Matterhorn: a novel of the Vietnam War

by Karl Marlantes

  “Yeah. Right here,” Jermain whispered back.

  There was a rustle in the bushes, and then Robertson’s sweating face emerged. He was duckwalking. “Oh, hi, Lieutenant,” he said, and smiled. He remained there in a squat, his little body looking perfectly at ease in its folded-up position.

  Mellas turned to look at Hamilton. “‘Hi, Lieutenant,’ he says.” He shook his head and turned to Robertson. “See anything?” he asked.

  Robertson shook his head, obviously unfazed by Mellas’s sarcastic tone. “I got the feeling, though, that they’re just in front of us keeping tabs somehow.”

  Mellas became serious. “Why do you feel that?”

  “I don’t know. Little things. I just feel it.”

  Mellas reached for the handset. “Bravo Six, this is Bravo One Actual. We checked out negative up here. I’ll be rotating squads and then we’ll be moving. I’m sending Arran back. Pat’s done and we’ll have big Victor”—he meant Vancouver—“on point anyway. Over.” Fitch acknowledged and Mellas stood up in the trail. “Pass the word back for Conman’s squad to move up. You guys take tail-end Charlie,” he told Jake. “Tell Arran to wait on the CP group.”

  Pretty soon Vancouver’s large frame could be seen moving up the trail, his modified M-60 hanging from his neck. Connolly was just two men behind him. Mellas told the lead fire team and Connolly about the situation and the need for haste. “But don’t go any faster than feels OK, Vancouver,” he added. “I don’t care how much of a hurry the colonel is in to move his little pins in the map.”

  “I got you, sir.”

  Vancouver stared down the trail, constantly scanning it, his eyes jerking with tension. Walking down a trail to save time, he knew, was an invitation for an ambush. Also, Robertson had smelled something. He was a good fire team leader and had been around a while. If Robertson was being cautious, there was good reason. But on point there are always good reasons to be cautious, even if there’s no hurry. The point man is all alone. It makes no difference if there’s a fire team or an entire battalion behind him. He sees no one—only shadows. At every turn lurks the possible ambush—and the point man is the first to go. Or, if the ambushers are particularly successful, they let the point man by and cut him off when they open up on the lieutenant and the radio operator. It’s like walking a hundred feet up on a bending two-by-four with the wind blowing in sporatic gusts from different directions. There’s no help. No rope. No friend to lean on. The point man is also blindfolded by the jungle. His ears are confused by every tiny sound behind him, obscuring the one sound that might save him. He wants to scream for the whole world to shut up. His hands sweat, making him worry that he won’t be able to pull the trigger. He wants to piss even if he just pissed five minutes ago. His heart thumps in his throat and chest. He waits out the eternity before the squad leader says it’s time to rotate back into safety.

  Vancouver stopped thinking. Fear and exposure drove thought from his head. Only survival remained.

  It was the oddly bent piece of bamboo about ten meters down the trail that caused the rush of dread that saved him. Vancouver dropped to his knees and opened up. The roar of the machine gun and the spewing of hot casings turned the silent world of the jungle upside down. Everything was motion—Marines rolling off the trail, seeking cover in the foliage, scrambling, praying, crawling for their lives. Vancouver saw only shadows, but the shadows were screaming back at him with AK-47 automatic rifles. Bullets spun past him in the trail, kicking up mud, churning the place where the Marines had been a split second before. Connolly rolled into the brush, coming faceup on his back, his M-16 clutched to his chest. He was holding his fire, just as they had discussed so many times.

  The sawed-off M-60 stopped firing. The belt had run out. Vancouver dived for the side of the trail, and Connolly rolled over into it on his stomach. He let loose on automatic just as an NVA soldier emerged from the wall of jungle to finish Vancouver off. Connolly’s bullets caught the NVA soldier full in the chest and face. The back of the man’s head exploded. Connolly rolled over again, fumbling wildly for another magazine. An M-16 opened up on Vancouver’s right, almost on top of him, the bullets screaming past his right ear. Then another M-16 followed almost immediately to his left. Vancouver was crawling backward, along with Connolly, as fast as he could. Connolly was pushing a second magazine into place, shouting for Mole. “Gun up! Gun up! Mole! Goddamn it!”

