"No, sir."
Major Richard W. Puller pulled on his boonie cap and slithered out the dugout door to the trench and looked around at his shaky empire. He was a lean, desperate man with a thatch of gray hair, and had been in Fifth Special Forces since 1958, including a tour in the British Special Air Service Regiment, even seeing some counterinsurgency action in Malaysia. He'd been to all the right schools: Airborne, Ranger, Jungle, National War College, Command and Staff at Leavenworth. He could fly a chopper, speak Vietnamese, repair a radio or fire an RPG.
This was not his first siege. He had been encircled at Pleiku in 1965 for more than a month, under serious bombardment.
He'd been hit then: a Chinese .51-caliber machine gun bullet, which would kill most men.
He hated the war, but he loved it. He feared it would kill him but a part of him wanted it never to end. He loved his wife but had had a string of Chinese and Eurasian mistresses. He loved the Army but hated it also, the former for its guts and professionalism, the latter for its stubbornness, its insistence always of fighting the next war by the tactics of the old.
But what he hated most of all was that he had fucked up. He had realty fucked up, gambling the lives of his team and all his in digs that the NVA couldn't get him during his window of vulnerability. He was responsible for it all, it was happening to them because it was happening to him.
And nobody could save his ass.
The main gate was down, and where his ammo dump had been, smoke still boiled from the ground, rising to mingle with the low clouds that hung everywhere. The S-shops were a shambles as were most of the squad , but a unit of VC sappers that had gotten into the compound the night before and actually taken over the Third Squad staging area and what remained of the commo shack had been finally dislodged in hand-to-hand with the dawn. No structure remained, most of the wire still stood, but for now, that was the mortar objective: to pound avenues into his defenses so that when Huu Co and his battalion got here, they wouldn't get hung up in the shit as they came over him, backed by their own mortars and a complement of crew-served weapons.
Puller looked up and caught rain in the eye and felt the chill of the mist. Night was falling. Would they come at night? They'd move at night, but probably not attack.
At least not in force: they'd send probers, draw fire, try and get Arizona to use up its low supplies of ammo on bad or unseen targets, but mainly work to keep the defenders rattled and sleepless for the No.
3 Battalion.
Would the weather break? On the Armed Forces Net, the meteorological forecasts were not promising, but Puller knew they'd try like hell, and if they could get birds up, they'd get 'em up. But maybe the pilots were reluctant: who'd want to fly into heavy small-arms fire to drop napalm on a few more dinks when the war was so close to being over? Who'd want to die now, at the very tag end of the thing, after all the years and all the futility? He didn't know the answer to that one himself.
Puller looked down his front to the valley. He could see nothing in the gloom, of course, but it was a highway, and Huu Co would be barreling down it at the double time like a fat cat in a limousine, knowing they ran no danger from the Phantoms or the gunships.
"Major Puller, Major Puller! You ought to come see this, quick."
It was Sergeant Bias, one of his master sergeants who worked with the Montagnards, a tough little Guamese who had seen a lot of action on too many tours and also didn't deserve to get caught in a shit hole like FOB Arizona so late in a lost and fruitless war.
Bias led him through the trenches to the west side of the perimeter, crouching now and then when a new mortar shell came whistling their way, but at last they reached the parapet, and a Montagnard with a carbine handed Puller a pair of binocs.
Puller used them to peer over the sandbags, and saw in the treeline three hundred meters out something that was at first indecipherable but at last assembled itself into a pattern and then some details.
It was a stick and on the stick was Jim Matthews's head.
Three quicksand one slow. Three strongs. That was the rhythm, the slow steady pace of accomplishment over the long years and the long bleeding. Now, he was under pressure, great pressure, for one last quick. Far off, the diplomats were talking. There would be a peace soon, and the more they controlled when that peace was signed, the more they would retain afterward and the more they could build upon for a future, he knew, he would never see, but his children might.
