The Congs we were after had been probing along our defenses, looking for soft spots. They would set up a mortar attack from somewhere within the jungle, raise a little hell, and then split before anyone could get to them. HQ figured the Cong operation to be a squad-sized unit. We had two squads from Alpha Company and two ARVN squads to clear them out.
What we were supposed to do was to set up an ambush on what we figured to be their route.
We hit the LZ at 2035 hours. We went in first and cleared the LZ, and then the ARVNs came in. We had four squads, but only twenty-five, maybe twenty-six, guys. All of the squads were short except ours. Simpson said that they kept our squad up to par because the battalion commander liked him.
Near Chu Lai the patrols had been serious, but away from Chu Lai, in the deep boonies, they were dead serious. There was no talking from the time we hit the LZ.
Once we hit the wood line the ARVNs broke off from us and went ahead. We were supposed to set up a company-sized “L” trap. Sergeant Simpson didn’t like it because it was too big, and we didn’t know how the ARVNs would react. I just hoped and prayed we weren’t walking into one.
Walowick was on point. Brunner was in the rear and Johnson was left flank. I was in the middle again, right behind Brew. In the darkness you couldn’t keep the proper distance. You were always afraid that you would lose the dude in front of you, that you would suddenly find yourself walking through the woods alone. We had signals, but they didn’t help when it was really dark.
“Don’t think about anything,” Sergeant Simpson had said. “Don’t think about your mama, don’t think about your girlfriends, nothing. Just look around and be alert.”
Sergeant Simpson had six days left in Nam. Brunner said that Captain Stewart had been on his case to extend for three months. The squad said that we would try to watch out for him, but we knew it didn’t mean much.
I looked around. I couldn’t see anything. I listened for Brew’s footsteps. He sounded like a cat, moving through the night. I heard the cat.
We reached the ambush site. The two ARVN squads formed the short end of the “L.” The two Alpha Company squads were the long side. Lieutenant Gearhart set out the claymores. He had the detonating wires, too. We waited.
I was lying on my stomach. I tried not to think of anything that would get my mind off of what I was doing. I tried to control my imagination, to keep the shadows from becoming things they weren’t.
Something crawled across my wrist. I jumped, and just managed not to cry out. It was too dark to see what it was, but it was still there. I tried to brush it off, but it didn’t move. I felt it. I thought it was a finger. For a crazy-ass minute I thought there was a Cong behind me and he had just dropped a finger on me. I grabbed it and squeezed. It was soft and mushy. My heart was pounding. Every Cong in the world had to hear it. I wanted to turn over and look behind me. I wanted to cry.
I remembered something. It was a picture of a guy with his hands on a bicycle. It was the picture that I had seen in the hut. I tried to picture the guy’s face that I had shot. Was it the same guy? Could it have been his hut? I wondered what he would have said if he had killed me. Would he have said that he was trying to stop the spread of whatever the hell he thought I stood for? What did he think I stood for? What did the bullets feel like going into his face?
Don’t think. Stop thinking. Stop. Look ahead of me. Don’t think, don’t daydream. Look.
Quiet. Suppose everybody had left except me? I didn’t hear anybody. Why was I so afraid of being left alone? It was possible. I knew it was possible.
Look.
I couldn’t see anything. Once in a while the moon would be bright enough to cast a shadow. Somebody had the Starlight Scope. Probably Sergeant Simpson. In the moonlight I looked at my wrist. A fucking leech. I got my bayonet out and cut it in half, then scraped it off my wrist. It stung like crazy.
Ignore it. Sure.
We waited for an hour that seemed like four hours. We waited for another hour that seemed like four more hours.
Voices. Charlie. They were supposed to be so quiet, so cool. I moved my hand up to the trigger.
The first charlies were in the killing zone. I waited. I wanted to pull the trigger. I knew they were passing the claymores. I heard them talking. My hands were sweating. We had the upper hand. We had them in the killing zone. I was waiting for Lieutenant Gearhart to open up with the claymores. The claymores would waste them. They were terrible.
Nothing happened. The charlies were going through the killing zone and out the other side. What the hell had happened? Where the hell was the squad? I heard the charlies go off into the night. They must have passed the ARVNs, too.
“What the fuck happened?” Peewee’s voice in the darkness.
“Shut up!” Gearhart.
Peewee mumbled something to himself, and was quiet.
Okay, it was cool. We weren’t going to do the ambush. We would wait until morning and then split. Maybe Gearhart was scared. He had made a mistake before, and we had lost a man and had one wounded. Now he was playing it safe.
I relaxed. My wrist stung. It felt like the leech was still on it.
Voices. More charlies. They were talking again, taking a stroll through the woods. They entered the killing zone. I kept telling myself not to think about the wrist, and I kept thinking about it.
The voices continued. How many of them were there? The nearly full moon drifted from behind some clouds, and I got my head down. I looked up. There were the charlies. Only instead of the four or five I had imagined there seemed to be an endless line.
I opened my mouth so I could breathe quietly. I had to pee.
Voices behind us. The woods were crawling with charlies.
Our Father, who art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy name… .
