“Right here, L-T,” Lieutenant William Hoyden said from behind Brooks. Hoyden was the artillery forward observer attached to Alpha.
“FO, I want preset coordinates for that peak. I want coordinates registered for the peak, the draw and that canyon there to the November Whiskey. If I were a dink honcho I’d set up in the canyon. Let’s go. I want to hear some chatter. What’s everybody think?”
“L-T, I think Recon’s hit the shit,” Bill Brown said. Brown was the third RTO of the company CP. “They’re callin for a Dust Off.” Brown turned up the volume of his radio which was set on Command Net. The group paused to listen to the dialogue of metallic voices as Echo’s Recon Platoon requested an urgent medical evacuation helicopter. El Paso changed the frequency of his PRC-25 radio from Alpha’s internal to Recon’s internal and the group monitored their sister unit’s movement in the firefight. Egan rose to his knees and looked toward Recon’s position. Red tracers could be seen floating down from a point on the west side of the peak. Occasionally enemy green tracers floated up toward Recon’s insertion LZ. No soldiers, friendly or enemy, could be seen. There was no movement. The sound of the firefight was mostly lost in the sound of helicopter traffic and the booming of artillery batteries already laid and registered on Firebase Barnett. There was no indication of the fighting except the infrequent fireflies of red and green crossing and the crackling voices being monitored on the radio.
“That’s enough of that,” Brooks said shortly. “El Paso, get that radio back on our internal. Let’s break it up. Get back to your people. Egan, Bill, get your men ready to move.”
“Quiet Rover Four, this is Rover Two, commo check,” Cherry said squeezing the transmit bar on the handset of his radio. There was no response. Cherry checked the frequency setting then repeated his call to El Paso. Again there was no response. “Quiet Rover Four, this is Rover Two. Do you read? Over.”
“Two, this is Four,” El Paso’s voice rasped. “I got you lumpy chicken. Hotel Mike? Over,” El Paso said meaning Loud and Clear. How me?
“Four, Two. Say again.” There was no response. Cherry repeated his call. Again nothing.
“Two,” El Paso’s voice squawked in Cherry’s ear. “Do you know what Mike Foxtrot Alpha is? Over.”
“Four. Negative,” Cherry answered.
“Two,” El Paso’s voice came in calm lecture-form, “it’s a Romeo Tango Oscar who forgets to say ‘Over’ when he’s completed his transmission. Mother Fuckin Asshole. Over.”
“Uggh.” Cherry groaned before squeezing the transmit bar. “Four. Sorry. Roger that and Wilco. Over and out.” For a moment longer Cherry sat where he had been sitting all morning. Then he rose and walked toward Jax and Silvers, and Doc and Minh who had joined them. All four were eating and talking loudly.
“If they repealed the mothafuckin Gulf a Tonkin Resolution how come we still here?” Doc shouted. “Huh, Mista? Tell me that. That was the legal basis fo us bein in this bad mothafucka, woant it?”
“Not necessarily,” Silvers said. “Says here ‘Nixon contends that the President’s power to wage war doesn’t come from any particular resolution but is based on his constitutional powers as Commander-in-Chief.’”
“That crazy shee-it,” Jax snapped. “They dee-cap-i-tate dick-tators, doan they? The people aint gowin stand fo it. We gowin tear him down.”
“Amen, Bro. Amen,” Doc said and raised a power fist salute.
“Amen,” Silvers added. “But I got a problem. See, the situation here is connected to the situation in the Middle East. If we show a weak face here …” Silvers paused and looked up. Cherry was standing above them, looking and listening. “What are you staring at?” Silvers asked accusingly.
“I, ah …” Cherry cleared his throat. He did not know what to say. He blurted out, “I was looking for Egan.”
“What?” Silvers shouted.
“Hey, Man,” Doc laughed. “You kin make noise now. No tellin how long we gonna have ta be quiet.”
“Oh,” Cherry said, a silly grin came to his face. “I ah,” he wanted to join them but he was uninvited, “I, ah,” his voice became louder, “ah, gotta find Egan.”
