Reports from Recon’s early morn firelight indicated that the recon platoon had engaged an estimated NVA reinforced squad. Technically they were still pursuing the enemy. The GreenMan had been excited and the Old Fox had been very pleased. “Caught em with their pants down,” the Old Fox had smiled. Now Alpha Company could follow it up, could seize the initiative, attack the reported bunker complex, overrun the enemy. “Goddamnit, Rover Four, you get your ass in gear,” Hellman had screamed. “We got em on the run. Go get em, Boy.”
Go get em, Boy, Brooks muttered to himself. I’ll get em, Boy. I might just turn this element around and overrun your position. Brooks handed the krypto radio handset back to Cahalan, grabbed El Paso’s handset and ordered the move to re-commence.
The motion of the point was so slow from the column’s mid-point and back that most of the soldiers were sitting between steps forward. Everyone was daydreaming. Brooks had a vision of his wife. He could see Lila and the arm of another man about her waist. Fuck it. Brooks chased the image away.
This is crazy, Cherry moaned to himself. If we’re goina get into it, let’s get into it. Egan glared back at him every time the radio antenna touched a twig. Fuck him, Cherry thought.
Farther back, Jackson was wondering if his child would be a boy or a girl. Girls is so pretty, he told himself, but boys is so much mo fun. William Andrew Jackson, Junior, an announcer said within Jackson’s thoughts, the son of the Vietnam War hero, the great-great-great grandson of a slave, today was inaugurated as the first black President of the New United States of America.
Should Ah? Whiteboy asked himself. If Ah do an the L-T finds out, Ah’ll be in a big worl a hurt. God A’mighty. If Ah do it ever gook in the AO goan know where Ah’m. Theah might even be a gook rahght theah thinkin Ah’m firin at’m an Ah can’t see a godblessamerica thin. Thinkin doan always do a man good. Sometime it’s bettah ta just do it. Oh Lit’le Boy, do yo stuff.
And in the still total silence, dispelling every thought from every boonierat head, Whiteboy’s machine gun like the first clap of thunder in the quiet before a storm ripped—explosive crackchattering savage spray. Not a burst. Continuous. Whiteboy fired the big gun from his hip, spraying the black holes of jungle, sweeping jerkily up and back. Hill jumped to his side, emptied his own M-16 into the jungle, attached a belt to the flapping tail of Whiteboy’s ammunition, reloaded his 16 and fired another clip. Andrews and Frye sprayed uphill, Kirtley and Mullen downhill, Harley fired the grenade launcher over the point. Egan jumped over Mullen, a hand grenade, pin out, spoon depressed, in his fist, arm cocked, throw dive. Egan now prone beside Whiteboy cutting the jungle to pieces with his M-16. Thomaston, Jackson, Silvers and Marko jumped past Cherry. Pop Randalph, not to be left out, up from the 2d Plt, jumped into the middle of the growing enfilading point. Cherry was on hands and knees, crawling forward toward Egan, his radio crackling. “What’s happenin?” El Paso demanded. He did not know if there were fifty NVA out there or one. “Rover Two …” Cherry couldn’t hear. “Rover Two …” the radio squealed. Suddenly it was the only sound to be heard. Everything else ceased.
“Lobo Niner, this is Quiet Rover Four Niner,” Brooks addressed the Old Fox. The company commander now went through a complicated explanation of the action, an action he did not fully understand himself. He completed his transmission with a request to withdraw to Alpha’s position of earlier that afternoon and to set up for the night. He requested artillery and air strikes devastate the peak to his west. All requests were granted. The boonierats loved it. Brooks was dubious.
Cherry was bewildered again—excited, exhilarated, scared and bewildered. The front of the column had backed up 100 meters, the rear had descended a short distance and the sides of the unit had bulged, but only barely, off the trail. Word had come down to dig in and to prepare an NDP, a night defensive position. Air strikes and artillery were ordered. Co-ordinates were checked and re-checked.
