“Pleasure to meet you,” Ellis said, and meant it.
Oretha nodded at him.
“Likewise,” she said, before turning to Vanessa. “We need to get started. We have a few speakers lined up. You going to pass out buttons while they talk or try to sign up new members?”
“Janet’s doing membership this time; I’m on button patrol. I’ll take Ellis with me.” She looked over at him and winked. Ellis felt a thrill go through him.
“Sounds good. We’ll meet up after, then head to HQ. You can bring him along if you like. The movement can always use more guys.”
Oretha nodded at him again before striding off into the crowd.
“She likes you. That’s a good sign.”
“Glad to hear it,” Ellis said, wishing the “she” in question were Vanessa. “So, what exactly does ‘button patrol’ involve?”
Vanessa laughed. It was a musical sound that made Ellis think of angels.
“Nothing to it, really. You just hand them out to people as they’re listening to the speakers, or getting high, or whatever it is they’re here in the park doing. The hope is that some of them will come across the buttons later and their curiosity will be piqued and they’ll come look us up. Or, at the very least, that they’ll wear the buttons and be free advertising for us. Passive recruitment, you know?”
Personally, Ellis thought if they wanted to get more members, all they needed to do was have Vanessa go around flashing that smile of hers and she’d have a whole line of new recruits following at her heels, like some kind of Pied Piper.
But then he’d have to share her attention, and he discovered he didn’t much like the idea of that. Not at all.
“Buttons it is,” he said, gesturing for her to take the lead. “After you, ma chère.”
And as he hurried to follow her through the crowd, he realized to his surprise that he was no longer interested in simply scoring. He’d found something—someone—worth far more than a conquest he could brag to his friends about, and he damned sure didn’t want to be left behind.
6
* * *
The attack came on Lincoln’s fourth night at Lang Vei.
He was on guard duty a little before midnight, walking the inner perimeter fence. Beyond that were three rows of concertina wire, then another chain link fence topped with barbed wire. Lincoln had been told that land mines would have been planted beyond that fence, but the locals objected, saying their water buffaloes walked past the camp to get to the river. Lincoln figured the beasts could be shot and eaten, but he guessed that wasn’t the way to win hearts and minds.
A sergeant named James William Gregory III had come out to check on him and stopped to have a smoke. Gregory, the only other black man at the base, was broad through the shoulders and deep through the chest, and his close-cropped head was almost as round as a cannonball. They’d been chatting for a couple of minutes when the mortar rounds started dropping.
Lincoln heard the whirring rattle of incoming rounds—a sound he had taken for a flock of birds the first time he’d heard it, until the explosions started—and hit the dirt. Gregory did the same. Five rounds landed inside the wire, but over where the South Vietnamese strike force was. Several of the Vietnamese soldiers cried out, and one of the thatched huts burst into flames.
Then quiet fell again. Lincoln picked himself up, dusted himself off. The other Special Forces soldiers rushed out of the team house, pulling on boots and helmets. South Vietnamese strikers fired into the brush toward where they thought the mortar rounds had come from, and the Montagnards raced to their battle stations.
But there was no one to shoot at. Gregory yelled at the Vietnamese to stop wasting ammunition. After a few minutes, they obeyed.
“What was that all about?” Captain Prato asked. He’d been asleep, but his uniform was pressed and his jaw looked clean-shaven. He’d come seemingly out of nowhere, appearing as if by magic beside Gregory and Lincoln.
“Mortar attack, Captain,” Gregory said. He waved an arm to the northwest. “From the hills over there, I think.”
“Casualties?”
“I don’t know yet. I think some of the Vietnamese soldiers were hit.”
“How many rounds?”
“I counted five.”
Prato looked at Lincoln. “That’s right,” Lincoln said. “Five.”
“They’re not done,” Prato said. “They’re not going to toss five rounds into the camp, then go back into a hole and take a nap.”
“Nossir,” Gregory said.
