Like you never hear a boonie rat say how long he’s been in country, Brian thought, only how short he is, how many more months before he goes home.
Home. Oh God, can’t think about that. Home’s where they send you when you’re dead. He knew of platoons where the grunts carried their own body bags, even slept in them to keep dry.
He thought back to his first day. Landing in Saigon aboard a Continental jet with Glen Yarbrough spinning a sugary melody over the headphones, a pretty blond stewardess chirping, “Welcome to Vietnam, gentlemen, I’ll see you again in a year.” Then hours of standing out on the broiling tarmac, waiting along with thirty or forty other cherries to be assigned to a unit. The guys were joking around with each other, punch-drunk from the heat and from eighteen hours in the air, one kid all revved up to get assigned to a frontline unit so he could “kick some ass.” Brian hadn’t been too worried. From what he’d seen so far, he figured the stories he’d heard about Nam had been mostly exaggerated.
[219] Then a big chopper landed and its crew began tossing large bags out like so many duffels. At first he’d thought it was some sort of cargo, and maybe he even could have convinced himself of that ... if it hadn’t been for the dull squelching noises those bags made when they hit the tarmac. Then one burst open, and in the ghastly split second before he fainted, Brian had his real welcome to Vietnam: a lump of bloody chopped meat in the shape of what had once been a human being.
Now, as he slogged through the jungle, Brian tried instead to blank his mind, the way Trang had taught him. Maybe he really would hear the river, maybe they really were getting close.
But all he could hear was the rain. The kid—Jackson, wasn’t it?—was silent, and there was only the endless drumroll of the rain, the wet slap of leaves against plastic ponchos. A cloud must have lifted because Brian, peering through the gloom, could now make out the blurred shape ahead (was it almost dawn? Christ, please, yes), the hump of Matinsky’s rucksack under his poncho, the antennae of his PRC-25 poking up alongside his head. He looked like some weird insect, maybe the man-roach of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” And beyond Matinsky, walking point ahead of the CO, Lieutenant Gruber, Brian now caught fleeting glimpses of the reed-shadow that was Trang Li Due, moving through the dense brush with uncanny grace.
He thought: If there’s any NVA action out there, Trang will spot it.
Trang, a Kit Carson scout, knew this piece of jungle better than anyone, and he had the eyes and reflexes of a leopard. At fourteen, he’d been forcibly recruited by the NVA, and by the time he fled at sixteen, he’d learned such tricks as listening for enemy activity by placing a small flat piece of wood on the ground and putting his ear to it, and locating claymore tripwires at night by sweeping the darkness just ahead of him with a blade of grass.
Some of the guys weren’t so sure about Trang. “Once a gook, always a gook” was Matinsky’s expression. But it had been Trang, not Matinsky, who’d saved Brian’s ass on a boonie patrol like this less than a month ago. They’d been humping the hills above Tien Sung, Brian walking point that time, exhausted after hours of trying to hold to a straight line on the steep ridge. By dawn, Brian was so beat he would have stretched out in a rice paddy full of leeches if it meant getting some shut-eye.
[220] They came upon the village just as the sun was casting its first red blaze above the trees. A sleepy little village tucked way high into the hillside with rice paddies like stair risers leading up to it. Smoke curling above the thatched huts, water buffalo, the whole pastoral bit. They had stopped for a good long time, checking it out, no sign of VC, just old men and mama-sans and little kids. One old mama-san was cooking a big pot of rice. Nothing unusual there. She gave Brian a toothless smile and wrapped some in a banana leaf for him. He was reaching out to take it when Trang suddenly grabbed him, shoving him to one side. A split second later a burst of sapper fire tore up the ground where Brian had stood. Two guys bought it before they could make it to cover.
“How did you know we were walking into an ambush?” Brian asked Trang later.
Trang looked at him with those flat, oddly expressionless black eyes and said, “Rice. She cook too much rice for one village.”
But now Brian’s aching body made it hard to think about Trang, or anything but his own misery. He wanted a pair of dry socks as bad as Jackson. Inside his boots, his feet felt like a couple of rotting sponges. They hurt, too. They hurt in a way that made him afraid of what he’d see when finally he got to undo the laces and pry off these damn boots.
