13th Valley

by John M. Del Vecchio

  “Quiet Rover Four, this is Red Rover, over,” came the sober reply.

  Brooks explained in detail what Alpha had found and he requested permission to remain at their present location to dig into the situation. His speculation, along with the others’, was running wild.

  “Fifteen minutes,” the GreenMan steamed. The battalion commander had his master plan, a plan unseen by the men on the ground, and this hole was not part of it. “The hell with that hole, dammit. There were a hundred and fifty enemy soldiers a quarter klick west of your position less than twenty-four hours ago. Arty blasted the hell out of them. Go find …”

  “Red Rover,” Brooks attempted to interrupt by keying the handset.

  The GreenMan’s stride was unbroken. “… some blood trails. Find some bodies. What in hell do you think you’re down there for? Over.”

  “Red Rover. They could have come from the earth. Over.”

  “Fifteen minutes. Then check out that sighting. Then get moving. Get down there and hurt those people. We’re looking for a fight, dammit, not a sandbox. What’s happening to you down there? Over. Out.”

  “We’re going to have to do this quickly,” Brooks told El Paso and Lt. Thomaston. “GreenMan wants us moving in fifteen.”

  Egan, Cherry and Whiteboy had already opened up the top of the tunnel with their entrenching tools. They had peered into the hole as deeply as their flashlight beams would penetrate. Still they could not see the bottom. Egan donned a gas mask, borrowed Doc’s .45 and descended head first into the tunnel. The fit was tight. Ten feet in his shoulders hit on both sides. Egan slinked downward. He pulled himself downward with his forearms. The tunnel dropped steeply and at thirty feet Egan was hit with a strong foreboding and claustrophobic reaction. Dumb Mick, he yelled at himself. Do it right. Get the fuck outa here and do it right. He edged backwards, upwards pushing with his forearms. It was difficult to climb in reverse in the tunnel and the exertion caused him to breathe very hard into the mask. The eye lenses fogged raising his paranoia and increasing his feeling of being trapped. He strained harder. His heart rate jumped. Someone grabbed him from behind. He attempted to swing around, to aim the .45 at …

  “See anything down there?” Cherry said smiling. He had hold of Egan’s ankles and was pulling him up and out the last few feet.

  Egan ripped off the mask. He inhaled one large breath. “It’s too fucken steep. We need a rope.”

  “How deep could you see, Danny?” Brooks asked. “This thing’s gotta be fifty feet deep at least,” Egan said. His breathing had normalized, the claustrophobic reaction receded. He became excited again. “Ya can’t tell how deep it is cause ya can’t judge the distance in there. But, Man, we gotta check this out. We can’t leave this. They got somethin down there. Nobody digs a tunnel fifty feet deep for nothin. We gotta get into it. We need a rope. Ya can’t get back out without a rope.”

  All around the hole people were talking, peering in, then returning to their conversations. Guard teams alternated watch giving every man a few minutes to inspect the find. Escalato was forgotten. Brooks called the GreenMan again and requested time enough to ascertain the parameters of the tunnel. He explained the depth to which his tunnel rat had descended and he described and perhaps embellished the view Egan had seen. He also requested a kick-out of two hundred feet of rope. The Green-Man asked a dozen questions then told Brooks he would call him back. Could the tunnel fit into his plan?

  Brooks waited. Alpha rested. The reprieve from the climb was welcomed yet stopping caused a queasiness amongst the old-timers. “Gawd dang dinks goan climb right up on us,” Pop Randalph complained to Lt. De Barti. “Hell, we’re foolin with their air vent. They know where it’s at, dang it, and they know Alpha of the Oh-deuce is fuckin with it.”

  “How they going to know that, Pop,” De Barti mocked the old boonierat.

  “Well, hell, Sir. They dug it. They goan drop some mortar rounds right atop o’ us.”

  Still Alpha waited. They ate, smoked, fidgeted. They talked about the tunnel. Everyone had heard a tunnel story. They repeated them. They speculated. They imagined a vast complex. The sun had shifted imperceptibly from east to west. It continued to burn down. Every other boonierat tried to sleep. Each platoon sent out one squad in lights, weapons and ammo sans rucks, to recon the hillside about their perimeter and to search for other possible outlets for the complex.

