Chapter 57: The Anabasis of Xenophon

I don’t think I was out very long. My right knee made me want to scream, but I couldn’t feel anything broken. I dug out a chemlight stick and broke it, and in the green glow I looked around. I was on a slope, with my chute fouled in a tree above me and to the side. I hit the quick release and shucked off my chute, and then straightened my leg. I didn’t scream, quite, and I was able to move it and maneuver it a bit. I couldn’t feel anything broken, and I couldn’t see any blood. Whatever was wrong with me was in the knee joint itself. Very slowly, I hauled myself to my feet.

Once upright, something seemed to slip into place in my knee and I was able to put some weight on it. Maybe I could wrap it and get around that way. I had fucked it up somehow. It still hurt like hell, though.

Around me, I could hear the rest of the company crashing about in the woods. From what I could see from the chemlight, we had landed on a slope in some trees, two things you never ever want to do. I also wasn’t the only one hurt, although I couldn’t hear any screams. Somebody was fumbling around to my left, so I twisted in that direction and yelled out, “Who’s there? Company C, that you?”

A moment later, a voice came back, “Who’s that?” and there was some rustling in the brush. I held up my light and five minutes later a corporal carrying his chute rolled up in his arms crashed through the brush. He looked at me and asked, “Who are you?”

“Captain Buckman. What’s your name?”

“Corporal Janos, sir. Third Platoon.”

I nodded to him. “You were a few seats down from me. How are you doing, Corporal?”

“Fine, sir. I just need some candy and I’m good to go.” Paratrooper candy - extra strength Tylenol!

“You and me both, but I think I’m going to need something more.” I turned back towards my chute but twisted my knee as I was doing so, and bit off a curse.

“Captain?”

“Bad landing, Corporal, bad landing. Give me a hand. Drop your chute here and help me gear up. You seen or heard anybody else? I don’t think we’re anywhere near the drop zone.”

Corporal Janos dropped his chute and came closer. He pointed in a vague direction left and downhill. “I think some of the guys landed down below.”

“Well, if we left the bird first, I’m guessing the stick is spread out in that direction. Help me on with my gear and let’s find out.” The corporal helped me get my shit together, and then helped me down the hill. I thought it would take forever, but eventually we limped our way to a clearing where we found another four guys. Like Janos and me, they were dinged up and very unsure where they were.

I eased myself into a sitting position on a fallen tree and asked who everybody was and where they were in the stick, and where they landed. As I suspected, they were all downhill from where I had fetched up. “Well, take a load off. No sense in hiking around in the dark when we don’t even know where we are. I can guarantee we’re not anywhere near where the exercise is,” I told them.

At that point, some rustling in the brush further up the hill made everyone turn in that direction. From what I could figure out, the only people in that direction should be Lieutenant Fairfax or Captain Donovan. Fairfax came stumbling into the circle of green light from my chemlight and a few others. He was carrying his chute, too.

“Welcome, Lieutenant. Join the party,” I said. “Take a load off.”

He looked confused and came over towards me. “Sir?” I don’t think he really recognized me. We hadn’t spoken much back at the base.

“I’m Captain Buckman, remember? I jumped right after you and Captain Donovan. Have you seen him?”

“No sir.”

“How far back that way did you land?”

“Sir?”

I repeated my question and Fairfax gave me a vague indication of a few hundred yards. Another couple of guys drifted in from the downhill area, and I now had nine men total, including me, not quite half the plane load. It was also obvious it was only our plane load. None of the other planes’ jumpers had been found, and the general rule is that everybody gets mixed up.

Fairfax immediately ordered search parties out into the darkness, without any plan that I could see. I promptly countermanded his orders. “Lieutenant, why don’t we wait on that until we get some better light?” I could see several of the men looking relieved as I said that.

“Sir, we have to begin moving towards the exercise area,” he protested.

“Lieutenant, do you know where the exercise area is? I certainly don’t, and neither do these men. We should be waiting until sunrise and figuring out where everybody is and where we are,” I answered.

“Sir, our orders were very specific. We need to move out!”

“And I’m countermanding those orders.” I took off my helmet and set it on the tree next to me and rubbed my hands through my hair. My leg was throbbing, and I needed an ice-cold beer, and morphine!

“Captain, you can’t do that!” Rather than speak to me quietly, he had raised his voice and was speaking in front of the group.

