Matterhorn: a novel of the Vietnam War

by Karl Marlantes

  “Maybe on the left,” Bass said. “No, make it down the center. A reverse Mohawk.”

  “I think we ought to take his fucking head off,” Ridlow growled.

  Cassidy squatted down and leaned forward to whisper in Parker’s ear. “Parker, you fucking turd, so help me God if you make one fucking wrong move I’m gonna screw your head off and shit in it. I don’t know what the fuck’s wrong with these fucking officers in this company to take the crap that pukes like you hand out all the time, but if I had my way I’d have your ass strung up to the nearest fucking tree. You don’t request mast about a fucking haircut. You request mast when something is really wrong. And you don’t disobey orders. Now you sit up real nice on the edge of this hole and get your hair cut like a man, or so help me God I’ll personally beat holy fuck out of you and leave you for the fucking maggots where you belong. You understand?”

  Bass had also squatted down to look directly at him. Parker glanced around. The others in the squad were peering at him from their holes. They had all gotten their hair cut. Broyer heard the sound of Cassidy squeezing the hair clippers. He looked at Bass’s heavy forearms. His knees were shaking and there was a racing feeling inside him.

  “I just want to say my hair ain’t no longer than some chuck that grease it down. That’s all I want to say.”

  “Good. Now you’ve said it,” Cassidy said. “And I want to say I don’t want a puke like you in my Marine Corps. I just want to say that. You aren’t worthy of the name. Now, I’ll give you three counts to sit your ass on the edge of this fighting hole. One . . .”

  Parker moved.

  Broyer, still standing next to the fighting hole, took a breath. He looked around. He saw the lieutenant standing by Bass’s hooch. Like everyone else, he was watching Cassidy clip Parker bald.

  As soon as they stood down from the evening alert Broyer took off for Second Platoon to find China. It was the first time he’d been in another platoon’s area, and he was a little surprised to see trash lying around the fighting holes. Walking by a hooch he heard a loud guffaw and then a hearty laugh. Lieutenant Goodwin’s blond head stuck out of the hooch. Broyer scurried by, feeling out of place and hoping to avoid a confrontation. He walked up to a brother he didn’t know, pushed his glasses back up on his nose, walked up to the man, and went through the now familiar handshake. He asked where China hung out. The brother pointed toward a small hooch, half hidden beneath a huge felled tree, barely two feet from a machine-gun position. He went over and saw China and two brothers leaning against the trunk of the tree on the side away from the hooch. They were eating supper. Their voices reminded him of summer nights in Baltimore.

  China greeted him, going through the handshake. “Hey, brother, glad you could come by. Meet my friends.”

  One of them offered Broyer a C-ration can filled with hot coffee. He took it and sat down, gingerly holding the folded-down lid so the heat wouldn’t burn his fingers. When he started to tell them about the haircut, he was surprised at the anger that spilled out. “And then the chickenshit motherfuckers shaved him bald. They shaved him fucking bald. And we just stood there and watched those motherfuckers.”

  When Broyer finished, China sprang to his feet. “You tell Parker get his ass over here soon as he can. And don’t worry, we won’t be standin’ ’round much longer no more. We got the power.” He was pounding his fist on the log. “We got the power. We gonna do some fuckin’ over our own pretty soon.”

  Broyer hurried away, feeling understood, feeling China’s will and strength.

  China sat down against the log and sighed. He reached out to heat up another cup of coffee. The two others, knowing that China would speak when he had something to say, began to talk to each other, extinguishing the fire when darkness finally fell.

  Broyer relayed China’s message to Parker, and when Parker got off watch that night he made his way over to Second Platoon’s area. He had to half-crawl, half-crouch up to the top of the LZ and then head back down to Second Platoon to avoid being shot by accident. In the blackness it took him about an hour.

  When he reached China’s hooch, the brother China shared it with was asleep and alone. He angrily told Parker to go down to the hole below them. He did, and after identifying himself, he slipped into China’s two-man fighting hole.

