13th Valley

by John M. Del Vecchio

  The men in the CP circle, joined now by Jackson, were acutely aware of their precarious position. They sat in a knee-touching circle, the four radios at the center hissing an almost imperceptible white noise. Brooks sat at the highest point against the tree, with El Paso to his right and Cahalan to his left. Brown was next to Cahalan. Jax was next. He had crawled up for the meeting, intending to make an announcement. Egan was to his left, then Cherry, Doc and Minh. They spoke in voices so low, had it not been that they anticipated many of each other’s comments they would never have understood the conversation. Cherry, as the newest member, found it difficult to follow the words in the dark.

  “Hey, Bro Jax,” El Paso whispered across the circle, “give me some teeth. I can’t see you.”

  “Yo bes not be able to see this duke,” Jax smiled. “Ef yo see em, then so ken a gook.”

  “We got somethin big here, L-T,” Egan whispered! “You goina stay here and see it through?”

  “You oughta split,” Doc said toward Brooks. “You gettin too short for this shit.”

  “How many days, L-T?” Brown whispered.

  “Thirteen en a wake-up if I decide to DEROS,” Brooks said. “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “You should dee-dee,” El Paso said. “You owe it ta yerself.”

  “I feel like we are on the heels of a major victory,” Brooks said.

  “We on the heels of a pipe dream,” Doc countered. “That aint nothin but a hole. If it’s more, dinks aint neva gonna let ya in there.”

  They were all silent for several minutes. The mity-mite droned on. The radios hissed. Brooks had the uneasy thought that he had extended the last time for the wrong reason. He did not wish to repeat the mistake yet there was a gut feeling of being needed. These men were his men. They liked him, knew he was not just their commander but their friend. It meant a lot to Brooks. Yet still he could not decide. He said nothing.

  Cahalan broke the silence. “Hey, Eg, is it true you’re goina write a book?” Egan and the others faced the darkness that emitted Cahalan’s voice. “Doc says you’re goina write the diary of a tunnel rat … call it, The Grotto-Canal Diary.” They all chuckled.

  Jax rose to a squatting position. He rocked forward and back on his feet. He had been debating inwardly whether or not to express his prepared remarks. He let go. “We gowin seize power by force a arms,” his voice lamented in the darkness. “By war we gowin get our solution. Our task is to kill the world’s pigs, an ol Jax gowin lead the revolution.” Jax remained with the group only one second more. No one answered him. He felt very alone in his disgust with the war and in his belief that it was racially directed and inspired. The silence of his friends, he felt, was driving him away. He crawled back to his guard position.

  Still they remained silent. Brooks grabbed his forehead and massaged his temples. Somehow, he thought, before I leave, I’ve got to help straighten that man out. “Hey,” Brooks whispered, “let’s get into it. Cahalan.”

  “It’s a long report tonight,” Cahalan said and without hesitation he listed the day’s events, chronologically, statistically. He mentioned Bravo’s location on each contact and the estimated size of the enemy force. Wherever possible he named the enemy unit and added what its usual structure should contain. He ran down the list of SKYHAWK companies, then the firebase bombardments, the activities of an enemy engaged by aircraft and finally his fragmented information about ARVN engagements in the AO south of the Khe Ta Laou.

  “How you keep all that in your head?” Doc whispered.

  Brooks cut him off. “Doc,” he said.

  “I got two items,” Doc said slowly, sounding more professional than Cherry had ever heard him. “First, resupply tomorrow. I’ve requested plasma. I need plasma.” Doc’s speech began quickening. “I want fifty bags. I want evera other sucka humpin a bag a blood en I want evera medic humpin five. Dig? McCarthy. Where you at?”

  “He’s over with Whiteboy,” Egan said.

  “You tell him five. Got that? Five.”

  “I’ll tell him,” Egan assured Doc.

  “Second,” Doc whispered firmly at Brooks. “They all dehydrated. Everaone a em. You can’t push a man so hard he droppin then expect him ta fight. What we gonna do today if we’d run inta a hun’red-fifty dinks? Huh? You tell that mothafucka GreenMan he gonna have him eighty-fo V-S-I infantrymen from Alpha bein evacked, he aint careful. You gimme da mothafuckin hook. I’ll tell im.”

