by Scott Ely
Every day the patrols went out, mostly into the Cunt, on search-and-destroy missions. Sometimes they found caches of rice or weapons, but they seldom brought back a body.
Before Jackson had become Hale’s RTO he had been assigned to Captain Wilson, Hale’s intelligence officer who was dead now, killed by a mine. He helped Wilson search the bodies of any enemy who were brought in. There were never many, at the most one or two a week. Jackson got used to the smell of feces and blood and burned flesh, but he never liked going through their pockets. Wilson was after letters, copies of orders.
Wilson usually sat beneath a parachute someone had rigged up to make some shade and waited for Jackson to bring him the documents. The captain always called them documents. Jackson remembered one man in particular. The patrols had not killed anyone for ten days, and all Hale could talk about was body count. Finally the chopper brought in the body of a young NVA soldier and dropped it on the pad.
Jackson stretched the man out, straightening one shattered leg. Then he went through the soldier’s front pockets. When Jackson rolled the soldier over to go through his back pockets, it was like the man was a rubber sack filled with water, heavy and hard to handle. Then Jackson searched the back pockets and found a picture wrapped in clear plastic of a small child. She stood on a stretch of green grass with trees behind her. Probably a park. The child held a white flower. A lotus?
“Found some documents?” Wilson asked.
He took Wilson the picture. Wilson looked at it a moment and put it in his pocket. Jackson wanted to smash him in the face.
“Strip him. Might have some more documents concealed on him,” Wilson said.
Jackson returned to the body and finished the job but found nothing.
As he thought of the picture, Jackson wondered if Light took dead men’s pictures out and looked at them.
Jackson always carried the radio because the ability to talk with the TOC anytime he wished made him feel secure. Radio men were often shot first in ambushes, but since Hale seemed determined to avoid going out in the field, Jackson felt safe for the present. Hale spent most of his time in the TOC working on his maps. And if the major did go out, Jackson believed he could count on Light’s promise of protection.
Sometimes he set the radio on a frequency assigned to the platoons and listened to the lieutenants talk to Hale in the TOC. During firefights he heard the fear in the voices of the young officers and their RTOs.
On clear nights he put on the whip and climbed up in the tower to talk with operators as far away as Qui Nhon on the coast. He wondered if with the addition of a longer whip he might be able to talk with Saigon or even Australia. There were even nights when he considered the possibility of reaching home. A chain of ham operators around the world might be able to patch him through to his parents or his girl who had taken a job in Birmingham.
“Loretta, Loretta,” he found himself saying one night into the handset as he thought about the girl, standing by himself in the darkness.
Static came out of the handset.
It was crazy, he thought to himself.
But he said it again, “Loretta, Loretta.”
Jackson promised himself he would never try it again. He did not want to come home from the war crazy.
At the firebase there was constant speculation about what the engineers had been sent up to the Laotian border to do. Some thought it was to build a road connecting the firebase with Pleiku while others claimed they were certain that the engineers were going to build an airbase in the Cunt.
One morning Hale assembled the two companies, Alpha and Charlie, and all speculation ended. Jackson with the radio strapped to his back stood next to Hale who had an M-16 cleaning rod in his hand. A big piece of plywood was nailed to a couple of two-by-fours behind him. Whatever was on it was covered with a section of parachute.
“Men, our mission is to protect those engineers,” Hale began.
They stood beneath the hot sun and waited for Hale to get around to whatever he was going to talk about. And Hale stood before them looking down at the ground as if he was having difficulty deciding what he was going to say next. The men, sensing his nervousness, began to whisper among themselves.
“The engineers are here to build a fence,” Hale finally continued.
He nodded to two sergeants who pulled back the parachute to reveal a map.
“It’s going to start here,” he said, pointing to a spot on the big map which Jackson recognized as the Cunt.
He paused again, looking up at the high blue sky like he wished a voice would come out of it and finish his speech for him. Then his audience would have to believe. The major took a deep breath.
“We’re going to fence every valley so the NVA can’t infiltrate into Two Corps,” Hale said, talking fast, tracing with the pointer the path of the fence on the map. “That fence could change the whole course of the war. If the NVA can’t get into ’Nam there’d be no war. Then we’d just have to fight Charlie. We kicked his ass during Tet. We’ll do it again.”
Everyone was silent.
Then Raymond said, “That’s a fucking great idea, Major. Fence those bastards out!”
And Reynolds sang, “There must be some kind of way out of here/Said the joker to the thief.”
“Make it a big fence. Ten foot tall. Fucking little dinks’ll never climb it,” Raymond continued. “Me and my buddy Reynolds will be proud to help.”
Reynolds continued to play his M-16.
“They’re fucked up again on speed,” a sergeant said to Hale.
“Goddammit! How’re they getting drugs? Get ’em out of here,” Hale said.
Everyone laughed, and the sergeant led Reynolds & Raymond away.
“That goddamn fence is going up on schedule!” Hale shouted.
“Bullshit!” Leander shouted, the pith helmet pulled down low over his eyes.
Now a kind of collective growl came from the battalion, and Jackson, who was standing behind Hale, wondered if he was watching the beginnings of a mutiny.