Cherry’s exhilaration came partly from the excitement of the day and partly because he was no longer totally petrified. So this is it, he thought. This is war. This is combat. This is what I’ve come so far to see and be a part of. It was a nice feeling, a satisfying accomplishment, and experience. It was scary. Well, maybe not so scary right now with all these old-timers around, he thought. Here I am, me and my young cherry ass, and here are all these cool-headed dudes. Veterans. I’m going to be okay. What little rice-propelled bastard with a little rifle is going to challenge that giant Whiteboy with his 60? And who could ever make a mistake with Egan around? Indeed, Cherry was completely surrounded by veteran boonierats. It seemed to him they were all there to protect him. The more he thought about it the more secure he felt and the more he liked them. It welled up in him as a warm happy feeling. He would do anything he could for any troop in Alpha Company, he decided. He was young, vigorous. He breathed deeply and felt the strong muscles of his chest and arms tighten. And he was in combat. It was wonderful, it would be wonderful. It was all that simple.
Cherry walked back to the 1st Sqd where Jackson and Lt. Thomaston were making coffee. “We’re stayin here tonight,” Cherry announced with a smile. “L-T says to dig in.”
“Right on, Bro me,” Jax said. “Want some coffee?”
“No thanks,” Cherry said. Neither of the men said anything. Cherry looked around then returned down the trail and moved through the point ring to where Whiteboy was sitting.
“Ah got two months lef,” Whiteboy muttered as Cherry sat. “Ah was hopin Ah could stay outa this shit.” He did not take his eyes off the trail below him.
“Yeah,” Cherry agreed toning down his enthusiasm.
Leon Silvers came down and joined them. He had a canteen cup with hot mocha in it. “How’s it goin?” he asked handing Whiteboy the cup. Whiteboy shrugged. Silvers sat with them in silence for several minutes then rose and said, “Man, ya oughta move up and dig in.”
Whiteboy looked up, nodded but just sat there. Silvers gave him a sidearm power salute, turned and climbed back up the trail and out of sight.
Cherry sat next to Whiteboy for several long minutes. He was vaguely hoping Whiteboy’s stature and speed would ooze from the big soldier and into himself. They sat there with their weapons pointing down the trail. Cherry did not say anything and tried not to be too obvious yet he wanted to look at the gun Whiteboy called Lit’le Boy. He wanted to feel it, to fire it.
“Man,” Whiteboy said quietly after some time, “am Ah glad they mortared us.” Cherry wrinkled his forehead but said nothing. “Man,” Whiteboy said, “if they’da ambushed us, Ah wouldn’t even be heah.” He shook his head slowly keeping his eyes on the trail and the jungle downhill.
They sat in silence. The shadow from the peak with the bunker complex was crawling up the ridge descending from 848. Clouds, at first faint and thin, were forming high above the valley. The heat of the day dissipated. The fog choking the river below them was rising.
“Where you from?” Cherry whispered. “I mean, back in the World.”
“Nebraska,” Whiteboy whispered back.
“Where bouts?” Cherry asked.
“A lit’le town outside a Bridgeport,” Whiteboy said.
“Really?” Cherry marvelled, sounding in a very quiet voice as if he had just found a long lost brother.
“Yeah,” Whiteboy turned and looked at him for the first time. “You know it?”
“No, ah …” Cherry stumbled. “I’m ah, I’m from Bridgeport, Connecticut.”
“Um,” Whiteboy moaned and turned back to the trail.
They sat in silence again. Four helicopters appeared over the hilltop where Recon had been dropped during the morning CAs. Two of the birds were Cobras which seemed to be attempting a complicated dual figure-eight movement. Off to one side a LOH, light observation helicopter (pronounced loach), hummed, hovered, darted short distances left then right, looking and behaving like a large bumblebee. Below the Cobras a Huey slick with white doors and red crosses hovered, descended, landed. Cherry was wat
ching the helicopters through a hole in the vegetation. “More birds comin in,” he whispered. Whiteboy looked over. “I wonder what’s happenin,” Cherry continued.
“Medevac,” Whiteboy whispered.
Again they sat in silence. Finally Cherry rose, tapped the big soldier on the shoulder, nodded and walked back toward the center of the point defensive ring.
“We’re gettin down there,” Egan said to Cherry. It was dusk now. Egan was waist deep in the earth. Red-orange clay clung to his fatigues. He bent over and swung the entrenching tool, half extended like a mattock, from above his shoulder hard down into the bottom of the foxhole. He swung it hard again, keeping his hands in tight to his body. Small wedges of clay broke from the bottom. He scraped the bottom and scooped up the chips and threw them onto the ground beside the hole.
