13th Valley

by John M. Del Vecchio

  “We oughta invite Lamonte out with us,” Doc said. “He’ll wanta go.”

  “Yeah,” Egan answered. “Cherry, you know anything bout pot protocol?”

  “About what?”

  “These dudes really got a rigid way of doin their dew.”

  “Ah, you’re losin me. Their what?”

  “God fuckin damn. How’d you get to be such a fuckin cherry?”

  “Their dew, Man,” Doc said. “You know, like in the morning the dew is on the grass. Dig?”

  “Look,” Egan stopped in the road again. He turned to Cherry and stopped him. “There are about ten dos and ten don’ts at a set. Those dudes find it necessary cause a downer’ll wreck a high and that’s UN-For-givable.”

  “I’ll watch it,” Cherry said.

  “No. Just let me tell ya. After they torch up a bowl be powerful mellow. Like never pass an unlit bowl; never reach for a bowl til it’s passed; never let your rap put the bowl out.”

  “Yeah, dig?” Doc added. “Never rap anyone inta a bummer and never keep a dude’s lighter after lightin a bowl.

  “Bowls pass to the right up at brigade. Take a toke and pass the bowl. Dig?”

  “Hey. Okay,” Cherry said. “If you see me doin somethin wrong, tell me. Okay?”

  They continued up the road a quarter of a mile and turned at the break in the low sandbagged wall that preceded the trenches for brigade rocket security. No one was about. It was 0145 hours. Behind them, beyond the Oh-deuce, beyond the perimeter, illumination flares popped and slowly sank against the black wall of the mountains. Up the hill before them were half-a-dozen hootches. At the right end of the line were the quarters for the Vietnamese interpreters then the hootch of the attached personnel then, the APO, the Military Intelligence Office, the PIO and Civil Affairs office and finally the MARS station. All the offices were vacant, the interpreters’ hootch was dark and silent. From the quarters for the attached personnel music drifted, oozed from the glow at the edge of the windows. The music seemed to have a difficult time squeezing through and expanding in the thick air. At irregular intervals the blast of artillery from the batteries deeper into Camp Eagle interrupted the music and the woosh of the mortar flares streaking skyward then popping, igniting and gently whizzing to earth added an eerie harmony to the sounds.

  Egan, Doc and Cherry entered the hootch from which the music seeped. The interior had been sectioned off with plywood sheets forming six rooms with a narrow-hallway down the center. A single incandescent bulb lighted the hall. A mural had been crudely painted on the wall of the first room to the left. The scene was a country road running back into green grassy hills with clusters of rounded trees here and there and fences paralleling the road over the hills, in and out of sight, finally disappearing at a vanishing point. A sign in the foreground had arrows pointing in five different directions: Quang Tri-78 km; Saigon-514 km; Big Moose, Montana-19,757 km; N.Y.C.-24,460 km; and one arrow pointing straight up, Moon-386,800 km±.

  Wooden ammo crate tops served as cafe doors for the room.

  Egan, followed by Doc and Cherry, pushed the doors aside and entered. Inside the room there were three men. They had been talking sporadically. Two of them sat behind a bar on high stools and the third sat on a footlocker turned on end. The bar had been the old bar from the Phoc Roc which the men had scavenged.

  The room was dingy. At each end a cot was covered by sloppily hung mosquito netting. Above the cot to the left was a stereo receiver/amplifier and 8-track tapedeck. Above the bunk to the right was a bookshelf full of volumes varying from The Working Press by Ruth Adler and The Information War by Dale Minor to a volume of Shakespeare and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Hung below each shelf was an M-16 rifle and a bayonet. Below the rifle to the right there hung a crude sign:

  IN MANY COUNTRIES POLITICIANS HAVE SEIZED ABSOLUTE POWER

  AND MUZZLED THE PRESS;

  IN NO COUNTRY HAS THE PRESS SEIZED ABSOLUTE POWER AND

  MUZZLED THE POLITICIANS.

  The man to the right behind the bar was thin and slight. He had long straight brown hair, longer than regulation. He wore civilian clothes, a western shirt with embroidered shoulders and blue jeans. He was known variously as Lamonte, PIO or Photog. Lamonte was an Army Information Specialist—Journalist, Spec. 4, assigned to the 1st Brigade Public Information Detachment. He was an infantry correspondent and he took himself and his job seriously. He traveled repeatedly with the same twelve infantry companies and he became close friends with many boonierats. Amongst them he was known as the Boonie Rat Correspondent.