  Vancouver pulled another belt of ammunition from the metal box on his chest and slapped it into the gun’s receiver. He heard Connolly shouting for Gambaccini, the M-79 man, and Rider, his first fire team leader. He saw the lieutenant, who’d moved forward and was shouting something at Hamilton and reloading a magazine himself. Then Gambaccini popped up and let loose with a grenade over Vancouver’s head. There was a crashing sound in the brush to his left. He almost fired, but it was Rider moving his team up; all four were abreast and to the left of the trail in the jungle. They began laying down disciplined fire, pouring bullets into the unseen enemy.

  To Mellas, the whole thing happened so quickly that he didn’t even remember thinking. There was the sudden burst of Vancouver’s machine gun, and Mellas dived for the ground and immediately started crawling forward to find out what was happening. Automatically, he started shouting for Mole to get the gun up front and heard the command being relayed back down the line. Fitch’s excited voice was screaming over the radio. Mellas shouted at Hamilton—“Tell him I don’t know. I don’t know”—and crawled furiously forward.

  He had just crawled around a bend in the trail when Vancouver’s gun stopped and he saw Connolly roll out, firing in front of him while Vancouver was scrambling backward. Mellas shoved his face into the dirt just behind Vancouver’s right knee, poked his rifle blindly down the trail, and opened up over Vancouver’s head. Almost simultaneously, it seemed, the M-79 grenade launcher shot off a solid thump that sent a round of fléchettes down the trail. Then a whole fire team crashed through the jungle on his left and opened up on full automatic. All this time, Connolly was also shouting for Mole and the machine gun, crawling backward.

  Mole came scrambling up the trail, gun cradled in his arms, crawling crablike, awkwardly, but very fast. His A gunner, Young, the only white kid in the machine-gun teams except for Hippy, crawled behind him, dragging the heavy steel boxes of machine-gun belts. Mole slammed the gun down on its bipod just off the trail and immediately started laying disciplined bursts of fire down the dark green corridor. Tracers sped down the tunnel of jungle like the taillights of receding cars. Young crawled up next to the barrel, fresh belt in hand, eyes wide with fear, ready to reload.

  Mellas rolled back and grabbed the hook from Hamilton, panting for air. “Ambush. I knew this fucking trail. Death trap. Vancouver spotted them. Before we got into the kill zone. I think they dee-deed. Over.”

  “Casualties? Over.”

  “That’s a neg. Over.”

  “Thank God,” Fitch replied, forgetting radio procedure.

  Mellas was quivering with excitement and with a strange exultation, as if his team had just won a football championship. No casualties. He’d done well. It was over too quickly, though. Somehow, it should be prolonged. He wanted to tell Fitch and Hawke all about it. He wanted to go running down the long line of excited Marines, telling the story of the fight over and over again. They’d broken up an ambush. His platoon. Killed two, maybe three of the enemy, and suffered not a scratch. A perfect job.

  “Bravo Six, this is Bravo One. Over.”

  “Bravo Six,” Fitch answered.

  “We need artillery,” Mellas pleaded excitedly. “The goddamned gooners are dee-deeing right out of the fucking area. Where’s the goddamn mortars? Let’s get some.”

  “Roger that, Bravo One. Character Delta’s working up an arty mission right now. It’s a little hard on the mortar squad to fire shells into the tree limbs over their heads. You copy? Over.” Mellas was too excited to notice Fitch’s sarcasm.

  He crawled over to where Connolly was lying beside Mole, peering down the shadowy trail. Connolly, too, was quivering and b
reathing hard. Vancouver was to Connolly’s left, and Rider’s fire team to the left of Vancouver, pulled back now in echelon, forming the left side of a wedge. The rest of the squad, without being told, had formed the right side of the wedge at the head of the column to get maximum fire in the direction of the ambush but still allow fire to their sides to protect their flanks.

  “I think they drug the body away, sir,” Connolly said. “Just as we was crawling back, I thought I caught some movement. Did you see them?”

