by James Webb
He jammed a letter into his flak jacket pocket as he walked along the center row of the tent. So, he thought, motioning to a man to go back and retrieve a C-ration meal on his cot, she doan’ like Philly. So Philly ain’ good enough for her. Shoulda left her in Noath Carolina, she says. Folks treat her better in Noath Carolina. So kids get used to white folks better in Noath Carolina, go to school with more white folks in Noath Carolina.
He snorted, shaking his huge round head. Well, if Noath Carolina so damn good, why the hell are there so many niggers in Philly? Oh, I doan’ know. You never can keep 'em happy. Shoulda left her in California. I know I coulda found some place in California. But it's the same. It's her. I keep tellin’ her. When she goan’ listen?
Rule Number One, thought Sadler, exiting the other side of the troop tent. People ain't never goan’ forget you're a nigger. People ain't never goan’ think niggers an’ honkies are the same. Only thing you can do is be so goddamn good that it doan’ matter. An’ if you ain’ any good, you can cry all you want an’ it won't make you good. But if you good, you doan’ need to cry.
Them mothafuckas an’ their “Black Shack” he thought. I work twelve years at bein’ good even if I'm a nigger an’ they want everybody to say they ain’ bad, no matter what kind o’ shit they put down, just because they're niggers. An’ the only thing they do is make everybody hate all o’ us 'cause they think we need a damn crutch. Well, the best damn NCOs in this here Marine Corps are black—the Major made a point o’ tellin’ me that when I left Camp Lejeune—an’ we doan’ need no punk imitatin’ Cleaver to do us in. I'da liked to kill them toads.
Now, where the hell is Snake-man?
“THE Plan,” the Colonel had advised the company's officers at a meeting in the Regimental Command Center the day before, “is to run a large-scale sweep-and-block to begin our operation. We know there is a full regiment, and another main-force battalion, operating in the central Arizona, getting ready to make a major assault, probably on An Hoa. We haven't been able to pin them down in a major battle yet” (bait dangling, alas, had failed), “so we're going after the whole kit-and-kaboodle in one shot. We have the Second Battalion of our own Twenty-Fifth Marines in the western Arizona, roughly here” (the pointer slapping expertly on the map) “and here. We're going to insert four more companies at night, into a block in the eastern Arizona. We're pulling two down from the Fourteenth Marines that will set up here” (the pointer slapping) “and here. Alpha of our First Battalion will move in here. Your company will move along the southeast edge of the Arizona, and set up in a block on the northern part of the Football Island, completing the block. There's a wide paddy, a good half-mile across, that will be to your front. It should give you excellent fields of fire when the day's festivities begin” (wry smile: a touch of humor always helps rapport).
“You'll take the afternoon convoy from An Hoa to Liberty Bridge. That will conceal your movement.” The Colonel smiled winsomely. “And frankly, we don't have any helicopters available to move you, anyway. Then you'll cross from the Bridge into the Arizona sometime after midnight. We'll give you the word.
“Just before dawn, Second Battalion will sweep across the Phu Phong paddies, through the central Arizona treelines. We should roust something big out. It will probably run right into you and the other blocking companies. Be ready.” He grinned one last, hopeful time. “You might not believe this, but I really wish I was going with you. Now, let's count some meat, all right?”
Hodges had grinned resignedly, remembering Bagger's usual retort: Some days you count the meat. Some days the meat counts you.
THE trucks were packed like crowded subway cars. Some men sat tightly on the two boards that ran the length of the truck bed. Others lay on the sandbagged bed itself, between the seats. The trucks followed one another closely, winding along the red earth.
Clouds began to form, first turning the sky entirely white in their distance, as if they had enveloped the earth and were now descending like a tightening grip, gradually graying, finally developing deep streaks but never pausing long enough to be cumulus or nimbus or cumulo-nimbus, merely racing toward the earth until at last they reached it in the form of steady, persistent, windless rain. A few pulled on ponchos when the rain began. Most accepted the wetness rather than expend the energy to undo packs and roll out ponchos and repack.
