by Gayle Rivers
Only Tan showed no sign of jubilation. He had not spoken since we crossed the border. His actions seemed to say that what we had accomplished in the past three and a half weeks was nothing; success could be measured only by tomorrow's results. Two months earlier, a mission such as ours would have been more
fantasy than Tan's pragmatic nature could allow itself. Now he stood a day away from the crowning achievement of a lifetime. Until it happened, Tan would hold on to the suspicions and distrust that were the essence of the man's character. I knelt beside the solemn Korean. We waited quietly.
The others clowned about for fifteen minutes, then grew quiet again, looking slightly sheepish for the way they had carried on. They waited for marching orders.
"Let's go, guys," I said.
We headed out overland and climbed toward our final campsite; from there we would move to the impact zone the following morning for mission-complete. Had we reached our final rendezvous on schedule, we would have had thirty-six hours to rest, reconnoiter, and prepare our gear for the hit. Now we were being given half a day; we would push out during the night to cross the rail line and penetrate the outer security ring in darkness. By sunup we would be in position. We could not scout the impact zone in advance because of the risk of exposure.
We climbed all day without seeing the security patrols we had anticipated. We were often moving over open land, totally exposed to observer aircraft, but we never saw a single plane. If a plane had gone overhead, we would have scrambled for cover, but it would have been little more than a formality; there was no hiding from the camera. Infrared film would have picked up our body heat.
We crested the range in midafternoon. On the far side, we all pushed forward to the edge of a narrow cliff that dropped sharply away beneath us. For days we had been moving through a landscape as deserted as the far side of the moon. Now all of China was spread before us. The land was gentler; stretching away below us lay a low sweeping valley carpeted with rice fields. A dozen villages scattered across the valley were joined by a network of roads that buzzed with activity. The Kun Ming railway line ran along the valley floor
before disappearing into a great chain of mountains to the northwest. I saw Ta shu tang on the far side of the valley, propped up against the first steep hill.
Suddenly I felt a cold wind against my face. I saw rain clouds approaching from the north. We retreated from the precipice and sought a campsite. We were above eight thousand feet; wind and rain had eroded great chunks of the mountain, exposing huge boulders. We secured ourselves within a circle of rocks surrounded by heavy vegetation.
I set to ensuring that every man was ready for the job. As much as anything else, we needed rest. The bit of hysteria at the river had alarmed me slightly, but I remained confident of the unit's ability to perform. We had proved ourselves pretty well capable of doing what we set our minds to. Once the job was done ... it was no longer terribly important to me that we got back. But were we fit to carry it off? I took a mental inventory. I had lost a lot of blood, and my hip was causing me great pain. But I could shoot, and I could fight, and probably even run for my life if necessary. My neck and eyelids were swollen from mosquito bites, but that was more a discomfort than a handicap. I had localized infection in my arms where I had dug leeches with the point of my knife; penicillin was keeping that under control. My head was gashed from a fall or fight, and one ear was covered with a scab which bled profusely if I picked it. All the hard points—skull, fingers, elbows, knees—were raw and lacerated. But for the hip, I was in more or less the condition in which I had expected to arrive.
Morrosco and Jackson were in far better shape than the rest of us; they were more or less whole. Prather's hand was holding together, so he was not bad off. We were all dehydrated, and Prather more than the rest of us; no matter how much water we drank, we never quenched our thirst now, and we were all taking salt tablets regularly. Wiley's wound was infected but not gangrenous. He was in constant pain and could maintain the pace now only with Benzedrine. He used it
sparingly, afraid of the time when it would let him down. Tan was in reasonable shape considering his wound. He was in constant pain, but he had a way of overcoming pain through sheer will power; he locked it outside his consciousness. It was either that or morphine or letting the pain drive him crazy. Tan wanted the hit too much for the latter two.
