by Gayle Rivers
We were a ghastly sight. Tan's right shoulder was a mess. A bullet had entered just above the collar bone and exited through the shoulder blade, shattering it. He was suffering great pain with stoic detachment. Prather's back was covered in blood where a ricochet had split the skin open from waist to shoulder. It was more messy than serious, however. Morrosco
bound my hip. The pain was increasing by the second, but I would still walk. Wiley's wound was forgotten. He was one of the whole ones now.
"We've got to get out of here," Toliver mumbled.
"What are you talking about?" Wiley said. "You can't move."
"Don't worry," Toliver said. "I'll move. Let's get in those hills."
Morrosco finished his rushed repairs, and we started off with Jackson carrying Toliver on his back. We had not moved fifty feet before Toliver began screaming; he could not stand the pressure against his body. We chopped two limbs and thrust them under his arms. We started running off down the hill with Jackson and Morrosco on the poles. Toliver dragged his feet behind him .
We were like a wolf running from a pack of dogs. We knew instinctively that safety lay in the solitude of the hills ahead. We crossed the highway quickly but not carelessly. Our cover had been blown; we no longer had the luxury of going around people. We were prepared to shoot our way through anything that stood in our path.
We had suffered total exposure. Not our identity, because we left no one alive. But we were exposed sufficiently not to bother with regaining our cover. We had to hope there would be no intelligence interpretation at a regional level of our destination and purpose. With a little luck, the reports might go no higher than an area commander who would take us for a Green Beret insurgency unit or downed pilots. The last thing he would expect would be that we were going to China. He would not know about the conference anyway. He would be aware of increased security; nothing more. So we told ourselves.
Toliver went in and out of consciousness as we moved. He was bleeding internally and losing a lot of blood from his nose. Death had its impact when it was this close. We had been a unit for so long. A feeling of great despair swept through us that one of
us was going to go. We knew that Toliver would die soon. No one said so. But we knew. And he knew.
We were moving very fast, and Toliver was in tremendous pain. I was not feeling my wound, even when my boots filled with my blood. Tan too seemed to be feeling no pain, though his arm hung useless at his side; we had not had time to strap it up. We were in a hell of a state . . . seven guys, half carrying, half pushing one another alone . . . parts of us hanging off ... a lot of blood ... a lot of bone.
We went into a river and walked straight into a five-man patrol. Prather and Wiley ran in among them, firing from the hip, and killed them all in seconds. Wiley took out two with one third of a clip. With his M-3 on automatic, he had the presence of mind to regulate his fire. They were both dead in a second and a half. We dragged the bodies into the bush and stripped them of two AK-47s with ample ammunition. We were running short of automatic fire, though I had plenty of ammunition for my shotgun. The AK-47 was a good weapon, light and rapid-firing. We all knew how to use it.
We pushed into the hills up a riverbed with high cliffs on both sides. The cliffs leveled out, and we found ourselves on a flat plain rising to the north. We turned to look where we had come from. It was a fantastic sight. The road was now far below us. We could see a river in the distance where it cut a sharp line through the jungle foliage. Far off to our left, the three peaks of Fan Si Pan hovered over the landscape.
We forced-marched up the plateau for another three hours until we had passed the village of Yang Ma Sin Tiay, then rested for a quarter of an hour. It was growing late in the day, but we were not yet safe. We had to push on as quickly as possible. Wiley and Morrosco worked feverishly over Toliver. It was hopeless. But, hell, you don't stop saving a man's life until he is dead. I watched silently, then walked away from the others and gazed at the mountains ahead.
When I saw the two men, exhausted and ragged, trying desperately to push life back into Toliver's depleted body, it hit me like the bullet that had slammed into my side. For once in my life, I felt love for a man. A very courageous man, a good man who had almost made brothers of us all. And now he was going to die because he had saved my life.
The mission purpose was sorely diminished to my mind, if it was going to cost the lives of men like Toliver. I would be in charge when he died, and maybe there was nothing more important than getting these men back alive.