Men of the 1st Plt and the company CP finished their lunches and secured their packs. Lieutenant Thomaston had told them to remain where they were until called individually. One at a time they were to circle to the north side of 848, slide into the vegetation then circle to the west ridge beneath the cover of vines and trees and begin the descent. If Alpha was being observed by NVA trailwatchers, as Brooks suspected, the tactic was designed to keep the enemy from detecting the company’s movement into the canopy or at least the direction of the movement. As the first soldiers began to move unobtrusively, an unexpected helicopter approached 848, landed, released two men in fatigues, lifted off and flew away. Thomaston motioned for the first seven men to slip into the canopy under the diversion of the bird and as it left, he motioned for the men to sit and wait.
At the top of the LZ the two men were met by Lamonte. Lamonte seemed to have an almost frantic enthusiasm as he greeted the lieutenant from the 3rd Brigade Public Information Detachment and the civilian correspondent he was escorting. Cherry could not hear anything that was being said but he knew Lamonte was speaking eagerly and quickly. Man, Cherry thought. That’s one cool job. I wonder what you have to do to work for Lamonte.
Sitting behind Cherry in ready order of march was Numbnuts. He threw a small stone at Cherry to get his attention. “That’s Craig Caribski,” Numbnuts said. “He’s the guy responsible for uncovering My Lai.”
“What?” Cherry whispered back.
“Yeah. I was talkin to Mister PIO. He said Caribski was comin out with us. Said he’s workin for Dispatch News now. Wants ta get a story on the Ripcord fiasco.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” Numbnuts said importantly. “Some of the dudes think we oughta blow him away.”
“Yer kidding.”
“Aw, it’s just chatter. Maybe he’ll take a picture of us an we’ll be in all the papers.”
“Hey, yeah,” Cherry smiled.
“Hey, Cherry,” Numbnuts said. “Did you know today’s Friday the Thirteenth?” Cherry shook his head. “You superstitious?” Numbnuts asked.
“No,” Cherry said. “Not really. I don’t think. Are you?”
“Naw,” Numbnuts said scratching at his waist then his right thigh. “Me neither. Except about some things.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. You know. Like this hat.” Numbnuts had an Australian bush hat with one side turned up.
“What about yer hat?” Cherry asked glad to be talking to someone. “Is it a good talisman?”
“Huh? Yeah. That’s just it,” Numbnuts said. “I aint real sure. Last time I wore it I got shot at but I didn’t get hit. Does that mean it’s good luck cause I didn’t get hit or bad luck cause I got shot at?”
“I see what ya mean,” Cherry said. His anxieties were easing with the conversation. “It may require a statistical analysis,” he joked. “How many times you been out with it?”
“I only wore it once,” Numbnuts said not smiling.
“A case of one is useless in statistics,” Cherry tried joking again.
Numbnuts paused. He looked at Cherry, curled his upper lip and turned away.
Cherry knew that the situation he was in had changed. The men about him were different today from the way they had been last night. But he did not know why. His mind had not shifted. He did not yet possess the boonierat mentality. It was frustrating, maddening. He did not know what was happening, what was wrong with him. He felt he was no longer accepted. He was sitting in a bush, waiting, waiting again. Now he was dirty. He had been getting dirtier by the day but at least at Phu Bai, Evans and Eagle there had been places to wash. Cherry removed a canteen from his rucksack, poured some water on his OD handkerchief and wiped his face and arms. Red-brown mud smeared on his skin. He wiped and added water and washed and wiped. The mountain air had heated up and the sun beat very harshly.
I’m losing my marbles, Cherry thought. I’m losing my ability to speak. This waiting’s driving me nuts. What in the hell am I doing here? I thought Silvers was going to be my friend … should have told him to fuck himself. I used to have a mind. Six months ago I remember being able to gross out Phil in the pizza shop and today I can’t even converse with an idiot without sayin something wrong.
Daniel Egan was alone again, sitting above the northeast corner of the LZ on Hill 848 feeling very much like a platoon sergeant. He sat and stared disgustedly at Cherry who was fifty feet to his left and at the L-T who was above on the LZ talking to Lt. De Barti, Garbageman and El Paso. Egan looked east, stared into the jungle before him and beyond that jungle at the jungle on the next ridge and still beyond. Across his lap was his M-16 and around his waist was the pistol belt with two canteen pouches filled each with six magazines of ammunition. Four fragmentation grenades hung from his belt. Strapped to his left calf was a bayonet. Before him ridges fell east with the gorge of the Rach Mӯ Chānh cutting across and through the ridgelines. Beyond the fourth ridge was a fifth where the Rach Mӯ Chānh flowed northeastward into the Sông Thác Ma and another ridge was beyond that and then yet another.