  Everyone has always portrayed infantryman, boonierat, as dumb. Everyone, except anyone who has ever been a boonierat. Boonierats were not dumb. Lamonte often emphasized this fact in his stories. He liked to tell people, especially soldiers, that the average soldier drafted into the army in 1969 had 14.4 years of schooling. “A junior in college,” he would say. “This army is probably the most highly educated army ever, anywhere.”

  Beside Lamonte stood a heavy soldier in jungle fatigues. He was Lamonte’s replacement. He’d been in-country two months though he had only limited field experience. His name was George.

  On the turned up footlocker was Le Huu Minh, the Vietnamese scout and interpreter of Company A. Like most Vietnamese he was small by American standards, just over five feet. GIs called him Minh or Little Minh in deference to the South Vietnamese general and political figure known as Big Minh.

  Whenever Lamonte and Minh were in the rear together they discussed politics and current events.

  “I heard on your radio today,” Minh had been saying in his soft precise English, “your federal tribunal reaffirm your chain-of-command courts.”

  “Oh, on My Lai,” Lamonte said. “Yep. The courts ruled … Egan!” Lamonte shouted as the three entered. “You ol’ rattlesnake, good to see ya. Doc! Jesus H., what happened to you.”

  “Ah, nothing, Man. Dig? Doan mean nothin’.”

  “Yer the first ones to the party,” Lamonte said. “How bout a Coke? You know, if you don’t want to drink anything alcoholic.”

  “No thanks,” Egan said shyly.

  “We’re goina be up for quite a while tonight,” the correspondent said.

  “We come over to ask you out with us in the morning,” Doc said. “What are you doin?”

  “That fuckin major. He and that fuckin asshole butterbar lieutenant we got. They keep killin my stories. I’m workin on an article about censorship. But I’m through for the night.” Lamonte stacked the scattered pages, bent down behind the bar and came up with two cans of Coke. “Here. Hey, this is my new cherry, George. This is Egan and that’s Doc and …”

  “This is Cherry,” Egan said. “Lamonte,” Egan pointed, “George and Minh. Minh’s from Phu Luong,” Egan addressed Cherry. “You know where that is.”

  “I do?” Cherry said.

  “Yeah,” Egan said. “Remember when we came in today, with that asshole captain from brigade? Remember?”

  “Yeah,” Cherry said. Doc had given Minh a power salute. The two now were power handshaking.

  “Remember that village he was rattling on about?” Egan asked.

  “I thought you were asleep.”

  “I haven’t slept in 17 months,” Egan said. “That village is part of Phu Luong. Minh lives down on one of the criks behind the village center.” Egan turned back to Minh. “You getting round,” he said.

  Minh smiled a shy respectful smile. Lamonte opened the sodas and handed them across the bar for the men to share.

  “No,” Egan said, “I think I’m imposin on you guys. We just come over to tell you we’re ruckin up at oh-four hundred. We don’t want to impose on you.”

  “You just think you’re imposin because you don’t understand, Man,” Lamonte said.

  “You know what it is?” George chuckled.

  “He’s in bad shape,” Lamonte nodded toward George.

  “Yer standin on that side of the bar,” George chuckled again. “By yerselves.”


  “That’s what it is,” Lamonte agreed. “Why don’t you shut the doors. If that hall light wasn’t on out there this place would look real cool.” Lamonte took a tensor-lite from the bar and placed it on the stereo shelf with the beam aiming at the ceiling! “Why don’t you go out and shut off the light, George?”

  With the hall light off and the tensor beam against the ceiling the room lost its dinginess and became almost cozy. “Where you all from?” George asked.

  “Oh-deuce,” Cherry said with private pride.

  “How long you all been in-country?” George asked.

  “Shit, Dude,” Lamonte interrupted. He pointed at Egan, “That man’s been here since before I was. Man, Egan was a cherry way back when Christ was a corporal. And Doc! God! Doc came here right after Genesis. Doc, you don’t look too good. How you feel?”

  “Man,” Doc expelled the word from his throat after taking a swallow of Coke, “my head burn and I feel all this pressure on it. But Man, my body is cold, dig? And I got a mean case a the chills and my feet is freezin. I’m five thousand years old, Man, an I feels like a five-thousand-year-old piece a shit.” Everybody laughed and Doc laughed the hardest.

