13th Valley

by John M. Del Vecchio

  There aren’t any birds out here, Cherry said to himself. I just noticed that. That really is peculiar. Lots of helicopters but no birds. Maybe they all left because they felt replaced by the mechanical flying machines. Cherry’s mind wandered but his eyes were very aware of the red ball. Where the fuck did Greer go? Cherry began thinking about his brother. He thought about their motorcycles. They had once planned on running the moto-cross series at the upstate parks and tracks but then Victor had split for Canada. Cherry thought about some of the girls he knew and about McDonald’s hamburgers. His mind would not stay on one thought. He began thinking about girls again. Damn, he was horny. He thought about Cathy and Judy. Then he thought about Linda. Linda. Was she still in Philadelphia? He planned his ravaging of her when he returned. Then he fantasized seducing the stewardess he’d met on the flight from New York to Seattle, seducing her while other passengers discreetly watched. What am I thinking? he thought. That’s not me. I’m not like that.

  Cherry looked across the trail, up the trail. He was conscious of his body and of the trail. Where the hell is Greer? They must be taking a break. Cherry turned around. The man behind him was sitting quietly, cleaning his fingernails. Cherry’s mind no longer seemed to be functioning properly. He could not maintain a thought. His mind jumped and jittered impatiently. He had, it seemed, ten thoughts working at once, all struggling for dominance and failing. There was the trail. Wasn’t he here to discover something about the elusive truths of the Vietnam Conflict? And Linda’s body. And Victor. And his shoulders. God, they were sore. Cherry’s watch was ticking. He could hear his heart pumping. He was aware of his thinking, thinking about his thinking about all these things. It was exhausting to be thinking so. He at once felt tired, physically and mentally, and yet excited, held in suspense. A twig to his right broke.

  El Paso received the mail for the CP and 1st and 2d Plts from Spangler. He sorted it. He handed Brown a letter. There was a San Francisco Chronicle for the L-T and the July 27th issue of Newsweek for Silvers. He gave Cahalan the mail for 2d Plt and delivered the letters to 1st Plt personally. There was a letter for Jackson and one for Whiteboy and along with the magazine a small package for Silvers. “They didn’t get it all sorted in the rear,” El Paso said to Egan. “Maybe on next resupply. Ya know, fuckin REMFs can’t do nothing right.”

  “They bring in the dogs’?” Egan asked ignoring El Paso’s’ comment.

  “Just one. Brought out another civilian photographer.”

  “Good. That’s just what the fuck we need.”

  “He aint stayin though. Bird’s goina come back for him. Most a 3d’s still up on the LZ with em.”

  “Can’t these people ever do any fuckin thing right?”

  “Who knows?” El Paso shrugged. “Hey where’s the Jew? His mommy sent him a package.” Silvers was close by and he looked up guiltily. He knew what was coming. It came once a month. “Com’on Leon,” El Paso cajoled, “let’s see what mommy sent.”

  Egan and Jackson and Hoover and everybody close by were laughing and Silvers laughed too. When he had first arrived in-country it had been during the monsoon season. He had sent a description of the rains to his folks along with an explanation about immersion-foot. Immersion-foot was the army updated euphemism for trench-foot, a painful foot disorder resulting from prolonged exposure to wet in which the skin wrinkles and creases then layers begin separating leaving the foot raw. Every month since Leon’s description, he had received a soft package from his mother.

  “Come on, Leon,” Hoover chimed in, “let’s see em.” Silvers tore away the brown paper and held up two pair of bright yellow knee-high socks. He gave a half-hearted smile and sighed, “Mother!”

  “Letter for Jax too,” El Paso called. He enjoyed passing out the mail.

  Jackson took the letter and looked at the envelope. It was from his brother-in-law. He put the letter in his helmet and returned to his perimeter position. It’ll be jest like all them others, he told himself.

