by Gayle Rivers
They spread out and decided to make camp right there all around me. One guy was no more than four' feet away. I could not change the position of my feet. < I could not exhale loudly. Within half an hour my! legs were cramping. So I began the mental therapy I that is what endurance is all about, the wiping out of the concept of time.
I started to withdraw. It was the only hope I had'
of staying alive. I cut my body off from the waist down. I forgot it was there. I had to stay alert without allowing the bottom half of my body to function in my thinking. I followed the hands of my watch. I played counting games. I composed math problems that were difficult on paper and tried to work them in my head. I thought of everything I could that was detached from human emotion. No memories. No dreams. No reflections. Nor could I let patience or boredom impose themselves upon my will. They might have impaired my judgment, taken the razor's edge off my readiness.
It was the next day before they left. I waited half an hour, then fell over on my side. I had been squatting for twenty-three hours and thirty-two minutes. My body was blue from lack of blood. I unpeeled muscles for the next five hours, screaming the entire time. I could not throw morphine into myself, because I v would have been too fucked to fight if more of these guys came along. Straightening the knees was the worst: absolute agony. And the calf muscles. It was worth all the pain. I did not die.
"You took us through a bad stretch, Kiwi," said Jackson.
"I hope next week is better than last."
"You're a hard man to climb a mountain with, mate," Wiley said.
That was their way of apologizing. We had all had to reject the state our minds and bodies had been in, otherwise we could not have stood it. Rejection needs a target, and I had been the handiest. It was as simple as that. But I needed no apologies. Their hatred had been nothing more than a mental notation for me. It was anger and temperament driving men on. I did not care how they felt about me. I had enough personal problems to make what they thought immaterial. Our predicament was my real concern. We were all preoccupied with it. There was a long conversation around the campfire, a lot of speculation about China, about the past few days, about what lay ahead.
"What I still can't make out," I said, "is what exactly happened at M Ngoi. Who set us up? Who was in the village? Damn it, if we knew that, we'd know what's happening now."
"I can't honestly say we were up against more than Pathet Lao and NVA regulars," said Morrosco.
"Those were tribal mercenaries at M Ngoi," said Tan. "Believe me."
"Even so," said Jackson, "they must have been working for the NVA. They could have obstructed our people from reaching us."
We were all hanging on to the hope that friends somewhere were trying to reach us.
"The village may not have turned," I said. "If there is enough head money on us, those mercenaries could have come halfway across the country after us. But that doesn't change the craziness of what we were sent to China for. It's that that makes me worry."
"It was the best move of the war," said Tan. "We should have done it. I know we should." f
"You didn't think it crazy when we set out," said r Prather. "It was a damned fine strategic stroke, if we'd carried it off. We're the ones who've messed it about and made it look crazy. Made it so ugly."
Prather was thinking about the children. It had remained a constant torment for him; he had been having nightmares about it, tossing and calling out in his sleep.
"We didn't make it ugly, Lew. Don't blame your- self. And as far as I'm concerned, it was absolute madness from the start, whether we recognized it or not. You can't prevent a war by killing the enemy high command. You can only start one. The question is, who are the crazies who sent us in? And what was their mandate? If we knew that, we might know what kind of support to expect."
"I don't see support coming our way from any quarter," Morrosco said. "If it was an unauthorized mission that got found out about, then they'd be happy
not to see us again. And if it was authorized, I figure we're damned if they did, and damned if they didn't."
"I can't believe a word of that," Jackson said, "but one thing's for sure. If we're being set up, they can't let the troops in the field find out. That they're hitting Americans. So we can just walk into any unit in the field, and they'll take us in."
Because of my wounds my rest was still a priority. Jackson adopted a secondary command role and detailed Morrosco, Wiley, and himself to stand guard. We doused the fire and went to sleep.
I woke up with a hand across my mouth. I grabbed for my knife, and another hand pinned my arm against my body. I saw Morrosco's face in mine. He did not need to signal me to stay silent. I heard moving in the trees all around us. Morrosco left me and crawled toward Wiley. I woke Jackson beside me, and he woke' Tan. We lay where we had awakened.
A Pathet Lao party was walking right through us. They were looking for us; I heard no more than the swish of fatigue trousers. The occasional clink of metal, bushes pushed aside, whispered commands. We abandoned half our gear, grabbing only what was in reach, and crawled out to the river. Jackson killed one man, trapping his body with his legs while he flopped and thrashed in the agonies of death. We fought the icy currents of the swift river for fifteen minutes, with Jackson pulling Prather behind him, before collapsing on the far bank. We crawled until dawn dodging people at every turn, covering a hundred yards an hour. When the sun rose, we saw that we were clear. We kept climbing as morning pursued us.
We reached a major river and moved a mile along the bank, then cut overland when the river meandered to the east. We rejoined the river on lower terrain and made good time walking the shingles. When a hill jutted sharply up beside us, the others lay low, and Morrosco and I climbed it for half an hour to get a look around. A mile to our northeast the river we
had been walking was joined by a second major river. J I got out the maps. Morrosco studied them over my i shoulder.
"I make that to be the junction of the Nam Hang and the Nam Khan," I said.
