by Gayle Rivers
but it was not working. They were a tight team. We fell down toward the road. I managed to reach my feet and walk with a stiff leg, but it felt as if the leg was not there. No one could help me, because we needed everyone firing. We got to the edge of the road and started to dash across.
"Jackson!" Prather shouted.
We had forgotten him where the others had dropped him in their scramble for cover. At that moment, we heard firing. Wiley and Morrosco ran into the trees and down the line to where Jackson had been. They came tearing back.
"The stretcher's empty," Morrosco shouted.
"Bodies all over the place," Wiley said. "He's gone."
"Here!" Jackson shouted.
I saw him waving from where he lay by the road a hundred yards away. These guys were grouping in the tree line to rush us. We rushed them first, hurling grenades, then dashed back to the road. I yelled to Jackson to go across while we covered him. The poor bastard was a pathetic sight, dragging himself across on his hands and knees. They spotted him and started yelling and firing. Bullets bounced all around him in the dirt, but he escaped unhit.
"Can you make it?" Prather shouted at me.
I said yes, not at all sure I was telling the truth. I hobbled across, feeling as if I had only one leg to support me. Tan and Prather followed me without being hit. Before Wiley and Morrosco could get clear, they were jumped by four guys. We laid down covering fire while they dealt with these four. Two of them were shot immediately, but the other two went into hand-to-hand combat.
One guy came at Wiley waving his rifle like a club. Wiley disarmed him, then brought him in close to stab him. They fell and rolled on the ground. The second one swung his weapon like a cricket bat. Morrosco ducked, but the stock caught his forehead. He went down like a rock, and Prather shot the guy off him. I saw Wiley grab up his knife from where it
had fallen in the struggle. He was looking at his man and did not realize he had grabbed it with the blade pointing backward. He tried to plunge the knife into the man. The man pulled Wiley into him and onto his own knife. The knife went into Wiley's stomach. I thought he was dead, but he got it out and killed the man. He stumbled to his feet and pulled Morrosco upright, and they both staggered to our side of the road. As they fell down beside us, we started cutting down a party that was grouping for a charge.
Toliver's Armalite was gone forever, and my shotgun was ineffectual at this range, so I lay there feeling sorry for myself until I saw the amount of blood surging out of Wiley's shirt. I tried to roll him over, and he pushed me away.
"I'm all right," he said. "Don't worry about me.
"Get back in the trees," I said, "and get that wound tended."
When he started to argue, I jerked his weapon out of his hand and kicked him away. I started firing across the road. He crawled back to the trees. Prather and Tan ran to help Jackson, who was now on his feet. He was in terrific pain, he was limping, but he was upright for the first time since he had been machine-gunned at the bridge. They helped him to the trees and then joined me on the firing line. The mercenaries failed to reach the road by frontal assault several times, so they moved out in two groups to cross the road on either side of us. I saw there were far more than I had counted. They wore American fatigues and carried American arms, and they were bloody well organized.
We had all we wanted of these guys, so we moved away as fast as we could. They dogged our trail for hours. They forced us into open ground between Highway 12 and Muang Kham Mouan. We were in no shape to fight a rearguard action on the run. I had lost a lot of blood. Wiley was in agony; when he ran, his heart pumped his blood out his stomach. Jackson was being dragged by Prather and Tan, but he was
hopping along and even using his bad leg from time to time. Morrosco was seeing stars, but we could not bother about that sort of injury. When we dared go to ground, we scrambled frantically to patch one another up. Half of us needed morphine, but we could not have taken it if we had any. I gobbled Benzedrine, but the effects would not last long enough to support the condition I was in. Prather was trembling with chill and fever, but he was surviving because he at least had legs. Legs were the weapons we needed most now. The fighting slacked off when night fell, and we kept moving as fast as we could. We covered several miles by midnight, then collapsed in the bush to take a desperate rest.
For a few moments, we lay on our stomachs without a sound, watching the trees like crazy. Even in our condition, we had carried out an automatic function of falling into a defensive arrowhead. This was partly psychological; if shooting started, none of us wanted his line of fire blocked by another's body. We dropped down in a semicircle facing where we expected them to come from. Then it was like a crowd watching the races—one man put his head out, and the next man up the line went out a bit farther, and someone went out even farther until we had quite naturally assumed an effective posture, though we were no more than ten feet apart.
We lay for a long time gasping for breath. When we had filled our lungs, our most pressing need was for nourishment. There was no thought of food. I sucked at a clove pack, and one or two others broke off a piece of glucose and tried to get it down dry throats. The rest took pills. We were so dehydrated that the saliva would not run in our mouths; anything we swallowed lodged immediately in the throat until it melted. I had water, because I used it like a watch to measure my endurance, but it was stretched to the limit. We shared it around, nipping just enough to wet our mouths and swallow stiffly.