Hodges sat on one of the long boards, accepting the drenching rain, peering out at landmarks along the convoy road. They emerged as the truck ground toward the Bridge, allowed inspection, then disappeared behind him, as if becoming a part of his past. The old brick factory that the French had built an empire ago, lying fallow under blankets of red dust that were rapidly becoming an ooze of clay. The German hospital, sitting yellow and sedate, haven for hurt children, still missing three fräuleins that the VC had hauled off to the mountains several weeks before. The children from the hospital gathered along the road, even in the rain. There were the ambulatory ones who were still receiving treatment. There were the recently released, who had found new homes in the nearby Mau Chanhs rather than returning to Arizona or La Thap or Go Noi to die.
They made a haunting crowd. They were pocked, eyeless. They were burned, one-armed, one-legged. One hobbled painfully, his toes spaced from the end of his foot to the top of his ankle, five grotesque toy soldiers, melted by napalm into rigid attention. The children waved merrily to the convoy and received cigarettes and gum for their effort. The Marines in the convoy did not mangle them. Buddha merely turned his head. Some days it rains rain, Hodges thought, thinking of Dan's acquiescent philosophy. Some days it rains other things.
The road opened up and Hodges watched the bald red circles of earth spaced on both sides, surrounded by C-ration cans and weeds, where small groups of men now huddled under makeshift hootches in an attempt to stay dry. Road outposts. He had stood them with his platoon. They, too, seemed a somehow tranquil part of his past.
The convoy passed through the Phu Nhuans. He peered through the gloomy rows of trees and ridges, remembering past patrols. Over there, somewhere, soaking with the rain into the earth, were a hundred pieces of Big Mac, and the bones of Phony's arm. And an invisible, rain-soaked bloodstain from himself. Far into one paddy a helicopter hovered in the rain, soaking a rice seedbed with aviation fuel that had been rigged to shower down in the rotorwash. In a few days the seedbed would be dead. The helicopter, remembered Hodges, was a part of Operation Rice Denial. If We Kill Off All The Rice, the logic ran, There Won't Be Any To Give To The Enemy. If The Enemy Doesn't Have Rice, It Will Have To Quit Fighting.
Hodges shook his head, watching the helicopter. Not a totally bad rationale. But, meanwhile, the villagers will starve. Ah, he remembered ironically. But they can always move to the resettlement villages if they really care. Ri-i-ight. Underneath the hovering monster a mamasan stood, squarely in the middle of her seedbed. She peered through the gasoline rain, reaching both hands toward the inanimate machine that soaked her and her life source. Hodges watched her chest heave. She was either crying or screaming. The helicopter did not hear her. Nor did it see.
Finally the convoy reached the Bridge Compound. It paused only long enough to excrete its cargo, dropping the company in clusters along the mud-soaked road where it passed through the wire. They stood, drenched already, splattered with red mud from the grinding, departing truck wheels.
Snake slung his rifle over his shoulder, upside down to keep the rain out of the barrel, and hunted down Hodges. Both wore soaked utility shirts underneath their flak jackets. Neither wore a poncho.
“Where to, Lieutenant?”
Hodges looked at his watch. Four-thirty. Eight hours to kill before the company would leave the compound. They still stood in huge knots along the road. The compound was so small, and so tightly structured, that there appeared to be no place for the company to pass the time. Hodges looked around for Captain Crazy, and could not see him. The platoon stared patiently, waiting in the mud.
There was a small cl
earing in front of the Battalion COC bunker, not quite the size of a basketball court. Hodges pointed to it. “Get with Sergeant Sadler and put 'em over there. I'll go check inside the COC and see where they want us.”
Inside the bunker it was warm and dry and fluorescently bright. Hodges stood in the room, surrounded by maps and squawking radios, remembering the gruesome terror of the night the Bridge had been overrun, contemplating his and Snake's earlier confrontation with Kersey. Nothing in the bunker had changed. Old Kersey's probably praying every night the Bridge'll get overrun again, so he can cop another Silver Star, mused Hodges.
