Matterhorn

by Karl Marlantes

  Their running steps awoke the crew. Small immediately began going through start-up procedures while Nickels radioed for artillery clearance so they wouldn’t get shot out of the air on their way past the big Army 175s at VCB and the eight-inchers firing night missions out of Red Devil.

  The engines whined. The blades turned clumsily. Instruments glowed in front of the two pilots. Small taxied out onto the runway. The fuselage trembled; the roar increased to the point where only the radios inside their helmets could be heard. The bird moved forward in the darkness and lifted gently from the earth. Stray lights rapidly grew dim behind them in the mist, then disappeared. They were in total blackness save for the dim green glow of the instrument panel.

  Small was sweating but not from heat. It was going to be a pisser.

  He got a bearing from Nickels and settled in at 6,000 feet. Black clouds obscured the sky above him. Below, unseen but clear in his imagination from countless daylight missions, were the plains with their elephant grass, bamboo, and slow sluggish rivers. Then came the mountains.

  “Try and get Bravo up on their company push,” Small told Nickels over the intercom. He was straining to catch a glimpse of anything familiar, to let him know how close to the ground he was—how close to death.

  “Big John Bravo, Big John Bravo, this is Chatterbox One Eight. Over.” Silence. Maybe the stupid grunts didn’t know that Group had changed the call from Magpie, standard operating procedure to keep gook intelligence guessing. Small didn’t like Chatterbox. It sounded too cute. He didn’t feel cute.

  “Big John Bravo, Big John Bravo, Chatterbox One Eight. Over.”

  There was a burst of static. “They must be able to hear us,” Nickels said. “Too weak to reach us on their company push.”

  Small looked at a dog-eared card on a clipboard strapped to his leg. He dialed to the battalion frequency, knowing that the battalion operator would probably have the big aerial up. “Big John Bravo, Chatterbox One Eight. Over.”

  Relsnik’s voice, amplified by the Two-Niner-Two antenna, came out of the blackness into the helmets of the two pilots. “Chatterbox, this is Big John Bravo. We got you Loco Cocoa. How you? Over.” Small smiled at hearing Loco Cocoa for loud and clear. That was new to him. Lemon and Coke last week. Lickety Clit two weeks before.

  “I got you fine. I don’t know where in hell you are. Over.”

  “We’re on Matterhorn, sir. Over.”

  Small cursed under his breath. Goddamn kids on the fucking radios. Where was the goddamn FAC-man? He took a deep breath to control his temper and fear. “I know you’re on Matterhorn, Bravo. I mean I can’t see you. It’s fucking dark up here. Turn on a goddamn light.”

  There was a long pause. A new voice came up on the radio. “Chatterbox, this is Bravo Six. We’ve been taking mortar fire all day and we’re a little reluctant to light fires. Over.”

  Well, I’m a little reluctant to fly fucking blind in the goddamned mountains, Small thought to himself. He knew Bravo had had the shit beat out of it lately. “What’s your ceiling like there? And where’s your FAC? Over.” There was another pause. Leave it to a fucking grunt to have no idea how high the clouds were.

  The answer was more like a question. “Hundred and fifty feet, Chatterbox? Over.”

  “Fuck.”

  Inside the dimly lit bubble the two pilots looked at each other. One hundred fifty feet at 100 miles an hour took less than a second.

  Fitch’s voice came over the radio. “We got your sound, Chatterbox. You’re to our Sierra Echo. Bearing one-four-zero. Can you come up on the company freak? Over.”

  “Roger. See you there. Over.”

  Small immediately corrected the helicopter’s direction and twisted knobs back to Bravo’s frequency, clearing the battalion net for other traffic.

  They got back in contact again. “You give me a mark when I pass overhead. OK?” Small radioed. “How am I doing for course? Over.”

  “Still to our Sierra Echo,” Fitch returned. “Keep coming. Over.”

  The bubble vibrated green and red in the darkness. Small pictured an imaginary Bravo Six, somewhere below him, in a muddy hole, straining to hear the faint lawnmower rattle that meant life or death for a wounded grunt. The radio spat out “Mark!” Small banked immediately but saw only blackness.

  “I didn’t see a fucking thing, Bravo. Over,” Small radioed back, already straightening the bird to horizontal and coming back toward the place where he had heard “mark,” all the while watching his altimeter and his roll and pitch indicator. “How high above you do you think we were? Over.”

