by Jeff Wallace
Static blasted on the radio. Startled, I jumped. Larsen calmly sipped his coffee while a staff officer ran over and reset the dials. The quiet restored, he continued. “Cobris is the smartest one-star in this theater. He’s ambitious, surrounds himself with a staff so subservient to him they make you want to puke, plays angles nobody else seems to notice, and calls it seeing over the horizon. And he’s vindictive. I insisted on an investigation; he probably has me down on his shit list for that. I intend to do my job as I see it. I have the stature to do that. You don’t. As one old ambush-buster to another, watch your ass around Cobris. If you get in trouble, give me a shout, maybe I’ll be able to help.”
* * *
The helicopter hurtled eastward over scattered clouds. I could smell the rain forest’s yeasty scents. The clouds spat rain, intermittent at first, then a downpour as we flared into Bravo Company’s one-ship LZ. Ducked over, I ran across grass the rotor wash had flattened to the jungle’s edge, where waited Captain John Ulrich.
A head shorter than me, packed with energy he constrained by force of will, in another profession Ulrich might have kept more bulk on his bones. Command and the jungle had sculpted him into a stringy greyhound. He ushered me along a machete-hacked tunnel in the bamboo to his company’s position. Nothing here resembled the elaborate brigade TOC—there were no air conditioners, trailers, or floor pads, only soldiers in shallow foxholes camouflaged to blend in. Water dripped from the trees and the men; both were impervious. In the rear echelon at Tan Son Nhut, I didn’t see many soldiers like these, the teeth of the U.S. Army in Vietnam. Within the perimeter, I was the only one not gritted and fatigued. They regarded me politely, a stranger among them. A tourist.
Ulrich led me to where Sergeant Henry Joshua waited. Two fallen jungle trees lay like parallel benches, and I sat facing Ulrich and Joshua. I’d studied their statements, but enlightenment rarely surfaces from the sterility of military prose, so I asked them to tell me what had happened at Hill 71.
* * *
Weaving and bending like a Chinese parade dragon over the undulating terrain, the eighty-man column of light infantry in mid-afternoon encountered a resistive thicket of giant, thorny bamboo trees, their quills as long as Bic pens. Nobody in the leading platoon had seen such trees before. The soldiers hacked into them with machetes and bore their stigmata—punctures and cuts in their hands, forearms, legs. They spent three hours cutting a meter-wide path. With dusk less than 30 minutes off, Ulrich knew he’d made a mistake to press through the thicket. He should have backed off and found a way around.
His planned night-perimeter location lay a kilometer away. Normally units set up their night defenses in the late afternoon, while daylight allowed them to see what they were doing. Night was when the agile enemy became truly fearsome. Emerging from beneath the jungle canopy near the apogee of a dome-shaped hillock, Ulrich faced a dilemma. He hadn’t studied this terrain in detail, and to remain here meant to trust his unit to possibly flawed ground. To keep moving to the planned site risked walking into an ambush.
His soldiers were exhausted. He decided to stay put.
At an elevation of 71 meters, the crest was the highest point in a generally low zone. He observed old shell craters, which meant the enemy probably knew the place all too well. The open top offered an LZ, so he wouldn’t have to cut a new one. On the eastern side, he evaluated what the map falsely depicted as an unbroken slope. The tree line dipped, indicating a gully below. From the hill’s bottom, the crafty enemy could follow it like a tunnel to the heart of Ulrich’s perimeter. There were mediations: He might elaborately booby-trap the gulch, or set up a listening post at the bottom. He disliked booby traps; animals could trigger them, and they had to be painstakingly deactivated in the morning. The LP was the solution. Whoever manned it had to stay vigilant—a high standard after the hours of hacking through the thorns.
For his LP team leader, he chose a soldier who’d often walked point for the company, Sergeant Henry Joshua.
Joshua’s childhood on the outskirts of New Orleans had made him familiar with marshy woods. He’d lived at the edge of the coastal bayou whose intricate scents had taunted his nose. Forbidden to the children, the marsh had beckoned them, the trees and vines receding into a steam-shrouded maze. A kid who knew the paths could find places to smoke away from adults. If you didn’t know the paths, better to stay out, the place harbored snakes, and gators deeper in.