Don’t think. Don’t even think of God. I thought. I thought of all the good things I had done in my life. I didn’t deserve to die. I didn’t want to die.
The voices went on for another ten minutes. If we had sprung the ambush, we wouldn’t have stood a chance.
“Let’s get out of here!” Brunner.
“Shut up!” Gearhart.
Quiet. More voices. They kept coming.
It lasted nearly fifteen minutes. It was only fifteen minutes, but it seemed like an eternity. Still, we didn’t move. A half hour passed after we heard the last one move, before I heard Gearhart calling us together. Simpson went out and got the claymores and we started going back, careful not to take the route the charlies had taken in case they mined it.
Jamal was shaking so badly I wondered how he could have stayed still all that time.
“How you doing, man?”
He didn’t answer. I looked at him and he was crying. I made a note to tell Simpson. If Jamal was that shaky, he was going to get us all killed.
There had been too many charlies to pull an ambush; they would have wiped us out. I wasn’t sure how many there had been, and I thought that Gearhart was only estimating.
“There had to be at least a battalion.” Gearhart was on the radio as soon as we got back to the base.
Peewee was trying to bum what was left of the leech off my wrist with a cigarette. The damn thing was disgusting.
“What did they say?” Sergeant Simpson looked at Gearhart when he put down the phone.
“They wanted to know if we saw any identifying patches on them,” Gearhart said.
“How did you figure there were so many?” Walowick asked.
“They were talking too much,” Gearhart said. “Too confident.”
If it had been me, I thought, I would have screwed it up. I would have.
Sergeant Simpson extended for thirty days. Nobody wanted to look at him, nobody wanted to see him. It was as if he had decided to die. That’s what we all felt. They gave him another stripe. He was a Master Sergeant. Big deal.
Most of the guys that extended in Nam did it for the rank, but some had other things in their heads.
It was as if the ide
a that any moment they could be killed excited them. I knew a kid on 119th Street off Eighth Avenue like that. He had run with a gang and was always in a knife fight or something. When he finally got killed — gunned down outside the Showcase Bar on 125th — nobody went to his funeral.
We could tell the action was picking up all over. The air strikes were picking up. The rumble of the big guns started as soon as it was light enough to see and sometimes lasted far into the night. Most of it was outgoing, but not all of it. Once in a while a mortar shell would land near the base, and then we would all run out into the trench built in front of the tent.
We reinforced that sucker with some two-by-fours that Lieutenant Gearhart had had flown all the way up from Saigon. Most of the patrols going out were Vietnamese, and Johnson said that he didn’t think most of them were really patrolling.
“They ain’t out a kilometer before you hear popping,” he said.
He was right. Half the time the ARVNs would go out, especially at night, they would be back within a half hour saying that they had been hit by a company of charlies. Then we would go on alert and send out a few rounds and spend the rest of the night in the trenches.
I won thirty dollars in the football pool. I had Green Bay and a point total of forty-eight, which
was closer than anybody else. I sent the money to Mama.
I got a rash or something on my feet. Peewee wanted me to put some of the salve he had bought from the old woman on them but I said no. I remembered how his face had broken out. At the new camp we had been working more in higher ground, and I thought the small cracks between my toes would heal. They didn’t. A medic from Tam Ky came by with the pills and gave me some powder for my feet and told me to keep them as dry as possible.
“Your feet get messed up and you’re going to end up with a profile.”
Yeah, thanks.
Lobel damned near dragged Jamal into our hooch.
“Go ahead, tell him what you heard,” Lobel said to Jamal.
“Sergeant Simpson and Captain Stewart got into a fight,” Jamal said. “Captain Stewart told Sergeant Simpson that if he didn’t shut up and get out he was going to bust him down to private.”
“Who the hell does he think he is?” Brunner asked.
“What they fighting about?” Johnson asked.
Brunner got up and walked away.
“He found out that Captain Stewart is volunteering Alpha Company all over the place. He asked him what he’s doing that for, and Captain Stewart said that if he didn’t want to fight he shouldn’t have extended.”
What Jamal said went down hard. We didn’t mind doing our part because it had to be done, even though we always didn’t have answers to why we were doing it.
But nobody wanted to go out and risk their lives so that Stewart could make major.
The mortars started coming in more regularly over the next three days, and the ARVN patrols started staying out shorter and shorter times. We didn’t go out for almost a week, but when I saw Captain Stewart talking to Gearhart I figured something was up. I was right. We were headed for another patrol.
The “patrol” turned out to be a company-sized sweep. We were supposed to take off at 1000 hours. At 0930 hours three Hueys, escorted by two Spook-ies, huge C-47 gunships, came in. It was the rest of our outfit.
Lobel wrote a long letter to his father, telling him that he was sorry about joining the army. He put it in his gear at the hooch before we went on the sweep.
“You really sorry?” I asked.
He shrugged, and I dropped it.
I wondered how my father would take it if I got killed. I told myself that I didn’t care. The more I thought of it as we waited to load up, the more I began to understand how Lobel felt. Having people care about you was probably the only thing that made any of it right. Having them not care made your whole life wrong.
