Heat waves rippled under the scorching hot galvanized tin roof. Oscillating fans resting on ammo boxes rolled humid air like warm blankets over the sweating bodies of Dawson and Markowski. The previous night Dawson had been on de-drumming detail at the asphalt plant and Markowski had been on perimeter guard duty. Now they had the day off and were alone in the hooch for needed sleep … alone until three hooch mama-sans arrived with their mid-morning chatter while gathering laundry bags, sweeping the hooch, straightening blankets, fluffing pillows, and gathering everybody’s extra set of boots to polish later in the day. They finally left to do the wash at the shower building.
Ten minutes after the mama-sans left, Dawson called again. “Marko, you still awake?” Dawson walked barefoot down the aisle past cots, footlockers, fans, and Conroy’s waist-high fridge toward Markowski’s bunk in the middle of the hooch. “I need to turn off these fans so we can listen—”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Markowski raised up on both elbows. “And leave my damn fan alone.” He pulled the tip of his walrus mustache down from where it had curled up on his nose. “Goddamn it. Between you and the hooch girls….” Markowski leaned to one side and punched his pillow. “Now I’m wide awake.” He swung his legs over the edge of his cot and sat up, giving a quick adjustment at the crotch of his jockey shorts. His brown hair stuck out on either side of his broad head like wings.
“Listen to me,” Dawson said. He was now standing in the aisle next to the wooden footlocker at the end of Markowski’s cot. His round, pudgy cheeks were copies of his round, pudgy belly. “I think I hear digging or scraping, and it sounds like it’s coming from under the hooch.”
Markowski closed his eyes to focus his thoughts. “You’re hearing the Vietnamese day workers filling sandbags outside.”
“No I’m not. I heard scraping sounds even when they took a break.”
Markowski opened his eyes, raised his thick brown eyebrows, and looked around as though sound could be seen in the air. “I don’t hear anything.”
“Put your ear on the frame of your cot,” Dawson said. “That’s how I heard it the first time. Better yet, get down and put your ear on the floor.”
“What the hell, I’m not laying on the damn floor to hear scraping sounds.” Markowski pronounced “scraping sounds” in a high, baby voice.
“Marko, I’m telling you, I think somebody is digging under our hooch.”
Markowski groaned and stood up. He rolled back a thin straw mat in front of his cot. He turned and glared at Dawson. Then he and Dawson got down on their stomachs and put their ears to the exposed concrete floor.
“I still don’t hear anything,” Markowski said, his head resting on the floor next to Dawson’s.
“I know,” Dawson whispered. “I don’t either.”
Markowski got to his feet and tried to brush the sand off his sweaty chest and belly. “I can’t believe you woke me up so I could get down on that goddamned sandy floor. Oughta fire those fucking hooch girls. They never sweep under the matts.”
Dawson sat on the floor with his legs folded like a meditating pudgy Buddha. He squinted and scanned the concrete. “Before I woke you up, before the mama-sans came in and after they left, I heard scraping for maybe ten seconds, then nothing, and then more scraping. It’s gone on like that … must be over an hour by now. I’m not imagining this.”
Markowski rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Christ. Okay, let’s try again. But this time let’s listen at your end of the hooch. And turn off the fans,” he waved his hand to encompass the hooch, “and unplug Conroy’s fridge. I wanna hear what you’re talking about.”
Dawson smiled, got up and brushed off the sand, and walked down the aisle and unplugged Conroy’s fridge. Markowski turned off the fan on the ammo box next to his cot and headed for the four-foot-high plastic oscillating pedestal fan three cots further down the aisle.
“Hey, I got an idea,” Markowski said as he padded on bare feet behind Dawson. “Put a drinking glass on the floor and press your ear in the glass.” He tipped his head sideways toward his cupped hand. “My brother and I did that on my parents’ bedroom wall.”
“That’s disgusting,” Dawson called over his shoulder. “You’re one sick pervert.”
“Nah. Just curious. All that grunting and groaning.” Markowski chuckled. “When Dad got going, he talked dirty in Polish.”
“What about plastic tumblers from the mess hall?” Dawson called from the end of the hooch. “I got some in my locker.”
