I pulled again, huddled with the others in the ditch. The explosion was lost, soft among limbs and leaves, but a naked flash climbed the sky, and the earth trembled under us. Novotny and I went for the body, but there was none: A charred log, not hard like wood, but soft and rubbery as we rolled it on the poncho, and it squeaked, rubber against rubber. Warm rain fell on my hands as I bent over the body, and it would be the next day before I remembered crying.
“Told him, told him to stay, stay on the road,” Novotny gasped as we carried the surprising load, too light for man, too heavy for whatever it was.
“You told him; he didn’t; forget it.”
“Don’t know how,” was all he answered.
The troops, officers, non-coms and all, here is the first loss, forgot the standing orders against bunching up, bunched like cattle in the rain, lowing, and chewing their fearful lips.
“You?” Capt. Saunders said to Tetrick. Saunders stood among the troops, but they moved away when he spoke. He moved back among them.
Tetrick’s head gleamed in the moonlight and his words were half lost under a dropped face. “Too tired,” he said. “Krummel, Krummel will.”
Sure, sure, Krummel will. Yes, Krummel, savior of his brood, mother-hen to the world and that miscarriage in the poncho. Fuck yes, Krummel will!
I stripped back the poncho, and waited until the sight stuck in every mind, then said, not too loud but loud enough:
“Not much to send home to Mamma, is it?”
No one misunderstood. Now we were ready.
10
Vietnam
For the next ten hours, until the convoy reached Hill 527, I sat in the stifling darkness of the truck, glad of the darkness, pleased with the heat of my own body. None of the ordinary things, none of the expected emotions came to me; no vomiting, only those few warm tears no more real than the glycerin dripped on an actor’s cheeks. First there had been cold anger, then calculated madness, and now nothing, so much nothing that I was glad when Morning noted my silence and said, remembering that I knew his secrets, hoping that I would now have a secret guilt too, “What’s the matter, Krummel? War not to your taste? The intellectual warrior get sick to his dilettante stomach? Don’t be sick, man, that’s your war back there, your lovely war incarnate in that sliver of flesh. People die in wars, you idiot…”
Even then I couldn’t raise an answer, a spark of feeling.
Oh, I had things to say: No, Morning, not my war, baby, but yours; he wasn’t killed in a war, he was murdered.
But these were thoughts without feeling.
* * *
Of course it must rain our first two days at Hill 527, air mattresses and shelter halves must leak, and men sweat and stink in ponchos, or stand naked in hard, cold rain, or fall prey to malaria and cat fever and fungus. Boots must mildew, and meals be cold, and mud ball at our feet and creep up our legs and stick to our fingers and clog in our eyes. Sleep must come in nightmare snatches, and guard be stood, and waiting drift in long cross hours, and of course it must rain without pause for two days and two nights square in the middle of the dry season. And of course the sun must shine, eventually. And it all must be endured.
* * *
Hill 527 and its twin, 538, were not really big hills, but tall rises in the middle of a large clearing where a jungled forest encroached on a grassy plain. Five hundred and thirty-eight was a gentle rise, an easy slope up and down from all sides, and 527 was the same except for a flat triangular peak like a surrealistic nipple smack in the middle of it. The sides of the nearly equilateral triangle were approximately one hundred yards long. A forty degree slope separated the flat nipple-top from the more gentle slopes below it. On the first two muddy days we laid wire around the steeper slope, dividing us from the two companies of provincial militia already entrenched in a rough circle about fifty yards further out and down. Outside of their wire and their mud and sandbag parapets, the grass and the occasional patches of brush had been cut down for about one hundred yards. The jungle was on three sides of the clearing, east, west, and north, but on the open side the land sloped away in rolling, grassy hills. The jungled forest came to within four or five hundred yards of the compound on the north and east, but because of Hill 538, it was between nine hundred and one thousand yards away on the west. Our antenna field was to be built on 538, and then the whole hill mined.