The company hit the landing zone at 1117 hours. Some squads from Second Platoon went in first. They didn’t get any fire, but they looked confused on the ground. We soon got the word that there were punji sticks in the tall grass we were jumping down into. They were sharpened sticks stuck into the ground or in pits. Usually they were covered with shit, either human shit or animal shit, so when they stuck you, you got infected. No one in our squad hit the punji sticks as we landed, and we started moving out toward the wood line. There was no resistance.
We got into the wood line and formed a skirmish line. Monaco spotted a mine symbol. He called Gearhart over and showed it to him. There were three leaves rolled into the shape of a triangle at the base of a tree. We looked around for the mine but didn’t see one. Then Johnson found it. It was one of our C ration cans rigged to a limb that you would have to push out of your way if you were over six feet tall.
Monaco blew the mine, and we went on.
“Look for shells, burnt leaves, anything that says charlie’s been here,” Captain Stewart said.
“We found the damn mine,” Peewee muttered to me. “The tooth fairy didn’t leave that sucker.”
The wood led up a hill, and the grass was getting taller. I hated it. You couldn’t see through the grass and you were scared shit of stepping on a mine.
“Keep your distance! Keep your distance!” Gearhart.
We were going uphill. You had to lean forward and sometimes catch at brushes with your hands. You didn’t want to touch anything that you didn’t have to, or pull on anything.
I went through a brush and nearly had a heart attack when the thick branches hooked my M-16 and jerked it out of my hand. I turned and saw Peewee. He disentangled my piece and handed it to me. He smiled.
We got a quarter of the way up the hill when a guy in the next squad called out.
“What is it?” Stewart called to him.
“Looks like a spider hole!” It was a corporal, tall, sleeves rolled up, tattoed arms.
Stewart stopped the company and a couple of men approached the hole. A spider hole is a hole dug in the ground that’s big enough for one man, sometimes two; but sometimes they’re disguised and there’s a tunnel entrance in back of them. The corporal fired a few rounds into the hole and then looked in.
“Empty!” he said.
“Look around for more!” Stewart called out. “And be alert!”
Just then the whole damn mountainside opened up. The tall corporal spun around from the impact of the bullets and came flying forward.
“Up the hill! Up the hill!” Gearhart was on his knees and pointing up.
Simpson was firing, and I opened up. We started scrambling up the hill toward where the fire was coming from. I heard the rounds whining and buzzing around my head like angry bees. I was doubled up, firing from a crouched position.
I moved against a tree and aimed at where I thought they had to be.
“This way! This way!” Gearhart was going up first.
I found myself going up after him. Johnson and Lobel were on our left. Johnson got down and started spreading fire. Brew was feeding him. I kept firing, moving under Johnson’s cover. We hit a ledge, and I almost fell over a dead Cong.
When we got to the ledge, we were less than thirty meters from the top of the hill. Gearhart had got a M-79 from some place and was shooting grenades to the top. Some guys threw some grenades over the top and Johnson and another sixty raked it over pretty good.
We made the last thirty meters in less than a minute, with everybody throwing grenades over the top. Stewart was on the phone. The choppers and the jets would be in the air already.
We got to the top, and there were three more Congs on the ground. One was only wounded. He was half-sitting up, and I think he was trying to get his hands up. Captain Stewart opened up on him, and his head snapped back and his arms flailed for a moment even after I knew he was dead.
We got to the crest of the hill and started firing down the other side. We didn’t see any Congs, but they had to be there somewhere. The fact that we had found four bodies was a miracle.
“Incoming!’’
“To the left! That way! That way!” I heard Gearhart calling out. I saw Johnson; he had a rag or something around the sixty and was shooting it from the hip.
Another round hit, and I saw Johnson go to his knees.
“O Jesus! O Jesus!”
I looked around. It was Brew. There was blood gushing out from the top of his leg. I could see the bone.
“Medic! Medic!”
I tried to get over to Brew. My head was spinning. I thought I was too scared to move. I tried to force myself to move, then I looked down and saw that my pants were ripped open. I saw the flesh already starting to swell. I was hit.
“O Mama, O Mama, please don’t let me die!” “Get the choppers in here!”
I pushed myself over on my stomach and looked for my rifle. The next round lifted me, and I felt something hit my wrist and tear into the flesh. I felt as if somebody was putting a hot iron on my wrist, then dragging it through the flesh.
“O God! O God! O God, please!”
“Back off the fucking hill, they got it zeroed!”
I could get one eye open. I saw Gearhart backing down the hill. He was firing the grenade launcher and looking around. I felt somebody grab me by the collar. I couldn’t turn around. My leg twisted under me and there was pain. But more than the pain in my leg, more than my wrist dangling in front of me, was the thought that I was going to die. I was going to die.
“O God. O God, please. Please.”
Chapter 16
I was trembling. I didn’t feel any pain, but I couldn’t move. There was stuff going on all around me. I saw guys moving past me. Blurs. I heard cursing. The sounds of automatic weapons seemed to be a rippling that swelled from somewhere.
What was going on? How long was it going to last? What had we run into?
“Howya doing, man? Howya doing?” Jamal was over me. He was opening my shirt.
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