  Again the long pause. Again the tentative answer. “Six hundred feet? Over.”

  “We got any other fucking mountains to worry about around here?” Small snapped to Nickels.

  Nickels answered immediately. “Dong Sa Mui at fifty-one hundred feet. About two klicks to the northeast. Other than that, Matterhorn’s about it for four klicks.”

  Small muttered under his breath.

  He asked the grunts to try artillery illumination rounds. They lit up only the fog.

  “What the fuck’s wrong with your emergency case, Bravo? Over,” Small asked, almost absently, as he was trying to think what to do.

  “He’s got both his legs blown off. Over.”

  Why even bother?

  “I can’t find you fuckers without any lights on the LZ. Isn’t there some way you can hide some? Over.”

  Again the silence. “We could put some heat tabs in helmets. Over.”

  Jesus, a fucking grunt that could think. A fucking miracle. “Good. Put them in a twenty-meter circle. You got it? Ten meters radius, exactly. Otherwise I won’t know how far above the fucking thing I am. Over.”

  There was a wait. Then Bravo Six came up again. “Chatterbox, it’ll have to be thirteen and a half meters diameter. The rest of the area is mined and we can’t guarantee it.” There was a pause and blip of static as Fitch let up on the key. Then he was back. “But if you want to risk it, we’ll risk making the circle. Over.”

  Small switched over to the intercom and spoke to Nickels. “Mined? Can you believe this fucking shit? They want me to hit the top of a fucking mountain in the dark, in the fucking fog, and the goddamned LZ is mined? And all this to get some poor bastard that probably would rather be dead anyway. At least I would. Jesus Christ. Both fucking legs.”

  “Better than both balls.”

  “I ain’t so sure. What’s he going to do back home? Fuck cantaloupes for the rest of his life?” Small was trying to imagine what thirteen and a half meters would look like compared with twenty, and trying to get that into his head so if he did see it he could guess how high above the LZ he was.

  “OK, Bravo. Don’t risk the mines, but get the fucking circle made. I don’t have all night. And when I say pop a Willy Pete, I don’t care if they mortar the fuck out of you, you pop a goddamned Willy Pete. You got one? Over.”

  Bravo Six said they did.

  They collected heat tabs from all over the company and placed their helmets in a circle around Jackson and the two corpsmen. When the pilot gave the word, China and Conman ran from helmet to helmet with cigarette lighters, igniting the heat tabs. A blue circle of light, ghostly in the fog, grew around Jackson, the helmets hiding the flickering blue flame from all directions except directly above.

  The huge helicopter rushed in just a few feet above their heads. The rotor wash tipped over two of the helmets, and dark figures rushed to hide the two heat tabs, throwing them back in with bare hands.

  Mellas heard the pilot mutter over the radio. “Jesus Christ, Bravo. I’m right on top of you fuckers. OK, coming around. Get that man ready. I got your heat tabs. Over.”

  “Can you believe this, Nickels?” Small said, switching to the intercom. “I actually said ‘I got your heat tabs.’” Holy shit, he thought to himself, thirteen and a half meters.

  “OK, Bravo, coming around,” he radioed. “You pop that Willy Pete when I tell you. Over.” Small looked over his shoulder into the blackness behind the chopper, but the dim circle was lost in the clouds again. Totally blind, he felt, mo
re than he piloted, the big bird around to come at the LZ again, keeping that faint picture of glowing blue in his mind. He straightened the chopper out slowly and came back down to the same altimeter reading. He changed the pitch and attitude. The helicopter roared alone in the blackness.

  Suddenly, like a marsh ghost, a quavering blue oblong appeared, moving fast, too fast, changing to a circle, changing too fucking fast, too fucking fast. “Now, goddamn it. Now,” Small yelled.

  “Now,” Fitch shouted, and Pallack popped the spoon on the white phosphorous grenade and threw it into the zone. Sudden brilliant white light stabbed at the men’s eyes. The huge whirling black mass crashed into the zone with an anguished screech of buckling metal. The front wheels gave way and the bird lurched sideways, nosing in, pivoting on the buckled wheels, twisted by the torque of its blades. Then it lurched sideways and came to a stop, its tailgate jammed.

