We descend on a trail beneath black cliffs. We stumble down into riverbottom land that reveals new shades of green so fast that we are swallowed up by a rainbow of greens.
Our point man is a girl about fifteen years old. Lifting a rifle almost as big as she is over her head, she calls a halt. Commander Be Dan moves up the line of march to investigate. The radioman in the Keds sticks close to the Commander, so I go too.
The girl on point is excited. She aims a finger at the deck. Commander Be Dan squats down, examines the trail, then nods his approval. It is a good omen for our mission: tiger tracks on the trail.
We hump through a defoliated rain forest that is too dead even to smell dead. Ancient trees stand stark and black and stripped of leaves. The black trees are hung with limp wind-blown flowers that are parachutes from illumination shells.
Later we see trees that are as white as bone, sun-bleached skeletons of the great hardwoods, white trees with black leaves. The trunks and branches of the trees are warped by unnatural cancerous growths that look like human faces and human hands and human fingers growing out of decaying wood.
In the poisonous folds of the defoliated rain forest we see monsters, freaks, and mutants. We see a water rat with two heads and as big as a dog, birds with extra feet coming out of their backs, Siamese-twin bullfrogs joined at the stomach. The bullfrogs scurry for cover with clumsy and desperately frantic movements horrible to see, finally sinking into oozing slime inhabited by shadows that are alive and best never seen by human eyes.
Total light-and-noise discipline forbids our shooting the deformed animals out of kindness.
Night comes but we do not make camp. We march on. The order is repeated down the trail from fighter to fighter by hand signal: une nuit blanche--"White Night." We will march all night without stopping and without sleep.
The night march turns into a real ball-breakiiig hump. Every step of the way the jungle grabs at us as though alive. The rocks attack us. My feet are numb and I got rock-bites all over my legs. I'm bleeding. We're all bleeding. But I'm the only one who's straining to keep up. It's easy to see that the Viet Cong cut their baby teeth on ball-breaking humps.
I lean into it and take it one step at a time. One step at a time. I can almost hear Gunnery Sergeant Gerheim, my Senior Drill Instructor back on Parris island. "Private Joker," he says, rapping me on my chrome dome helmet liner with a bamboo swagger stick, after I have had the bad manners to faint on a
three-mile run with full gear and a backpack full of rocks in one-hundred-degree heat. "You little maggot! You will put forth effort! You better show me something, sweet pea. You better start shitting me some Tiffany cuff links."
We hump. The sun comes up. We hump some more. The radioman looks back at me constantly to see how I'm keeping up. And Commander Be Dan, who is on the move constantly up and down the line of march, checks me out each time he goes by, like a doctor looking over a patient in a terminal ward. But be doesn't say anvthing.
I'm insulted by all this attention. What am I, a candy ass? Some kind of New Guy? I want to say, "Hey--I'm a United States Marine, people. I will hump until my leg falls off. No sweat.
Marines know how to hop."
Every time we pass anything that looks like it might possibly be food, the radioman eats it.
Bananas, coconuts, berries, green leafy plants, orchids, even honey ants, down they go. The Viet Cong radioman is defoliating the jungle by eating it.
We hump.
We have to go far away from Hoa Binh to fight, because the Woodctitter has a deal with General Fang Cat, the province chief, not to attack anything within the General's Tactical Area of Responsibility. In exchange, the General reports that there is no Viet Cong activity in our area and that Hoa Binh is a leper colony.
We're going to team up with a battalion-size force and attack an enemy fortress twenty miles south of Khe Sanh.
We see two old men cutting down a banana tree. They wave.
In a bombed-out clearing the order comes back to pick up the pace. "Tien! Tien!"
We enter a smelly black-water swamp. The water is neck-deep and teeming with slithering invisible nameless things and leeches like big black garden slugs. We wade through slime, rifles held high, our sandaled feet straining for traction on an underwater bridge that can't be seen from the air. Some of the fighters giggle from the tickling on our legs as fish nibble at our scabs.
Then we're pushing through blue-green elephant grass ten feet high and as sharp as swords.