  Brooks pretended to be studying the topo maps and the reports of contacts and enemy sightings. Things were turning up all around the valley. Charlie Company had found fighting positions with overhead cover on Hill 711 five kilometers west of Company A. Across the valley Bravo had found another red ball with signs of vehicular traffic, that could mean carriage-mounted .51 caliber machine guns or possibly 37mm anti-aircraft cannons or nothing more than a pushcart for rice. Recon was lying low, sending out patrols, not finding recent signs of enemy activity but finding old ARVN NDPs and some questionable material. Licking their wounds, Brooks thought. Only Delta had reported no sightings at all. They had come in on a peak on the north escarpment and had decided to come almost straight off the south face which was a cliff. No one, no NVA, would place positions there, Brooks thought. It would be too easily surrounded and then impossible to escape. And the GreenMan’s pilot in the C & C bird with the GreenMan aboard had shot up a sampan on the river with unknown results.

  Brooks stared at the maps and repeated the reports but now he was not aware he was doing it. He was thinking of Lila again, of their conflict and of conflict in general. He tried not to think about her. He attempted to supplant it with thoughts of the here and now but it didn’t work. There was Lila and there was that thing bothering him and there was racial tension and there was war. They were all conflicts and he wanted to think about conflict causation but under it all there was that thing. The thing in Hawaii. Perhaps it had really begun with their first fight and with what happened afterward. Maybe, he thought, that was the origin of the Hawaii thing. It goes back a lot farther than those divorce papers, he said to himself. Farther back even than Hawaii or even than getting married. Man, he thought, so your gal’s off with some Jody. So what. When you get back to the World you can slip into his AO and set up an MA. It won’t mean a thing. How does Egan always say it? ‘Don’t mean nothin. Just say fuck it and drive on.’ Yeah, it don’t mean nothin. Goddamn Lila. Goddamn you. Goddamn, it’s a lot easier to get into a woman’s pants than it is into her head. Goddamn she knows how to hurt a person. She has the power to make me feel like shit. It’s not her, Rufus, it’s you. The conflict came with you. You brought it to this marriage. You bring it with you wherever you go. The causes of conflict between two people are the same as the causes of racial violence and of war. Goddamn, I wonder if that’s true.

  He could not get hold of his thoughts. Concepts began to crystallize then vanished. The thought production element of his brain was pumping out work faster than the analyzer element could handle it and a backup of ideas overwhelmed him. He recognized what was happening. He relaxed, took a few deep breaths. It was a perfectly beautiful day in the jungle. Well, maybe it was too warm. “Rufus,” the lieutenant said to himself, “we must back up on our thoughts, back up on theory development, back up to the beginning and take this one step at a time. Think carefully. Be patient. The goal should be to develop a framework theory for conflict by careful elucidation of the concepts, correct analysis of the information available and patient resolving of the problem.”

  That thought made him feel very good. It gave him a clear guideline for his thinking task. An Inquiry into Personal, Racial and International Conflict, he titled it in his mind. Then, he said to himself, we’ll get down to this Hawaii thing.

  Shortly after Rufus and Lila met, he persuaded her to spend a weekend with him. She had refused to be at or near his school or with his jock friends—” like that Italian creep,” she had scoffed—and that, perhaps was the real beginning. Brooks had been nearly broke. Lila was singing and painting and earning and had far more money left over after expenses than he did even with his assistance, ROTC pay and scholarship. And trying to get a date with this lady had been near impossible. She was always out with dudes with bread. “I’ve got two tickets to …”—what concert had it been—he began after finally catching her home. She said yes to it all much to his surprise. “Meet you at Keystone Korners at seven Friday,” she said. And that had been that.
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  Dinner was delightful, the concert superb, all of it costly. Rufus had let one of his teammates reserve rooms for him. “It’s gotta be cheap,” he had told his friend, “but it can’t look cheap.” Rufus took Lila to the Kennedy Hotel down on the Embarcadero. It was the cheapest place in town. Rooms began at $7 and that was for a week. Not that his friend registered them for the cheapest room. He had paid $7 for two nights. Rufus and Lila came in late, through the darkened lobby, a ten-foot-square room with a desk, up the dimly lighted stairs and down the dark narrow hallway. He half carried her as she nuzzled her nose into his ear. He opened the door. Without turning on the light, with only indirect lighting from the street coming through the window, he undressed her and she tore his clothes away. She was a madwoman, a crazed woman. He could not get enough of her or she of him, especially she of him. After, as he slept, tried to sleep, she stirred and moaned faintly and stimulated herself.