  The crew chief came crawling out over the barrel of a .50-caliber machine gun, shouting. The litter bearers hoisted Jackson in through the narrow opening, handing the plasma bottle to the side gunner. Fredrickson and Sheller, seeing Jackson safely inside, scrambled back and dropped to the mud as the blades of the chopper gained speed. Fredrickson picked up two bloody objects and threw them through the side opening: Jackson’s boots, his feet still in them.

  Then the mortar shells started homing in on the burning phosphorous. The helicopter skimmed across the landing zone and disappeared, falling downhill into the darkness. “Get off the top of the fucking hill,” Fitch shouted, unnecessarily. Everyone was running for cover. Conman tried to extinguish the burning phosphorous. It broke into smaller pieces and he screamed in pain when one of them burned a tiny hole into his leg. It went through the muscle and didn’t stop until it reached the bone.

  Mellas spent the rest of the night trying to understand why Jackson had lost both legs while he himself seemed to bounce from near miss to near miss. He felt that somehow he had cheated. Then he laughed softly. What was he supposed to do, stand up and get blown away to make things up to the dead and the maimed?

  He thought of the jungle, already regrowing around him to cover the scars they had created. He thought of the tiger, killing to eat. Was that evil? And ants? They killed. No, the jungle wasn’t evil. It was indifferent. So, too, was the world. Evil, then, must be the negation of something man had added to the world. Ultimately, it was caring about something that made the world liable to evil. Caring. And then the caring gets torn asunder. Everybody dies, but not everybody cares.

  It occurred to Mellas that he could create the possibility of good or evil through caring. He could nullify the indifferent world. But in so doing he opened himself up to the pain of watching it get blown away. His killing that day would not have been evil if the dead soldiers hadn’t been loved by mothers, sisters, friends, wives. Mellas understood that in destroying the fabric that linked those people, he had participated in evil, but this evil had hurt him as well. He also understood that his participation in evil, was a result of being human. Being human was the best he could do. Without man there would be no evil. But there was also no good, nothing moral built over the world of fact. Humans were responsible for it all. He laughed at the cosmic joke, but he felt heartsick.

  The next morning Mellas crawled from his hole to make his round of the perimeter. He went from hole to hole, kidding, trying to lighten everyone up. He poked fun at Conman for trying to handle burning phosphorous with his bare hands. Conman flipped him the bird and looked pleased that Mellas was acknowledging his sacrifice. Some of the kids began to open C-rations with the tiny can openers that hung with their dog tags. Others brewed coffee. Several were digging a hole to shit in away from the lines.

  All around Mellas the ridges and peaks stood clearly against the lightening sky. The jungle in the valley below him was no different from when he’d first arrived: silent, gray-green, at once ancient and ageless. But it was no longer a mystery. It contained rivers that he’d waded across and fought in. There were also hilltops whose approaches and slightest contours he knew intimately, and bamboo patches, beaten down and forced back, already starting to rise again. And there was a trail, now beginning to grow over, soon to disappear. It was another ordinary day in the world of fact. But it was different because the mystery had been slightly penetrated and Mellas saw things differently.

  He stopped at the CP to find out about Jackson. Fitch said he was still alive.

  Four Phantoms roared across the top of the hill, shattering the dawn with noise, just as artillery fire erupted in the valley to the northwest. “That’s the prep for Speeding Home Kilo,” Fitch murmured to no one in particular. Soon, four CH-46s circled into the valley to the north. Everyone in the CP group listened in on Kilo’s frequency as the lead platoon commander reported a cool zone.

  “D’gooks are making fucking hat,” Pallack announced. Everyone smiled. Mellas guessed, however, that Kilo’s job would be to sit astride the escape routes. They’d be busy soon enough.

  Hawke joined them and Fitch passed his coffee around the circle. They decided to build a new LZ out of sight of the NVA observers, between Matterhorn and Helicopter Hill, to evacuate the walking wounded like Mellas. Mellas gave Conman the platoon and was helped down the hill to the new zone, where he collapsed.