But I was still a soldier. And I was in command now. We were a military unit, the best around. We had a purpose, a mission which must be accomplished at the price of any of us. Or all of us. Toliver was going to die. I had to think beyond that. I called Prather over to me, more sharply than I intended.
"We've got to change the firing line, Lew," I said.
"I don't think Tan will be up to it," he said. "We've got a lot of reorganizing to do."
"We'll go through the entire thing with the unit when we break for the night," I said.
"Gayle," said Prather, "you know what Toliver means to Tan. And his target. When he finds out he's out of the firing line, he may wipe himself out up there."
"We need him," I said. "I'll talk to him."
We were joined by Jackson.
"Toliver is almost dead," he said. "He doesn't have much time."
We pushed on at once, climbing for an hour until we found a protected spot. We lay Toliver on his groundsheet and waited. His eyes were open, but he could not see us unless we bent near his face. His mind floated on a cloud of pain, morphine, and approaching death.
"Lew," he said.
Prather knelt beside him.
"I have a son. He doesn't know I'm going to die
on a hillside in North Vietnam. I hope he gets more out of life than this. There's got to be more. There must be. Hold me, Gayle."
I put his head in my lap and cradled him in my arm. He tried to speak, but coughed and convulsed, and blood spilled from the corner of his mouth. Morrosco was crying and trembling.
"You're not dying, Vic," he said. "I won't let you die. We need you."
There was only ten years between them, but Toliver had become the father Morrosco had always wanted, and now he was losing him. The daddy of us all, perhaps. Morrosco sounded like a small boy when he tried to speak. Jackson found himself driven away; he would come and stand by Toliver for a few moments, then drift to the edge of the clearing, then come back again. Tan sat quietly watching. Prather spoke softly, humoring the dying man, pretending he would live. Wiley was in despair.
I felt sick of the whole damn thing. It seemed almost unnatural. One man dying in a unit like this, where we had all seen so much death, where any one of us could have died, and we were breaking up. But Toliver was just the wrong man to die. We had all been damned good soldiers on the first day, and we knew it. But he had brought us together and made us close, led us and fought alongside us and made us into a body of men who belonged together.
Then something very strange happened. Toliver wanted to tell me something. He would start to speak, then a look of despair, of total frustration would pass across his face. He would stop himself by grabbing my hair and clutching at my hand. A minute passed in silence, and he began to talk about the outside world. After so many days on the march, we had forgotten there was an outside world. He reminded us that it still existed, and that it was worth staying alive for.
For one moment, he became a soldier again. He broke orders, passing the command to me, naming Prather as second-in-command. He tried to talk about
China, but he did not have the strength. He convulsed again, and his mouth filled with blood. I tilted his head to let the blood run away.
"Win the game . . . game . . . Pat. . . Pat, I'm here, sweetheart ... get Giap no matter what . . . you're a good boy, Gayle . . . don't let it get to you . . . don't forget there's an outside . . . why did it have to be you? . . . oh, yes . . . go hom
e . . . let's all go home ... get my bag, Pat ... I love you all . . . don't let it make you hate . . . I'm coming, Pat . . . where are the tickets? ... give me the tickets ..."
He raised his head and reached out with his hand. And he died.
CHAPTER 12
It took me five minutes to accept that Toliver was dead. Then I set about doing the things that had to be done. It was very dehumanizing, having to bury him as we did. He would not have a grave, just a hole in the ground on an unnamed hill in Vietnam.
We tore some gorse loose from the soil, then worked in shifts for two hours, digging with our hands and rifle butts. Prather clipped Toliver's dog rag to his beret. He laid the beret beneath his chin and spread the cloth over his face. We wrapped the body in a groundsheet and lowered it into the ground. We pushed the soil and rocks back and covered the raw earth with shrubbery. Tan knelt beside the grave. He rocked from side to side and sang softly in Korean. Morrosco sobbed tearlessly. The rest of us waited in silence.
