by Gayle Rivers
ping just in front of Prather and me. The second car crashed into the first and skidded to a stop. The third swerved off the road on the opposite side, bounced off a small tree, and came to rest against a dirt embankment.
'Tour to a car!" Toliver shouted.
The first car had separated Prather and me from the rest of the team, but it shielded us from the other two vehicles. Two men were still alive in the front vehicle. One jumped out the open top and ducked for cover behind the car. The second searched frantically for a weapon.
"I'm going up," I shouted to Prather.
As I sprinted out of the trees, I could hear Prather laying down covering fire. The man behind the car never saw me. I waited until I was fifteen feet away, then fired at him from the hip at full run. The man's head was blown clean off his shoulders in a cloud of bone and flesh. I spun on the second man. He had a weapon in his hands and was trying to scramble out on the far side of the car. Before I could fire, he flew backward out of the car, hit in the chest by Prather's M-3. I fired, and the man's stomach opened and closed before he hit the ground. Prather ran up and fell down beside me. The Laotians had piled out of the other cars and were firing across the road, unaware of us at their backs. When Toliver saw us fire at the second car, he broke out of the trees and ran toward the third.
'Toliver is going!" Wiley shouted.
While Prather laid down covering fire, I pulled back into the trees and sprinted past the second car to the third. Toliver was opposite me on the other side, firing exposed from the edge of the road. He had killed two of the four in the third car; the other two were crouched down on my side, firing wildly in Toliver's direction. When I gained the trees directly behind them, Toliver broke into a run toward them. Both men stood up to fire. I went straight at them from the rear. A shout from the second car gave me away. Suddenly they
were trying desperately to look both ways at once. I changed direction three times in the seventy-five feet that separated us without firing once; when I was near enough to know that my rounds would hit the targets, I blew them both apart. I was so close to the second man I could see the gold in his teeth. Bone and gristle stung my face, body matter clung to my fatigues. I ran past the two bodies, searching for more targets. Thirty seconds of deafening automatic fire was followed by the roar of three grenades exploding in quick succession. I dropped to one knee and waited. One grenade had blown the sides out of the second car. Sound and movement ceased as quickly as they had begun. Toliver sounded off. We replied hoarsely, still catching our breaths. No one was hurt.
"Weapons and personal effects!" Toliver hollered out.
It was senseless hiding the bodies; the vehicles would have to be accounted for. By stripping them, we became another band of tribal mercenaries. I was covered in the blood of the men I had killed, but there was no time to clean properly. When I untied my dog rag to dry my face, the tip of a thumb fell out of the twisted cloth. I wiped at the blood and the pieces of flesh that were fast sticking to my skin.
The others were already gathering weapons. I grabbed a body and pulled it free from one of the cars. I searched inside the man's waist for the slim leather wallet in which he carried his identification, money, and perhaps a photograph of his family. I tossed it aside without opening it. I stripped a cheap watch from the man's wrist and cut two fingers off one hand to get at a thin gold band.
A shot rang out. I dropped down beside the car and grabbed my shotgun. I saw Wiley with a pistol in his hand standing over a body. He must have come upon a wounded man still trying to fight. Wiley habitually cleaned up after a flash action with a pistol in his hand. I did the same on occasion. It was a spontaneous reaction; the pistol just seemed to fall into
my hand. But we did not have the ammunition now to waste indiscriminately. Wiley would have used a knife if there had been time.
I stripped two more bodies quickly and carried the booty in my shirt to an opening Toliver had cleared in the thickest undergrowth. I tossed the things down and turned back to gather weapons. Wiley walked right into me without looking. Wallets and personal effects were cradled in the crook of his left arm. He was staring at a large piece of paper that fluttered in his right hand as he walked.
"Hey, Kiwi, look what one guy was carrying," he said. He handed me the paper. It was a centerfold nude from Playboy, creased and worn with age.
"He took it from some Yank," Wiley said.