  After fifty minutes the GreenMan called. He told Brooks to expect a kick-out of rope, demolition supplies, a mity-mite blower, smudge pots and CS canisters. “You’re due romeo sierra in twenty,” GreenMan radioed. “Blow a lema zulu on the high feature.” The battalion commander reasoned that Alpha, due to resupply the next morning, could send an element up to the peak of 636 to cut a landing zone and still have a contingent of troops delving into the tunnel. In that way they would do tomorrow’s work today plus excavate the hole, and by tomorrow afternoon he would have them in the valley. Before the GreenMan finished delivering his order, Bravo Company broke in and reported being pinned down by .51 caliber machine gun fire.

  They requested immediate aerial and artillery support and their third medevac in twelve hours. Within two minutes the rumbling of artillery from across the valley echoed over Alpha. Five minutes later a Huey was hovering ten feet above Alpha’s now partially cleared attraction. The crew chief threw down the rope first, then crates of C-4 explosive, smudge pots and CS tear gas canisters, two five-gallon jerry cans of gasoline, and finally, shoving with his boot, a heavy wooden crate containing a motorized blower.

  “I’m goin back down first,” Egan told Brooks. “Doc,” Egan went over to McCarthy, “let me borrow your .45 too.” Now Egan had two pistols. He borrowed a second flashlight from Lt. Thomaston. He tied the rope about his waist and arranged rope signals with Whiteboy and Cherry and he dove back in.

  “That fucker’s crazy,” Harley laughed to Frye. “You couldn’t get my ass down there for all the pussy in Saigon.”

  Frye pulled out his dog-eared Playboy Playmate. “How bout for a night with this,” he laughed.

  “No fuckin way,” Harley chuckled. “Not for a month with that.”

  Easy, Mick. Egan slowed himself at fifteen feet. He proceeded with extreme caution. He yanked once on the rope signaling he was okay. Whiteboy jerked once back signaling receipt of the message. Doc Johnson, Cherry, Brooks, Thomaston and El Paso had rigged a poncho tent over the opening of the tunnel so as to reduce Egan’s silhouette if there were enemy below him. Whiteboy sat within the blackout. Egan descended. His feet were above his head and he could feel blood pulsating at the back of his neck. He slid downward, inching forward under control, holding himself back, feeling if he let himself go he would fall tumble down to … to where? His shoulders were fatigued from holding himself back. It was like doing push-ups with feet elevated. He went deeper, pushed forward by curiosity and by his desire to find and destroy the enemy and by his need to show the boonierats how it was done. He could hear his own breathing into the mask. The mask smelled like rubber. At various levels the tunnel widened to perhaps two and a half feet, at other spots it narrowed to a tight squeeze through. Egan slipped deeper. He checked the sides carefully for closed or covered connecting tunnels. He found none. He jerked the rope once and edged down. The walls were the hard clay and shale stone mixture of deep foxholes and bunkers. They appeared to have been scraped with pointed sticks for the upper side of the tube was raked with inch-wide scratch marks. The bottom was smooth from having been crawled on. The entire radial surface was fresh. As Egan snaked down checking for booby trap wires he could not help but admire the work the little people had done.

  Egan held one .45 in his right hand and with it he tapped the tube’s walls. He kept the second .45 in his belt at his back, the barrel stuck down between his cheeks. He was now more than one hundred feet in, fifty feet deep. He felt a slight breeze rising to him. It stopped, then began again, then stopped. Doors, he thought. Cherry relieved Whiteboy at the orifice. Egan tugged. Cherry t
ugged back. Egan continued. At seventy-five feet down, with one hundred and forty-five feet of line stretched behind him, Egan came to a small room large enough for two men to sit in. In the floor of the room there was a hole about eight inches in diameter. Egan pushed a flashlight into it. A shaft dropped straight down for eight to ten feet, then stopped. The shaft was definitely too narrow for any man, even the tiniest Vietnamese, to pass through. Egan lifted the mask carefully, sniffed carefully as he broke the air seal on one side. Okay, he thought. He removed the mask. He looked down into the narrow shaft. How in the fuck …?

  On the surface above Brooks was back on the hook, now with the brigade commander, Old Fox. Lamonte and George were photographing the hole, the poncho hootch and the soldiers working. Andrews, Hill and Whiteboy dislodged the mity-mite from its crate, gassed it up and prepared the smudge pots. “Yes Sir,” Brooks said in exasperation. “Yes Sir … No Sir … That’s a negative, Sir. Sir, the man is not an unauthorized citizen … Sir?… That’s affirm, Sir. I have their film … Yes Sir, I’ll have them report directly to you … Yes Sir, the civilian is still with us … With 3d Plt. He’s being escorted by Lieutenant Carrie from the 3d Brigade PIO … I’ll give Carrie the film, Sir.”

