The Five Fingers

by Gayle Rivers

  We moved out on the high ground, from which we could watch the road below. We reached a river that we knew had to pass under the road somewhere. We moved into the river. By midafternoon we spotted a bridge that carried the road across. My heart sank.

  Sitting in the middle of the bridge were two canvas-topped lorries similar to the ones we had seen. Machine guns crowned the two cabs, one facing in each direction to sweep both riverbanks and the bridge approaches. There were a loader and a gunner on each gun, and one rifleman stood down on the bridge. I was sure these people were waiting for us; by now we felt the focus of every movement in the entire region, even as we approached safer terrain. We were only a few days from the Mekong, a couple of days from areas of intense American activity. We were very close to slipping through our pursuers' fingers. There was a good argument to be made that they were communist troops, Pathet Lao in government uniforms.

  The unit was badly split over the question. Tan supported my instinctive fear of these people, regard-

  less of who they were. Jackson was convinced communist troops would never move up and down the road so boldly. He thought Tan and I were being paranoid. He kept an open mind about a double-cross, but he was all for finding out one way or the other. Morrosco rallied to Jackson's side. Prather was in the worst shape of all, mentally and physically. He had reached the point where he just wanted the whole thing to end. His attitude was what the hell, old boy, we're not going anywhere anyway. We might as well get it here as the next spot. Wiley disturbed me even more than Prather. He simply would not talk. He was cutting himself off from the environment, even from us. I tried but failed to draw him into the conversation, I made a note to watch him.

  Fully expecting it to create loss among us, I decided we would expose ourselves. If these people were friendly, we would never match this opportunity to cross back over. We would wait until almost dark, then impose ourselves upon them. The men on the bridge were growing careless; they looked to have been on duty a long time and were getting bored. There was a general milling around, smoking of cigarettes.

  Two hours later, they were joined by two jeeps carrying six men and an officer. They conversed for a while, confidently, very casually; I began to doubt that they could be communists. The guard changed over; six stayed behind, the others departed in the jeep. My combat instinct told me there was no military presence either side of the bridge; the officer made no attempt to contact any party farther along, and when they left, we heard their vehicles drive without stopping until they were out of earshot.

  When the sun at last fell behind a distant hill, I took Tan and Jackson forward to reconnoiter before we made our move.

  "It's wrong," Tan said flatly. "Those guys are looking for us. I don't care if they are communists or nationalists or what. I can just tell you they are waiting

  for somebody. And as far as I'm concerned, we're the only people in the area worth waiting for."

  "Let's see what they have to say," I told him.

  "Look," Jackson spoke up, "they've got government uniforms. American trucks. Those are our boys. I know damn well they are." His voice rang with the irritation he was beginning to feel toward Tan.

  We slipped into the water a hundred yards upstream and climbed out on the bank directly beneath the bridge. Every footfall from above was amplified on the heavy wooden planking that surfaced the stone structure. We listened for five minutes, but the guards were standing forty feet away in the middle of the bridge, and Tan could not make out what they were saying. I thought I heard the word "American" more than once.

  "Climb up under the bridge and see if you can hear what they are saying," I whispered to Tan.

  Tan swung a leg over the wooden beam and began inching his way out with great difficulty, pulling himself along with his one good arm. He sat on a beam directly below the vehicles for fifteen minutes before dragging himself back. He swung off the beam and sat down. He stared at me for a long time before speaking.

  "They're after us."

  "Shit," Jackson said. He and Tan glared at one another.

  "Keep your voices down. What did they say?" I asked.

  "They're just talking. They didn't say anything."

  "You see! They're not after us. It's his imagination."

  "They were confused about their orders. They can't believe them."

  "What does that mean?"

  "They've got orders to get an American insurgency unit."

  "If they're surprised, they can't be communists. But 'get a unit' . . . what does that mean? Find them or kill or what? How do you know they are going to hit us?"

  "I just know."