Zero two hundred hours. In the listening post at the gully’s mouth, Joshua crouched awake. He smeared more camouflage paint on the black skin of his nose and cheeks, to suppress the oil that glinted at night. He didn’t mind the LP duty. This furrow between banyan roots was safer than the hilltop—an obvious target for enemy mortars. The LP site afforded him a rare visibility of his surroundings. In the monsoons, the nearby stream had overflowed its banks, scattering light-gray pebbles in a washout. When the rains subsided, the water had settled in its gentle course, and the pebbles spread like a tanning reflector over the darker jungle floor.
Soon fog began to intrude. If an enemy unit had been tracking the Americans, the mist was deadly. It occulted infiltrators. On nights like this, a stealthy crawler might slash a soldier’s throat, and his friends a foxhole away wouldn’t even hear the gurgle. The fog slinked up the gully like a white caterpillar, brushed wetly over Joshua’s forearms. Alongside in the banyan root’s embrace, Specialist Cagill’s head poked out of his nylon poncho liner. Cagill was motionless but not asleep. He scanned the white curtain and loosed a sigh of recognition.
Joshua mentally rehearsed. In his lap he cradled a portable field telephone whose wire snaked to the platoon leader’s foxhole atop the hill. If anything happened, he’d report over the field phone; if things went to hell, he’d detonate the claymore and charge one hundred meters toward Bravo Company, shouting the running password, “Margarine! Margarine!” It was a word the Vietnamese couldn’t say, supposedly.
On fifty-percent alert, the troops on the hilltop manned their hasty positions, guns out in all directions. Automatic weapons and grenade launchers covered the gully, a lot of firepower to be sitting in front of, Joshua knew. He’d seen it happen—a rustle in the bushes spooks a GI, and he lets go a shot that avalanches the whole perimeter. In this ninth month of his tour, Joshua was acutely aware of the things that could kill him and of the steps he must take to stay alive. He didn’t rely on other people to do his thinking. Clinging to his skills, he was hard to kill, and with three months left on the clock, he had a good chance of going home in one piece, as long as he didn’t slacken. Diligence equaled life.
The trees blurred into vague creases in the white. He could taste the moisture on his lips. It slicked the plastic field telephone in his lap.
Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack. The instrument’s ringer was set so low he couldn’t hear it as much as feel the dance of the little pendulum within. He nestled the box to his ear and depressed the rubber push-to-talk.
“LP.”
“What’s your situation?” The new platoon leader.
“Quiet. Fog rolling up your way.”
“Okay. Let me know if anything changes.”
Joshua nested the telephone in his lap. Let me know if anything changes. Like telling a man to piss in a downwind direction. The platoon leader was starting out jumpy. He was the fourth lieutenant Joshua had served under in the same platoon. Of the others, one had been wounded severely, two reassigned. Each new officer brought weeks of angst while his jungle legs grew under him. An officer’s education must be the most expensive in the world, Joshua mused, paid for in other men’s blood.
From the mist, a splash.
He gripped Cagill on the arm. His partner didn’t startle. Solid man, Cagill. Joshua was very selective about the soldier he took with him on LP duty. With hardly a whisper of nylon, Cagill slid from under his poncho liner, and his hand fell on the fist-size claymore detonator.
Hard to tell what was corporeal and what wasn’t. On top of that, he was de
ad tired. Exhausted men hallucinated, saw purple dragons cavorting in the trees; he’d experienced such visions himself. Over the root he peered, keened his ears, breathed to Cagill as if to a lover, “Once you blow the claymore, wait for my word before hauling ass.”
Aimed toward the washout, the convex mine pronged out of the soft soil only twenty meters away, technically too close, but what the book said didn’t match the real world, conditions were never optimum. Twenty was as far out as their claymore could go and stay concealed. The ground-rise would protect the LP from the backblast—provided that the mine was oriented correctly. The claymore was directional; raised letters on its plastic face read ‘Front Toward Enemy.’ At night, you couldn’t see the letters—you had to rely on the mine’s shape and the protrusions. Like every soldier who’d ever set up a claymore in the dark, Joshua fretted over whether he’d done it right.
