The Five Fingers

by Gayle Rivers

  Prather was the worst hit. The bullet had entered in a downward angle by the left side of his neck and exited through the back of his left shoulder; the wound was remarkably similar to Tan's, but on the othr arm, and Prather had no broken bone. I was surprised to find Prather conscious. A wound like his usually brought on shock, but I was getting a continuing education in what a body could take. Tan went to work on Prather while Jackson looked me over.

  The bullet had not hit me until it had gone through everything in my pack. It had ripped out the canvas

  bottom and scattered my belongings all over the jungle before tearing more or less harmlessly along my back. The grenade had done far more damage. I had caught a lot of shrapnel and was bleeding heavily from my torso. Jackson saw the condition of the pack and immediately thought I had been back-shot. He started I cutting frantically at my pack straps.

  "Piss off, Jackson," I said. "I'm all right!" I tried to sit up, and keeled over. He tore my shirt up to the collar.

  "Shut up, Kiwi," he said, "I'm in charge here." There were a score of tiny metal shards in my side, i plus one flat piece about the size of a penny match I box which fortunately had hit me on the flat. I had a I couple of cracked ribs, and my side felt as if glass! splinters had been driven into it, but I was far more I concerned about directing our defense than what had i happened to me. I was waiting for another wave of these guys.

  "These pieces have to come out," Jackson said, probing my side.

  "For Christ's sake, no morphine!" He accepted my plea. I could only survive another charge if I was not doped. He rolled me onto my back, and I tried to sit up again and could not. He took four pieces out of me with the point of his knife. I did not scream. I wanted to, but there was a sense of urgency here that did not allow me the luxury of succumbing to my pain.

  Pain was not new to me. The first time I got hit had been bad. But after a year in combat, I had almost grown to disbelieve that my body could be immobilized. I remembered Toliver. Half his stomach had been hanging out, and he had marched into the mountains. If we had been under normal combat conditions with a helicopter eight minutes away, Toliver would have lived. A new boy would have died five times over. It was a matter of what you knew and what you wanted.

  A GI—he was just a young kid—had taken a

  grenade very near his body. His flak jacket had been ripped off his back, and his eyes were bleeding because of burst blood vessels.

  The boy was crying, and we were gathered around him; a medic held him in his arms. We were trying to convince him that he was all right, just hang on, the choppers are on their way. The kid started going through this ritual of dying as the Church had taught him to do. He took a cross from around his neck and held it trembling in his hands, and he fumbled blindly in his shirt until he found a picture of his mother. He kissed the photo and asked for the last rites. And he died.

  The medic started crying and he looked up and said, "When they die as easy as that, what can you do?" This kid became another statistic because he thought it was his time. He had come to Vietnam, and he knew he would not see home again. He should never have been sent off in the first place. Kids like that have lived such a sheltered existence—community, Church, family—they know nothing about survival. When a man is praying, he is dying.

  This kid had the Church around his neck. He ripped it off, and it took him three minutes to die.

  Tan came to assure me Prather was all right. The arm was useless, so Tan had stuffed the wound with wadding, strapped the arm to Prather's side to stop the bleeding, and shot it full of morphine. Morrosco bandaged my chest tightly, and I found my feet. We policed the area on the run.

  The NVA were all dead. The battlefield looked like hell. People being shot at point-blank made a terrible sight. The bodies on the road were grotesque . . . limbs blown off ... stomachs ripped open....

  We got another AK-47 off an officer and twenty magazines from his two carriers. The rest had been carrying a sort of Lee Enfield we did not bother with. Morrosco scanned the bag on the road; when he was satisfied it was not booby-trapped, he ripped it open. Nothing but personal effects. Jackson kicked one man

  out of his shirt and slipped it over his own torn one. In ration pouches we found rice, and hard sausage, and a soft doughy bread, a few large gritty sugar cubes like coconut fudge.