  "He's crazy," Jackson whispered, trembling with anger. "If we're ever going to get out of here, these are the people to get us out. Tan's making it up about us getting hit. He's over the top."

  I saw the hair rise on Tan's neck. He turned and looked deeply into Jackson's eyes without saying anything. I thought he might kill Jackson on the spot. We're breaking up, I told myself. The unit is falling apart. It gave me a feeling of great sadness. I laid my knife lightly along Tan's forearm and grabbed Jackson by the shoulder.

  "No more! Now shut up, you two. Jackson, you're going to expose yourself to the people on the bridge."

  Tan crawled back and brought the others forward. I tapped my Armalite and pointed up at the lorries. I kept Jackson and Tan with me and waved the others under the bridge. I gave them five minutes to take a firing position.

  "Give me ninety seconds, then go out on the road as close to the bridge as possible," I told Jackson.

  Jackson moved off with Tan behind him. I climbed up and away from the bridge until I was level with the lorries. Through my night sight, I watched Jackson slip off his rocket pack and belts and climb toward the road carrying only his Armalite. I saw total contempt in Jackson's face for what he was doing. Either he knew he was going to die and no longer cared, or he was that convinced that these were friendly troops. I swung the Armalite back to the machine guns. There was only one man on each gun. The loaders were standing down on the bridge. But the gunner facing our side of the river could take us all out if it started too soon. The other man would have to swing his gun in a 180-degree arc before he could fire; I had time to take him out. I settled the cross hairs on the first gunner. From the corner of my eye, I saw Jackson step out on the road and start walking toward the bridge.

  "American special forces unit!" he shouted.

  He had his Armalite at the ready without pointing it toward the lorries. The startled Laotians scrambled for their weapons. The near machine gunner swung his barrel sharply and took aim on Jackson. One of the loaders began climbing up the side of the lorry. I tightened my finger on the trigger, but I did not pull off a round. I had to allow them reaction time. The second gun swung around. One of the riflemen who had been smoking in the cab of the first lorry threw on the headlights, pinning Jackson against a white sheet of light. It was too late now. For Jackson's sake, they had better be friends.

  Fewer than a dozen seconds had passed since Jackson had surfaced. The belt operators were still scrambling up on the cabs. But it was enough time for the initial confusion to subside. The gunner had positively identified Jackson as an American. He seemed to relax: They have recognized us, I thought. I exhaled heavily.

  "American special forces unit. What is your unit designation?" Jackson yelled as he advanced.

  I never moved my sight off the first gunner. I heard a cab door open and a man jump to the bridge. Instantly he let off a burst of automatic fire. I saw the gunner glance down, then he raised his eyes back to Jackson. And squeezed off on the machine gun. I heard Jackson scream. Events began to whirl, and time tumbled and pitched forward at an astonishing speed. I fired at the first gunner, swung and fired at the second. They both went down. I swung back to the first gun to hit the loader, but before I could fire, the man was blown off the lorry by a burst from below the bridge. Tan ran out on the road and dragged Jackson to a ditch at the side. There were sev
eral seconds of sustained firing, then a grenade was lobbed onto the bridge, deadening the action immediately. One lorry burst into flames. I could see no more targets, so I broke for the spot where I had seen Tan drag Jackson. As I mounted the embankment, I saw Morrosco and Wiley run in among the vehicles, firing from the hip. Wiley jerked open a cab door and dragged out a wounded man, then

  crushed his skull with his rifle butt. Prather came loping up the other side. He had only one clip left for his M-3 and had not fired a round. He and I reached Jackson at the same time. Jackson lay unconscious on the ground, his Hfe running out of him. He had been stitched from the waist down; half the muscle and flesh had disappeared from the inside of his right leg. Tan fought desperately to stop the bleeding, but the surging wounds swallowed up the gauze pads. Prather and I dropped down on either side of the unconscious man and hacked at his trousers with our knives. Wiley began to shout, but I could not understand what he was saying. As I pulled at Jackson's webbing belt, Wiley lurched up behind me and threw a weapon over my head. It landed with crushing force across Jackson's chest.

