Lizzie's War

by Tim Farrington

  your loving,

  Mike

  INSPIRED BY the latest letters, Danny occupied the high ground in the backyard, a small rise above the lake dominated by twin oak trees, and began to dig a bunker for himself. Angus wanted his own bunker, but there was only one shovel. The bickering got so intense that Liz finally went out and bought a second shovel.

  She also bought a case of beanie-weenies, as the boys suddenly wanted to eat all their food cold, C-ration style, out of cans. Danny and Angus had already coaxed a loud green parrot out of her, for Christmas, after many promises to care for it responsibly. They named it Hotel Henry, after the already-legendary bird mentioned in Mike’s letters, and were trying to teach it to say “Semper Fi.”

  Standing at the kitchen window, watching her sons dig their fortifications, with the birdcage sitting on top of the case of stockpiled beanie-weenies between the trees, Liz thought, I am insane. I have been going crazy for months now and have finally gone over the line. I am insane, my sons are insane, my husband is insane, and my country is insane. I am a madwoman in a world gone absolutely nuts.

  JUST AFTER midnight, on January 21, a single flare sizzled upward and burst into bright red above Hill 851. In the eerie glow that suffused the fog enshrouding the hilltop, Mike could hear the thunk of mortar tubes firing from down the slope. The mortars were very close; he just had time to dive for the trench in front of his command bunker and cover up before the first salvo hit.

  Instantly, all was chaos. The mortar shells kept coming, landing in clusters of three like weird rain, and some 12.7mm machine guns opened up from the neighboring ridge, lacing the fog with green tracer trails. A rocket-propelled grenade hit the bunker roof behind Mike and took out the radio antennas, and the first cries of “Corpsman!” went up. More flares lit the sky, the red NVA lights mingling now with white illumination rounds as the Marines tried to see what the hell was going on.

  In the swimming light, through a break in the fog, Mike caught a glimpse of the north slope in front of the First Platoon’s positions. It was swarming with dark figures scrambling upward, right into their own mortar fire. The clotted mass of enemy soldiers seemed almost comically hectic, as if there were too many teams on the field for a rugby scrum. As Mike watched, the red streaks of Marine tracer rounds began to stipple the enemy ranks.

  Bring it on, you bastards, he thought. They’d been stuck on this damned hilltop for almost a month by now, doing nothing but dig and take incoming mortar rounds and listen to the latest rehashed rumors. It felt good to finally just be able to fight.

  CHAPTER 23

  JANUARY 1968

  “MOM, DAD’S ON TV.”

  Liz’s nerves flared, an electric crackle like a jolt from a frayed wire, but she made herself check the roast before she went to the door of the kitchen. She had summoned all her resources and had a real dinner in motion for once, roast beef, mashed potatoes, and fresh green beans, which none of the kids would eat without complaint. It had felt like a cosmic statement when she started it, a message to the universe: Life goes on. I can do this. Now she wondered if it had seemed like hubris to the gods of war.

  Having allowed five seconds for defiant dignity, she hurried to the family room, where Danny and Angus were glued to the nightly news, as usual. Liz had found she couldn’t stand to watch the war footage on TV, and she relied on her sons for headlines and updates. Tonight, CBS had led with the usual Vietnam story. On the black-and-white television set, a pillar of black smoke rose over some bleak landscape.

  “The ammunition dump blew up,” Danny informed her excitedly.

  “What ammunition dump?”

  “At Khe Sanh. That’s where Dad is, right?”

  “…a spectacular explosion in a rocket attack just before dawn….”

  “Yeah,” Liz said. “That’s where Dad is.”

  “…heavy fighting through the night as a number of the Marine positions on hilltops north and west of the combat base came under intense attack,” a reporter in a helmet and flak jacket, hunched in a trench, was saying into the camera now. Behind him, Marines scuttled against the backdrop of the burning dump, their heads low.

  “What hills?” Liz asked. “Has he said what hills?”

  “No,” Danny said. He was excited, pure and simple, as if an interesting development had occurred in a football game. His father was where the action was. That was cool.