  Cherry smiled from ear to ear. He was sitting next to Doc, touching him, feeling him punctuate his speech with jabbing arms. He wanted to say, you tell him, Doc, but he remained quiet.

  Without answering Doc, Brooks called, “Danny.”

  “I just want to say, I’m goin back in that hole tomorrow. I want ta go back down with an E-T. We’re on ta somethin big. I don’t know if the dinks’ll let us in or not but I think it’s imperative we try.”

  “Concerning the hole,” Brooks said, “we’re going to have to wait to see what GreenMan and Old Fox want us to do. We’re going to resupply second tomorrow behind Delta. I think we’ll have to be up on six-three-six by ten-hundred hours. He wants us in that valley with a passion.”

  “That mothafucka,” Doc cussed, “he gonna burn these men up. It fo klicks minimum to that valley.”

  “Hey,” Brooks said. “First we’ll have to see if there’s any smoke. We may have to follow and find the rest of this complex.”

  Cherry wanted to join the conversation but he did not wish to force himself upon them. “How extensive do you think this tunnel is?” he asked.

  “That mothafucka go all the way ta China,” Doc snarled.

  “Some people,” Minh whispered, “believe the tunnels go from the Ho Chi Minh Trail all the way to lowlands.”

  Cherry whistled soundlessly.

  “We’ve never been able to break into the tunnels,” El Paso said. “Intelligence reports claim the dinks got an elaborate network.”

  “The trails of the Ho Chi Minh,” Cahalan recited, “appear to be an almost endless series of well-engineered dirt roads. They are highly maintained by coolie labor and often tunnels cut through mountains.” No one questioned Cahalan as to where or how he knew. Cahalan always knew these things. “Throughout the maze of interlacing routes,” he continued, “are numerous underground transfer points and supply depots where weapons, ammunition and food are unloaded and broken down for redistribution to units within the south. We are most likely on a branch line.”

  Brooks rubbed his scalp. Cahalan, he thought. That man is indispensable. Brooks attempted to picture Cahalan’s description superimposed on a topo map of the Khe Ta Laou. Where and how should he move his men?

  “They say,” Brown intruded, “the dinks got everything we got. They got trucks, they got howitzers. They even got helicopters.”

  “No way,” Doc challenged him.

  “Yes Sir. I shit you not.”

  Cahalan’s voice again entered the darkness. “Intelligence teams have reported spotting several helicopters painted all black and without identification. No one has ever confirmed or denied the reports. The birds are either the NVA’s or the CIA’s.”

  “Do you really think this tunnel might go all the way to Laos?” Cherry asked.

  “It’s not that far,” Egan whispered. “We’re not even fifteen klicks from Laos.”

  Cherry was impressed. He had not pictured them being that near the Ho Chi Minn Trail.

  “I do not think we can ever get into these tunnels,” Minh whispered. “I do not think we should try. If we find they are so extensive as you say, your government will withdraw. They will say Vietnam is a lost cause.”

  “I thought you wanted us out,” Cherry said.

  “Yes,” Minh answered. “Out. Your army, your people out. But we must always have your friendship, your moral support and your materiel.”

  “Five years ago,” Egan said contemptuously, “they said the dinks owned the countryside and everything but the center cities. Now most of it is ours. Two
years ago they said the dinks owned the night. Now we own it. Now they say the dinks own the underground. We’ll get in there. We’ll own that too before long.”

  “No, I think not,” Minh said softly. “I fight along your side as a brother but I do not like what I see. I do not like what you do to my country. Your money makes us poor. The more of your money that comes into my country, the more are my people forced into poverty.”

  “That don’t ee-ven make sense,” Brown said.

  “Oh yes,” Minh answered. “Before a man could make 1000 piasters a month and feed his family. Your money comes and prices go up. Now he makes 10,000 piasters a month and he must steal to even feed himself.”

  “Well, we’d be pretty incredibly naive to believe we haven’t fucked with the economy here,” Egan conceded for Brown.

