Perfume River Nights
Page 25
Again Doc reached up from the base of the bunker to grab the lieutenant. Again the hand came out with a grenade. Singer fired at the hand, but it released the grenade before disappearing. The grenade fell toward Doc’s chest, turning over once. Doc, instead of rolling, jumped up, turning to run. His head went back when the round struck him in the face. His legs folded and his body collapsed just two feet from the lieutenant’s.
Singer stopped firing too late to take back the round. He lifted his face slowly from his rifle. The firing around him continued unabated, but he couldn’t hear it. The world had gone silent. Doc didn’t move, and though his face was hidden, Singer could still see his last look of surprise. It was the same look he had seen on the face of the NVA in the crater when the round had struck him. Neither had expected to die.
He turned his rifle on its side and studied its lines, the dull blackness of the metal and hard smooth plastic of the stock. It couldn’t have been a round from his M16. It was the NVA. They had killed Rhymes, Stick, Red, Doc Odum, Sergeant Edwards, and before that Sergeant Prascanni, and now Lieutenant Creely and the medic. They were the killers.
He pulled the magazine from his rifle and dropped it beside him, though it still held rounds. He pulled a new magazine out of his ammo pouch and pushed it home until it clicked, and then he heard the heavy beat of the NVA machine gun, the AKs, and the Americans’ M16s. It was the NVA. They were the killers. They were the killers. He fired at the bunker, not caring anymore about being careful, only caring about the steady recoil of his rifle that would end it all.
The firing waned, both sides pausing as if the fighters were exhausted and needed to catch their breath. Singer pulled inside the tree and surveyed his situation. On the side slope, the RTO lay holding the radio handset away from his face like it were a dangerous object, and the others who had come forward with Lieutenant Creely cast repeated glances at him as if waiting for some release. Further up the slope the blurred images of others hunkered down. He saw the prospect of another long, lonely crawl to safety and didn’t like his odds.
The air was thick and charged with tension that seemed ready to ignite. The skin on Singer’s arms prickled, and he found it difficult to swallow. It felt as if all of them were hanging by a thin thread somewhere between life and death, each of them waiting for the thread to break and send them falling into some dark abyss. A collective fear hung in the air, fed by the intensity of the NVA fire, Lieutenant Creely’s bizarre behavior and death, and the failure of any leader to take charge. It was like a gas-filled room just waiting for the spark. Singer knew it was coming.
The radio squawked.
Singer turned and looked up at the hillside. The RTO was lifting the handset toward his ear, though there was no need. The sound carried through the charged air like voices across a still lake.
“Pull out!” the voice from the handset said.
The room ignited. The thread broke.
The RTO and the men with him on the side slope rose as one, turned, and ran. The NVA fired. AK and machine gun fire scoured the hillside.
“No!” Singer screamed. But none of them stopped, and he watched the puffs of dirt from the machine-gun impacts chase up the hill until they caught the RTO and holes exploded in his legs and up his back, smashing the radio. The RTO crumpled. Still the other men ran, and the enemy fire chased them.
Singer had seen enough. He had envisioned an orderly withdrawal, with some men firing as others moved, as he’d practiced with Rhymes and Bear on exercise in Florida. And which Rhymes had expounded on later back at Fort Bragg in a scholarly kind of dissertation. Fire and maneuver. It worked the same in advance or withdrawal. He would have stayed and put out covering fire and waited for his turn, but all that changed when the simmering fear became an undisciplined retreat. He wasn’t about to be left down here alone again. While the enemy was concentrating on the men fleeing up the side slope, he made his own escape.
After he crawled away from the most intense fire he scrambled back and around on a route similar to that which California might have taken when they were first trapped. He called out as he climbed toward the American positions and didn’t stop until he was well inside their perimeter. Then he just lay there oblivious to the sporadic firing below him, thinking of nothing.
“What happened down there?” Top asked.