We needed water. What did we not need? I knew
everyone was low on ammunition, because they had been firing on single shot in the heat of action. I gave Wiley back his Armalite. I had a few rounds remaining for the shotgun. "Ssh!"
We froze. From the point of the arrow I saw four men silhouetted against the night sky, two on either side of me. They were walking very cautiously, taking three or four steps, then turning in a full circle with their arms at the ready. They had not seen us down on the ground. They were going to walk right onto us.
We had to take those four silently in case there were more. I showed my knife to Prather. He withdrew his. I ran my knife blade down my sleeve, which meant it was to be done silently. I touched my nose and held up two fingers; I would take the two to the right. He touched his nose and held up two fingers. The rest would cover us.
I came off the ground and put my knife in the first man before he saw me. I leapt at the other man and tripped over the fallen body. I fell right at this guy's feet; I could see his boots. As I glanced up, his rifle came down on the back of my neck.
I came around with Tan slapping my face. It took a few seconds for my head to clear, then it was racked by pain. Everyone was lying prone in complete silence. The four mercenaries lay dead, one from a bullet wound. When no more appeared, we very quietly stripped the bodies. They were carrying Armalites and a lot of clips and wearing U.S. fatigues. I had lost the night sight, so we moved slowly until we broke out on open ground. We were dragging along. Fortunately, my leg was numb. But I had bled inside my fatigues, and the blood had caked on the insides of my legs and broken into sharp pieces which were cutting into my scrotum with every step. The skin went raw, then began to tear, and my testicles swelled from the bruising. I bit my lip to keep from screaming. I began to get disoriented.
Running ... we never stopped running. . . . We
were somewhere in the open ... it was night ... we went into cover ... on high ground ... in the heat of another day ... we dragged along like zombies . . . stumbling . . . struggling over fallen trees . . . trying to vomit when we stopped to rest . . . running again. We broke into a river and ran wildly down its bed until the sun was on our faces. Our condition was worsening. I fell into the water to soften the blood on my legs, then tied my testicles to one leg with my shirt. How Jackson stayed on his feet, I did not know. Prather was supporting him, so Tan dropped back to help me. I refused his help, and he took Wiley's weight on his good shoulder. We moved like this for hours, with no idea where the r
iver was taking us.
CHAPTER 20
We were lost. I still had the maps; along with a few weapons, they were all we had left from the beginning. But it had been days since we had looked at them. We knew only that we were moving vaguely east. We left the river and raced across open ground for cover in some distant trees. We ran until we were in high ground, then we collapsed. We were too tired to talk, so we crawled about helping one another, redistributing load and ammunition.
Half an hour later, we started taking stock of the situation. We reckoned unanimously that we were a prime target, because we had been in running action for weeks with people who showed absolute determination to kill us. We were so few in numbers, they could simply have observed us, then written us off when we moved out of their areas. But they had underestimated what we were capable of. They had been losing men at a desperate rate, and on the rebound they had resolved we could not live.
"What for?"
"I don't know . . . follow it . . . make for the Mekong."
"Right," said Prather, "make for the Mekong. Is that a joke, Gayle?"
"How many goddamn times have we tried that already?" said Jackson.
"And if we got there, what would be waiting for us anyway?" said Morrosco.
The conversation started building on itself, people expanding other people's observations. The unspoken thoughts we had been nursing for days began to spill out.
"We're not only being hunted," said Tan, "we're being maneuvered. How many of you have worked around here before?"
We all had, but for Prather.
"I bet you never had this much trouble. Faced this kind of opposition. Have you ever seen so many freshly formed units over such a wide area?"
"You know what we've got here, don't you?" said Jackson, picking up a weapon by his side. "These Armalites are brand-new. Look at them. They'd never been fired before today. And the fatigues those guys were wearing. They still had the crease in them. You think these guys turned over before they fought their first battle? You think they walked out of a U.S. armory and joined the other side?"
"We're puppets on a string," said Morrosco.
"What do you mean?"
"You know what I mean," he said, then retreated into his shell.
Morrosco and Wiley were growing more silent by the day. They were almost environmentalized now, like an animal doing what had to be done to stay alive, and no more. They both had a positive sense of betrayal and almost total disinterest in conjecturing
where it might come from. It was easier to count everyone as an enemy.
The rest of us had more command experience; we knew how a higher command might work, and we wanted to make some military sense out of it. Tan noted that there was a marked absence of low air activity along the Mekong. There should have been constant movement of American troops. He said they were being kept away so they would not see an American unit being hunted down by allies.
There was argument in the degree of the sellout. I thought we were being sold out by people who knew who we were.
"This is a bastard sellout. No way can we win. We're finished," I said. I was feeling pretty lousy. Prather refused to let loose from his myths.
"It may be our fault. For not exposing ourselves to the units that have been looking for us. Perhaps they were friendly. Possibly those last blokes were looking for us."