I motioned him closer. “Lieutenant Fairfax,”, I said quietly, “You’re a second lieutenant and I’m a captain, and I’m a line officer in the combat arms, just like you. I hereby inform you that I am taking command. Do you understand?”

“You can’t do that, sir! This is my platoon!” The idiot couldn’t keep his voice down, and now everybody knew I had assumed command.

“I can and I have. Now, when Captain Donovan gets here, I will be happy to relinquish command to him, but for the time being, my orders stand. Drop your gear and get comfortable. It will be dawn in a few hours. We’ll worry about things then,” I told him.

He gave me a dirty look and moved to the edge of the clearing.

One of the men, a Private Martinez, glanced at his platoon leader, and then looked over at me. “Sir? Any idea where we actually are?”

I smiled and shrugged. “Not a clue, Private, not a clue. I wouldn’t worry about it though.”

“How come?”

“Well, that Gooney Bird dropped us somewhere in Latin America. Tomorrow morning, all we have to do is figure out where the sun comes up, turn left, and start marching north. Sooner or later, we’re bound to hit Texas!” Martinez grinned at that, and most of the others chuckled or laughed. The mood lightened considerably. “Listen, guys, we’re the Eighty-Second-Fucking-Airborne! We’re going home if we have to walk the entire distance! Is that understood?” A chorus of loud grunts and HOO-AHs rang out in the woods, and I relaxed. “That’s more like it! For a second there I thought I’d been transferred to the One-Oh-Worst!” The One-Oh-Worst is the 82^nd’s favorite nickname for the 101 ^st Airborne, who now rode to battle in helos. That earned me a string of catcalls and insults.

I just smiled and relaxed. After a few minutes one of the guys dug out a big bottle of Tylenol and passed it around. I dry swallowed a half dozen myself, then dug out my canteen and took a swallow.

Just as I predicted, a few hours later, the sun rose in the east. The guys dug out some Lurps (LRRPs), Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol rations, and made what would pass for breakfast. The Army was just starting to issue MREs (‘Meals Ready to Eat’, or ‘Meals Refused by Ethiopians’, take your pick) but we hadn’t brought any to Honduras. Lurps generally sucked, but they were better than nothing. The problem was that they were freeze-dried, so you needed lots of water, which was in short supply. If we couldn’t find potable water, we would need to start using the halazone tablets, which made the water taste lousy, but prevented diarrhea and all sorts of even worse diseases. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Welcome to the Army.

In the morning light I started to get very worried. I didn’t think we were anywhere near the drop zone. I wasn’t even sure what country we were in! The drop zone and the surrounding region was an upland plateau sort of place, but this was a lot more mountainous. It was entirely possible the Gooney Bird pilot had dropped us somewhere we weren’t supposed to be.

As soon as there was enough light, and the men had at least gotten something to eat, I sent a patrol of four men down the hill, in the direction the rest of the stick had landed. They returned in an hour, leading another eight men, including the senior sergeant in the plane, a Sergeant First Class Briscoe who was several years older than the rest of the men. He had organized his little group last night much like I had and waited for sunlight before looking around. Most importantly, he had a Spec 4 radio operator with him, along with a radio! I could have kissed the pair of them!

“Greetings, gentlemen! Welcome to the party!” I said as a welcome.

The new group mingled with the group already there. Sergeant Briscoe came up to where I was sitting. Lieutenant Fairfax did not join us. He was sitting alone and pouting. Briscoe glanced at him curiously, but then turned to me. It was obvious he had figured out where things stood, or the patrol that found them told him. “Captain Buckman?”

I held out my hand and shook his. “Welcome to the party, Sergeant. How are your men?”

“Good shape, sir.” He pointed down the hill, and said, “The ground levels off somewhat. I think this is the rough section. Who’s missing?”

“I was about to ask you that. Captain Donovan hasn’t shown up. He jumped before me, so he must still be up the hill. I don’t know your men well enough to say who else is missing.”

Briscoe looked at the group and started mentally counting off names. “We’re missing Privates Masurski and Smith.”

I nodded. “First things first. We need to find those men. We need to send out search parties.” I talked it over with him and it looked like the stick had landed in a pattern about two klicks long and half a klick wide. The two privates were in the first half of the stick to drop, so they were probably on either side of us or back up the hill. Captain Donovan was almost certainly up the hill.