An hour later, we snapped back to reality. We had allowed ourselves that indulgence, and now it was time to stop. The loss of Toliver only a day from China could not have come at a worse psychological moment.
We put our emotions and anxieties into cold storage and went back to work.
There was an immediate transition of command without a hitch. Toliver's leadership had been very diplomatic, almost democratic. It would stay that way; we would function as a co-operative, but no one doubted I was chairman of the board.
I turned my attention to Tan, whose arm was in a terrible mess. He insisted he could still hit his primary target, firing with his one good arm, but that was out of the question. Prather and I walked a short distance from the others and worked out a new plan for the hit. We would attempt to strap Tan's arm so that he could hold a weapon. Tan stayed in the firing line, but I took his primary target. Prather took Toliver's primary targets. Tan, Prather, and I would then get as many secondary targets as we could. It was not satisf actory, but short two men, the best I could do.
Morrosco did a quick but effective patch-up of Tan's shoulder, strapping the upper arm tightly to his chest but leaving the forearm free. While he tended to other i various wounds, we redistributed the gear. I took the mapping case and Toliver's carbine and night scope; : Prather took Tan's adapted M-3 and gave Tan his j own. This gave Prather a better sniping weapon, and i Tan could hip-shoot. We spread the balance of Toliver's and Tan's gear across the unit. Jackson and Wiley ! carried the AK-47s. We were overloaded with weapons, i but we would need everything we could carry. We ' broke camp quickly and headed for the border. Dawn was approaching.
We listened for the abort signal en route the previous afternoon. Radio failure in the swamps must have been due to atmospheric condition, because we were now able to raise a carrier wave. No abort had been transmitted. As we were a day behind schedule, our command would place us in China, reconnoitering ' the hit zone from our final campsite. The conference was scheduled to open on the next morning.
We came down a steep incline, slipping and sliding in the darkness toward a tributary stream we knew would carry us to the border at the Red River. We moved through dense jungle; strange trees grew out of the sides of the cliffs and then shot upward into mushrooms of foliage. In places the decline became so steep that we had to lower the gear by hand. Storm clouds choking the valley below dissipated as we descended. We reached the tributary stream about twelve miles from its junction with the Red River. We eased off the bank and waded downstream in waist-deep water. A land route would have been less demanding, but the steep riverbanks gave us some cover from aerial surveillance. We walked all day without seeing anyone and reached the Red River in late afternoon. We went into hiding and waited for nightfall.
Though we stood on the threshold of China—the river was the dividing line between China and North Vietnam—we had a difficult march ahead before we touched Chinese soil. Our route at the Red River was like a half of a swastika; we had joined the river from the south by a tributary stream; now we would turn northwest along its bank for five miles before crossing over and leaving the river via another tributary that joined the far shore. Our crossing point would be a shallow stretch at approximately twenty-two degrees, forty minutes north by one hundred and three degrees, forty minutes east. Ta shu tang lay fifteen miles to the north.
Night fell, and we moved into the river. We had two small villages to pass—Coc My on the Vietnamese side of the river and Po Dai on the opposite shore— both very small but centers for patrol activity along the border. Running the length of the Chinese bank of the river was a major tar-sealed highway which was our last geographical barrier before the railway line at Ta shu tang. We saw lights and cooking fires in both villages but slipped past in the darkness without incident.
We moved with extreme caution, traveling by signal and a minimum of whispered commands. I felt as if China could pluck us out of the river and destroy us at any moment. We had to traverse some rough vegetation; when we slipped or banged our weapons, the sound seemed to carry for miles. We saw people on the road; we went to ground half expecting them to start shouting. A frogman had once talked to me of planting limpet mines on enemy ships. It was impossible that he had not been seen; there must have been so many eyes watching the water, it was impossible that he could escape observation. Yet somehow, he got away with it. I felt the same now; how dare we walk the Chinese border with such impunity?
