by Gayle Rivers
Above the hamlet, the river forest gave way to a rock-strewn landscape of sparse grass. We moved northwest until we hit the foothills of the western range, then turned north to follow its lower slopes. Toliver wanted to cross Highway 13 just above Muang Kasi to put distance between us and Luang Prabang. Muang Kasi lay fifteen miles to the north over steep and rugged terrain, but we were traveling fast. After a hard two-hour climb, the foothills leveled out into a forested plateau. The trees grew together overhead as the vegetation thinned at ground level. At times we broke out of the trees and moved across vast expanses of tussock. We had little cover, but the country was empty of human life, and we made good time. We reached Muang Kasi half a day ahead of our scheduled night crossing. We set up camp overlooking the village and listened for the abort signal. We rested all afternoon and into the night. I took out a dried fig, started to chew on it, and turned to Toliver. He and I had fallen into a pattern of taking our breaks together.
"Who killed those three guys?" I asked.
"I did." Jackson answered. "Me and Morrosco. When I came up out of the water, this guy was just sitting on the bank, and he got up and came over to see what was happening. He walked right onto the
end of my knife. But he made some kind of a noise. He must have been with them other two. They came running out of the bush, and Morrosco and me took S them out."
From where we rested, we could see Highway 13 ] as it followed the opposite bank of the Lik through Muang Kasi. There were two bridges in the village that joined tracks on the west bank to the highway. ] Both bridges were carrying traffic; oxen- and horse- * drawn carts, an occasional jeep, peasants on foot. ! Beyond the second bridge, our maps showed a shallow stretch of river that would make a safe crossing. Night i came, and the village grew quiet. We dropped down into the riverbed above the village, hugging the western banks. Before we could move, several peasant men strolled out on the highway on the far bank. We ducked quickly into the chest-deep stream. Only the elevated bank of the highway shielded us from view.
We stayed in the water until we came under the first bridge, then scrambled into a tight bunch on the bank. Wiley moved out first. Just as we started to follow, he went down, pulling Toliver with him. In the pale light, I saw a small wooden boat drifting directly toward us. We all slid silently back into the water. There were three men in the boat, talking quietly and trolling behind them while the boat drifted stern-first. It came within feet of Wiley, then veered away and slipped back into the deep water. We stood without moving for a quarter of an hour in the gentle current, then Toliver tapped Wiley, and we moved off.
We crossed under the second bridge without incident, but just beyond we came upon a pontoon bridge that was not on our maps; it was a fish trap or boat dock of recent construction. It was built of barrel-sized corks lashed together with rope, with a wooden structure and slatted flooring above. The floor of the bridge stood seven feet above us. We studied the bridge a few moments, then Toliver turned to Prather.
"Lew," he said, "see if you can get under that thing."
Prather slipped out of his gear and handed it to
Tan and Morrosco. He took a breath and dropped out of sight. After thirty seconds, he surfaced long enough to gulp a lungful of air and disappeared again. He did this twice more. He came up gasping after the fourth attempt.
"There are a lot of support beams under there. I couldn't find my way through. We can manage it if we take enough time, but someone may drown under there. I don't believe it is worth the risk."
"We have to go up and over," Toliver said. "Take a look, Lew."
A riverside path approached the bridge from botH ends, so we would be totally exposed until we dropped back onto the river on the other side. We had to get over in a hurry. Prather strapped on his knife. Morrosco and Wiley boosted him as he scrambled up the steep ten feet of the mudbank. Suddenly his wet boots slipped in the soft dirt, and he slid halfway down the bank before grabbing a root that held firm. He scrambled back up and had his hands over the edges of the bank when we heard someone approaching. I saw Prather poke his head up, then heard a man speak in a voice that was more curious than suspicious. Prather tried to pull himself up onto the path, but his feet kept slipping beneath him. As he struggled to keep from falling, the man spoke again.
"What the hell am I supposed to say to him?" Prather said without turning Ids head.
