Fields of Fire

by James Webb

  Mounds of family bunkers reached high through the dry weeds, and craters from a hundred bombs dipped low. The trail detoured around a huge crater left by a five-hundred-pound bomb. The earth itself was swollen and distended from the daily beatings it was taking.

  Suddenly (finally, breathed Hodges, after having added up his clues) there were screams from the point of the patrol, then random shots. Hodges ran forward and saw that the wide, dike-rippled paddy at the far edge of the village had filled with fleeing figures, sprinting for a bald, red ridge two hundred meters on the other side. There were dozens of them. Some were dressed in blue, some in green, some in white. Some wore conical hats and some were bareheaded. Most carried long cloth bundles.

  The men moved with a quick certainty that always amazed him. They formed a line behind a wide, thick dike, and began firing furiously at the images that danced before them in the brown grass. Hodges remembered to place one fire team of three men to the rear, toward the village, lest they get ambushed from behind. He congratulated himself again. Very shrewd, Hodges. Two months and you're thinking like a gook.

  The figures continued to run away. It angered him. He urged the machine-gun team on. Compos, the gunner, fired determinedly, his black eyes wide and his arms dripping streams of sweat on the stock of the gun. Cronin, the assistant gunner, shivered with recent malaria as he clipped ammunition belts into place and pointed out targets. Wolf Man broke out clean ammo from the boxes he carried, his garish tattoos gleaming in the sun. They worked with intimacy, stopping and calling to each other, four parts of the same machine. The gun ate the belt of bullets with an insatiable greed. Cronin poured LSA oil to cool the steaming barrel. Bodies dropped in the high weeds of the paddy.

  But it was not enough. Still they ran. Hodges walked the line, urging his platoon to kill, screaming at the fleeing figures.

  “Fight us, you bastards!! Come on! Fight us!”

  Most of them disappeared over the ridge. It was unfair, mused Hodges, that they should flee after he had pursued them so skillfully, had read their clues so well. They never fought back until they were ready, but he had to pursue and attempt to engage every slightest vision. Not fair, and they were doing it again. Once on the other side of the ridge it would be their game, not his.

  There were still a dozen running in the field. Hodges noted Goodrich lying forward on his elbows, his weapon impotent before him in the dirt.

  “Put out rounds, Goodrich! They're skying out!”

  Goodrich glanced at Hodges, then out into the paddy at the fleeing figures. “Those are kids, Lieutenant. Kids and mamasans. I saw the ponytails.”

  “If those are kids, I'll kiss your ass. Now open up.”

  Goodrich shrugged and decided not to pursue it, feeling that any additional comment would be pushing it. In the weeks since the Bridge had been overrun, he had continually flirted with trouble over similar incidents. He fired his weapon perfunctorily in the general direction of the fleeing mob. What the hell. He can court-martial me for not shooting, but he can't court-martial me for being a lousy shot.

  Hodges knew what would follow. It was the worst part. He had been able to anticipate them, but now he knew they would read him. No patrol like this was finished until the bodies were found and tabulated. Very important, he mused, tempted to fake it. Sheeit. If they're dead, they're dead. I had 'em but they wouldn't fight. It's their game, now.

  The company commander called him and ordered him to count the meat and he studied his map for a quick moment, hiding behind a bush for fear of snipers who looked for such things in order to kill platoon commanders. He had to take the ridge, or they would waste his whole platoon in the paddy. Where is the ridge? Let's see. Phu Nhuan (8) over there. Phu Nhuan (3) right here. There it is. The ridge has no name. All right. He grinned. Appropriate. The battle for No-Name Ridge.

  He didn't want to do it. He thought again about bagging it. But if he did it to the Skipper, some of his men would do it to him. Shirking danger was an infection that spread more quickly than the plague. He left half of his platoon in the village as a covering force, and moved with the other half into the paddy, on a wide, cautious line, sweeping toward No-Name Ridge. He walked behind them on a low, blackened dike that had been charred by a napalm drop in someone else's war a week ago, feeling that he was offering his body as a sacrifice in the name of not bagging a superior's order. Blind obedience. Here I am, God of Dumb. Take me quick.

  He was so certain of what was to follow that he removed a LAAW rocket from its strap along his back and extended it, pulling the safeties out. He had figured them in the village but they had him now.