Within minutes, Markowski and Dawson were on the floor again, this time beside Dawson’s cot. But then the hooch door squeaked open and banged shut. Carl Zimmer, the Headquarters Company clerk, sauntered down the aisle, whistling as he walked, until he came opposite Markowski and Dawson stretched out on the floor.
“Hey, what are you guys doing?” He squinted and leaned his head forward. He looked quizzically—suspiciously—at the two sandy-legged men clad only in their under shorts.
“Quiet, Zipper.” Dawson glared at him. “We’re trying to hear something. Okay?”
Carl Zimmer was a fundamentalist Christian from Indiana who talked about Jesus every chance he got until one night three men pushed him into a corner of the hooch and told him to “Zip it up about Jesus or we’ll squirt Deep Heat up your butt.” Everybody called him Zipper after that.
“You drunk again?” Zipper asked.
Nobody said anything for a few moments.
“There!” Dawson whispered. “Put your tumbler down, Marko, and listen to that. That’s what I heard!”
Markowski was lying on his side pretending he was looking at Zipper through the plastic tumbler like a telescope. Markowski rolled over on his stomach and put the tumbler on the concrete floor and listened. He looked up. “I still can’t hear anything.” He put his finger in his ear and skewered it back and forth as though reaming a clogged sewer line. “Shared a bunker on the perimeter line last night with a guy from Charlie Company. Damn asshole fired several rounds with the muzzle near my ear. Still ringing—”
“God damn it,” Dawson yelled. “Damn it all to hell. Why didn’t you tell me that before? Jesus Christ.”
“What are you guys talking about?” Zipper asked. “And do you have to use the Lord’s name—?”
“Come over here, Zipper,” Dawson said, “and put your ear in this tumbler and tell me if you hear anything.”
Zipper hesitated, but Dawson was apparently serious, so Zipper got down on his belly and pressed his ear into the plastic tumbler. He looked up. “What am I supposed to—?”
“Just listen,” Dawson said.
Zipper pressed his ear in the tumbler again and listened. He squeezed his eyes shut in concentration. “Well, I think….” He lifted his head and looked at Dawson. “Sounds like scratching or scraping. Sort of thunking, too. Is this a trick or something?”
Dawson jumped to his feet. “I’m reporting this to First Sergeant Watkins. The fucking VC are digging a tunnel under our hooch!”
****
Delta Company’s Lieutenant Redding—a blond-haired, blue-eyed, ROTC graduate from the University of Georgia—walked double-time next to Specialist Dawson toward Delta Company’s hooches. First Sergeant Watkins walked a slower pace behind them. Watkins’ brown head was shaved and oiled. His portly frame and brown eyes were confident and steady with twenty-eight years of experience in the Army.
The company area was deserted except for Vietnamese day workers filling sandbags. The truckers of Delta Company were out hauling laterite and asphalt for Charlie Company’s paving crew working on a side road off QL-13.
After listening to the scraping sounds coming from the hooch floor, Lieutenant Redding and First Sergeant Watkins walked outside. They looked toward the perimeter line a quarter mile away and then back toward the center of the base camp and the nearby chopper pads and especially the heavy equipment yard next door.
“Bet they’re planning to surface some night in Charlie Company’s equipmen
t yard,” Redding said to nobody in particular.
Watkins raised his eyebrows and tipped his head to one side, granting qualified plausibility to Redding’s idea. He waved his hand toward the cluster of Vietnamese sandbaggers moving to another work site. “Day workers could calculate the distance to the equipment yard or any other damn thing in the base camp. Never trusted those little bastards.”
“If we dig at the end of the hooch nearest the perimeter,” Redding continued, shading his eyes as he looked at the distant perimeter bunkers, “I’ll bet we find the tunnel.” He turned to see who was standing nearby. “Hey Dawson, go over to Charlie Company and ask First Sergeant Taylor for a backhoe and start digging at the end of this hooch. ASAP.”
“Sir, I’m a truck driver.” Dawson hiked up his pants from under his bare, sagging belly. “I don’t know anything about backhoes.”