The unit was in better shape than it looked. Our uniforms were like stiff cardboard that rubbed the flesh raw at the neck, under the arms, between the legs. We had long since discarded underwear, and the outergarments were in tatters. We had tried to repair them when we stopped for more than an hour, but those times had been precious few.
Prather was the most domesticated of us all; he had even sewn while we waited for Toliver to die. Now he was stitching Morrosco's fatigues; Morrosco was useless at it. I had been watching a deep depression creep over Morrosco. Toliver's death had hit him very hard, and he had not found the strength to refocus his attention on the mission.
"Who's scared besides me?" he said suddenly.
No one spoke.
"Don't any of you guys give a shit about getting killed?" he said.
"Just shut up," Jackson said.
"What do you think the security guard will be? I bet there'll be two hundred of them."
"Knock it off, Morrosco," I said.
"I know you, Rivers," he said, "you don't give a fuck if you live or die."
"Knock it off. That's an order."
"Kiss my ass."
"Go reconnoiter the site," I said, handing him my glasses.
He was right. Dying did not bother me. I did not care. I had come into this war bitter; the more I was involved, the more bitter I grew. I wanted to live, but there was no priority in making a big thing of it.
Dying I could accept. Capture, never. The possibility
had arisen more than once. I was never aware of making a conscious decision against it. The day arrived when I knew I would never hang by the heels in a village square or be paraded before the television cameras in Hanoi. -
I was in a large party working just south of the seventeenth parallel. We were creating a diversion to cover a major drive by the Seventh Airborne. We blew two bridges and a railway link, and on the return to our pickup point, we stumbled over a Viet Cong arms cache hidden in a tunnel. We decided to lengthen the mission to ambush the VC when they came for the arms. Six Viet Cong turned up, but most of them survived our ambush and got down the tunnel. They would not surface, so we knew they were retreating through the tunnel, which could stretch for miles underground. Half a mile away, they blew the tunnel out— probably by accident—and tried to escape into the jungle. Two other guys and I went after them. We ran smack into a battalion of North Vietnamese regulars. One of our guys was killed immediately, and the second got his side ripped open by automatic fire. He could walk, so I fought a rearguard action to cover his retreat. I got pinned down against a cliff.
I had only my shotgun, so I could not kill them at a distance. They closed on me and began to rush me in small parties. I was low on ammunitiion and saw myself being sieged out. I was under tremendous pressure, but my mind was problem-solving like a computer. And the final answer was complete contempt for the enemy; I would fight with my knife and my gun butt and take as many as I could with me. I would die fighting.
If these guys had stayed their distance, my ammunition would soon have been gone. But they had no way of knowing that, or how far away my relief was. So they sent in suicide parties of five at a time. I killed three in the first rush, but two guys got through to me. One was five feet from me when he went down, and
the second hit me on the shoulder with his rifle just as I blasted him with the shotgun. Now I had two automatic weapons and plenty of ammunition.
A few minutes later, five more guys popped up and tore off in my direction. It is hard to believe, but the only thing in their favor was their numbers. They were firing on the run, with their weapons on automatic, hit
ting everything but me. They were not coming straight on, but weaving about as they closed; experience had taught me to recognize that the inside men would not swing outside the flankers, so as soon as I saw how wide the flankers were going, I knew the extent of the weave pattern. It became a process of elimination. I shot the first one through the neck, and he somersaulted backward. It was very dramatic and off-putting for the others. They hesitated long enough for me to hit the second one. After that, they were too close for anything but open sighting. The last one was ten feet from me when I gave him a bullet through the upper chest. Before they could regroup, I broke out and fought my way back to the unit.
Morrosco was gone ten minutes, then returned and sat on the ground, saying nothing. I sent each man on his own to look at the target area. It was a way of restoring mission purpose, of reminding them what we were there for, of eliminating any residual doubts about the rationale of what we were going to do. It kept Morrosco's self-indulgence from spreading to the others.