Hale said, “I know what you men are thinking. You can frag me and my officers.”
One of the lieutenants flinched at the mention of the word frag.
“The brass at Two Corps wants this fence,” Hale continued. “It’s going up.”
“Yeah, it’ll go up. You’ll make colonel. We’ll all get fucking wasted!” Leander yelled.
“I see you one more time with that goddamn gook helmet on, and you’re busted,” Hale said.
“You’re gonna see plenty of these fucking helmets,” Leander said.
Everyone laughed.
“Leander, the only way you or anybody else is going to get off Desolation Row is to build that fence,” Hale said. Then he paused and continued, talking fast, “I’m going to tell you men why we’re going to build that goddamn fence. They wouldn’t tell you why in the Russian army. Remember that. Some general at Two Corps has a son-in-law who’s in the chain-link fence business in Chicago. This goddamn civilian son-in-law got himself a contract for one thousand miles of interstate highway fence. Paid off some congressman. But didn’t pay off the right one or pay enough because he lost the bid on the contract. Got himself stuck with all that goddamn fence. Daddy the general found a way to take care of his own. Goddamn, men, a two-star general can do any fucking thing he wants!”
No one laughed.
“You mean some asshole general is gonna fence the dinks out of ’Nam with a fucking playground fence?” Leander yelled. “That dude is crazy.”
That set everyone to laughing. Hale patiently waited for them to stop.
Jackson wondered what he could do to escape Hale. He could ask to be transferred, but that might mean he would end up as a rifleman in some company that stayed out in the bush for months at a time, far away from Light’s protection. With an extra long whip he might be able to reach Saigon and tell the commander of American forces what the general was trying to do. Or better yet he might have his signal relayed to the states by ham opera
tors. Jackson tried to remember the chain of command, those pictures he had seen in company orderly rooms ever since basic training. The Joint Chiefs could be told or even the President. He imagined the Secretary of the Army flying into II Corps and relieving the general of his command.
The men were quiet and Hale was talking again as Jackson returned from his reverie of escape.
“We’re going to fence this country all the way down to the goddamn South China Sea!” Hale said, speaking very fast. “It’s going to work. We can’t go up to Hanoi and kill ’em all. The politicians won’t let us fight this war. Fence ’em out! Put a mile of cleared ground on either side of the fence and kill any goddamn thing in it that moves. The commies did it in Europe. We can do it here. It’ll be a goddamn chain-link curtain!”
No one laughed, and Jackson realized it was because the men knew they were trapped.
“Those hard-core NVA won’t let that fence go up without a fight. They’re sitting in Holiday Inn base camp right now over there in Laos waiting to see what we’re going to do. They probably already know if those goddamn sorry ARVNs are in on this,” Hale continued.
Jackson had heard of Holiday Inn base camp. Once, two battalions had been sent to attack it, and only parts of them had returned back across the border. Soon after he had arrived at the outpost a rumor had started that they were going into Laos after it. He had been unable to eat or shit until he had discovered that they were not going after all.
“One of these days we may have to go over there again,” Hale said. “This time we’ll run ’em all the way back up to Hanoi!”
Now Hale had become very excited, waving his arms about to emphasize his words.
Jackson wished he was out in the bush with Light. Once work on the fence started the builders and their defenders would be easy targets for the NVA. He hoped Hale would not decide to go down there to direct the defense personally.
“I know you’ve heard stories about that base camp. The NVA are tough. They’re hard-core,” Hale said. “But you can be just like them. Men, back in high school, out in the piny woods of Louisiana, I used to play football for a coach named Hog Willis. Goddamn, but we loved that man. Hated him too because he worked us. Made us mean. Hog got his name from catching razorbacks barehanded down in Honey Island Swamp. Wrestled ’em down and tied ’em up with barbed wire. Coach hunkered down with those hogs in the mud. You got the hunker down with the goddamn NVA! What will it be men? Are you going to let the enemy run us off this mountain?”
“Hell, no, Sir!” one of the lieutenants shouted.
Hale looked hard at the men, waiting for them to take up the yell. But they were silent, most of them staring down at their boots. Even Leander had nothing to say. Hale dismissed the battalion.
Jackson wished he could call for a chopper on the radio and fly away from Hale and the fence and the war and Light. Fly home to the farm: fields and pond and pasture and woods and the white frame house where he could sleep safe in his bed and wake to the sound of a mockingbird singing its heart out, not to the thump of incoming walking heavy across the compound.
CHAPTER
5
DURING THE NEXT FEW weeks shipments of wire, steel poles, and concrete started arriving at the engineer camp, brought up from Pleiku by the big helicopters, the sky cranes. Jackson thought the sky cranes looked like huge wasps bringing food back to their nests, the cargo dangling between their long legs on steel cable. Gradually a mountain of wire began to grow at the camp until it seemed to him that there was not going to be room for the men.
He thought they might start stringing just outside the perimeter, but instead they began down in the Cunt. One morning the radio operator in the TOC told him that the air force was sending a plane to drop a 1,000-pound bomb to clear out the initial landing zone in the jungle. He went up to the tower and waited with the guard. Soon the plane appeared, flying so high it was just a speck in the blue sky. When it reached the mountain it made a turn and circled the Cunt.
