Supers Box Set

by Kristofer Bartol

  Fire consumes all else that remains.

  Pharos stalks the hall with his shotgun raised. Flames lick the iron sides of a filing cabinet. An abandoned radio crackles with foreign messages. A painted wall chars; cement blocks blacken; firelight streams through slotted windows as innocent as if from a cabin’s hearth. Watchdog leads his comrades down a flight of stairs, preemptively peppering the gooks he sees behind corners. A fluorescent lightbulb crackles from the heat, exploding with a shower of threaded glass and mercurial dust.

  Miss Bliss widens her portals and Boy Cumulus passes through, descending upon a wartorn thoroughfare. He grimaces long enough for the residents of a bus—its wheels melted to the pavement; crippled alongside an intersection—to open-up on him, rolling a fierce tide of gunfire down the road. Miss Bliss captures the cannonade with a portal and sends it into the side of a building. She teleports herself to Boy Cumulus’s side, insisting with her tongue to her teeth that he keep his head out of the clouds. He waves her off and calls lightning down upon the bus, electrifying its crew and detonating its munitions. The fuel reserves explode, engulfing the decommissioned vehicle in an inferno.

  A riddled and steaming gook stumbles out of the bus, waving his arms and twirling—helpless—as the blaze upon his chest saps the oxygen from his lungs and melts-away the chiseled youth of his facial features.

  Fire consumes all else that remains.

  Dawn breaks on the city of Khe Sanh. A blanket of armor rises over the horizon, sweeping through the Demilitarized Zone. The men of MACV-SOG reported finding NVA tank tracks on a recent recon mission, but their intel was disregarded as unlikely. Then, in the early morning of February seventh, they came from the hills—the second wave, undetected. In less than thirteen minutes, the American camp at Lang Vei was overrun.

  The Marines based in Khe Sanh had the resources and opportunity to extract their surviving brethren, but they refused, calling it a “suicide mission.” General Westmoreland agreed, but the Green Berets—those elite soldiers who had foretold of this invasion—wouldn’t allow a single man to be left behind. With a dozen commandeered helicopters and an hour’s time, the Green Berets reclaimed Lang Vei long enough to extricate eighty-six wounded infantrymen and South Vietnamese irregulars. Nothing more was asked of them, and yet, that night, they went back, recovering all two-hundred and ten of the deceased.

  A half-moon rises over the city of Khe Sanh. Astrologists have suggested that the waxing gibbous symbolizes a need for stability, as well as the momentary inability to satisfy this need. The Marines are driven from Khe Sanh in the night, by columns of armor and ambulatory machine gunners. They are unable to find stability. Perhaps it is karma, intervening on behalf of the dishonored demigods.

  The shadows of war conceal daylight evermore.

  In the morning, they return to the city; pressing their bodies against the pavement; peering over curbs and beyond lampposts at distant firebursts—unreachable targets still attempted; knowing that firing from cover without conscious intention is always a safer practice than ensuring your ammo expenditure is effective. Further down the road, eight men crouch behind an idle tank, fearing the fate of their ninth squadmate: the cold carcass beside them, formerly in possession of an eager soul in search of a shortcut.

  An M16 pokes around a fascine of barbed wire bundled around iron rods and oil barrels. A nervous finger hovers over the trigger. A chicken waddles down the street, pecking at puddles. Fingers clench around the barrel grip. A rusty blade fidgets in a belt loop, clanking kindly against an empty canteen. Blotted greens make for poor camouflage in concrete environments. Sandbags weigh-down the wooden planks that support an apathetic machine gun, looking down upon the neighborhood; spitting on passers-by.

  Prone in the sand, a Latino boy squints in the sunlight, aiming his M14 at a concrete pillbox beyond the shrubs. His helmet is an easel, like many others: a peace symbol, “all along the watchtower,” and a timetable of ‘67 and ‘68, with four months yet uncrossed. His brothers are as expressive: “NOT A TOURIST - I LIVE HERE.” “BORN TO KILL,” corrected, “BORN TO DIE.” Nude form of a relaxing woman. “HEAR ALL EVIL. SEE ALL EVIL. KILL ALL EVIL.” “JUST YOU AND ME, RIGHT, LORD?” The Egyptian hieroglyphic ankh. “HAVE GUN WILL TRAVEL.” Forty-four tally marks. “MAY GOD HAVE MERCY UPON MY ENEMIES, BECAUSE I WON’T.”

