The Five Fingers
Page 15
We were still in the highlands, and the population was increasing below us. Above Tao Vai, we had another river to negotiate, and when we stopped on high ground to reconnoiter it, we could not see the river because of the dense vegetation below us. We would have to approach it blindly.
We fanned out over the hillside and moved with extreme caution. The river was a mile below us, down a steep grade. Jackson moved out ahead, with Tan and me following, and the others farther behind.
It was refreshing to come down out of the barren landscape of the hills into these river valleys. Vegetation, dense and moist, suddenly thrust itself around us. The sounds of birds and insects intensified. What had all been pale and gray was now awash in yellows, reds, and many shades of green. The shading of the bark on the trees changed every few feet because of the moisture at different heights up and down their growth. The bush turned to jungle vegetation so thick that it was total darkness below the treetops, and then all of a sudden we would break out into brilliant sunshine.
Tan and I were a hundred yards short of the river when I saw Jackson slip out of sight over its edge. Immediately I heard a man shouting excitedly in Vietnamese, followed by abrupt silence, then a lot of splashing and the sounds of a struggle. I waved the others down, and Tan and I ran toward the river. Before we reached it, I heard two or three more excited voices.
We broke out on the bank to see Jackson attacking a peasant with his knife. He brought the man down on rocks near the middle of the river; the man must have spotted him and tried to run. Though the man was down, Jackson was having trouble putting him away. Then suddenly he was dead. The man must have been with companions whom Jackson had not seen, because as we reached the riverbank, three more men set into Jackson from behind with rocks. At that moment, Toliver broke out alongside us.
*Tor Christ's sake, get them!" he shouted.
Jackson was just holding his own. Tan and I charged off the bank into the river.
Sometimes it would be funny to watch a totally frightened, totally helpless human being fighting for his life when he had no chance to save himself. I had seen it so many times, and it was always the same. Jackson and the man would have seen one another simultaneously.
The man started running. He was chased by a man who looked the part he was playing; he was a soldier, he had guns, he had knives, he was chasing a guy who wanted desperately to get away. The guy was running and falling down and yelling all sorts of things, trying to get away, like a little boy running from his father. He was brought down, and he struggled like he had never struggled before. It was funny. He was biting and kicking and gouging at eyes, and he never had a chance. And then he was dead.
But the other three were giving Jackson a bad time. When we got close, Tan tried to jump a pool and went in up to his chest. The three heard us behind them and came off Jackson to take us on. Two went for me, and one jumped in the water after Tan. And we had a hell of a free-for-all.
The North Vietnamese peasants were far more spirited than the people we had been up against so far; they were not the whipped dogs south and west of here who just wanted to be left alone. They were more like us. More their own people. Because they were part of a unified culture. They were communists in a communist country; they were making a living out of the land, and I guess they were proud to be what they were. Communism had given their nation solidarity. If these peasants had any political inclinations, it would be to unite all of Vietnam under communism. We were facing a different attitude now; we would not be pushing anybody around. We were up against men, not subservient human beings.
Tan was struggling in the water with the man who
had jumped on top of him. Another had put Jackson down with a rock and was doing him, though Jackson was putting up a good fight. The third man turned to me, and we squared off. I had my knife. He held a rock in his left hand and a short ax handle in his right.
Twice I moved in, protecting my head with my left hand, and he hit me two whacking blows in the ribs with the ax handle. The third time I turned and caught the blow on my pack. I grabbed the handle under my armpit and gave a great shove upward, bringing the man to me. He lost the ax handle, but before I could use my knife, we both fell. We were on our feet instantly. He swung at me with the rock. I went under the arc and drove the knife into his rib cage. He did not die instantly, but he was finished, and he was out of the fight.
The other guy came off Jackson, kicked him in the head, and turned toward me to protect his rear. Jackson jumped to his feet behind him. The guy came at me, nervous as hell and determined to come off better than his mates and wondering what the hell he had gotten himself involved in. We were circling, our eyes darting all over the place. I threw my empty hand up a couple of times to open him up for my knife. I was just coming in to make contact, when Jackson drove his own knife into the man's kidneys. He was dead instantly. We turned quickly, but Tan had killed his man as well. The others came from the shore, where they had been covering us; they would have fired if we had been in real danger. We dragged the dead men into the jungle and pushed off. Decomposition or animals would take care of the bodies within a few days.
We moved on quickly in the early morning light. Jackson was groggy and had a gashed head, which Morrosco treated as we moved. There had been a lot of shouting during the fight, which could have been overheard. We were really in the soup now if we were spotted, so we maintained the minimum profile, crawl-
ing around exposed outcrops to retain cover. There were people about everywhere. We could see them below us. A nlan cycling on the road with a load of sacks over his bike. People moving down to the rice fields in the flats. It would have taken only one pair of eyes to land on us and the entire countryside would have been on our trail.
We stayed well west of Lai Chau, which meant circling a fifty-five-hundred-foot peak on which the undergrowth petered out to nothing; we stayed low, within the vegetated area. We made the upper regions of the same range and rested for a couple of hours, then climbed to the top of the range, where we could look down on Highway 4. The last pull up the mountain had been hard. As night was falling, we struck camp.
