by Tim Curran
I noticed Roshland was looking about nervously.
“What’s up, Tommy?” I asked.
He shook his head side to side very slowly, spitting a ribbon of mucus at a leaf spider. “I don’t know. I just feel strange. Something wrong about this place.”
“Charlie?”
“No, not that, man. I don’t know. Imagination. Beaucoup bad vibes.” He didn’t seem to be sure of his diagnosis. “Maybe it’s just this daylight shit.”
I had to agree with him on that.
I didn’t care for daylight insertions. We usually went out at night. But for some reason, intelligence wanted us to hit the vil in broad daylight. In fact, when Barber was briefed by the Admiral and his spooks in Saigon, they said if it was getting dark, to scrub the operation. Under no circumstances were we to approach the village in the darkness. Go figure. Those spooks were funny sometimes. Or maybe not funny at all.
In about five minutes, Barber finished with his funny papers—maps—and we moved out. I took point. The jungle was thick and swampy. Mosquitoes and biting gnats were landing on my face and neck despite all the bug juice I’d smeared on with my cammo paint. I didn’t even bother swatting at them—for each one you killed, six more would take its place. You patrolled enough jungle like I had, you didn’t waste time with the local wildlife. You just acclimated yourself. Things like insects and jungle rot became as much a part of you as your skin.
I was starting to sweat a lot, so I took a salt tab. It was very quiet. Just the way I liked it, jungle birds screeching and monkeys chattering. The day had become oppressively hotter as we approached the river, a finger of the Mekong Delta system. I kept thinking about beers in frosted mugs. The farther we went, the more an uneasy feeling began to grip me. I couldn’t put a finger on it, but it left me cold.
We reached our first target before long.
Map coordinate Q-14. Supposedly, there was a supply route running through here for the slopes. We found a few footpaths beaten through the brush, but they were mostly overgrown. We canvassed the entire sector in every direction, but found nothing worth noting. Thurman, however, picked up an old French bayonet. It was rusted to shit and had probably been there for fifteen, twenty years since the Frenchies got their asses kicked out of that neck of the woods by the Viet Minh.
Finally, we called it quits.
Back into the bush, humping through swamp and hacking through jungle. I was on point again. The Rung Sat was a large area, true, but I was still somewhat unnerved that we hadn’t come across anyone at all. Not even a band of drug smugglers. Strange.
Then, just after sunset, we came upon a small village.
Not the village, but a little clearing with a couple thatched huts and a bonfire blazing away. I moved in cautiously to take a look. Thurman and the others hung back and checked out the huts. There were seven men and one old woman around the fire. The men had AKs and black pajamas on. VC, all right. Hardcore pricks spoon fed off Uncle Ho’s bullshit wagon. They were giving the regular Army and Marine units nothing but trouble, but they were no match for us. We’d proved that again and again.
Thurman came back and told us the huts were empty. He’d found one VC sleeping and slit his throat. Barber decided we were going to waste them. Thurman and I made a sweep around camp to see if there were anymore dinks around. Fifteen minutes later we came back. Nothing. It was cool.
Barber signaled us to form a killzone.
Roshland took his sixty to a small copse directly across from them. Barber, Thurman, and I spread out. Thurman carried an AK like me, Barber had a Stoner LMG. Dinks didn’t know it yet, but they were meat. Night, night.
Barber open up first.
He took out two of them before Thurman and I even fired. Together we cut down three more before they knew what the fuck was happening. The other two gooks rolled away and tried to scramble into the jungle, but Roshland cut ‘em in half with his sixty.
We slipped from the jungle and went to the fire.
I didn’t like it: standing there in the flickering light it would have been easier than shit for someone to draw a bead on us. The old woman had gotten hit in the leg and shoulder by stray rounds. She was bleeding pretty good.
She looked up at us, spoke in English. Her face was a maze of wrinkles, her eyes shiny and wet. “You go into land of dead, Joe…you don’t come back…you numba ten, you numba ten thousand…”
We all chose to ignore her meaning.