The deck is a damp, spongy layer of decaving leaves. Creepers and vines grab at our legs and feet as though alive.
We move through the black jungle as silent as ghosts. We don't fight against the jungle the way foreigners do. The jungle is alive and the jungle never dies. The jungle is the one thing you can't beat, and the fighters know it.
To the Americans the jungle is a real and permanent enemy. The jungle is undisciplined. The jungle does not respond to subpoenas. The jungle definitely is not going along with the program.
The jungle grows and eats and fucks and dies and just goes on and on and on, getting bigger and meaner. The jungle is always hungry, always ready to meet new people and make new friends. The jungle is cruel, but fair.
To a place older than the dinosaurs come puny Americans wagging their fingers like sternlibrarians telling library patrons to keep quiet. Naughty jungle, say the white foreigners, and the jungle welcomes them in with big yellow flowers and funny brown monkeys.
When night comes, the jungle sucks their brains out, boils them alive, pulls out their hearts and eats them whole, then swallows up their pale pink bodies, because the jungle eats raw meat and shits dry bones and the bones fall apart and flesh scraps rot and the jungle stands like a black wall while the jungle eats more raw meat and shits out more dry bones and a billion insects are chewing and chewing until the jungle sounds like an eating machine bigger than the world and the green cannibal engine's moving parts are all lubricated by warm red blood and the jungle just goes on and on forever and it never stops feeding.
White Night. When we feel safe we light little perfume bottles full of kerosene. The perfume bottles have been fitted with wicks held in place by shell casings. As we move down the trail the golden dots are like a string of fireflies flying in formation.
A shadow on the trail! The order comes back: danger, halt.
"Dong Lai," says Commander Be Dan on his way up to the point to investigate.
After a infinite or so Commander Be Dan gives us permission to bunch up. We move toward the bad smell.
In the faint flickering light of our tiny lamps we can see the great head of a tiger, still fierce, still beautiful, with teeth as sharp as the point of a bayonet and thicker than a man's thumb.
The eyes are gone. The orange-and-black-striped fur is charred and burned. The huge claws are dug deep into the earth. The powerful jaws are locked in a final tree-shaking roar of defiance.
We all crowd in for a quick look.
Even in death there is something royal about all eight-hundred-pound Bengal tiger. We can all see the tiger, awesome in his final moments, roaring, pouncing, clawing at the fire that falls from the sky, strong and beautiful in a burning jungle. We see the tiger, wet with fire, fighting fearlessly against a power it could never understand. Then the great beast shrivels to ash under a splash of napalm while jellied gasoline drips from tree branches like hot jam.
As we stare in respectful silence at the napalmed tiger, Commander Be Dan reaches down, grabs one of the big smooth ivory fangs, gives it a hard tug, says, "A good omen," and then moves out.
Without a word or a sound, each of the Chien Si touches the tiger's tooth in turn, then moves on.
I touch it too.
At dawn we take a break on the strangely silent site of the abandoned Marine Corps Combat Base at Khe Sanh.
The scary, ghost-guarded mound of red dirt has already been plowed and the Word is that it's to become a coffee-bean plantation.
The section will rest until noon before moving on, because we know that when the day is hottest, Americans in the field break for chow.
Not much is left of my old hometown. What the Marines left behind as junk, refugees have hauled off as building materials or to sell on the black market: scraps of lumber, rusty truck parts, torn plastic sheeting, brass shell casings, scraps of rotting canvas, steel planking from the airfield. Our trash is their treasure, and the army ants have stripped the hill clean.
I sit down on some crumbling sandbags where I estimate Black John Wayne's bunker used to be. It's hard to be sure. In the year since the Woodcutter captured me, the jungle has come back like thick hair sprouting all over a bald man's head. I should feel at home here, but I don't.
Commander Be Dan squats near me, not for a neighborly visit but to keep an eye on me.
Being back on my old stomping grounds might revive my bad road habits as a running dog lackey of the imperialists.