  “This isn’t a bad place,” he joked and laughed the next morning, happy, cheerful, anticipating the morning, afternoon and night to come.

  “This is a filthy trap,” she had growled getting her first good look around. There wasn’t even a shower in the bath. She hadn’t noticed that before. The showers were down the hall. She went to inspect them and returned yelling, “This stinking hole’s filled with bums and fags.” She scurried away from his outstretched hands. “No way college boy. You bring your hookers here.” She was indignant. He couldn’t understand it. It caused their first fight. She called a cab and left.

  Rufus had paid for the room for two nights. He stayed. Indeed the hotel proved to be infested with cockroaches and frequented by homosexuals. That night, alone, depressed, he allowed a man to pick him up. It was the first and last time. The man was a short-order cook. He invited Rufus to a birthday party at the Club 77. “Hey, I’m game,” Rufus said. He could not believe what he saw. Not the guys kissing and squeezing so much, that he expected, but the food. The club was closed except to regulars and their dates. The bar was open, booze flowed freely, and in back the buffet was two eight-foot tables end-to-end stacked with mounds of food. In the center of the table there was a cake Rufus would swear was five feet in diameter and four feet high. All this just for allowing some white fag to rub his buns.

  For a month after that weekend Brooks tried to get a date with Lila, even for lunch. He apologized profusely over the phone. He dated no one else. The homosexual called him several times but he refused to even talk to the man. Rufus finally arranged to see Lila but she broke the date. He tried again, then again and again. He needed her badly but every date made was broken. Finally they had it out.

  “Look, you want to know what’s going on,” he yelled at her. “I’ll tell you what’s going on. I’ve been trying to get a date with you for a month. That’s right, Lady, a month. Every time I phone you’re all booked up and you say, ‘call me back.’ But every time I call you you always have a sick girl friend to take care of or something. So I, like a sucker, say, ‘What about the next day or the next?’ and you say, ‘Well I’m going sailing on Saturday and it’s going to run into Sunday with the regatta and I’ll be too tired Monday. Why don’t you call me on Tuesday?’ Lady, that’s been going on all month. Lady, you just go off with your rich boyfriends. I wish you the best. That’s right. I really do. I’m happy to have known you.”

  “My goodness,” Lila said coldly, nastily. “You’re jealous. You really are, aren’t you? You think just because we’ve gone out you own me. Aren’t we getting awfully possessive? Do you think you own every woman that lets you touch her? You bastards are all alike. You lay a guy once and he thinks he owns you.”

  “At least, Lady, I’m only out with one woman at a time. How many men do you have chasing you, hanging around cause you’re in heat?”

  “Why you lousy … lousy … honky’s fag.” That’s what she said. He could hear her say it now. “… honky’s fag. You jive with them cocksuckers in Fag Hilton.” He stopped. The fight had passed. Making up from the fight had been terrific. He probably would never have thought of it again had it not been for Hawaii and then the divorce papers.

  Rufus and Lila dated more and more frequently and finally exclusively. At times she bickered and complained that she was being lost in the narrowly directed course his life was taking but he was always able to overcome her arguments with an intellectual logic she could not refute. And he was so happy. That meant a lot to her. He brought enough love to their relationship for the two of them. They fought but they always made up and they had such good times. They married and soon he was on active duty.

  Brooks craned his neck. Then what happened? he thought. Brooks cleared his mind. He breathed deeply and said to himself, the roots of conflict and the expansion and escalation to violence are similar whether interpersonal or international. That’s the beginning of the answer. Perhaps conflicts caused by …

  Brooks’ thoughts were interrupted by the crackbarking of an M-16 close by. Then the popping of an AK, two AKs opening up. Then more 16s.

  Cherry sat motionless for what seemed like a year. Behind him Roberts had also heard the twig snap. Cherry went rigid. The blood in his veins seemed to squeak, his tired bones and joints creaked, his watch ticked thunderously. Slowly, slower than he had ever moved in his life, he turned right. He looked behind him, moving only his eyes. Roberts had stopped cleaning his fingernails and was watching him.