“Bitch speaks pretty good,” Thurman said. “Want me to see what I can get out of her?”
Barber shook his head. “Negative. No time.”
“Won’t take me long.”
“Intel doesn’t want that. No interrogation of unfriendlies in this area.”
And that was weird. Interrogation was pretty much SOP with a unit like ours. We’d been extensively trained in procedures of that type…nice ways and not so nice ways. We all spoke Viet and French, some better than others. Barber could speak Russian and Chinese, too.
But orders were orders.
“Well, we can’t leave the cunt,” Thurman said. He was pissed—Barber had cheated the sadist out of a good hour of cruelty.
Before Barber could answer, the old bag pulled a skinning knife out of her pants and made a lunge for him. We were all caught momentarily off-guard…except Thurman. A split-second after she pulled the knife, his boot connected swiftly with her temple, sending her sprawling senseless in the dirt.
“Crazy fucking mamma-san,” he said.
“Get moving,” Barber whispered. “Thurman, take point. Haul those bodies into the jungle and strip ‘em.”
We stripped the bodies of everything they had—weapons, ammo, food, personal items—and dumped them in the bush. That way it would look like bandits got ‘em and not American guerrillas. We scattered the ammo and sabotaged the AKs so they wouldn’t work. Thurman took a couple ears for his collection and some greasy photos of the soldiers’ girlfriends. He had quite an assortment of both. There was a well back near the huts and I dropped a vial of poison into it so any VC getting a drink would die a painful death. It was SOP to leave little presents like that behind. Deny the enemy the essentials of life.
Before we moved out, I looked back once and saw Barber break the old woman over his knee and stick his K-Bar into the side of her throat. I’m glad he did it. I hated doing women, particularly old ones.
Guerrilla warfare. It ain’t just a job, it’s a guilt trip.
We were all pretty deadass-tired from walking for twelve hours, so Barber decided we could bed down for a few hours. Said it would work out perfect. By the time we hit the vil next afternoon, we’d be fresh. We crawled up on a little flattened ridge that was nearly covered by a small, low thicket of bamboo and shut our eyes. Thurman took his Starlight scope and stood watch.
By the time I closed my eyes, Roshland and Barber were breathing even and regular. I always wished I could knock off that easy, but I needed to unwind a bit. Didn’t take me long, as it turned out. Last thing I saw was Thurman creeping about, setting up perimeter.
I was dreaming about an old Chevy I used to own when I felt someone shaking me. I opened my eyes and saw the dim figure of Barber hunched over me.
“Time?” I said.
“Thurman’s gone,” he said. “Get your gear together.”
I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and shouldered my ruck and rifle. The night had gone dead quiet while I slept. A gentle breeze skirted the trees, but it didn’t do shit towards stopping the sweat that ran down my brow. I popped a salt tab and took a pull off my canteen.
“What time is it?” I asked Barber.
“Just after three,” he whispered.
After three? Christ, we’d been asleep for hours. We crashed out just after 2300 hours, eleven ‘o clock. Thurman should’ve roused us at one.
“What happened?” I heard Roshland say.
Barber didn’t reply. He scanned the darkness with his Starlight scope.
“VC?”
�
��No.” Pause. “I don’t think so.”
I kept watching him. His fuzzy, black outline told me nothing. But, then, I didn’t have to be told: If it had been Cong, they would have greased us all. There’s no easier kill than a sleeping man.
I looked through the thick jungle canopy overhead. The starry sky looked down between the branches, noncommittal. Whatever it had seen, it wasn’t for us to know.
We spent the next thirty minutes or so crawling through the foliage. There were no signs of Thurman...he was just gone. Almost like he had simply walked off or just disappeared into thin air. Or gotten himself zapped by Charlie. It didn't seem possible, though. Thurman was good, the best I’d ever seen in the jungle. I couldn’t imagine anyone expert enough to take him without a sound.