  Then the roof fell in. The rounds erupted with their mocking pops, and before he could make a conscious decision he was hugging a charred portion of the field, mashing his face hard into the black ash. The rounds kicked up little ash spots all around him and he rolled onto one side and casually fired off his LAAW. Am I cool, or what?

  Flaky screamed behind him. The radioman was shot. Hodges turned his head, keeping his body flat as dust and ash kicked up around himself and Flaky. Flaky peered back, terrified. One hand was a bloody pulp. Well, thank God it's him, Hodges thought absently. If anybody ever deserved it…

  He had to move. The rounds were getting closer. He crept back to Flaky to check his hand. Behind Flaky, at the edge of the village, the other half of the platoon put out a steady rate of fire at the ridgeline. Hodges had brought a 60-millimeter mortar section with him and the men were free-tubing an inaccurate mortar barrage along the ridge, the gunner grasping the hot tube with a towel. Goodrich was now firing madly at the ridge. Hodges caught his eye and winked to him. Not bad for babysans, eh, Senator?

  Doc Rabbit crawled heavily over, helmet on backwards because he claimed he saw better that way, strapped with double bandoleers that held battle dressings instead of ammunition. His corroded M-16 dropped to Flaky's feet, useless, unfirable even if Rabbit cared to fire, even if he ever thought to bring ammunition in the bandoleers instead of battle dressings. The rifle and bandoleers were camouflages that misled snipers in their hunts for corpsmen. Or so Rabbit consoled himself.

  And for all his camouflage, Rabbit now sat exposed against the dike, impervious to the incoming rounds, wrapping Flaky's hand. He looked over to Hodges, who was flat against the dike to protect himself. “They shot the radio right out of Flaky's hand, Lieutenant. Some shot, huh?”

  Radio. Supporting arms. Hodges grabbed the handset, still huddled against the paddy dike, and pressed his map into the dirt where the dike met the field, hoping the enemy would not see it. As if they didn't know by now, he fretted sardonically. “Delta Six, Delta Three! Contact mission, Grid eight-niner-five, five-zero-three, direction five-one-hundred, distance two hundred. Gooks on a ridge.”

  The firing stopped before the guns were up for the mission. Hodges called the artillery anyway, unsure of why they had stopped shooting and aware that at least fifty of them had fled over the ridgeline. They know I have to go into that paddy to check bodies, he reasoned, searching along the ridge as the artillery rounds impacted with their haunting crumps. They could just be waiting.

  He kept the gun up as he again moved half of the platoon toward the ridge. Behind him, the now-ecstatic Flaky was writhing animatedly against the dike as someone took a picture of him for posterity. A few minutes before, Flaky had called in his own medevac and then announced that the wound, which was a ricochet, had paralyzed his hand until the date of his discharge.

  They took No-Name Ridge and set up along it as security. The other half of the platoon, led by Staff Sergeant Gilliland, who had replaced Austin, swept along the fields where the enemy had fled. Hodges sat on the ridge, feeling irritated at the inconclusiveness of their efforts, and smoked his fifteenth cigarette of the patrol. On the far side of the ridge was yet another paddy, and another stand of opaque trees. Swarms of figures flashed and faded in the treeline.

  Damn gooks are everywhere today, he fretted. He called another artillery mission
on the trees, thinking ironically that if he used too many rounds the artillery people would demand he take his platoon over into the next treeline to check for more kills, and then he would have to call an artillery mission on the next treeline for his own safety, and have to check it out, and … well. It could go on forever. Fuck 'em, he decided. Just fuck 'em. Fuck everybody who doesn't come out here and do this. Let them go check that treeline. What do they know?

  Sergeant Gilliland called up from the paddy. He was standing just below Hodges. He and a few members from Snake's squad held several rifles, and had captured a soldier. Or at least it appeared to be a soldier, if one used his imagination.

  “Peep out Mamasan!” Gilliland was lifting a cone hat off the man's head, then dropping it back on. Gilliland would lift it, and reveal the closely shaved head of a North Vietnamese soldier. Then he would drop it, and the hat would cover the man's face, and a ponytail would hang down his back. “And did you see her ditty bag? Poor Mamasan. We drove her out of her home.” Gilliland held up a long cloth bundle. He shook it and an AK-47 rifle dropped out onto the ground.