“If they don’t sleep, we don’t, either. Return mortar fire. And I want every man on the wire. They’re coming, tonight.”
“Yessir.”
“I’ll have Nilsson radio Khe Sanh for reinforcements.” Nilsson was a burly commo man with bad teeth and a quick, booming laugh. He wasn’t much to look at, but he was some kind of communications genius, according to Gregory. “Check on those 106s and the .50-cals.”
“Yes, sir.”
Prato spun around and vanished into the dark as quickly as he’d arrived. As soon as he was gone, Gregory turned to Lincoln. “What are you waiting for, Corporal? Get on those guns.”
“Yes, sir,” Lincoln said. The captain’s words had been addressed to Gregory, not to him, but that was a distinction that didn’t matter. He swallowed it down and headed for the nearest 106 bunker.
A gunner named McClure was already manning the big recoilless rifle. It primarily served as an antitank weapon, but the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong weren’t known to have a lot of tanks. Still, it could make chop suey out of foot soldiers in a hurry. “You got enough ammo?” Lincoln asked.
McClure took a quick look, using a flashlight to illuminate the inside of the pit. “Looks like a few dozen rounds,” he said. “Should be okay, depending on what they throw at us.”
“I’ll be back,” Lincoln said. He raced to the other 106, manned by a soldier named Adelstein, along with two Vietnamese soldiers to help spot and load. Satisfied that they were set, he made off with the rounds of the Browning M2 .50-caliber machine guns.
By the time Lincoln returned, Gregory had some mortars operating. Someone had fired a couple of flares to light the area beyond the perimeter, and mortar rounds were thumping into the hills north of the camp. Vietnamese and Montagnard companies, bivouacked on the east and west fringes of the camp, stood at the wire, waiting for someone to kill.
Lincoln had barely dropped down into the last M2 pit, occupied by a single soldier named Ligotta, when a trip flare went off at the northwest corner. Light from that and the overhead flares illuminated thirty or so soldiers in dusky gray uniforms, throwing ladders over the concertina wire and scrambling across it.
“There!” Lincoln shouted. “Ten o’clock!”
Ligotta swung the big, air-cooled barrel around on its tripod, both hands on the spade handle grips, and pushed down on the trigger. Lincoln took up a position on his left to help feed the ammo belts. The gun made a metallic, ratcheting noise, compounded by the clinking of shell casings and clips as they ejected. Interspersed tracer rounds helped Ligotta aim, and in the flare’s light, Lincoln saw them tear apart oncoming NVA soldiers.
Then another trip flare went off, this one nearer his position. He raised his M14 to fire, but the flare showed him a black pajama–clad VC hurling a grenade toward them.
“Incoming!” he shouted.
Ligotta, focused on bringing the .50-cal around to target the newcomers, didn’t hear him or didn’t react in time. Lincoln pressed himself to the cool earth in the bottom of the pit, where the hot brass of fallen shell casings burned his face and hands. A wave of heat passed over him at the same moment as a roar that felt like knives stabbing his ears, and he was pelted with earth and shrapnel.
As soon as it was over, Lincoln straightened. “Ligotta, you okay?” he asked.
But Ligotta wasn’t in any condition to answer. He had been thrown to the back of the bunker. Half of his face was gone; his chest was smoldering.
The gun looked okay, and half of a belt still dangled from it. Lincoln grabbed it, swinging it into place, and pressed the trigger. The weapon’s shake and stutter were satisfying, as was the sight of communist attackers being shredded by the big rounds.
Then he heard the boom of the 106-mm recoilless rifle on the camp’s north side. Its shell exploded on impact and was followed quickly by another one. The range was short for that gun, but it was hard to argue with the effect.
Still, the attackers pressed on. They seemed to be limitless, threatening to overwhelm the little camp through the sheer weight of their numbers. Lincoln wondered whether his first Special Forces assignment would be his last. He fed another ammo belt into the .50 and kept firing, sweat slicking his arms and rolling down his sides.