With his left hand Egan kneaded the earth. He moved his right hand to his lap and stroked the pistol grip of his rifle. He massaged the steel of the rifle’s bolt housing with his thumb, fingered the plastic pistol grip and the trigger-guard and the trigger, thumbed the safety selector, now staring east down toward the lowlands and beyond toward the sea. In his aloneness and disgust there was a sadness in vague memories that tried to force themselves to the surface of his consciousness, thoughts which he kept fully suppressed, thoughts which he supplanted with the disgust feeling and which accentuated the aloneness, which if he conjured them up would be dangerous in a bad AO. Egan hid in his disgust and loathing for what he was, for what was about him. He glared at the sun now risen high. He glared at the ridges and the valleys before him. In his mind an old sergeant was chattering. The old sergeant was saying something about the ridges which Egan did not even know he had heard the old sergeant say. Egan counted. There were four ridges down the Rach Mӯ Chānh and two down the Sông Ô Lau. They were clear though the distance made the trees blur. He stopped counting. He put the thought out of his mind, chased it from his mind with thoughts of the gypsy girl in Australia.
“You’re crazy,” she had screamed at him. “Get on out of here.” He’d shown up for a third day even though she’d dismissed him after the second night. It was in her apartment and she’d been listening to Isaac Hayes’ “One Woman.”
“Hello, Darling,” he had said forcing his way in. She had been mean the night before. After 17 months in the jungle there is only one thing a soldier wants to do. Softly, violently, any way. And she had been an extreme bitch. She had tormented him. She had a lovely body and long slender legs. She had been fine in bed. Egan grinned inwardly but it went sour in his mind. Good to love but lousy to sleep with, he thought. Too restless. Stomach cramps or some shit. Everything had been a tease. She was soft passionate kisses on the ferry across the harbor to Bondi Beach; warm hugs in the hallway of the Illowra Lodge then nasty in bed. And the worst of it, Egan thought, she was totally ignorant about the world and the war. She’s got a mind for bed, for love, for money, my money, and not much more. When his money began running out she had cramps. She had a talent for making men fall in love with her. Egan was disgusted with himself for having fallen. She was a poor substitute and he hated himself for having accepted her. Now she became one more thing to chase from his mind.
Egan looked again at the ridges then over at the slow progress the unit was making moving into the jungle. He got to his knees, struggled, rolled his ruck over and removed from it the letter he had begun to Stephanie. He skipped a few lines then wrote:
It’s still the same day. I’m getting short. My time is almost up. I’ll be back in the World in twenty five days and out of the army in a month. I’d like to see you again. Memories of you keep floating up in my brain. Like the time in that funky Martinson Hotel when I told you you deserved better than that. I’m really feeling disconnected right now. Must be because of the start of this new operation. I should be thinking about this thing but you keep floating up before me. I don’t know why but I’ve got this image of you and me in the Martinson right now. There was an old chair in the room and I’m lying in the bed. The lights are off but there’s light coming in the window from the bar signs and street lights across the street. You’re in front of the window looking out and you’re naked. You are saying that I hurt you. Why did you say I hurt you?
Egan stopped writing. It did not sound right to him. He returned the letter to his ruck. The eastern ascent of 848 rose from the jungle abruptly, crested in a false peak of bomb shattered rock, merged with the debris surrounding the landing zone, rose and fell then rose to the peak. Egan was in the cover of the debris on the second rise. Again the view east hypnotized him. On the first ridge every tree, every leaf, was crisp in his vision. The second was less clear and by the fifth the vegetation was splotches of lighter and darker green. On the ridges beyond the green seemed to lose its color and become gray shaded gradations blurring and collapsing hazily into the foothills and finally piedmont. Egan counted the ridges, eleven of them. He could hear the old sergeant at the briefing hall, hear him saying, “You will be on the 12th and highest ridge with”—Egan slipped his arms into the rucksack shoulder straps, turned to the west, and rose—“with,” the sergeant’s voice came, “your back to the 13th valley.”
