13th Valley

by John M. Del Vecchio

  “Snipe,” Brooks said. “We’ve got three Starlight scopes. Use them.”

  “Snipe,” Snell nodded. “And call in arty.”

  “Let arty get some.” Brooks smiled. The group was psyching up. Cold blood lust, contempt for the enemy, spewed from one then another. “Use your MAs,” Brooks said.

  “Blow em away,” Catt cooed.

  “Kill the fuckers,” Cherry giggled venomously.

  “Kill the fuckers,” Mohnsen cried, wept bitter tears.

  Brooks let them seethe then purposefully settled them back down with a few cautions and a few questions. “Field ingenuity,” he whispered. “Every boonierat must think for himself, adjust himself to the situation he finds himself in. You guys have to be more versatile, more flexible than the dinks. And you have to be smarter. Think about what you are going to do before you do it. Plan. Out-fox them. Don’t go out of your own AOs without clearance. Don’t ambush each other. No chatter on the nets. Rovers!”

  “Aye, L-T,” they whispered.

  “Kill em, kill em, kill em,” Mohnsen beat his rifle butt against the ground.

  “Teams Cindy, Joan, Ellen and Laurie,” Brooks whispered, “you leave at 1900 hours. Teams Claudia, Beth, Irene and Mary, you leave at 1915 hours. Teams Danielle, Suzie, Jill and Stephanie—1930.”

  Before the first boonierat could rise an ear-splitting concussion rocked Alpha. The MA on the road below the north escarpment had detonated.

  As Rover Team Stephanie—now Egan, Cherry and Bo Denhardt—rucked up, Brooks collared Egan. “I want to ask you some questions before you sky, Danny,” Brooks said. He was a man now completely different from the one who had led the briefing, rally, only minutes before. He spoke in his graduate student voice, concerned, contemplative, the exact opposite of the previous passion. And he seemed unaware of the change. Indeed Egan noted what seemed to him to be a complete repression or denial of the commander role. It made Egan uncomfortable.

  “Danny,” Brooks said meekly, “what causes conflict?”

  Egan dropped his ruck and sat atop it. “I’ll tell ya what I know,” he said. “I been thinkin about this for ya. You’ll have ta check it out for yourself but here’s some shit I remember from school. And some shit I just think.”

  Brooks smiled softly in the rain, silently begging Egan’s indulgence as he uncovered his notebook and covered it and himself with his poncho.

  “I had an engineering prof, guy named Tom Wheeler, who did his thesis on the effects of technological advances on population demographics. Something like that. Basically what he said was every major advance in technology is followed by a period of prosperity, then a population explosion. Works like this. A technological advance alleviates the pressure of population but then the pressure builds up again except now to a higher level. Follow me?”

  “Kinda,” Brooks whispered, writing.

  “Look,” Egan said. “Go way back. Hunter/ gatherer mankind learns how to herd animals. He stabilizes his life following pastures. For a while everyone has food and prospers. Then there’s a population explosion followed by overcrowding, disease and famine.”

  “And war?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Anyway, now nomadic mankind learns how to cultivate crops. He settles down on fertile lands and he becomes more stabilized but at a more complex level. For a while everyone prospers, has food, the whole thing. Then there’s a population explosion followed by overcrowding, disease, famine and probably war and migration. Mankind then learns how to store food against famine, how to irrigate against drought. For a while everyone prospers, again at a more complex level. With no pressure man seems to be more fertile. The population explodes and puts the pressure back on and the same problems occur.”

  “Are you saying,” Brooks asked softly, “that war is a means of limiting population?”

  “Wait a minute,” Egan said. “I don’t know if I got there yet.”

  “Excuse me,” Brooks apologized.

  Egan’s concentration on his thoughts deepened. “Each advance brings greater stability yet with a higher, more complex structure supporting it. Each period of stability brings a population explosion. That can be documented. If you plot the growth of human population before every major increase you’ll find a major technological advance. After each major increase you find population pressure and war. Pressure is conflict, L-T. Want to stop the pressure? After the next advance, stop people from fuckin each other.”