  “Shhh,” China said, pretending to hear something, trying to think. The wind moved up the hill toward them, smelling of wet earth and moss. Brush, unseen, just ten meters in front of them, whispered beneath creaking trees.

  “You said you wanted to see me,” Parker finally whispered.

  “Yeah.” China was still thinking.

  “They fucked with me this afternoon. Fucked with me bad, man.”

  “You stupid shit, shut the fuck up,” China whispered fiercely.

  “Hey, what’s with you, man?”

  “What’s with me?” China whispered. “What’s with you makin’ a jive-assed flaky scene over a fuckin’ haircut?”

  “Hey, you told me, man—”

  “I told you we’d wait to pick our ground and then we’d have a cause. Now I got every brother in the company wonderin’ what the fuck I’m gonna do over a jive-assed fuckin’ haircut. I ought to take you fuckin’ head off. I just get the brothers sendin’ parts to me and you got to blow shit up.”

  “They fucking castrated me right in front of my brothers and you be saying I fucked up?” Parker’s lips curled back; his anger was barely under control. China felt it but knew he could handle Parker.

  “Hey, brothers, cool it, huh?” China’s hooch mate was whispering from the open flap. “Ridlow be checking lines anytime and he light big fire to our asses if you don’t cool it.”

  Parker cooled down slightly, and China shifted his feet.

  “Look,” China said, “the racist motherfuckers gonna be taught a lesson, but you gotta do it up right. You hear me? You gotta do it up right. We don’t keep the power unless we keep our brains. You hear me? And the brothers back home need weapons—real weapons.”

  “I hear you,” Parker said sullenly. “I’ll kill the motherfucker myself.”

  “You don’t kill nobody without my say-so.”

  “I’ll kill any fucking pig I want.”

  “You listen a me, Parker. We need you. You know that. Right? You know that. You brothers need you. But we don’t need you doing no killin’ unless it’s a real showdown. We don’t need you doin’ that. You let me and Henry decide that stuff. We get it together next time we in VCB.”

  “Shit. We ain’t seen VCB in two months. What makes you think we see VCB now? Henry rotate home before you see him. Sheeit.”

  “We see him, Parker. You just learn to bide time. We got time. Now you let me think how I’m gonna handle this, OK? And no fuckin’ around with it. You just let me think about this tonight and I’ll start seein’ the brothers in the morning. OK?”

  “OK.”

  “You did fine, brother. It took a lot of guts to stand up like that. I’m sorry I jumped on you. It’s just we playin’ for really big stakes here. You hear me? Big stakes. Can be no mis-takes.” China cackled, leaving Parker nothing to say.

  Parker went to all fours to feel his way back to his own fighting hole, leaving China in total blackness. China spent the rest of his watch and even took his hooch mate’s watch trying to figure out how to handle the situation. He had to move the emphasis from something trivial like haircuts. Cassidy seemed the likely target. Cassidy, not the fucking haircut, was the key to the situation. He’d see the brothers first thing in the morning before patrol.

  China did see the brothers first thing in the morning. Mellas, worried, watched him talking. When Mellas went down to join First Squad for the patrol, Mole was conspicuously late, still cleaning his machine gun in full view of the assembled squad, picking away at minuscule pieces of lint. The heavy noose hung from his coffee-colored neck.

  Mole, who was six-two and very well built, didn’t look like a mole. He’d received the nickname on the DMZ operation. Connolly’s squad had been pinned down, and Mole had moved so low to the ground behind rocks and bushes to flank the enemy that the re
st of the squad swore he’d gone underground. He’d opened up on the NVA, killing two and scattering the rest. The skipper had put him up for a Bronze Star.

  “You going to burp it too, Mole?” Mellas asked, trying to make his voice light.

  Mole continued cleaning the weapon. “Gun’s gotta be babied, sir,” he mumbled, “’specially when we can’t get the fucking parts we order.”

  Mellas squatted down next to him. “You pissed off about something, Mole?”

  “No, sir. Just doing my job.” Mole scrutinized the gun’s heavy receiver.