  “You see,” Minh continued, “you cannot win this war for us.” His voice was very soft. “If you win then we are conquered. We have been conquered many times before. Each time we rise up and drive out the foreign army. It is in our blood. And you will be driven out. After you are here a very long time, you will find we are a poor country. There will be nothing to keep you here and you will want to leave. Then we will rise up and drive you out.”

  “What the hell do you think we’re doin here?” Brown whispered angrily. “We don’t want your country.”

  “We’re here to establish peace,” Egan said. “We’re not here puttin up permanent bases. We aint even tryin to defeat North Vietnam.”

  “Yeah,” Brown carried on. “We don’t care what you guys do. You can be free to do whatever you like. Soon as we stop the dinks.”

  Minn was overwhelmed by their retorts. Cherry attempted to come to his rescue. “Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity,” he said. It had been a cliche at college and everyone in the peace movement agreed it was valid.

  “No it’s not,” Egan said. No one else commented. Egan’s words were final. Now Cherry felt shunned from the group.

  “I mean …” Cherry began after a pause.

  “No it’s not,” Egan repeated flatly. “That’s a lamebrain’s over-simplification and the analogy doesn’t hold. And it doesn’t hold because you don’t know what peace is. It is possible to fight for peace, to defend oneself, to deter or stop an aggressor. Fuck your pat little phrases.”

  “We’ve made a commitment to your country, Minh, and to your people,” Brooks added. “We’ve committed ourselves to guarantee you the right to choose your own government. My government claims your country is under attack by forces organized, trained and equipped by another country. How do you feel about that?”

  “You Americans,” Minh said softly, respectfully, “sometimes you are blind.”

  “Yeah,” Cherry chimed in, “They’re not under attack by another country. It’s their own country that’s attacking em. Ah, I mean …”

  “Look around shithead,” Egan growled. “Who the fuck you think we’re fightin? ARVNs?”

  “Well,” Cherry came right back repeating another idea he had heard earlier, “their way of life is a lot closer to communism than it is to our way anyway. Maybe we should let the communists have this place.”

  “What do you base that on?” Egan said.

  “You know. The way they live, kind of all on top of each other sharing everything and their religions and all. It stresses the group more than the individual.”

  “Would you say communism is more in style with their living style than is western democracy?” Egan baited him.

  “Yeah, I would,” Cherry said.

  “Would you say that federalism, you know, a powerful central government, stresses the individual more than the society or the society more than the individual?”

  “The society.” Cherry said cautiously, feeling Egan preparing a semantic trap.

  “I think so too,” Egan said. “El Paso?”

  “Generally the larger the population a government controls, the more it must deal with the people as a mass than as individuals. And the more powerful a government is the more it controls the people governed.”

  “Do you agree with that?” Egan asked Cherry.

  “Yes, I would, but …”

  “Do western multi-party governments tend to control their people more or less than one-party systems such as in Russia or China?”

  “Less.”

  “And the party in power,” Egan continued, “can it be toppled more easily in a multi-party system or in a one-party cell-system?”

  “Multi-party.”

  “Then the government in a multi-party system must not have as great control over the people as does the government in a single party communist system. True?”

  “True.”

  “Now, in Vietnam’s cultural tradition, do the people like to have the central government direct their village affairs?”

  “No,” Minh answered the question. “It is not good for the national government to control the village.”

  “Then our way must be closer to their traditional way than would be communism,” Egan concluded.

  “But they’re all Vietnamese,” Cherry protested. “They’re Vietnamese just like the ARVNs.”

  “Eg, mi hermano,” El Paso said calmly. “Your argument is good but flawed. When people say the traditional culture here is more adaptable to communism than to something else, that something else is not democracy but capitalism. Perhaps, Cherry, what you propose is a socialist system. It is not quite true, also, that these people are all Vietnamese.”

