13th Valley

by John M. Del Vecchio

  The howitzer round from Barnett exploded near to where the sound of the popping tube had come. “Right fifty,” FO called. “Yo on the money. Fire for effect.”

  KARRUMP! The NVA mortar rounds were exploding on Alpha’s old NDP, on their location of three hours earlier. “Shee-it,” Doc laughed. He turned to Minh and punched him on the shoulder. Up and down the column troops were breathing easier.

  KARABABOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM! Six US 105mm howitzer rounds exploded in the valley very close below Company A. The entire peak rocked. KARABABOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM! Another volley exploded. “Get em, Arty.” Another volley. The earth shook. Rifle fire was still clattering from Bravo’s position. KARABABOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM! Silent cheers arose, imaginary banners, waved. Silent bands played. The cavalry rode across ninety unseeable TV screens. The pioneers were saved.

  The frequency of artillery explosions in the valley increased. The 105s from Barnett were joined by huge 175mm and eight-inch howitzers from distant firebases. The small arms chatter at Bravo ceased, then erupted, then ceased again. It settled down to sporadic crackings in the wet drizzle night sky.

  “Bravo’s requesting an emergency Dust-Off,” Cahalan reported to the group.

  “No fucken way, Man,” Brown said.

  “How in fuck they gonna get them dudes out?” Doc whispered angrily. “How they gonna get a bird inta the middle a dis mothafuck?”

  “Their FO’s dead,” Cahalan said. “They got three urgent, one priority, one tactical urgent. And their FO.”

  “Oh this fucken valley,” El Paso said. “It’s socked in tighter en shit in yer ass when hell’s rainin down.”

  Cherry’s hands and legs were quivering. He had his radio on company internal freq and monitored the routine sit-reps from his squads and the other platoon CPs. His whole body shook. Oh God. Don’t let any of us get blown away. Please God.

  The sounds of the valley diminished. The small arms fire at Bravo’s location ceased. The NVA mortar tube was silent. US artillery slowed but continued to erupt in the valley. Waiting dragged heavily.

  “How will they get the wounded out?” Cherry whispered to Egan.

  “They’ll get em,” Egan said. “Medevac pilots got big brass balls.”

  Doc Johnson was sick, nauseous. The inability to help, to affect the situation at all, always made him ill with frustration and anger. You trah, trah, trah, Doc thought, an what it get you? You trah bein good, doin right, an it doan change a fucken thing, Mista. Not a fucken thing. It was the same in the rear and the lowlands as it was in the boonies. It was even the same back in the World.

  Doc was a large dark brown man, large and heavy for an infantryman. He had a large head and fuzzy black coarse hair and a scant fuzzy moustache that came to the corners of his mouth and curled back into itself. His chin was covered with coarse stubble. Over his left eye there was a deep scar, pink against his deep brown skin, that ran to the bridge of his nose and obliterated the eyebrow. In all, Doc had a heavy thick look which many people automatically associated with slowness, dullness and dumbness.

  Doc, Sergeant Alexander Vernon Johnson, was a city black. He was born and raised in New York, Manhattan, up at 143d Street with a turf extending from the Hudson River east across all of Harlem, mixed neighborhoods, mixed ghetto of Puerto Ricans and blacks, some whites, old Irish and Jewish remnants. Doc’s family had been lured from the South in the 1920s by the prospect of high-paying employment in the factories of the northeast, lured with tens of thousands of southern blacks migrating for a better life. Long before he was born, in 1949, his people had settled into a pattern of male nomadic job searching and broken matriarchal families. Alexander was raised by a woman who was not his mother in a family where the siblings were not blood brothers and sisters in a street culture which was more tribal than cognatic. Alexander had no father but many fathers, no mother but many mothers and no siblings but brothers and sisters everywhere on the turf.

  For a boy growing up in the city, the street was a good place, the best place. Inside it was dull, dingy gray close and dirty with age, the kind of dirt cleaning does not affect. Inside was where the winos laid in the hallways, where the roaches spawned in the moisture beneath sinks and behind tipping commodes. Inside the paint had all yellowed and cracked and chipped, and the plaster walls and ceilings had cracks running like veins in science book pictures of the human body. In the street there was handball and stickball and stoopball, and over at the school there was basketball. On the street the buildings had color and the walls carried ads for skin bleach and hair straightener. On the street there was music and dance. The street never, never was completely dark.