  We counted twelve bodies. These men had belonged to a larger unit that could not be too far away. The others took Prather's gear and mine, and we ran. Prather was not used to carrying wounds. He was sweating from shock, but he refused to be carried; this was his way of overcoming the wound psychologically. But he was obviously in agony. I was in terrible pain myself now. This had been a hell of a fight. All fights were messy. But in ten minutes, there had been half a dozen occasions when we should have all been wiped out. It did not happen. All I could think was Jesus, why hadn't it happened?

  It was almost night. We hit the trail for half an hour, left it for the river, then set out on a direct bearing for M Ngoi, ten miles away.

  Though we had rested and rearmed there with impunity on mission-in, M Ngoi lay inside a Pathet Lao region only forty-five miles from North Vietnam. The village could have gone over to the Green Berets because the peasants favored the national government, or because they liked the money. Now there was little they could do about it. If they tried to turn over, the Green Berets would punish them. So would the Pathet Lao, for past transgressions. The villagers would do what they had to and keep very quiet. If a Pathet Lao unit walked in, they would get the same courteous treatment we had. The Green Berets would surface again when they left.

  The Green Beret unit might be three men, or one. He would not sit there and operate a regional headquarters. He would live with the peasants. Take to the bushes when he had to. The Pathet Lao could ambush us ten miles away, and he might not know about it, nor they about him.

  How safe was a safe village anyway? We might

  arrange a pickup from M Ngoi; the pickup point could still be thirty miles away and fighting all the way. In another village, safety could mean being hidden or simply handed a sack of rice as we passed through. Or not being shot at. Or just ignored. Small mercies, that was all we were asking. We would not walk into any village, throw our gear down, and assume we had made it.

  The ambush had put to rest any thoughts that we were being ignored by the enemy. At M Ngoi, word could go out to a few friends that we were alive. We were anxious to get there. We were sharp, but our bodies were slowing us down; it was near dawn before we closed on the village. We stopped to rest, and I sent Jackson and Wiley forward to observe. They were back in half an hour.

  "The village looks safe enough," said Wiley.

  "It looks safe, that's all I can say," said Jackson.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I don't like the feel of it."

  "Be specific," I said.

  "I can't. It's just too quiet... too perfect. .."

  "Everybody would be asleep now."

  "I'm telling you, I don't like it."

  "Well, like it or not, we've got to go in there. We need what that village can give us. We're in a fuck of a shape, Alvin. If nothing else, there's a radio in there somewhere."

  We moved off slowly, with Jackson and Morrosco at point. We were no more than two hundred yards short of the village when all hell cut loose. Bullets whistled around us. I could not see where they were coming from. We scattered and went to ground.

  "Where the hell are they?"

  "Can anybody see them?"

  The people doing the shooting were between us and the village. We had set off an ambush prematurely. There was a terrific amount of fire, but it was passing over us. I identified at least one, possibly two, Anna-

  lites. There were AK-47s, and other weapons. The firing died down, then stopped. We stayed under cover but moved close enough together to talk.

  "Did anybody see anything?"

  "How many?-"

  "At least six weapons," Tan said.
/>   "Then you can bet your ass there's twenty of them."

  Someone had fired too soon, and others had followed suit. But in any ambush, enough men would obey orders to hold their fire that I always counted two or three times as many guns as fired in the first salvo. We heard moving in the trees to our right quarter. They were trying to outflank us. Someone began shouting furiously in Laotian. Tan told me it was an officer dressing down the men who had fired. Then just shouting back and forth, covering one another as they moved, wondering where we were.

  "Tribal mercenaries," Tan said.

  "Tribal mercenaries!" I said angrily. "It's the villagers."

  "The bastards have double-crossed us," said Jackson.