  The shadows of war conceal daylight evermore.

  Fallen timber drapes over a shattered stone wall, bowing into the furrow on the other side, where a platoon of tired men take refuge. A draftee reclines against the rack of munitions strapped to his back. He packs his lips with chewing gum. His sleeveless buddy cradles a long tube—a recoilless rifle. A scrawny kid peers over the remains of the wall, and a man draped in crossed bandoliers pulls him down.

  The leaf-sight extends from an M79 grenade launcher, held loosely in the dirt by a dismembered hand. A man with a thin, groomed mustache stares into the void as he nurses a cigarette, standing between the rear-hatch of a disabled tank and the armless corpse of a kid no older than nineteen. Men park themselves on the street corner, coming to rest on the trestles of a blown-out storefront. Exhausted arms lie limp across baggy pants; tightly-laced boots. A flag half-buried in debris; a green shutter hanging only by its lower hinge; a radio pack removed from weary shoulders. Hands fiddling with smoke grenades and cigarettes; a carton placed back into the nylon band of a helmet. Silent conversations and distant, lonely gazes. Killing time with timely questions.

  Whatever purpose there was is long forgotten.

  The city of Huế is more graveyard than battleground. The corpses of six-thousand civilians are uncovered from a mass-burial—all that remains of a systematic slaughter. Some show signs of torture; dismemberment; suffocation and broken, soiled fingernails. Miss Bliss weeps upon sight of the pit. Watchdog cannot look away. Pharos sulks in the corner, tapping his foot and lubing his rounds. Raze scorns him for his apathy. He leaves.

  The radio calls-in regarding heavy sniper fire in the southern suburbs; the 1st Marines are subsequently entrenched in intense house-to-house fighting. Boy Cumulus rounds his gang upon his cloud and shuttles them off to the firefight, settling in an alley lined with empty wooden coops. The MACV Compound is overrun, they’re told; the comms facility is on its last stand.

  Whatever purpose there was is long forgotten.

  The night lasts an eternity. Streets are taken in increments of inches. Abandoned cars provide an adequate defense, and reliable stonework trades hands like the flowing of the tide. Stairwells are fought for, tooth and nail, as the firefights ascend to the second and third floors. Balconies are blown away, roofs are caved, and tanks are lobotomized, but the ground enough is never taken. Boy Cumulus lays a thick fog over the street to cover their extrication of the wounded, yet such a shroud impedes the visibility of their abetting gunships.

  Air support is recalled, and the battalion hunkers-down for the rest of the night, maintaining their engagement with the enemy. Miss Bliss condemns Boy Cumulus for his veil of clouds, though he is quick to remind her that she asked it of him. A pause and concession. They’ve nearly exhausted their munitions, and the decision is made to pierce their encirclement and retreat to friendly territory. No other words are said.

  The shadows of war conceal daylight evermore.

  Rifles protrude from the barred windows of elevated houses, firing upon one another across the way. An infantryman sprints down the road, carrying an elderly local woman in his arms. She bleeds from her leg; he loses his helmet; a jeep hops the curb to meet them.

  Two tanks rumble down the road, swallowing crumpled cars and signposts beneath them. The exhaust spews black smog, rising up where the palm trees sway and mortars rain. South Vietnamese irregulars run along the beachfront, and all serenity is lost in the sandbursts. From on high, one mortar caves the thatched roof of a bamboo hut, propelling reedy shards into the backs of a half-dozen ambling men. Among them, the radio operator is spared—protected by his electromechanical jockey.
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br />   It's February seventh and the Viet Cong are laying siege to the city of Huế. Never before have the Marines been involved in such intense urban combat. Missiles fall with such regularity they’re deemed as innumerable as snowflakes. An apartment block collapses inward; transformed by a fiery dust cloud into a mountain of steaming rubble. The Marines surmount it, on all fours—trembling for what awaits them on the other side—only to find a patchwork of half-walls and concrete valleys.

  Fire consumes all else that remains.

  Three Navy destroyers linger off the coast, sending salvos screaming overhead; quieting firefights and decimating neighborhoods. More than half of the city lays in waste, bombed and brutalized. The Americans have learned to play by the rules of the host team: if it’s within range of artillery, consider it fair game.

  Gen. Westmoreland still perceives the offensives at Huế—and a hundred others—as feints, with Khe Sanh as the only true target. He lets all others fend for themselves. The Viet Cong, aided by his inaction, thusly gain the upper hand in most of their strategic goals. Any and all allied tactical triumphs belong to the battlefield commanders—the Candymen, the Sergeants Greene, and the Misses Bliss.