He knew he would not survive. His children would be his monument. He would leave a new world behind for them, having done his part in destroying the terrible old one. That was enough for any father, and his life did not particularly matter, he had given himself up to struggle, to tomorrow, to the ten rules of the soldier's life:
1) Defend the Fatherland, fight and sacrifice myself for the People's Revolution.
2) Obey the orders received and carry out the mission of the soldier.
3) Strive to improve the virtues of a Revolutionary Soldier.
4) Study to improve myself and build up a powerful Revolutionary Army.
5) Carry out other missions of the Army.
6) Help consolidate internal unity.
8) Preserve and save public properties.
9) Work for the solidarity between the Army and the People.
10) Maintain the Quality and Honor of the Revolutionary Soldier.
All that remained was this last job, the American Green Beret camp at Kham Due, at the end of the An Loc Valley, which must be eliminated in order to take more land before documents were signed.
Three quicks, one slow, three strongs.
Slow plan.
Quick advance.
Strong fight.
Strong assault.
Strong pursuit.
Quick clearance.
Quick withdrawal.
He had developed the plan over three years of operations, gaining constant intelligence on the E5 sector of administrative division MR-7, knowing that as the war wound down, it would do, it was explained to him by higher headquarters and as he himself understood, to make an example of one of the camps.
Quick advance. That is where No. 3 Battalion was now. The men were seasoned, toughened campaigners with long battle experience. They moved quickly from their sanctuary in Laos and were now less than twenty kilometers from the target, which was already under assault by local Viet Cong infrastructure under specific orders from Hanoi, and from whom he got combat intelligence over the radio.
The column moved in the classical structure of an army on the quick, derived not entirely from the great Giap, father of the Army, but also from the French genius Napoleon, who understood, when no one in history since Alexander had, the importance of quickness, and who slashed across the world on that principle.
So Huu Co, senior colonel, had elements of his best troops, his sappers, running security on each flank a mile out in two twelve-men units per flank, he had his second best people, also sappers, at the point in a diamond formation, all armed with automatic weapons and RPGs, setting the pace, ready to deliver grenades and withering fire at any obstacles. His other companies moved in column by fours at the double time, rotating the weight of the heavy mortars among them by platoons so that no unit was more fatigued than any other.
Fortunately, it was cool, the rain was no impediment.
The men, superbly trained, shorn of slackers and wreckers by long years of struggle, were the most dedicated. Moreover, they were excited because the weather was holding, low clouds, fog everywhere, their most feared and hated enemy, the American airplanes, nowhere in sight. That was the key: to move freely, almost as if in the last century, without the fear of Phantoms or Skyhawks screaming in and dropping their napalm and white phosphorous.
That is why he hated the Americans so much: they fought with flame. It meant nothing to them to burn his people like grasshoppers plaguing a harvest. Yet those who stood against the flame, as he had, became hardened beyond imagination. He who has stood against flame fears nothi
ng.
Huu Co, senior colonel, was forty-four years old.
Sometimes, memories of the old life floated up before him: Paris in the late forties and early fifties, when his decadent father had turned him over to the French, under whose auspices he studied hard. But Paris: the pleasures of Paris. Who could forget such a place? That was a revolutionary city and it was there he first smoked Gauloise, read Marx and Engels and Proust and Sartre and Nietzsche and Apollinaire, it was there his commitment to the old world, the world of his father, began to crumble, at first in small, almost meaningless ways. Did the French have to be so nasty to their yellow guests? Did they have to take such pleasure in their whiteness, while preaching the oneness of man under the eye of God? Did they have to take such pleasure in rescuing bright Indochinese like himself from their yellow ness
But even still, he wondered now, Would I have followed this course had I known how hard it would be?
