Supers Box Set

by Kristofer Bartol

  With the Ho Chi Minh Trail on hiatus, and the sieges of the coastal cities at their fiercest, the last thing General Westmoreland would’ve expected was an invasion of the Mekong Delta and an assault on Saigon.

  So it began in the last days of April, nineteen-sixty-eight: PAVN forces swept east and encircled Saigon, routing the city’s primary waterway through suburban Thủ Dầu Một and An Phú. South of the river’s oxbow, they stormed the sole easterly bridge into the city—a bridge which Saigon had always considered their exit strategy—thereby entrapping the urban center, leaving only a three-mile huff between the Viet Cong and the Dinh Độc Lập—the Independence Palace; the seat of the democratic government.

  As the Newport Bridge was being seized in the east, the Viet Cong crept-in from the west, cloaked in the confiscated uniforms of American Marines. Their task was to take Chí Hòa Prison, an impenetrable octagonal penitentiary that signified the repression of all pro-communist dissenters. Chí Hòa Prison was seen as an ideal location for a western stronghold, being a mere two-mile jaunt from the Independence Palace. Were they to take both Newport Bridge and Chí Hòa Prison, the end of the Vietnamese Civil War would have been inevitable.

  Of course, sieging the prison meant first acquiring a staging arena, and it was decided this would be the Phú Thọ Horse Racing Ground. Situated halfway between Chí Hòa Prison and the westerly suburbs, the Phú Thọ racetrack was a flat and unencumbered half-mile stretch that all but begged to be the LZ for a fleet of VC helicopters. Accomplishing such a feat would enable the North Vietnamese to deploy enough troops for a ground assault on the prison.

  So it began before the dawn of May fifth, nineteen-sixty-eight: a battalion of Viet Cong, disguised as American Marines, infiltrated the Phú Thọ Horse Racing Ground and overwhelmed the local ARVN sentries. By daybreak, the true Marines had begun a counterassault, seizing authority of the air with a fleet of helicopter gunships. With missile barrages and minigun broadsides, the Marines laid waste to the racetrack, devolving its concrete stadium into rubble.

  The VC stood their ground at Phú Thọ until the setting of the sun, when word came from the eastern front—the vital throughway across the Saigon River—that the Newport Bridge chokepoint was at stalemate. With the racetrack untenable, the Viet Cong of the west chose to recede into the surrounding boroughs, from which they could still harass the Marines and potentially stage a resurgence. In the spirit of John Lovewell, the US Army’s 33rd Rangers descended upon Phú Thọ and took-off into the suburbs, pursuing the scrambled Viet Cong like scalphunters in Pequawket.

  As the VC fled Saigon, over the course of a week, the decision was made to abandon their stake at Newport Bridge. One of their sapper squadrons blew the bridge’s center supports, on the witching hour of the twelfth, thereby dropping the middle fifth of the bridge into the river. The Viet Cong spent the remainder of May regrouping in the rice paddies, bamboo thickets, and marshlands of the Mekong Delta.

  It is here that the Viet Cong stalk, creeping through the earth and the underbrush like the hoary bamboo rat. It is here that they lurk beneath the murk, like the sea snake, reared to strike. It is here that they vanish into the sawgrass like phantoms, neither alive nor dead; omnipresent.

  And among them lurks another, with eyes as fearless and grey as a wolf's. Down the right side of his face runs a grizzled scar—a shallow, red chasm—that carves through his eye, a glassy orb as pale as curdled milk.

  Shimmering brass plugs aligned on a leather sash, pinned with hedging eggs, pull slow from the drink, twinkling in the dayglow; dripping like faucets, making ripples in the muddy blue.

  Out from the reeds pokes a rifle barrel, familiar—sleek and black—followed by the wetted tips of steely hair. The eyes search, and the hands grip the stock and hilt. From the weapon's breech rises a curved metal case, and clenched between its wielder's teeth lays a knife, sharpened to excess.

  He snarls beneath his breath as the sampans float into view: Guiding each boat is a sturdy oarman, plunging the yuloh with a careful drift, mimicking the gentle death of falling leaf. Under the cover of arched thatchwork, another gook threads copper-plated, finger-long, pointed bullets into a dark steel magazine. One by one, as nimbly as thumbing through currency, his delicate digits plunge cartridge upon cartridge—scooped by the handful from the bounty of a woven basket—into these crepuscular crescents.