  Street life connotates a harsh nastiness to the uninitiated but to a boy who knew the street it was communal, pleasant. Alexander knew from very early on that someone or thing would watch out for his welfare by forcing him to school or by rapping with him when he needed a man to talk to or by protecting him when a rival gang invaded his turf. He was an inner-city poor black child who did not know he was poor and who scoffed at the social worker’s condescension. For a time he was a city cowboy, a small time street hustler, good friend, bad enemy.

  Alexander was the kind of teenager his country calls first when it needs men for war, the kind of man his country, even its military, rejects when there is no need for strong hands to carry rifles and strong backs to carry the dead.

  So it was with Alexander Johnson in 1966. At seventeen, his country decided it would like to use his services. Perhaps he was lucky to have had a brother advise him to enlist for a school instead of simply being drafted or perhaps he was wise enough to accept the advice or perhaps it was the vein-cracked walls and the science book diagram, for Alexander signed up for four years and a guarantee of medical corps training. Perhaps that was not luck at all.

  When Alexander left New York for basic training in early ’67, he thought New York would be an easy place to forget, the kind of place a man turns from easily. But almost immediately he missed his home, his siblings and his sister who was not his sister at all: his delightful little sister Marlena, three months apart in age and always together.

  When Alexander came home after basic training and before he was shipped to Texas for twenty-six weeks of medical training, he spent his week’s leave on the streets with old friends, but mostly he spent time with Marlena. One evening they had come through the streets and upon a street meeting. There were lots of young children running about and older people on the stoops sitting and talking and some older men sitting together drinking wine and several hard-looking women standing by the curb watching the street. It was late March and it was warm for the first time since the January thaw. Down the block, away from the meeting, Puerto Rican punks were playing stickball with stones, trying to clear the street and hit the windows in the buildings on the far side with their triples and homers.

  On the center stoop there were two sisters and three brothers. One sister raised up her arms and started to sing and the others joined in. Marlena’s eyes lit as she watched and listened and Alexander watched her as she watched the meeting.

  A white couple approached, crossed the street and passed, then recrossed the street and continued on their way. “Look at them folk,” Marlena sighed, “all dressed up in their white skin and their threads just so. That make me sad.”

  “That jus crazy,” Alexander said. “White folk is crazy. I’ll tell you bout them in Basic. Lena, white folk is a crazy cluster.”

  Marlena slipped her arm around Alexander’s waist and he put his arm about her shoulder and they looked at each other and gave each other a squeeze and she said, “Let’s go listen to some sounds and maybe do some boogyin.”

  The schools for army medics in San Antonio lasted from twelve to forty weeks depending upon the specialty. Draftees with two year commitments generally were run through a short course that concentrated on basic combat first aid—traumatic amputation, sucking chest wounds, shock. Enlistees, Regular Army personnel with more promising service length, were tra
ined in all the various medical fields from operating room technicians to physical therapists. For most, when their schooling was over, their first duty assignment placed them with medical detachments attached to combat units; they became grunt medics. It was thus with Alexander, twenty-six weeks of intensive medical training followed by a month’s leave and a year with the First Cavalry Division, November ’67 to November ’68, in I Corps, the Republic of Vietnam, as a grunt with a big bag of medical supplies.

  During the time of his paramedical training it was discovered that Marlena was suffering from a blood disease of the sickle-cell syndrome, a lethal disease where increasing numbers of red blood cells deform, become excessively fragile and finally burst in great numbers releasing toxins into the victim’s system. Treating the symptoms can elongate a victim’s life but the disease is painful, unstoppable and incurable.

  After a year with the Cav, Doc was assigned to the RNV training school at Fort Riley, Kansas, an assignment stimulating at first but terribly isolated and finally completely unacceptable.

  In July of ’69 Marlena died from untreated internal lung ulcerations and the complications of pneumonia. She died as much from lack of treatment as from the disease. “Died, Mothafucka,” Doc had screamed in drunken nauseous vomiting when he’d heard, “cause she was a beautiful black lady inheritin bad genes from some badass fucka seven thousand years ago. Died cause them people, my people, don’t yet know that they don’t have ta die.” On request, Doc was transferred back to Vietnam and in December of ’69 he was assigned to the 326th Medical Battalion Detachment attached to the First Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile).