Singer sat up and looked at Top’s deep-set eyes, prominent nose, and strong cheekbones. A warrior’s face. Where had Top been?
“The CO came down screaming, took the point, and the NVA shot him point blank. He fell on their bunker.”
Top shook his head and something passed across his face. Disgust?
“He was dead before he hit the ground. Doc tried to get him, but he’s dead, too.”
“Where’s his RTO?”
“Dead. Machine gun got him as he ran up the hill.”
“You sure?”
“He was hit maybe ten times. No way he’s alive.”
“Jesus,” Top said. “The radio?”
“NVA probably have it already. It was fucked-up, Top. We needed some firepower down there.”
“Okay, hook back up with your squad.”
“It was fucked-up, Top.”
“Yeah. You did what you could.”
“They’re in bunkers. You can’t even see them. We need some heavy firepower.”
“I know.” Top moved off in a low crouch.
The bodies lay below them. The NVA would be waiting. Singer counted the few full magazines he had remaining, knowing what would come. But they didn’t go back down. Instead they turned and left. Leaving the base camp and its bunkers. Leaving the bodies of Lieutenant Creely, the RTO, and the medic. Singer felt he was leaving something more behind.
They made plodding steps, feet dragging, heads down. Singer felt the exhaustion and despair coming off the men around him mingling with his own. It was different than the tension that charged the air after Lieutenant Creely and Doc were killed, when fear was palpable. This was the residue of disaster. Of defeat. They were trailing away like a line of refugees fleeing death.
The images of the men they were abandoning to the enemy were stuck in Singer’s mind even as they moved farther from them: Lieutenant Creely carelessly taking the point, the sound of the AK so close, and the guttural moan as he collapsed; Doc unexpectedly standing and the look on his face when the round stuck him; the RTO fleeing uphill, machine gun rounds chasing him and tearing holes in his back; the RTO, along with his threats, crumbling into the earth. All of it had saved him.
Even moving back through the jungle, putting one foot in front of the other, he didn’t feel he was leaving. He saw himself as one of the men left behind. One of the bodies. He was a dead man three times over. Surviving made no sense and he couldn’t process it. If Lieutenant Creely hadn’t so bizarrely taken the point, it would have certainly been his and California’s bodies the company was leaving with the NVA. Why the NVA had not killed them all as Lieutenant Creely stood before California chewing him out for moving too slowly, he couldn’t understand. That he was alive made no sense at all.
Now they were walking away. His shoulders slumped under some new weight. Abandoning men, even dead men, wasn’t right. Yet what effort had he made besides calling for more men and firepower that never came? He could have done more. Someone had ordered them to pull out, but he had refused the same order earlier when California was pinned down in front of him. He believed in the promise that they would never leave anyone behind. Now that promise was broken. He was leaving more than just the bodies of men he watched die. There were things within himself he was abandoning.
The terrain rose and he felt the sharp angle of his feet and his body leaning into the hill and the weight of it pushing down on him, trying to force him back. He edged along with little awareness of the men around him except for the helmeted form in front of him that he followed mechanically. Their retreat could be little more than a temporary withdrawal to reorganize before going back in. Nothing was over y
et. Soon they would halt, regroup and turn and make another attempt to somehow breech the bunker line of the camp, or at least recover the bodies. There would be no end. Just a deadly back and forth with each direction frightening and holding its own dangers.
He wasn’t sure anymore whether they were retreating or attacking. He thought they had stopped once or twice. He could recall gunfire, but his mind had wandered or he had dozed off and now everything was distorted, like he was hearing and seeing it across the heat warp of a desert. It was like he was watching a movie in which he had a part. The movie was blurred and hard to follow. There was more gunfire, but it was far off, and he could lie there and listen to it knowing it didn’t concern him. Then he was walking again and it was nearly dark and his left arm was weighted down by the body he was helping to carry.