  The phantom soldier rises from the waters, tucking his rifle into his shoulder and staring down the barrel. He whistles a cardinal's tease, earning the curious gaze of the oarmen. With the turning of their heads, they are atomized—reduced to particles of red and black—in a flurry of thunderous pain; their chests erupt in a pink mist, and their eyes go wide and white.

  The furthest oarman tumbles out his sampan, with a splash, into the murky marshwater, as the other oarman crumples to the bottom of his wooden boat. The two nimble-fingered companions—panting and shouting—scramble out from their thatched shelters, plugging dark steel crescents into the underside of Russian rifles; aiming into the riverbank’s gnarled mangrove roots; firing blindly.

  The phantasmal soldier inches out of the reeds and, in two short bursts, unfastens their soft, brown heads from their black-cloaked bodies. The marshes return to silence. He slings his rifle over his shoulder, lukewarm, and wades to the nearer sampan, hoisting himself aboard.

  He rummages through the woven baskets, and the corpses’ pockets, but he finds nothing worth a second look. From a pouch on his hip, he retrieves two cellophane-wrapped nuggets. He untwists one into his mouth, bites it in half lengthwise, spits the gooey bisection into his hand, and places—with theatrical precision—each of the caramel discs onto the featureless slant-eyes of the deceased oarman.

  And he does the same for the other—the disembodied head.

  He hoists the head up beside his own, standing proudly with his fist cocked in his hip. He feigns an indifference—listing eyelids and drooping jowls—as he swivels the head towards him, held close. He raises it and, with his other hand, manipulates the head’s loosely tethered jaw, simulating speech; reciting histrionic, in harmony with the head, “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio—a fellow of infinite jest; of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times… and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!”

  “Alright,” hollers Radiation Brother, emerging from the cavernous underbelly of a mangrove; its gnarled roots dipping like sickly limbs into the brown water. “Enough with the bard bit. You’re going to catch a disease.”

  The Candyman turns the head close to his own, frowning with a curious doubt. His mandibular hand twists into Texan horns as his pinky and forefinger drag the head’s limp lips down, into a frown of its own. “You wouldn’t do that to me, would you?” he asks the head, then wagging his dextrous hand so as to make the head refuse.

  He nods with affirmation, whispering, “I knew I could trust you,” before dropping the head to the floor of the sampan—a soft thud—and jumping off; returning to the marshwater with a careless splash.

  Private Page, aboard the other sampan, dumps basketfuls of Soviet ammunition into the drink. He wipes his brow of sweat and squints, up, at the glaring sun.

  “You won’t find it up there,” Candyman hollers.

  “Huh?”

  “Ain’t no relief to be found.”

  “It’s so hot today.”

  “It’s hot everyday. Where do you think you are?”

  “But it’s gotta be, like, a hundred degrees.”

  Candyman shrugs. “Anything else you want to get off your chest?”

  “I’m just saying,” he whines, “it’s hot.”

  Candyman shakes his head. “I gotta question…”

  Page raises his eyebrows in expectation.

  “I imagine your mother never bed the milkman, so I’d hafta guess, in my absence, you had no paternals—that’s zero padres—in your youth? Cos for all the pubes I bet you have tangled-up in your dungies, I’ll wager you’ve never,�
� counting on his fingers, “swung a hammer, pissed standing-up, or uncapped a beer with your hands.”

  “I don’t drink beer.”

  Candyman laughs into a sigh.

  From afar and overhead, two Hueys thwap, thwap, thwap the air as they race west beneath the sun. The platoon cranes their necks, transfixed by their passing. Private Page smiles, announcing with pride, “Glad to know we’ve got our guys watching over us.”

  Candyman snickers. “Michael, those birds have somewhere to be. We’re alone out here.”

  Pvt. Page looks to his constituents, who surround him—up to their ribs in brown water—grinning with zeal.

  The door gunner aboard one of the distant Hueys spurts his arsenal. Candyman looks thataways. “Ah,” he cries, “the enemy is afoot!”

  A dozen men cry with committed glee: “Huzzah!”