  “…facing a critical ammunition shortage. The problem of resupply is complicated by the weather and heavy North Vietnamese mortar fire on any aircraft landing….”

  Liz could feel something solid in the pit of her stomach, like a large, dull knife. She wanted to sit down, but to do so seemed to be conceding too much importance to all this. She had a dinner in the oven, for God’s sake. She had potatoes to mash.

  The breathless guy in the helmet yielded to a map and the soothing overview of Walter Cronkite. Liz had not really had a solid image of where in South Vietnam her husband actually was. Gio Linh, Dong Ha, Phu Bai—they were all the same to her, obscure places with alien names, details at the tops of letters, each as vague and dangerous as the last. But here was Khe Sanh on a neat CBS graphic, a tiny spot in the extreme northwest corner of South Vietnam, framed by Laos and the DMZ, emblazoned on the map with a jagged red dingbat that was probably supposed to look like an explosion but resembled a spattered blood drop. The dot was encircled by thick black arcs representing bad guys.

  “…reports of at least two divisions of North Vietnamese regulars surrounding the base,” Walter Cronkite was saying. General West-moreland was assuring everyone that the Marines intended to hold. Khe Sanh would not be another Dien Bien Phu. Blah blah blah. Walter Cronkite seemed dubious. The parallels were ominous. And blah blah blah.

  Liz asked Danny, “What’s Dien Bien Phu?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, which meant that whatever it was, it hadn’t happened to Marines.

  The phone rang. Liz considered letting it go but picked up after three nerve-jangling rings, in case the two guys in the sedan were overloaded tonight and the Marine Corps had decided to just telephone the news that Mike was dead. But it was Maria Petroski.

  “Are you watching the news?”

  “Yeah,” Liz said.

  “Isn’t Mike—?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Shit.”

  They were silent for a moment. Liz could hear the Petroski boys squabbling in the background at Maria’s end, over the same TV sound track as her own. Someone in Washington was also insisting that Khe Sanh would not be another Dien Bien Phu.

  “What the hell is Dien Bien Phu?” Maria said.

  “Damned if I know,” Liz said. The Vietnam report ended, and Walter Cronkite moved on soberly to other matters. The world’s fourth heart-transplant patient had died, two weeks after receiving his new heart.

  “Everything looks worse on TV, you know,” Maria said.

  “Does it?”

  “Way worse.”

  “So this is actually only really, really terrible, not completely catastrophic.”

  “Maybe just terrible,” Maria said. “Really terrible, at worst.”

  Liz stared at the TV screen. According to the FDA, IUDs were a safe and effective means of birth control. A little late for that, Liz thought. The pain in her stomach was sharpening, and she had a sudden sense that her bowels might let go. “Listen, I’ve got a roast in the oven and I think I have to go throw up. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

  “Illegitimi non carborundum,” Maria said. Marine Corps Latin, an old favorite of Larry’s and Mike’s: don’t let the bastards get you down.

  “Love you too,” Liz said.

  SHE BARELY MADE IT to the bathroom, trying not to double over until she was out of sight of the kids. She closed the door and fumbled at the buttons on her slacks, but she was already so crumpled from the pain that she couldn’t get onto the toilet, and she sank to the floor with her slacks at her knees. She was still hoping it was something digestive, somethi
ng she’d eaten, but her underwear was soaked with blood. The pain was not labor pain, it was more like a deep cramp with a knife edge, and the blood was bright red. Fresh blood, hemorrhage blood.

  Not here, not now, Liz thought, trying to breathe. Jesus, God, no. She would rather die than lose this baby here, on the goddamned bathroom floor. But the blood kept coming. She groped for a place in her body free of pain, some point of leverage, like a mountain climber who had slipped on a sheer slope of ice, stabbing at the surface with an ax, trying to dig the point in somewhere and arrest the slide to ruin. But nothing held; there was only the pain, like the cold of the mountain itself, and she was lost in it.

  Time must have passed, because someone was knocking at the bathroom door. Liz could smell the roast in the oven, just starting to burn. So it had been half an hour at least.