Our bivouacs were very primitive now. We made no fire and ate what we had gathered on the march. We slept in our clothes, not even stripping off our boots. We were rough men, living on the move. Very different men from the hapless young GIs in South Vietnam who flailed at the Viet Cong like a battered, half-blinded heavyweight trying to catch an opponent who could only jab and run. They were dying because no one had taught them how to stay alive.
It was my second year in Vietnam. I had only recently been attached to the Yanks as adviser. I was leading several sections of American infantry against a Viet Cong unit that had wasted a village. We were setting an ambush. When I went to check out one section, I saw a soldier with the earplug from a transistor radio in his ear. He was listening to the radio in the middle of a combat zone. I told the sergeant to tell the guy to put away the radio and do things properly. The sergeant walked over to the guy, and I turned away to tend to something else.
The next thing I heard was music. In complete contempt for his sergeant, the guy had torn the earphone jack out of the transistor. The guy's contempt for his
sergeant was inadvertently reflected on me. But that did not enter into the situation. He was such a low priority to what we were doing, he just did not matter. Except that now he had become a nuisance. I called the sergeant forward.
"Go tell the son-of-a-bitch to turn off his radio within one second of your arrival," I said. "Or I will shoot him."
I watched the sergeant walk back to the boy. The boy jumped, looked at me—I gave him an extra half second—and threw the radio into the bush. He never spoke again on the mission.
I would have killed him in a totally depersonalized way. In combat, surrounded by Viet Cong, we survived largely by our discretion. This boy was risking the lives of a score of men. I gave no thought to who, what, or where he belonged. He would have gone.
&n
bsp; This boy just totally misunderstood what he was involved in. This was the immaturity in America coming out. A sort of immaturity where he believed there would always be someone there to help him out.
Highway 4 was a major tar-sealed road. The traffic we saw was unnerving: push-bikes, cars, even buses. But when it was well dark, we fell down to the highway and crossed without incident, skirting two military outposts on the way. East of the highway, we came quickly out of the hills into low-lying ground.
There we moved into a mangrove swamp which, as we marched toward China, became thicker and wetter and muddier and stinking hot. Our progress came to a standstill; in two days we made twenty miles. The mangroves were growing directly out of the water with roots and branches six inches thick entwined like balls of string. We had to hack our way through, walking on bearings because we could see no landmarks. We were on constant alert against snakes; there were two species of constrictor here large enough to drag a man into the water and drown him. There was a ming blue spider, deadly poisonous, that spun a web tough
enough to catch small birds. I spotted their webs on two occasions.
Leeches dropped on us like rain water; within an hour they had pinned my shirt to my arm, biting into the flesh through the heavy canvas. I watched their bellies fill with my blood. We were all too busy to have the privilege of burning them off, so I had to leave them or dig them out with my knife. I was desperate ... the constant nauseating sucking and swelling . . . the feeling that they were spreading malaria through my body.
Wiley let out a scream, then a series of ugly grunts as he hacked to pieces a snake entwined about his M-3. Prather's face puffed from the unceasing stream of mosquito bites until his eyes were slits. The mosquitoes went in through a rip in Morrosco's shirt and bit his arm until the swelling filled his sleeve. We smeared ourselves with a stinking yellow repellent that the insects ignored.
It was useless to stop, impossible to rest. We walked for two days with only the stale water in our canteens to quench our thirst. We listened for radio transmission on the march; the receiver refused to transmit a carrier wave. I assumed the radio was finished. Morrosco tied Wiley in a tree and changed his bandage. The night was worse than the day. Our nerves were screaming. Everything that moved was a poisonous snake. We plunged into waist-deep bogs and thought we were drowning in quicksand.
We broke out of the mangroves in midmorning onto a grassy plain. We were all sick and exhausted, but we had to force ourselves on another five miles to better cover before we could rest. We moved across a high, wind-blown plateau through ankle-deep water from which sprung a flax-like grass taller than a man's head. We took our bearings off Fan Si Pan, a vast mountain that dominated the horizon, and pushed toward Highway 132.
We crossed the plateau in the heat of the day, because we wanted to reach Highway 132 before night-
fall; it was a busy road, and we needed daylight to cut it safely. We were moving toward wild mountainous country now. Below lay a flat valley with ample cover, but we could not go down there because the Kun Ming railway line ran its length.
We moved at a staggering lope, covering the ground quickly. But we were pushing up against exhaustion. It took all our strength now to maintain schedule and the personal application we needed to stay alive . . . hell, we had been twenty-five days on the march.
We were all overtired, drawing on fast-dwindling reserves of strength. Wiley's wound grew pussy and burst open every few hours, but he would not let it slow him down. Morrosco stayed with him and worked to keep the infection under control.