“Then tell Taylor I need an operator, too. On the double.”
When the backhoe and heavy equipment operator arrived and began excavating at the end of the hooch, nobody thought to arm himself. The idea of VC digging a tunnel under the base camp was so audacious it seemed like wild speculation. But when the backhoe operator broke through the top of a tunnel four feet below ground, everybody got serious.
“Hey, Markowski,” Lieutenant Redding yelled. “Get your weapon and stand guard over this hole. We don’t want VC popping up and firing at us. You too, Dawson.”
“Lieutenant, can I speak to you a moment?” First Sergeant Watkins walked slowly away from the excavation site and stopped to confer. Redding followed and stood close to Watkins.
“Digging that hole, Sir,” Watkins bobbed his head and raised his eyebrows in admiration, “was a sign of real leadership.”
“Why thank you, Watkins.” Redding’s young face turned pink.
“But now somebody’s gotta explore and blow that tunnel, and none of our boys is trained for that kind of operation.” Watkins rubbed his hand over his smooth, brown head. He looked up. “But we could ask the 25th Infantry Division, right here on our own base camp, to send us a tunnel rat. They got a tunnel school that trains men for that kind of thing. We’d be smart, though,” he squinted at the sky, “if we clear our request through Colonel—”
“Wouldn’t that make us look like we can’t take care of our own backyard?”
“Sir, with all due respect, are you going down that tunnel?”
“No, but that’s not my area of responsibility. Nor is it yours.”
“Well, Sir, you go right ahead and send one of our boys down there, but you best tie a rope around his leg because he won’t be coming out alive.”
“Shouldn’t we at least ask for a volunteer?”
“Sir, none of our men will volunteer for that job. And if they did, we’d be irresponsible if we let ’em do it when experienced men might be available.”
“Okay, call Colonel Hackett and see what he says about your idea. But make sure he knows it’s your idea.”
****
I reached for the receiver resting in the cradle of the ringing black phone to the left of two other phones on my desk in the battalion headquarters office.
“182nd Engineer Battalion, S-1 Office, Specialist Atherton speaking.”
“This is Watkins in Delta. We got a VC tunnel being dug under one of our hooches and I gotta talk to Colonel Hackett right now, if he’s available.”
I put Watkins on hold and walked to the closed door of Hackett’s air-conditioned office and knocked. I opened the door as Hackett called, “Come in.” Cool air, smoky and rancid from Hackett’s cigar, cascaded over my face and arms.
“First Sergeant Watkins from Delta Company on the battalion phone for you, Sir. Apparently they found a VC tunnel under one of their hooches.”
Hackett jerked back from his papers as though buzzed by a wasp. He dropped his cigar in the ashtray and grabbed the receiver off his battalion phone and yelled, “What’s going on Watkins?”
I retreated to my desk in the main office. Three minutes later the battalion phone rang again. I picked up the receiver.
“182nd Engineer Ba—”
“Get me someone on the horn from Tunnels, Mines, and Booby Traps. ASAP.”
“Yes, Sir. And where—?” Hackett hung up.
I looked at the hunched back of David Connors, our head clerk—known as “Dickhead” behind his back—leaning over his typewriter two desks ahead of me. “Hey, Connors. Hackett wants me to phone something called Tunnels, Mines, and Booby Traps. You know anything about that? Who do I call?”
“25th Infantry Division.”
Connors sounded irritated. Impatient. He was making a typing correction on a court-martial document by over-typing his mistake on a tiny sheet of white carbon he was holding against the document as he struck a word’s worth of keys. So I knew my question wasn’t the primary source of his anger. The tight-assed little Dickhead was irritated because each of two carbon copies below his original would reveal his whole-word fuck-up as a black-blob over-type.
I waited a few moments and asked, “Why would I call the 25th Infantry Division?”
Connors answered into his typewriter, his voice going higher and louder as he spoke. “Because a school for training tunnel rats is here on our base camp and it’s run by the 25th Infantry Division.”
“Really? They have a school for that?”
Connors spit out the words: “Will you let me do my goddamned work?”
“Ah … any special way of getting hold of the 25th? I haven’t called them before.”