  “Sew up all the cunts of the Third World, huh?” Brooks joked, laughed, trying to lessen Egan’s intensity, and also trying to reduce Egan’s last statement to the absurd because to Brooks it smacked of racism.

  “The whole world,” Egan said sharply, defensively. “Fuck it, Man. You listenin? There aint no chance about this. There aint no such thing as chance. Only ignorance of natural laws.”

  “I didn’t mean to put your theory down,” Brooks said. “I’ve been writing what you’ve been saying. How does it fit though, in a world where some nations are rich and some poor? Some advanced, some not?”

  “Advances in technology don’t just happen, L-T,” Egan said calmer. “Technology grows. It has prerequisites.” Brooks shifted beneath his poncho. Egan slid lower on his ruck, then slid off the ruck and onto the ground next to the lieutenant. “Look, in what are today’s industrial nations, before they were industrial, certain conditions existed. The advanced societies today were the early machine societies. And those societies changed to accept new styles of living. And they gave up a lot to do it.”

  “What did they …”

  “Wait a minute. In places like England there was a belief in rational thought, in natural sciences and in mathematics. They prized analytical thinking. They had to give up more comfortable religions for ones that would accommodate their science. Maybe they gave up their souls. But see, L-T,” Egan was concentrating hard again, burning his words out quietly, “those things led to a high degree of technology built on a substructure of technology. The less complex fed the more complex. Technology, with only minor lapses, stayed ahead of their population pressures. If the pressure ever catches up and undermines the substructure all developed countries have a long way to fall.”

  “Well, why can’t Vietnam use the technology too?” Brooks asked. “If they could use it to stay ahead of their population pressures there’d be no war.”

  “No base. Development is not a matter of the industrialized nations giving equipment and advice to the Third World. That just doesn’t do it.” Egan was trying to pull old thoughts from areas of his mind that he had not used in a long time. “It just hasn’t worked that way,” Egan said. “These people can blame America or western Europe for conspiring to keep them down, for keeping the price of their raw materials low while selling high-priced finished goods to them but the fact is there’s no conspiracy. The conspiracy is in the minds of communists who want to control these people. It’s really a matter of no base structure.”

  “Then what you’re saying,” Brooks whispered, “is that Third World societies just haven’t accepted the pain of giving up their old cultures and building the base for new westernized forms.”

  “Well, yeah. There it is, L-T. These people got something we lost. To gain economic prosperity you got to want to work, you got to want that wealth bad enough to work at boring dehumanized work, highly technical work. You got to love machines like papa-san loves his water-bo. Cause that’s what technological advances are.”

  “We think ourselves into what we are and our thought patterns are determined by the culture of our upbringing,” Brooks repeated a statement of his own theory which he wanted to tie to Egan’s.

  “Oh. Okay,” Egan said. “Now I read you lumpy chicken. That’s what you meant when you said we think ourselves into war.”

  “Yeah,” Brooks said. “That’s what I meant. So, industrialism is based on a people whose culture identifies with strong causative forces, with logical cause and effect patterns of thought. And western culture is based on logical thought p
atterns. And to get that we gave up something.”

  “Yep,” Egan agreed. “Or at least we accepted something along with it that isn’t positive.”

  “War,” Brooks said.

  “It’s inevitable,” Egan said.

  “We think ourselves into it and our minds don’t have an alternative. We’re a war-or-peace culture.” Brooks wrote that down.

  The two of them sat silently in the rain, in the gray darkness, feeling close again. For some moments neither spoke. The valley seemed quiet. Artillery rounds were bursting far away. The noise of the rain had become so normal they did not notice it. Campobasso held only twenty-five soldiers and in the thicket none could be seen.

  “Do you think war is against human nature?” Brooks asked just as Egan was about to rise to leave.

  “No way,” Egan said settling back down. “People are always sayin it’s against human nature for man to war against man.” Egan spoke with contempt for the idea. “They say any advocate of war is against mankind. You can make just as good an argument for war being man’s nature. If you want the truth all you gotta say is man’s nature is intermittently warlike. War and peace. They have a continuous, maybe sine-like, maybe erratic, function. Did you know that on any given day there’s an average of twelve wars goin on on earth? There’s been over a hundred wars since World War Two. You don’t gotta justify war. Fuck the pansyass politicians and the pantywaist left. War’s its own justification.”

