13th Valley

by John M. Del Vecchio

  “Ssssssttt. Jax.”

  “Here, L-T.”

  “How you doing, Little Brother?” Brooks asked. It was going to be harder than he had thought.

  “Like a uncorked jug upside-down. Drained, Man.”

  “You’ve already heard?”

  “Right on.”

  “How do you feel about it?”

  “Doan mean nothin,” Jax said softly. “Only yo din’t have ta do it like that. I never thought yo do it like that. Yo aint one a em.”

  “Jax, it’s my time to go.”

  “That aint it, L-T. Shee-it. Yo owe it to yerself. I’s happy fo yo but I aint believin yo din’t know. Jest spring it on us like locust attackin.”

  “I’m sorry, Jax,” Brooks said. Jax sounded very depressed and it saddened Brooks.

  “Who gowin get the company?” Jax asked. “Yo aint gowin give it to that mothafucken honky Thomaston, is yo?”

  “That’s not my decision. The GreenMan decides that. Thomaston’s pretty good though.”

  “That honky fucka doan know his weapon from his ass wid out Eg point it out to’m. An Eg leavin in two weeks. We gowin get our asses kicked seven ways ta hell.”

  “Jax, it’s going to work out.” Brooks felt a little disgusted. Goddamn, he had the right to leave. “Hey, what are you going to do?” Brooks shrugged and tried to sound carefree.

  “Gowin start a war,” Jax said very factually.

  “No, Jax. Now listen. You’ll lose everything you ever worked for if you do that.”

  “Aint gowin miss somethin I aint never had.”

  Doc and El Paso approached Jax’ perimeter position, whispered the password and came forward. They sat, one to each side of Jax and the L-T, and aimed their weapons outward. “Doc,” Brooks whispered, “when I’m gone I want you to keep an eye on Jax here. Watch over him, okay? El Paso, you too.”

  “He okay,” Doc said. “He’ll be watchin over us. What’s happenin, Jackson?”

  “War,” Jax said. “War in our homeland.”

  “Can’t fight with that,” Doc said.

  “You guys be careful, huh? Please.” Brooks pulled out his notebook. “Hey,” he said. “I want to give you guys my address. Look me up when you get back.” He wrote his name and address several times and tore the bottom from the page. “Here,” he said. “Give me your addresses too.”

  “There aint gowin be no address when I get back,” Jax said. “I’s gowin be roamin. Sabotagin. Blowin up the cities, creatin terror. We gowin hold a million people hostage. Trade their lives for King Richard’s.”

  “Take the countryside first,” El Paso said. “Then the cities’ll fall.”

  “Not this time, Bro. We got the cities already. We jest gowin hafta squeeze. Then the country’ll fall.”

  “What about your kid, Jax?” Brooks said softly.

  “I’m gowin do it fo my kid!” Jax snapped emphatically. “Whut yo think I’s talkin bout?”

  Egan and Cherry slid into the thicket beside El Paso. The vegetation was so dense they could not see Doc on the other end. Doc rolled to his knees and crawled to the other end. He exchanged abbreviated daps with Egan and Cherry. “Jax pissed about L-T skyin,” Doc whispered.

  “They killin our fucken people, they killin Pap, and they takin the best man away from me,” Jax continued. He launched into a quiet tirade of name calling and complaints. He quoted Eldridge Cleaver, “The oppressor has no right which the oppressed is bound to respect.” And he added his own invectives.

  “They all a time inventin programs to help minorities which all a time helps keep em down. You hear bout affirmative action. I got affirmative action. Right here in my 16.”

  “What do you think about all this, Danny?” Brooks asked Egan. Egan shrugged and said nothing. He did not want to get into it.

  “What about you, Doc?” Brooks asked.

  Doc shook his head. He looked at Egan. Egan always had something to say. “Doan you care about us no mo, Eg?” Doc said.

  “What?”

  “Doan you care about Jax no mo? We gotta hear from you. L-T leavin. We gonna be lookin to you ta carry us inta the new honcho. Keep him cool. You dig, Mista? You always got somethin ta say cause you always sayin somethin. What you think?”