Huu Co, senior colonel, fought in seven battles and three campaigns with the French in the first Indochinese War. He loved the French soldiers: tough, hardened men, brave beyond words, who truly believed theirs was the right to master the land they had colonized. They could understand no other way, he lay in the mud with them at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, eighteen years ago, praying for the Americans to come and rescue them with their mighty air power
Huu Co, senior colonel, learned the Catholic God from them, moved south and fought for the Diem brothers in building a bulwark against the godless Uncle Ho. In 1955, he led an infantry platoon against the Binh Xuyen in violent street fighting, then later against the Hoa Hao cult in the Mekong and was present at the execution of the cult's leader, Ba Cut, in 1956. Much of the killing he saw was of Indochinese by Indochinese. It sickened him.
Saigon was no Paris either, though it had cafes and nightclubs and beautiful women, it was a city of corruption, of prostitutes, gambling, crime, narcotics, which the Diems not only encouraged but also from which they profited. How could he love the Diems if they loved silk, perfume, their own power and pomp more than the people they ruled, whom they yet felt themselves removed from and immensely superior to? His father counseled him to forgive them their arrogances and to use them as a vessel for carrying God's will. But his father never saw the politics, the corruption, the terrible way they abused the peasants, the remove from the people.
Huu Co went north in 1961, when the Diems' corruption had begun to resemble that of a city destroyed in the Bible. He renounced his Catholicism, his inherited wealth and his father, whom he would never see again. He knew the South would sink into treachery and profiteering and would bring flame and retribution upon itself, as it had.
He was a humble private in the People's Revolutionary Army, he who had sat in cafes and once met the great Sartre and de Beauvoir at the Deux Maggots in the Fourteenth Arrondisement, he, a major in the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam, became a lowly private carrying an SKS and wanting to do nothing but his duty to the fatherland and the future and seek purification, but his gifts always betrayed him.
He was always the best soldier among them, and he rose effortlessly, though now without ambition: he was a student officer after two years, and his passage in the west and in the south, after six months' strenuous reeducation in a camp outside Hanoi, where he withstood the most barbarous pressures and purified himself for the revolutionary struggle, only toughened him for the decade of war that was to follow.
Now he was tired. He had been at war since 1950, twenty-two years of war. It was almost over. Really, all that remained was the camp called Arizona, and between himself and it, there stood nothing, no unit, no aircraft, no artillery. He would crush it. Nothing could stop him.
CHAPTER twelve.
In the dream, he had caught a touchdown pass, a slant outside, and as he broke downfield all the blockers hit their men perfectly, and the defense went down like tenpins opening lanes toward the end zone. It was geometry, somehow, or at least a physical problem reduced to the abstract, very pleasing, and far from the reality which was that you ran on instinct and hardly ever remembered things exactly. He got into the end zone: people cheered, it was so very warm, Julie hugged him. His dad was there, weeping for joy. Trig was there also, among them, jumping up and down, and so was Sergeant Bob Lee Swagger, the sniper god, a figure of preposterous joy as he pirouetted crazily, laden with firearms and dappled in a war face of camouflage.
It was such a good dream. It was the best, the happiest, the finest dream he ever had, and it went away, as such things do, to the steady pressure of someone rocking his arm and the sudden baffling awareness that he was not there but here.
"Huh?"
"Time to work. Pork."
Donny blinked and smelled the wet odor of jungle, the wet odor of rain, and felt the wet cold. Swagger had already turned from him and was off making his arcane preps.
The dawn came as a blur of light, just the faintest smear of incandescence to the east, over the mountains on the other side of the valley.
In its way, it was quite beautiful in that low 0500 light: vapors of fog clung to the wet earth everywhere, in valleys and hollows and gulches, nestled thickly in the trees, and though it wasn't at present raining, surely it would rain soon, for the low clouds still rolled over, heavy with moisture.
Still, so quiet, so calm, so pristine.
"Come on," whispered Swagger into Donny Fenn's ear.
Donny shook sleep from his eyes and put his dreams of Julie aside and reconfirmed his existence. He was on a hillside in heavy foliage above the An Loc Valley, near Kham Due and Laos. It would be another wet day, and the weather had not broken, so there would be no air.
"We got to get lower," said Bob.
"I can't hit nothing from up here."