  Sgt. Greene spies the greenhorn's perplexion. “Um,” he begins, gesticulating, “it's the beginning of monsoon season, and, uh, we have these traditions… much like the sportsmen of old.”

  “Huh?”

  “Like the English foxcatchers, you know—the merry men of Nottingham, but if they were crossbred with the cast of ‘Wagon Trail.’”

  Candyman thrusts his blade to the sky. “Tally-ho!”

  Pvt. Page nods slowly. Pointing to his father, he asks Greene, “So, is that Ward Bond?”

  “In some ways,” the sergeant grins. “In others, I'd say Robin Hood.”

  A mountain moves behind the private, casting him into shadow. “So what am I?” the mountain bellows. “Friar Tuck?”

  Page turns to see Radiation Brother looming over him, waist-deep in the murky brown. “Uh,” the private begins, “maybe Radiation ‘Brother John’?”

  The ebony giant smiles. “‘Cept I ain’t sleepin’.” He slugs Page in the shoulder and—despite his gentle intention—the nudge topples Page, who sinks up to his mouth in brownwater.

  The private sputters and stands, sloughing off the excess wetness. “Have I mentioned,” he spits, “I don't like getting wet?”

  The ebony giant laughs. “Brother,” he says, “you're gonna love the next few months.”

  Another two Hueys pass overhead. Plastered on their noses and bellies are the signs of the red cross.

  Page watches them go. “Hey, Radiation Brother,” he asks.

  “Yeah, man.”

  “What’d the captain mean about-”

  “The captain?”

  Page blinks. “My dad.”

  “Yeah,” Radiation Brother grins, “alright.”

  “What’d, um, he said we don’t have air support, right?”

  “Yuh.”

  “Is that for real?”

  “Logistics, man. I dunno the details.”

  “I can’t imagine logistics an issue. We won in Nazi Germany because of air superiority. Now we’re in a much less familiar environment with much less conventional fighting, and keeping a vigilance in the skies would-”

  “Mike, trust me, you’re thinking too much. And infantry aren’t tasked to think; we’re here to take—and take three things: orders, borders, and lives. If you go off thinking about strategy, you’ll only drive yourself mad.”

  Private Page looks down at the brown water, rippling ahead with every slogging step.

  “As for your air support…”

  Page looks up to the ebony giant.

  “They only put as many birds in the air as they need, especially in the summertime. Of course, the Sea Wolves might be circling nearby—like the safeties of the team, playing a zone coverage. See, infantry is like the linemen—playing man-to-man—or the corners, right? But the safeties, they just stay alert and go where they’re needed. Yeah—the Sea Wolves are the safeties.”

  Page blinks. “I, uh—is that a sport reference?”

  “Shit, kid,” he groans. “Well, I don’t have any other analogies.”

  “That’s okay.” He trudges, sloshing water. “So the Sea Wolves… if they’re always aloft, doesn’t that qualify as-”

  “No, no—the Sea Wolves are a last resort. Just cos there’s likely one within ten minutes of you doesn’t mean you should rely on them. McNamara doesn’t put birds up in the summertime.”

  “Cos the sun’s too bright?”

  “Humidity, man. Air’s too thick and warm. Birds don’t get the right lift. Can’t carry as much; can’t hover. What’s the point of a helo that can’t hover?”

  “Hm… Yeah, that’s… reasonable.”

  “Mhmm.”

  “Sorta disappointing though, huh, Radiation Brother?”

  “I ‘spose,” he hems. “I don’t try to get mad at physics. Nothing I can change.”

  “Right, sure,” the greenhorn fidgets. “Thanks.”

  “No problem, Mike.”

  They trudge toward the shallows, sloshing louder. Lily pads float among the reeds.

  “Oh—and, Mike?”

  He looks up. “Yeah?”

  “Relax on the ‘Radiation Brother’ bull. That’s my paper name.”

  “Oh, alright,” the greenhorn mumbles. “So, uh-”

  “Ajax Madison. The others call me it just fine.”

  “Yeah, but I- uh, I was taught to maintain a sense of respect for-”

  “Ain’t no respect in war, Mike. Hell—look at your dad. You think he gives a shit about anything?”

  Page looks to the front of the line: The Candyman stands atop a grassy causeway, on the edge of the marsh, bowing over the reeds; extending his hand to help his comrades up the embankment.

