by Gayle Rivers
"Let's hear it," said Prather.
"The Pentagon has got its dominant thinkers. And
there are certain political dominant thinkers who serve as a buffer zone between the Pentagon and the White House. Some of the close-to-the-heat guys like the CIA, got wind of the conference through somebody. Maybe from the communists, from a little country that doesn't want to be swallowed up by China. This might have been a year before we were thought of. The intelligence was fed through the military analysts until someone decided to take an article of action to counteract what was envisioned as taking place. This was taken to the political arena for acceptance, and the buffer-zone people agreed to the implementation of our mission. But even after we moved out, we were being discussed. Argued. Compared to the alternatives. So you had the hard-liners and the soft-liners and the pure military all working together. All the time we were marching to China. They couldn't reach a decision, so the only thing to do was to spend us."
"Do you really believe all that?" asked Morrosco.
"It's the most likely possibility I can come up with. But, no, I don't believe it. Sometimes I believe we are an experiment. Sometimes I think it was an American general pushing all the chips up on the table. If certain political decisions were not taken—by the Chinese, or the Americans, I don't know—prior to mission date, he was going to let us do it. That man wanted war with China. He was hoping the mission would take place before it was aborted. I agree with him. If we had carried out our job, the war might have been over in a year. He was found out. And we're being sacrificed. Either that, or some people knew they would be getting mandates or briefs of what would take place at the meeting while we were on the march. If it was unfavorable to the west, we carry through. If it was favorable, we get spent."
"All you've said is there's a contract out on us," said Morrosco, "and we don't know friend from foe."
"Oh, we know. Everybody's our enemy. We have no friends," said Wiley. It was the first time he had spoken all day.
"A contract?" I said. "That sounds like a gangster film."
"So what? A contract's a contract."
I said no more, though I concurred with Morrosco. I started to see Stacey, my commanding officer, and these other people, and I decided that I was going to kill Stacey. I had a fantasy about the two guys who had briefed us for the hit. We had gone back to barracks, all charged up to save the world, and they very calmly discussed the finality of our existence. Our lives were of no consequence to the importance they put on their jobs or whatever it was they had us doing. My resolve to survive was redoubled. I would settle that score.
We spent most of the day talking, waiting for Jackson to improve. He did not get better. He needed more than we could give him. Tan and I went back out to survey the valley. Several miles away, we spotted a small hamlet on a river. We had to get help for Jackson.
We struck out at once and reached the hamlet before nightfall. Tan and I jumped two peasants; Tan stopped me from killing mine. The men were babbling that theirs was a safe village. They took us into the village. When the women saw Jackson, they rushed to him before we could get the stretcher on the ground. Tan pushed them away. While the others held the place under arms, Tan and I went to work on Jackson. The entire village crowded around us. The women were frantic to help. Tan relented, and they went to work on the wounded man. This was a very poor, backward village that wanted to stay isolated from the rest of the world. I started to relax. Before we had our packs off, they were pushing fish soup at us. I grabbed up the fish and ate it whole, like an animal. We ate and rested in rotation throughout the night.
When the women cleaned Jackson's wounds with salve and herbs, he regained consciousness within an hour. He remembered nothing since being hit and was amazed at how far we had carried him. The peasants
were delighted to see the improvement. They did not want a dead American on their hands.
With Jackson on the mend, the peasants turned to us. They washed our uniforms and produced great wooden tubs of M hot water for bathing. I climbed in first and nearly fell asleep. My energy seemed to melt away with the weeks of accumulated dirt.
I called Tan back from guard by the river. He felt comfortable with these people, which increased my growing sense of security. One guy reminded me of a newsreel I had seen as a child of the Second World War, where the troops were passing by, and a guy was picking rice in a paddy. The war and the world ran over the top of these people. It did not matter to them if we were American or Laotian or communist or whatever. The quicker we were made welcome and given what we wanted, the sooner we would depart. When the next party came in, they would keep quiet that we had been there.
We spent the night repairing ourselves and sleeping. Only I did not sleep. I had not relaxed sufficiently to sleep for days. I did not want to sleep. My mind was racing . . . Jackson . . . where we were going . . . how long it would take. I was one hundred per cent insomniac by now.
As dawn neared, I told the others to prepare to move out. Jackson was still conscious and aware of the extent of his injuries.
"I'll stay here, Kiwi," he said. "My leg's as dead as Kelsey's nuts. These people will take good care of me. You send somebody to get me."
A peasant spoke to Tan.
"He says Alvin can stay here."
"You're safer in the jungle."
We pushed off just before dawn, carrying Jackson by shoulder straps Wiley had fashioned during the night. We seemed to me to be in fairly good condition. As soon as we got on the trail, Prather dropped back to walk with me.
"You've got to sleep, Gayle."
"How can I sleep? I have to keep my guard up, so the rest of you can relax."
"If you don't rest, you'll collapse. Give us one more man to carry."
"Rubbish."
"You're not restocking your reserves. You're not functioning as a man now, Gayle. You're a bloody machine. And you're running low on fuel."
"You can't get along without me."
"We can take care of ourselves. We don't want to have to take care of you."