But nothing he could do about it now. You could no more get away from jungle rot than you could the bugs and the leeches and the rain. But, Christ, wasn’t there ever going to be any end to it? The mud seemed to suck at him, drag him down a little bit farther with each step he took.
A rustling sound deep in the bush caused him to break stride, cocking an ear. The river? He couldn’t really tell. Probably not yet. Dickson back there with the funny papers had said two, maybe three klicks more to go before they hit the water. But that had been more than an hour ago, hadn’t it?
“Wish I had me one of them Starlight scopes,” Brian heard a voice behind him mutter. “You could see a snake taking a piss in the dark two miles away with one of them suckers.”
Another, wearier voice, “Oh, man, I just wish I was home.”
Then no one spoke. Just the slapping of leaves, the squelch of boots pulling away from mud, the faint fuzzy static of Matinsky’s radio.
[221] Home, Brian thought. An image of Rose formed in his mind. He felt as if he’d swallowed a heat tab. A flame that crawled up from his gut and settled in just above his Adam’s apple. He saw her in his room at Columbia kneeling on the floor spangled with pennies, naked, her face wet with tears. He saw himself hunkering down, gathering her in his arms, making love to her right there on the floor. The image was so vivid he could almost feel each sensation, even the pennies pressing cool circles into his flesh, the furious heat between those long legs wrapped about his. Don’t leave me, Bri, don’t ever leave me. ...
Then it vanished. He was back in the jungle. The rain pelting against his helmet, slithering off his poncho. The sound of the river just a whisper in the back of his head now. Brian felt like crying. If only he could have held on to her, just for a little while longer, until they made it to the river.
Wise up, man, she’s forgotten all about you.
No, he wouldn’t believe that. He couldn’t. But face it, it had been months since he’d gotten a letter. She could have met someone else. Maybe she did. No, it didn’t make sense. Another girl, it could happen, not Rose. But what did make sense anymore? Out here in these jungles, he had seen things, monstrosities, that before he never would have thought possible. Now he could believe just about anything.
Disneyland West. That was grunt lingo for Nam. A make-believe place. But here, now, Nam was as real as something he’d swallowed, something hard and cold settled deep in the pit of his stomach. It was home that didn’t seem real anymore. Brian could hardly remember what it felt like to walk on a sidewalk, to lie in a bed with clean white sheets, to go through a whole day without looking over his shoulder expecting someone to try to shoot him.
Even Rose seemed not quite real. When she did come to him, it was usually in the morning, those first few seconds before coming fully awake. In that gray DMZ between sleep and alertness, he would feel her breath warm against his cheek, certain that when he opened his eyes he would find her asleep beside him, a tumble of dark curls against his pillow, one long golden-skinned arm stretched across his belly. Then someone would flop over in the bunk above his, or start banging on the corrugated metal side of the hootch, and her image would evaporate like faint morning haze.
[222] In the real world guys got dumped all the time. That poor bastard O’Reilly, boasting nonstop about how his wife could never get enough of him. Then just last week come the divorce papers. Not even a dear John letter.
Jesus Christ. If only Rose would write. Just one letter.
That’s all he was asking.
Brian felt himself shivering. The rain had leaked through his poncho, soaking his fatigues. He thought about the notebook carefully wrapped in oilcloth at the bottom of his rucksack. The journal he’d been keeping since day one of this nightmare. If he ever made it out of here, he’d need that journal, if only to convince himself all this had really happened.
A sudden noise. Brian froze in his tracks. A rustling, but louder and closer than before. Farther up the trail, he glimpsed Trang sink into a crouch, his M-16 swing into position.
Brian dropped to his belly, hammered the bolt back on his own M-16, chambered a round, as if a switch had been pulled in his head. Beside him, Jackson did the same. Ahead, Matinsky broke clumsily for cover, a big slow-footed Nebraska farmboy, the radio on his back lurching and bobbing.
Brian heard popping sounds, like a string of firecrackers going off, and Matinsky toppled, crashing into the brush like a downed chopper.
Then all hell broke loose.