CHAPTER 13
At the step-off point where Whiteboy entered the jungle the vegetation showed scars from the morning bombardment, but only ten meters down the wilderness appeared untouched. It began with walls of green to his sides. At fifteen meters he turned left, ducked beneath several branches and found a trail west. Branches draped with vines crossed overhead. With each step the canopy thickened, the jungle became darker, the trail descended. The trail appeared to Whiteboy to have been unused in three months, perhaps even six. Palm fronds crossed the path at shoulder and waist height. Bamboo thickets, clusters of stalks clumped like pillars, rose in the midst of his downward movement. He stepped quietly, slowly, cautiously around, over and between, always looking, listening, smelling before each step. He did not smell the mortars.
When Brooks had dismissed the men from the CP conference earlier Egan had immediately searched for and found Whiteboy and had told him his squad would be point. Egan had explained to him the direction and objective of movement and then left. Lieutenant Thomaston had followed Egan to Whiteboy’s position amongst the leafy brush down a trail off the northeast corner of 848. Thomaston confirmed the move and set up the diversionary step-off location and then he too had left.
“They stickin it to us ah-gain,” Whiteboy had muttered to himself, his thick lips trembling imperceptibly, his great mass hunched in dread. Before him was his M-60 machine gun. He had not lowered the bi-pod legs which could be used to support the barrel but had simply rested the barrel in the crotch of a bush and generally aimed the weapon down the trail. Whiteboy had stroked the metallic side of the machine gun and had muttered to it, “They stickin it to us ah-gain, Lit’le Boy. They au a-time stickin it to us.” He had rolled over, gotten to his knees, hefted the gun and begun organizing his squad.
There was nothing fancy about Whiteboy’s organization. He had decided to walk point himself. He always walked point for his squad. Whiteboy hated it but he could not allow another boonierat in his squad to walk point. It was partially that Whiteboy believed his responsibility as squad leader carried with it a need to protect his men but it was more a matter of pride—the pride of a boonierat, of a squad leader, an M-60 gunner, a point man, a big man. That is the way he described it to himself. He could not bear that another boonierat should do his work.
With his walking point came the advantage of immediate obedience by his squad to whatever he ordered. Justin Hill, th
e assistant gunner and ammo bearer, would walk Whiteboy’s slack. Behind Hill Whiteboy set Cookie, Bill Frye, a rifleman, then Andrews, the squad’s RTO, then Harley with the M-79 grenade launcher and finally Kirtley and Mullen, both rifleman. After securing their equipment they all had risen from their positions and carried their rucks to the step-off point, where they sat and waited for Thomaston to tell them to move out.
“We’re goina work west down that finger,” Thomaston had repeated to Whiteboy for lack of anything else to say. “If we don’t find anything we’re goina sweep up to that peak then maybe move southwest.”
Whiteboy had not really listened. He had sat above the step-off smoking and checking his ruck again for anything that might make a sound when he moved. A knot had grabbed his stomach, tightened, forced acidic fluid to the back of his throat. He had patted the gun, rubbed his immense hands, his thick fingers over the oily bolt carrier and feed tray. As he squeezed, the weapon seemed to push back, as he caressed, the weapon seemed to sigh and caress his hand in return.
Whiteboy had spent most of the preceding ten months in the bush, much of the time without close human contact. He had learned to speak to his weapon and to listen to it. He had learned to listen and to smell and to feel the jungle. Before entering the army Whiteboy had been a mechanic. He had always worked with his hands, always with tangible things. Whiteboy was now a mechanic with his M-60 and he was in touch with the physical world of the jungle about him. His primal instincts were accentuated in the jungle. He was in physical touch with a physical universe that required no verbal explanation or justification. Whiteboy, feeling, communicating with the physical world through his hands, was primally touching reality at a level the intellectualizing Brooks or Silvers could not feel for they cloaked reality in words as if the words were the reality and the real did not exist, could not exist, without description. Whiteboy communicated with his men in a way Brooks could never communicate, could never understand, could never feel.
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