"For Christ sake, get him!" Toliver said in a whisper.
"I can't get up," Prather said. The man suddenly appeared at the edge of the bank, standing beside Prather's head. Dressed in a makeshift uniform, he held a rifle casually at quarter, pointing out over Prather's head. He must have seen the seven of us quite clearly, but he seemed totally relaxed. He was typical of peasant militia everywhere, refusing to believe in the reality of war even as it stared him in the face.
At that moment, Prather's boot found a rock. He
strode up the bank as if he were mounting a staircase three steps at a time. The man must have recognized from Prather's silhouette against the sky that he was not Oriental.
He sprang back, half stumbling, and tried to bring his weapon to bear, but his movements were jerky and overcompensating in his fear. There was a loud crack when Prather hit him a straight-arm punch that seemed to split the man's face open. Blood gushed from his nose and mouth. As he fell, Prather caught his shirt with one hand, slipped the man's head under his armpit, locked wrist in forearm, and gave a tremendous thrust back and downward. The man's neck snapped like dry timber. His body sank under its own weight. Prather fell down out of our sight line, and we all lay still. We waited in the water with weapons at the ready. Prather stuck his head over the edge of the embankment.
"He was alone," he said.
We handed up the gear, then Prather hauled us one at a time up the slippery slope. We dropped as quickly into the water on the far side. Prather pushed the dead soldier down to us, and Tan and Morrosco lashed the body with torn shirting to the bridge supports beneath the water. It would be days before it surfaced.
We followed the riverbed for a mile, then forded the shallows and crossed Highway 13. We struck northwest on the slopes paralleling the road. We all felt a sense of relief that we now had the highway between us and any activity out of Luang Prabang. We moved onto open ground for three miles, then climbed a series of low hills where the vegetation grew dense again and gave us enough cover to relax. Prather lit his pipe, and Wiley fell out to roll a cigarette. We began to talk softly. I caught up with Toliver and fell in beside him.
"Too much luck," I said.
"You're right," Toliver said. "That guy should have blown Lew right off the riverbank."
"We can't make it on luck," I said. "I don't intend to," Toliver said. He sounded slightly annoyed.
"If that bloke had been any kind of a soldier, all hell would have let loose," I said.
"He wasn't," Toliver said, then moved on up the line.
It frustrated and angered me that so many unpredictable elements controlled our destiny. At the bridge, why had we lived and the peasant soldier died? The fortunes of war? It made the pit of my stomach burn when I saw the worst soldier in the field go on surviving mistake after mistake and the best walk into a stray bullet. There was no rationale to death.
The thick grass quickly gave way to jungle as we climbed. At first the jungle was soft and green, the thick foliage growing above us as it reached out for sunlight. As we moved higher, it grew dryer and closer to the ground. Soon we were pushing through heavy undergrowth that tugged at our uniforms and scratched our hands and faces. We broke out onto a rugged hillside carpeted in hard knee-deep tussock. We walked for three hours over exposed ground without seeing any signs of human life.
We were closing on the village of Ban Pho Khuan, which we wanted to skirt, then join Highway 13 beyond it. By midnight, we began to encounter hill tracks again and stumbled across isolated rice fields with a few huts clustered nearby. We grew quiet again. I heard Wiley coughing softly. Toliver h
eard it as well, and he dropped back to walk alongside Wiley.
"I didn't dry out. I'm coming down with a cold," he said without being prompted.
"We'd better bivouac and get some rest," Toliver said.
We had maintained a tremendous pace for six days. Only our high spirits were driving off the signs of physical exhaustion that must set in soon. Toliver moved to point to scout for a proper bivouac.
'We'll break here," he said when we caught up with him in a small clearing in the now almost impenetrable jungle.
We were tending our weapons before the first man had sat down. We had little trouble with oxidization in the jungle, but the heat and humidity made the weapons slippery in our sweaty hands. We coated them very lightly with oil, then wiped them almost dry. Moving parts got a drop of oil, then were coated in a dry charcoal-based paste similar to boot black that left a peculiar matte finish.
