Matterhorn: a novel of the Vietnam War

by Karl Marlantes

  Within minutes Mellas’s hands were raw and blistered, and his arm felt weighted down. The whole time he was hacking at the bamboo he felt naked, aware that his rifle was in his left hand, and that his finger was not on the trigger. If he was fired on he would have to rely on the kid behind him to take out the enemy. Finally, after an eternity, someone tapped him on the shoulder and he dropped back behind Conman, where Skosh was with the radio. Mellas was sweating profusely, from both his labor and his fear. A voice within his head began mocking him, asking him why in hell any NVA would be anywhere near the middle of this damned bamboo patch they’d stumbled into.

  Two more hours went by before they were out of the bamboo and back into the relative ease of walking through jungle, sweating, fighting insects, groping, as blind as the leeches against which they waged their real war. Lieutenant Fitch asked for pos reps—position reports—every twenty minutes or so. Mellas dutifully radioed them in, feeling frustrated and useless because they barely changed. In two hours the patrol had gone perhaps 300 meters.

  Then, in an instant, the dullness and fatigue were swept away, leaving clean, cold terror.

  Conman dived to the dirt in front of Mellas. Skosh too hit the dirt, before Mellas could even fold his knees. The entire squad was flat on the ground, rifles alternating sides all along the line, as they were assigned. Conman peered intently forward, then he started to hunch and wriggle backward on his belly and forearms toward Mellas. He turned and held up three fingers, then held out an open palm with a questioning look on his face. At least three, maybe more. Mellas’s heart started to pound painfully in his throat. He was trying to remember what he’d been told to do, back at Quantico. His mind seemed empty. Conman squirmed back farther. Mellas could see no one else. All alone. All alone, and maybe about to die.

  “Pat alerted,” Conman whispered. “Arran says at least three gooks, by the way Pat’s acting. Probably more.”

  “Maybe it’s the machine-gun team,” Mellas whispered, thinking, Why me?

  Conman shrugged. “What’ll we do, Lieutenant?”

  Mellas didn’t have the slightest idea.

  He wanted to radio Bass and the Jayhawk and ask them. At the same time, he knew that this idea was ridiculous. His mind was turning over possibilities so fast that he felt dizzy. Meanwhile, Conman waited, open-mouthed, for Mellas to come up with a plan of action. If it was just three, he could send in the squad on line and wipe them out. If it was a three-man OP, an outpost for a larger unit, that unit could be anything from a platoon to a company. If he went in with the squad, they’d walk right into the deep shit and be lucky to come out with anybody alive. Then again, if it was only three there would be no excuse for not going after them. But someone would probably get killed. It might be Mellas, unless he sent two fire teams in without him. But what would the others think of that? He’d have to go. But he could get killed. It was only three. How could he be afraid? The odds were so much in their favor. Mellas suddenly saw himself and the fourteen squad members lined up against a wall, facing a firing squad of fifteen men, only one of whom had a bullet in his rifle. The odds would be very much in his favor there as well. But suppose the one bullet hit him. He suddenly knew that odds became meaningless when everything was at stake.

  Mellas decided to assume it was an outpost for a larger group until he knew otherwise. That meant he’d have to find out. His training took over. His mind started inventorying his available weapons.

  “Gun up,” he whispered to Skosh. The word went back to invisible kids lying on the jungle floor. “Set it in here,” Mellas whispered to Conman. “Put Vancouver with his machine gun one-eighty from it.”

  “He won’t like it.”

  “To hell with him. Send a fire team around to the left. We’ll cover with Mole if they get into the shit. Who do you want to go?”

  Now it was Conman’s turn to play God, at age nineteen. He shut his eyes. “Rider.”

  So some are chosen to die young.

  Mellas turned to Skosh. “Rider up.” Skosh crawled back toward the next man. “Rider up.” The whisper passed along.

  “Your seventy-nine man have any shotgun rounds?” Mellas asked Conman.

  Conman held up three fingers.

  Mellas cursed under his breath. The rounds, so useful in the jungle where nothing could be seen, were always in short supply. The M-79 men hoarded them like misers.

