I gave him nothing back, looking at the Gunny and waiting for him to adjourn the impromptu meeting.
“Alright, head ’em up and move ’em out,” the Gunny said, imitating foreman Gil Favor from the Rawhide television series.
Jurgens got up abruptly and walked over to me. My hand went to my .45 casually, so as not to alert the bigger and older sergeant.
“Just because you took care of Alfie like that don’t get you off the hook for the other seven,” he said in a whisper.
We stared into each other’s eyes for a few seconds. I wondered why both he and Sugar Daddy directed so many deadly threats my way. I fully intended to kill both of them when the time was right, and I was not about to threaten either man. Why would I ever want to warn them of what was coming? It made no sense I could understand for either of them to threaten me. When Jurgens and his small retinue moved off, I waved Fessman to me.
“Forget the frequency Mertz gave you,” I told him. “If the six actual comes up on the command net and orders us to the saddle that’s one thing. If he doesn’t, then we’re not talking to Kilo until we get to the A Shau.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Fessman said with a smile.
I moved to my stuff to get ready to make the hump to the A Shau. It was past mid-day and the hump would be another tough one with full packs, even though it would all be down slope. I sat down and unlaced my boots. I hadn’t had my boots off in five days. My socks weren’t identifiable as socks anymore, but I rolled them up and put them in an outside pocket anyway. I put on a thick pair of white socks and laced the boots up tightly. When I stood up I felt unaccountably like a new man. I joined the scout team, approaching Stevens from the rear.
“Why did Nguyen say the sappers respect us?” I asked, not satisfied with the sergeant’s earlier laconic response.
Stevens waved Nguyen to him. They spoke back and forth for a couple of minutes. Stevens turned back toward me while Nguyen stared over his right shoulder. Suddenly, the native Vietnamese moved forward and pointed down at my right wrist.
I looked at the elephant hair bracelet he’d given me earlier.
“Respect,” Nguyen said, very softly, in English.
“They’re Montagnards, sir,” Stevens said, “like him. They don’t think like we do. They’re pretty weird because you’ve made an impression on him and them somehow or another. He said they’re not waiting because they know they’ll see you again.”
I looked into Nguyen’s eyes but the man’s dark orbs didn’t give me anything back. I blinked and then he blinked, just like the times I saw him disguised in the bush. The man was inscrutable. The Montagnards were inscrutable. The Vietnamese were inscrutable. Even my fellow Marines were almost impossible to understand. Somehow, taking out Alfie was credited as a good thing while the seven Marines who’d died was a bad thing, for me, even though they were all veterans who should have damn well known to keep their heads and asses down when there was live fire about to begin. And then there was the Gunny’s responsibility, which didn’t seem to really exist. It was all on me.
I began the move down the mountain and on into the afternoon. The short rest reinvigorated the company and knowing that they did not have to go back to the saddle where we’d lost so many. The company wouldn’t have taken the point for anyone or anything. With this revitalized energy the company moved faster than it had in rushing to the rescue of Kilo Company. I brought up my usual place near the rear, thinking about how I did not want the respect of the enemy, nor the hatred of my Marines. I didn’t want anything except to get through the afternoon and then endure another night.
Zippo passed me on the right. He was wearing the sapper helmet like it was his own. When I exchanged glances with him he grinned. I could not help grinning back, not because he looked ridiculous, which he did, but because I knew he needed me, too.
forty-one
The Ninth Day : Third Part
When the company came to a slowing halt, I was more than ready to rest. The straps of my pack burned where they pressed down over the narrower suspender straps that held up my web belt. We’d made it back close to where the company had veered north and gone to the aid of Kilo Company the day before. I stripped off the pack and collapsed to the jungle floor. I checked my canteens but both were empty. Fessman pushed his own toward me, and I accepted it willingly. I drank down about a third of the warmly awful, but so welcome, liquid before giving it back. I looked around. Even though we were moving downward along the ridge we were still high enough for the temperature to be cool, the wind slight and the mosquitoes limited to occasional bites not important enough to warrant slathering on the nasty oil repellent.
My scout team rested only a few feet away. I leaned over to ask Stevens about the sapper regimental helmet affair. Zippo had discarded it when others around him had taken to calling him a black gook.
“I thought the Montagnards were on our side,” I said, motioning for him to put the question to Nguyen. It took almost a full minute for Stevens to counsel with the Kit Carson Scout and reply.
“They are advisors to the sappers, as he is an advisor to us,” Stevens said. “They don’t call themselves Montagnards. That was the French. They call themselves the Moi. Nguyen is Jarai Moi and the advisors to the sappers are Mnong Moi.”
“Why do some choose the NVA instead of us?”
“They help so that their villages will not be burned and their people killed,” Stevens said, without counseling with Nguyen this time.
“We don’t burn their villages, I don’t think,” I replied. “Why does Nguyen work with us?’
“His village was already burned.”
I looked over at the Moi scout. He stared back at me with his usual expressionless eyes. I knew if I blinked that he would too, though. I turned back to Stevens. “His family?”
“Gone.”
