13th Valley

by John M. Del Vecchio

  The column continued to descend. The morning was quiet except for the rain and the noise of men slipping and falling, and the bursting of artillery far to the northeast. By noon the point element of the column reached the first rolling hills, mounds, between the steep slope of the finger and the valley floor. The boonierats set up a defensive perimeter and rested. The 1st Sqd of the 1st Plt, the farthest extreme of the column, was only halfway down the finger, still in the cliffs. For them the trail had become so mushed by the preceding troops, they had to crawl backward and dig their fingers into the thick slop to keep from tumbling off the trail and into the jungle below.

  The column expanded into an elongated egg about the first mound as the troops at the rear completed the steep descent. Alpha was half-in, half-above the valley fog, a thick sticky-feeling mist through which the rain continued to fall but through which no one could see. The vegetation about them was as different from the trees and vines of the ridge as it would have been if they had crossed space to another planet. It was gray scraggle brush, low, only five to ten feet high, and it was so incredibly dense, except on paths, it was impossible to even shove an arm deeply into it. With the mist it made the boonierats uneasy and frightened. It was another world, the NVA’s world. Hand signals passed unnecessarily: maintain strict noise discipline, keep movement to a minimum. Egan moved a thumb toward his open mouth signaling to Cherry, eat. Cherry passed the signal to Doc McCarthy behind him and slipped from his ruck.

  Along with all his other aches and stiffness, Cherry found the skin of his thighs was raw. Shit, Man, he said to himself, what if I got a case of the black syph. Oh shit. Maybe I got it from movin them barrels of shit down at Cam Ranh. Cherry glanced about him then unbuttoned his pant fly. He looked at his legs. Patches of skin on his inner thighs from his testicles down about four inches were brightly inflamed. The rainwater dripping from his hands onto the chafed skin burned. “Oh God,” Cherry moaned. He did not want to tell anyone because he was embarrassed by the location of the sores and also because he feared it might be something serious. He had heard stories about strains of venereal disease immune to penicillin and all other modern drugs. There were rumors of an American colony on Guam of infected men from Vietnam that the government would not allow to return to the States. He looked at the rash again. It was on his balls too. Oh shit. Oh shit, oh shit. Cherry tried to recall from his biology classes what the incubation period for syphilis was. He looked down. Goddamn, each day it gets worse, he thought. He thought about how it had progressed, spoke it to himself as if he were telling a medic. “Doc,” he said to himself, “it’s really gettin bad. I don’t know where I could a got it. I aint even sure what it is but I can hardly walk with it.”

  Lt. Brooks had been working his way around Alpha’s perimeter. He very quietly asked questions and advice. When he reached Egan he squatted. Egan was sitting in a puddle. He appeared comfortable. The L-T and Egan tapped fists. “If you were a little people,” Brooks asked, “where would you be?”

  “If I knew somebody was comin after me?” Egan asked.

  “Yeah,” Brooks said.

  “Are you rulin out the tunnels in the hills?”

  “Yep. Down here. Where?”

  “I’d be leavin a trail so you’d follow me to my battleground.”

  “Where?”

  “Away from my headquarters.”

  “Where would you put your headquarters?”

  “Away from the trail I’d want you to follow.”

  Brooks pulled out his topo map. “Show me.”

  Egan looked at the map. He studied it. “Not in the foothills, we might come down on them. Not on the flat, too easy for the birds to fire em up. Ah, unless they got some Russian tanks in here, ya know, L-T …”

  “What?”

  “… I’d be at the high feature on the river. There’s the ridge comin out toward it from both sides. Not a lot of room for fast movers to work.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Right on.”

  Brooks moved back to Cherry, asked him how he was holding up, and moved on as Cherry nodded okay. Cherry waited until the commander had passed Doc McCarthy then he crept back to the medic. Egan turned and watched. Fuck Egan, Cherry thought.

  “Ah Doc, ah, can I ask you somethin?”

  “Yeah. What is it?”

  “I got this, ah, problem.”

  “What is it?” McCarthy asked. He looked at Cherry very sympathetically and asked him, “Where is it?”

  Thanks, Cherry thought. This guy’s got a talent for making it easy. “It’s my groin. I think I got the syph.”

  “You got burnin?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Really bad, I mean.”

  “I can hardly walk,” Cherry said.

  “Walk? I mean when you piss.”

  “No Doc. When I walk.”

  “Let me see,” Doc said.

  Cherry unbuttoned his pants. Goddamn Egan, watchin, Cherry thought. Cherry dropped his fatigue trousers and pulled up the inside of his OD boxer trunks exposing the chafed hot skin.

  “Ooooo! You got it bad,” McCarthy said. “You shouldn’t a let it get that bad.” Egan had come back to look. Doc winked at him. “Got it bad.”

  “What is it?” Cherry said turning away from Egan.

  Egan pulled his bayonet from the sheath at his calf and smiled sadistically. “Ah ha, gotta cut it off.”

  Cherry’s eyes widened. He began pulling his pants up. “Well what the fuck is it?” he demanded.

  In one quick motion Egan slipped the blade of his bayonet into Cherry’s boxer trunks and cut the cloth up the side.

  “Crotch rot,” McCarthy said. “Jungle rot of the crotch.”

  Egan kept Cherry off-balance tugging at the waistband of his underwear as he slipped the bayonet blade into the other side and cut the material. Then he whipped the tattered cloth away and flicked it into the jungle brush. “You can’t wear underwear here,” Egan chuckled. “It’ll rot yer balls off.”

  “Here,” McCarthy said handing Cherry a tube of salve. “Rub some of this on it.”