“Sergeant, I am going to need you to organize the search. I’m not going to be moving much. I fucked my knee up. We aren’t leaving here without all our men. Understood?”

“HOO-AH, sir!” He pointed at my leg. “How bad is it, sir?”

“I’ll live, but I won’t be doing any marathons for a bit.”

“DOC! FRONT AND CENTER!” he called out, and a trooper with medic’s insignia bounced over. He was armed just like the rest of the troops. According to the Geneva Convention, medical troops were to be unarmed and festooned with red and white crosses indicating their non-combat nature. Viet Nam had shown that those crosses were excellent aiming points for snipers. Since then, most medical troops went about as heavily armed as their patients, and rarely wore any kind of insignia.

“Thank you, sergeant. Leave me the RTO, too. Maybe we can raise somebody on the net.”

“Yes, sir!”

Sergeant Briscoe organized a search pattern, with various noncoms and PFCs leading in different directions, and then led one of the groups up the hill in the direction where Captain Donovan should be. The medic, whose real name was Gerald and was called Doc like every other medic in the Army, wanted to cut my pants from me, but I just stood and dropped my trousers. I wasn’t sure how long we were going to be like this, but I didn’t need shredded pants along with a shredded knee. Meanwhile, the RTO came over with his radio and tried to call home.

After a few minutes I learned two things. First, my leg wasn’t broken, but I had screwed up my knee. Doc thought I had ripped a tendon or some cartilage, but without X-rays, we were guessing. I could walk, painfully, so I wouldn’t need to be carried. He cut up some parachute and wrapped my knee with it, along with some parachute cord. It wasn’t an Ace bandage, but it did feel better, and I could hobble around.

Second, ET couldn’t phone home. The radio seemed functional, but nobody was answering the phone call. This wasn’t surprising. The AN/PRC-77 ‘Prick 77’ radio had a range of about eight klicks at best, ground to ground. We could reach further if there was an airborne antenna, to a plane for instance, but for now, we were at least eight klicks away from the drop zone, and I was betting much further. He also had an AT-984 antenna which he rigged up, which doubled the range, and still couldn’t raise anybody. Then he rigged up his spool of WD-1 telephone wire as an antenna, and still didn’t get a signal.

Things started getting worse. Sergeant Briscoe returned with his little group quickly, carrying a body on a makeshift stretcher. The body was covered with a torn parachute, and nobody looked happy. I looked at the men, and at the Sergeant. “Oh, shit!”

He just gave me a miserable nod. “Yes, sir.” I hobbled over and he pulled away the parachute, exposing Bob Donovan’s lifeless face. “We found him wedged against a rock. It looks like he landed wrong and snapped his neck.” He flipped the cover back over the captain.

About a half hour later the other two men came in. Private Masurski had crashed into a broken tree trunk, which had gutted him like a fish. He was dead, too. Private Smith, at least, was alive, if not exactly kicking. He had a multiple compound fracture of both the tibia and fibula in his left leg, and was barely able to hold in the screams as he was brought in. Doc took one look and shot him up with some morphine before examining him any further.

Well, we were all there, all twenty of us. Two dead, one a stretcher case, half a dozen more with strains and sprains, a sullen officer, no communications, not enough food and water, and no idea where we were. I closed my eyes for a second. Maybe I would wake up and find myself having a bad dream after a night at the Fort Bragg Officer’s Club!

I opened my eyes and found a bunch of paratroopers watching me. Time to get back to work. “Lieutenant, I want you to see to the Captain and Masurski. Briscoe, we need to do some recon.” I dug out the area maps I had been issued regarding shooting howitzers at things, and quickly concluded we weren’t on the smallest scale maps. I found a larger map, showing most of Honduras and the surrounding countries. We were currently facing southward on the side of a large hill or small mountain, with a shallow valley in front of us. A small road ran through the valley below us, from left to right.

I also kept an eye on Fairfax. It was readily apparent he was clueless as to what to do. I wondered how he ended up in the 505^th and chalked it up to outstanding scores in his classes at West Point. (Yes, even Hudson High has its share of idiots!) I had no doubt that if asked, Lieutenant Fairfax could give me a textbook answer about “deploying his assets to maximum effect” and “utilizing personnel to accomplish the mission” but he couldn’t actually figure out how to order his men to do something. All he knew was how to order his ranking sergeant to get something done. Briscoe glanced over at Janos and silently ordered the corporal to take a couple of men and dig out some body bags.

