13th Valley

by John M. Del Vecchio

  “Negative, Four. Over.” Egan snarled inwardly then said to himself, “Fuckin dinks can’t hit diddlysquat.”

  Other squads called into the CP. Egan monitored then rose silently and vanished. Cherry was shaking. He lit a cigarette. Oh God, he thought. Three hundred and fifty days to go.

  Within minutes after the last mortar round fell on Alpha Company’s location ARA Cobras appeared in the sky. SSShheee-saaBAMM. The first rocket exploded against a target on the next hill. Cherry jumped. The Cobra fired two more rockets. Cherry could see the rockets leave the bird before he could hear them. Then came the explosions. Then the echoes. The echoes came from across the big valley and from intermediate ridges. A rocket left the tube at the Cobra’s side, the propulsion, explosions, an immediate minute echo, pause, major echo and reverberations. SSShheee-saaBAMM bamm BAMmbammbambam. The Cobras peppered the side of the opposite hill. Rocket after rocket. The explosions were 200 to 300 meters from the defensive point where Cherry sat. He smiled. There was nothing frightening about a rocket exploding at that distance when he knew it was directed at someone else. He sighed and smiled and felt reassured. He almost rejoiced and he noticed that Hill and Harley were giggling and that Frye and Mullen and the others were lying back nonchalantly smoking. Only Whiteboy seemed tense, intent, lying prone in heavy brush with just the tip of his machine gun protruding from the leaf cover.

  The two Cobras were diving in series at the targeted hill, firing two rockets each with each pass. Then the birds opened up with their miniguns, electric Gatling guns, firing so quickly the noise ripped like a giant chain saw. Together, with rockets between, it sounded like music to Cherry. He felt pleased. Hell, he thought, this isn’t so bad. Not with them birds doin most of the fighting.

  There was a faint movement in the trail above Cherry. He turned. Lamonte came through taking photographs. George was behind him. They spotted Cherry, gestured hello then proceeded by. Lamonte crouched to frame Whiteboy with palm fronds. He and George discussed the best angle for the shot and the best light and depth of field settings. The Cobras made another pass. Lamonte came over to Cherry and said, “Excuse me,” then aimed his camera up through a hole in the canopy where a small beam of sunlight was coming through. Lamonte waited then attempted to catch a Cobra within the small leafy frame on the next pass.

  Egan reappeared. He laid his hand on Cherry’s shoulder and whispered, “Come with me. Bring yer shit.”

  They climbed back up the path to the back of the 1st Sqd where Lt. Thomaston was monitoring the situation on Steve Hoover’s PRC-25. Silvers and Jackson were sitting with him. “They’re trying to blow the canopy away,” Thomaston said. “They think they see something.”

  “Wow!” Cherry said.

  “Yeah,” Thomaston smiled at him. “We really brought you to the right place. Gettin your cherry busted, huh?”

  Cherry smiled sheepishly.

  “Those was sixty mike-mikes,” Jax said. “Ef those been eighty-twos that close, they blast yo ears out.”

  Silvers, Jax and Hoover were concocting a mixture of C-rations and sitting back lethargically. Egan and Thomaston were still monitoring both radios, one on internal, one on command. Cherry sat a short distance below them all and said nothing yet inwardly he was smiling. He had seen his first action and he had survived it.

  “Ah think we’re doin just what ol Charlie wants us ta do,” Whiteboy whispered to Hill. They were now lying side by side in the vegetation, concentrating on the trail below.

  “Yeah. Givin Chas time ta dee-dee outa here,” Hill whispered back.

  “Or maneuver up heah,” Whiteboy whispered.

  “If we get hit, you know they got somethin down there they don’t want us ta see.”

  “They must have sompthin down theah if they had the guts ta mortar us in daylight.”

  “I bet they waited for us ta come off the fuckin LZ ta drop em. They just wanted ta see what direction we’d go in.”

  “Ah aint gonna go down theah tanight. That’s damn straight. Ah aint movin. Orders nor nothin.”

  “Well,” Thomaston called to Cherry, “you may have missed 882 but you aint goina miss this one.” Thomaston monitored the conversation between the helicopter pilots as they continued to waste the far hill.