“Shit,” I said, softly, wondering what it was like to lose your whole family while you’re gone somewhere trying to do the right thing and take care of them, too.
In the back of my mind, in spite of the loyalty I felt from the strange man, I wondered just how much communication he had with other Moi around. The sappers would have had to hear about us, and me specifically, from someone, if that was really the point of the symbol.
“Arty up,” came whispering in from around me.
“Shit,” I said, wondering whether the Gunny needed artillery, which seemed unlikely because there had been no small arms firing or explosions of any kind. I began crawling along the jungle floor. I thought of snakes for the first time in three days. I found it kind of funny that I’d been too afraid of other things to be afraid of snakes, or maybe that was as it should be because the lack of them seemed to indicate that any snakes around were smart enough to stay high in the trees or underground.
I felt more than heard Fessman behind me, since my own noisy progress over the moist but solid ground kept me from hearing anything else. I found the Gunny thanks to many silently pointing fingers. This time I’d brought my binoculars, as the jungle near the edge of the ridge was more open and I hoped to be able to look out over whatever valley lay beyond it to the south toward, the American artillery fire-base.
The Gunny turned as I approached, holding an index finger over his mouth and pointing down to the south.
“There’s somebody out there,” he whispered. “And then there’s that…” He pointed downhill in the direction of our travel.
I couldn’t see anything in either direction. “What?” I finally asked in frustration, keeping my voice as low as his.
“I don’t know who’s there,” the Gunny said, pressing his head down behind a small pile of leafy bracken. “I just know that these Marines have been doing this for a while and they’re pretty good about knowing such things.”
I pulled out my binoculars and scanned the area down to the south. We were about a quarter of a mile, I guessed, from w
here we’d turned to head toward Kilo the day before. There was nothing. I swept down toward the second area the Gunny had pointed out. I silently cursed the stupid individual focusing of the eyepieces on the Japanese binoculars. Each had to be adjusted for distance individually whenever focus was needed. Regular combat lenses had one lever to quickly make that adjustment on both lenses, not to mention meter scales to approximate distance. I finally got the focus right and saw what concerned the Gunny, and helped bring the company to a halt. Two Marines lay next to a dark spot. Just beyond the spot a bamboo reinforced slat of leaf-weaved matting leaned up against the trunk of one of the larger trees. Without the Gunny saying a word, I knew I was looking at the entrance to my first tunnel. At Quantico they had created a field of tunnels to train enlisted Marines how to find and fight the enemy below, or destroy underground supplies. The Marines who went down in the holes were called “tunnel rats.”
I put my binoculars down. “Okay to check it out?” I asked the Gunny, “or have you already sent in the tunnel rats?”
Both Fessman and Pilson snickered right after I made the comment. I caught their laugh but didn’t understand.
The Gunny got to his feet, and then started moving low toward the hole in the ground guarded by the two Marines. I followed with Fessman and Pilson bringing up the rear.
“I’m more worried about what’s out there rather than down in this hole,” he said over his shoulder as he crouched low.
I laid on my chest looking down into the hole, surprised by it’s size. The round hole would have barely fit my body. If I crawled down into it, my shoulders would be pressing up against each side. The tunnels at the Marine Base stateside had been square, plenty big and dug into hard ground. I pointed my flashlight into the hole. It went down for about four feet before veering off in the direction of the company’s travel. I could not imagine a less welcome place to climb into. I stared for a moment more before deciding that I would never enter such a place if I could possibly help it. I noted that the cover of the tunnel appeared flimsy, but with cross-slatted bamboo strengtheners, it would probably hold the weight of a man stepping on its surface.
“Tunnel rats?” I asked again, still staring down.
“We don’t have any,” the Gunny said, accepting a green cloth-wrapped package from another Marine. “Nobody in this unit is dumb enough to go down into one of these tunnels. We find them all the time. The A Shau’s supposed to be full of them, but I don’t exactly remember.”
I realized the Gunny was priming several pounds of Composition B at my side. I eased back.
He glanced up at me. “You can write the words ‘tunnel rat’ on each package if you want.”
Fessman and Pilson laughed again, this time not so secretly.
“So, we blow them in place,” I said, thinking about the ramifications. “We never find out where the tunnels go, and what’s down there?”
“Got a better idea?” The Gunny asked with a smile, while he worked away.
“But the explosives will only affect a small part of whatever the complex below really is,” I replied, not having a better idea.
“How about some of that concrete piercing arty shit you were dumping around before?” the Gunny said, getting to his feet and beginning to walk backward while unwinding a thin set of wires from a small spool.
I got up and moved with him. “The canopy,” I said, pointing upward. “The concrete-piercing will trigger in the tops of the trees and then detonate before hitting the jungle floor. The fuses are that delicate, even though the rounds themselves are called concrete-piercing.”
The Gunny squatted down behind a tree trunk and prepared a small metal box for transmitting the electric signal.
“Ah, the others you’re worried about, won’t this let them know exactly where we are?” I asked.