For the first time, I realized I had detached myself from the others; I was an outsider, trying to manipulate us as from a great distance. My job ... I was obsessed with the job of keeping these men alive. I had to go to the limit. I had to watch the others, be somehow a step removed from them. Keep them from making -a mistake. How could I afford to sleep? Was I going mad?
We pushed out toward Borikhan along the river, then over a track that took us near the road. The going was easy, over open ground. We took turns on the stretcher and walking point. Jackson was conscious and not complaining much. He lay in the stretcher fully armed, with his weapon at the ready. We hoped to reach Borikhan early in the night by a track from the east.
With two hours to go until nightfall, we moved quickly down an unobstructed trail. We may have been lulled a bit by the easy going, because we came around a bend and walked straight into a party of mercenaries. We had no time to run; they had already seen us. There were eleven in all, a shabby lot, but very heavily armed. Morrosco, at point, froze in his tracks. He had his Armalite at the ready. The leader held up his hand in greeting.
"Allow them to come forward," I told Tan.
Tan told them to advance, then he walked to where Prather and I were holding the stretcher. The mercenaries came past Morrosco and stopped in front of
Tan and me. Everyone had weapons trained on everyone else.
Their leader was quite friendly. He was an ugly son-of-a-bitch. Most of his front teeth were missing; the remainder were brown and rotten. His crew were filthy, practically walking around in rags. They could see by the way our eyes were darting around that we were ready to go. Prather and I eased the stretcher down. I laid my Armalite on the stretcher with Jackson and casually unslung the shotgun.
The boss of this ragged outfit kept smiling as if he did not see any of this. He asked Tan what unit we were from. Tan translated for me but made no reply. The guy said they were from a village
just down the trail. He asked us if we wanted to fall into their village to rest.
Tan asked him something about Borikhan, how far away it was; I heard "Borikhan" a couple of times. The guy replied, gesturing with his arm.
"It's a trap. He says Borikhan is about a kilometer down the road."
Borikhan was at least ten miles away. Without exchanging a word, we all made ready for action. Prather was the first to spot the others.
"They're more in the trees to the left," he said in a casual voice loud enough for all of us to hear.
"For Christ's sake," Jackson said. "Get me off the road."
My mind was racing like a merry-go-round. Instinctively I told Tan to tell those in front of us to move, so we could put the stretcher down on the narrow trail. They saw that we were about to jump out of our skins, so they lowered their weapons as they moved away.
We hauled Jackson to the side of the trail, and Wiley and Prather nonchalantly slipped off their packs and piled them in front of Jackson so that his chest and head were hidden. The gear would not stop a bullet, but it was psychological cover.
The eleven guys were all standing on the road, five
in front with the leader, then four a few feet farther back with his second-in-command. Tan walked up very close to the leader, and I followed him. Gradually we pushed the front group back down the road, away from Jackson, simply by violating their psychological space.
"Come back a few feet," I said to Morrosco. "Make it look casual."
He was fifty feet past the second group. He sauntered toward us. I could see three guys in the trees closing behind him. When he was almost even with the second party, I stopped him.
"Stay there," I said. "Be ready to go to ground. I'll take the ones in front. Wiley and Prather, go into the tree line on the left."
Tan, his rifle resting on his shoulder, was conversing with their leader, but he was hearing every word I spoke. The two units were close enough to touch each other. And these guys were cool. I could see the dollar signs, the head money, rolling around in their eyeballs. The leader had slung his rifle, an American M-l carbine, and was chatting and offering Tan tobacco. He was waiting for his men to position themselves in the trees, then they would come out with a bead on us and take us alive. But it was taking them longer than he had expected. Tan refused to lead the guy along. We stayed like this for a couple of minutes, with just this strained chatter coming from this guy. Everyone was nervous. His henchmen were getting jumpy, because they had been briefed on what would happen, and it had not happened. And suddenly the conversation came to this strange end. The guy had run out of stall time.
I had been easing myself toward the side of the road, out of Morrosco's firing ilne and away from Tan. Their two groups were being forced together, by people trying to remain at a psychological distance from one another.
Suddenly we were all functioning again like highly tuned machines, like a Ferrari instead of a delivery van. It became a matter of watching the movement
through the trees . . . the shuffling of the people on the road . . . measuring the arc of my weapon . . . checking the disposition of the unit . . . setting the thing up so that we had maximum fire power before they could retaliate. I could take two out immediately. Tan two. Morrosco was in position to hit a lot of them from the rear. We were ready. I was waiting for the right moment . . . that instinctive feeling that would tell me the scene was balanced in relation to how we were disposed, how we were thinking. The time came right.
CHAPTER 19
I fired the shotgun twice in quick succession. I bowled two guys over with the steel balls and felled two more with the pellets before they knew the fight had started. Then I danced away.
With one smooth stroke, Tan brought his rifle off his shoulder and smashed the barrel across the leader's skull. The rifle fell into Tan's hand. He dropped to one knee and started firing, bringing down two more men. Morrosco opened up with automatic fire and killed five of them in seconds. One of the guys I had hit with the pellets climbed to his feet and stumbled backward into the trees. He was terrified, firing everywhere. It was funny to see. I fired at him. And missed. Three guys came tearing out of the trees toward me and Tan, but their line of fire was blocked by the man I had missed. Prather and Wiley shot them down from the trees.