More popping of automatic rifles, then the darkness exploded in a deafening blast of orange fire. Mortars, oh Jesus, they’re shelling us. For one hellish instant, night switched to day, and the jungle seemed to leap out at Brian in a Technicolor blaze. Branches and vines twined together like snakes, veiled in mist and silhouetted by the Halloween afterglow of mortars. No sign of the enemy—but, God, it sounded like hundreds, those popping rifles, spitting fire from every bush, every goddamn tree. Chunks of red clay flying, stinging his face. A crater the size of a freshly dug grave not ten yards to his left, naked tree roots clawing their way to the surface like huge skeletal fingers. Farther down the line, men were screaming. Wounded. Some probably dying. Others already dead. He heard their gunner, Dale Short, open up on the brush with a round of Quad-50 fire.
Brian’s mind spun like an empty gunbarrel. A numbing terror seized him.
[223] They were lying in for us. The river. We’re never going to make it to the river.
He heard a high gurgled scream, saw Jackson buckle to his knees as if in prayer.
One whole side of Jackson’s skull was blown away.
Oh holy Christ, no ... no ... no ...
A thin film of gray came scudding across Brian’s vision. His ears were ringing. His rifle suddenly felt as if it weighed a hundred pounds. Everything seemed to be taking place in slow motion. As if in a nightmare. Making sense only as dreams do, with a kind of existentialist rationale.
Where the fuck is Lieutenant Gruber? Why isn’t he giving orders?
Another blinding orange-red mortar blast, and he heard the crackle of Matinsky’s radio, and a voice not Matinsky’s booming into it, “Delta Bravo, come in, come in, do you read me? Delta Echo here. We’re hit. Looks like they’ve got us flanked on all perimeters. We’re gonna need a medevac in here, and pronto. Coordinates are VD 15-oh ... Holy sh—”
The voice was cut off.
Surrounded on all perimeters. Christ, if only he could see them. Brian let off a round of M-16 fire into the bush. Beneath him he felt the earth convulse with the impact of the enemy’s AK-47s. He tried not to think about the body leaking its brains into the mud beside him. He was afraid he might be sick.
Then he was sick, vomiting up the stink of cordite, blood, and scorched flesh. Sweet Jesus, they’re picking us off like ducks in a shooting gallery.
Digging his elbows in, Brian belly-crawled into the bush, a tangle of vines and elephant grass. He stopped, bile rising in his throat again. A pair of sightless eyes stared up at the sky not two meters away. Gruber. Oh God. The rain was falling against his staring eyes, pooling in the sockets.
Brian felt a scream gathering force in his solar plexus. A scream that would rip the roof right off what remained of his sanity.
But something was gripping his shoulder, forcing him down. Brian twisted his head around, and was confronted by a sharp Oriental face streaked with orange mud, a pair of impenetrable black eyes. A face like a rusty ax blade. Trang.
“Mau lên!” Trang hissed, motioning off into the thicket of [224] bamboo that lay to their left, two, maybe three dozen yards away. “River this way. Follow me.”
Brian looked back. In the hellish glow, he saw their perimeters seemed to have dissolved. No visible line of support, no voice of authority calling out flanking maneuvers. Gruber dead. The Prick-25 strapped to Matinsky’s back shot to hell, a gut-sprung tangle of copper wires, circuit boards, buckled plastic casing. Sergeant Starkey lying dead beside it in a puddle of blood, the handset clutched in his frozen grip. Shot before he could radio in their coordinates.
The river. Yeah. If he and Trang could make it to the river. There was a sandspit on the opposite bank where a chopper could land, Dickson had said. If he could sit still long enough to pop open a heat tab and scoop a hole in the ground for it, the chopper’s infrared might pick them out.
Brian yanked a frag grenade from his belt, popped its pin, and lobbed it into the brush to clear their way. A strobe flash of white boiling up into red smoke, a split second later a thunderous boom.
In the heartbeat of quiet that followed the grenade explosion, he heard it, the sweet sound of rushing water. So close. Not more than a hundred yards. But it might just as well be a hundred miles. They might make it to the river, all right. But in one piece?
Nevertheless, he followed Trang, now crawling low and silent as a lizard, cutting a diagonal path through the brush. Ahead lay the dense thicket of bamboo, a Crosshatch of shadows tantalizing as a mirage.