  Not wanting to confront the haircut issue, Mellas looked at his watch. “Look, Mole, we’re five minutes late already. Try and hurry it up, OK?”

  Mole grunted and clamped the belt-feeder assembly into place.

  Mellas joined Connolly and Vancouver, as well as Daniels, the artillery FO; the German shepherd, Pat; and Corporal Arran, Pat’s handler. They were all checking their weapons, adjusting straps, stuffing favorite C-rations into pockets for lunch, and taking final drinks of water before topping off their canteens—all the nervous rituals one does to keep the ego functioning in the face of imminent death.

  Mellas felt a surge of pride that Vancouver was in his platoon. Although he hadn’t known who Vancouver was at the time, he remembered clearly their first encounter. It had been at VCB while he was waiting for a helicopter to take him and Goodwin out to Matterhorn. It was mostly a time of cold drizzle, boredom, and nervous energy amid rifled boxes of C-rations gone soggy and the smell of JP-4 fuel and urinal pipes stuck in sodden clay, but Mellas could have spent the rest of his days lying there in the mud. That squalid landing zone at VCB was a place where he could stay alive, where the dreaded bush lay in the future, beyond the helicopter’s ramp. At VCB you could watch the helicopters leave without you. There, you never had to step through the dark aluminum-ringed portal to the unknown terror of the bush.

  Still, by midafternoon, even Goodwin had been worn down by the rain and the boredom. They all dozed in the gray light, drizzle falling on them, stupefied by waiting and by their desire to forget what they were waiting for. Then the monotony broke.

  A single Marine jumped off the back of an incoming helicopter and walked slowly across the landing zone toward the dirt road that led to the regiment’s rear area. The Marine stood six-three or six-four, but his size wasn’t nearly as interesting as the sawed-off M-60 machine gun dangling from two web belts hung over his shoulders. An M-60 usually took two men to operate. The book assigned a crew of three. A crude handle had been welded onto the barrel so the Marine could control the kick without resting it on a bipod. Two cans of machine-gun ammo lay against his chest, suspended from his shoulders. In addition to all this weight, Mellas guessed that he also carried the usual full pack of the bush Marine: sleeping gear, food, extra clothes, hand grenades, books, letters, magazines, ponchos for shelter from the rain, shovel, claymore mines, bars of C-4 plastic explosive, trip flares, handmade stove, pictures of girlfriends, toilet articles, insect repellent, cigarettes, rifle-cleaning gear, WD-40, jars of freeze-dried coffee, and maybe a package or two of long-rats: freeze-dried trail food designed as rations for long-range patrols but more often used by the grunts for special occasions. On the Marine’s head was an Australian bush hat, left brim folded up at the side. Matted blond hair, discolored with grime, showed beneath it. His uniform was a mass of tattered holes and filth. One trouser leg had been torn off just below the knee, revealing pasty white flesh covered with infected leech bites and jungle rot. His hands, face, and arms were also covered with jungle rot and open sores. You could smell him as he walked by. But he walked by as if the LZ belonged to him, seemingly unaware of the hundred or more pounds he carried. He was a bush Marine, and Mellas wanted fervently to be just like him.

  What Mellas didn’t know then, but knew now, was that Vancouver had made the usual swap for the most tattered clothing in his platoon—he would be able to get all new clothing back in the rear—and that Lieutenant Fitch, acting on Fredrickson’s recommendation, had sent him to VCB to clean up his NSU—nonspecific urethritis. Vancouver had contracted this medical problem when the company was at VCB some weeks before, waiting to lift out on the next operation. Instead of staying where he should have been, he had sneaked off one night through seven kilometers of unsecured territory to a Buru village near Ca Lu. Rumor had it that Vancouver was secretly married to a girl there.

