13th Valley

by John M. Del Vecchio

  For a week Daniel worked for Sontag. The second day he discovered a bar across the street from Pier 15. It was long and narrow inside. To the left of the door there was a dark wood bar and to the right against the wall were several small tables. In the far back beyond where the bar ended there were four larger tables and beyond these a small kitchen. The bar was dark and cool. Carved teak wainscoting circled the narrow hall of the bar to a five-foot height. On the upper edge of the wainscoting at ten-foot intervals there were stained prints of the sea. It could not have been more picturesque to a small town college kid. The cook was called Cookie and he actually had a wooden leg and wore a black eye patch. When Cookie found Daniel was working for Sontag he dropped the price of a glass of beer to 15 cents, doubled the lunch portion and allowed Daniel to eat half a loaf of bread with butter during lunch.

  It did not help.

  Cherry sat up quickly causing the poncho beneath them to rustle. He handed Egan the radio handset and crunched back to the earth. Egan looked around. The jungle was very black.

  Everything was still. He could distinguish no sounds close by. In the distance, in the valley somewhere, artillery shells were exploding, their peaceful rumbling echo relaxed him. He lay back silently. The clouds had thickened between him and the moon and it was now difficult to distinguish individual branches against the ash sky. She was there. All of her. Her eyes. Stephanie’s eyes were blue-gray, clear and deep. Egan could see her eyes and he felt elated. Suddenly the world was back to absolutes. He was in love. She was a gently flowing life and she was with him.

  Egan had left New York one week after beginning with Sontag. He felt angry. Paul’s ship was two days at sea. Daniel went to the apartment late, after work, and collected his few things. Pattie said good-bye and they shook hands. Stephanie was not home but as he turned to go, she arrived. Pattie left and Daniel and Stephanie talked for a few minutes. He said he must leave and he kissed her good-bye. It was the first time they touched. He could feel the warmth of her moist lips. He could feel them now. “You’ve got silver eyes,” he had said. “No,” she had laughed gently, “they’re gray.” “No,” he corrected. “They’re silver.” They kissed again. His left hand was on her breast. “Good-bye,” he said. And he left. He hitchhiked to Alaska, he meandered down to San Francisco, he bummed his way to New Orleans. He spent the summer wandering, searching. He found many things yet nothing satisfied him. He had been trapped by the mystique that was Stephanie.

  The moon broke through a hole in the cloud cover. Egan was very groggy. His eyes were closed. The new glint of light penetrating the canopy ignited the nightmare which had become perversely attached to all night dreams of Stephanie. The glint rose. Egan was in the jungle in the dream. The night was very black. Sappers had penetrated the perimeter undetected. The glint rises higher. There is a sapper by his side. There is a silver machete in the enemy’s hand. Moonlight sparkles on the blade as the man raises the huge knife. The machete begins its quick strike toward Egan’s face.

  Egan bolted upright.

  SIGNIFICANT ACTIVITIES

  THE FOLLOWING RESULTS FOR OPERATIONS IN THE O’REILLY/ BARNETT/JEROME AREA WERE REPORTED FOR THE 24-HOUR PERIOD ENDING 2359 13 AUGUST 70:

  AMERICAN UNITS COMBAT ASSAULTED INTO THE FIREBASE BARNETT AREA AT 0840 HOURS AND RELIEVED ARVN UNITS FOR OPERATIONS IN THE FIREBASE O’REILLY AREA.

  RECON, COMPANY E, 7/402 ENGAGED AN UNKNOWN SIZE ENEMY FORCE 1500m SE OF BARNETT KILLING FOUR NVA. US CASUALTIES WERE ONE KILLED AND THREE WOUNDED. AT 0855 HOURS, VICINITY YD 198304, CO A, 7/402 DISCOVERED TWO ENEMY KILLED BY ARTILLERY. CO A WAS MORTARED AN HOUR LATER. THERE WERE NO CASUALTIES. AT 0940 HOURS BARNETT RECEIVED SEVEN MORTAR IMPACTIONS WITHIN THE PERIMETER. NO DAMAGE WAS REPORTED. AT 1440 HOURS RECON, CO E, 7/402 ENGAGED AN ENEMY FORCE WITH UNKNOWN RESULTS. ONE US SOLDIER RECEIVED MINOR WOUNDS.