  “Those mothafuckers,” Egan cursed. “Scatter’m, birds.”

  “Did you make Hamburger?” Thomaston turned to Hoover.

  “Were you there?” Hoover replied.

  “There en Blood Ridge,” Thomaston said.

  “That was a motherfucker, wasn’t it?” Hoover said.

  “Hey,” Thomaston exclaimed in a normal speaking voice. The men above and below and at his side looked toward him. “They’ve spotted the mortar tube. They’ve spotted the mortar pit.”

  “Super,” Egan chuckled. “They see the tube or just the pit?”

  “They see movement down there,” came the reply. “They see movement down there. Chas is dug in and got bunkers.”

  Cherry gulped.

  CHAPTER 14

  Slowly, very slowly, Whiteboy stepped forward, down, descending toward the draw. He crept. He inched. The crest of the ridge was 25 meters uphill to his left. The draw was 50 meters ahead, to the left. He did not want to cross below the saddle of the draw in the canyon that ran down toward the big valley. He aimed at the point where the draw should be flat. He circled toward it. He would direct his squad to spread below the saddle on both sides, wait for the entire platoon to come on line behind them then begin the sweep up toward the peak.

  It was becoming darker under the canopy. It was mid-afternoon, 1540 hours, but the mountain to the west already cast the pointman in shadow. Below to the right through the jungle vegetation an occasional glimpse of the Khe Ta Laou revealed the valley still cloaked beneath heavy fog.

  Whiteboy proceeded deliberately. He studied each step before he made it, studied the earth, the jungle to his left and right and front. He wanted to look over his shoulder to check Hill’s position yet he fought the urge and concentrated on the jungle before him. Shadows were playing in the patchwork greenness, deep black holes beneath vine-draped palms aiming their muzzles toward him. It would be so easy for a sniper to be in that hole, beneath that tree, there or there or there. Fuck it, Man, Whiteboy said to himself. Doan mean nothin. But Ah aint gonna do this. This gettin worse au the time … If Ah had mah druthers me en Lit’le Boy’d be someplace else. Fuck it. Whiteboy massaged his weapon with his large hands. He stepped forward. He planned the next step and the next and the next, like a chess player planning well in advance before moving, anticipating the locations of an enemy before him, anticipating the moves the enemy would make, the counter-moves he would have to make to survive.

  Behind Whiteboy the tension in Hill was immense. He wanted to scream. It was hot, muggy. The straps of his ruck were cutting deeply into his shoulders. His mouth was dry. He did not dare make an extraneous movement.

  The column had again moved out in the same order of march, Whiteboy’s squad with the big infantryman at point followed by Egan and Cherry and now Thomaston then 1st Sqd, 2d Sqd, the company CP, 2d Plt and 3d Plt lagging at drag and rear security.

  Whiteboy set an even slower pace than he had during the morning move. He stayed lower on the hill, below the ridge’s crest. Had they been on the crest when the NVA mortars fell, the enemy would have inflicted heavy casualties but as it happened the explosions kicked shrapnel out horizontally and Alpha had been below the flying steel. No one in the column had been injured. Several of the mortar rounds had impacted on the LZ and there the shrapnel had been more serious. Carlos Fernandez, RTO of the 3d Sqd, 3d Plt, had been chatting in a clearing on the LZ when the first rounds were launched. “Man,” he had said to the soldier next to him, “that sounds like mortars.” With the first burst, everyone on the LZ hit the dirt. There were crater holes from the early morning bombardment and low indentations from ancient and collapsed NVA foxholes. Fernandez slithered to a shallow depression. The rounds came up the rid
ge, across the LZ, down the eastern side of 848. Dirt, smoke and the smell of cordite saturated the air. “Oh God,” Fernandez cried. “God, you get me out of this and I do anything you ask. You know. Anything. I never do nothing wrong again. I don’t touch myself. I be a monk.” Within a minute it was over. There were no wounded but Fernandez’ ruck was the victim of a near direct hit. It was ruined. Cans of fruit and food seeped juices onto the earth. Shrapnel had pierced three of his canteens, his poncho was shredded, his PRC-25 was scrap. And worst of all, he was going to have to salvage and carry whatever he could. No more helicopters were due at their location until resupply three days away. “For thees I say I be a monk? Me an my beeg mouth.”