  Doc came up to Brooks while he was on the radio. “I doan like it, L-T,” he interrupted. “Eg’s down there too long. He doan have good air in there and he doan have the good sense ta come up til he droppin.”

  “Tell him,” Brooks snapped unkeying the radio handset, “to get the fuck up then. He’s exposing all my men.”

  “Huh?” Doc backed away. He was surprised by the quickness of the L-T’s response. He turned and walked toward the blackout tent.

  “Yes Sir. Over.” Brooks snarled at the handset and threw it down. “That asshole,” he muttered. “Doesn’t he have any goddamned better thing to worry about than PIO’s fuckin film?”

  “Sir,” Lamonte had overheard the L-T speaking.

  “Do what you have to do, Lamonte,” Brooks said.

  “Thanks, L-T,” Lamonte said. “Sir, did you know 90 percent of all American males finish high school and 55 percent at least begin college?”

  “No. I didn’t know that,” Brooks said.

  “Makes ya wonder,” Lamonte said, “how a dumb shit like Old Fox became a brigade commander with all the smart people around.”

  “He’s comin up,” Cherry called from inside the poncho tent. “Give me a hand.”

  Cherry, Whiteboy and Doc Johnson pulled steadily on the rope. They kept enough pressure on the line to power-assist Egan up but not so much pressure as to hamper the climber’s own actions. In three minutes Egan crawled out head first. He was covered with brown-orange clay. Lamonte and George snapped pictures. “I need an E-T,” Egan said immediately upon removing the gas mask. Six questions sprang at him. Then six more. If the soldiers had had microphones it would have looked like a newsmen’s mob of a heavyweight challenger after he had KOed the champ. Everyone wanted his question answered first. Everyone wanted to get near the hero.

  Egan excitedly gave a detailed account of the tunnel but there were few details. He speculated about where the tunnel was going and to what it connected, how far and how extensive the system. “If it’s that far down it could go right through the mountain or even under the valley.” He wanted to go back down. Over and over soldiers asked, how, if the only opening to the tunnel was a small shaft at the bottom, did the NVA dig it from inside? “That’s what I mean to find out,” Egan said.

  Brooks cut them all off. He had a bad feeling about the hole. “We’re going to pump it full of smoke,” Brooks said. “Get that blower on top of the hole and light the smudge pots.”

  “Aw, L-T!” Egan’s enthusiasm dampened.

  “El Paso, alert the platoons. Have them on the lookout for smoke rising from other air shafts.”

  “Gawd damn,” Whiteboy shook his head in awe. “You could drop a whole air strike load a bombs rahght atop em heah and you wouldn’t even cause em a headache nor nothin.”

  “Hell,” Harley rasped, “they’d be impervious to B-52s.”

  “You can’t even attack em,” Frye added. “You can’t make a ground assault on em. You can’t make a underground assault.”

  Andrews and Hill started the mity-mite. The small gasoline engine sounded like a lawnmower. Hill lit the first smudge pot. Black smoke billowed up as it caught. He grabbed the pot, placed it at the top of the hole and, with Andrews’ help, he sealed the blower tube to the hole and the pumping began.

  “This is great, L-T,” Egan exuded exhilaration from every fiber of his body once he had accepted not returning to the hole. “L-T, this could reveal a hundred secret connections. If they’re that deep, this thing could go all the way to Laos. We gotta bring in a bigger blower. We oughta get the biggest blower the army has and pump this land full of smoke until it comes up somewhere.”

  Brooks agreed. So did El Paso and Doc and Thomaston. Their enthusiasm was contagious. Cherry caught it and spread it to the 1st Sqd when he went over to tell Silvers the details. Cahalan radioed all of Alpha’s sister units using the krypto net, explained the find and asked them to be on the lookout for rising smoke. The excitement spread like an epidemic. Brooks conferred with the GreenMan in his C & C bird and he, in turn, had instructions passed to all the helicopters in the Khe Ta Laou area and to those working as far south as Firebase O’Reilly. “Look for smoke.”

  Alpha threw in another smudge pot. Then another. They tossed in smoke grenades of different colors. They searched for rising smoke. They checked the tunnel to see if it had been sealed off below but there was no smoke back-up. They refilled the gas tank on the motor and kept the mitymite blowing.