“Now that’s funny, Junior,” the Gunny laughed, stopping to light a cigarette. “We’re out here playing rock and roll across the jungle, and some huge regiment passed by and left a helmet dangling on a stick to let us know how much they respect us. And the enemy doesn’t know where we are? You’re killing me here.” The Gunny blew some smoke, but didn’t direct it my way like Sugar Daddy had.
I took off my helmet and liner to scratch my head and think. There was really nothing to be said about how badly we’d had to let our position be known in coming to Kilo’s defense. If we’d all been killed, no one would have ever known about the company’s good intentions.
“Fire in the hole,” Gunny suddenly yelled out, dodging behind the tree trunk and twisting the little lever on the box.
The shock wave of the blast rocked my head and body back. I swallowed a few times to clear my ears. Bits of jungle and mud rained down for almost half a minute before subsiding.
The Gunny grinned while he pulled in and wound what was left of the wire back around the little box. I put my helmet back on and prepared for what was ahead, although I didn’t know what was ahead other than the fact that we were either already in, or just short of arriving in, what everyone called Indian Country. And that was all bad.
“Who do you think is out there?” I asked, when the Gunny finished with his explosives task.
“Well, if it’s those sapper guys, and there’s a regiment of them, then we’re dead as door nails no matter what we do. What do you think?”
I looked out in the direction we were traveling and then down where we’d gone before. And then it came to me. They were out there alright, but it wasn’t the sappers, if the sappers even existed.
“It’s the remnants,” I said. “When we hit them down at the saddle, and then Kilo followed up, they took unexpected and big casualties. This part of the tunnel complex is probably part of it. They didn’t move down the mountain afterward. No, they followed us and now here we are. They weren’t expecting us to go get our stuff and come back because they didn’t know we left it there in the first place. Now, they’re waiting again for us to pass by on our new path to the A Shau.”
“Jesus, Junior, if I didn’t know you were green as a pea pod and been here for nine days I’d think you were a gook. You think like a gook. Hell, you’re about as tall as a gook.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I replied, as acidly as I could.
“So what do we do now?” the Gunny asked. “We’re damn near out of ammo, food, water, and you name it. If we pass on by where they probably are waiting, then we get blasted. If we try to attack them first, we get blasted for sure.”
“What’s the edge look like?” I said.
“What edge?” the Gunny said, taking a last drag of his cigarette before putting it out in the jungle debris at our feet.
“The edge of the mountain over here to the south,” I replied, pointing to my right. “The contours are pretty compressed on my map but if we’ve got any margin at all then I can use Cunningham to our advantage.” I pulled out my map and unfolded it to show him.
“Can we try that in English?” The Gunny said, his tone one of frustrated impatience. He deliberately looked away from my map.
I refolded the map and put it in my morphine pocket, wondering when I’d get a chance to write to my wife again. I could write about finding my first tunnel and what it was like, leaving off the rest, of course. “Come on, let’s just move a couple of hundred meters south and check it out.”
We walked past the tunnel entrance, which was a large smoking crater after the blast. I wondered how far down a surface explosion caused damage. If the tunnels were angled and blocked with anything at all then the shock wave would do little, beyond barely penetrating dirt cave-in stuff. It took only a few minutes for the Gunny and my scout team to arrive at the edge of the mountain ridge, although ridge turned out to be the wrong word. The edge of mountain wasn’t an edge at all, except for a cliff that dropped about six feet down. After that the side of mountain went down into a relatively shallow valley in flat steps, ea
ch about twenty feet long protruding from the side of the rock and dirt.
The Gunny studied the land around and below us as we stood on the top edge of cliff. The view wasn’t stunning but it was pretty beautiful. The sun was low overhead but not close to setting, and the wind had picked up to make the warming air pleasant instead of cloying and miserable, as it always was in the lowlands.
“We can go one level down and just walk right by them if we keep our heads down,” the Gunny said, with one hand rubbing his chin.
I shook my head. “They’ve got Chicom radio crap and maybe even Prick 25s by now. If anyone spots us down there moving right along, they’ll attack and simply shoot down at us until we’re done, given that we can barely shoot back. Sitting ducks is the expression, I think.”
“So?” the Gunny asked.
“So, we climb down right here and move until we get about a thousand meters further along. That’s about where we detoured and headed for Kilo. Then we climb back up and set in right near the edge. We let them know we’re there. They’ll wait until the sun goes down and attack. When they attack we’ll quickly climb back down again. I’ll call in an artillery strike using variable time fuses. Should work like bug spray. The rounds will impact on top of the mountain while we’re covered completely by the lip of rock.”
“Shit,” the Gunny breathed out. “Variable time, like in radar-timed?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “The gunners can set the fuses to go off from thirty to three hundred meters off the ground. The little radar waves will go right through the jungle and play back from the jungle floor. We can have them set for about a hundred meters. The shrapnel will spray down at about twenty-four thousand feet per second. Wonderful stuff.”
“I’m sure,” the Gunny said, sounding anything but sure. “Sounds a little bit complicated to me.”
“Well, it’s a plan,” I offered. “I can’t think of anything else right off the bat. Maybe you can.”
Thirty Days Has September Page 34