Fuck-you lizards called from across the valley as Singer and the rest of the three-platoon patrol struggled up the hill in the fading light. “Fuck youuuu. Fuck youuuu. Fuck youuuu.” The voices were shrill and taunting. Singer was sure it was the NVA mimicking the lizard’s call, mocking them, saying this was their valley and they weren’t leaving, and the Americans would never be able to make them leave.
At the top of the hill, Singer tried to count, to organize his memories, but everything was confused. How many times they had gone back in today, he wasn’t sure. Nor was he sure how many more casualties they’d taken. How he had survived and who might have died he didn’t know. He recalled moving across the same ground wearing down their own trails and knew they had never gotten as close to Lieutenant Creely, the medic, or RTO as he had been when they’d died. He recalled the firing, but wasn’t sure if he was confusing events from one assault with another. If they killed any of the NVA they must have been quickly replaced, as their firing never diminished.
He remembered the quiet as they waited and his bitterness when there were no whistling rounds overhead or explosions of artillery. No jets. No gunships. Nothing. Just the sickening stillness and the knowledge they would attack again.
It seemed like days ago that Trip had been hit and screaming for him not to fire or come near him, but he was sure they had shared a foxhole last night. Singer looked over as if to confirm this, almost expecting to see Trip, uncertain if he had only dreamed he’d been hit and screaming. But it was California who sat there ashen and hollow-cheeked, looking years older, intently pushing rounds into a magazine, his rifle near his hands. Trip was gone. They were all gone now. Trip. He was probably already lying on cleanpressed sheets in an air-conditioned post-op ward, or perhaps on a medical flight to a hospital in Japan. He was most likely already giving the nurses a hard time, collecting names and numbers and making promises to visit. He made it out the hard way, but he made it.
Singer gazed down into the darkness and had to put his hand out on the ground to steady himself, feeling as if he might tumble into the void. California was still there, head down, the magazine he fed nearly lost in the blackness. The repetitive click of new rounds being pushed home. For a moment Singer wasn’t sure where he was, which hill, which valley. Then he remembered the A Shau, the climb, the weight of the body he helped drag up the hill and digging a fighting hole. He remembered it all.
They were back on the same hill they had left at first light so long ago, reunited with second platoon and their rucks. The second platoon held the hilltop unchallenged throughout the day, able to hear the fighting not far away that marked each assault. A few of them would have heard the radio traffic, but most would have had to wonder at what was happening and who was dying and whether they would be called to help or if they would come under attack where they were.
Reunited, the men of the Charlie Company tightened the perimeter, digging new holes. There were fewer of them tonight. Singer listened as the medevac and resupply choppers came and went. They came in high and wide, guns working hard as they broke toward the hill, pausing only a moment and then racing away with their loads of men who would not have to face another day of assaults against the enemy base camp. Some of whom would never have to face anything again.
He’d recovered his ruck and opened a can of Cs, feeling an emptiness which might have been hunger, but his stomach protested at the first food of the day and he fought to keep from retching. He forced down a few more spoonfuls before abandoning the activity, thinking it not worth the effort. After burying the half-full can, he reloaded his empty magazines with the ammo that came in on the resupply. Then he went through each magazine, testing it for tension that would push the next round up, feeding the bolt that would slam the round into the chamber ready to fire. Finally he set out his grenades at the edge of the hole. He felt calmer and more focused when he finished these things, more able to face the night and the prospects of tomorrow.
He ran his hand over the rough stubble on his face. Even in the darkness, he saw the caked blood on his hands. He scratched at it, uncertain when he came by it or whose it might be. With water from a nearly empty canteen he washed his hands, then wiped them on his pants, leaving dark stains. Beside him, California sat bent over his rifle as if trying to memorize its parts, a pile of newly filled magazines beside him.
“I’ll take first watch,” Singer said. “Get some sleep.”
California didn’t answer, continuing to stare at his rifle.