  The mortars had stopped Alpha’s progress until Major Hellman, the battalion executive officer, heard the Cobra pilots report seeing the mortar pit and then enemy movement. “Hell, yes,” Major Hellman had screamed through the radio at Brooks, “I want you to go after them. What do you think you’re down there for, Boy? Get off your ass and go get a body count.”

  “Yes Sir,” Brooks said, pissed over the ‘Boy’ reference.

  Rufus Brooks was six years old when he realized there was something different about being black. He and his older brothers had been playing stick-ball when the game erupted and Rufus came shooting through the family’s Oakland flat chasing his brothers with the bat. The two older boys raced down the hall, cut into the parlor then stopped dead in their tracks. There, on the edge of his chair, a scowl on his face, sat their father. Rufus was last into the room. He went flying past his brothers, out of control, stumbled and pushed an end table over, knocked ashtray and ashes onto the old man.

  The roar was unintelligible to the young boy but the booming noise that came from his father communicated enough message. His father rose, raged, grabbed the stickball bat and cracked it in two over the end table. “You get outa this house, Boy. I’ll break every bone in your body you do a fool thing like that again.” The older boys bolted; Rufus scampered at their heels thanking heaven and his sneakers to be out of the room alive.

  In the hall of the flat the older boys dodged their mother but Rufus ran squash into her large soft body.

  “What’s matter wid you, chil’?” she cooed gently, her hand in his hair.

  “Don’t you go calling him child,” his father shouted into the hall. “Do you want him to grow up like every other nigger on this block?”

  Rufus trembled in his mother’s arms. His father came out, scowled, hesitated, then apologized. He knelt in the hallway with his arm around the boy and said times were bad because he’d lost his job. “I want you and your brothers to grow to be gentlemen in the finest sense,” he said. “I want you to know what is right and what is wrong. And you must always do what is right. Do you understand that, Son?”

  The frightened little boy trembled, choked back a cry and with wide eyes stared at the large man.

  “Rufus,” his father said trying to be gentle, trying to calm the boy, “Rufus, you are black. It’s not enough for you to be good. You have to be the best.”

  While Rufus was growing up he was surrounded by conflict both from within his family and from without. George Brooks had come from a merchant family, his own father owned and managed a small retail business in Oakland. Rufus’ mother had come from a poor southern family. She was a simple unpretentious woman, unlike her husband. “We are a family of color,” George Brooks would say to his son. “Of what ca-la?”’ his wife would shrug.

  In the early fifties, after losing his job, George Brooks went to work at his father’s store. At night he took classes which led to a degree. He became an electronics technician as that industry first began to boom. George so badly wanted the best for his family he pushed himself hard. For a few years things went well. He moved his young family to the new white suburb of Westgate just south of San Francisco. They had purchased the home through a white friend of his father’s because at that time it was still impossible for a black man to buy in the suburbs. There were minor incidents but they passed and the Brookses settled in with their white neighbors. Until the late forties Westgate had been cabbage fields and hog farms and in the early fifties the development still had a rural atmosphere. Outwardly George Brooks was proud. His wife was excited. Inwardly George was uneasy and apprehensive.

  Rufus could still recall the pride he had in his father and he could still picture the house. It had been a yellow stucco box that looked like all the other stucco boxes being constructed south of San Francisco. There had been three bedrooms, a tiled bath, a living room with a brick fireplace and a dining el and even a kitchen with a picture window that overlooked the back lawn and the newer construction beyond and the fields beyond the framed skeletons. The house was nicer than anything his cousins lived in. The families of his father’s brothers lived near their grandfather’s store in east Oakland. That wasn’t too bad. The few cousins from his mother’s side lived in run-down basement apartments where the plumbing worked sporadically and where the best entertainment during a visit was chasing the rats in the hallway.

  When Rufus was nine years old his father lost his job again. Just prior to being fired George Brooks had been promoted to assistant design engineer and the whole family had celebrated.

  Some of their white neighbors and some co-workers had come to their house and Rufus was shy but very proud. When George Brooks was fired no one stopped by to express their condolences. Rufus was ashamed. Years later his father told him he had been fired as part of a plot to force the blacks to move out of the neighborhood.