  “That’s sad,” Brooks said.

  “Why?” Egan demanded.

  “We’re here and that justifies our being here?” Brooks made it sound ridiculous.

  “The only justification you need for Nam is we’re doin it. It is, thus it is right. That goes for everything. If it is, so it is.”

  “That’s crazy, Danny.”

  “Don’t worry, L-T. It’s supposed to be. The stupider the war, the more the blunders, the better for mankind. Shit, if we ever become one hundred percent proficient at killing each other, then we’ll kill one hundred percent of us minus one. Like if we have thermo-nuclear war. We’re a lot better off runnin around with 16s than if we begin tossin ICBMs at each other.”

  “Why can’t we change mankind and eliminate the need for conflict yet still remain different and flexible. It would only require tolerance.”

  “Never happen.”

  “Why?”

  “You’d have ta change it all—every last man, woman and child—if you wanted ta break the cycle of peace-war-peace-war. You’d have ta build a new base. If you can’t change the system that produces war there’s one thing you best mothafuckin do—you better win them fuckin wars.”

  “Amen,” Brooks said.

  Egan began rising. “We gotta get to our AO,” he said to Brooks. “I gotta find what happened to the MA.”

  “Wait a minute,” Brooks said. “I want to ask you just ah … about something else.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I want to switch to personal conflict. Like,” Brooks hesitated then nearly blurted it out loud instead of whispering it in his field voice, “like between my wife and me. You know the situation?”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “You ever not been able to get it up?” Brooks asked.

  “You mean like …”

  “Yeah.”

  “When drinkin,” Egan admitted.

  “What about, you know, like when perfectly sober?” Brooks asked.

  “I never had that problem,” Egan said, “but I think it’s common. Temporary impotence they call it. Like if you’re nervous. Playboy, I think, they had an article on it. I think it said it happens to fifty percent of all dudes at one time or another.”

  “Really?” Brooks was amazed.

  “Yeah.”

  “Ah …” Brooks began slowly again, “have you ever fantasized about another man being with your lady?” He now had almost no voice at all. “I mean, like seeing an image of another dude and your lady making love?”

  “Oh yeah,” Egan answered robustly. “All the time. I think everybody does that.” Suddenly to Egan, Brooks seemed transparent.

  “It doesn’t mean, ah, like ah …”

  “This is really botherin you, huh?”

  “Yeah. I guess so.”

  “Happen in Hawaii? Begin there?”

  “Yeah. How’d you know?”

  “Same thing happened to Hughes. Happened to Rattler too.”

  “Really?” Again Brooks was amazed. “What about, like seeing you and another guy and your lady? Three of you?”

  “Yeah. Sometimes,” Egan said. “I don’t think a guy can get it on with a lady who he knows has had other dudes and at some point not think when he’s eatin her he’s gettin some other dude’s cum or when she’s stickin her tongue in his mouth thinkin like she’d wrapped that same tongue around somebody else’s meat. It’s almost like he was blowin the other dude.”

  Brooks looked at Egan, shocked. Then subdued he said, “Yeah. I guess so.”

  “Yeah,” Egan continued. “Rattler said the Doc … not Doc but the shrink at Division … he called it the Nam Syndrome.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Rattler thought he was turnin fag. He was really shook up, L-T. You didn’t know him then. He was really nuts. That’s why he went to the shrink.”

  “I thought that was because of what happened on 714 and 882?”

  “Well, he couldn’t come out en say somethin like that.”

  “Yeah, I guess not,” Brooks agreed. “Hey, Danny, ah, either of those guys tell you what happened, ah, what kind of thoughts …”

  “Yeah, that’s what I mean,” Egan said. “Rattler said he kept jerkin off fantasizin he was gettin butt-fucked.”