  “Yeah,” Mellas lied, without intending to. “You’re right.” In his imagination, fueled by the excitement, this mention of an NVA soldier pulling a body back into the cover of the jungle was enough to convince him that he’d actually seen it happen. “Why doesn’t the skipper send a platoon around in an envelopment?” he asked, staring down the trail.

  Connolly looked at Mellas. “In this shit?”

  Mellas stopped gazing straight ahead and looked at Connolly. For some reason, that comment had brought him down. Once more he saw tangled jungle on both sides of a narrow muddy path. “Yeah, it’d take forever. They’d be sitting ducks. You’d hear them for miles.”

  “There it is, sir.”

  “Maybe we can get it on with the artillery.” Mellas wanted to keep talking about the incident. “You’re sure about the gook you zapped in the head?” he asked.

  “I saw his fucking face disappear,” Connolly said grimly.

  “We’ll call it a confirmed, even if we don’t have the body. I mean, there’s no way the gooner can still be alive. Vancouver must have greased at least another one or two.” Mellas turned to Vancouver. “Hey, Vancouver, how many you think you got?”

  Vancouver looked down at his steaming weapon. “Jeez, sir, all I saw was fucking bushes and all this shit came flying at me. I maybe hit a couple of them, though.”

  “We’ll look for blood trails soon as the arty mission’s over. But we must have got at least one confirmed and two probables.”

  Mellas turned around to where Hamilton was lying with the heavy radio pressing him into the dirt, its small bent antenna waving in the still air. He proudly reported the score. “Bravo this is One. We got one confirmed up here and two probables. Over.”

  “Roger, one confirmed and two probables,” Pallack’s voice answered. “Heads down. I just heard character Delta say ‘shot.’ He’ll be working it in close. Over.”

  “Incoming,” Mellas called out in a loud voice. “Friendly incoming.”

  He looked around to see if his men were reasonably safe. Then it occurred to him that everybody already had his head down and had been that way for the past three minutes. He buried his own head in the earth as the first anguished scream of the 105s came through the sky from Eiger.

  It was again Third Squad’s turn to take point. They handed off Williams’s body to Second Squad and moved quietly forward. Cortell kept taking his helmet off and putting it on, rubbing his high, glistening forehead. Everyone hurried through the would-be kill zone, breathing a thank-you for Vancouver’s eyes and reaction time.

  Jackson found two rice cakes hanging from a man’s bloody web belt that had been removed and tossed beside the trail. He happily stuffed them into his large trouser pockets, as all of his squad’s food was gone. He quickly cut the brass buckle with its red star from the belt, knowing it would bring some good money from souvenir hunters in Da Nang, and passed it back to Vancouver. A little farther down the trail they found a bloody cap. That also was passed back to Vancouver, who silently gave it to Connolly. Connolly stuffed it into his pocket.

  Mellas’s whole body was zinging. His hands quivered. He started at nearly every noise and talked too rapidly, and too much, on the radio. He kept mentally replaying the scene, wondering how he could have reacted faster and killed more of them, wondering if Connolly was aware that, while he was changing magazines, Mellas had saved him by firing. He wondered if people outside the company would hear about his action and how his platoon had succeeded when Alpha Company had lost so many in a similar ambush. He remained charged up until they reached the ammunition dump that afternoon as the light began to fade from the gray sky.

  At the dump, Mellas was bitterly disappointed.

  He couldn’t believe that all the reports he’d read about the Air Force and Navy destroying bunkers had referred to what he saw before him: three large holes dug in the dank ground, covered with logs and earth.

  Inside the three bunkers were ten 120-millimeter rockets, several hundred 82-millimeter mortar shells, eighty small 61-millimeter mortar shells, enough AK-47 ammunition to supply a platoon for one firefight, and a few medical supplies donated by the English Red Cross.

  Hawke seemed strangely happy. He broke into the hawk dance, then climbed on top of one of the bunkers and tossed bandage rolls in the air like streamers, shouting at the top of his lungs, “The fucking English! I knew it was the fucking English behind this war!” He laughed and tossed another bandage, looping it in the trees. The whiteness looked out of place against the dark canopy.