  ARVN UNITS MADE NO SIGNIFICANT CONTACT.

  CHAPTER 16

  14 AUGUST 1970

  Everything went wrong on the 14th yet everything went right. To begin with the battalion TOC on the firebase did not make its standard wake-up calls. Brooks slept on. At 0400 El Paso, although he was awake with the radios, was dreaming about his mother. “Rafael,” she called to him as she had called to him ever since his father had been killed. “Rafael, come in and stay with your mother. Today, I am very tired.” “Isn’t the priest with you tonight?” he snapped bitterly at her. “Rafael,” she called. “I am an old woman whose husband has abandoned her. Why has he abandoned me?” She speaks Mexican-Spanish yet her speech, even in her native tongue, is poor. The boy turns and walks away from her. He passes the priest as he walks from his mother’s shack. The entire world is filthy. “How is she today?” Father Raul inquires. “She is bitter,” Rafael sneers. The background kaleidoscopes. They are outside the old church. Rafael says, “First she is bitter that the school takes me. Now she is bitter that the government takes me for the war.” To the side in a stage whisper he adds, “She does not understand. I have not told them. I have signed up to get away.” The priest is oblivious. The background becomes jungle though the old priest is still there, sitting deaf in an armchair. “They do not know,” Rafael laughs, “that I have extended.” It is a recurrent dream of which Rafael has told no one. During the entire dream El Paso did not look at his watch. The wake-up call from the TOC did not come. It is one of the very few times El Paso has ever faltered in his duties to Brooks and the company.

  Rafael Jaoquin Pavura was raised in the torpid, sordid communal Mexican quarter of El Paso, Texas. He had been born to an old laborer and his young wife who were childless for the first ten years of their marriage. When the child was conceived the old man was well into his fifties and the impending event was not considered a blessing. Rafael was born in a jacal hut on the mesa west of Cuidad Juarez, far from the bullring and the cantinas, out on the flat arid wastelands. There the old man and the woman kept a small garden and stayed mostly to themselves. The summer of 1946 had been very hot and very dry and the plants had wilted early. In the first days after Rafael’s birth and for two silent months the old man took to wandering in the barren lands. On a cool evening in early autumn the old man entered the hut, decisive, driven. He ordered his wife to pack whatever she might want to take and could carry. In the darkness they worked their way to the city and then across the Rio Bravo and north into the city of El Paso where they lost themselves in the shanties of the wetback villages.

  There were no regular jobs and no place to settle and for five years the old man carried his son and the family wandered from hovel to hovel. The old man longed for the open barren lands yet the city and America offered many futures for his son that the mesa did not. It held forth the promise and anticipation of opportunity, the possibility of advancement, the promise of prosperity for future generations, the same promise America had held forth to all immigrants for over three hundred years. And the promises were very powerful in placating the old wetback. Something would happen, he told himself.

  As a very young boy Rafael was allowed the freedom to wander unsupervised. At six Rafael was responsible for much of his own welfare and adept at coping with his ever-expanding world. The expanse of the Chicano community was unknown to his parents but everyone knew Rafael Jaoquin for he would dance through the streets and wander into homes. He would eat with a family he had never before seen and do it with confidence. When he would return or be returned to the shanty of his parents he would stay only long enough to tell his father of his adventures and then he would again wander off. Rafael listened to the stories of the farm workers who knew all the history of Mexico and knew all the people who had come north. He learned many of the stories and he would repeat them as though they were his. Older people loved to have him around and to listen to his stories and to laugh at his imagination but finally they would get tired and send him away. All except his papa.

  A young priest once met the boy and listened, fascinated, for hours. He asked the boy about his home and the boy told the priest he was
an orphan. For a week Rafael lived with Father Raul until the priest received word of a search and returned the boy to the old man and his young wife. The priest took an interest in Rafael’s schooling and helped the old man obtain a night job at the canning works. At night the boy and the priest would watch the old man disappear through the wire gate and behind the chain link fence of the factory, and then the priest would bring the boy home and visit with the boy’s mother while the boy was in bed.