I took the glasses from Wiley and went to look for myself. What I saw this time really took my breath away; I had failed to take it in with that first brief glance. The valley was literally filled with peasants: working the rice paddies, driving ox carts, pedaling bikes along the roads, washing in the streams, repairing the railway line. Getting to Ta shu tang unobserved was preposterous. Like sneaking across Paris or London without being seen. I began to panic. The mission
cannot be done, I said to myself. But that was what we had fought a month for, what Toliver had died for. It had to be done.
I needed to collect my thoughts, to be positive I was getting it right. I found myself wishing Toliver were there with me. Then the mission went straight out of my mind; suddenly I was thinking about people a million miles away, times I had spent in another world. But the reflections had a dreamlike quality, as if ours was the only real world, that other world outside was only fantasy. I glanced at my watch. It was 1512 hours. I returned to the campsite. "Lew," I said, "switch on the radio."
Prather fished it out of Tan's pack, switched it on, and set it against a rock. It was just 1515 hours. A very strong sense of purpose began coursing through my veins. I untied the Sahka from its pouch and laid it carefully on the ground, then knelt in front of it. Very slowly I pulled back the waterproof wraps and stripped them from the gun case until it lay exposed on the ground. I flipped the top open. The Sahka lay like a virgin on a velvet couch. I wiped my hands on my fatigues, then lifted the stock from the leather case. I looked at my watch again. The minute hand had passed the half hour. No one could recall us now. I began assembling the Sahka. I would carry it whole into the hit zone.
Wiley sat slumped on the ground next to me, resting against his pack. He had stripped off his shirt and bandages and was prodding his wound tentatively while waiting for Morrosco to dress it. Jackson squatted nearby, assembling his rockets. Prather watched Morrosco as he fussed with Tan's shoulder.
Tan had not broken his silence, nor was he reacting to the pain of having his wound cleaned and bandaged. It was as if his whole life had been directed toward this mission, toward the momentary fury to come. Now I had taken his target away from him. Our wasted condition, the accumulation of wounds—even more, Toliver's death—had robbed Tan of his instinct for
survival. I had seen it seeping from him. I had seen it because he and I were much alike, except that Tan was not so good at hiding it as I was. We needed Tan. I had a sudden inspiration. If we could strap his arm tightly enough to put him back on the line, he might care enough to stay alive. Just as I rose to take a look, Prather turned to me.
"You'd best come look at this arm," he said.
I laid the Sahka down and joined them. As Morrosco slowly turned Tan's arm with his hands, I heard the deep sound of bone grating against bone. Tan winced. Sweat was pouring from his face. I squatted beside him. Prather read my thoughts.
"He can't go into the firing line like this," he said. "He can't hold a weapon."
"Can you wrap this arm up where we can tie a weapon to it?" I asked Morrosco.
"I don't think he'll be any good with it, but Til try."
"Get the heavy tape, and well see what we can do."
Morrosco walked over to the medical kit and rummaged through it. I broke open my own medical pack and took out a syringe of morphine. Suddenly Morrosco began to shout wildly. "That's it! That's it!"
"Hurry up," I snapped.
"That's it!" he shouted again, his voice more frantic than before.
"That's what?" I asked, turning on my haunches.
Morrosco held the radio in both hands, his arms extended to their full length in front of him. He was staring at the face of the radio. His eyes were wild.
"Abort! Abort! It's abort!"
Then I heard it too. Soft and steady.
CHAPTER 13
My first reaction was to glance at my watch. It was 1550 hours.
"It's too late! They're five minutes too late!" I shouted, scrambling to my feet. "They can't send it now! It's too late!"
"It's three days too late," said Prather.