He took the photograph out of my hand, refolded it carefully, and buttoned it in a flap pocket on his fatigues. Within ten minutes we had hidden everything fifty feet from the path in foliage so dense it might never be found. We had destroyed what were probably the only vehicles in the neighborhood. But the peasants from the village up the trail would have heard the action. We faded into the trees and headed for higher ground.
I looked back for one moment at the devastation we left behind. Not a man among us was carrying a wound. I had never been with a unit like this before, nothing like this. It was as if we were reading each other's minds. I had not been told that Toliver was exposing himself. But I was on my way almost before he moved. I had not asked Prather for covering fire, but he was throwing out a hail of it when I went up on one knee. I had never seen anything like the fire pattern we were laying down. We were communicating with our weapons as if they were extensions of our arms.
We struck due north on a line to the Suong River. We were only twenty-five miles east of Luang Prabang, close enough to be within the circle of activity fanning out from there. But we had a range of peaks up to nine thousand feet between us and the capital, and the
population was thinning. We kept a hard pace to clear the battle zone. As we moved along the western slopes of a lower range, the jungle gave way to waist-high tussock and a thick shrublike grass spotted by an occasional hardwood forest. It began to seem that we never put a foot on a level surface; we were either climbing or running downhill for hours at a time. We covered twenty-five miles a day in mountains, walking around the clock with one break of two or three hours to eat, rest, and listen for the abort signal. The pace would have killed an ordinary soldier, but we were trained for it; we could move for weeks like this.
Wiley's cold became a fever. His eyes grew red and swollen, and his breathing came hard. But he never slowed us. Spirits and energy were soaring. Toliver doubled the pace. We pushed on without complaining. We rested in elevated positions, where we could relax with maximum security. Occasionally we boiled roots and wild vegetables, but most often we ate field rations to conserve energy during the breaks.
Just after dawn we hit a long ridge back and climbed without stopping until the sun was overhead. There was no water on the slope, and we were careful to conserve what we had in our canteens. The last hour to the summit had my thighs and calves screaming for rest. We stopped for fifteen minutes on the flat surface of the hill; there we had a clear view of the surrounding landscape. The back side of the hill sloped away from us in a gradual decline. We saw half a dozen farms scattered in the valley ahead.
A few hundred yards below us was a small clearing with a bamboo hut surrounded by cultivated fields. There were chickens in the fields and two goats tied up under a thatched shed, but no sign of a peasant family about anywhere.
"Let's get a decent feed," Toliver said.
We were all in need of fresh food to get our bowels moving and to* replenish the minerals we had sweated out. We were well above the route of any normal patrol. If the family returned, they were expendable.
We fanned out around the clearing and waited in the trees for thirty minutes. When no one returned, Toliver and Tan moved in, then called the rest of us. Jackson and Wiley stood guard while we scavenged. Nothing was done hastily. Toliver had decided we needed a rest and a hot meal; we went about it in a relaxed, businesslike manner. Breaking in the open was a calculated risk; if a patrol wandered up, we were badly situated to get away. But maintaining the physical integrity of the unit was as much a part of the mission as marching thirty miles a
day. This was just one of thousands of calculations Toliver had to make to keep us alive and pull off the mission. We had great confidence in his judgment, and were prepared to accept the consequences.
Toliver turned up a burlap bag of rice in the shack. He set part of it to boil in a clay pot and put the rest in his pack. I milked the goats in a large wooden bucket. Morrosco killed and cleaned two chickens and added them to the bubbling rice along with some vegetables he had dug from the fields. Tan broke eggs into the rice stew and packed half a dozen more in straw in his pack. We all washed and refilled our canteens from a shallow well. We ate, then rested for another hour before pushing on.
We came down off the slopes onto the valley trails. Some of the trail junctions were guarded by local militia or small Pathet Lao units. When the point spotted activity, we would back up for a mile or more and skirt a wide circle around it, then fan out quickly at trailside in a defensive position and dash across one at a time.