  I was sure the villagers had set us up because the price on our heads had made it worth the risk. It was important to verify this, because if the villagers were being held by mercenaries, and we could free them, they would take our side. But if the village had turned over, we had no help from any quarter. I told everybody to stay together, that we were going to take the village, though I knew we were in no condition to be so bold. We were in such terrible shape that it seemed the only alternative, twenty men or no. M Ngoi was the one village in the region we could be sure had a radio. If we could not get a radio there, we had another two weeks' walk ahead of us, back to our starting point.

  I suddenly realized that no properly co-ordinated drive was being made for us, because the enemy patrols we had been meeting were not carrying radios. We had been set up at M Ngoi not because of a radio

  message out of a military command post, but because news of our ambush on the road had traveled ahead of us. If a big price had been put on our heads, the mercenaries of M Ngoi would not have told anyone else we were on our way. They would have set out quietly to get us on their own. Ten thousand dollars a head could tempt any village to turn.

  I remembered we had not found the village head we had expected at M Ngoi, nor any sign of Green Beret presence. There could be a hundred and one reasons for this, but they all led me to the conclusion that the villagers were directly involved in our ambush. My determination to get into M Ngoi was redoubled, if for nothing more than to clarify the situation. We had had a door slammed in our face, and I wanted to know who had done it. The villagers? A Pathet Lao unit? Mercenaries from elsewhere who held M Ngoi? The ambush party was still moving about noisily.

  "They're confused about where we are," Tan said.

  "Let's keep it that way," I said. "Move on out to left."

  We lagged toward higher ground, overlapping one another, while they tried to flank us on our right. We moved across a firebreak and had just faded into the trees when their lead party exposed itself behind us. They had not seen us and came carelessly into the open, where we could see their bodies silhouetted against the sky.

  "Get them," I shouted.

  We wheeled and hit them as hard as we could. We brought down several within seconds, but we received heavy answering fire from the village. The din was deafening. With fire coming in from two directions, there was nothing to do but withdraw. We struck up the hill behind us, firing every step of the way. An hour passed, and we had covered only a few hundred yards. The gray light of dawn crept over the battlefield. We could never hold our position in daylight, so we leapfrogged into higher ground. Jackson and Mor-

  rosco helped Prather along. He had been firing his M-3 quite effectively with one hand by resting the barrel on a rock or a fallen tree. The pursuing party got slightly stretched, and when the trees thinned, we pinned some of Jhem down. We pulled out of effective range. Our pursuers broke off the chase and turned into M Ngoi to join up with the people there, whom we had never seen. We were high above the village now and had good cover, but we were grossly outnumbered.

  "We can't go into M Ngoi," I said. "Do you want to use your rockets on the place, Alvin?"

  "Wouldn't do any good in the open. Don't worry, Kiwi. I'll find a use for them."

  We kept moving higher, seeking cover, distance, time to figure our next move. Our route-in had been southwest of M Ngoi. Now we were moving almost due east. We would have to keep climbing until we were clear of our pursuit, then work our way back to our original route. We climbed for three hours, the last hour over open ground which would expose any party chasing us. Then we dug in. No one appeared behind us. I spotted a Pathet Lao unit route-marching up the river toward M Ngoi. M Ngoi was being strengthened. Someone had certainly expected us there.

  "What weapons did you hear from the village?"

  "Armalites and communist."

  "Whoever is holding the village has access to American weapons. Which would have come from the Green Berets. The village has been exposed, or it has turned over. Either way, we're not going in there."

  "What do we do?"

  "We take our original route back toward the Mekong. A lot of people know about us. We expose ourselves to any friendlies, or go back to Thailand."