Gradually, the VC onslaught slowed. All over the camp, the Americans and their Vietnamese and Montagnard allies were returning fire, giving as good as they got or better. Lincoln felt the tide of battle shifting. The attackers still tried for the wire but couldn’t get there; bodies piled up on the concertina, their weight making it droop in spots.
He risked a look over his shoulder, to see where the defense might need to be shored up. Twenty yards away—a little less, maybe—Captain Prato stood tall, an M14 nestled into his shoulder, firing into the latest wave of invaders.
Another fifteen or twenty feet behind him, one of the Vietnamese soldiers aimed his AR-30 in the same general direction.
In the uneven light from multiple flares, Lincoln couldn’t be certain, but it didn’t look like the ARVN soldier was looking the same way his gun was pointed. His gaze appeared fixed on the back of Prato’s head. Then he swiveled his own head this way and that, as if checking to see if he was observed. He was too far back to notice Lincoln—dark-skinned against the darkness of the machine gun pit—and, satisfied that no one paid him any attention, he inched the barrel of his gun over until it pointed directly at the captain.
If anyone else spotted the threat, Lincoln couldn’t see him. In another few seconds, Prato would be a dead man. Lincoln couldn’t bring the .50-cal all the way around in time, and a shouted warning would be pointless over the roar of battle. Instead, he snatched up his own M14, took aim quickly, and squeezed the trigger. The Vietnamese soldier’s body twitched when the rounds struck home, and the AR fell from his lifeless fingers. Captain Prato stared, wide-eyed, at the Special Forces soldier who had just nearly shot him. Someone else pointed out the crumpled form of the ARVN soldier and presumably explained what had happened.
With no more time to spare on that situation, Lincoln returned to the machine gun, feeding in another belt and firing in short bursts to keep the barrel from overheating, until the NVA and VC attackers fell back and disappeared into the hills.
When they were gone, he drained his canteen in two huge swallows and climbed out of the pit, lacquered with sweat and grime.
Prato strode up to him. “Corporal, you damn near shot my ass!”
“Your nuts, sir,” Lincoln countered. “Your ass would’ve been on the other side, where that ARVN motherfucker was aiming.”
“You’re positive he was gunning for me?”
“Absolutely, sir. No question about it. He looked like he was shooting toward the enemy, but his finger was outside the trigger guard. When he turned the weapon on you, that’s when he went for the trigger.”
Prato studied him, as if he could tell through visual examination whether Lincoln was telling the truth. Lincoln didn’t figure he could see much but a soldier in desperate need of a shower and maybe a brew.
He seemed to accept Lincoln’s version of events, though. His stance relaxed, and a rare smile flickered across his lips. “I guess I owe you my thanks,” he said. “A lot of men wouldn’t have noticed that, and if they had, they wouldn’t have been able to stop it at that distance, under those conditions. I’m a little disturbed that you even tried that shot, but I’m glad you made it. You’re one hell of a marksman.”
“Just doin’ my job, sir.”
“You’ve been here, what, three days?”
“Four.”
“Four, what?”
“Four days, sir,” Lincoln replied with a quick grin.
“I get the feeling you’re not used to following orders.”
Lincoln wasn’t sure what he was getting at. Anyway, everybody in Sammy’s organization learned to follow orders, or he didn’t last long. “I’m a soldier, sir. That’s what I do.”
The captain shook his head. “There’s something about you, Lincoln. Something I don’t see often. What am I going to do with you?”
“That’s why you wear those bars, sir. You get to figure that out.”
The tight muscles on Prato’s jaw moved, but he didn’t say anything. Then he shook his head again, turned, and walked away.
Lincoln watched him go. If there was an answer to the captain’s question, he didn’t know what it was, either.
7
* * *
A week passed before Captain Franklin came to Lang Vei. Twenty minutes after his helicopter landed, he was walking with Lincoln up the hill on the far side of the fence, picking their way through stands of bamboo.