  “Well, I think there are alternatives to racially administered programs or racially interpreted legislation. And I think they might be more effective because they won’t stink and there won’t be any racial backlash.” Brooks was listening intently to Egan. He began to take notes on his steno pad. Jax glared at Egan, looked at the L-T unsure, interested. Egan continued. “We might call it communityism or something. We could base the action taken to equalize opportunities on communities and not on race. Each community might be defined as this thousand or maybe twenty-five hundred people, no larger. That way it couldn’t be corrupted like if you had one community for a city of one hundred thousand or something.”

  “That’s an interesting idea, Danny,” Brooks said.

  “Yeah,” Egan agreed. “It could get around all the racism bullshit. You know, why should a black doctor’s kid have preference in a job or in getting admitted to school or something over a white laborer’s kid. That’s not the problem we’re trying to solve. I think if a poor community, and there’d be lots that’d be all black or all Chicano or all Indian or something, if they were treated specially so the poor did not stay poor, the whole idea of equalizing opportunity, ah, hum … what am I trying ta say? You know, you could break the poor produce poor and the illiterate produce illiterate syndrome. And that’s what we’re trying to do. Break down the ghettos but not because they are race ghettos, because they are jails which imprison people and don’t let them get out. Let’s make sure everyone who wants to get out has the opportunity to get out but not simply because they are black. And don’t nobody stress race so there’d be no backlash and no hate. Poor could be mixed with rich and vice versa by busing or somethin. But not blacks with whites simply because blacks are black and whites are white. That only keeps the emphasis on race. It institutionalizes race and it institutionalizes the ghettos. That shit keeps blacks down no matter how many programs you got.”

  Alpha moved out of the bamboo thicket, across paths, trails, roads. They moved generally south, generally up, ascending toward a knoll on the side of Hill 636. FO called in a random pattern artillery barrage in the path of their advance, clearing their way, and a sweep of rounds exploding in the trail behind them to close off their rear. They moved slowly, climbed cautiously yet steadily. Under no circumstance did the L-T or any of them want to delay resupply. They pushed on without stopping. They crossed through elephant grass and into brush. Over the mounds they went and to the base of the cliffs. They were two kilometers farther east in the valley than they had been on their original descent. The cliffs here were bluffs and with their half-empty rucks they climbed easily. With each step up the fog thinned, each foot higher the sky lightened. The scrub brush became jungle forest and suddenly the pointman was blinded by the bright searing sun. Alpha rose like a column of dead out of the mist and into the sun-dappled jungle. Like moles the boonierats squinted, blinded by the sun. And then they were there, on a large vegetated hump on the side of 636. They worked like madmen, two platoons on security, one chopping, slashing with machetes, clearing an LZ. A bird, the first unfogged view of a helicopter in many days, passed over, returned, hovered, kicked out two cases of TNT and left. The demo crew set about blowing the larger trees down. “Cheap fuckers,” the demo team members cussed, “dynamite stead a C-4. Shee-it.” Then, “Fire-in-the-hole. Fireinthehole … fireinthe-hoooo …”

  Cherry looked around at the men he had been with. Their eyes were hollow, haunted. The weariness of the valley showed on their skin, their drawn cheeks, mostly in their eyes. Could I possibly look that bad? he thought. No way, Breeze. No way.