All in all, it wasn’t a bad position. The peak was high enough so that we, if we had to, could fire on the lower slopes without chewing up the protective coating of Vietnamese militia. The militia had good wire out, and we had wire ten yards wide, two fences and four rows of concertina on the slope off the peak. (The harried American major who advised the Vietnamese major commanding the militia said he wished that we hadn’t strung the wire between our two forces. The Vietnamese major thought it an insult to both the patriotism and the fighting ability of his men. Capt. Saunders showed them his orders signed by the admiral in charge of American forces in the Pacific, the area military commander, and the major’s commanding officer, so the wire stayed, and we stayed alive.) We dug a four-foot deep trench along the inner edge of the wire with twenty rifle positions on each side of the triangular peak, then put machine gun bunkers at each point of the triangle, a communication trench midway across the triangle, north to south, connecting to the ammo and gas bunkers, then dug mortar pits at the four corners of the trapezoid formed by the communication trench and one behind the eastern point. A spotting tower was erected over the mid-point of the communication trench, and a CP and guard mount bunker dug under it. All the trenches were dug in a regular wavering curve so that a man could step around half a curve and be away from a grenade explosion. After this was done, we began slit trenches all over the compound, laid Claymore mines to protect the western side and gate, and constructed a concrete landing pad for choppers, south and west of the gate, inside of the outside wire.
All this work, which was not nearly the total work we would do, took the first week, a hard week of digging and filling sandbags, of sleeping on the ground under shelter halves, of cold rations, and lots of heavy guard duty. Thirteen men had left on med-evac choppers, ten with fevers and/or malaria, two with infected shovel cuts, and one who couldn’t stand the waiting; but we were beginning to feel secure, as if hard work could keep death away, as if dying could be endured like manual labor, but Capt. Saunders set us straight.
“We have no intention,” he said, “of being impregnable, because the intention would be foolish. The VC could take this Det any time they wanted to pay the price. The trick is not to be impregnable but expensive.”
Some trick, but we were dug in, dug out, and halfway ready.
* * *
On the third day of the second week, the troops were still busy, raising squad tents with wooden floors, a four-foot protective wall of mud between two rows of logs on the three open sides of the lower half of the triangle, and digging bunkers for ammo, gasoline, and a guardshack command post radio room. Four rhombic antennae were being erected on Hill 538, now known, of course, as the Other Tit. A log cutting detail had gone off to the edge of the forest on the north to cut trees for the wall and the bunker roofs. I had mounted guard details for the log cutters and the antenna builders, then finished drawing up the guard roster for perimeter duty, two men in each M-60 position, two men at the west gate, a walking guard on each of the three sides, and a man in the spotting tower, day and night.
The paperwork had bored me, so I left my tent to check guard posts, then climbed up the steel spotting tower in the center of the compound. I stayed there a bit, bumming a cigarette from the kid on duty. I was trying to quit for physical and professional reasons. Morning had tried to give me a bad time about it, and about wearing my watch with the face against my wrist, and carrying a .45 automatic, and the tiger-striped camouflage coveralls I used as a uniform of the day, and the razor-sharp bayonet slung in the scabbard sewn on my right boot, and the combat harness, etc. He couldn’t piss me off, though. Quite fr
ankly, I felt above such minor emotions, minor griefs, even above the constant irritant of dysentery which I, like the rest of the Det, seemed to have caught out of the air. Like a Trojan on the walls, or a Kamikaze pilot, I felt anointed, and afraid.