  The Brookses went from being an oddity in Westgate to being a threat. After Brooks was without a job the neighbors spoke of the nigger family who didn’t know enough or didn’t care enough to finish the landscaping around their house. Incidents were infrequent at first, but the longer George Brooks was out of work the more depressed the home became and the more frequent paint or excrement or screams of “Nigger go home,” splattered against the front of the house. Rufus was sheltered from the brunt of the abuse by his mother and father but he was not sheltered from his mother’s tears or his father’s indignation.

  George Brooks instituted legal action in an attempt to get his job back. Pride forced him to accept no other employment. Rufus had not understood how or why it had happened and he thought if he could just tell someone, people would-understand and they would help and everything could be set straight.

  When Rufus was ten years old his family moved into a four-room apartment in the projects of east Oakland. The apartment was already occupied by the family of Rufus’ uncle, and Rufus, his brothers and his parents moved into one room. The projects were rectangular rows of green and pink stucco-sided shoeboxes with caged windows and fight-for-sur-vival, fight-for-recognition gangs.

  For several years the Brooks family shifted between the poor black Fillmore district of San Francisco and the ghetto of east Oakland. George Brooks spent what little money he had attempting to rectify his employment difficulties and when the money was gone he gave up. He pumped gas. His wife became a domestic for a wealthy white family who lived in a large house in the Oakland hills. Rufus’ mother would stand at the windows of the Victorian mansion and gaze out to the Bay and the Bay Bridge and across to the San Francisco skyline and south toward where her wonderful yellow stucco home had been.

  On Rufus’ twelfth birthday his family moved into a comfortable apartment in San Francisco’s Mission District and the next year his father was again working in the electronics industry—now as an assembler. Times improved but they were never the same. George Brooks spent nights in bars and Rufus’ mother withdrew and became very quiet and Rufus spent more and more time away from home, much of it roaming the streets by himself.

  In high school Rufus excelled. He was accepted by the roughest street gang for his physical attributes; he became a track star and captain of the basketball team; he was liked by teachers and college-bound students. For the first time in his life he was accepted by everyone, yet he accepted
no one. Each of the groups with which he associated despised all the other groups. How could he truly accept any one of them, he would ask himself, without rejecting all the others? Rufus was friendly. He listened, but he very seldom talked.

  Rufus’ post-high school plans were to join the Marine Corps but his father had refused to sign for him, had forced him to consider continuing his education as the only method of insuring a future. He wanted Rufus to become an attorney.

  In September 1963 Rufus Brooks entered the University of San Francisco on a partial basketball scholarship. The sport became his ticket through school, his invitation to fraternities, his pass to parties and his introduction to girls, both black and white. Rufus was cool. He could play ball. To help finance his education Rufus joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps—one month after the North Vietnamese reprisal attack on the American destroyers C. Turner Joy and Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin.

  In college Rufus maintained his quiet exterior yet he developed a harsh critical eye. People liked him. He was an intellectual and an athlete—the perfect token. He was accepted by everyone on campus though he did not allow himself to accept anyone nor would he allow anyone to know the real Rufus. He always maintained a distance. For a time Rufus dated only white girls, but then, in his junior year, he met Lila, a beautiful mocha-colored singer and painter.

  “You act so BAD,” Lila teased him, “but I know you. Inside you just a marshmallow. You don’t fool me. You don’t gotta be criticizin things for me. I love you the way you are.” It was magic. He saw this woman accepting him as he saw himself, taking him as her man, without qualification, without plans, without motives.

  In his senior year they were engaged. The next autumn, during his first semester of graduate school, they were married.

  “Sir, does Red Rover wish Quiet Rover to delay until your niner element is back on station? Over,” Brooks said. The reference and implication was this: the GreenMan had been flying in his C & C bird 4000 feet above the action most of the morning. The helicopter had returned to Camp Evans for refueling. In his absence Major Lothar Hellman, exec of the 7/402, sitting in the forward TOC on Firebase Barnett, was in charge. Brooks did not trust the major. He wanted to delay until the GreenMan returned.