A twig snapped. Was somebody out there in the mist? As a boy, Joshua had learned to catch bayou snakes from an older kid who’d been doing it all his life. Some snakes you could grab with your hands, the kid had taught him. Others you had to use a stick. Didn’t matter if the snake was poisonous, the difference was whether it would whip at your outstretched hand, or let you grab it as languid as rolled cookie dough. You just knew, said the kid. After a while, watching his friend handle the snakes, Joshua understood. Nine months in the jungle, and he knew in the same unexplainable way that somebody was out there.
Gripping the field phone, he thought of what he’d say to the jittery lieutenant. No small thing, to bug out of an LP. He cared about his rep among the old timers—they trusted him not to lose his nerve. He knew he could intuit bad shit. But what if he abandoned the LP and nothing happened?
Like frosted glass, the mist seeped ambiance. He beheld a shadow slowly separate from the cloud and coalesce into a human silhouette, rifle in hand. The figure treaded across the washout, barely paces from the claymore. Beside him, Cagill’s breath halted.
Shit! Quickly Joshua scanned the forest. The man could be the tip of an attack, a unit converging on the gully. No, that didn’t make sense. In the mist, the man’s comrades would have lost sight of him. No unit movement was ever so fucked up as in the jungle at night. If men didn’t stay close to each other, they’d lose contact and become widely separated. This one didn’t act like he was part of an attack. He didn’t walk stealthily, he just plodded forward.
No time. A few steps closer and they’d lose the advantage. Joshua set aside the telephone, leaned over his rifle, pulled the butt hard into his shoulder, soundlessly rotated the selector switch from safe to semi-automatic. Rough-sighting, he aimed for the dark breadth of the torso.
He couldn’t hold even a fuzzy sight picture; the shot might go anywhere.
The figure was close enough to piss on the claymore.
“Bust it.”
Cagill crushed the detonator, and in the flash Joshua saw a man suspended in air, legs and arms spread, an X on brilliant white. The backblast stormed debris over their heads; soil and pebbles pattered.
Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack.
Joshua felt blindly for the phone. Dun globs floated. The flash had erased his night vision.
“LP.”
“What the fuck was that?”
“Blew the claymore on somebody who walked up on us.”
“Withdraw immediately to my position.”
“There was only one.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” Joshua said. As if he could see jack shit. A minute after the blast, his night vision was inadequate to notice an elephant on a bicycle. A rookie move, to watch the claymore go off at night. He should have covered one eye.
Silence on the line. Good, thought Joshua. The lieutenant was reconsidering the order. It would give Old Man Ulrich time to supply adult supervision.
Now Joshua could distinguish the lump on the washout. No movement behind the mist. If the man had been part of an attack, Joshua would have heard a reaction to the claymore burst, men going to ground, equipment clattering. No such thing as a noiseless infantry movement. Weird, a lone soldier roaming the jungle at night. Gradually he relaxed. Chemical smoke hovered pungently. A rivulet slalomed down his face. He counted time while his night vision mended.
Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack.
“LP.”
“Change of plan.” Restraint in the lieutenant’s voice, no doubt following a lecture from Ulrich. Once an LP is withdrawn, it cannot be reinstated—security is compromised, not to mention the risk the LP team faces crossing into the night perimeter without getting shot. Another lesson toward the day the lieutenant found his brain in his head. “We’re on one-hundred percent alert. Find out who it was you blew up.”
“Roger.”
Now Joshua was grateful for the enveloping mist. For a weapon he took the .45 pistol, better for stooping over a body, more controllable, less likely to snag on a vine. He knew he could pull the trigger three times in a second if he had to. Advancing, calculating his footfalls, he swung the .45 with each scan of his eyes. He hoped not to fire a shot. Up top, the men the claymore blast had awakened would have no idea what was happening. Their fingers hovered by their triggers. Tension and sudden noises, a bad combination.
His feet compressed spongy leaf layers stinking of decay. At the washout, the ground firmed. The expanse of gray pebbles left him exposed, as if on a stage. He peered into the mist along the streambed that furrowed beyond. Tuning out the incessant insect chatter, he strained for the telltale clang or click that only a human makes.