  It was Danny, sounding concerned. “Mom, are you all right?”

  Liz tried to find her voice, and failed at first. The blood had puddled between her legs, sopping, liquid, shocking. Life spilled, life lost, the color and substance of failure and defeat. But she was not beaten yet. She could still feel the baby inside her; it was exactly the size of the pain.

  She tried again to speak and found a stranger’s weighted voice, weirdly compressed. “Danny, call—” Your father, she had been about to say. Call your father, for God’s sake. “—Mrs. Williams, okay? Ask her. If she can. Get over here right away.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. It’s okay. But tell her to hurry. And…turn off the oven.”

  “Okay. What about the potatoes?”

  “What?”

  “The potatoes. They’re turning brown from sitting out. Do you want me to finish mashing them, or—?”

  “Never mind. About the potatoes, sweetie,” Liz said.

  AT FIRST LIGHT on the morning after the attack on Hill 851, Hotel Company started to sort the wounded from the dead. There were bodies everywhere. The NVA had broken through the wire during the night and overrun the First Platoon’s positions on the Hump, but for the most part the Marines had stayed in their trenches and just fought from where they were. It had been chaos for several hours, shadows fighting shadows, until Dermott Edmonds’s Third Platoon had finally counterattacked at about 4:00 a.m. and retaken the Hump just before dawn.

  Mike picked his way among the shell holes through the devastated positions, his M-16 unsafed. The hilltop was still engulfed in fog, and visibility was about ten feet, which made it quite an adventure moving among the dead and dying. He was looking for Doug Parker, without much hope of finding him alive. Parker had stayed on the radio the night before when his platoon’s position was overrun, and when it was clear that almost everyone on the Hump was enemy soldiers, he had begun calling in mortar rounds on his own location, watching the shells landing around him and adjusting the fire in increments of less than ten meters, until he went off the radio net at about three in the morning. They’d heard nothing from him since then.

  Mike squatted to check two bodies sprawled side by side in the red dirt, but both were NVA. One of the dead men carried a stack of pamphlets in English, promising the Americans decent treatment as POWs and laying down some rules of behavior. Apparently the enemy had expected to prevail the night before. The other man had a vivid blue tattoo on his upper arm, partially obscured by the wound that had killed him. The tattoo’s inscription was familiar to Mike; he’d seen it on half a dozen other painfully young North Vietnamese dead already: BORN IN THE NORTH TO DIE IN THE SOUTH.

  “Skipper—” Stinson called, from the edge of a foxhole nearby. Mike went over to find Doug Parker curled up in the hole, with his radio operator beside him. A mortar round had landed between them, killing both men instantly. Parker was still clutching the radio handset he’d been calling in the fire with. Stinson bent to take the mic out of the lieutenant’s hand, but it was frozen there, and he finally cut the wire and left the mic there rather than breaking Parker’s fingers to get it out.

  Mike felt the loss, but there wasn’t time to dwell on anything but getting ready for the next assault. They had almost no ammunition left, and he had everyone shamelessly foraging among the dead and wounded to take what bullets and grenades they could find. With the fog, there were no choppers coming in, and so no reinforcements, no resupply, no ammo, no food, no water. They had wounded men who should have been off the hill eight hours before, just lying there to live or die, bleeding on stretchers in a makeshift bunker with nothing but a sheet of plywood overhead.

  The crunch of shovels could be heard everywhere in the fog. Almost every bunker on the hilltop had been destroyed. Hotel Company was somewhere near half strength at the moment, defending a hilltop they hadn’t had enough men to cover in the first place. If they come now, Mike thought, they might take us. He had a clip and a half of M-16 ammo left, one grenade, and seven shots in his .45. Six for them, one for him, if it came to that.

  The fog lifted for a moment, and he could see down the hill to the wire. The hillside was strewn with NVA dead, like crumpled sacks, soggy now with dew. A number of enemy soldiers dangled from the concertina wire, frozen in the shape of assault or flight. The Marines who were visible were milling around like it was a piss-and-cigarette stop on the Quang Tri Day Tour and they were wondering where to buy postcards. It was a bad time for a fucking Chinese fire drill in a bad, bad place, and Mike already had a sick feeling in his stomach when he heard the first swoosh of a rocket being fired from somewhere in the brush to the northwest. And, a beat later, swoosh-swoosh-swoosh. And again, just before the first one hit, in that eerie clarity that came upon you instantly under fire, swoosh-swoosh.