Jackson watched through armored glasses the plane’s slow circle over the Cunt, hoping he would be able to see the bomb fall. But the explosion took him by surprise, the tower guard tapping him on the shoulder and pointing down into the Cunt where a cloud of red dust rose silently, the deep roar reaching them in a few seconds later. Using the LZ as a base, the engineers with chainsaws, TNT, bulldozers, Rome plows, and thousands of gallons of defoliant attacked the jungle, creating a red scar on the Cunt. Then they started stringing wire.
Hale placed platoons in permanent positions at the LZ, rotating fresh ones into it every week. The engineers were choppered back to Little Tit each night. But work on the fence went slowly, the NVA sappers blowing up at night what the engineers had built during the day.
When the platoons were back at the firebase the men lived with rats in underground bunkers. After dark the big gray animals had no fear of the men, and some who had developed a taste for tobacco ate cigarettes out of the pockets of sleeping men, leaving only the filters. In their spare time they held rat-killing contests, shooting the animals with pistols. Someone had the chopper pilots bring up a cat from Pleiku, but the rats, some which were almost as big as the cat, cornered it in the ammo bunker one night and killed it.
“Alabama, you get Light to bring you a tiger in from the bush, waste these fucking rats,” a soldier said to Jackson one day.
“I got a cat at home that’ll take care of those rats,” Jackson said. “Gook cats are just like the ARVNs, no fucking good.”
“Shit, Alabama, you’d need a pack of cats. Call Light up on that radio you sleep with and tell him to get us a tiger,” the soldier said.
“He’s using them like tracking dogs to hunt down the dinks. Can’t spare any,” Jackson replied.
The soldier and his friends laughed. Jackson liked the attention, but no one got too close. They were afraid of Light. Jackson had spent the night in the bunker with Light and lived.
“We know it’s gonna happen,” a soldier finally told him. “No sense one of us getting wasted when you get blown away.”
And Jackson realized he would have done the same had he been in their place.
Jackson had watched Desolation Row go up in one day. At dawn the air force hit the mountaintop with 250-pound bombs. Then the helicopters inserted a platoon which encountered light resistance from the NVA, who chose to pull back and drop mortars in on the mountaintop. Jackson had been a member of that first platoon and had watched most of his squad die, killed by mortars. Engineers followed with chainsaws, and cut down the trees. Once a secure LZ was formed, a bulldozer was brought in by sky crane to finish the job of clearing the trees and leveling the ground.
A chopper brought in a 20-foot prefabricated steel tower and dropped it at the center of the LZ. The engineers tied a rope to the tower and used it to mark the circumference of a circle with a 250-foot radius. The bulldozer finished the job of clearing brush and trees out of the way. Then helicopters came and dropped concertina wire which the men strung on metal stakes in a pyramid pattern, two rows on the bottom and one on top. After that the choppers dropped sections of perforated steel plate and cratering charges at 20-foot intervals around the circumference of the circle. The men used the charges to blow holes for bunkers and the plate to provide support for overhead cover made out of sandbags. Mortars were brought in, two 81-millimeter tubes for illumination and three 4.2-inch mortars for close fire support. Jackson worked hard on his bunker and spent a sleepless night with three other soldiers staring out into the jungle, waiting for the ground attack that never came.
In the morning Hale arrived with the 105 howitzers, each gun brought in as a single load by a chopper. The howitzers were formed into three double emplacements. Recoilless rifles were put in position. A communications center bunker was built which would be the TOC and a fire support coordination bunker was constructed. Radar emplacements were installed on the perimeter along with searchlights. Rocket-propelled grenade screens of chain-link fence were set in place ov
er the bunkers.
Two more circles of concertina wire were added. The men placed claymore mines along with trip wires attached to flares and booby traps. From the wire they hung beer cans filled with pebbles. It did not seem possible to Jackson that a man could get through the wire, but he had been told stories of NVA sappers dressed only in loincloths who could effortlessly pick their way through the tangle.
Machine-gun emplacements were periodically shifted to prevent the enemy from gaining a fix on them. Every night the men planted claymore mines in new locations just behind the first circle of wire. And small patrols of four or five men and sometimes single men were placed on listening posts out in the bush.
Soon after Jackson arrived Hale had ordered the men to plant electronic listening devices outside the wire. These responded to vibrations by producing a beep on a set of headphones worn by an operator in the TOC. But this plan was abandoned when it was discovered that small animals, the wind, and the mortar firing produced vibrations which were picked up by the sensors.
One night the operator, an Indian from New Mexico named Alfred Ten Deer, had thrown the headphones down after hours of trying to distinguish beeps produced by enemy movement from the others and had declared he preferred going back out in the bush to spending another second on the headphones.
“Goddamn ping-ping inside my head,” Alfred had said, holding his hands over his ears after he had thrown the headphones against the wall of the bunker.
Within the circle of wire there were ammo dumps, stores of C-rations, and an aid station. All supplies were flown in by chopper. Mail came every day, and once a week a chaplain flew out to hold services for those men who were interested.