"Yeah. They were planning a surprise party." "What I mean," Prather insisted, "is that an area commander may have been told to look for us. And was not told what we have been up to. Fair enough. He's friendly. He's going to pick us up. And we burn his villages down and slaughter people and wipe his men out up and down the countryside. Then he doesn't care who we are. He's going to kill us."
"It won't wash, Lew. You're trying to explain away the obvious. That we're being used."
"It's all a farce anyway," said Wiley. "It was nothing but war games from the start. Right mates, if it's games we're playing, I retire. I just want to be let out of here."
"You retire and you die," said Jackson. "It may be a game to you, but it's fucking serious to me."
"You fight your war and 111 fight mine, Jackson," Wiley answered.
"You're a piss-poor soldier, Wiley, when you talk like that," Jackson said.
"You're talking shit, Jackson. You know how good I am."
"You're gonna be good and dead if you don't stick with us."
"Wiley is right," said Tan. "War games. We're an experiment. Somebody built the best unit they could put together. To see what we could take. Submit us to the extremes of trauma. And they're watching us all the time. We're laboratory rats. They've put us in a huge trap, and they're waiting to see if we'll start eating each other."
"Killing each other. That's what they want us to do," said Morrosco. "I'm not killing you people. I'm getting back. I've got some other people to kill."
Revenge. It had been keeping me alive for days. If they wanted us to kill each other, they had picked the wrong unit. We would kill the people who had done this to us. I saw determination grow in every face. And stubbornness is the basis of endurance; endurance, of survival.
Hatred began to work on us like a powerful intoxicant. Tan started looking for targets in the American Army, then suddenly he hated his own government. Tan, the most loyal Korean I had ever known, hated his people, his country, and everything it stood for. The conversaton got very strange. Jackson started cursing his wife, calling her every filthy name he could think of. If she had made a better marriage, stood behind him, he would have quit the Army years before. The others encouraged him, joining into rage against their homes, their backgrounds, their families. It was preposterous, but a very human reaction to our condition.
I was swept by despair that rolled over me like waves in a heavy sea. For the first time, I was afraid of death. Morrosco and Wiley were souped up on the Benzedrine that was fast running out. We were all mentally disoriented. I could hear the conversation getting senseless, but I could not quite understand why or how. We must have been approaching a collective
insanity. I could not imagine myself insane. But where does insanity begin?
I looked at our state. We were sitting in enemy territory, no guard posted, arguing with one another, shouting at people a lifetime away. Anyone could have come up upon us and just sat and watched us rambling among ourselves. If we had been hit, I was not sure the unit would have bothered to move. We would have fought it out on the spot, made the engagement come to a definitive conclusion. Which is a way of saying suicide. I think we might have shot it out with an American unit.
The only thing I trusted in the whole wide world was my gun. I was sick of the others. We were all sick of each other and began to say so. It was superficial; deep inside we could not forget how many times we had saved each other's lives. It was the decay that had set into us all. It was the absolute despair of being completely on our own, our lives of no consequence to anyone but ourselves. Everything we had been through was no more than a fly on a piece of paper. I started to get angry again. Some people had grossly underestimated us. Like a mean drunk in a bar who only knows how tough he is. No one stopped to think how tough we were.
I had seen it so many times. A guy is showing off in front of his girl or his mates, and you can see right behind his eyes into his ignorance. He cannot know what he is getting into. The only mercy that he is going to share is how lightly you choose to handle it.
When you have killed people with your hands, and a year later you are in a bar in Saigon or Tokyo facing a guy who is trying to pick a fight, his mind can no way reach out to the extremes of violence that you have known. His fantasy of how the fight might go would carry him to where he put you on the ground and put a boot in your head. Your mind has gone right past that, past seeing the man altogether. Get in a fight, and you know how easy it is to take his life
away. His detuning from the fact th
at he could hurt you and kick you in the head can no way be compared with your detuning from the knowledge that you can kill him.
You are going to take the fight to a more effective level than he ever dreamed of. But you do not let that happen, because you have got this feeling in your guts that it does not have to come to that. He is full of himself and thinks he is the better man. And you see beyond his ignorance that he has no idea how lucky he has been. He has no idea of the man you are.
For a couple of weeks, we had been entirely self-motivated. We had done our regrouping, rearming, fighting. No one had made any effort to help us. Now we were arguing among ourselves, and we were all we had. Even my cool, collected exterior broke down. I had argued as much as the others, and I was just as scared as anybody. Of my inability to think and act. Of dying. Or worse, coming out of it unwhole. Missing an arm or a leg. We must have raved this way for an hour before it died down. Now we looked closely at one another. This was not our way of working. None of us was ready to surrender to failure; without comment, we went back to the job of surviving. We were past the wrangling and the indecision. We started talking rationally.
"We'll forget about the Mekong and keep going southeast," I said.
"That makes sense," said Jackson. "The population down there is a lot less committed than around here. We'll have a better chance with the peasants at least."