  The memory of seeing Vancouver at VCB gave Mellas a deep yearning to be back in its comparative safety. From VCB, Matterhorn had looked like the bush. Now Matterhorn itself felt like VCB. In the distant valley below Mellas were unseen trails, connecting base camps and supply dumps, crisscrossing the border into North Vietnam and Laos, a spidery network that carried the supplies and replacements for the NVA’s operations against the population centers in the south and along the coast. The battalion’s job was to stop them. Soon, he knew, he’d be down there—no perimeter, no artillery battery, no landing zones, no Matterhorn. The real bush.

  Mellas’s mind snapped back to the task at hand. They were going on another routine patrol to protect the artillery battery.

  When Mole finished cleaning his machine gun, he walked over to Connolly and nodded. Connolly broke into activity, calling out the starting order of the fire teams in the patrol. Vancouver moved quietly down toward the intricate maze that was the only way through the barbed wire. Skosh, normally Bass’s radio operator, had been sitting against a stump with his eyes closed the whole time. He rose and joined Mellas behind the first team. He and Hamilton had traded jobs to help relieve boredom. The scout dog, Pat, sniffed at each Marine as he went by, memorizing his smell. Once in the jungle, Pat would be alert to any smell that was different. Arran said Pat could memorize well over a hundred individual scents.

  In five minutes they were down the steep hill into the jungle, away from the litter, tangled wire, garbage, and barren mud. A bird called. They heard its wings as it flapped away from the squad’s path. The canopy rose high above them, 100 to 150 feet, blocking out sunlight, casting the squad into shadow. Down they went, like divers in a gray-green sea.

  Pat was alert almost immediately, but Mellas and Corporal Arran were both expecting one of three two-man outposts that sat outside the company perimeter during the day. The squad wound silently by Meaker and Merritt from Second Platoon, acknowledging them with silent smiles. Outpost, or OP, duty was easy except that the OP was likely to be sacrificed warning the company of an attack.

  The squad continued down the trail. The OP disappeared behind them. About ten minutes later, Arran went down on one knee, his hand on Pat’s quivering back, trying to read Pat’s message. The squad halted, and everyone tensed, looking to the sides of the trail. Arran pointed off the trail to the right and then pointed down. Mellas raised an eyebrow to Conman, and Conman nodded. Mellas put his thumb up—OK—and Conman tapped the kid in front of him and pointed right. The squad slipped off the trail that followed the crest of the finger and began working down a steep draw toward the valley floor. Suddenly, they were engulfed in bamboo. The top of the bamboo was about three feet above their heads, and they had to thread their way cautiously, moving aside stalks to build their own tunnel through the solid green mass.

  Vancouver, on point, started going too far into the bottom of the draw. Mellas threw a pebble at Conman. Conman turned, and Mellas gave him a negative sign and pointed upslope. The word passed up front to Vancouver, and the squad quit going downhill into the draw, staying mid-slope on the finger that led down to the valley. Walking down a draw was an invitation to an ambush.

  The sign came for the machetes. One was passed up from behind Mellas and soon everyone could hear the dull thwack of the blade as an impassible tangle was cut away so the squad could move again. With each sound, rifles were held tighter, and eyes and ears strained a little more. Finally the sound ceased. The squad began moving again, everyone ready to fire at the slightest noise or movement in the jungle.

  The squad crawled, slid, sweated, and muttered its
way through the dark jungle. Machetes had to be passed forward again. Again their dull thwacking echoed down the line. Kids bit their lower lips, fingered their safeties off and on. Yet without the machetes they couldn’t move; and if they couldn’t move, they couldn’t return to the safety of the perimeter.

  Conman rotated the lead fire team as each team became exhausted from the tension of being on point and the backbreaking work of swinging the machetes. Everyone, even Mellas, took his turn with a machete. Mellas knew it was foolish for him—it hindered tactical control—but he wanted to show that he could share some of the burden. He was acutely aware that the squad could be heard hundreds of meters away. Yet the patrol was going to certain checkpoints to make sure the NVA were kept well away from approach paths to Matterhorn. This literal bushwhacking let the patrol accomplish its mission without walking down established trails where the odds of getting ambushed were greatly increased. As he was finding out, no strategy was perfect. All choices were bad in some way.