On its side, the face turned upwards, the body had the floppy posture of violent death. Joshua lightly pressed the gun muzzle against the man’s temple; with his other hand he checked the neck for a pulse. Warm, gluey wetness. He fingered the other side. The man was definitely dead. Joshua found the rifle, an M16, and pushed it away, just to be sure.
What was he doing here, this lone walker? A Viet Cong deserter? Around the head, a bandanna damp with sweat. Hugging the torso, web gear. A canteen in its holder. An ammo pouch. A butt pack on the web belt.
The Mighty C contained some 700 miniature ball bearings. The exploding compound scattered them in a V pattern. But no explosion is perfect. The pellets snuggled in a thin plastic bed. When the claymore detonated, they fractured unevenly, single pellets and clusters cocooned in plastic. A cluster had caught the man below the belt and streamed his intestines out through the lower back, a gruesome sight in the shimmery mist.
The man’s gear—the uniform, webbing, rifle—was American. Not unusual—the Viet Cong would fight with whatever they could get. Maybe this one had stripped it off a U.S. or South Vietnamese casualty.
He checked the legs. Cargo pockets on the thighs. He opened one, extracted a folded map. Adhesive acetate covered the sheet. In his mind, a warning rattled like the field-phone tumblers. The enemy used map coverings too, essential in the damp climate, but clear plastic bags were the common thing for them. Acetate was American stuff, too expensive for the thrifty VC.
What the fuck?
The rule: no lights at night; lights were a sure way to serve you up to somebody’s rifle sights. He knew this as he unhooked his flashlight. Night vision impaired, what else could he do? He had to be sure. The mist should protect him, unless the enemy was close, out searching for this lost sheep. Making sure the red lens cover was screwed down securely, cupping it with his fingers to fashion a peephole of exposed lens, he bowed forward so that his body formed a cave above the dead man’s head. In the red-filtered glow, a Caucasian face. Half-open eyes floated in an infinity stare. No expression. The burst had killed him instantly. Joshua cut the light.
A Caucasian face!
Crazy. How could an American solider be out alone in the jungle at night? Joshua patted for dog tags around the neck. Nothing. Some soldiers hated the chain’s rub, kept their tags elsewhere. The morning light would help. He didn’t want to touch the man again. “God bless you, buddy.” The benediction came as a whisper in
audible but to himself and the vigilant dead. “Very sorry. But you fucked up. You were in a bad place at a bad time. You were stupid and wrong and you died.”
Stop scolding! Enough to have killed him.
The body submerged into a shadowy mound at his feet. The company would have to evacuate the remains. There would be questions to answer and statements to write. No time to worry about that now. The LP was still in business. Against the banyan root, he rested two grenades that could substitute for the claymore, if needed.
After first light they came down: the company commander, the platoon leader, a medic, and a fire team for security. Joshua sat on the banyan root while the medic checked the casualty. Nobody spoke at first. He thought, it was so clear what had happened. On the washout twenty meters from the LP site, the splayed body. The nearby crater where the claymore had burst. Dark. Mist. Obvious.
He was smoking a cigarette when Captain Ulrich approached, took off his helmet, and sat on the root. “He doesn’t have ID on him. Did you find any last night?”
“I checked, but no.”
“You’re not riding yourself for this, are you?”
“Never killed an American before.”
“If he was an American. We don’t know that for certain. Anyway, it was his fault, not yours. To be tracking alone at night through the jungle is incomprehensible. Suicidal, basically.” Ulrich was silent for a minute. “As soon as a chopper becomes available, we’ll evacuate the remains.”
“Yes sir.”
“Listen up, Joshua. I’d have done the same thing. An unidentified fucker approaching my night perimeter damn well better get dropped. That’s what my report will say.”
Then Ulrich was up and gone.
With his finger Joshua pushed the cigarette butt into the soft soil, leaving nothing for the enemy to find. He stared at the leaves. He didn’t look at the body bag they carried past him toward the hilltop. Soon a chopper would bear it away. The company would resume its movement through the rain forest. The urgent business of staying alive would take away the face he’d seen in the red oval.