  The men on the ridge began screaming and cheering. Down the ridge one man moved off the wide dust trail, stepped down a paddy dike, and began to call to someone who stood near Gilliland. The claydirt belched loudly, a screaming roar, and the man slammed to the dirt, legless. He appeared asleep. Twenty feet away someone else now crawled on stumps of fingers, yelling for Doc Rabbit. He peered down at his hands and held them in front of his face, examining them as he squealed in terror. Marines ran immediately to help the two men, stepping cautiously toward them both to avoid possible trip wires from other booby traps.

  Hodges sat down, burying his head between his knees. He was defeated. The very regularity of the actions, the fact that everyone knew exactly what to do, what words to say, and where not to step, was an indictment. The strained emotion that he kept just beneath his nonchalance was creeping through again. He wanted to cry. They would watch him and then wonder what kind of an officer he was, how he could give orders to them when he couldn't take it. He couldn't cry.

  Rabbit walked past him. “How's Boomer, Doc?” “He ain't got any legs. But I got him tied off.” Flaky had already called the medevac. A month before, Hodges would have insisted on doing it himself, but it didn't matter. They all knew how. The skipper would call it good training, but to him it was another indictment. The only real test of success anymore was how many came back whole from each patrol, and now he was again a failure. They got us again. They got us.

  He hated it and he hated himself. He walked over and tried to talk to Boomer but Boomer was out of it. He started to walk toward the man who had lost his fingers, it was a new dude whose name he didn't remember, and Doc waved him away. They had bandaged both hands heavily so the man wouldn't have to look at his pieces of fingers and they were talking rapidly to him about the World, holding his attention until the morphine hooked him. Below him, in the field, the prisoner had done something, said something wrong, and two men were hitting him. It didn't bother Hodges. The prisoner was the only tangible enemy to focus their frustrations on. Boomer was a good man, and now he didn't have any legs, just because he tried to get a better look at the phony mamasan. Somehow a chopper made it to the ridge. Someone popped a smoke grenade and red powder curled acridly around Hodges. Then the helicopter gobbled them up and fluttered off and he crawled underneath a bush and fought back his sobs and beat the ground, all the time wondering if he wouldn't set off a booby trap each time he pounded the dust, but that was how paranoid he had become, and he thought of all the others who had become raw meat at his direction after only two months, and he hated it and himself more deeply and he pounded the dust some more, making a vow of rage. He would not allow their blood to have soaked into that unproductive dust for some mad amorphous folly.

  He rejoined Gilliland in the paddy and as the patrol made its way among the weeds he felt a surge of deep, undirected anger and desire to kill. Kill everything, mused Hodges. We're a floating islet waiting to be killed just because Those Bastards think we should be killed so they can have more bodies on their tote boards when the React pulls us out from where we never should have had to go. Those Bastards sit somewhere with air conditioners around them and Coca-Cola inside them while we drink this goddamn wormy water. We're closer to being gooks than we are to being Them and yet here we are wanting to kill gooks, any gook because of this ulcerous anger that eats the insides of my guts and this is only Checkpoint Four.

  Stork humped the radio now. “Call in Checkpoint Four.”

  “Yes, sir. Six, this is Three.”

  Hello Checkpoint Four you mother two more of you and I'm one patrol closer to being out of this shit-hole.

  “Roger, Six. Be advised we're at Checkpoint Four.”

  Shards of earth, broken trees, staring gook mamasans and kids they're numb look at them numb from all this and I look at them and wonder where their old man is. He probably set the trap that just blew Boomer up the bastard and the kids would like to kill us I don't blame them I'd like to kill them too not the kids but who gives a shit anymore it's all the same too hard to draw lines seen too many dead kids I don't feel bad for them anymore. They hate me. They're pathetic as hell but their old man's trying to kill me right now they'd just groove on watching me crumple to the dirt that's right need another cigarette. Here comes another paddy if they hit us again it will be in this paddy it's too wide to cross without prepping I'm going to put us all on line and call a mission Battery Three if they'll give it to me Open Sheaf three repeats I'll blow that treeline all to hell. There's mamasans and babysans in there I know that but what the hell I didn't ask to do this dangling and if I don't blow them away I'll hit a goddamn company of NVA and I'll never live long enough to be glad I didn't kill any mamasans besides they have family bunkers and anyway there you are again it's them or us and that my friend whether you'll admit it or not isn't any choice at all.