Across the valley, lights moved on an invisible mountain as if suspended in space. Singer watched the lights traveling up and down, coming together and separating, with more fascination than fear. It was amazing that the NVA would move about so brazenly with lights. But then, it was their valley. Singer waited for the tracers to descend from the sky or the flash of explosions from an artillery barrage that would extinguish the lights, but the skies stayed quiet and the lights went unchallenged. They were forgotten men.
Singer gathered his poncho liner up over his shoulders against a sudden chill and pulled his M16 tight to his body.
A lizard called, “Fuck youuu.”
20
June 7, 1968
A Shau Valley, Vietnam
At the sound of the rotors, Singer raised his head, hoping to see the bird, but he saw only a dark tangle of branches and leaves above him that obscured the sky. A fog clouded his brain, as if he’d suddenly been awoken from a deep sleep. He ducked at the heavy crack of rapid gunfire despite the distance and heard the rotors whine in protest, then fade into an uneasy silence. He remembered he was in the A Shau.
With his M16 in his right hand, he slowly turned his head. A few paces away, another GI sat hunched over, his head down, so Singer couldn’t see his face, but he could see the thin curl of cigarette smoke just above his head. Were they just taking a break or encamped? He rubbed his hand across his face and then pushed his thumb and forefinger against his eyes. He couldn’t remember what he had been doing before the sound of the helicopter or how long he might have been asleep.
He remembered the lights. When had he watched them? Lights moving like fallen stars struggling to regain their positions in the sky, climbing slowly up and falling back, then rising again. A silent, eerie ballet. He was sure he hadn’t dreamed it, but the memory ended with the lights still dancing.
There were other disjointed memories. Movement across nearly level ground and then on slopes so steep he had fought to keep from falling. Tangles of vines, impenetrable thickets of bamboo they moved around and tree trunks so large two men couldn’t encircle them with their arms. And trails they encountered and sometimes traveled on not knowing where they led. At times he crawled, he remembered, uncertain of what direction he was going, or whether he was moving away from the enemy or toward them. In the end it hadn’t mattered as the enemy was everywhere, always there cutting them off. He shuddered at the recollection.
He looked over to see if the hunched figure was there, unsure if he had imagined him. The man was farther away or the light had changed. He thought to call out to him, but then thought better of it.
Time. Think. He wasn’t sure what day it was or whether the dim lig
ht was dusk or dawn. At some point he had started tracking time only by the presence or absence of gunfire. He was floating, adrift in some nightmare. He tried to grab onto something. If he could remember how he came to this moment, maybe he could find his way out. But there were only the pieces of memories that he couldn’t connect and the bone-numbing fatigue, an exhaustion that came from the depths and filled his being so that it was a great effort to move or even think. He wasn’t sure he could get up again when they had to move. All he wanted was to sleep and then wake up somewhere where the sun was shining and where there was no gunfire and no smell of death. He could smell it now emanating from the jungle, coming off his clothes, and carried on the air from the dead and dying who must lay somewhere nearby.
How long had he been here? He’d heard someone say it was ten days, but that didn’t make sense. How could it be ten days already? He could remember riding helicopters into the A Shau and Trip still being there and finding the base camp, and then Trip was gone and the CO was dead. The CO’s RTO and Doc, too. He remembered that. But he couldn’t remember how many days it had been since then, though they still hadn’t retrieved their bodies. At least, he didn’t remember retrieving them. They tried, but each time the NVA drove them back. He couldn’t remember how many times they went back down or if they’d ever even gotten close. He didn’t think they had.
Ten days? Maybe. There had been other deaths and more bodies. He’d carried some. Drained by the weight of them, trying not to look or think, secretly happy it wasn’t him. He’d seen others lying there wrapped in ponchos, boots hanging out, a face only half covered, waiting for an evac helicopter that couldn’t get in. He’d been there when some of them had died, but they’d had no names, or none he could recall, and the places had all looked the same, so he was confused about where things happened and about how near they’d been to reaching the ground where Lieutenant Creely and the others lay. So many more bodies. It could have been ten days already.