“I hear you saved Prato’s bacon,” Franklin said.
“I got lucky is all,” Lincoln said. “I just happened to look at the right time.”
“You’ve used that ‘lucky’ line with me before,” Franklin reminded him. “It seems to me Captain Prato’s the one who got lucky. Lucky having you assigned here, and lucky you made that shot when you did.”
“Maybe he should’ve been more careful about who he allowed in his camp.”
Franklin stopped, blinked his brilliant green eyes a couple of times, and turned to face Lincoln. “You know he doesn’t get to decide who serves in the Vietnamese army, right? That’s up to them. If some people get in who are sympathetic to the communist cause, that’s too bad, but it’s something we just have to keep our eyes open for.”
“Why enlist on the enemy’s side? Why not just join the VC?”
“Because they’re looking for opportunities to gum up the works, just as you saw. You have to remember the history of this place. Vietnam was colonized by the French in the middle of the nineteenth century. During the Second World War, Japan took it over for a spell. After the war, the French wanted it back, but the Vietnamese had other ideas. It took ten years of fighting to get rid of the French, but the 1954 Geneva Accords that finally did that also split the country in two—Ho Chi Minh’s Communists in the north and the former French loyalists in the south.
“The split wasn’t meant to be permanent, but when Diem pronounced himself president of all of Vietnam in ’55, old Uncle Ho put on his fighting gear again. We backed the French for years, and then we came in to help prop up the succeeding governments in the south. That’s where we’re still stuck. So when you’re surprised that someone living in South Vietnam might take up arms against his own ‘side,’ remember that every adult you see has lived with nothing but colonization and war for his entire life, and the lives of his parents and grandparents since the days of our own Civil War.”
Lincoln nodded along with Franklin’s description. When the captain finished, he turned away and started up the hill again, Lincoln following. “I’m not saying it’s not in our strategic interest to stop the spread of communism, and that’s what we’re trying to do here. I’m just saying, don’t underestimate the lengths a man will go to if he thinks he’s fighting for his country’s freedom.”
Lincoln had never thought of the struggle that way. He had come to Vietnam because that’s where the Army had sent him, and he’d enlisted because he was likely to be drafted anyway. Rich white kids who went to Harvard or Yale were exempt from such things, but not black kids from New Bordeaux—even ones who, thanks to their adoptive father’s criminal activities, were better off than most.
At the crest of the hill, Franklin stopped. Lincoln came up beside him and cast his gaze over rolling hillsides, each one
cutting a line across those behind. The landscape was green and lush, each line of hills a darker green than the one before it until finally it faded into black. It couldn’t have been more different from the flat swampland around New Bordeaux, except where the rice paddies broke the foliage, looking almost as green as Franklin’s eyes. The view made Lincoln think about fairy tales he’d been read in the orphanage, as if this were a mystical, magical place where anything could happen.
Franklin pointed toward the west. “See that hilltop there?”
Lincoln looked, saw a dozen hilltops or more, guessed it didn’t matter which one in particular the captain meant. “Sure.”
“That’s in Laos. You see the borderline between here and there?”
Lincoln looked for it. From here, he couldn’t see a single man-made structure, no sign that any human hand had ever made a mark on the landscape. “Nope.”
“That’s because borders are imaginary lines. They’re not acts of God or elaborate constructions of the aliens that came before us—”
“Aliens?” Lincoln interrupted.
“You ever read Chariots of the Gods, Clay?”
“No, should I?”
“Don’t bother. It’s probably all bullshit, anyway. Point is, governments set borders. Like the line between here and Laos, or between North and South Vietnam. They’re not set in stone; they’re lines drawn on maps. They can be erased or moved at the whim of fallible humans.”
“Okay,” Lincoln said. He was confused by the captain’s philosophical musings and by the way the man jumped from subject to subject. If there were threads connecting them, they were as invisible as the border that lay somewhere below.
“Reason I’m telling you all this, Clay, is that your country needs you.”
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