The sergeant now wore the M3 grease gun on his back and in his hands carried the M40 sniper rifle, a dull pewter Remington with a thick bull barrel and a dull brown wooden stock. It carried a Redfield scope, and a Marine Corps armorer had labored over it, free floating the barrel, truing up the bolt to the chamber, glass-bedding the action to the wood, torquing the screws tight, but it was still far from an elegant weapon, built merely for effectiveness, never beauty.
Bob had smeared the jungle grease paint on his face, and under the crinkled brow of the boonie cap his visage looked primitive, he seemed a creature sprung from someone's worst dreams, some kind of atavistic war creature totally of the jungle, festooned with pistols and grenades, all smeared with the colors of nature, even his eyes gone to nothing.
"Here. Paint up and we'll get going," he said, holding the stick of camo paint out to Donny, who quickly blurred his own features. Donny gathered his M14 and the impossibly heavy PRC-77, his real enemy in all this, and began to ease his way down the slope with Bob.
It seemed they were lowering themselves into the clouds, like angels returning to earth. The fog would not break, it clung to the floor of the valley as if it had been enameled there. No sun would burn it away, not today at any rate.
Now and then some jungle bird would call, now. and then some animal shudder would ripple from the undergrowth, but there was no sense of human presence, nothing metallic or regular to the eye. Donny scanned left, Bob scanned right. They moved ever so slowly, frustratingly slowly, picking their way down, until at last they were nearly to the valley floor and a field of waist-high grass, in the center of which a worn track had been beaten, by men or buffaloes or elephants or whatever.
From far away, at last, came some kind of unnatural noise. Donny couldn't identify it and then he could, it was the noise of men, somehow--nothing distinct, not breaking talk discipline--somehow become a herd, a living, breathing thing. It was No. 3 Battalion, still a few hundred yards away, gearing up for the last six or so klicks of quick march to the staging area for their assault.
Bob halted him with a hand.
"Okay," he said.
"Here's how we do it. You got the map coords?"
Donny did, he had memorized them.
&nbs
p; "Grid square Whiskey-Delta 51201802."
"Good. If the sky clears and the birds come, you'll have line of sight to-them and you can go to the Air Force freak and you talk 'em in. They won't have good visuals.
You talk 'em down into the valley and have 'em plaster the floor."
"What about you? You'll be--" "Don't you worry about that. No squid Phantom jock is flaming me. I can take care of myself. Now listen up: that is your goddamn job. You talk to 'em on the horn.
You're the eyes. Don't you be coming down after me, you got that? You may hear fighting, you may hear small arms, don't you fret a bit. That's my job. Yours is to stay up here and talk to the air. After the air moves out, you should be able to git to that snake-eater camp. You call them, tell them you're coming in, pop smoke, and come in from the smoke so they know it's you and not some NVA hero. Got that? You should be okay if I can hold these bad boys up for a bit."
"What about security? I'm security. My job is to help you, to cover your ass. What the hell good am I going to do parked up here?"
"Listen, Pork, I'll fire my first three shots when I get visuals. Then I'll move back to the right, maybe two hundred yards, because they'll bring heavy shit down. I'll try and do two, three, maybe four more from there. Here's how the game works. I pull down on a couple, then I move back. But guess what? After the third string, I ain't moving back, I'm moving forward. That's why I want you right here. I'll never be too far from this area. I don't want 'em to know how many guys I am, and they'll flank me, and I don't want 'em coming around on me. I guarantee you, they will have good, tough, fast-moving flank people out, so you go to ground about twenty minutes after I first hit them. They may be right close to you, that's all right.
You dig in and sink into the ground, and you'll be all right.
Just watch out for the patrols I know they'll call in. Them boys we saw last night. They'll be back, that I guarantee."
"You will get killed. You will get killed, I'm telling you, you cannot--" "I'm giving you a straight order, you follow it. Don't give me no little-boy shit. I'm telling you what you have to do, and by God, you will do it, and that's all there is to it, or I will be one pissed-off motherfucker, Lance Corporal Fenn."
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