  14

  From outside the lines came a racing whoosh, then overhead a wavy string of smoke. The green-star cluster popped, its burning capsules lighting a phosphorescent patch of scraggly hill inside the perimeter, and in a moment all was predawn dark again.

  Doc Rabbit squinted toward the middle of the perimeter, where the burning capsules had landed, looking for movement. He grinned sleepily, sitting up in his bed of raw earth. That had to be Waterbull's team coming in, Rabbit mused. Bagger shot that green-star. Bastard gets closer every time. But if he ever really does set the Skipper's hootch on fire … Oh, well. That was his last chance before R & R, anyway. Skipper'll have ten days to forget about it.

  Hodges had the last radio watch. The handset squawked and he braced himself, answering the call.

  “This is Three. Go, Six.”

  Hodges held the handset away from his ear, making a pained face at Rabbit. Green-stars go parallel to the lines, the radio was saying. Train your men, it continued. Finally there was a waiting silence.

  Hodges keyed in. “Roger, Six. Probably was the first time my man ever worked a green-star. I'll talk to him.” Hodges shook his head hopelessly, sharing Rabbit's grin. A listening post with Wild Man, Waterbull, and Bagger. The Skipper was lucky they didn't start an imaginary fire-fight out there, just to wake everybody up. He looked across ten feet of weeds to Rabbit, who had fought his way out of his poncho-liner blanket and was sitting in a disheveled lump in the middle of an array of canteens, C-ration tins, and battle dressings.

  “Crazy bastards. I better find a new game for 'em before we all get in trouble.”

  Rabbit nodded, stretching sleepily, then drank deeply from a canteen. The water was musky, alive with creatures from some leech-infested pool, but was cool from the night air. Rabbit liked to soak his canteen covers with water just before dark. The evaporation, and the night air, had a small refrigeration effect, and made each morning's drink a luxury. He finished drinking and held the canteen like a toy in his huge hands, pondering his choice for breakfast out of t
he C-ration tins that were scattered at his feet.

  Rabbit should have been called Doc Bear. He was large and thick, with a layer of dark hair that covered his limbs and heavily bearded him. He had sad brown eyes and a sleepy growl of a voice that made his comments sound like afterthoughts. But he had been nicknamed Rabbit years before, because his top teeth were prominent, and he sported a rabbit tattoo on one bulky forearm.

  Rabbit selected a can of fruit cocktail and began working a C-ration opener around its lid. “Rained last night, Lieutenant.”

  The sky was gray now. It was almost dawn. Hodges tore off a quarter-sized corner of C-4 explosive, lit one ragged edge, and dropped it quickly into a punctured C-ration can. The C-4 ignited and burned hotly. Hodges set his canteen cup over it, heating water for cocoa.

  “I noticed. I dreamed I was taking a shower, and I woke up to turn on the hot water.”

  Rabbit chuckled. Hodges reached over and shook Staff Sergeant Gilliland, who was snoring loudly underneath a poncho. “Come on, Sarge. Up and at 'em. Today's the big day. Look like you love it, man.”

  Rabbit laughed again, eating his fruit cocktail. On the lines the first radio clicked on, meeting sunrise, piercing the still air like the first lathe in a factory that would soon be overwhelmed by noise and motion.

  “Goooooo-o-o-o-o-od morning, Vietnam!”

  Gilliland's poncho flew into the air, and he sat on the piece of C-ration cardboard he had scrounged for a mattress. He rubbed his craggy, acne-scarred face, then ran a hand along the wet, packed earth at the edge of his cardboard.

  “Rain.”

  Hodges nodded. “Yup. We were just talking about it.”

  A cigarette appeared automatically under Gilliland's bushy black moustache, and was lit by hands that needed no guidance from the eyes, which quickly scanned the perimeter, then the field and the village across from it, finally becoming satisfied that this would be a boring, empty morning, like so many others. They lost their molten look and Gilliland threw his match disconsolately to one side and sat smoking, staring bleakly in front of him. He quickly smoked the cigarette down to a nub, then flicked it in front of him, rubbing his eyes.