They were surrounded by the sound of ETs and machetes hacking and slashing at the ground and at roots. Men not digging were on guard. The holes being dug were two-man foxholes 40 inches in diameter, 40 inches deep. Below the thin layer of mulch and humus the ground was hard-packed clay and rock. Thick roots ran through the clay like steel reinforcement bars in concrete. The trees beside the trail were so numerous and closely packed it was difficult to find a clear 40-inch diameter surface.
“When I was a kid,” Cherry said, “I thought if you dug deep enough you’d hit China. I wonder, if we dig deep enough here, will we hit the States?”
Egan looked up and laughed. “Here,” he said getting out of the hole and handing Cherry the ET, “you dig. If you get there, I’ll go with you.”
Egan and Cherry took turns digging. The shortness of the ET and the hardness of the earth jarred Cherry’s arms and hands. “This is tearin my hands apart,” he complained to Egan.
Egan was not paying attention to him. Now that he was not digging he was pensive. Cherry repeated his gripe. Egan looked at him. “Ya know, I bet Nguyen’s pissed the holy mothafuck off at us.”
“What?”
“He took all that time siting in this trail, waiting for someone to come trickytrottin down. Then he goes riskin firin our asses up in broad daylight.”
“He may think he got some of us,” Cherry said, resting, rubbing his hands.
“Naw. No medevacs.”
“Oh,” Cherry said quizzically. “Maybe we should a had one come in as a decoy.”
“Yeah,” Egan agreed. “Then if he fires us up tonight maybe he’ll drop em in on the same spot he missed us in this morning. Shit. Now the mothafuckers’ll adjust to our location. This was a bad move stoppin here.”
High above the valley a small, single-engine prop-airplane appeared. It circled above Alpha’s position, the sound of the small engine barely reaching the ground. The plane spiraled lower, increased the radius of its circle, descended again to an altitude perhaps only 200 meters above Company A. It made a pass over their heads from east to west and another from south to north then east to west again. Then it seemed to disappear. Several minutes later the tiny plane appeared again. It had regained much of its altitude. From the foxhole, with Egan pondering the problem of how to convince higher-higher to send in a decoy medevac, Cherry could see the small plane fire a rocket toward the opposing hillside. On the hill the rocket burst in a dense cloud of bright white-phosphorus marking smoke. Immediately the air split, a sound louder than artillery, than rockets, than bombs—a continuous roar ripping, splitting overhead and the tail of first one then immediately a second F-4 Phantom jet fighter-bomber shot past their position.
There was no warning. The fighter-bombers had come in low from the south then had dived down paralleling the descent from 848’s peak, not fifty feet above the ground, not twenty feet above the treetops. Quiet, peaceful, no audible approach warning and then the entire earth shaking, rattling. In the split second it took for the F-4s to pass over the heat from their exhaust defoliated the upper tips of the trees. The heat could be felt on faces and in eyes, the sound shook men to the bone. All Cherry had seen was the second tail as it sped past, a tail looking like a three-spoke wheel with an immense hub spewing hot exhaust gases and noise and vibrating limbs out of the trees.
“Holy Fuck!” Egan yelled, smiled, crept closer to the foxhole. “Chas don’t like them fast-movers. They bring in the damn-damn.”
The F-4s dove down the canyon toward the valley floor then pulled up hard left sweeping in a great arc out west beyond the valley, passing out of sight out of sound range someplace to the south.
Again the air ripped instantaneously. This pass was followed by an immense concussion pressing eyeballs and eardrums in toward the centers of skulls. Cherry was standing in the foxhole when the first 250-pound bomb burst. The explosion was directly across the saddle from him, at his same elevation. The shockwave rocked the entire ridgeline. Cherry flung himself to the bottom of the hole, Egan pounced head first in on top of him, scrambling to go deeper. A second blast thundered between the two peaks.
“Holy Christ Fuck,” Egan yelled. “Move them fuckers outa there.”
Again the two jets screamed over. They shriekroared down the valley flying faster than sound yet at treetop level, dropping napalm canisters and finned bombs on the suspected enemy location. The jets vanished before the bombs and canisters exploded. The flash flame sucked air from the side of 848. Black smoke mushroomed, spread, cloaked the next hill. Andrews screamed. Shrapnel from the bombs smashed into trees above and about the defensive point. Egan jumped from the foxhole, scrambled to Andrews who was lying facedown holding his side. Again the Phantoms dove from atop 848. Cherry heard Egan retch loudly, then vomit.