Besides, why take him and leave us?
Barber called us together. It was 0400 by then.
“We gotta get moving. Thurman will have to take care of his own ass,” he said.
Barber took point and we fell in behind him.
The further we pushed on, the worse the terrain became. The jungle grew dense with long twisting vines that coiled down like tentacles and snatched at my boonie hat and gear, snagging and tangling. It was a real pain in the ass moving through it. We had to crouch down most of the way. The ground became muddy and then turned into swamp as we passed through low-lying areas, the muck coming up to our hips sometimes. The sky was streaked with indigo blue. There were birds cawing overhead and ten-foot pythons hanging in the trees, testing the air with forked tongues. You could see them in the bluish, pre-dawn light and that was enough. Every time I got close to one, I gripped the handle of my K-Bar, ready to slash at it if it made a move towards me.
But none did.
They just hung lazily by their tails, paying us no attention as if they saw crazy, mud-encrusted humans every day. And I guess they probably did.
I never liked snakes too much, but I’d gotten used to them like everything else in that goddamn country. For some reason, harmless as they were, they were getting to me that day.
Everything was.
But it was only the beginning.
Just after first light we regrouped at the perimeter of another little village. It wasn’t the one we were looking for. There was no mention of it on the maps. We sat out there in bush, reconning it, while Barber made up his mind about whether we should bypass it or not. In general, where you’re on a specific mission—that vil we had to hit, for example—you’ll go out of your way to avoid contact with not only the enemy, but the civilian population as well. Unless you find something so sweet and easy you can’t pass it up, you know, like that other little hamlet with the gooks by the fire. They were begging for it, so we gave it to them.
“It looks deserted,” Barber finally announced.
And it did.
Like a cemetery.
It was bigger than the last one, a good eight or ten huts crowded against the encroaching jungle. A place that size, there should’ve been some kids running around, an old lady or two at a cooking fire. But there was nothing. The silence was eerie. It was a heavy, almost physical thing. My military turn of my mind told me that what we had here was one sweet ambush, all primed and ready. Slopes were hiding in the huts, the woods, just waiting for our asses.
But I didn’t believe it for a minute.
I could smell death twisting in the air—warm, pungent, but not recent. There had been killing here or mass dying maybe yesterday, maybe the day before. I knew that much because I knew death: knew its smell, its taste. And this place was full of it like a drawer in a morgue.
We walked right into it. Not exactly SOP; usually you would skirt the perimeter, check the jungle for signs of unfriendlies. But, somehow, the three of us knew this place was empty.
And it was empty, all right.
No pigs or chickens. No people. Barber and I started checking the huts while Roshland patrolled back and forth with his sixty, looking for trouble. I prodded open the door of the first hut we came to and there was nothing living inside. My guts pulled up sickly at the smell. There was a little boy in there, maybe eight or ten. His decayed body had been nailed to a post. He’d been eviscerated, his head nearly cut off. His eyes were missing. His jaws were sprung open in a scream. He wore a beard of flies.
Outside, Barber said, “Pretty sadistic even for the Cong.”
“Yes,” I said, but could say no more.
The kid smelled bad, but he didn’t account for that smell of death we encountered upon entering camp. This was localized, small. The other was huge, omnipotent. It was draped over the village.
We checked two, three other huts and didn’t find a thing.
In the last hut we found another body. An older guy, maybe fifty, crouched in the corner. He had one arm up over his eyes like he was protecting his face or didn’t want to see something. In his other hand was a small homemade knife. He’d slit his wrist. He was stained dark with old blood. Ants and beetles were all over him.
It looked like he’d cut himself open before something got at him. As if death was better than what he was facing.
I’d seen some bad shit over there. Things that could warp a sane man. Shit so ugly, so horrible, so hideous it could’ve scared a maggot off a gut wagon. But by that point, nothing bothered me much. I’d long before shut down my humanity; it was the only way to survive, to hang onto what remained of your mind. So, yeah, I was steel, I was hard, I hadn’t had a decent human emotion in months and months.