  "Fuck you, Jackson!" Wiley screamed from the edge of madness, unaware that Jackson was unconscious.

  I jumped to my feet in amazement. Instinctively Prather and I threw Wiley and pinned him to the ground. He did not fight back. I jerked him upright by the collar.

  "Have you gone crazy?" I shouted at his face.

  "Somebody's crazy!" Wiley roared, grabbing up the weapon he had thrown down. It was an Armalite.

  "Fucking American weapons! We're being shot at with fucking American weapons!"

  CHAPTER 18

  There was no time for argument. I was frantically trying to fill Jackson with morphine before he regained consciousness; his body could never withstand the shock of these wounds.

  "Strip the lorries," I ordered Wiley.

  "Over here, Barry," Morrosco called him.

  Wiley jumped up and sprinted back to the bridge, Prather at his side. The three raced in and out of the flames, stripping the vehicles of everything of value. Morrosco found boxes of ammunition. Wiley grabbed an armload of weapons from a burning tailgate. Prather found a stretcher and a wicker creel of medical supplies which he brought back to us. I had planned to cut the canvas tops to make a sling for Jackson. I was suddenly struck with an idea.

  "Get the good lorry off the bridge," I shouted at Tan. "We'll drive it to Thailand."

  Before Tan could take a step, the second lorry burst into flames. The scene was absolute chaos. We had to get out of there before the lorries exploded.

  While the others continued to scrounge, Tan and I sorted out some Armalites that were in good working order and quickly piled them with Jackson's gear. Jackson looked like a dead man to me. I did not want to lose the guy. We put him on the stretcher and bound him down with leather straps.

  "Let's get out of here," I shouted. "Grab weapons, ammo, and Jackson's gear."

  I saw Wiley hesitating over the pile of gear.

  "Leave the rockets," I said.

  "We'll need them," he answered, grabbing them up. We were all looking for excuses to kill. But Wiley wanted to destroy.

  Wiley humped the rockets up on his shoulder, then he and Morrosco grabbed up the stretcher. There was no thought of leaving Jackson. Our fates had become inextricably intertwined. I was no more concerned for my own life than the lives of the rest of the unit. We were all thinking as one on this score.

  Taking Jackson increased the odds against the rest of us. There was support in numbers; Jesus, there were only six of us. But I could not see Jackson ever being more than baggage. He would not walk again. He was a dying man. If he had been hit this hard in China or North Vietnam, I would have given him an overdose of morphine. Or put a bullet in him. We needed morphine. But now we would carry him until he died, or we died, or we made it. He was part of us. While we lived, he went where we went.

  We dashed across the bridge and hightailed it into the hills. We followed a jungle trail to higher ground where we could look back down on the bridge burning furiously below us. We saw headlights racing toward the bridge and heard sporadic gunfire. People apparently thought they saw us in the trees. A short time later, we heard the lorries explode.

  We crashed on through the night, moving higher. We had to stop often because Jackson was bleeding profusely. He was saturated in his blood. There was virtually nothing we could do to stem the bleeding,

  because we were in almost total darkness. We could not even see the extent of the damage. We would give him a few minutes' rest, tighten the bandages, and push off again. I took point and led the unit south for the rest of the night. I used the night sight to scout our trail, and I set a murderous pace; I felt a great sense of urgency to get clear of the last battle. All through the night I was blaming and vindicating myself for Jackson's wounding. Why had I held my fire? What else could I have done? We had to give them a chance to recognize us. Instead, Jackson had been torn in two.

  We reached morning in a shattered state. We crested a ridge just as the sun came up, and we stopped to survey the damage. Jackson regained consciousness. At first, he did not know who or where we were. Then briefly he was lucid.