  “I got somethin to fix you right up,” Lamonte said, smiled and the others laughed again. “We got a new, super-mellow one-hit bowl and some stash that’ll warm ya up and ease the pain.”

  George reached up behind the books in the shelf and produced an eighteen-inch-long bamboo tube. The tube was almost two inches in diameter. The bottom was sealed by a natural sectioning of the bamboo. The top sectioning had a small hole drilled in it. About midway up the side of the tube a tiny carved bowl on a long stem had been inserted at an angle into the only other orifice in the tube. George handed Lamonte the pipe and Lamonte carefully, methodically, removed the bowl and stem from the tube and laid the tube on the bar. From under the bar he produced a bottle of white wine. He very slowly poured wine into the orifice in the tube gradually raising the top so the wine did not spill out from the mouthpiece.

  “Where you going out to tomorrow?” George asked Egan.

  Lamonte gazed up at George in amazement at the inappropriateness of the question. Stoned George was oblivious.

  “Just into the boonies,” Egan said. He looked distrustfully at Minh from the corner of his eye. Then he turned to Minh, “You comin out?”

  “Yes,” Minh said. “I am ready. I will be on the pad when the helicopters arrive.” Minh’s voice was an octave higher than Egan’s. He spoke English more precisely than most American soldiers though he added an intonation to the words which made his speech oddly like singing. He was proud of his diction and extensive vocabulary.

  Lamonte gently placed the bowl stem into the tube and then filled the tiny bowl with finely ground marijuana leaves. He handed the pipe to Doc. “Let’s get your head squared away,” he said. Doc took the tube and holding it at an angle so the bowl stem was in the wine but the wine was not high enough to flow up the stem into the bowl, he placed his mouth over the upper end of the tube. Lamonte clicked his lighter and held the flame over the bowl as Doc sucked. The dried leaves glowed to amber red coals. The smoke bubbled through the wine then cooled in the air chamber below the mouthpiece finally passing through and into Doc’s expanding lungs. The coals died. Doc shut his eyes, held the gases in and handed the tube back over the bar to Lamonte who reloaded the bowl.

  “Damn,” Doc opened his eyes wide, exhaled and bellowed, “that’s one mean mellow bowl.”

  Lamonte handed the one-hit bowl to Egan and fired it as Egan sucked then reloaded it for Cherry, George and finally himself. Little Minh declined to smoke which was typical of all the 1st Brigade Vietnamese interpreters and scouts. Smoking, like drinking alcoholic beverages, was a very social way of relaxing in the rear-areas. The men who smoked usually maintained a lower profile than the men who drank. There were men who only drank and others who only smoked, the juicers and the heads, but most men did both and some men did neither.

  Lamonte and the crew laughed and joked and passed the bowl several more times. Then Egan took some OJs from his pocket and they passed the opium joints around until everyone was feeling very relaxed and introspective.

  Cherry picked up some papers Lamonte had written and read them slowly, concentrating on the images of each word, each letter of each word. The dope gave him a pleasant tight sensation at the temples and across the top of his head. Slowly he pieced it all together.

  ‘Hello Kiddo.’ That’s a line from a movie I saw about four years ago. ‘Hello Kiddo, Kiddo hello.’ I think it was David and Lisa.

  Lots of things have been happening around here. So many things that I’m dying of boredom. Brian Thompson got killed yesterday. Bill Martin caught a piece of shrapnel just below the navel but it wasn’t too bad and he didn’t even have to be medevacked. They’re allowing him to stay in the field with all his buddies who all want to look for the NVA who killed Brian Thompson. As a matter of fact they are going to look for any NVA and try to shoot and kill them. Brian Thompson or no Brian Thompson, they’d probably do it anyway. They killed three soldiers, NVA type, today. They probably were not the ones who got Brian but if they could have gotten Brian or Bill they probably would have. Not any more, though.

  Lots of people have been killed in the last few days. Probably some of them were from Colorado. Probably some of them were killed in Colorado or Kentucky or even California. Some of them weren’t even in the Army. Some of them were probably too young or too old to be in the Army or the Navy or even in the Air Force for that matter.