  During the early months of his second tour Doc was in charge of the Oh-deuce MEDCAPs, Medical Civil Assistance Program. He and another medic and an interpreter and usually one or two boonierats temporarily in from the bush would go from hamlet to hamlet on a scheduled route. They tried to visit each of their eleven assigned hamlets once every week to ten days. At first that had given Doc Johnson a great deal of satisfaction but then the despair, the depression, the nausea set in. Doc Johnson once described it to El Paso.

  “There one thing, Mista, you gotta know first,” Doc had said. “It’s old age that hold traditional Vietnamese society together. You remember Quay, one fine Marvin de ARVN? Quay was my interpreter fo three months. He tell me how the Buddhist and the Taoist and the Confucianist all hold there to be a proper order in the universe. Like that’s their religion. Ya know what I mean? Everybody gotta respect the old cause that’s their proper place. You doan never be sarcastic to a old papa-san. He is like the man, the key of their social structure.

  “We go to a ville like Luong Vinh. There’d be dogs layin outside and baby-sans runnin round naked amongst the grass shacks. We go up to the school buildin which our own engineers built a corrugated steel in the center of the ville and Quay’d look for the village chief.

  “Mista, people’d jam inta that tin shack ta see me. They be round the corner standin in line. All a em barefoot. Quay’d go out, explain to em that I’d see all the baby-sans first, then the mamas with small children and then the old. People be standin on tiptoes ta see what I doin. Be jus like a circus tent. I’m maybe about done. Some old lady come up an I know she got TB or pneumonia an she gonna die. So I give her maybe some vitamins or somethin cause I know I can’t do nothin fo her. Or an old man come up and talk to Quay and Quay, he say to me, ‘Doc, you give this man some medicine. He an old man. He have no money. He need something to trade fo food.’ Like that.

  “Then I realized it, Mista. You understand what I’m sayin? There a reign a terror in them villes. It aint the Cong. It aint the NVA. It’s the cowboys. All these young bucks who aint been drafted yet. They like a gang back on the block cept worse. They approach, little kids dee-dee. Mamasans run. I give this one old man some Sing to, vitamins, and some nitrofurizone fo ring-worm. He leave the school house an four wiseass cowboys take half a what I give’m. They rough him up tee-tee then let’m go. Like a protection racket, Mista. The old man whimper his shit ta some baby-sans but he powerless.

  “Cowboys. That’s pure Americanization. They take half a everybody’s shit an sell it on the black market. All the middle-aged men been drafted. Or killed. They the link between the young and the old. These kids grow up without discipline. They’re like animals. The whole social structure fallin apart, Mista. An you know why? You know why, Mista? Nixon pushed Saigon inta passin one hundred percent mobilization an they draft every dude from eighteen to thirty-eight. And they put the seventeen and the thirty-nine ta forty-three-year-olds in the popular forces. Aint nobody left home ta mind the ville and the ville probably a refugee camp tha’s overcrowded anyway. Break my heart, Man. It break my fuckin heart.”

  It was the same feeling Doc Johnson had now, that same feeling he suffered when he had a boonierat brother lying with his intestines on the ground and blood flowing from a dozen holes in his body and the valley’s socked in and he could not get a medevac. It made him sick. The frustration went very deep. It went back to his sister’s death. Poor Marlena. She could have been helped but he could not, did not, help. It came from being black, from being low class ghetto, from speaking low ghetto English. You trah, Man. You trah, trah, trah. If only I could be a doctor, a real doctor. If only I could go to school, I could be a researcher or a doctor.

  Cherry could not stop shaking. His arms and back were quivering with the cold and his teeth chattered. “Maybe I’m coming down with malaria,” he whispered to himself. “Oh God, please let us get out of here.” Cherry had not been to church in over four years. He had been raised Roman Catholic, been baptized and confirmed and then he had broken away. Before coming to the boonies he had not prayed in years. Now he prayed hard. He thought of every prayer he had ever memorized as a child and he mouthed them. He said Hail Marys and The Lord’s Prayer and the Act of Contrition.