  "You boys go on without me," he said. "I'm dying. I don't care. I'm not interested anymore. Too much ... I can't walk. You can't. .."

  He lost consciousness. We stripped him down. He had been stitched up the inside of the leg from knee to the groin as if someone had hacked at the flesh with a machete. His scrotum was ripped, but his testicles were intact. Incredibly, neither bone nor the main artery had been touched. What flesh remained was torn and shredded. Tan and Morrosco worked like mad trying to keep him alive.

  To my surprise they managed to stop the bleeding. Then Morrosco took off his shirt and began to strip threads out of the seams. He found a needle in the Laotian medical pack and stitched the open wounds together with the heavy waterproofed canvas thread. He was threading infection into the wounds, but that was better than leaving them open to bleed.

  I assumed we would sit there until Jackson died, so I went out to scout the route ahead. And to think.

  All night I had been weighing my decision to bring Jackson with us. It was what we all wanted. But what was it doing to our chances of survival? Jackson would

  die sooner or later. Was it going to cost all our lives to carry him for another day or two?

  I had never felt so desperate or alone, I was in command of these guys' lives, and I was so worn out I could no longer think. I was out of my depth. How much longer could any of us carry on? Our problems were just too many, too big for us. The whole thing appeared almost ridiculous. I found myself thinking about friends I had left behind in New Zealand. They were getting married or starting law school. And I thought, this cannot be real.

  I snapped out of it. I could not accept that way of thinking because it was not logical enough for me. Quite logically I made up my mind. To save five men, we must abandon one. It must be what they all wanted, deep in their hearts. It was our only chance of surviving.

  I walked back to where the four were gathered closely about Jackson's outstretched body. They all looked up as I approached, and Morrosco stopped wrapping a bandage.

  "We're not deserting him," Prather said.

  All four were watching me. They had read my mind, and I had misinterpreted their feelings. They were not offering an argument; they were telling me how it was to be. I had gotten over the psychological barrier of making the decision, but it was an easy one to retract. I made no reply.

  We spent the morning resting and tending to Jackson. No one wanted to talk much. In little more than twelve hours, we had had a flare-up between Jackson and Tan, Wiley had thrown a weapon at Jackson, Prather and I had thrown Wiley, and I had made a decision to abandon Jackson. The incident between Tan and Jackson was not serious. Their blowup had been like a release valve on a steam engine; they were letting off feelings that had been building for days. Two minutes later, Tan had dashed out in the road
under fire to pull Jackson to safety. Nevertheless, it remained

  the first sign of personality conflict in the unit, and no one could ignore it.

  Nor could we ignore Wiley's explosion, which had had very little to do with the event of the moment. He could no longer contain his sense of desperation. These things manifested themselves in momentary illusion-stripping scenes, then went back into cold storage.

  Physically, Wiley was with us and willing to do any chore set for him, but his thoughts were a million miles away.

  Tan and I went forward to survey the route ahead. A vast plain stretched before us. We decided to cut straight across it, aim directly for Borikhan. The others agreed. We were within twenty miles of Borikhan and about a day and a half from the Thai border on the Mekong. At Borikhan, we could join a relatively safe road to Muang Pakxan on the river. At Muang Pakxan, there was a Bailey bridge protected by Laotian government troops at one end and Thai forces at the other. If we could not reach the bridge, we would push west and south along the Mekong—it curved away from us like the outer rim of a half-moon—until we found another way to cross. We abandoned forever any thought of returning to our old route.

  None of us felt safe even this close to the border. If we came across an American unit, we agreed to take every precaution before approaching it. The feelings of betrayal that had arisen in China and returned with a jolt at M Ngoi were resurfacing again.

  "How do you see it, Lew?" asked Morrosco.

  "The sad fact is that we're no more than the victims of a snarl-up somewhere."

  "No way. Setup, not snarl-up. What about you, Kiwi? You have any sensible explanations?"

  "I've only managed to come up with one sensible explanation, and it's a bloody complicated one."