  “He’ll go with the team.”

  Conman nodded.

  “Set the gun in so Rider can get his ass back if he runs into trouble. I’ll go and pick him up.”

  “What about artillery?” Conman asked.

  Mellas felt a sudden sinking in his stomach. He’d forgotten all about it. “I’ll see Daniels on the way down,” he said, saving face.

  Conman gave him a thumbs-up and started crawling to the nearest person to set up the perimeter.

  Mellas passed Skosh. “Stick with Conman. I’ll be with Daniels and on the arty frequency if the Six wants me.” Mellas continued crawling down the line of intense questioning faces. He kept whispering, “Three gooks. Maybe more. Conman’ll set you in,” all the while motioning them forward. He met Mole and Young, Mole’s assistant gunner, moving forward, both of them sweating heavily. Mole looked grim. Young gave a wan smile, dragging the heavy machine-gun ammunition beside him on the ground, trying very hard to move without making noise.

  “You’ll block for Rider,” Mellas whispered to Mole. “See Conman.” Mole nodded, continuing in a low crawl, the large gun cradled across his arms as he worked his way forward. Rider came crawling forward behind Mole and Young, his face glistening, his eyes slightly wild. The two frightened kids in his fire team crawled behind him. Yet no one questioned that they would do what they were told. “Three gooks,” Mellas whispered. “We have to find out if that’s all. Could be an OP. Tell Connolly that I said for you to take Gambaccini and his M-79 with you.”

  Rider licked his lips and looked quickly at his two friends. One nodded. The other was staring into the jungle as if the intensity of his gaze could reveal its secret. But the undergrowth revealed nothing. The secret could be revealed only by crawling into the jungle and meeting it there.

  Rider nodded and pointed uphill, looking at his team. The three of them crawled toward the head of the column, disappearing almost immediately. Mellas continued down the line, sending kids forward to form the perimeter.

  Daniels crawled up, his radio slipping awkwardly from side to side on his back.

  “The angle is the shits for Golf Battery,” Daniels whispered. “The ridge is between them and the gooners. The one-oh-fives will have to shoot nearly straight up to come straight down on them and Golf is so far away the rounds won’t reach. If they shoot a flatter trajectory to make the distance, they’ll hit the ridge’s front side or fly right over the target. I think you ought to use the company’s sixties. The rounds are a tenth the weight, but they’ll hit the target. I’ve got them up on the net now.”

  Mellas nodded his head, thankful for Daniels’s foresight. “Good,” he said.

  Daniels started forward again, twisting the frequency knob at the same time to tell his battery to stand by, that he’d be using the mortars; then he switched frequencies again and started talking to the company mortar squad. Mellas and Daniels met Vancouver lying in front of them, his own machine gun cradled on a rotten limb. Skosh was crawling toward Mellas, holding out the handset. Mellas grabbed it, waiting for Daniels to finish with the mortars. He noticed that Rider’s fire team and Gambaccini and his M-79 grenade launcher were already gone. “It’s the skipper,” Skosh whispered.

  “I’ll need a pos rep,” Fitch said. “Over.”

  “We haven’t moved squat since the last one,” Mellas whispered. “Over.”

  “Bravo One, I want a pos rep. You copy?”

  “Wait one.” Mellas’s hands were shaking as he dug out his map. The jungle made it impossible to see any landmarks. He tried to remember the terrain they’d walked over, estimate the distances. It was like navigating underwater. He stabbed a finger at the most likely spot, still feeling it
was the same place he’d radioed in last time. He looked at Daniels, raising his eyebrows. Daniels moved his finger to a point on his own map with his own peculiar pencil marks and dogears, not trusting anyone else’s. He looked at where Mellas was pointing on his own map. Thumbs-up. Mellas radioed in the position. If he was wrong, the shells could hit Rider’s team, or them, instead of the enemy.

  Fitch got off the hook and let Corporal Devon, the squad leader of the 60-millimeter mortars, come back up on the net.

