A state of disobedience

Qui Nhon Province, Republic of Vietnam, 1966

The helicopters had radioed for friends, then proceeded to do whatever they could themselves to help Montoya and Schmidt with their own door guns. It helped, but it wasn't quite enough.

Montoya recited "Ave Maria" as he poked his head and rifle over the wall of the ditch in which he and Jack sheltered. Blam, blam, blam, went the rifle and two of the pair's assailants fell into bleeding, choking, shrieking ruin not fifteen meters from the ditch. A burst of fire drove Jorge's head down again.

Overhead one helicopter made a low pass from Montoya's right. Its left side gunner fired a long burst into the tree line before the pilot pulled his nose up and around to line up for another pass. Jorge saw tracers outline the helicopter even in the bright morning light.

It all seemed futile to the barely conscious, bleeding Schmidt. With a radio between them and the helicopters, the choppers could have cooperated with Montoya, and vice versa. As it was, the shot-up radio being long abandoned, they were each guessing at what the other would do or had seen.

"Jorge!" Schmidt cried as three Viet Cong leapt into the ditch, not far from where he lay.

Montoya turned, attempted to fire only to have his magazine run dry after the first, missed, round. With an inarticulate shout he drew a knife and charged the VC.

Whatever the guerillas had been expecting to greet them in the ditch, it apparently was not a hundred and fifty pounds of shrieking Mexican fury. They turned and clambered back out again, shouting for help. All except the last got away. That one's escape was halted by Montoya's knife, buried eight inches in his back. He slid face against the earth to the foul dirt below.

* * *

Jack reached a sudden decision—sudden, although its nature and implications had been torturing him for days. "Juani, let me roll my division. I've got over three hundred tanks and a like number of other armored vehicles. And they're manned by Texans, Juani. They won't let your brother go down."

Spanish eyes flared. "You want to start a civil war, Jack? We lost the last one, remember?"

Schmidt smiled. His multi great-grandfather, the captain, and the governor's, the sergeant, had fought side by side in that lost cause, members of Hood's Texas Brigade. His eyes turned and looked over the governor's bookshelves. He walked over to one and selected from it an old, red leather-bound volume. He checked the index and then opened to a page.

A nod; it was the right page. Schmidt's eyes scanned briefly before he began to read aloud. " 'There is no retreat but in submission and slavery. Our chains are forged . . . The war is inevitable—and let it come. I repeat it, sir, let it come.'

"Patrick Henry said that, Governor." Schmidt closed the book slowly, reluctantly.

"Jack, I just don't know."

"Juani," Schmidt persisted, "we won the civil war we had before the one we lost. Maybe you should remember that. Come to think of it, Americans won the civil war before the Texas revolution, too . . . if you'll remember that."

He didn't need to open the book again to say, " 'The battle is not to the strong alone. It is to the vigilant, the active, the brave.' "

* * *