He looked around for his company commander, who still was not apparent. But speak of the devil, mused Hodges. A wide back leaning over a chart straightened, then turned to face him. He caught the jowls as the head turned. The narrow eyes inspected him haughtily. Kersey. Hodges feigned casualness.
“Hey. We got a company out in the rain, you know, just sitting there in front of your bunker. And we got eight hours to kill before we make our bird. Got any place we can hole up?”
Kersey grimaced at Hodges’ greeting. “No, I don't. This isn't a hotel, it's a combat base.” He folded his arms, his head tilted back. “What the hell you complaining about, anyway? If you were in the bush you'd be wet. You're gonna cross the river and get wet.”
“Something called leadership, Kersey. Taking care of your people. You wouldn't know a thing about that. Ahh, forget it.” Hodges turned to leave, but could not resist a dig after Kersey's arrogance.
“Hey. You and the Colonel get your Silver Stars yet?”
The radiomen in the bunker exchanged knowing smirks. Kersey stood erect. “Colonel rotated. I'd guess he got his. I got mine a few days ago.”
“That General from the World.”
“That's right.”
“I figured that.” Hodges smiled blandly. “He gave the Sergeant Major a Commendation just for having the good sense to leave before somebody did him a total job.” Kersey stared threateningly at Hodges. Hodges was enjoying the amusement of the radiomen. “Oh. But I forgot. That's how you got your Purple Heart.”
The bunker broke out into muffled guffaws. Hodges turned to leave. “Yeah. I hope your legs are O.K. You know, where those—gooks shot you?”
Kersey challenged him with a curse, but Hodges was already out the door.
It was a Pyrrhic victory. For eight hours the company sat packed in the dirt yard, under sheets of intermittent rain, huddled inside leaking ponchos. They sat mournfully in the black as the rain beat at them, nibbling from tins of C-rations, smoking wet cigarettes. The rain soaked their clothes and equipment. It crinkled their skin. It deadened every ember of what used to be their spirits.
35
The river was high and swift, cool from recent rain. Goodrich slid clumsily through wet grass down the steep bank, squinting at the wavy line of figures that disappeared in mist and darkness halfway across the water, then stepped carefully into the current. The water filled his boots, coldly shriveled his groin, tickled his armpits. He held his weapon over his head. His cigarettes were in his mouth. Every other part of him and his equipment was soaked. In front of him New Mac stumbled, going underwater briefly, and lunged to catch his helmet as it began to float off his head. He succeeded, but his cigarettes bobbed quickly downstream in their waterproof container. New Mac swore after them.
On the far bank cobwebs of limbs and roots from shattered trees reached through the mist. Goodrich approached them, haunted by their shapes, by the craggy pocks of sand and earth below them, by the very silence that greeted his first step onto the Arizona shore. Where are they? The valley's filled with them, they know we're here. It will only be a moment and then they'll kill us all. None of us knows where the other is except for the ones just in front and behind. Why haven't they hit us? Maybe just beyond this curve, behind that mound.
But there was nothing. Only a forest of devastated trees, its floor so deeply rent that it seemed they walked through sand dunes. For an hour they experienced the moon, following a winding trail. The column was continually halted. Men fell into craters that they did not see. They tripped over trees and lost the man in front of them. The point squad lost the trail once, and had to double back to find it.
Then the trail broke north. To the west, their front, was a ridge that dropped into a wide river of sand. The sand separated Football Island, to the south, from the rest of the Arizona Valley. They dropped down the ridge and walked in the sand, thankful to be out of treelines, away from near ambushes. The sand was loose, like walking on thick, wet sponges. They walked it for two hours, stopping periodically and resting in its openness, some of them now collapsing on it when the column stopped, mindless of the grainy irritants that stuck to all parts of them because they were still wet.
Abruptly, in the middle of the sand, as if by divine command, the column moved north. No landmarks guided it. They reached the ridge again, and climbed back into thicks and stumps and mounds and also hootches this time. They fought a thick treeline that was interlaced with trails and deep trenches, moving through it rather than along it, and finally reached its northern edge. There before them, like a seashore swallowed in its evening fog, was a wide, seemingly endless paddy, blanketed with mist. They took positions along it, making a thin, elliptical perimeter with the back side on a nearby trail, and awaited first light.