Tan and I lashed half a dozen boughs together and draped groundsheets over them to make a hootchlai large enough for all of us to sleep under. Within minutes of halting, fatigue seemed to sweep through the unit. We chewed slowly at cold rations. Morrosco dressed a small scalp wound Prather had somehow picked up when he killed the man by the bridge.
"Hey, baby, we're making time," Morrosco said, giving Wiley a thump on the shoulder. "Mucho miles in six da
"We're bloody invisible," said Wiley.
"Let's stay that way," said Toliver. He was studying the maps. "\'e e got five miles to cover on the highway between Ban Pho Khuan and the junction with High-7. We've got to do it in the dark." Toliver looked at his watch. "It's 0100 hours. We'll take three hours' rest. Jackson, you split watch with Morrosco. Wake me at 0400." It was better that five men rest and two go short than all seven be deprived of sleep.
The night was black when Morrosco shook me awake. We loaded the gear and broke camp within minutes. We dropped quickly out of the hills onto the valley floor just behind Ban Pho Khuan. We circled the village, tracking through the rice fields on the south side where we caught several chickens without much ruckus. We strung the chickens from our packs for a hot meal later. We were clear of the village before the first peasant stirred. Half a mile north of Ban Pho Khuan, the village trail dropped down onto Highway
13. We still had an hour before sunup. The highway was empty.
We spaced out at ten-yard intervals at the edge of the road and struck out at a tremendous pace. I could feel the tension falling away with every step, now that we were not fighting through the undergrowth. The blood was flowing freely through my calves and thighs, easing the cramps that had plagued me all night. I had known few pleasures in combat; walking this road by morning was sheer joy. As the faint light that precedes dawn spread over the landscape, what had been a forced march became almost a stroll. For the first time in a week, I had the freedom to think. I could forgo the mental application to push myself up and down hills, to survive an endless series of localized pressure zones. Hills and rivers frayed the nerves. Fire fights stretched them to the breaking point and left them limp and inelastic. As we walked the highway at dawn, I felt as if twenty-five pounds had been lifted from my shoulders. My stride lengthened. My hip joint seemed to throw off six days' accumulation of dirt and grit.
Tan was out in front, pulling us along fast. I could see in the way the others moved ahead of me that they were rejuvenated as well. But this did not affect our readiness. A man did not lose his edge six days into enemy territory. But there was a spring in our step, as if we had all recognized we were being offered a brief respite. We would grab it and be stronger for what lay ahead.
We were within a few miles of the junction with Highway 7; both roads carried a lot of military traffic. For a long while, we heard nothing but the sounds of the forest and the noises of canvas and leather and metal we carried with us. The first traffic arrived just as the colors appeared in the landscape. We heard a jeep approaching from a great distance and stepped into the trees as it sped past. It was followed immediately by a second. The land was coming to life. We left the highway and walked the lower slopes of the hills to the east, then climbed higher to reconnoiter
the country. The jungle was busy with movement: birds, insects, animals, all hidden from view by the heavy foliage. As we walked, I watched the morning sun slipping down the hills to the west. I thought of other mornings—colder, the air sharp rather than heavy —when I had walked as a boy with a party of men in the mountains. I had known a freedom then that vanished when we came back down from the hills. These men . . . this mountain . . . that feeling was reborn now.
A brilliantly colored bird lifted noisily out of the trees ahead. It turned and circled, beating furiously past at treetop level fifty feet below us on the steeply sloping hillside. I felt against my cheek the stock of the tiny 410-bore single-shot. I took aim just ahead of the speeding bird. I waited, then pulled slowly at the trigger. The bird spun, tumbling toward the ground, a shower of feathers in its wake. . . . Prather slowed down to let me catch up with him.
"It's a beautiful sight, hills in the morning," he said. I nodded. For a moment I had been a boy in New Zealand again.