"You're wrong. It's the Nam Hang and the Nam Khao. The Nam Khan should be just west of here, over there." I looked where Morrosco was pointing. My breath caught in my throat. The Nam Khan Valley x was swarming with troops spread out for miles along the riverbank, beating through the underbrush. Traveling fast. And north. Where we had come from.
Twice they had stretched a net to catch us. Twice j we had been a day ahead of them. The country was being swept by an army steadily moving away from its prey. Morrosco laughed. He put his hand in his fatigues, drew out an imaginary object, kissed it, and returned it to his pocket.
"My rabbit's foot," he said. "Christ, we're lucky."
"So they're behind us. Who knows who's ahead of us?" Morrosco's superstition annoyed me. "We can't use the river. Go fetch the others. I'll wait for you < here."
I was alone for the first time since we had departed. I did not waste the opportunity for uninterrupted thinking; I started analyzing, problem-solving, reflecting, projecting. I wished we had brought a silencer for the Armalite. With the night sight, we could have sniped our way out a lot faster the previous night. Then I realized I had not even used the night sight. Tan had it in his pack. I did not usually overlook such ] opportunities. I stored it in my mind to take the sight off Tan.
Our alternatives were rapidly being reduced. The Khan was cut off to us now. We had to strike south, stay east of a great mountain called Pau Sa along the eastern edge of Plain of Jarres, cross Highway 7, and keep moving in a southeasterly direction toward } Borikhan.
An hour passed. I watched the unit struggle up the
hill toward me. I was appalled. They looked not so much physically whipped as damaged. Like animals crawling off to die. The wounds were only a part of it. Swollen glands in Wiley's neck and throat had twisted his features grotesquely. Morrosco and Jackson had been racked by dysentery for several days; their eyes were blood-red, and they clutched their abdomens when the cramps struck. The tension had
given Prather a violent migraine headache. I saw him stop and squeeze his temples with both hands until it seemed he would crush his skull. Wiley's hands were trembling, and the left side of Morrosco's face drew up continually. I noticed for the first time a tic in my own neck; I drew my head sharply, then shook it every few seconds.
Body decay preceded decay in morale. I resolved to restore some self-respect, some vestige of interest in our bodies. The men were too beaten to force any-. thing more upon them, but I could maintain my own body as an example to the others. I rummaged through the remainder of my rations for a packet of salt. When they arrived, I was rubbing it on my teeth with the end of a split twig.
"That will stop some decay," I said.
I cleaned my fingernails with the point of my knife, then shook my canteen. Corroded bits of metal rattled about in the water.
"I'm cleaning that in the next sandy river," I said, "and this uniform."
We moved into the highlands just west of Highway 6. which we could see in the distance carrying a lot of military traffic. We stayed well clear, for fear of running into NVA units. We were not many miles off the North Vietnamese border.
We were also watching for mercenaries. The Plain of Jarres had known horrific struggles through the years; we saw the tracks of great tank battles and earth seared by napalm. The civilians had no loyalties here. While they had survived, and the ground was still fertile, they cultivated rice in great paddies that fanned out over the undulating landscape. And they fought
for anyone who paid and provided arms. If we ran into a unit working for the Green Berets, we were home free. They would have the backup to get us out. I just prayed we would not be hit by mercenaries carrying American -arms. That would be soul-destroying for men who were already having doubts about the cause of their present predicament.
We moved along the edge of the plain, sometimes in dense undergrowth, sometimes in open country. We moved down a river, then picked up a track that passed between Bouan Long and Highway 6. We passed another hamlet that appeared deserted. We took the path out of it to make some quick time. The path, along the side of a mountain, was a genuine luxury: cover above, cover from below, a flat surface, a good view of the valley. Jackson fell back a quarter of a mile and followed us walking backward. Tan, at point, made a good pace, and we quickly covered four i miles. The path took us to the base of Pau Sa. In the waning light, we saw activity toward Highway 6, so we pushed out across Pau Sa as night closed in. We were east of the mountain by midnight. We rested briefly. I decided to push on through the night, to be down to Highway 7 by the following night.
The moon came out of the clouds as we pushed out south across a vast slope. It was a fantastic sight; * this great mountain washed in moonlight, an empty 1 landscape that seemed to stretch forever about us. The whole world was hundreds of thousands of miles below us. The night wind blew. The peak of Pau Sa shot up out of nowhere and hung four thousand feet above us. I lost track of where we were. My mind drifted to other places, other times. I thought of hunting with my older brother in the mountains of New Zealand. I was a boy again, not a soldier with two months of self-destructive combat behind me.
"If we ever get out of this, Kiwi," Prather said, dropping back to walk with me, "I want you to come to stay with me on the farm in Devon. We'll hunt
pheasant and fish for trout. I've a mile of chalk stream that's some of the best fishing in the west country."
"I'd like that, Lew."
"I want a second bite at life."
The trio talked about women they had known. Wiley had fallen in love too many times to count, and Morrosco and Jackson had both experienced an early turnover in their lives. They had become involved with a woman when very young. They had married, and it had fallen apart. I felt similar in a way. I had met a girl I cared for, but I had a pretty wild youth, and it had not worked. For weeks now there had been nothing more than the moment to live for. Then suddenly, walking along together, we were thinking idiotic things, like Prather's second bite at life.