But I was scared.
Scared like a kid in a spook house.
Everything was hot and dry and you could hear the brush crisping in the morning sunlight. Hot, yes, but my skin had gone cold and something inside me had curled up in a tight ball. It was more than the kid’s body, bad as that was. And it was more than the man’s body. It was just a raw, grim feeling I had. Just a deserted village? Sure, but there was something terribly wrong about it.
Roshland broke protocol and called out to us.
We ran over and found him in a little clearing between the hootches. He was a big, black bull of a man, but at that moment he was small and weak, a stick man smothering under all that killing hardware.
We saw what he saw.
Somebody had dug a pit, scooped a hollow out of the earth. They’d dumped the bodies of fifteen or twenty villagers into it and burned them. What we were looking at was like some blackened mass grave of jutting limbs and screaming faces, bodies cremated nearly down to skeletons. And the smell…Jesus. Roasted flesh, charred bone. And something else, kerosene maybe.
Roshland looked at me, at Barber. “What the fuck, man?” he said, his voice breaking. “What the fuck is this all about?”
“Must’ve soaked ‘em and lit ‘em up. But why?” I said.
We turned away, each separately filing this away for future nightmares. The village was the sight of an atrocity we could only guess at. I was thinking about what that old lady said, about us going into the land of the dead and not coming back. She knew what we’d find. Maybe those VC with her had been the ones who’d done this, probably yesterday. But, for some reason, I didn’t think they had anything to do with the kid or the man. That was something else. The VC were more like….what? Damage control? Burning those bodies like plague victims, so some pestilence wouldn’t spread.
But that was crazy, right?
I started thinking about our target, the other village, wondering why the brass insisted we hit it in broad daylight. They’d even told Barber that under no circumstances were we to make contact at night. What the fuck was going on here?
“Let’s go,” Barber said, regaining his composure. “Whatever happened here, it’s not for us.”
Back into the jungle. Swamp. Hills. Insects. Brush so thick you had to crawl through it on your belly in spots. After a few hours of that, we spotted the river. The village couldn’t be too far. My back was aching from being stooped over for so long. It hadn’t been that sore since my first week of BUDS, frogman schoo
l.
We paused on the riverbank and looked around. Everything was quiet and serene. For a second there, I almost forgot where I was and what I was doing. All I could hear was the rushing of the water. It could have been a river back home in Michigan, save for the oppressive heat.
And it got hotter, too.
We crossed the river quickly, the cool water feeling great as it sluiced around my waist. I wished we could’ve submerged ourselves in there for awhile and cooled off. But that was out of the question: We had to cross it as fast as possible, just as we had been taught.
On the other side, we slipped into the jungle and paused while Barber checked out his funny papers.
“I wonder where Thurman is right now,” Roshland said. “Probably dead...all cut to shit by Charlie. We found a Lurp like that once, Davis, when you was still with Two. We were across the border on a recon patrol. Poor bastard was cut to pieces. Got himself caught in a booby trapthen they got him.”
“Laos?” I asked.
“Yeah, damn straight. Pathet Lao mothers can be wicked.”
“Quit it all ready,” I snapped. “Slopes didn’t get Thurman. He could’ve wasted a platoon of them with his fucking knife.”
“What then?”
“I don’t know. A jungle cat or something.”
“Sheeeit.”
“Well, it wasn’t Charlie.”
In about five minutes, we continued on.
“How far?” I asked Barber.
“Be there soon.”
I’d heard that one before.
The terrain wasn’t bad at any rate. It was high ground, dry, without an overabundance of brush. Just enough so there was plenty of cover, but you didn’t have to hack your way through.
It was weird, though.
The closer we got, the deader things became: no animal sounds, no insects...nothing. I didn’t like it. Something was telling me we were in the shit and it was getting deeper every minute.