  “GreenMan’s on the horn to Bravo’s niner,” Cahalan’s voice slid into the wet blackness. “They got a Dust-Off comin out.” Cahalan reported in short low bursts, listening then speaking then listening.

  “Bout fuckin time,” Egan said.

  “They tried earlier,” Cahalan said. “First bird got lost comin up the Sông Bo. Ran low on fuel and returned.”

  Random artillery had been exploding in the valley. It stopped as the helicopters approached. For a moment everything was completely silent. Then the soft thwack of rotor blades reached the valley and quickly the noise level rose. The birds either had come out without lights on or the rainmist obscured and diffused the light completely. To Alpha they were only noise.

  “Little people gonna lay-n-wait fo the evac,” FO said.

  “They goina want that bird,” Egan agreed.

  “Oh God,” Cherry said aloud.

  The sound of the rotor blades slapping the night air caused an eerie sensation. It was difficult to distinguish what had arrived. There were at least two Cobras, one very large bird, possibly a Chinook, and three, maybe four Hueys.

  Bravo’s Senior RTO, Joe Escalato, was directing the birds to his location by sound. Escalato was well known to the old-timers of Alpha. He had been Lt. Brooks’ RTO when the L-T was a platoon leader with Bravo, and Escalato was a good friend of El Paso’s. “You can do it, Babe,” El Paso quietly cheered him. El Paso monitored Escalato’s net. Bravo troops popped two green star clusters, handheld flares that fired vertically a hundred feet then burst like small skyrockets.

  “I’ve two lime stars.” The Dust-Off commander identified Bravo’s signal. The medical evacuation helicopter began its descent toward Bravo company. The large helicopter circling above began dropping parachute flares. Dozens of them. The burning white phosphorus splashed brightness throughout the valley and sent flat white light down through the canopy to the wet jungle floor. “I’ve my LZ marked with four reds at the corners,” Escalato informed the pilot. The flare ship circled Bravo again, dropping a second ring of flares. The lights rocked gently beneath the parachutes, desce
nded, sputtered and went out. The flare ship renewed the lights with each pass. Alpha troops froze. “Bird’s makin a pass,” El Paso reported. “The center of my LZ is marked with a strobe,” Escalato’s voice came from the radio. “Bird’s comin in,” El Paso informed the group. With all the light from the flares it was still not possible for Alpha to see Bravo. The sky glowed like the inside of a frosted light bulb.

  When the medevac helicopter was still about 100 meters in the air Bravo company opened up like a mad minute, 16s, 60s, 79s, frags. They showered the jungle with suppressive fire. The intensity slowed as they reloaded. “Bird’s in,” El Paso said. Loud exploding pops from AKs intermingled with the blasting chatter of the friendly fire. “They’re loadin up,” El Paso reported. “Bird’s comin out.” The suppressive fire continued the entire time the helicopter was on the ground and as it lifted, the firing intensified. Sporadic fire came from AKs, as if the NVA were toying with Bravo, simply letting them know their mad minute was a joke. The medevac was up. The helicopters retreated from the valley. The flares sank and went out.

  The night was peaceful again. Only the exploding H & I rounds disrupted the black velvet mistdrizzle. At the CP they passed the time softly discussing whatever came to mind. FO told several stories of units he had been with in the Mekong Delta on an earlier tour. El Paso jumped on an opportunity to tell Cherry about the history of Vietnam and Egan added his views of the present political situation. Doc spoke a little about the proper treatment for various wounds he suspected Bravo troops had sustained. No one mentioned Bravo’s dead FO. At one point the L-T said a few lines about the causes of war and violence and Cherry said he believed it was genetically predestined by the structure of the brain. “I want to hear more about that,” Brooks said. In their exhaustion none of them went into much detail. The GreenMan radioed Brooks and told him to speed up Alpha’s movement and get into the valley. “You gotta get in there and hurt those little people,” he said. He also congratulated Brooks on evading the NVA mortars. It was Cherry’s first CP rap session. He enjoyed it immensely. For the others it was a repeat of many previous nights. Cahalan, Brown, Doc and Minh slept. At 0455 the NVA began a full scale assault on Bravo Company.