As I smoked, the day became perceptibly hotter, but a fragment of morning air drifted under the hot steel roof and I stayed a moment longer. Inside the outer perimeter, children played, wives gossiped, and their soldier husbands and fathers sat in shaded places and cleaned their old Springfields. Smoke from cooking fires ascended stiff columns straight into the ashen blue sky, but sounds wafted about the compound like the odor of burning charcoal: a soft curse and a grunt of pick into dry, rigid earth as the bunker diggers toiled; a metal squeak streaking from the Other Tit as nut and bolt strained metal to fit tightly; the clunk of an axe late after the swing or the sweeping fall of a tree from the cutters on the northern edge of the clearing. In spite of the activity, the compound, the scene, seemed essentially peaceful; perhaps because work is a peaceful occupation, whatever you’re building. I was reminded of the American West, of building a fort against the hostile land, of peaceful treaty Indians camped about the stockade walls; out-riders, wood-cutters, and scouts moving out and back across the parched grass hills. And over all this, controlling each contraction of muscle in this new land, the confident, foolish idea that because man piddles in the earth with pointed sticks, because he shits in holes and covers it like a serene tomcat, because he cuts trees and replants them where he wishes, that because of these things man shall inherit the earth. That we shall be masters, inheritors with the tried and true strength of our brown arms and calloused hands and with great boldness and strength, never fearing for a moment the violent winds which might cast us like chaff across the land; nor afraid that the land itself might buckle and rip beneath our very feet and suck us into its soft hot core; nor afraid, least of all, that the aborigines who came before us can stand against us, feathers and paint and leather shields no hope against a Sharpes or a Henry. It seems our only fear might be of those who come behind us, the wave pushing behind us just as the Huns and the Vandals pushed the Visigoths into the Romans and the Romans into the sea. But we know there are none behind us, know we are the last, the best and the last of the barbarians, the conquerors, the long knives, the jolly green giants of history who move at first across the land with fire and sword, then with transistor radios and toothpaste, seeking not even greener grass, nor even movement itself, but merely senseless turds in the large bowel of history…
But I stayed too long in the tower; I revealed my position to the enemy. As I climbed down, Morning looked up from where he dug in the ammo bunker, saying, “Looking for them pesky redskins, Sarge?”
“And the angel of the Lord shall sink his scythe into the great winepress of the earth,” I said, “and bring peace to the heathen.”
“Stop stealing my lines, Sarge,” he said, raising the pick, then plunging it deep into the ground.
“Stop stealing mine,” I said, walking away.
* * *
I collected the Armalite and two clips from my tent, hooked two fragmentation grenades on my combat harness, and then walked down to where the log detail was stripping limbs from the felled trees. I watched, chatted with the guards, and had the second cigarette of the morning. The forest, though not as thick as it had looked from the compound, blocked out the sun fifty feet inside, so the men had cut their logs at the very edge. After splitting them, they cut them into five-foot lengths and, two men to a log, started carrying them back toward the compound along a trail beaten through the hip-high elephant-grass by previous details. I followed, last man behind one of the new guys, a kid from southern Ohio who hated the Army with remarkable passion because the dentists had pulled all his teeth during Basic. He thought nineteen premature for false teeth, and he let the world know it, bitching a while, then clacking his choppers, then bitching again. His buddy in front told him that the girls back in the ZI would just love it if he took out his plates and gummed their titties. Like all Army discussions, politics, religion, war, or false teeth, this one moved quickly to the terminal point of all of them: fucking. The kid laughed, only partly convinced, but in a way that promised he would try it with the first girl who showed him a bare breast.
I was still chuckling when the sniper shot. Before my mind recorded the sound of the rifle behind me or the snap as the round whipped past my ear, a hole magically winked two inches to the right of the base of his spine, blood and dust clouded before him, and his legs buckled. But even as my mind wasn’t recording, it was working. I dove and rolled into the high grass at the right of the trail. Another shot skimmed the grass tops up the slope, and the ricochet scattered chickens and children in the outer compound.
“Stay down!” I shouted, but everyone had already burrowed into the grass roots. The snipers held their fire now. Either cutting out or waiting without revealing their position, I thought. Two shots from different rifles: no automatic weapons. One shot down, one up: one man in a tree, one on the ground, and probably a third covering who hadn’t fired yet. Thank God for the grass. The protection of the outer perimeter was two-fifty or three-hundred yards uphill. I had twenty-five men, counting myself, but only five weapons. “Smoke!” I shouted. “Holler it up!”
As the cry for smoke drifted back up the hidden line, I crawled as close to the trail as I could. The kid’s body slowly stretched out, easily, carefully, as if he carried eggs on his back. Once flat, he lay as still as the dropped log, his hands out in front of his head. He began to moan, to whisper please, but the moan seemed almost conversational, detached as if he might be having a discussion with an ant crawling below him. A rivulet of blood, black in the dust, beaded red hanging on the trampled grass, crept sedately back down the trail.
“Hey,” I whispered. “Roll over here. Roll over, kid.”