  Isn’t it wonderful the ways, all the ways, that people die? And just think of all the stuff people will do for you after you die. Why, as I understand it, somebody will replace all your bodily fluids with formaldehyde and other good tasting chemicals. Then someone will put you in a plastic bag. That isn’t really for you. That’s for other people. They don’t want to smell your BO.

  Arnie Thompson, he’s not related to Brian … Brian is a black man or was a black man … Arnie is a white man and still is, all of Arnie except his liver which he has succeeded in turning black with some stuff you can buy over here in a bottle … you can buy it back there too … Arnie was telling me last night about Lieutenant Anderson. Lt. Anderson was a devout Mormon, Arnie said. I didn’t know the lieutenant. The day before the assault on Ripcord, Arnie told the L-T that he’d kill him if he ever left the body of an American up on a hill. Evidently the L-T had done that on an earlier assault attempt.

  So the next day the lieutenant is a changed man. And he’s got the courage to charge up the side of Ripcord … For the Glory of the Infantry. Someone had earlier suggested to the generals that they withdraw all allied troops and send in air strikes and B-52s and stuff like that but the generals wanted the victory of Ripcord for the Glory of the Infantry, too.

  So, L-T Anderson from someplace in Indiana and his men go up the side of Ripcord to reinforce the sieged troops at the top, up ol’ Ripcord with the pride of the Queen of Battle. Arnie never said why the generals wanted them to assault up the side of Ripcord. He never told me why they didn’t just pick up his company and fly them up there and let them assault down if they really had to assault. Anyway, Joey, L-T Anderson’s RTO, gets lost or something. Actually he had his head splintered. Not bad enough to kill him. Arnie found him at the bottom of the hill later. Good Mormon Anderson is up on the hill looking around for Joey when he gets his right arm and left hand and both legs blown off. “My arm, it isn’t there,” he says to Arnie. “No Sir. Your arm isn’t there.” “And my hand is gone too,” Anderson says. “Yes Sir. Your hand is gone too,” Arnie tells him. Arnie had tears in his eyes as he told me this. I’d been feeding him wine and scotch and listening. I wasn’t drinking myself because I had a bad case of the shits.

  “Well,” Arnie says, “I wrapped up his arm and his legs and called for a medevac but they were all busy and it was going to take some time.” Arnie’s been around for some time. He’s old. Maybe forty. His face is pockm
arked.

  “It were two hours later that man died,” Arnie whispered with tears rolling down his cheeks. There were not a lot of tears. Just one on each side. Arnie isn’t the kind of man to bawl. “That man died right here,” Arnie said holding out his arms. “Right here, of a sucking chest wound that he didn’t tell me about,” Arnie said.

  And it was all so they could go up the hill and kill some North Vietnamese who were there only to kill some Americans or some ARVNs or maybe a ROK or two. Lt. Anderson never did find Joey. Joey is back in the World now. Arnie was saying he’d kill a man if he ever left another man behind on the battlefield. Isn’t it wonderful what people will do for you after you are totally unable to do anything for yourself?

  They’ll do even more for you than that. They’ll get your insurance money and spend it on a lot of flowers and on a great hulk of marble or granite and on a hole in the ground. Maybe there will be a little left over for gas money so they can go to the movies and forget why you died.

  Come to think of it, it was David who said to Lisa, ‘Hello, Kiddo, Kiddo hello.’ Yes David who wouldn’t let anyone touch him and Lisa who was so into poetry she would speak only in rhyme, and everyone thought they were crazies.

  The real crazy was Brian Thompson. I was talking to him the night Delta Company had a ground attack on their position. That was two weeks ago. Delta was on the hill across from us. We felt sorry for them and very helpless because we couldn’t help but could just listen to the firefight all night long. That night Brian told me he wanted to get the Medal of Honor. ‘They’s gointa put me in for it cause a the way I react in the field,’ he said. Later I asked the captain if any of his people were up for medals and he said no. “Lots of the people in the company now are cherries,” the captain said, “and we haven’t been making a lot of contact. I had one man who DEROSd who is in for a Silver Star but none of the men we have now.”

  Cherry looked up from the pages. He looked at Lamonte and at Egan and Doc and George, all who were laughing at something George was doing. Minh was laughing too but his laughter was more subdued because he was not stoned. Doc passed Cherry his OJ and George passed Cherry half an oatmeal cookie.