  The sun seared and dried the newly exposed jungle floor and the surface turned to dust. The boonierats stripped off their shirts to expose their skin and it
too dried, flaked and peeled. In the jungle the security teams hung their fatigues on branches and opened their rucks and spread their equipment. The sun filtered through the canopy and the dancing shadows accentuated the gaunt faces, the ghoulish stares which possessed half of Alpha. Brooks sat alone below the LZ workers, above the perimeter guards, sat alone obsessed with the view of the valley before him. Marshmallow Lake, he thought. It looks like a marshmallow lake. From above the mist again looked soft and clean and white yet it was not beautiful anymore. It was ugly. Brooks glared at the valley, at the rising cliffs and at the ridges and fingers, at the gorges and the undulating foothill mounds all hidden beneath triple canopy. Brooks snarled at the valley floor cloaked by bamboo forests and elephant grass and that blessed terrible ever-present mist. Entire NVA divisions were concealed in those landforms. Enemy, enemy everywhere. Perhaps the valley itself was a malicious adversary. And there in the middle above the mist ugliness, above it all, alone, stood that immense tree. Brooks sat still, hypnotized by the tree. He cursed it in his mind. What must be at the tree’s base? Brooks removed the topo map of the valley from the large pocket on his fatigue pant thigh. He traced the river, located various high features and aligned the tree. There, right there, he thought, right there on the river. On a knoll on the river. All signs, all intuition pulled him toward the knoll and the tree. That was his mission. Alpha had circumvented the knoll on their first descent into the valley, now they would spiral back down, in tighter. Seize the knoll. Why not? Why not just go direct? Why not walk right up to it? Follow an arty raid on in. No. One more time around. One more time through Leech Row. Then we’ll cross the river and hit it.

  “L-T,” Doc Johnson approached the commander from the LZ.

  “Hey,” Brooks called up, coming from his trance.

  “Dry em out.”

  “What?”

  “Let me see your feet,” Doc said. “Take off them boots.” Doc did not raise his voice but he spoke with absolute authority. Brooks grumbled as he unlaced first one boot, then the other. “Socks too,” Doc said. “We got trouble.”

  Brooks peeled his OD issue socks from his ankles and feet as if they were a second skin. “Uuuumm,” he groaned. He wiggled his toes. The skin was gray and ulcerated.

  Doc grabbed one of the L-T’s feet and inspected it. Brooks winced. “You lucky you ken walk, Mista,” Doc said disgustedly. “Half your company sufferin from immersion foot. You expectin these dudes ta walk any place you best get em dried out.”

  Brooks stood up barefoot and twisted in small spasms of agony as twigs ripped at the soft convoluted flesh of his feet. “Let’s inspect them all,” he said to Doc and the two set off on a slow circuit of the perimeter inspecting that prize asset of the infantry—feet.

  Half the company was suffering from the onset of immersion foot. Doc and the L-T looked at foot after foot. Every foot was wrinkled and gray. A quarter of Alpha’s feet were swollen. A tenth had progressed to being convoluted. The two worst cases, both in 3d Plt, were Arasim in 2d Sqd and Roseville in 3d. With both of these men the immersion foot had progressed to the point where the skin cracked and fungal infections had begun. The outer skin layer of Roseville’s left foot had completely died and was peeling off in putrid chunks. Below, the tissue was raw.

  “Evac those two,” Brooks agreed with Doc. “Get them out of here on the first log bird.” Arasim was delighted. He was packed in a minute.

  On the opposite side of the perimeter Whiteboy was also all packed and ready to leave. His eye was worse than it had been when originally cut. The eye watered constantly now and Whiteboy said it felt …” lahk someone throwed a shovel full a ground glass in theah.”

  “Whiteboy,” Brooks said, “do you really feel like I should medevac you? We need your firepower.”

  “L-T, Ah caint keep mah eye open.”

  “Really?”

  “L-T, Ah’d stay out heah. Haven’t Ah always done mah part? Ah’ll be back, L-T, in no time a’tall.”

  “Okay, get up to the LZ with Roseville. But listen, we do need you. Get back as soon as possible. Okay?”

  “Yes Sir, L-T.”

  Brooks completed the circuit and sat down again below the LZ. How, he thought, can I tell a man to get back here as soon as possible, that we need him, when I’m leaving? About him now half his company was not only barefoot but naked. To his left Cherry lay in the sun, his pants at his ankles. His legs spread wide apart, his penis flopped up upon his belly, his red raw thighs, burning ass and crotch rot drying and baking in the sun.