  The company mostly shrugged at the Jayhawk’s antics. Cassidy organized a work party, and soon the ammunition was hauled into a pit where he, Samms, Bass, and Ridlow joyfully collaborated in blowing it up.

  Everyone buried his head in the earth and they set off the charge. There was a tremendous explosion, but not even a quarter of the ammunition went off. The rest twisted skyward, tumbling end over end, and scattered across the area. The kids booed. Cassidy laughed and immediately put the booers to work collecting the ammunition. The Marines on the work detail grumbled. “We must have the only fucking lifers in the Crotch that can’t blow up a fucking ammo dump.” They waited for an hour to make sure there were no cook-offs in the pit and once more set the charges. This time they covered the ammo with rocks and earth to contain the explosion.

  The platoon sergeants themselves were laughing about the incongruity of the situation. Most people would think they couldn’t light a match around an ammo dump without setting it off. Basically, everyone was happy. They would probably clear an LZ the next morning and sky out by afternoon, their mission accomplished with no casualties other than Williams.

  Mellas, however, felt a curious malaise, anxiety, and an emptiness beyond hunger—he had been on half rations for five days and had eaten nothing at all today. Four thoughts kept hammering at him. First, how could the English, seemingly the most civilized of people, the people with whom they’d fought side by side against the Nazis, be aiding their enemy, the North Vietnamese Army? Every penny that the North Vietnamese saved by receiving donations could be spent on ammunition that could kill him. Every life saved was a life that could kill him, too. Mellas felt betrayed. Second, he was still trying to reconcile those tiny log-covered pits referred to as bunkers with the images in his mind of bombs smashing concrete and steel, the Siegfried Line, the Guns of Navarone. Third, why in hell had they walked all this way, sacrificed Williams, and nearly killed the entire First Squad but for Vancouver’s uncommon alertness, for no more ammunition than could be hauled off with a couple of trucks?

  These thoughts nagged at him as he struggled to dig his hole for the night. When he finished, he sat down to face the fourth question. Should he make his last cup of coffee now or in the morning? The platoon was just about out of food. He decided to wait. He went off to find Hawke and Fitch to talk about medals for the action, half hoping that maybe he’d get one, too, but at the same time realizing that all he’d really done was show up for the party. He also hoped Hawke and Fitch would be fixing coffee.

  Fitch was on the hook with the Three, who had questions of his own—to which Fitch had the wrong answers.

  “I was informed that there were three ammunition bunkers in this complex. These numbers you’ve given us just don’t jibe. Over.”

  Fitch took a deep breath and looked at Hawke before answering. Pallack rolled his eyes.

  “That’s affirmative. Three bunkers. We got them all. The numbers you got are everything that’s in them. They’re little bunkers. Over.”

  “I copy.” There was a burst
of static as Blakely released his transmitting button. Fitch waited nervously. Static burst out again. “Stand by for a frag order, Bravo Six. Over.”

  “Roger your last. Bravo Six out.”

  “A fragment order on the original?” Mellas asked, uneasy about any change. “Does that mean we’re not skying out tomorrow?”

  Fitch shrugged. “Maybe something to do with Delta Company over the ridge. Hell, we can’t go far with everyone out of food.”

  “Not quite everyone,” Hawke said, digging into the side pocket of his utility trousers. He held up a single can of apricots. Everyone looked at it longingly. “And I ain’t opening it.” Hawke stuffed it back into his pocket. “I got a bad feeling about that frag order.”

  At the regimental briefing that afternoon, Major Adams was particularly snappy. Whap. “And at coordinates 768671, elements of Bravo One Twenty-Four destroyed the ammunition dump uncovered by Alpha Company and believed to be one of the supply sources for elements of the Three Hundred Twelfth steel division now known to be operating in our TAOR. Approximately five tons of ammunition consisting of one-hundred-twenty-millimeter rockets, small arms and automatic weapons ammunition, and mortar rounds were destroyed along with approximately one thousand pounds of medical supplies.”