"Were you thinking of home?" Prather asked.
"Morning is a good time to be on the trail," I said.
Prather pointed to the west, where the sun had just touched the stream that meandered at the foot of the hills.
"If the light were softer, those hills could be in Devon," he said.
"You got much jungle in Devon?" Morrosco said. He had dropped back to walk with us. "It's funny," he said, "those hills remind me of the Lower East Side. My old man's got a little coconut farm on a hill just like that one. Near Washington Square."
"What does a city boy know about the country?"
"If a city boy had known, he'd be back in the city. You country boys got no excuses."
"Piss off, Morrosco," I said without malice. I had seen us all drawing closer over the past week. Down below, where every step took us closer to an invisible
enemy, where every movement was a struggle against a hostile environment, I often felt completely alone, as if I were pushing my body, my thirst, my fatigue almost dumbly toward a fantastic and impossible goal. But up here, where we could see for miles, where every step was not a battle with vines or greasy hillsides, where we could breathe and talk, I felt us fusing into one close body of men. We were almost enjoying life. Morrosco's natural lightheartedness, which had been subdued for several days, was resurfacing. Prather was quiet; he was probably thinking about his family. Even Tan was unwinding a little; his eyes had lost some of their furtiveness. We were all walking upright for the first time in days. Our backs had straightened, our hunched shoulders fallen into a more relaxed posture.
Toliver took point and increased the pace. We raced across the green landscape as if we were soaring. The weight of the gear melted from my back. We climbed hills and tumbled down the valleys below, but we were not tired, nor thirsty, nor hungry.
Where Highway 13 turned sharply west toward Luang Prabang, we skirted Ban Pho Tout and drove due north along a steep river valley. We wanted to keep well east of the patrols that protected the capital, only thirty miles away. We climbed first a dirt road, then jungle trails that led up to scattered hamlets where the land was arable. We were moving more cautiously now. When the road took a lazy meander around a low hill, we cut over the top. Sliding back down to the road on the far side, we stumbled ito a small field hidden behind a screen of jungle vegetation.
"Poppies," said Tan.
Instinctively, we primed our weapons. Intelligence had not warned us of opium this far west. The opium poppy flowers private armies.
I hated drugs like I hated communists. One of my few brushes with authority had been over them. A group of us were working as a support detail for supplies coming from the Cambodian highlands. We wanted to know what we were doing; the more we
knew, the better we could work on the odds against us. We broke into the consignment and found it to be opium.
We destroyed it.
Our high comMand was all over us when we came in. We had caused an embarrassment with the Cambodian Government. No mention was made of the cargo. They slapped our hands and demanded close confinement to orders in the future. I paid no attention to that. I would have destroyed the next batch. I was not risking my life for opium.
We slipped through the trees at the edge of the field and dropped back onto the road below, then left it to follow a mountain path. The trail was firm and bore recent jeep tracks. Ahead, it rose rapidly and disappeared where it turned sharply to the right. Trees bordering the trail provided good cover, so we pushed ahead at a jog.
Without warning, three open military vehicles raced bumper-to-bumper around the bend and headed straight for us.
CHAPTER 8
The men inside were laughing and hanging on as the vehicle bounced in the ruts. A few wore the uniforms of tribal mercenaries; the rest were Pathet Lao. They were all drunk and all armed with automatic weapons. The jungle had muffled the racing engines until the vehicles burst upon us.
We broke for the trees. Prather and I automatically moved left from the center of the line, the others darted to the right. But the men in the lead car had seen us; they shouted to the others and pointed. The vehicles slowed momentarily, then the lead driver changed his mind and accelerated down the track directly toward us. The other cars followed, with the whole lot of them rounding off automatic fire from the bumping, speeding cars. When the first car was level with Tan, he hit it with a long burst from his M-3. The windshield exploded. The two men in front arched in their seats and tumbled backward. The car careened to the right, hit a rock, rolled back to the left, teetered, came upright again, and skidded fifty feet before stop-