  In Huế, the communist cadres corral the local sympathizers—those who’ve aided the Americans—for a holy slaughter; a vengeful butchering en masse. And the deceased were not buried thereafter; rather, their corpses were stacked among the debris—left to putrefy beneath the brimstone.

  The wastelands are thick with rubble and bones.

  The once “Fragrant City” smells of sulphur and death. It's February seventh and the Marvelous Six reconvene in a hotel basement. Pharos apologizes for going AWOL; Raze bites her tongue. Boy Cumulus recommends a group hug, but he’s cast aside when the hairs on the back of Watchdog's neck stand. Miss Bliss sighs, shuddering with anxiety; desperation; fatigue.

  The upper floors are rocked by an impact. The plaster ceiling cracks, sprinkling dust in their eyes. Subsequent shakes suggest more. Another bombardment? Another firefight? Watchdog looks west and squints, peering up and through an empty wall. He smiles. The calvary is coming, he says; the Marines are here for extract.

  The wounded wait upstairs, wrapped in gauze; seeping blood and pus. The orange hues of dusk and firelight filter through the slats of shuttered windows, marking battered bodies with heavenly stripes. A medic looks up from his handiwork—the weary son of Midwestern parents; his bare chest bound in bandages—and the kid looks to Boy Cumulus with a piercing gaze, both wordy and meaningless. A shared glance, interrupted by growling overhead.

  Pharos throws open the shutters and the Marvelous Six bear witness to glory: in the cold distance, silhouetted by the setting sun, are the ethereal shapes of two Hueys approaching; cutting the air like scythes reaping a harvest, and the wind begins to howl.

  Exhales, and sighs; simple faultless sobs. As gently as the first snowfall settles, this blanket of relief eases upon the shoulders of the wounded. Six words echo throughout the halls of the old hotel, whispered: “reinforcements are on their way—hallelujah.”

  It was dark when their tanks rolled-in.

  ( II | VI )

  “Who won and who lost in the great Tet Offensive against the cities?” asked the uncle of the airwaves, clamping his lips beneath his trademarked white whiskers. “The Viet Cong did not win by a knockout, but neither did we. The referees of history may make it a draw. And that's the way it is: Tuesday, February twenty-seventh, nineteen-sixty-eight.”

  It had been nearly a month since they reclaimed Tan Son Nhut Air Base, on the first night of the endless offensive. They then moved southeast, deeper into the heart of Saigon, where the Viet Cong had captured the National Radio Station. The gooks had barred the doors and begun broadcasting a tape of Chairman Ho Chi Minh announcing the “liberation of Saigon;” encouraging the locals to unite in “an uprising against the southern democratic government.” The insurgents held the station for six hours, until their munitions were depleted, at which point they primed and detonated the building—and themselves along with it. They died believing their Chairman’s recording would continue on in perpetuity, but little did they know it had never actually broadcast: Private Page had cut the audio lines the moment the station was overrun.

  The Americans took Saigon back by March eleventh. Operation Quyet Thang (“resolved to win”) saw them reclaim the suburbs around the capital, seizing a street a day in fierce house-to-house fighting. By the end of four weeks, they were driving the Viet Cong back into the swamplands—Operation Toan Thang I (“complete victory”)—killing six gooks for every mortal loss of their own.

  As the earth warmed, the marshwaters rose—runoff from the Himalayas—saturating the Mekong Delta with mud and brown water. The air grew once again thick with moisture. Unresolved dew accumulated overnight, waiting for ascension in the morning sun; bathing the Michelin Rubber Plantation in a haze.

  On the morning of April the twelfth, as the sun peered over the far-eastern horizon, it cast its glow upon the mists of Michelin: a diffusion of pink and pale blue, swirling to lavender in the illuminated air; refracting in the floating dew; reflecting off the wide and waxy leaves of the categorized rubber trees. There, beneath the slick teal, laid in wait a battalion of bloodthirsty Viet Cong.

  Eighteen canisters of o-chlorobenzylidene malononitrile were uncapped and unleashed upon the plantation. With the morning mists so thick, neither gook nor gas were detectable by the naked eye—masked in the diffusion of pink and pale blue. As the sun broke over the far-eastern horizon, and Uncle Sam’s infantrymen strode into frame, the deluge came pouring down upon them.