A feeling almost of devilment came over me. We were a wee flea on the back of the giant, and the giant could not find us. The initial fear—if it was fear; I am not quite sure how to define fear, because I am not sure I have experienced it—our original anxiety was mingled with mounting excitement. I was suddenly feeling very clever. Cheeky. We were sneaking into China. We had worked so hard to get here that our accomplishment had a slight sense of unreality about it. When we got safely past the Chinese village, we relaxed a bit.
"You know," said Wiley, "we've been so long on the road, the whole world may have been blown up by now, and we'd know nothing about it."
"If that has happened, our little pin prick ain't worth much," said Jackson.
China, just three hundred yards across a muddy river, brought the uniqueness of our accomplishment into dramatic focus. Our isolation was complete. Absolute. We had all been behind the lines many times, but this was something different. We were in the lion's mouth now.
It took us all night to cover the five miles in the river. People wandered along the shore, came down to the river, pushing us against the bank in water up to
our waists. We struggled over fallen trees, hid from the occasional fishing boat.
At last we came opposite the tributary stream on the far shore that would lead us into the mountains. We crossed over quickly before dawn and struck north after passing under a road bridge. We left the stream at a meander, rejoining it a mile farther on. The sun was just rising. We were in China. We had only to scale the mountain before us to look down upon our target. We were thirty hours behind schedule. The conference would open in twenty-four hours.
By the time we rejoined the stream, we were beginning to feel secure. We stopped instinctively and looked behind us. We were on a gently rising plateau, with Vietnam spread beneath us reaching out to the horizon; I had the feeling I could see all the way to Hanoi. Ahead lay a string of mountains, behind those a second string capped in snow. Around us the landscape was lit by the morning sun into a hundred shades of brilliant green severed by the white chalk of the riverbed.
"We'll break here," I said.
We stripped off our gear and lay it on the ground. For a long time, we just stared at one another.
"This is it, pal," Morrosco said. "This is the big C."
I picked up a stone, juggled it in my hand, and threw it as hard as I could into the water. It was all I could think to do. I was heaving with emotions I could not identify. Most of all I felt a sense of achievement. One by one, I saw the men's faces break into grins. Only T
an remained composed. I grinned with them and threw another stone. Jackson let out a whoop and jumped on a pile of loose boulders. They collapsed under him. He picked himself up, laughing.
"I always figured I'd end up breaking rocks in China," he said.
"If we muff it tomorrow," said Morrosco, "half of America will be here breaking rocks."
"Shut up and give me a ride," Wiley shouted. He
leapt up on Morrosco's back. Using his hand as a whip, he drove Morrosco across the river. On the far shore, he jumped down.
"I've always wanted to ride an ass into China," he shouted.
Morrosco threw a rock at Wiley. I was skipping stones on the water when I heard Prather behind me. I turned to look. He was standing on a huge boulder, his arms outstretched, his face toward China.
"A soldier told Pelopidas," he recited, " 'We are fallen among the enemies.' Said he, 'How are we fallen among them more than they among us?'" Prather bowed and, with a flourish, offered Morrosco his perch. Morrosco scrambled up alongside the older man.
"Confucius say, 'Woman who puts carrots and pees in same pot very unsanitary.' "
We were making too much noise, but I did not care. Our bodies were physically rejecting stress that had been accumulating since we pushed off from Thailand. The tension dammed up in us all had reached a bursting point with Toliver's death; now we were sluicing them off in a childish, almost hysterical way. We must have looked half mad, but it was harmless fun, so I let it go. I felt like banging my head against a rock, I wanted so desperately to release all the feelings bottled up inside me. My mind was racing. What the hell were we doing here? How could we expect to get away with it? How much more can we take? But we had gotten away with it. Here we were in China. Mission conclusion was a day away. I had almost a panicky feeling. I had so much to say and no way to express it. I let them play. We laughed and wrestled and jabbered away. And nothing was said.