As night approached and the jungle went from green to gray artillery worked over the NVA bunker complex on the hill west of 848. Shells exploded at irregular intervals as much as fifteen minutes apart. Free soldiers clustered in groups. Half of Alpha remained on guard.
At 1st Plt CP, which was Egan and Cherry’s foxhole, Cherry and Jackson sat sharing a cup of coffee and a cigarette. Thoughts popped up in Cherry’s mind like pins on an electric bowling machine. Cherry looked at each thought briefly then knocked them all down with a mental disc and let another set pop up. In all that came up there were no pins he wished to share with Jackson. Yet he wanted to talk.
Jackson also wanted to speak. He knew that within an hour they would be completely silent, would enforce their own noise discipline, and he wanted to talk before the night actually began. But to Jax Cherry was such a white boy, a condescending college white boy and every syllable that got to Jax’ throat was stopped by his jaw.
“Jax,” Cherry finally said, “can I, ah, ask you something?”
“Say it, Bro,” Jax said back quickly, happiness in his voice.
Cherry stumbled for a moment. Then he said mechanically, “How long have you been here? I mean, ah, that’s not really what I meant to say.”
“Oh Man,” Jax laughed. “I been here longer en yo, Cherry. Boocoo longer en yo can even imagine. I was born here. Man,” Jax continued, “I can see what’s happenin in yo mind. It’s like written all over yo face. Yo gotta stop yo head from struttin like yo was back on the block, cause yo strut like that heah, yo aint never gettin back ta the block. Understand?”
“What I mean, what I meant was,” Cherry paused, then blurted, “I feel like a robot.” Cherry was unable to stop himself. He now felt committed to those words and felt he had to explain. “I feel like a robot with things just wired into me and I don’t understand why.”
“Yo is a robot. Yo a cherry. Yo s’pose ta be like that,” Jax said matterof-factly. “I remember my first time ta the field. Here’ ol Jax on his first CA.” Jackson began acting out his words, bopping his body as he sat. “I got my helmet all buckled down and my 16 on rock’n’roll. I jumps off the bird and hunch over and quick like a bobcat runs inta a bush. Somebody say, ‘Why yo got yo steel pot all strapped down?’ An I looks around. There’re guys leanin back catchin the sun. The CO’s standin up on the LZ scratchin his balls. An I’s all hunched up in this bush. Shee-it. We
was all cherry once. Man, yo jest been on yo first CA. Yo jest been mortared. There aint nothin yo ever done compares with CA. An, Cherry, that CA won’t nothin. Wait’ll yo hit a hot one. When yo catchin-all the shit Charlie can throw an yo still in yo bird an yo bird still comin in—THAT is the ultimate experience. Aint nothin like it. Better’n drug, better’n Colt-45.”
Jackson motioned down the trail to Daniel Egan who was approaching, “Even Egan was a cherry once hisself. Right, Eg?”
“Right, Jax. What’s happenin?” Egan climbed up to them and sat across the foxhole from them.
“Yo are, Bro,” Jax said. “I was jest tellin yo cherry yo was a cherry once yoself.”
“Shee-it, yeah. Hell, I was DRO at the Last Supper. You tell’m that?” Egan laughed a sadistic laugh.
“Sho did.”
“We nearly got him his cherry busted today.”
“We gowin get his cherry busted soon nough.”
Egan smirked to Cherry, “That was just makin out this afternoon. Not even heavy petting.”
“I tol him that too,” Jax laughed. “Sho did.” It was a strained laugh bordering on the sadistic and it strangely matched Egan’s laugh. “This one bad mofuckin AO. We gowin have us another 714. Dinks up the ass, Dudes.” Jax raised his left hand, countered on his fingers. “Dinks on the LZ, Recon hittin the shit, Barnett, dinks in bunkers. There dinks everyplace.”
“Fuck it. Don’t mean nothin.” Egan laughed again, again that strange sickening chuckle laugh.
“It’s really a pretty spot,” Cherry said seriously, somehow feeling guilty.
“Sho is pretty,” Jax said gazing into the jungle. “Lord,” Jax called in a quiet deep tone, “Lord, Yo sho done one nice job on this piece a creation but Yo sho fucked up puttin ol Jax out here. Look what these white folk done messin it up.”
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