  Someone was coming up the trail. Cherry reached down with his left hand and silently moved the selector of his M-16 from safe through semiautomatic to automatic. Very slowly he lifted his rifle to his shoulder. He could feel his arms quivering, his stomach cramping. He examined the trail below him, scrutinizing every leaf. Again he heard something. A footstep.

  His mind clicked to being a soldier. The first general order shot over his tongue. “I will guard everything within the limits of my post and quit my post only when properly relieved.”

  Roberts could not see the red ball from where he sat but he too heard the approach and he aimed his rifle toward the noise. The second man behind Cherry was beyond the sight of either of the two poised with their weapons.

  Throw a frag, flashed through Cherry’s thoughts. Throw a frag. Goddamn it, I don’t have a frag. Training took over. Cherry had an instantaneous flash of an entire platoon on an infiltration exercise. The men low-crawled slowly through the woods at Ft. Dix. There were thirty men crawling and it was difficult to tell anyone was there at all.

  From the depths of the trail, amidst the vines and brush, Cherry could distinguish a man’s shoulder. Then a head and chest. Cherry waited. The man approached with extreme caution. He was carrying an AK-47 automatic rifle. He wore Ho Chi Minh sandals, khaki shorts and shirt and a pith helmet.

  Go away! Cherry’s mind ordered the soldier. Do something.

  Still the man approached. He was less than twenty feet away. With underhand beckoning typical of Vietnamese he motioned for someone to his rear to come forward.

  Get the fuck outa there! Oh, God. Cherry was furious and frightened. Why me? If Egan were here he’d know what to do. Maybe he’s South Vietnamese.

  The soldier moved forward another step and all thoughts vanished from Cherry’s mind. Cherry’s arms steadied, the soldier’s nose rested above the front sight post of Cherry’s M-16. The man stepped forward into clear view. Slowly, Cherry squeezed the trigger and a volley of eight rapid shots cracked from his weapon. Instantly from below the first enemy soldier, two AK-47 rifles discharged long volleys of explosive bursts. The AK fire hit to Cherry’s right and left and one round smashed into the dirt below his left foot.

  Again Cherry squeezed, this time aiming only at the sound of the enemy rifles. His and Roberts’ M-16s drilled the trail and jungle below them cutting branches and leaves. Cherry ejected the magazine and immediately inserted another and continued firing until the AK fire stopped. The action seemed to take minutes but Cherry knew it was only seconds. Cherry retreated toward Roberts. He dove and lay prone on his sto
mach. Peering from behind a tree he pointed his weapon toward the last burst of enemy fire. His breathing was deep and quick. Roberts leaped and set up beside Cherry. Sklar, Lairds, Denhardt and Polanski closed into a defensive ring, all searching the jungle.

  “What’d ya see?”

  “I got a dink,” Cherry babbled frantically. “I saw him fall.”

  “Shhh,” Roberts ordered. Again they waited.

  “Where’s everybody else?” Roberts asked quietly.

  “I don’t know,” Cherry whispered. “They’re up the hill. I’ve been waiting for them to …”

  He was interrupted by Moneski’s voice shouting from about forty meters up the red ball. “It’s us. Don’t fire. Anybody hurt? We’re comin down.”

  CHAPTER 18

  “Let’s go over it again,” Brooks said to Cherry, Roberts and Moneski. All four had cigarettes going.

  It was late afternoon. The last of the patrols were just returning to the company position. The men who had remained behind had already dug foxholes and most had eaten. The returnees ate, rested for a few minutes, then picked and shoveled at the resisting earth. It was a repeat of the motions from the day before except this time it was more complex and more confused and they were more tired. The boonierats were back in the boonies without any vestige of REMF mentality.

  “Dude from 1st Plt got’m a gook,” they whispered to each other. “They sayin he blew the dink’s head clean off.” Even the two squads from 3d Plt which had remained on 848 were whispering it back and forth. “New cherry in 1st Plt KIAd one NVA.” It excited them all.