  Daniels started talking. “Bravo Whiskey, Bravo One One, fire mission. Over.”

  And Mellas had nothing to do.

  He sat down while Daniels called in the mission. He noticed that there were ants on the ground where they had set in. He could barely see the backs of some of the kids as they lay beneath the foliage. A bird chirped. He didn’t know if the whole thing wasn’t just a foolish exercise.

  The thunk of mortar shells leaving the tube jarred him. For all the hours they’d walked, he was surprised to hear the sounds of tubing so close to him. There was a sudden rush and a loud crash as the 60-millimeter shells came nearly straight down. The sounds were muffled and seemed far away. Mellas wondered if they’d read the map that badly.

  “Right fifty. Drop one hundred,” Daniels whispered, correcting by sound alone. The second salvo came down right on the ridge above them. The sounds were magnified tenfold, no longer masked by the earth. Daniels called for four salvos. Then he adjusted to the right and called in four more. Mellas was amazed: it was all mechanical, yet people were probably getting killed.

  Pat was lying quietly next to Arran, who was sitting against a log. The dog was panting and so seemed to be grinning. His odd reddish ears were standing up.

  The radio whispered. Skosh handed Mellas the handset. “I have to know the word on the basketball team.” It was Fitch, using the radio code for a fire team. “Big John Six wants to know. Also Golf Six wants to know why he’s standing by and not firing the mission. Over.”

  “Tell him character Delta thinks the angle is bad. We’re masked by a ridge and the mortars have a better shot at it. And I can’t walk out and ask the damned basketball team what the score is because I don’t exactly know where they are. Which is another reason why we don’t want the artillery right now. Over.”

  Fitch came back up laughing. “OK. Let me know ASAP. Six out.”

  An ant bit Mellas, who suppressed a yelp. He noticed Pat pressing his paws on the ground, holding his head back as if to push the ants away. Several of the kids were squirting insect repellent on their faces and legs. He looked at his wristwatch. Only five minutes had passed. More mortar shells crumped into the jungle; the explosions moved the ground beneath them yet seemed somehow far away. Mellas slapped at a fly and missed. It circled off and landed on Skosh, who did exactly the same thing. Two more minutes went by. Daniels told the mortars to hold off for a minute. One of the kids was cautiously moving his leg back and forth, probably trying to get the blood back into a foot that had fallen asleep. The fly landed on Mellas again. Then the jungle ripped apart.

  It was as if someone had torn a sheet of solid sound. The M-16s, on full automatic, screamed, making Mellas wince and shut his eyes. Just a few meters in front of him he could hear the slower, more solid hammering of the heavier-caliber NVA AK-47s. Mellas, who had buried his face in the earth, now raised his eyes, trying to see through the jungle to where the sound originated. Quick bursts from the lighter, higher-velocity M-16s of Rider’s fire team were going off; the bursts alternated as one rifleman would cover for another who was slamming in a new magazine. The blurred screams of the M-16s on full automatic answered the slower and heavier slapping of the AK-47s. The AK bullets cracked overhead, cutting branches in two. Leaves, bark, and splinters rained down on the men’s helmets and backs. There was a short explosive pop followed almost immediately by the thud of a much louder explosion as Gambaccini got off a grenade round. Uphill from them, someone was shouting. There were crashing sounds in the jungle. The radio was screaming. “What the fuck’s going on? You being hit? Over.”

  Mellas could scarcely talk because of the blood pounding in his throat. The air was crazy with the ear-hammering noise of automatic weapons. “That’s a neg.” Mellas was unaware that he was shouting. “It’s the basketball team. Over.”

  “Where are they? Give me a pos rep. Over.” Fitch’s voice steadied Mellas, who had to cover one ear with his hand to hear what Fitch was saying. “About twenty-five meters bearing zero-four-five. Maybe less. I don’t know. I can’t see shit.” Mellas’s words were coming out in gasps.

  “Get your arty cranked up. You want the sixties dropped in closer? Over.”

  “That’s a neg.” Mellas gasped for air. “Don’t know where the team is.” Panting. “Character Delta’s going up on the arty net now. Over.”