The going grew rougher as we approached the Nam Suong Valley, but we were relatively safe as we moved farther from Luang Prabang. The scattered farms gradually disappeared; the patrols grew fewer. We had been ducking enemy parties as often as twice a day, and the tension and hard mountain walking were draining us rapidly. Wiley's fever increased. His breathing was labored and his eyes puffy and blood-
105 red. Finally he dropped out of the line ahead of me and took out his contact lenses.
"I can't wear them," he said, putting on his plastic-rimmed army-issue glasses.
I said nothing. The reflective power of two spectacle lenses were enormous. Wiley knew that. He would have them off as soon as he could wear the others. We marched all that night along the upper slopes of the valley. Early the next morning, as we worked our way toward lower contours, a following rain hit us without warning. We ignored it until we were thoroughly soaked, then one at a time buckled our body wraps around us.
It rained without stopping for three days while we struggled to reach our Nam Suong crossing. There was no solid footing anywhere. The earth was covered in a sheet of running ground water. Every small wash was a rushing stream that could sweep a man down a hillside. After the first day, I could feel my boots cracking up. We moved without talking, without stopping now. Yesterday's dust was six inches of greasy mud. Every fallen tree limb, every leaf was moss-slick and treacherous. The rain drove the mosquitoes down to the ground where they swarmed around us, diving for exposed flesh.
We stopped to hand the gear over a treacherous ford in a streaming gully. As Tan passed my shotgun across, I saw a small black lump fall from his beret onto his neck. I started up the hill, then realized what I had seen. I spun around, grabbed the lump off Tan's neck and threw it to the ground.
"Leech," I told Tan. I had managed to knock it away before it sank its two tiny hooks painlessly into Tan's neck, depositing disease and infection and drawing human blood to feed itself.
"Leeches!" Tan shouted up the line.
The others instinctively hunched their shoulders, then quickly buttoned fatigue collars and rolled down shirt sleeves. Prather drew out his pipe, and Davies rolled a cigarette, but neither would light in the rain.
The leeches dropped on us with no more impact than the huge incessant raindrops beating at our backs. Wiley traded his beret for a bush hat that covered his neck. Prather managed with great difficulty to get a flame going on a short piece of hardwood. He kept it dry and smoldering as we moved. Every time we stopped, he burned off the leeches with the hotstick. Jungle disease was a far more dangerous enemy than we had faced so far.
Our pace had slowed; we were now losing time to the schedule. We kept close together. There was no air. With my collar up and sleeves down, I felt the heat of the jungle pressing on me. It was like trying to run in a steam bath. When I breathed in, I was not getting air; I was getting something else that did not fill my lungs. The packs, ammunition belts, the weapons, the canvas and leather and metal pulled at my body and squeezed and choked it in a giant fist. I tore open my collar. I rolled up my sleeves. I would have to take care with the leeches.
The rain fell. Every step became more agonizing than the last. The mountainsides were broken by a series of raging streams, the banks slick with rotting foliage that crumbled beneath us. Toliver, at point, cautiously worked his way down a steep slope. It collapsed under him, and he slid a hundred feet before a tree checked his fall. He was not hurt, but one of his boots was ripped halfway up the ankle. We passed his mud-choked gear around and cleaned as much as we could on the spot before pushing on.
Our loads were constantly sliding about on our backs as we stumbled through the mud and slime. The rain hit the trees like gravel on a rooftop. We had to shout to be heard.
On the second day the rain stopped as suddenly as it had started. In an instant, we were blanketed by silence. Slowly the jungle noises—birds chattering, cicadas buzzing, the scurrying of unseen small creatures along a jungle floor—rose in a cacophony of
sound. Minutes later, that too stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and the jungle was as silent as a cave. Silence is a danger signal in the jungle. We stopped and quietly primed our weapons. But it was that other silence that precedes a change in the weather. Without a warning drop, the rain fell in sheets.
Climbing, falling, fording a dozen streams in half a day, we struggled on, losing time to the mission schedule. Toliver tried to increase the pace, but he pushed up against the exhaustion barrier and had to slack off.