  Their coughing fits gave them away, triggered by the invisible gas. Crackling omniscient lights then erupted, innumerable and abound, followed closely by the rolling thunder of gunfire. The rubber plants—someday to serve upon beltways, runways, and doorstops—offered futile cover from the assault: the whispering iron rain that seemed to come from everywhere, all at once. And, before the sun could expose itself in full, over two-hundred young men laid still in the soil, returning to the earth; fertilizing the Michelin crop.

  Phase Two of the Tet Offensive began in modest, only to endure and ultimately define the month of May, 1968. America’s response was Operation Truong Cong Dinh, in the Mekong Delta: deploying the year-old Mobile Riverine Force to the marshlands of Cochinchina, in active defense of Saigon.

  There are few roads in the Mekong Delta, and only those wide enough for two-wheeled vehicles—motorcycles, mopeds, bicycles—and bipeds. The villages are simple, and tight-knit; generations of mostly rice farmers and fishermen, troving the marshlands knee-, waist-, and shoulder-deep. Flat-bottomed sampans cruise the brown waters, sculled by a lone oar—the aftward yuloh—with the serpentine stroke of a falling leaf. The fisherman of each sampan conceals his haul beneath a convex thatchwork awning, safe from the talons of passerine swifts and the heavy rains of midsummer monsoons.

  The larger, junk-rigged cousins of the sampans—the schooners, yawls, and catboats—patrol the deeper waters of affluents and distributaries, whose wide confluences host floating marketplaces. The largest of these, on the shores of Mỹ Tho, is an eclectic combination of bamboo, plaster, concrete, timber pilings, and corrugated metal. Here, the seafaring ships, gardeners, and rice farmers gather to hock their wares: catfish, crab, dried squid, fermented mackerel; oxtail, bok choy, chives, rice; durian, persimmon, and every square inch of the pig, cow, and chicken.

  Waterfront shops are accessible by short piers, fielding docked sampans and waving hands. Canvas tents and cluttered tables form bazaars on tied-off barges. Dried fish hang by their tails underneath awnings. Cleavers strike wood blocks, quartering meat and sinew for sale. Heavy baskets leak rice grains through their woven fibers. Clay pots steam sawgrass and spices above a tempered stove. The shrill echoes of feverish bartering pervade the river’s agora.

  Mỹ Tho—the gateway to Saigon; the rice basket of Vietnam—thrives despite the tumultuous climate. Of cou
rse, life was easier before the lunar new year of nineteen-sixty-eight (the understatement of the century) but life endures nonetheless. For example, although Vietnam’s first railway—from Mỹ Tho to Saigon—was explosively decommissioned months ago, the riverways of the Mekong Delta have heretofore proved incorruptible.

  Like clockwork come the springtime blossoms—and the heat, and the melt; the voluminous marshland swells. From the north, the Tibetan plateau feeds the Red, Lô, and Mekong Rivers, saturating the Cambodian floodplain in the Tonlé Sap. At the start of the dry season, the Tonlé River reverses its flow and converges with the Mekong at Phnom Penh. Here, the sympathetic Khmer Rouge grant the Viet Cong passage on the Tiền River—across the border into South Vietnam, and the marshlands of the Mekong Delta.

  From Hanoi, deep in the Communist North, Ho Chi Minh’s PAVN troops bypass the Demilitarized Zone altogether through Laos; to the riverside city of Vientiane, and south on the Mekong. The nation of Laos, as few westerners knew, was more torn than its coastal neighbor, having endured a three-way civil war since nineteen-fifty-nine. The PAVN openly supported the leftist Pathet Lao, whereas the US Army supported the neutralist royal government, and the CIA funded the rightist wing of the old kingdom, aided by the Hmong hillsmen rebels.

  The “Secret War,” as it came to be called, was the active western theater of the Vietnam Conflict; a proxy war developed to circumvent the thirty-seven-mile stalemate north of Huế, Khe Sanh, and Quảng Trị. The Americans mobilized tank divisions into Cambodia and Laos, as early as nineteen-sixty-four, thus curtailing the progression of the Viet Cong during the dry season.

  During the monsoon season, however, the highlands were bogged and the lowlands were impassible. Supply lines in Laos were put on hiatus and troops from both sides receded back to Vietnam. Yet, in Cambodia—despite the Mekong diverting north to Tonlé Sap—the marshes of the Vietnamese floodplain provided a boundless thoroughfare for south-stationed Viet Cong to launch offensives behind American lines.