  In his many months in the jungle El Paso had found hundreds of hours to read. He read Vietnamese histories and he read the current events affecting Vietnam. He now launched into a detailed historical account of how various peoples arrived in Vietnam and from where the population came. El Paso told how some nomadic tribes descended from China to settle the regions about Hanoi and Haipong and how other peoples migrated east from south central Asia to settle the areas of Cambodia and the Mekong Delta. Still others drifted west from Polynesia. “Never,” El Paso stated emphatically, “have the people of the North and the people of the South been one people. They have always fought each other. The early unifications of Vietnam invariably refer to the uniting of segments above the 17th parallel. Hell, there weren’t hardly any people south of the 17th until the 14th century. This land was empty, emptier than America when the white man came.”

  Cherry was surprised by how thoroughly El Paso knew the subject. El Paso continued for a short time, then said, “We often call our opponents Viet Cong and we think of them as independent rebellious South Vietnamese. I do not think this is the case. All our contacts are with North Vietnamese regulars. This is part of the confusion and political myth of the war. It is part of the propaganda the North produces to justify their invasion of the South.”

  Minh remained silent through El Paso’s remarks. Cherry acknowledged it with a quiet, “I see.” Doc wearily asked, “What all that got ta do with anythin?” They were all very tired. The droning of the mity-mite did not allow them for even one moment to believe their position was uncompromised. The excitement of discovering and speculating on the tunnel had dissipated and apprehension filled the void.

  Moonlight seeped into the black above as the moon began its late ascent. Thin clouds were forming at a very high altitude and the moonlight reflected off their earth facing surfaces.

  “Hey,” Brooks said, “it’s getting late. Get some sleep. We’ll have other times to discuss these things.”

  Cherry lay on his back in the dirt, his face flushed, feverish. The night had become cold and damp. Doc and Minh lay next to each other to Cherry’s left. Egan was shoulder to shoulder with him on the right. At his feet El Paso and the L-T and Brown snuggled into the crotch of a stubby tree. All shivered with cold and their compromised position. Beneath a thin poncho liner Cahalan monitored the radios, checking 1st Plt squads, the other platoon CPs and reporting to the battalion forward TOC on Firebase Barnett.

  Cherry shivered severely. “Oh God. No,
” his whisper demanded. “Go Away!” The soldier had returned. Cherry’s thoughts sped. He was completely exhausted. His arms and legs ached. The burns and scratches were not healing, but festering, inflamed and slowly oozing sticky thick liquid. Cherry shut his eyes. The NVA soldier moved quickly in Cherry’s imagination. He moved quickly, determined to get his face into the sight of Cherry’s M-16, determined to look straight up the barrel, through the sights, into Cherry’s eyes. The enemy’s head enlarged, his eyes, set deep in hollow haunted sockets, gleamed. A smirk rolled across the man’s mouth. The mouth opened large, larger than the entire growing head, all teeth and tongue flashing. Cherry tensed about the trigger, began squeezing, squeezing with both hands, ten fingers, the headmouth became larger, the tongue whipping madly, saliva splashing Cherry squeezing the rifle exploding, flashing …

  Oh fuck. I gotta get that man outa my head. Please Dear Lord, please … Cherry had sat up without being aware of having moved. The jungle rule—Always Be Quiet—had seeped into his subconscious. He had not even awakened Egan.

  Cherry tightened the poncho liner about his neck and shoulders. His face remained hot. God. God? What god? He forced himself to think of something other than the dead NVA. Use your brain, he told himself. It can get you through. He searched his mind. He thought of Linda but the thought would not stick. He thought about school. Images dashed through his mind, a classroom, a lecture hall. Cherry forced the thought on. He wanted to sleep. So badly he wished for peaceful, unthinking sleep.

  He recalled a picture his eyes had recorded several years before he had arrived in Nam. It was autumn in Vermont, the peak of the foliageseeker season. The sun had set and the sky was very dark and clear. Vic was driving the pickup truck with their moto-cross motorcycles in the back. Jim, Cherry paused, Jim he thought, that was me: I rode shotgun. They had been returning from a backhills course, coming down a twisting side road. From the crest of a mountain peak they looked down for several miles to Interstate 91. The roadway and numerous adjacent capillaries were jammed with automobiles. The reds of taillights and the beams from headlights illuminated arteries and veins on the blackness. Cherry could see the image clearly in his mind, could see all the tiny cells traveling through the organism, giving the body life.