  "You know," said Jackson, "we got a lot of briefing on the trip up. A whole bunch of intelligence about Ta shu tang. But they didn't tell us much about the trip back, did they? Just kind of 'Get to M Ngoi, boys, and everything'll be all right.' "

  This was heard in silence. We knew that we had little to look forward to for a couple of weeks. We moved to the top of the hill and along the ridge, striking due south to follow a valley that paralleled our route-in. The ridge rose to four thousand feet; we had a clear view back to our route-in. We knew the lay of the land, so we knew what we were observing. As we continued south along the ridge, we saw several Pathet Lao units going north up the valley floor to intercept us. They had underestimated our speed and the height to which we climbed, but their presence prevented us crossing the valley and rejoining our old route. They obviously knew our route-in. The villagers at M Ngoi could have told them, or we might have been seen by enough peasants whom we had not seen to chart our route-in pretty accurately. The ridge we were following swung eastward, turning us away from familiar ground. We had no choice but to head for the Nam Suong and use it to get back to the southwest.

  The unit was in an ugly mood. Our progress was slow. Prather was in great pain, and my wounds had opened in the scramble out of M Ngoi. Morrosco was clearly worried about Prather, but he was fighting an instinct to get emotionally involved as he had with Toliver. As a consequence, he was almost brusque with the older man. With every passing day, Morrosco was becoming more the youngest brother in the family. We all recognized it; he recognized it, and he resented it. Wiley was growing up in a hurry. Things were no longer so unpredictable to him. His bravery went without question, but now he was more self-reliant, perhaps a little less concerned about his own safety.

  Even with the fresh wounds, we were by no means as washed out emotionally as we had been coming out of the swamps. We had pulled off two drastic pieces of action, and we were almost matter-of-fact about what had to be done. We were a long way from safety, but we no longer felt that anvil about our necks of being

  in China or North Vietnam. We knew how to look j out for ourselves. And we might run into help at any time.

  Physically we were weak. Particularly Prather, from delayed shock and loss of blood. We all depended on Benzedrine to keep us going, and we all knew it was a luxury we would have to pay for. We had to get back , to our route-in at any expense, because if our high . command knew we had survived, that was where they would look for us, assuming they wanted to. We were far north for helicopters, but they could send Green Berets or even mercenaries to pick us up.

  We spent a day walking the ridge before starting down to join the Nam Suong. It was not hard going, and we talked nonstop. We were all confused, not knowing what to believe, too excited to analyze with any logic the events of the past few days. The feelings of betrayal we had shared in China were resurfacing; movement against us that had once appeared unpredictable we could see going on all around us now in a very organized, methodical manner. Events began to seem more sharply defined and cut to a preordaine
d pattern. But how had the situation come to exist? We refused to blame ourselves. We felt we had done pretty well so far. Who was to blame? The people who had put us there? What was their motive? Would they give us any help?

  At the end of the day, we dropped down into the valley, onto a rich grassy plain that spread out from both banks of the river. We reached the Suong at midnight and struck camp. We would intercept our outbound route at dawn.

  I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. The wounds in my side and back were painful and growing infected. Prather was willing to keep going, but we both desperately needed rest. Everyone was tired from the pace we had been making. Tan had begun to use his shattered arm under pressure of combat, and this had allowed him to break through the pain barrier; he now started to move the arm about a bit, though it was a

  terrible mess. I told Jackson to organize a four-hour break; because of our condition, Prather and I would stand no guard duty. Jackson and Wiley took first detail. When I fell asleep, Tan and Morrosco were having an idle chat.

  I seemed to have been asleep about five minutes when the sound of firing jolted me awake. Incoming and outgoing. Jackson and Wiley were firing at targets I had not yet spotted. We hurried into our gear, strapping on packs and kits while trying to fire. By the time we had scrambled into a defensive position, I was beginning to sort things out.

  "Sound off!" I shouted.

  Everyone responded.

  "How many?"

  "Twenty. Twenty-five NVA." It was Jackson. "They're trying to sweep us on the flank. Pin us against, the river."

  They must have seen us strike camp and waited until we were quiet. But Jackson had spotted them. They were quickly closing our flank; we had to move or get pinned in. We could never survive hand-to-hand combat with these numbers. They had to move across open ground to sweep us. I waited until their flank was slightly stretched, then we hit them hard. We brought down several.