  “Hey,” Brooks called to Cherry. Cherry looked over. They were not cautious about noise. What with the machete hacking and the blowing down of trees, everyone in the valley knew exactly where Alpha was. With the LZ completed much of Alpha was in the open. They knew it was unlikely the NVA would hit them. The sky was full of helicopters and FAC planes. Ownership of the night may have been in dispute but the day very much belonged to the Screaming Eagles. The perimeter guards still camouflaged themselves. There were three two-man OPs hidden 100 meters out. The security guards rotated hourly with soldiers loafing about the LZ. The slicks which were to resupply them at 1100 hours had been called off for an emergency CA of ARVN infantry nine kilometers to the south. Resupply was rescheduled for 1330 hours. Alpha lay back in the sun.

  “Hey,” Brooks said again getting up and reseating himself a few feet from Cherry. “Several weeks back we were talking about war and you said something about it being biologically determined. Would you tell me something about it?”

  Cherry twisted his body to look at the L-T while keeping his legs spread for the sun. “Yeah, I guess,” he said. “What kind a thing did you want to hear?”

  “You know,” Brooks said not looking at Cherry, “theories maybe. Are there biological theories about war?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Cherry said. “Kinda.” His mind had been far from biological theories.

  “You’re a biologist, aren’t you?”

  “No,” Cherry said. He sat up yet still kept his legs open to the sun. “I got a BA in psych.”

  “Where’s the biology come in?”

  “I did a lot of reading and research into physiological correlates to behavior,” Cherry said. “After I decided to go into psych I found I thought most of it was bullshit. Almost all of it except the material based on neurological or physiological data.”

  “Oh,” Brooks said. He was disappointed.

  “But wait a minute,” Cherry said. He wanted to tell Brooks his views. Cherry felt eager to impress the L-T and talking, thinking about his subject brought him a step back toward reality, toward a world he was quickly forgetting. “Ya see, L-T, what you’re talking about is behavior, human behavior. That’s the realm of psychology. It’s just that so much of psychology has been individual conjecture that it turned me off. There are physiological correlates to all behavior. When I was a student my interests were about what happens in the central nervous system when a person does something, or what happens there before he does something. What makes him do it, behave? War is a kind of behavior.”

  Brooks changed his position and became more attentive. “Are there books on the biological, ah, on psychological or physiological, ah … connected to war?”

  “Well … well there are some.” Cherry hesitated. “Not exactly like that but.… well … you might want to read The Territorial Imperative. I forget who it’s by.”

  “Wait a minute.” Brooks pulled a ballpoint from his pocket and the steno pad from his pants. “The … Territorial … Imperative,” he said slowly writing the name down.

  “Yeah, and ah, African Genesis,” Cherry added. “I’m sure they both contain bibliographies.”

  “Good,” Brooks said.

  “L-T, the crux of their position is that man is an animal. It gets a little complicated but it’s possible to extrapolate from the known data to relatively sophisticated ideas or maybe theories, hypotheses anyway, about war.”

  “Tell me more,” Brooks said moving c
loser.

  “Okay,” Cherry said settling back and attempting to recall segments of his formal education. Brooks was poised to take notes. “I’m goina throw some facts and figures to start with to help me think. Okay?”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  “Okay. First, mankind is like three million years old. Maybe older. He’s been evolving the whole time.” Cherry frowned, paused, rolled to his side and continued. “Man a long time back was a hunter. As an animal he either hunted game or he gathered food. He didn’t cultivate crops or raise animals for slaughter until something like ten or fifteen thousand years ago. Long time back he had a very tiny brain. Try to picture these pre-men men. They lived in small packs and hunted. They ran game. And they were evolving. But during evolution they never lost their hunterbrain. Instead, what happened was, they developed new layers over the old brain. Not really layers like you’d pack a snowball or something but like you’d take a snowball then add another ball to it here, and another there and over hundreds of generations the new balls became larger and larger and wrapped themselves about the original ball which we’ll call the brain stem. Can you see that?” Cherry began sketching his image in the earth.

  “Okay,” Brooks said. “So?”

  “Well,” Cherry jumped the conversation forward, “these two balls are the neocortex. They’re maybe five hundred thousand years old. Now it’s been shown through neurological experiments and … ah, there’s another guy you should read, Wilder Penfield. I think one of his books was something like Mechanisms of the Brain. Something like that. He and others did a lot of work on functional mapping of the brain. Do you know what that means?”