Connors turned in his swivel chair and looked at me over his clear-plastic-framed glasses. “You pick up the base camp phone, not the battalion phone or field phone, and you ask the base camp commo operator to connect you with an operator for the 25th. Then ask the 25th’s operator to connect you with the tunnel school. Got it? Oh, and by the way, I hope someday you’ll stop announcing the name of our battalion when you answer the battalion phone. Anybody calling on the battalion phone is in our battalion”—Connors’ eyes got big—“and he needn’t be told what unit he’s in.” He forced a wide smile, rapidly blinked his eyes, and turned back to his typewriter.
Asshole. Dickhead.
Five minutes later I was routed through the necessary phone connections and got a sergeant from the tunnel school and put him on hold. I walked over and opened Colonel Hackett’s door and said, “Staff Sergeant Albers from Tunnels, Mines, and Booby Traps on the base camp phone for you, Sir.”
I returned to my desk and tapped a pencil’s eraser on my typewriter for a minute or two. Then I got up and walked to the adjutant’s desk in the rear-left corner of the office.
“Lieutenant Harris?” I said quietly. “There’s a story developing in Delta Company I’d like to cover for the battalion newspaper and maybe for release to Stars and Stripes.” I reiterated what Watkins told me, and I explained that Hackett, at that very moment, was very likely asking the 25th Infantry Division’s tunnel school for a tunnel rat.
Harris’s eyebrows shot up. “What’s your typing load? Anything you need to finish today?”
“Two easy letters and a long memo for Major Roberts. Nothing urgent. Corrections and margin edits are done on the Roberts thing. Ready for typing.”
“Okay. Ah … Bonky is loaded for the day, so give that stuff to Connors, and tell him I said he should stay after hours, if necessary, to get them typed.”
“Oh my goodness, I’d hate for—” I shook my head and frowned. “This might be a hot story in Delta, but I can patch it together tomorrow after it gets cold.”
Harris grinned. “Atherton, get the hell out of here.”
“Yes, Sir.”
I grabbed the two yellow legal pad pages off my desk. They had Major Roberts’ indecipherable scrawl on them and my red corrections and rewordings on the margins of each page. I took the yellow sheets and crumpled them together, twisting them like a yellow rope. Then I flattened them out and carried the wrinkled pages to Connors’ desk. He had been taking pho
ne calls while I was talking to Harris.
“Harris wants you to type this stuff for Roberts.” I spread out the wrinkled yellow pages in front of Connors. “Gotta be perfect. Without correction over-types. Gotta be done today.”
“What the hell…?”
“Hey, ask Harris. I’m only telling you what he told me.”
“Why are these pages wrinkled?”
“Major Roberts must have wadded them in his pocket.”
“Wait a minute. This is your work. Why aren’t you typing this stuff?”
“Beats me. Harris said I can take the rest of the day off. Oh, and he wants you to type the two rough drafts in my inbox, too.”
“What the…? That’s bullshit!”
I shrugged and returned to my desk while Connors hustled over to Harris. I slid the gray plastic cover over my typewriter, grabbed my M16 and ammo bandoleer off a wall hook, and walked out the door.
****
I stopped by my hootch and picked up five small pads of lined paper and stuffed them in my pockets together with three pens. Then I walked to Delta Company. I passed Delta’s HQ building and walked a dirt road to the hooches that sat in a grove of young trees at the edge of a flat field that extended a quarter mile out to the perimeter.
I didn’t have a problem finding the right hooch. It had a backhoe parked at the building’s end facing the perimeter, and there was a truck-size pile of dirt off to the side. A dozen men from companies all over the battalion were walking around the excavation site talking and pointing and looking down at the tunnel hole at the bottom of the excavation. Most of Delta’s men were still out with their trucks hauling asphalt or laterite for a paving operation.
When I asked a couple of men standing at the site how the tunnel was discovered, they directed me to Dawson and Markowski. I questioned them and got notes for the beginning of this story. Then I talked to First Sergeant Watkins who told me how they decided to dig at that particular spot. I made a note to talk to Lieutenant Redding later. He was standing on the hootch-road talking to several other officers.
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