Fairfax faltered at the point where he had to remove the men’s dog tags and jam one into each of their mouths. To be fair, so did Janos; I doubt any of the men had ever done this for real. I limped over and knelt next to Bob Donovan, and Sergeant Briscoe knelt next to Private Masurski. He took Masurski’s dog tag and said, “Like this, sir,” and jammed it into the dead man’s teeth.

I suppose we didn’t have to do this. I had one of their dog tags in my pocket now, and almost all of us carried extras. Like every man in the group, except maybe Fairfax, I had two around my neck, a third sewed into my right boot laces, and a fourth in my left rear pocket. No matter what happened to me, they’d be able to identify the pieces. Still, I knew what I had to do.

“Yeah,” I sighed, and did the same to Donovan. Several of the men made the sign of the cross. Fairfax ran to the edge of the clearing and puked up breakfast. Well, it made me a bit queasy, too. I suspected he had never seen a dead body before, even in civilian life. Still, the rest of his performance was enough to get him shitcanned from the military! I was sure that Donovan, if he had lived, would have given Fairfax an OER that would have gotten him assigned to a Port-A-Potty repair depot for the rest of his career. In Viet Nam, his men would have fragged him, simply to get him out of their hair!

I looked back at my wide area map. If the pilot of the C-47 had simply gotten lost and dropped us when he figured we had gone far enough we could be practically anywhere in Central America. If he had flown north or east, we were still in Honduras, but if he had flown south or west, we might well be fucked! To the south was Nicaragua, then in the hands of the Sandinistas, communist and flagrantly anti-American. To the west was El Salvador, home to a nasty multipart civil war, with most of the parties not caring for gringos all that much, either. In addition, most of the two countries had active drug trades going on in the hills, and the narcos were as heavily armed as we were. It was like being in a bad Tom Clancy novel! It was too bad I was the only guy here who knew who Tom Clancy was. He hadn’t even started writing yet. We had to know where we were.

“Sergeant, who are the men who speak Spanish the best? Not just mas cervezas, por favor either. Guys who can speak it and read it?” I asked.

Briscoe gave me a surprised look, and scratched his head, but a couple of the men came forward. They were swarthy under their grease paint, with Hispanic features. I recognized one of the men from earlier in the morning. “Private Martinez, right? You speak Spanish?”

“Si, mi capitan!” he said, and then rattled off something else too fast for me to follow.

I looked at the other guy. “You, too? What’d he say?”

The other private said something to the Martinez, generating a big laugh, and then replied, “Private Guillermo, sir. It was something about sending officers south of the border who can’t speak Spanish.”

I snorted and laughed at that myself. “I can’t argue with that. Anybody else?” Two more men came forward, another Hispanic private named Gonzalez and Corporal Janos. I looked at Janos and said, “You speak Spanish? With a name like Janos?”

He laughed. “My father might be Polish, but he moved to Texas and married a Mexican girl from Juarez.”

“A Texas Polock? Well, now I’ve heard of everything. What about you fellows? Where are you from?” I asked the other three.

Martinez and Guillermo were Mexican American, from Arizona and California respectively. Gonzalez was from Puerto Rico by way of New York City. “Okay, my life is in the hands of three wetbacks and a Polish Texan! My mother told me I’d come to a messy end!” That got me a few laughs and even more grins. “Seriously, all of our lives are in your hands right now. More than anything else, we need to know just where the hell we are. There is a very, very good chance we aren’t in Honduras anymore. If we aren’t, we are surrounded by bad guys, either commies who hate Americanos or drug dealers who hate everybody. Got the picture?”

Suddenly the entire group got serious and silent. I continued, “You four men are going to be our scouts. I want two of you to go east and two to go west along the road and try and figure out where we are. However, I don’t want you guys seen. Until we know where we are, we can’t take a chance.”

They all nodded at that, and then Janos asked, “What if we’re still in Honduras?”

“That’s different. If we’re still in Honduras, then find a phone and get us some help! This exercise is over! However, you aren’t to do that unless you are absolutely, positively sure this is Honduras! You know, like a sign saying Welcome to Honduras! That sort of thing, got it?”

“Got it!”

