through the pitch-black night.

At 0050 on 6 May, a Charlie Tiger LP spotted five NVA moving toward Force Tiger in a slow, cautious fas.h.i.+on. An hour later, two more NVA with AK-47s were seen walking right at the LP. The GI with the M79 waited until they were within fifteen feet before he fired them up with a canister round. One NVA was blown away, and the grunts in the LP returned to the perimeter. There was an uneasy lull punctuated by an enemy soldier with a captured M79 who fired on Charlie Tiger.

At 0425, contact was made where Sergeant Stone, a squad leader in Alpha Three, had established an LP in a big crater in the dark, unfamiliar lunarscape. The LP was within a hundred meters of their line. Stone had been instructed to go out farther, but as he told his grunts, ”No way, you know, we'll never make it back.” Stone, awakened by Private King, whom he was to replace on watch, had just edged up to the lip of their crater when he saw two NVA with AK-47s and khaki fatigues coming in their direction. One had halted, and the other was catching up with him. They were only twenty meters away. Stone could see them clearly in the eerie white light of the latest illumination round, but he had not asked King where the detonators were for the two claymore mines they had set up in front of the crater.

Sergeant Stone woke his four men one at a time, whispering to each as he began to stir, ”Be quiet-don't move-we got gooks right in front of us.” He bent over King and asked, ”Where're the detonators?” King said they were by the tree limb lying in front of their crater. Stone, feeling around with one hand while he kept his head down, could not find them. Jesus, they're gonna be in the hole with us pretty quick, Stone thought as he broke squelch on his radio handset to indicate that they were in trouble. He tried to whisper in response to the CP's questions about how many NVA there were, how far away they were, et cetera, but he finally signed off with a hushed, ”They're too close, I can't talk,” and placed the handset aside as he went back up with a fragmentation grenade. He lobbed the grenade toward the two NVA he had seen-he could sense others out there-then opened fire with his M16 on automatic. He slid back down, ejected the empty magazine, and fumbled for a fresh one in his bandolier. He was so scared that he put the magazine in upside down. He finally thumped it in correctly, then realized that his four charges-all new replacements-were still lying where he had awakened them, doing nothing more than looking up at him. He had told them not to move, and they were following orders. Stone screamed at them, ”Get up and shoot, get up and shoot!”

Specialist Four Allan G. Barnes did most of the shooting as he lobbed M79 rounds toward a muzzle flash behind a tree stump. Reloading, Barnes turned to Stone, ”How's that?”

”Closer, Barnes, closerl” closerl” Stone answered. Stone answered.

Each time Stone rose up to fire his M16, the NVA behind the stump would also pop up with his AK-47 on full auto. They were firing right at each other, but they kept missing. Barnes found the claymore detonators and blew one of the mines, but it had no visible effect. Stone decided they'd better pull back before it was too late. Wasting no time with a radio call to the CP to request permission to withdraw, Stone simply shouted at his team, ”Okay, you guys take off. Go for the perimeter. Me and Barnes will cover for you, then we're comin'!”

Sergeant Stone squeezed off another M16 magazine and Barnes another M79 round as the three replacements clambered over the back side of the crater, then they dropped, reloaded, and started after them. They were scared and moving fast, and they left their radio and grenades. Clearing the crater, they were stunned to see the three greenseeds lying p.r.o.ne on the other side. Stone shouted at them to get moving. Running for the perimeter, they hollered their catchall pa.s.sword-”ALPHA GIMLETS!”-and screamed at the men on the line not to open fire. This was a real concern as RPGs had begun flas.h.i.+ng past them. No one was hurt, though, and no one fired. As soon as the men from the LP were safely inside the perimeter, their platoon leader, Lieutenant Kimball, hustled over to Stone and asked, ”What's out there, what's out there?”

”There's gooks all over all over out there!” out there!”

Referring to Captain Osborn by his call sign, Lieutenant Kimball said, ”Cherokee says he might send you back out, so keep your squad together.”

”s.h.i.+t, we ain't going back out,” back out,” exclaimed Stone. ”There is gooks exclaimed Stone. ”There is gooks all over all over out there!” out there!”