  “Incoming! Incoming!”

  Time slowed, as it always did when the shit hit the fan, and everything got very clear. Everyone went into motion, looking for the nearest hole. Mike dived into the foxhole where Parker’s body still lay, and Stinson slammed in beside him. The first rocket hit the command bunker, and the second found one of the surviving gun positions, which blew up twice. Fifty-caliber machine gun rounds started cooking off, adding to the chaos.

  The screams of “Corpsman! Corpsman!” began. Several of the company’s Navy medics were already up and scurrying toward the wounded, extraordinarily, but they all dropped flat again as another salvo of rockets hit, and another. There was really nothing to do for the moment but survive. Mike pressed his helmet down on his head with his free hand and tried to burrow and blend with the mud, even as he was conscious of Doug Parker’s body beside him, cold and imperturbable.

  On his other side, Stinson began to pray, in a steady, unhurried murmur, “Hail Mary, full of grace…” Mike was surprised; he wouldn’t have pegged his radioman as a religious sort. He was also impressed; his own mind was completely incapable of articulating sentences at the moment. The ground heaved palpably beneath him with every impact, the concussions slammed at him from above like blows, and he could feel his bowels on the verge of release.

  More rockets hit. He’d lost count, long since, of how many; the noise of the individual blasts had fused into a single overwhelming roar, like a sea too stormy to distinguish individual waves. One of the mortar positions took a direct hit, then exploded again as its ammunition went up, and rounds of 60mm shells splayed everywhere like deadly fireworks. There was no sign of any of the crew escaping. Another salvo of the 140mm rockets came, and then another, and in the brief silences between the salvos the cries for corpsmen came, rendingly, from all around the hilltop.

  Mike raised his head during a pause and spotted Bill Savard, his forward air controller, in the trench about ten yards in front of him. “Billy, get us some air!”

  “My radioman’s hit!”

  “Just get us some fucking air!” Mike turned to Stinson, to call in artillery support, but just then another salvo of rockets began to land and he buried his face in the mud again and rode the bucking earth.

  “…Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death. Amen�
�. Hail Mary, full of grace…”

  CHAPTER 24

  JANUARY 1968

  THE GLARE of the hospital lights hurt her: too bright, too cold, a suffusing, almost chemical atmosphere that seemed to fix you forever in whatever painful posture you were caught in, like a fetus in a jar. Hospital lights should be soft, Liz thought. They could blow up cities with broken atoms, track submarines a mile beneath the sea by the sound of someone’s disquieted heartbeat, and orbit the earth in tin cans. Why couldn’t they make hospital lights that were soft and warm?

  She lay on a gurney in a curtained niche of the emergency room, with a rood of IV bags canted above her, including a plump red sack of blood that looked like a swollen tick, while three doctors argued matter-of-factly over how to kill her baby. Two of them wanted to induce labor, and the other one thought they should do a cesarean. They all agreed it was probably too soon for the baby to be viable.

  “Guys—” Liz said. It came out as a croak, and none of them turned. She felt a moment’s ridiculous compunction, as if it were rude to interrupt. God, she was her mother’s daughter. Just another woman, politely bleeding to death. “Hello? Hello?…Hey!”

  The three men turned to her at last. Liz drew the deepest breath she could manage. She hadn’t been given any pain medication yet, and it still felt like she had swallowed a guillotine blade. She said, as calmly as she could, “I would like to be included in this discussion.”

  All three of them looked dubious; the two pushing for the induction of labor actually exchanged a glance of collegial annoyance while the one advocating the cesarean said, a trifle grudgingly, “Of course.”

  His name tag read Levine. The best of a bad lot, Liz decided at once. I’ll work with this one. She met his eyes and said, “So what’s the deal?”