  One-by-one, the infantrymen clamber out from the muddy shallows, just as the first tetrapodomorphs had when they emerged from their stagnant Devonian swamps—swallowing air; feeling the full-weight of gravity for the first time.

  Surmounting the embankment, they stroll the earthen line between the murky marsh and the sunlit rice paddies: these placid waters, sectioned in uniform squares by causeways of unkempt, luscious, rich-green grass.

  These earthen strips amend the absence of roads, and the waters on either side reflect the sun’s harsh light upon their weary faces. The thick air holds the heat against their skin. The causeways come and go in passing.

  They turn down one, marching single-file; flattening the tall grass. A marmot leaps away and into the water. It paddles with tiny paws, making little progress for all its effort.

  The causeway ends at a levee, lined with bamboo, that draws distinction between the paddies and a canal, coursing out from the jungle; encroaching on the native agriculture.

  The platoon unpacks along the riverside. From six canvas sacks they unfurl six wads of folded plastic—inflatable dinghies, full of potential—and five appending air pumps. The stocky Pvt. Hudson—who confesses to having misplaced his pump—is tasked to inflate his dinghy “with the power of breath.”

  Private Page joins his squad in harvesting ten-foot-long shoots of bamboo, for use as quants—poles to set upon the riverbed and push, steer, push.

  Their handsaws grind and file the hearty reeds. However, the grating snores of their duty are soon brought to a halt by the cautious palm of Sgt. Greene, who strains to listen to the canal…

  It tells him, “motors.”

  Private Page unhooks his saw from the half-cut bamboo stalk and he drops to all fours. The platoon drags their gear below the lip of the levee, and they lie against the embankment—on their sides and bellies; entwined in the bamboo thicket—with their rifles clutched at the ready.

  The grumbling motors churn the water, louder and louder; closer and ever-closer. The men look to one another. Page eyes his father, holding tight against the soil, and he turns his head to notice Sgt. Greene: gesturing with little nods and an intense darting gaze at a lone rifle, lying in the dirt beside him.

  Page looks at his hands: empty. His eyes bulge. The motors groan and growl, like woodchippers grinding the river to a pulp.

  He reaches for his rifle but it remains distant. He wriggles closer, extending his arm and proffering his shou
lder—to no avail. The motors near; ravenous.

  Page presses himself against the bamboo, stretching his arm to its limits and plying his weight against the obstructive bamboo stalks—and one, half-cut, snaps against his strain.

  With a hearty crack, it falls.

  Sgt. Greene looks to Pvt. Page—his face flush and heart palmic—with eyes of equal fear and anger.

  The motor sputters, in question, and a bellowing voice orders a flame to be cast upon the levee.

  Candyman, on instinct and without hesitation, stands with his top-fed Stoner LMG raised in his hand, signally as friendly. The boatmen—midwesterners, new englanders, and southerners—call for a halt of the engines.

  Relief is shared among both parties, rising to their feet with sagging shoulders—their bodies draining of both adrenaline and fear—tired as if summiting at the end of a hike.

  The drifting motors belong to the Mobile Riverine Force; the expeditionary wing of the Brown Water Navy—America’s response to the putrid, shallow swamplands of Southeast Asia; come to repel the slant-eyed invaders from the Mekong floodplain. This particular gang of naval patrol boats are headed west from their firebase on the banks of the Mỹ Tho River, and northward to the Cambodian border.

  “What luck,” Candyman shouts with authority. “We’re headed the same way. Care for some stowaways?”

  “Not at all,” the naval commander waves, flashing his pearly whites. “Climb aboard, gentlemen! We’ve the finest ferries this side of Saigon—offering expeditions to all corners of the country—starting at the low, low price of One Human Soul! That’s right, folks! Offer up your soul today for a thrilling voyage on the brownest of the rivers exotic. We’ll see trees; we’ll see little birds; and, if you’re lucky, we might even spot one of nature’s most elusive and fearsome creatures… the tan-backed slope!”

  Abandoning the bamboo, the platoon boards the patrol boats, five apiece. Some of the men gleefully prepare their inflatable dinghies as couches, while others return the dinghies to their natural, compact, in-sack state.