“I want you to only move out about five klicks and then come back. We’ll be expecting you in time for afternoon tea, 1600, is that clear?” I got their assents and said to Briscoe, “Sergeant, get these men on their way.”

“Yes, sir!” He took our designated scouts and led them aside. They checked gear and grabbed their weapons, and then Sergeant Briscoe led them back down the hillside towards the road.

I then had Specialist 4 Thompson try the radio again, but nobody was on the other end. I had him shut it down to save the battery. He asked, “Captain, what if we aren’t in Honduras?” Several of the other men were listening to us as well.

I just smiled and said, “I told you that answer this morning. We start walking north. I figure that if we aren’t in Honduras, we’re probably in either Nicaragua or El Salvador. Either way, Honduras is to the north. Let’s be clear on that, fellows. We all jumped in; we’re all going home. Are we clear on that?” I got some smiles back, and a variety of positive grunts and HOO-AHs.

I also added, “Don’t forget, I don’t care how inefficient the Army is, they aren’t going to just up and lose a platoon, are they? Sooner or later, somebody is bound to notice we didn’t show up in the drop zone! They’ll come looking for us, just like we’re going to be looking for them.”

That got some excited nods and talk, as the men realized it wasn’t just them. They had people on the outside to help, as well. Thompson asked, “What do you think happened, sir?”

“No idea. The pilot probably just got lost and decided to drop us and try to find home. Unless he flew out to sea and never looked back, he’s probably home by now answering a whole bunch of very rude questions.”

“Serve the fucker right!” was a comment I heard from more than one voice. I agreed!

“What if he got lost and crashed? Won’t they think we’ll all have died in the wreckage?” I heard.

“Who asked that?” I said, looking around. A young private who looked nervous at being singled out raised his hand and gave me his name, Wilson. I nodded to him in acknowledgement. “That sort of thing only happens in the movies. You know, the plane crashes, giant fireball, everything is gone in an instant. What really happens when a plane goes down is that there is wreckage strewn all over the place. Even if the plane crashes, the rescuers won’t find our bodies, so somebody will figure out we dropped before the crash. All we have to do is figure out where we are, and then go home.” I shook my head and smiled at them. “We’re the Eighty-Second Airborne. We survived World War II. We’ll survive this, too.”

When Sergeant Briscoe returned, he got the men organized for the day, and then sat down next to me. “Excuse me sir, no disrespect, but you’re the guy called ‘Doc’, right?”

I smiled. “Only by captains and above, Sergeant.”

“Yes, sir. Like I said, no disrespect, sir. I just wanted to be sure who you were.” I just nodded. “You’re actually a doctor, sir?”

“Mathematics, sergeant, although that seems like a very long time ago.”

“Sir, what the hell is a guy like you doing in the Army?”

I laughed. “You ever meet a recruiting sergeant that actually told the truth?” Briscoe laughed at that too, and then went and checked on the rest of the guys.

And that was the order of the day. Keep morale up. Take care of Private Smith and prepare him to be moved. Rig stretchers for Smith and the body bags. Get food into the men and find some water in a stream down below to clean with halazone. Wait for the recon teams to return. We cleaned our weapons and posted security so that nobody could sneak up on us and instituted a sleep schedule. We even inventoried our ammo, since the Army really freaks out about issuing troops ammo (We had 5.56 NATO for the M-16s and a few frag grenades among the non-coms, along with some light demo gear.) It was all the shit that Fairfax was supposed to be doing, the fucking numbnuts!

The first team, Martinez and Guillermo, came back after only a couple of hours. They had headed east along the road, but it petered out into a few logging trails after a couple of klicks. They high tailed it back and we all waited for Janos and Gonzalez. Their road must lead somewhere. They didn’t come back on time though, which made Fairfax say a few stupid things about punishment. I simply told him that we would give the men some time. Maybe they were chartering a bus.

They returned a little after 1800, on foot, and without a bus. Both men were grinning like little boys who’ve gotten away with something. Janos produced a road map for northern Nicaragua. “We stole it from a car in this little village down around the bend. We’re right ... here,” he said, pointing with a grimy finger at the map.

Janos, Gonzalez, Briscoe, and I bent over the little map, and then I dragged out my wide area map. We were off my map completely, at least a hundred kilometers from where we were supposed to be. No wonder our radio was out of range! I looked around the little group. “Tell me about this town. What did you see?”