I began to lose the pattern of things. There were only three or four still alive, and we were all firing furiously. As Morrosco came charging forward, a man
rose up off the ground with a pistol in his hand and shot hfm in the back. Morrosco pitched forward on his face, and I blew the guy's head off at point-blank range. There were two left and five of us firing at them. We fired and fired. We shot dead bodies. We wasted more ammunition than we had on the entire mission. We were still wound up and there was nothing left to fire at. Tan ran to Morrosco, glanced at his wound, and shouted that he was all right. I dashed to Jackson and found him with a smirk on his face.
"What's so funny?" I said.
"Look around."
The trees were torn to shreds, the road dug up by flying bullets. Somehow not one round had touched Jackson. I ran back to Morrosco. He was lying on his stomach, his back soaked in blood. Tan had stripped off his shirt.
"They got me, Gayle," he said. "The bastards have finally done it."
"You're all right," Tan told him. "The bullet hit the pack and deflected into your arm. No bone broken. Just some torn flesh. You're all right," he assured the disbelieving Morrosco.
I saw that Tan was right. If the guy had been using anything more than a small-caliber pistol Morrosco would have been dead. The wound was not severe. I was more concerned about our performance, about the obvious sign that we were cracking when I thought we had come to life again. I had missed an easy standing target. And the aftermath ... the way we kept firing. The place was a hellish sight. We had to get out of there while the adrenaline was still pounding at our hearts. We bound Morrosco's arm, gathered ammunition for the Armalites, grabbed the stretcher, and took off.
We left the track and went into a river to avoid two hamlets. We could still reach Borikhan by midnight or the early hours of the morning and strike from there to the Mekong. Once past the hamlets, we stopped
for two hours on the riverbank. Carrying the stretcher was exhausting us. Morrosco was in great pain. As Tan was dressing the wound, he suddenly pulled free, then probed his arm carefully with his fingertips.
"The bullet's still in me," he said.
The bullet had entered the upper arm, and the flesh had closed around it, like a ball pushed into Plasticine. It was resting against the inside of his bicep. We had to get it out to avoid infection. We had no morphine.
Prather bound his dog rag very tightly around the upper arm, cutting off the flow of blood. We waited a few minutes for the arm to go numb. Morrosco put his shirt collar in his mouth to keep from screaming. Tan and I sat on his chest, and Prather knelt across his forearm while Wiley dug out the bullet. It was only a small thing, and we had it out quickly, but we made a mess of the job in the dark. We wrapped the wound quickly and strapped his arm, then loosened the tourniquet. He lay in a cold sweat, fighting off his desire to scream, as the blood flowed back into his arm.
We washed and cleaned ourselves up. Once again we were covered in the shit of other men. When we were fighting hand-to-hand, the one thing we could not stop was the other guy's bowels opening. When a man died, his body reacted against his death. If he had been done with a knife, or Morrosco's garrote, it became quite grotesque; his guts and the contents of his bowels came spilling out. I could stop a man from screaming with my hand, but he was shitting, and I was floundering around in it. If he was wearing a loincloth like these mercenaries, it was very ugly.
When Morrosco could stand, we moved on. We left the river to join a road that led into Borikhan. We fled into the trees to duck a line of mercenaries heading for the river. We reached the road, only to find it occupied by forty or fifty men. Half were government troops, the rest mercenaries; they
were chatting and sharing a meal served out of the back of several military transports.
I was desperate to find out what they were doing together, but Tan could not get close enough to eavesdrop. It was enough for me to see the two groups together. The government was paying mercenaries to do a job in the region.
Two vehicles went off toward Borikhan carrying mercenaries and government troops. Other parties went into the bush. We were about to get caught between these guys and the first party we had seen. We had to forget about Borikhan. We would head straight for the Mekong. We raced away southward. As the vehicle had returned to Borikhan, the city was in government hands. The feeling that we were being paranoid was fast fading. It looked as if everyone was up against us.
We had a nightmarish struggle with the stretcher through thick jungles. We broke out on a rushland to find it crawling with government troops. They were in battalion strength, sweeping through tall bamboo reeds, moving and stopping at the bark of a whistle. Through the night sight, I saw them probing the reeds with their bayonets. We sat and watched these guys for a while. They were sweeping toward the Nou River, which we had hoped to take to the Mekong. We had to go back to high ground.
"Wouldn't it be ironical," Morrosco said, "if they were looking for us to bring us in."
"With bayonets?"
Again my choice of route had been made for me. We could never cut through a force that size; we had to keep moving east. We would go east and south until we found a river that would take us to the Mekong.
Physically we were not in bad shape. I was the worst of all, fatigued beyond the measure of fatigue. But Jackson was growing stronger by the minute. Morrosco was simply impatient with his wounds, tired of the pain and restriction. Prather and Tan had learned to accept theirs. My hip had become infected, which was annoying; otherwise, I was healing. Exhaustion was depleting our energies far more than wounds.