  Rafael worked for the priest, cleaning his room and sometimes the church and always delivering the messages the priest had for parishioners as he wandered through the streets telling and collecting stories. The boy loved the priest very much and he dreamed that some day he too would be a priest.

  When Rafael was twelve his father died of heart failure. The old man had been moving heavy cases in the warehouse of the canning works and a high stack had toppled and trapped him. They had said he was not injured but the enclosure had frightened him and his heart had stopped. Father Raul arranged the funeral. The affair passed in near total isolation from the community. In a week the disturbance was settled, in a month forgotten. The only residual effect was a guarantee from the canning works pension that when and if the boy was ready to advance his education beyond that publicly provided, the funds would be available.

  Rafael was outwardly quiet yet inwardly turbulent. His father had been destroyed by an ever closing trap which he had always hated, destroyed solely to give the boy a better future. Rafael felt cheated by the death, bitter when the mourning was so quickly over, guilty for having spent so much time with the priest and so little time with the ancient laborer.

  The priest continued coming to their home for several years but Rafael’s mother was now in her mid-forties and the priest too was getting old. On the nights the priest came, Rafael wandered the streets with other boys until he knew the priest would be gone. Finally the priest came no more and Rafael’s mother stayed alone and complained that Rafael was not watching after her. Again he felt guilty but he knew he must wander as his father had wandered. And there was the cause.

  La Raza. The Race—a revolutionary organization dedicated to returning the lands of the southwest to the brown people from whom it was stolen. In the schools it was an underground organization that initiated the young males into their first gangs and into self-righteous hatred of the Anglo oppressors.

  There was a simple law in the southwest and along the border where the Anglo oligarchy controlled the lands: No man is guilty of anything unless he is a Mexican. It was the same law against which El Paso revolted many years later when it was applied by Americans to Vietnamese—the It’s-Only-A-Gook Law. In the southwest the society was so structured as to continue the vicious circle of poverty, to trap the menial labor force in their mosquito-infested barrio bajo, a reinforced plague of illiteracy and unemployment. From this grew violence and revolutionary politics and to this Rafael was attracted. Father Raul would caution the boy with a resignation born in the carrying of a cross, “My young friend, you are going to get hurt and you are going to hurt others. I wish I knew how better to talk to you. You can work within the system to change it. You do not have to go out and do violence.”

  The priest had little effect yet slowly some of the boys changed. They became more political and less violent and La Raza became a significant political force.

  Rafael had to go his own way. There was always something causing him to break from gangs and political parties and personal relationships. He always moved on toward open spaces. Someplace, sometime, in his adolescence, he was encouraged to study history, to go into law. In high school he studied hard and was influenced by two teachers who prodded him and helped him gain admission to the University of Texas at El Paso. In college he was a loner. After graduation and one year of law school he enlisted and by the spring of 1969 he was in Vietnam as an infantryman with the 7th of the 402d.

  Rafael never spoke of his past or of his family. He listened to the others and he became the arbiter and the negotiator of intra-company squabbles. No one—not Jax, not Egan, not even the L-T—knew what happened in El Paso’s mind, although they all knew that if El Paso said a dispute was solved then that was the decision and it stood.

  On the perimeter some of the guards must have realized the time. They all had wristwatches. They could not all have been dreaming. Perhaps those who realized that the company was not yet up simply felt it was not their place to stir their sleeping brothers. Besides, most of them did not want to move at that hour.

  At almost 0330 Cherry whispered to Egan, “What’s that? I think I hear something.”

  There was a pause as Egan listened. “Like what?” he asked.

  “Like, maybe a small animal. Listen. There.”

  “Fuck! It’s one a them spiders. I hate spiders,” Egan cursed lowly. There was the sound again, very close to Egan’s and Cherry’s heads. “Fuck,” Egan’s voice quivered. He very silently worked his body down, away from the sound.

  “Are they poisonous?” Cherry asked, shaken.

  “They’re fucken big,” Egan blurtwhispered.

  Cherry giggled. He lifted his rifle and gently poked the brush where the sound had been. Something scampered away. Egan wiggled his body back into place.

  An hour later the noise was back. Egan punched Cherry. “You hear that?”

  Cherry lay very still. He reached over to Egan and placed his arm on Egan’s chest. “Don’t move,” he said.