We had planned to reach the Suong River Valley in late afternoon and ford the river under cover of dusk, but it was hours past sundown before we began to descend to the valley floor. My body was crying for rest, and my nerves were drawn to the breaking point. I found myself startled by the snap of a twig underfoot or a branch that suddenly leapt out to brush against my face. We struggled on for hours, never exchanging a word.
The rain stopped while we were traversing the valley floor in total darkness, but when we reached the Suong, it was swollen to a raging torrent. Our ford was to have been an easy dash across a shallow stream; we found chest-deep rapids twisting and spilling across the rocks.
"We'll have to go across in a chain," Toliver said.
"We'll be completely exposed," Wiley said.
"For God's sake, Barry," Morrosco said, "who but us would be stupid enough to be here in this weather?"
We lashed driftwood into small rafts, onto which we strapped the gear. We crossed in a human chain, one hand clinging to the rafts, the other clutching the belt of the man in front. It took us half an hour to inch our way through the chill waters. Just off the opposite bank, a huge tree limb came tearing around a boulder. It hit me a glancing blow, then pivoted and swung its full weight at Wiley. He ducked, and it passed harmlessly over his head. Jackson and I pulled
against the surging current and hauled up the choking, spluttering Wiley. We edged ashore, then collapsed with exhaustion. Our gear was intact.
We were within a day and a half of our second cache at the village of M Ngoi, which we were very anxious to reach. We were growing short of ammunition. Our uniforms and boots were decaying. Our bodies were worn out and cut about and bruised. M Ngoi was a safe village; we could rest there, bathe and repair our bodies. We pushed on through the night and the driving rain that soon started again.
M Ngoi was thirty miles due north of our river crossing, but we anticipated intense mercenary activity in the valleys between. Our intention was to march east for nine miles along the northern bank of the Suong, then strike north and drift back west to M Ngoi. But within an hour we were in vegetation so thick we had to chop our way through. In three hours we managed to cover less than a mile.
"We'll lose a day doing this," Toliver said. "I'd rather take my chances with the mercenaries." We turned back toward the river crossing. By the time we got there, the rain had stopped, and the ground water was quickly running off. We struck north on a direct bearing to M Ngoi.
We broke out of the dense vegetation onto
a plain of shrub grasses and woods. The number of farms was increasing on the upper valley slopes, where the soil was better.
Morrosco took point a hundred yards ahead of the rest of us. He was breaking cover from a stand of trees when he let off a long burst of automatic fire. He had walked straight into the middle of a patrol of tribal mercenaries strung out in a line in the tall grass just beyond the trees. We quickly closed behind him in a V formation. He was exchanging fire with five men who had taken up prone positions in the grass. Five men bunched so tightly meant a very large patrol and a larger unit somewhere nearby. The two ends of the patrol, split by Morrosco's action, started closing on
us. I counted eighteen or twenty altogether, but they were split into three groups.
Tribal mercenaries were impossible to second-guess. They had practically no access to field intelligence, knew nothing of tactical warfare, fought with any weapon—American, Czech, Russian, Chinese— that fell into their hands. They respected neither discipline, rank, nor fear. They roamed everywhere, fighting for the highest bidder, or for what they could loot. And they were ready to make every fire fight a shoot-out to the last man. They were forever getting themselves killed needlessly, but their spontaneity and unpredictability made them extremely dangerous. If we did not hit them hard enough, they would make it their business to track us down. For head money and for revenge.
Toliver gave no orders, because we all knew what to do. We were outnumbered, but we had greater fire power than any of the three parties facing us. We were running low on ammunition and could not sustain a long fire fight. We had tree cover for the moment, while the mercenaries were trapped in the open. We had to move fast, hitting one party at a time.
Morrosco's initial burst had killed one man and wounded another. The other mercenaries were joining the battle singly. Morrosco led us in a rush out of the trees. We over-ran and killed the four in front within seconds, then swung right to hit the stragglers caught in the open. We killed four more in a rolling action and drove the rest back. Before they could recover, we struck northeast on the run, fighting a fading action as we moved. We were almost out of range when Tan gave a short cry. I spun around. Tan was still moving steadily on his feet, but blood was pouring from a wound behind one ear.