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ammunition at a rate that testified to their desperateness. They fought for each meter through the cluster of bamboo huts, leaving a burning swath through Phu Lai in their efforts to break out of the trap that had severed them from their main body.
    The linkup with their company came on a small village lane that ran between a duck pond and a pigsty. The wounded were handed over to the less fatigued troops of the second and third platoons and passed down the line to a concrete pagoda where the four company medics had gathered. The enemy was still firing, but the battle lines had become so obscured that Alpha Company was not drawing effective fire at the moment.
    Browder approached, a stocky figure covered with grime, moving nonchalantly along the path. He spoke to Tyson gruffly. "Well, you're out of the neck-deep shit, sonny, but you got me wading in the knee-deep stuff."
    "Thanks for coming."
    "Yeah. Well, we can either form a perimeter here, dig in and fight it out until they break it off. Or we can make a break now and beat feet across that rice paddy dike we came in on. Any thoughts?"
    Tyson rubbed his bleeding ear. "I don't like the smell of this. Too many gooks with too much ammunition, acting too ballsy. I think we hit something bigger than we are. Time to go."
    Captain Browder said, "But we've got nonambulatory wounded to drag out, and I've got some KIM.-
    Tyson shook his head. "I don't think Charlie's going to break contact and disappear this time. I think if we stay, they mean to finish us off."
    Browder considered a moment, then nodded. "Let's pull out before they get a fix on us again.

    WORD OF HONOR * 37

    Let the artillery and gunships pound the shit out of this asshole of a village."
    Browder spoke into his radio and gave the orders for a withdrawal. The Cobra gunships arrived and were surprised to meet heavy-caliber antiaircraft fire. One ship crashed in flames into the village. The artillery began landing in Phu Lai, round after round of incendiary white phosphorus as Browder had called for, and the village began to bum as Alpha Company reached the rice paddy dike that marked the western edge of the village.
    They staggered across the sodden paddies, carrying the wounded and a few of the dead, leaving a trail of abandoned equipment. Tyson saw a boot stuck in the mud. The enemy fired after them, but Alpha Company paid little attention. Their sole objective was to distance themselves from the village of Phu Lai.
    The gunships and artillery covered their withdrawal, which was in reality a rout. The enemy did not follow them across the exposed paddies but took to their underground bunkers and tunnels to wait out the rain of fire and steel.
    Alpha Company regrouped on a high and dry piece of ground dotted with burial mounds: the village cemetery. They picked off the rice paddy leeches and began digging in. Bones were turned up, and they littered the reddish earth as the men dug deeper. Skulls were set on the edges of the foxholes, facing outward, a circle of grinning death's-heads stark white against the upturned earth. Someone dug into a fresh grave, and the stench caused the man to vomit. The grave was quickly closed again.
    Casualty lists were prepared by the platoon sergeants. The officers read and tallied them: five known dead, present and accounted for.
    Thirty-eight wounded, ten critically. Fifteen were missing, and Browder reported by radio to battalion headquarters that the presumption of death 38 * NELSON DEMILLE

    was strong, but this did not save him from a fierce dressing-down for leaving Americans behind.
    Under normal circumstances, Tyson thought, both he and Browder would have been relieved of their commands for the Phu Lai fiasco. It was, after all, a defeat, and a defeat equaled a blunder of some sort. But on that particular night of January 30, in the words of Roy Browder, the feces hit the rotary blades, and they were spared the humiliation of being fired. In the general confusion and panic that