“It’s called Santa Maria de los Milagros, Saint Mary of the Miracles, and isn’t much more than an overgrown village. A few cars, some pickup trucks, probably a store in the center,” commented Janos. “Mostly empty farms around a crossroads.”

I looked up at that. “You didn’t go into the town, did you?”

“No!” answered Private Gonzalez. “We’d have been spotted for sure. We just went down the road until we saw some signs of life, and then slipped up a hillside overseeing the town.”

“We also saw troops, sir, Nicaraguan troops, a convoy of them,” said Janos.

That got everybody’s attention. There was some hubbub that I waved back to silence. “Numbers and deployment,” I demanded.

“Two convoys, each a half dozen trucks loaded with troops. They looked like deuce-and-a-halfs, but funny, like foreign versions.”

“Probably GAZ trucks. They’re Russian, either from Russia or second hand through Cuba,” I answered.

The two men looked at each other. “I think you’re right sir,” continued Janos. “Anyway, six trucks and a Jeep, looked to be an officer. We had one convoy and then another about an hour later. That one stopped and everybody got out and had a piss call on the side of the road. I didn’t get a good count, but it looked like a short company, pure infantry. Lots of AKs, not much else.”

Great! I had two companies of Sandinista infantry in the area, and that meant at least a battalion around us.

I looked back down at the road map. The road we were on wasn’t marked, although Santa Maria de los Milagros was a small dot on a larger road. That road ran north. If we skirted around the town tonight, we might be able to head north towards the Honduran border. I outlined my plan to the others. Both Janos and Gonzalez agreed it could be done. The two convoys were heading north, also, probably to reinforce the border in case the Yankees invaded.

Which we had done, by the way.

Lieutenant Fairfax had a contribution at that point. It was a really lousy idea, but at least he was thinking. “What if we steal some cars and pickup trucks, and use them to drive to the border? We could make it there in just a few hours.”

A few of the men looked hopeful at that idea, but I noticed the more senior troops, like Briscoe and Janos, were more thoughtful. I simply shook my head in the negative. “We need to do this in a way nobody knows about us. The perfect outcome is that we go home without the Nicaraguan Army ever figuring out that armed American troops have invaded the peace-loving nation of Nicaragua. We start stealing cars and trucks, the cops and the Army will be all over us long before we ever hit the border. We’re going to have to sneak out of here.”

“We could capture everybody and tie them up and cut the phone lines.”

“With a dozen-and-a-half guys? And nobody is going to get away? You’ve been watching too much television, Lieutenant. I wouldn’t try it with the whole company. Besides, we are trying to do this without anybody knowing about us. No casualties, no kidnapping.”

Fairfax simply pouted. At some point I was going to be tempted to put him in a body bag, just like Donovan and Masurski.

He also protested when I ordered the men to dump their chutes and related gear at the edge of the clearing. He wanted us to carry everything out, just like we would if this was an exercise in the drop zone. Fairfax didn’t realize that this was combat conditions, or at least as close as we could get without getting shot at. I made the point by tossing my steel pot helmet on top of the collection of chutes and digging out a boonie hat. I also made a point of checking the clip on my .45, and slinging Captain Donovan’s over my shoulder. The other men noticed this and got serious and checked their own gear as well.

We made ourselves comfortable until later that evening. At 2100 we moved out. I had my scouts out ahead of us. The center of the march was the three stretchers, each being carried by two men. Doc Gerald and I were with this group. I had a large stick I was using as a cane, and once I got down to the roadway, could make decent speed with it. Fairfax trailed behind us a little. Briscoe played tail-end Charlie, keeping an eye out for stragglers, and the rest of the men were used for flankers and to alternate with the stretcher bearers.

Our march that night sucked. The town was only a couple of klicks, maybe a mile and a half, down around the bend from where we had landed. If we could have kept going, we could have marched through it in ten minutes, with time to spare. Instead, we spent half the night crawling on hillsides and through the brush around the town, dragging stretchers and me half the time, just to go another two kilometers. Then we couldn’t make great time since we had to get off the road several times when traffic came through, once when a convoy of Nicaraguan Army trucks trundled through. Still, we made about ten kilometers north of the town when it started to get light, and I called it quits. We holed up a couple of hundred meters off the road in a small notch in the hillside. It was now Thursday morning, 12 November.