HODGES lay dozing in the mud of a bomb crater, supposedly on radio watch. The radio was an uncommunicative hiss against his ear. Mosquitoes hovered and swarmed lazily around his face, whole flocks of them in motion after the drenching rains. Ten yards away a group of rats played on the porch of an abandoned hootch. Across the crater, Sergeant Sadler snored, occasionally slapping a mosquito or slumbering against the crater's mud. There were slaps and mutterings in all directions, punctuated by exhausted groans. Just through the trees was the black and silver gloom of paddy.
Then the booms began. The crunch and whump of artillery digging out some distant earth, round after round, a dense bombardment, like rolls of thunder and deep drum crescendos. Ten minutes. Fifteen. The ground vibrated gently. Hodges was fully awake now. He crawled from the crater and made his way to the edge of the tree-line, watching. Two miles away flashes that resembled storm clouds lit the mist.
As the prep fire continued the black lid of sky lifted, allowing an eastern gush of blue. The awakening fields now creaked and moaned. Tanks. Then, from where the tanks creaked, there came other new sounds: machine guns rattled doggedly, rhythmically, steadily.
The sweep was on.
The sky lit and the mist began to lift and the fields were lush, rain-soaked, and green. Hodges peered along the tree-line and could see the other Marines of the company set in at its edge, watching also. They lay in the mist and weeds, faceless in their distance, and it struck him that he was watching a timeless vision: the taut stillness of a hundred men frozen by their individual fears. This part of it, at least, was eternal. They could have been anywhere—in a jungle clearing on Saipan, a quarter-century before. In the sweet spring grass at Shiloh. No matter. These were his people, passed down by time to fill a warrior's conduit, and this was where he belonged. He dreaded what the rumbling tanks, the sputters of machine guns would bring, but at the same time the very prospect energized him with awe and determination.
Bred to it, like a bird dog.
In front of them another treeline bent, perhaps two hundred yards away. Hodges peered through lingering wisps of fog and felt his eyes enlarge. A rush that resembled passion crept from the insides of his guts and somehow drew the skin from every part of his body toward that center of his joy and fear, so tight that when he smiled it made his cheeks burn.
Gooks. Hundreds of them, trapped in the treeline, swarming with all the apparent order of a mob catching a subway.
We got you! You bastards, we got you! He felt like standing and screaming at them, slapping the others in his platoon on the back, declaring the war finally over. Artillery crumped in the treeline
and the sweep from the west roared with tanks exploding 90-millimeter shells.
The enemy, a North Vietnamese Regiment, had left outposts to delay the sweep, and was searching for a point to consolidate and regroup. Later, in their best tradition, they would attempt to chew up the sweeping companies piecemeal, after the sweep expended itself. But now, they were indeed trapped.
A group of perhaps twenty soldiers bolted south out of the treeline, which was becoming saturated with artillery. They ran wildly toward Hodges and the others. Closer, closer they came, and Hodges felt a joy and anticipation so hard to contain that he found himself bobbing up and down inside the trench where he hid. Come on, you bastards. After all the months, all the bullshit. Come on! Ten more meters and you die.
The soldiers ran to within fifty meters of the company.
Abruptly, the machine guns signaled the beginning of the ambush. The NVA were caught between two paddy dikes, and had no cover. Some fell immediately. Others ran or crawled back toward the paddy dike behind them. The company unleashed a fierce barrage of machine-gun and rifle fire, gunning down most of the soldiers before they could even return fire.
Above the roar of a hundred weapons, like a curdle in the blood that had been passed down to him from some other dust-filled field, Hodges could hear the Marines screaming. He joined them. It seemed appropriate, a century later and half a world away: a chorus of Rebel yells.
In five minutes it was over, and the company lay spent, watching other enemy groups pour out of the far treeline, moving east, across another open paddy. “Bronco” observation planes arrived and dove busily at the fleeing enemy, firing rockets and mini-guns, then stayed on station to direct artillery strikes, generous with air-bursting antipersonnel rounds, into the open fields.