  Mellas was bewildered by the suddenness of it all. It had been so methodical, so easy. Now he couldn’t even tell where the fire was coming from. Should he go after Rider or wait for him? Questions rattled through his head, but no answers came. He decided to stay put.

  An AK-47 bullet with just enough energy left to keep moving after it exited from a thick brush stem fluttered over Mellas’s head with a high-pitched whine and lost itself in the dense jungle behind him.

  Then there was silence. It was as if the last shattering burst had killed all sound. Everyone was breathing rapidly. Mole was digging his toes into the earth behind the machine gun, the stock pulled in tight to his shoulder, staring down the barrel as if trying to cut through the jungle with his eyes.

  There were no sounds from the forest.

  Mellas crawled up next to Connolly and whispered, “We’ve got to get in touch with Rider.”

  Connolly nodded. He cupped his hands and called out in a strangled half whisper, “Rider?” His voice carried through the silence like a shaft of light through a dark cave. No answer. An insect started to chirrup again. “Rider, get your ass back in here. Call my name when you get close so we’ll know it’s you.” Connolly turned to Mellas. “He ain’t hardly going to yell back, sir.”

  The radio hissed with static. Mellas knew what was coming. “This is Bravo Six. We need a sit rep. Big John is creaming his jeans. Over.”

  “Six, this is One Actual. No change yet. Over.”

  There was a long pause. Fitch knew as well as anyone that, at the moment, to go looking for Rider would be insane. He’d be shooting anything that moved. So would any number of NVA. The radio hissed again. “I copy. But you’ve got to get me a sit rep ASAP. Over.”

  “I copy. We’re working on it. Over.”

  “Roger that. Bravo Six out.”

  Three long minutes went by. Then they heard a sound in the bushes. Rifles moved in unison, focusing on the single sound. Connolly’s hand was up, holding the fire. A whisper cut through the bush. “Conman?”

  Rifles relaxed.

  “Here,” Conman whispered back.

  A brief commotion followed, then Rider came scrambling into the perimeter, crouched low, followed by his two team members and Gambaccini with the M-79 still smoking from the barrel. They threw themselves to the ground.

  Rider crawled over to Mellas. He was breathing hard. His face was streaked with dirt and sweat. His utility shirt reeked. “Two gooks,” he said. “Maybe more. We saw each other at the same time.” His chest heaved, trying to pull in more air. “We both opened up. We hit the deck. Shot shit out of everything. I may have hit one. They dee-deed.”

  “Which way?”

  Rider shook his head negatively. “Fuck if I know. Downhill.”

  “That’d be south,” Mellas said, pulling out his map. He pulled the squad back while Daniels worked over the area south and east of them with artillery and mortar fire, controlling the 105-millimeters from his own radio and the 60-millimeters from Skosh’s radio. After about fifteen minutes the squad moved into the worked-over area, everyone on the alert, Pat quivering with excitement but under perfect control by Arran.

  Pat picked up a trail and started tracking. The squad followed Pat down into the valley. They
worked through thicker and thicker growth, occasionally seeing a torn bush, a broken tree limb, or fresh dirt from the artillery. Other than these small signs and the smell of the explosive, the half-hour fire mission and fight had made no impression on the jungle at all. The Marines began to grow weary.

  The radio cracked. “Bravo One, this is Bravo Six. Big John wants an after-action report. He can’t wait any longer. He’s got to see Bushwhacker Six. I’ve also got Golf Six on my back wanting to know how his artillery did. Over.”

  “Wait one,” Mellas said. He sighed, holding the handset in front of his mouth, thinking. Mellas wanted to believe something had happened, something good that he could report. They’d shot up a quarter of an hour’s worth of shells. Rider had done an incredible job checking out the alert. No one had been hurt. It was a good job. Mellas wanted to believe they’d done well. He wanted to, so he did.

  “Bravo Six, this is Bravo One. Our character Romeo feels certain he got one right when he opened up. He only saw two gooks, but from the sound of things there had to be more than that. We got a probable for sure. Over.”