  At 1700 hours the Old Fox ordered them to move. Brooks argued that they should stay. The GreenMan arbitrated and compromised the two sides to the plan made earlier. He directed Brooks to have two platoons continue up Hill 636. He ordered them to cut the LZ at the peak then to continue past it toward Hill 606, a full kilometer further west. “Just more bullshit,” Alpha troopers cussed. If they were looking for NVA, here they had something. The enemy would not be where aircraft had spotted them yesterday. They never stayed still above ground. 3d Plt rucked up and humped toward Hill 606 to search for blood trails. 2d Plt rucked up, took two of the cases of C-4, and headed for 636 to blow an LZ. The company CP and 1st Plt tightened the perimeter about Whiteboy’s Hole and prepared to NDP about the noise of the mity-mite. They lit another smudge pot and dumped it down the tunnel. They opened a canister of crystal CS tear gas and added that to the plunging fumes. The hole accepted it all.

  The afternoon droned slowly on for the 1st Plt of Alpha while all about them sporadic actions flared. The .51 caliber machine gun that had pinned Bravo down earlier and wounded one American had been destroyed by rockets from a Cobra. Bravo had barely regrouped and moved out when they were mortared. They took five rounds, had three more casualties, none serious enough for immediate evacuation. They rose and moved forward, farther west. Forty minutes after being mortared they stumbled into an NVA hospital bunker complex. It had been evacuated only moments before. Warm food was found in the first underground room. Tunnels led from there in three directions. The hospital contained a ward room with nineteen jungle beds, plus other bunkers and tunnels the leery Bravo troops refused to explore with the onset of darkness. They would return tomorrow. At 1855 hours Firebase Barnett was mortared, sixteen rounds impacting within the perimeter. They reported no casualties though a supply helicopter was badly damaged. With the approaching night it was too late to rig and sling it out beneath a Chinook. That would be first priority on 16 August. 2d Plt of Alpha reached the peak of 636 at 1900 hours and by 1930, working like madmen, they had blown down all the larger trees. They moved a hundred yards north in late dusk and settled into a circular NDP. 3d Plt crossed the top of 636 and descended west 210 meters into a steep canyon. At the bottom of the chasm the dog, Cherokee, at point, alerted. The dog handler wanted to stop and have the boonierats reco
n the trail ahead and to the flanks. Lt. Caldwell didn’t want to be caught in the canyon at dark. He wanted to reach the peak of 606 and NDP there. He ordered the column forward. Twenty meters up the far side, just at sunset, Cherokee was shot through the head by a sniper. 3d Plt retreated east and settled into an L-shaped ambush/NDP on the down slope of 636.

  Night closed upon the valley and hillsides with the suddenness common in mountain regions, in the last few minutes of gray light, all the boonierats of 1st Plt shifted south, uphill. They situated themselves as far as possible from the droning mity-mite while still keeping the hole and the machine tangentially in touch with the perimeter. Whiteboy manned the position closest to the hole. Gawd, he thought. You only have ta be lucky nough ta sit on somethin lahk that ta be-come famous. Ever’body in battalion knows that Ah discovered the secret openin ta all the North Vietnamese Army’s supply routes inta I Corps. Shee-it, Ah hope that picture Mr. PIO took comes out. In the last minutes before blackness Whiteboy picked a board from the mity-mite crate and carved a crude plaque:

  WHITEBOY’S MINE

  C. JANOFF—DISCOVERER—A/7/402

  With the dropping of the sun the temperature went from broil to cool. FO established new DTs and called in a series of H & I targets. “Hey, L-T,” he said softly to an uneasy Brooks, “look at it this way; at least we’re still keepin up the illusion there are two hundred of us out here. Nobody in their right mind would secure a noise maker like that in an AO like this with only thirty-four men. The dinks are bound ta think there’s a hundred of us here.”

  Indeed the CP and 1st Plt consisted of only thirty-four men. Lamonte, George, Carrie, Caribski and the dog team had all left with 3d Plt. Brooks, his three RTOs, Doc, Minh, Cherry and Egan were at the center of the NDP, leaving twenty-six for guard. Thomaston and FO moved down and manned a position between 2d and 3d Sqds. Doc McCarthy teamed with Whiteboy. The thirteen positions with overlapping fields of fire nestled tightly in amongst the trees and brush. Each position put out two claymore mines. Up and down the trail, Egan and El Paso set two mechanical ambushes. Jax and Silvers set an MA on the ridge above the platoon. All of them silently cussed the mity-mite, cussed the noise, cussed the smell of gasoline and smoke, the acidic taste the air had acquired from the CS crystals, and Whiteboy for finding the hole in the first place.