  A single shot cracked the air. Nothing more. It came from south and west of the CP. In the rain splattered valley night the exact direction and distance of a single shot was impossible to determine. An aerial diagram of Alpha’s set up would have looked like the cross-section of an orange cut perpendicular to the axis. The very center would be almost empty. Only a skeleton CP remained. The first circle out would be formed by the apex of the sections. This would be the thinned though still tightly packed berm perimeter of Campobasso. Farther out, spaced almost evenly about the center, are six dots, seeds, LP/ OPs protecting the center. Expanding beyond and filling the circle are twelve sections, the AOs of the rover teams. To the south is the river. To the north is the road. The teams with sections to the southwest were Mary, Claudia and Laurie. There was no report. Then the squelch on El Paso’s radio was broken three slow times. Sitting tight. Nothing more happened.

  At the CP Cahalan monitored a krypto call that excited Brooks and FO. Bravo Company’s honcho POW from several days earlier had agreed to lead that company to a headquarters bunker complex he maintained they had swept over twice without discovering.

  “There it is,” FO said, smiling, relieved.

  “Thank God,” Cahalan said. “They’re goina send Bravo back up that ridge.”

  “Least it aint us,” El Paso said.

  “I still think there might be a bunker complex on that knoll,” Brooks said cautiously.

  “You heard the man, L-T,” Cahalan said wanting to believe the call. “Their hotel quebec is down by Bravo.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up too high,” Brooks said. “Bravo still hasn’t found it.”

  After an hour the squelch on El Paso’s radio was broken twice. Rover Team Laurie reported laconically, “Kilo india alpha one november victor alpha. Counted two seven moving november. Out.”

  Cherry and Egan and Denhardt left Campobasso well after dark. The rain had not ceased. It was very dark. Egan led them at a slow walk. The move even to the close perimeter of their NDP was hard. They cleared themselves with the guards, radioed the LP and walked out erect. They made no sound. They moved slowly, Egan leading, Cherry laying one hand on Egan’s ruck following in the middle, Denhardt holding Cherry’s ruck at drag. No one spoke. No one coughed. No equipment rattled. Egan kept o
ne eye on the luminous dial of his compass. Cherry counted their steps. Every few meters they froze and listened. Then they moved on. Twenty meters, forty, sixty. They froze. The LP should be to their left. Cherry keyed his handset three quick clicks to break the natural static of the radio at the LP. The LP acknowledged by repeating the signal. Rover Team Stephanie moved on. And on.

  They came to a trail Pop had skirted earlier when he had led Egan and Cherry to the road. Egan dropped slowly to his knees. He felt the ground for a thin, rigid piece of grass. He found one. He lifted it to his face and brushed it across his nose. He brushed it against his pant leg, over the compass, on the ground. Egan hefted the grass blade in his right hand then spread prone, on his stomach in the trail. Cherry followed Egan down kneeling behind him in the muck of the trail, grabbed Egan’s left foot with his left hand. Denhardt slowly squatted behind Cherry. The team inched forward.

  Egan brushed the ground before him with the grass blade before each movement. Very slowly he extended his right hand with the grass checking each inch of trail for booby trap trip wires. There was no rush. He had all night to cover only a few hundred meters. He retracted his hand then pulled himself forward the cleared one-third meter. Cherry and Denhardt crawled forward with him. Egan repeated the sweep. The trail was bare of growth because of heavy traffic. The mud was three-inch thick slime. It seeped into every opening in Egan’s fatigues, into all their boots. Somehow it was not uncomfortable. It was soft. It was no wetter than they already were. It even felt warm. Cherry felt very relaxed.

  Where puddles inundated the trail Egan put the grass stalk between his lips and walked his fingers slowly through the water. Then he slid into the puddle and checked the next arm’s length of dark territory. Cherry continued counting. After every fifty movements he shook Egan’s left foot. After three hundred and fifty movements they ceased moving. The road, the smell of cordite, was directly ahead.

  Jax’ skin was almost rotted through. Of that he was sure. His muscles were cramping from the cold and the hours of stillness. He was sure he would die of exposure. “Au this fucken way,” he whispered to Hoover. “Au this way ta die a nee-moan-ya.”