We had all run and gathered around the radio, staring at it as if expecting it to talk. Everyone was babbling at once. I told them to shut up. The message kept coming without a break, "v . . . e" repeated three times, then three "v's" followed by three "e's." I suddenly realized we did not know how long it had been broadcasting; we had forgotten about the radio after 1530 hours, forgotten to turn it off. They could have been broadcasting for twenty minutes now. They knew I we had received the message by the built-in automatic response transmitter which indicated our receiver was r functioning. But they were going to keep on sending it as long as we would listen. I
"Shut it off!" I shouted. i
I grabbed the radio and smashed it against a rock. It bounced once and landed at my feet. I jumped on it with my boots. It flew apart; the others joined me, wildly stamping the pieces into the dirt, kicking them into the bush.
Wiley looked at his watch. "It's 1555. If they've been broadcasting at us for twenty-five minutes, every Chinaman in China knows we're here, mates."
The first signal would have been picked up on Chinese radio monitors, and they would immediately have started looking for a receiver. If we had received no more than what we had been promised—eight or ten seconds of transmission—they could not have pinpointed us within five hundred miles; they would have had precious little time to name the province we were in. Given three minutes, they could put us inside a hundred-mile radius. In twenty minutes they would know which rock to look under. Someone flying high in a plane somewhere south of here knew we were receiving, but he held his finger on a button. And signed the death warrant for six men.
"It's a trick. A phony signal."
"We've been set up. Double-crossed."
"Maybe the radio picked up somebody else's signal. Maybe it wasn't for us," Morrosco said, looking around anxiously for encouragement.
"It's a sell-out. We've been fingered for the Chinks."
A feeling of betrayal spilled out in a jumble of confused words, as if it had been on all our minds for days, and we had been afraid to speak.
"Toliver!" I said. " 'A game,' he said. What was he trying to tell us?"
"That motherfucker led us into a trap!" screamed Morrosco.
Everyone began to shout at once, oblivious that we were standing on a hillside a day's march into China. Tan's eyes welled with tears. My stomach was so knotted I had difficulty breathing. I started trying to think the problem through.
"Slow down," I said. "Let's try to think."
"It's simply impossible. Impossible," Prather re- l peated, shaking his head. 3
"You know who it was. It's that son-of-a-bitch in •■ the raincoat," said Jackson. "The one with the pictures. 'Photos,' he said. 'Prime targets/ He's conned us. '-Well, I'm gonna con his ass with a fucking grease gun."
Morrosco turned his head from side to side, then ] revolved on his feet two or three times, as if
he might J find the answer somewhere behind him. Finally he I slumped to the ground by his pack. Very deliberately, he beat his head against the rocket platform. Tears were pouring from his eyes.
"I got to die," he said, "because somebody's playing games."
Tan began to speak in Korean, then his voice rose ^ to a tirade. "I'm going anyway," he said. "I'm going." j
Jackson ran to the edge of the hill.
"Better look out, you motherfuckers! We're coming q after you!"
"I'll go with you," Wiley said to Tan. "No, let's get ; the hell out of here." He paused. "I wanted that signal 80 badly a week ago; you'll never know how much I wanted it. I've been scared shitless for two weeks. All j I wanted was to go home. And now it's come, and it ( means nothing except that we're sure to get killed. I r don't know who I want to kill."
"You don't want the cheese no more, do you?" -Jackson said to Wiley. "You just want out of the ] trap. Well, I tell you what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna f kill all them fuckers at that conference table, and then I'm going back to Bien Hoa and kill all them fuckers ] there. And I might just kill the motherfucking■ President of the United States. I put eighteen years J in this man's army. They ain't selling me cheap."
"It's the U. S. Army," Prather said. "My govern- k ment would be no party to this."
"What difference does it make? You're dead, pal."
My mind was reeling. It was back to the briefings, and things began to click in place. The chain of com-
mand had been so vague. We had been promised no abort after Laos but ordered to listen for it. Who had sent us in? What was their authority? And what were the consequences if we did carry on? I felt like a pilot in Strategic Air Command, racing toward my target and suddenly starting to think that a technical fault might have put me in the air. Maybe we had become more important than the people who had sent us in. Our orders were specific. Abort. Any decision to disobey that order was mine now. If we all died doing it, we could blame no one but ourselves.