  “Oh fuck,” Egan shook. He was sweating. He felt for sure the spider was on him. He opened his eyes. Two feet above them both, there was a slender black silhouette. Egan froze. It was a banana spider, a long narrow spider body with twig-thin angular legs spread in an eight-inch ellipse against the gray-black sky. From the brush beyond their feet to the vines above their heads, filaments of silk had been woven into a parachute web. The spider twinged the taut web. Egan’s heart stopped, sputtered. Cherry, one arm over Egan still, lifted his rifle. One by one he snapped the supporting threads on his side of the web. The spider charged the muzzle then retreated into the brush.

  “Oh fuck. Oh fuck, oh Fuck,” Egan sat up. Web clung to his face. “I hate fucken spiders,” he whispered vehemently. “I can’t stay here. What time is it?”

  “Four thirty-five,” Cherry said. He could hardly believe it. Hardass Egan afraid of spiders. He giggled silently, his whole body shook with the laugh without emitting a sound.

  “What’s so fucken funny?” Egan demanded but dropped it immediately. “Hey,” he said, “we’re supposed ta be movin by now.”

  It was cold but the wind had ceased. There was a vague glow in the sky coming through the clouds. On the jungle floor nothing could be discerned in the blackness. To see a man’s form the observer would have to squat and silhouette the observed against the sky. Egan radioed El Paso. Within minutes the entire company was up. They were already a half hour behind schedule.

  Perimeter guards retrieved their claymores, rolled the wires about the mines and placed them in their rucks. The people who set up the MAs very cautiously disarmed them by disconnecting the batteries, then dismantling the trigger and trip wire. Radio calls went out to the LPs to return. Soldiers cleaned and oiled their weapons and cleaned their ammunition. Everyone had a cigarette going. They smoked with their hands cupped over the ember or with the ember end held in an opaque foil bag from a C-ration accessory packet.

  Very carefully Egan brushed the night’s dirt from his fatigues and poncho liner. He folded the liner and placed it in his ruck. Then he brushed his teeth. He used no water, simply allowing toothpaste and saliva to foam. He ejected a white stream of foam into a tiny hole and he covered the hole with dirt. Then he sucked the remaining foam from the bristles and swallowed. He carefully replaced the brush in a plastic carrying case, placed the case in a sock and placed the sock in the ammo can at the base of his rucksack. In the sock the case could not rattle against the inside of the ammo can. Egan checked his ruck carefully again for loose items. He
tightened this, adjusted that. He checked his canteens. One was two-thirds full. He took a drink and passed it to Cherry who was also packing up. Cherry drank and handed it back. It was still a third full. Egan emptied the water on the ground. He did not want it to slosh as he walked.

  Cherry was as imprecise with himself and his equipment as Egan was precise. He did not brush his teeth. He crushed his poncho and stuffed it into his ruck without cleaning it. He made no attempt to straighten his clothing, comb his hair or clean his face. He stuffed his poncho liner crudely about the cans in his ruck only at Egan’s insistence. He cleaned his weapon but he carelessly spilled and splashed the LSA (Lubricant, Small Arms) onto his fatigues. Egan was appalled but after the thing with the spider he decided to say nothing. Doc McCarthy came by with the daily-daily (anti-malaria) pills. The column was ready to move out. It was 0509, thirty-nine minutes late.

  Brooks led off. He descended by the same path that Whiteboy had taken, descended as quietly and slowly in the dark as Whiteboy had in the green-gray light below the canopy yesterday. Brooks moved steadily. He was becoming warm even in the chill of the night. He moved like an animal stalking prey, moving in the manner learned from animals and learned from the NVA and perfected through self-criticism within the company. NVA tactics in an NVA stronghold in an NVA war. Better than the NVA. Stronger. More fire support, more intrinsic fire power. Walking into a potential ambush. Brooks reached the terminus of Whiteboy’s trek, the point where he had stopped the column’s movement. He breathed controlled even breaths through an open mouth so as not to be heard breathing. He glanced at a trail he could not see in the blackness, his slow moving feet feeling each step down, securing each unseen foothold. The crest of the ridge was to his left. He could feel it there looming high above his left shoulder. Forward. Downward. The entire column in motion behind him.