The Viet Cong soldiers laugh, eat chow, and tell tall tales, sea stories, about their many heroic exploits against the Black Rifles who held Khe Sanh. When the lies of the New Guys get too big, the older Chien Si tell the New Guys about fighting the French as Viet Minh, the Viet Cong "Old Corps," back when war was really tough.
Commander Be Dan's radioman sits next to me. I've already assumed that Commander Be Dan has ordered the radioman to stand guai-d over me and waste me if I so much as blink an eye.
The radioiman puts out his hand, touches his chest with his other hand. "Ha Ngoc," he says shyly, politely avoiding looking me directly in the eye. Then: "I have never met an American bandit.
I shake Ha Ngoc's hand. "Bao Chi," I say.
"Bao Chi Chien Si My?"
I nod. "Yes," I say in Vietnamese, "Bao Chi, the American who fights for the Front."
Ha Ngoc smiles. "American," he says, pointing at his tennis shoes. "American." Then he says, "You know, Bao Chi, America must be supernaturally rich because Americans shoot very many bullets."
Ha Ngoc digs into his shirt pocket and pulls out a pack of Ruby Queen cigarettes. "Truoc La?
" he says, offering me the pack. I shake mv head as he lights up the bitter black tobacco.
"Lien So," he says, showing me his wristwatch. Russian. I nod. Ha Ngoc pulls the wooden plug from a length of bamboo shoot he has fashioned into a canteen. He offers me a drink of green tea. Only after I decline does he take a drink himself.
Then Ha Ngoe fumbles around inside his muddy knapsack and produces two mangoes. He offers me one.
"Cam on." I say, "Thank you." I accept a mango. I take a bite.
Ha Ngoc smiles. He pulls a black ballpoint pen from his knapsack and shows it to me like it's a family heirloom. On the pen is Chinese writing in gold characters. I look the pen over like it's a valuable antique and nod my approval. "Good," I say, but Ha Ngoc just looks at me without expression, not satisfied with my reaction. So I say, "This is the finest specimen of a Chinese ballpoint pen I have ever seen in my entire life." And Ha Ngoc beams, a rich man whose wealth has been confirmed by the highest source.
We eat tangy mangoes. "I don't hate Americans," Ha Ngoc says. "I only kill them because they have killed so many of my friends."
I nod. I say, "There it is."
Commander Be Dan is having a cigarette too. Using a page torn from his pocket diary, he's rolling his own, like my grandfather used to do.
Ha Ngoc produces a greasy paperback book from his knapsack. The title of the book is How to Win Friends and Influence People, in French. There's a photograph of Dale Carnegie on the back. The book has lost its spine and the loose pages are bound together by a black rubber band.
Ha Ngoc shuffles through the book to a dog-eared page, then suddenly decides to tell Commander Be Dan a Viet Cong joke. I try to follow, but my Vietnamese is not up to the test. Something about how many Comrade Lizards have been killed by the latest American shellings, as the enemy cannons make war on the trees. It seems that Comrade Lizard is quite a hero of the revolution because it costs the Americans so many valuable bombs to kill him.
So even with their supernatural supply of big shells the Americans will never win, because in Viet Nam even the lizards fight back with a strong spirit.
Ha Ngoc laughs at his own joke, but Commander Be Dan ignores Ha Ngoc. The Commander is examining his right leg, burning off leeches with his cigarette and then massaging the triangular bites.
Ha Ngoc, thinking perhaps that he has overlooked an important chapter, goes back to reading his book.
At noon, when the hot sun is vibrating in the sky like a brass gong, we saddle up. Ha Ngoc struggles into his radio harness. I give him a hand lifting the heavy radio and help him adjust the straps.
Down the hill the Chien Si are laughing uproariously at Battle Mouth's latest antics. Battle Mouth, with his pack on his back, is sitting on the ground, struggling to get up, but without success. Someone has tied Battle Mouth's pack straps to a root.
"Tien," says Commander Be Dan, and we move out.
Ha Ngoc teases me. "Now, Bao Chi, don't you be an Elephant." An Elephant is an Army grunt in the field, so named for the way in which American columns glide through the jungle undetected. I laugh.