We came down into a heavily scarred valley pocked with bomb craters, the earth scorched from napalm. ^ We reached Highway 7 by midafternoon. This was the v biggest road we had seen on the mission: tar-sealed, wide as a dual carriageway. We paralleled the road until dark, skirting well clear of the outposts. We crossed without incident and struck out on a southerly course across the highlands.
We were feeling pretty good. Our wounds were holding steady, and morale was high. As we moved unhindered, I asked myself if we were being observed, if someone was reserving the right to pluck at us farther down the line. We crested a ridge. Morrosco was the first to spot them. Laotian nationalist troops moving in the valley ahead of us. He let out a whoop.
"We've made it!"
CHAPTER 17
I was still cautious.
"Let's make sure who they are. Are we all agreed they're nationalists? Friendlies?"
Everyone nodded.
"Tan?"
"They can't be anything else. Their vehicles are American. Look at the way the troops are dispersing."
"Could they be mercenaries in nationalist uniforms?"
"Never. Not moving that confidently."
"Let's get down to them."
"They're moving away from us!"
"We can cut down to the low ground and intercept them on Highway Forty-two."
We had to negotiate several steep hills and a small river; it took two hours to cover the five miles to the highway. The highway was quiet when we arrived. The others stayed in the trees while Jackson and I went forward. We went out on the side of the road about a hundred yards apart and started walking in the direction of the troops we had seen. Suddenly five
open lorries with troops in the rear appeared around a curve behind us. Jackson turned, then waved and shouted frantically at them. To my astonishment, the lorries roared into low gear and sped past Jackson. He ran into the middle of the road and waved both arms over his head.
"Government troops!" he shouted. "Stop them!"
I stepped to the middle of the road and tried to wave the lorries to a halt, but they swerved past me and disappeared around the next bend. As soon as they were out of sight, I heard the lorries grind to a halt. Jackson ran to me.
"What on earth are they playing at?"
"I don't know. But I don't like it. Stay where you are," I shouted to the others.
Jackson and I ran down the road and ducked into the trees at the bend, then moved forward cautiously-to take a look. Two lorries were pulling off in the direction they had been going. The other three were reversing on the road. Belts were being passed up to load machine guns on two of them, and all the troops were piling into the third vehicle. We stared amazed at what we were seeing.
"What the hell is going on?"
"I really don't have a clue, Alvin. I don't know. But we're not approaching those people."
"Maybe they just want to identify us positively as American troops."
"What do you think we look like, Eskimos?"
"I want to risk it."
"We're not exposing ourselves to these people. That's an order."
"Order's ass. This is a chance to get out of here."
"These people are out to shoot us. Go back to the others. I'll follow."
"What are you going to do?"
"I don't know."
I had to play safe. There was no exposing ourselves to these people, then running if they proved hostile. They were too many. And they had not jumped for
joy when they saw us. Usually these guys hero-worshiped special forces.
"Get across the road," I shouted to the unit. "Quick!'* I ran to join them.
We had just taken cover when two more vehicles. came past and went around the bend. I positively identified them as government vehicles. We heard them stop.
"What's happening?" Morrosco asked.
I explained quickly.
"What are you going to do, Gayle?" Prather asked. "This may be our big break."
<
br /> "I guess it's now or never. I'll expose myself."
I walked back toward the edge of the road. Just as I started to step out of the trees, two lorries came very slowly back around the bend. Troops stood shoulder to shoulder in the rear, rifles at the ready, searching the bush for us. Roof-mounted machine guns j were sniffing for targets. My mind was whirling. I could not think of any sensible action, so I went to ground. They went past me, reversed, and cruised back again. And stopped opposite me. I lay without breath- ] ing while the drivers talked between the cabs. To my horror, Jackson and then Morrosco crawled up alongside me.
"What the fuck is all this about?" Jackson asked.
"Just look for yourself."
At that moment, another vehicle with a mounted machine gun came in sight. It cruised very close to the edge of the road, barely creeping along. The machine gunner and loader were darting their eyes all over the place. There was no way they could have held off on the gun if they had seen movement.
"Ill chance it anyway," Jackson said.
"You're not getting us all killed," I said.
He and I were arguing bitterly beneath our breaths when Tan joined us.
"These guys are after us," he said. "They're going to blow us away if we surface."
"If they're after us, then why aren't they combing the trees?"
"Maybe they want us to come out on the road. They'll kill us and leave us there. Then anybody can be blamed for it."
"Bullshit," said Jackson.
I exploded with rage.
"That's it. We're leaving. No more argument."
We faded back into the trees and gained high ground where we could see the road. The lorries cruised up and down for an hour. They were joined by a jeep. After some discussion, two of the lorries continued to cruise, and the rest drove off to the south. To cut us off, I presumed. I said nothing to the others, because it was an interpretation I feared would lead to a violent and unpredictable reaction in the unit. I was questioning everything now, even my own sanity. If I could not recognize these people as friends ...