Another face appeared between two clumps of grass on the other side of the path. It was the kid from the front of the log, and he was crawling out into the path.
“Stay put,” I said, but he came on.
“Harvey,” he said. “Harvey, you bastard, I told you to take the front, you fuck head, I told you, I told you.”
“Stay put, soldier,” I said. “Goddammit, stay put, and shut up.”
“Digs, Digs,” Harvey said calmly, “Digs, I think they done shot my balls off. I sure believe they did.” As he talked, he sounded calmer, but his body shook in quick tremors.
“Oh, Harvey, goddamn you, Harvey,” the other one said, reaching out along the ground for Harvey’s hand. His thumb disappeared in a burst of dust, and while he was throwing himself back into the grass, three quick but spaced shots searched the grass around him. Harvey shook harder, as if by vibration he would sink into the earth.
“Roll over here,” I told him again. “Please roll over.”
“Sarge? Sarge, is that you?” he muttered into the ground. “Sarge, can you find my teeth. I lost my teeth.”
His buddy appeared once more at the edge of the path, closer to the ground this time, holding out his hand so I could see the thumb missing above the second joint. “Sarge, they shot my thumb off. My fucking thumb, right off. What can I do, huh, Sarge?”
“You bastards, shut up or I’ll shoot your heads off. Shut up.”
I slipped the Armalite on automatic fire, threw a long burst downslope, then leaped across the trail. I landed on Harvey’s teeth, laughed, kicked the other kid away from the edge, and as he rolled one way, I went the other. The sniper followed me, rounds stinging my face with dirt, burning at me as I rolled and crawled, until I thought that the automatic fire I heard was directed at me. The rolling and crawling went on after the sniper stopped firing, and when I stopped, my hands, with their own will and concern, flew about my body seeking wounds, blood, bone, gristle, searching until they found me intact, then nodding yes to my stupid face as the first of the smoke rounds dropped twenty yards downslope.
I went back to the two wounded, wrapped t
he bleeding hand and stuffed a T-shirt into the bleeding crotch, and sent them back through the lovely smoke with two men to help each. I screamed at them to tell Tetrick to give me mortar and automatic fire at random intervals; made them scream it back with angry faces at me. The two M-60s had stopped ranging and were beginning to traverse in short bursts cutting up the edge of the woods. I crossed the trail again, waited for more smoke and rifle fire, then shouted for the men to go.
The two VC rifles opened up, one right and high, the other left and low on the ground, two rounds apiece, my rational mind confirming what my instinct had already known, and I might have spotted the snipers but for some low rounds from behind me that sent me to earth again. The smoke, thick now, and the M-60s coming in hard at the edge of the trees kept the snipers down while the men moved uphill.
I slipped back into the thickest smoke, then ran back to my left, jumped the path again, the log and the bloody mark, then crawled another twenty-five yards to a brush-choked depression which ran down from the saddle between our two hills. Brush we had meant to clear the next day. The slight dip offered cover only because of thick growth, but the dip quickly became a dry wash as I moved downhill, and the brush was too tangled to move through. But at the bottom, just like the mesquite and cat-claw thick arroyos back home, I found eighteen inches of clear space under the growth, and I crawled down that until the smoke rounds and the covering fire ceased. I assumed that the men had make it back, so I waited for them to give my instructions to Tetrick.
I caught my breath in the pause, dropped the web belt with canteen and first-aid pack, changed clips, had a quick drink, then poured some water on the wash bottom and scrubbed the mud on my face, ears, neck, and hands, and waited. I assumed patience, in this case, to be a major virtue.
When the fire started again, I moved down the wash with the bursts and the echoes following mortar rounds, looking. The wash turned to the left, then sharply back to the right, as I had remembered, and I moved down it on my belly, looking. If the two men had been deer instead of men, and this happening in a South Texas arroyo in the afternoon heat, one slow step then a long look and watch your shadow and don’t turn your head quickly, I would have seen the men much sooner. But they were men with guns, not deer, and I was belly-flopped under the brush, each breath raising tiny dust-devils below my chin, and they were men with guns, hunting too, and not deer.
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