After a few hours the horizon of palm fronds opens up and we emerge from the jungle onto a paved road. We file past an old French kilometer marker, a stubby white tooth of cement with fading red numbers.
A mile down the road we come to a pattern of bomb craters. Only a few of the bombs have hit the road, which is one of the great network of paved roads, cart trails, and jungle paths known to the Viet Cong as the Strategic Trail and to the Americans as the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The craters in the road have already been repaired by the road menders, because this is hard-core VC country.
We pass a deserted banana plantation. The moaning wind that lives inside the big house sounds like the voices of the vines have climbed inch by inch up all the walls. The windows are black holes. The porch that goes all the way around the house has only a few planks remaining that have not been broken. In one of the empty windows sits a baby monkey. The baby monkey watches us with intense interest, his eyes too big for his head, his face almost human.
On the outskirts of a large village we see a work crew of hundreds of men, women, and children, a Dan Cong Worker Brigade.
We see a huge blue-gray Molotova Russian army truck being refueled with gasoline which has been stored in old wine bottles.
The Dan Cong are repairing the road. The men drag boulders down out of the hills with ropes, levers, and brute force. The women pound on the boulders with sledgehammers, splitting each stone into chunks. Children with hammers pound the chunks of stone into smaller pieces. This back-breaking process is known as how to make gravel in Viet Nam.
Building the Strategic Trail and keeping it open in spite of the greatest aerial bombardment in history is an incredible ball-busting monster victory against all odds that is exactly the kind of miracle American pioneers once performed in another time, another place, when there was a wild frontier and only the grunts had the nerve to go there, before the Wild West became tame enough to become infested by pogues, pencil-pushers, and schoolmarms, who came out on the railroad, and stayed, and spread, like the plague.
Commander Be Dan holds up his hand.
Halt. The Commander barks out an order and the Chien Si form into a column of twos. I fall in beside Ha Ngoc.
"Tien!" says the Commander, and we march into the village in formation, standing tall, lean and mean, like Parris Island recruits marching down the grinder on graduation day.
"Compatriots!" says Commander Be Dan to the workers, proudly. "We are the liberation forces!"
The cheers of the workers along the road bring out Self-Defense Militia sentries, followed by the village elders.
The section halts at the Commander's order. We snap to attention, ignoring the heat, insects, and the hot asphalt under our rubber sandals.
Commander Be Dan is greeted by the vil
lage elders and a Viet Cong officer under the big bamboo star over the village gate. The elders are a fireteam of dignified and ancient men, bowing and smiling. The Viet Cong officer is about eightenn years old.
Commander Be Dan bows to each man, salutes the local Chien Si commander, then shakes hands all around.
There is some polite conversation, ending with the local commander's proud declaration to Commander Be Dan, "Comrade Major, we have forced the Americans to eat soup with a fork!
" This must be the punch line to a joke, because everyone laughs.
Executing a perfect about-face, Commander Be Dan gives us the order to fall out.
The sun is low in the sky, so everyone relaxes. Twilight is safe time because the daylight air raids are over and it's still too early for the night raids. We are escorted through the village to a huge bonfire, where the women of hte village have prepared a feast. Village trail watchers must have reported that we were on the way well in advance of our arrival.
The familiar murmur of activity and the smells of food, farm animals, and cook fires remind us of our village and we feel a little homesick. But not for long, because we are made welcome.
As usual, I am the star. In show business at last! Everyone is curious about the Chien Si My, the American Front fighter. Some people speak to me in French. Others ask me if I am Lien So--"Russian." But most of the villagers are eager to try out an English words they know on me, either to show off or to test the accuracy of their pronunciations.
I am becoming more famous than Jesse James. Little kids follow me around in mobs. They are happy and healthy kids, not at all like the sad and dirty little savages in the occupied zones. Instead of yelling, "You give me one cigarette! You give me one cigarette!" they ask politely, "May o day?"--"Where do you live?"
The Phantom Blooper Page 11