Three miles short of Highway 132, our route was cut by a secondary road, a very narrow dirt path. As we approached it, we heard voices closing on us. We went to ground. A dozen North Vietnamese regulars came down the path on bicycles. We gave them a few minutes to clear, then struck off across the road in pairs, with Wiley and Morrosco in the lead. Halfway across, the two got their legs tangled and fell over. The others raced past them to take up positions in the trees, while Tan and I ran to jerk them to their feet. At that moment, two more guys came cycling down the road. They spotted us and started yelling. We ran into the undergrowth.
They must have thought there were only four of us, two wounded, because of the way we had been staggering around on the road. They took out after us, firing and yelling. We kept moving without returning their fire. Then I heard a lot more voices behind us. The first lot had heard the firing and come back. A hunt began.
They broke into the bush behind us, and we started to run. Somehow Wiley managed to keep the pace. We had a fifteen-minute lead and good cover, so there was a chance that we might slip away.
"Toliver!" Prather yelled out. "We're taking them to the road!"
Highway 132 was only half an hour ahead. If there was anybody there, we could be caught between two groups. Our pursuers were closing on us fast because Wiley could not run. Every few minutes, we heard them firing off rounds when they thought they had found us. We broke out of the trees into a small clearing. Beyond the clearing the jungle thinned toward the highway. Beyond the highway lay a range of hills. When we crested those hills, we were looking into China. We were right on the doorstep. And so close to being stopped.
"We'll take them," Toliver shouted. "Morrosco and Wiley go forward."
The two went a hundred yards down a steep slope just ahead of us. I heard the NVA pick up their pace; they were expecting to find four wounded men running down that hill ahead of them. We fanned out, with Toliver and me in front and Jackson, Prather, and Tan in a semicircle to our rear. The NVA came loping into the clearing in a tight group and ran past Toliver and me. The lead men were right on top of Tan when we all cut loose. We killed five outright before they broke out and a general fire fight started. Four rushed down the hill in a group, and Morrosco and Wiley killed them with grenades. The rest sought cover behind trees. The setup and initial impact were the only static moments in the fight; after that, we broke from cover to cover, stalking, outflanking one man, intercepting another.
When the firing started, there were three blokes moving straight on to me. One broke to my right as I was drawing a bead on him, and the others turned off to my left. I killed the first, but the other two, instead of seeking cover, circled and rushed me on my blind side. I heard movement and spun around to find one coming down on me. Lying on my back, I stuck the barrel of my Armalite at him and fired.
He was four feet from me when the round carried him away. The second man was standing directly over me now. He leapt at me. I fired and missed. He grabbed the barrel of the.carbine and twisted it out of my hands, then rolled to his side. Before I could recover, he drew a bead on me with his weapon. At that moment, Toliver came over the top of me. The man raised his barrel and shot Toliver through the stomach.
Toliver fell on top of the man. I grabbed my weapon and killed him by sticking the barrel up under his chin and blowing his head away. I glanced around for another target. I saw Wiley in the distance strangling a man with his hands. I jumped up to help Toliver. A bullet slammed into my hip and bowled me over. I went down, but kept shooting. Bullets were flying everywhere. I knew I was hit, but I felt no pain, just an enormous amount of strength. I felt I could do anything at that moment, like a man running from a bull who would vault a wall he normally could not climb. Adrenaline was racing through me. My gun was jumping around in my hands and firing at targets faster than I could recognize them. I saw two break for Prather. Tan brought one down, but the second put a bullet into Tan that knocked him over backward. The man kept running, and I lost sight of him. There was total confusion: bullets flying, people fighting everywhere with guns and knives. Gradually the noise abated. We had killed the lot.
I examined my wound. The bullet had entered from the front, bounced off my pelvis, and exited out the back. It had stayed near the surface and ripped a trench of flesh as it moved across my body. I was bleeding profusely but still feeling no pain. I stood gingerly on my feet. I could walk, so my pelvis was intact.
two fell, locked in each other's arms. The guy was full of holes, a dead man, but he would not give himself up to death. The man grabbed Prather's throat, then tore at his face. He twisted one hand in Prather's hair and pulled his head back. Prather managed to get his weapon up between them and blew the man off him. It was a gruesome end to a scene of tremendous violence. Tan sat slumped on the ground, his right arm hanging at his side. No one was moving.
"Sound off!" I shouted.
All answered but Toliver. I ran back to where he had been lying. He was gone.
"Vic! Vic!" I shouted.
"He's here!" I heard Wiley reply.
He had managed to walk down the hill to Wiley and Morrosco before collapsing. I ran to join them.
Toliver had been so close when he took the round that his body had muffled the roar of the weapon. One look told me he was dying. His stomach had been blown open; half of it was hanging out the back. My knees gave way. Suddenly I knew how much I wanted him to live. And it had to happen like this. I had been staring at the bullet that would have killed me, and Toliver had taken that bullet.
He was conscious and writhing in agony. Morrosco filled him with morphine and stuffed the entrance wound with gauze pads. There was no way to avoid infection with the exit wound; Morrosco shoved Toliver's entrails back inside him and bound his back with gauze and tape. We put half a dozen penicillin tablets under his tongue. The morphine took effect quickly, and Toliver's ugly cries subsided to soft moaning. I turned to the others.