  He lay there semiconscious. Anne floated through his mind, and he awoke to feel the hidden sun on his face, or the cool mist—and to an emptiness and a longing for her unlike any he’d ever felt. But he knew it was useless to think of getting back together, and that was months in the future anyway. There were white girls in Sydney. Round-eyes. Maybe he’d go to the outback. A quiet farm with sheep. Maybe he’d fall in love there. Maybe he’d save his eye. Everything seemed to be part of a cycle as he stared into the gray nothingness above him, hearing the wash of distant waves on a warm beach, feeling the sun pulling his body upward like evaporating rain.

  Then he remembered Vancouver’s sword, still in the CP bunker on Helicopter Hill. He got two of the walking wounded to come with him for security.

  Stevens was on watch in the little bunker. A work party was just finishing a larger bunker for the CP group. Mellas could see the colonel and the Three talking with Bainford, looking at something off to the north, their maps out. He nodded to Stevens in the gloom, crawled over to the corner, and pulled out the sword.

  “That yours, Mellas?” Stevens asked in amazement.

  Mellas eyed him for a long moment. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “I really don’t know.”

  “Yeah. OK,” Stevens said. “You guys did a hell of a job yesterday.”

  Looking at Stevens with one eye made Mellas aware that he had taken seeing for granted. Now, this way, he saw Stevens differently from before. He couldn’t get mad at Stevens for the comment. Stevens was just Stevens, a cog in the machinery, trying to be nice. And Mellas was just Mellas, another cog, deciding not to get angry. He didn’t much like being a cog, but there it was. He smiled at his silent conversation. “Thanks,” Mellas said.

  He returned to the new LZ and fell asleep with the sword beside him.

  Someone was kicking his boot. Mellas opened his good eye. He was flooded with ugly anger at being disturbed.

  It was McCarthy. Alpha Company was winding through the small landing zone. “Wake up, you silly fucker,” McCarthy said. “It took me forever to find you with that goddamned bandage wrapped around your face.”

  Mellas, smiling, reached a hand up to McCarthy. McCarthy’s radio operator was smoking impatiently. “Where the fuck you going?” Mellas asked.

  “West. Two Twenty-Four set up a blocking position right on the Z at the Laos end of the valley. We’ll be the hammer. Charlie Company’s kicking off to our north right now. They’re pulling you guys out this afternoon.” He paused. “You guys had a rough time, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Mellas agreed. “Nothing unusual, though. ‘Light casualties’ I believe it’s called back in the world. All you have to do is report it as a battalion action and the percentage lost thins to nothing. Who’s going to
hold Matterhorn?”

  “Why should you care? You’ll be skating on board the Sanctuary, dazzling round-eyed nurses. Maybe we’ll get in another mystery tour when this fucking op’s over.”

  “Who’s holding fucking Matterhorn?” Mellas demanded, rising to his elbows, his good eye beginning to spasm.

  McCarthy shrugged. “No one,” he said.

  Mellas sank back to the ground and lay looking at the sky. No one. Finally he spoke. “Be careful, Mac.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” McCarthy said.

  Mellas looked at him. They both knew McCarthy was going into a fight that afternoon, the same day Mellas was leaving it all. It was another cycle, another wearying, convulsive rhythm, and if it wasn’t Mellas it was McCarthy, and if not McCarthy someone like McCarthy, forever and forever, like an image in facing mirrors in a barbershop, deeper and deeper, smaller and smaller, curving with time and distance away into the unknown, but always repeating, always the same. Mellas thought that if he could smash one of those mirrors, then this agony would stop and he’d be left alone to dream. But the mirrors were only thoughts, illusions. Reality was McCarthy, standing above him, a friendly face, his radioman impatient to get going because they’d have to hump extra fast to catch up with the rest of the platoon.

  “Good luck,” Mellas said.

  McCarthy waved and trudged after his radio operator. He turned and waved again. Mellas kept thinking, Don’t get killed, damn you, don’t let yourself get killed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The medevac helicopter flew eastward. It flashed across a white beach and then out over the South China Sea. Eventually a white ship with large red crosses on its superstructure and hull appeared below. The chopper tilted back, its blades pounding the air, and set down on the deck. Corpsmen ran inside and hauled the wounded out on stretchers. A nurse in fatigues was holding a clipboard, looking at medevac tags and wounds. She was rapidly sorting the wounded into groups. The most severely wounded were being shoved to the side as the less wounded were stripped of weapons, boots, and clothes and rushed into the interior of the ship.