Pop. A bullet whined past his ear. Brian kept low, his belly to the ground, taking the impact of each exploding mortar like a dull kick in the pit of his stomach. He used his knees and elbows to propel himself forward, foot by painful foot, branches and roots clawing at his face, the gritty taste of dirt in his mouth.
Don’t think about dying. Don’t think about heaven or hell, or anything except getting out of here.
He kept his eyes trained on the dark lizard shape of Trang ahead, hardly daring to blink for fear of losing sight of him. Just a little bit farther. Please, God. Just a few feet more.
Now tiny razor-edged leaves slicing, stabbing his face. Slender stalks of bamboo glinting like polished jade, falling away on either side with a dry rattle. His knees sank into slimy river mud rank with [225] the smell of decomposition. The sound of rushing water swelled in his ears, the sweetest sound in the world.
Through the bamboo, he could see it, moonlight gleaming on black satin, oh Jesus, the river. His heart leapt. On the other side stretched a long spit of sand, wide enough for a helicopter to land.
Like a prayer answered in a miracle, Brian heard the distant whumping of rotor blades overhead. They’re looking for us. Relief backfired through him. He fumbled inside his flak jacket for a heat tab.
His hands were trembling as he tore open the foil packet, and frantically pawed a hole in the sludgy earth. The enemy wouldn’t see it, but the infra-red on Spooky could pick it up.
Just then Trang’s slender form unfolded from the ground into a crouch, moving like oil skimming the surface of water to the river’s edge.
Suddenly the bamboo exploded in a corona of red fire. Brian felt something slam into him, a train going a hundred fifty miles an hour.
Then a huge whistling blackness, falling like a guillotine’s blade, severing him from consciousness.
When he came to, it felt like a huge red-hot stake had been driven through his stomach, pinning him to the earth. He tried to scream, but there didn’t seem to be any air in his lungs. There was only this vast burning gulf of agony he had somehow tumbled into.
His mind skated to the gray edge of unconsciousness once again. Dimly, he heard noises. Men shouting. The strafe of Gatling guns.
Slowly, agonizingly, fighting the gray tide that pulled at his brain, Brian managed to drag himself into a sitting position. He stared down at the shredded remains of his poncho. Oh Jesus, he was hit bad. Blood. There was a lot of blood. He wondered if he was going to die.
He
had never been so scared. He didn’t want to die. Most of all he didn’t want to die here, in this godforsaken shithole, a leftover going putrid on a dirty plate.
I promised Rose I would come back, I promised—
Brian heard an agonized moan, and his eyes searched the darkness. Then he saw. Trang. Face down in the slime, a shank of splintered bone sticking out where his right foot had been.
[226] Oh Jesus ... a mine. He tripped a mine.
Ignoring the white heat gnawing and twisting in his gut, Brian crawled over and hooked an arm under Trang’s slender shoulders. Kneeling, he pulled Trang up so his head rested against his thighs.
“Gotta get out of here, buddy,” he gasped. “Gotta get to the other side.”
Brian peered up at the sky. He saw the red lights of a Cobra assault helicopter swing in a wide arc, then bank, followed by an explosion, huge white and orange blossoms of fire unfurling over the trees like some beautiful poisonous flower out of Rappaccini’s garden.
“Didi mau! Didi mau!” Trang was shaking his head, his face an ashen circle in the semi-darkness.
“No,” Brian panted, “no way I’m ditching you.” Trang had saved his life once. Brian had not forgotten.
Brian clamped his arm tighter about Trang, and felt the stake in his gut give a savage twist. He went faint, a high-pitched whine in his head like a swarm of jungle mosquitoes. He steeled himself against it.
Later, man, you can’t lose it now. You’re too close. Nobody quits on the finish line.
The river, the river.
Gotta make it to the other side.
His right arm hooked under Trang’s armpits, using his left elbow as leverage, Brian began the slow dragging crawl through the muck and bamboo to the water’s edge less than five yards away.
The pain rose, poised on a crystal-shattering note. His mind looped in and out of delirium.
Christ ... He walked on water, turned it to wine ... Old Man River, he just keeps rolling ... rolling ...
Trang was heavy, so heavy ... how could that be ... a sliver of a kid like him?
Garden of Lies Page 26