  Suddenly from behind them 60s and 16s erupted. Cherry hit the dirt pulling his pants up. Egan charged toward the firing. Grenades exploded. Snell, Nahele and McQueen from 3d Pit came racing through, running to the fight. The initial firing lasted less than ten seconds. Jackson, Marko, Brunak, Lairds and Denhardt had fired simultaneously down the slope of the mound. They were at the very rear of the column. They had descended the cliffs last, had crossed the small draw to the mound and had been sitting quietly when they heard the chatter. They all turned slowly and looked through the tangle of dense brush and they saw an NVA squad. The enemy soldiers were walking casually, talking, their rifles slung over their shoulders. The initial blast felled four.

  Egan, Brooks, Silvers, Nahele, a whole group of them lay on the ground, whispered back and forth. “Silvers, take six men down there,” Brooks directed pointing to the right. “Danny, Don, Queenie,” Brooks pointed to the left. Brooks, Thomaston and Whiteboy dropped down straight. Above, at the spot where 1st Sqd had been when they fired, Moneski’s squad covered the advancing recon and all around the perimeter men shifted to fill gaps.

  “Holy fucken Christ!” Egan uttered. In the hollow below the mound there was a red ball but it was unlike any red ball Egan had ever seen. The trail was five feet wide with an all-weather surface. The ground had been leveled and reinforced with bamboo. The canopy above had been woven into living semi-solid mats. Egan’s group followed the trail only half-a-dozen meters then stopped. In the opposite direction Silvers’ squad followed the trail a few meters to where it turned to the hill. Here a culvert allowed a stream to pass beneath the trail without washing it out. Where Brooks descended his group found blood puddles, blood trails, a small rucksack and nothing more. There were no bodies. The boonierats retreated back to the mound.

  “There’s gotta been at least a dozen,” Thomaston said.

  “You think you hit four, maybe five?” Broo
ks asked.

  “At least,” Marko whispered and Silvers and Jax agreed.

  “They had to have at least a dozen to carry those bodies out a there that quick,” Thomaston said. “I don’t think if there were only seven or eight they could a done that.”

  “Look at this shit,” Egan whistled. He was pilfering the NVA ruck. Along with a bag of rice and a bowl there was black licorice candy, a C-ration B-2 Unit, US matches and various odds and ends Alpha had left at their resupply site.

  “So,” Silvers said punching Egan’s shoulder and chuckling, “there’s my gook.”

  Alpha moved out again almost immediately. They remained in the same order, 2d Plt, CP, 3d and 1st. Their fight was not for the road, and they had no intention of following it to a certain ambush. They called the action in to the TOC and found that Bravo Company was again engaged in a major battle. The Bravos had left the hospital complex and had returned toward their original insertion LZ. At the same location where they had been assaulted on the night of the 14th, they cornered a well entrenched NVA company. Artillery was attempting to soften their objective. The rain and fog prohibited Tac Air or helicopter support. Alpha monitored the fight. Recon too was in a skirmish.

  The column humped north and slightly west moving from mound to mound of ever decreasing size, descending to the flat valley floor. Alpha humped steadily, cautiously. They crossed another red ball and this one too had an all-weather surface. At a pause Brooks studied his topo map. None of the trails were indicative. Alpha continued toward the river, aiming northwest now, downstream. The mist thickened. The vegetation changed again as they descended, the dense scragglebrush giving way to dense bamboo and elephant grass. In places the bamboo was over fifteen feet high. The point man felt as if he were breaking trail through knife blades of spring steel. His arms were soon slashed and bloody and his face had multiple tiny lacerations. The grass cut fine and quick and a boonierat did not know until after he was cut that a blade had touched him. The blood trickled and microscopic barbs stung in the wounds. The point alternated with his slack and finally every man in the lead squad had experienced the agony of breaking trail.

  The valley floor was even more eerie than the mounds. The rain continued. It was nearly impossible for Alpha to establish their precise position. Surrounded by fog and high grass they could not sight landmarks. The flat valley floor revealed no clues. They knew the location of the first mound below the cliffs and their own approximate direction. The distance they moved was vague. When Brooks believed, guessed, his point element was 100 meters from the river, he called a halt. The column sat.

  “El Paso, call De Barti,” Brooks directed. “Tell him to move his gunteams to point. Call Snell and get Nahele and McQueen up here. Have Thomaston send up Whiteboy.”

  When the two machine gun teams from behind the CP reached Brooks, they and the entire CP moved forward. They walked quietly up the trail stepping over and around seated men. At 2d Plt’s command post Brooks and De Barti planned Alpha’s sweep to the river.

  Leon Silvers was at the rear of the column. To his front was Brunak, then Marko and Jax and the rest of 1st Sqd ending with Numbnuts. 1st Plt’s CP had dropped back to between 1st and 2d Sqds. The boonierats were sitting at six to eight foot intervals. Thomaston, facing Egan, held up two fingers on his right hand and four on his left. He smiled and mouthed, “Twenty-four and a wake-up.”

  “Twenty-one, you cherry,” Egan smiled back.

  The column began to move again then it stopped. It moved a little then stopped again. Cherry came up behind Egan and whispered, “They’re at the river.”

  Egan nodded, moved up several feet and sat down.

  Cherry sat where he had been standing. One by one the men to his rear situated themselves on the wet ground. A cool breeze swayed the tall grass. Cherry examined his fingers. The skin was puffed and white and wrinkled from the long exposure to the wet. He began to meditate, to ponder the loneliness he was experiencing. For extended hours they all humped without speaking. For hours he marched seeing only the one man before him and at times not even seeing him. Cherry longed for a CP meeting. He looked to his rear. McCarthy was lying back on his ruck. From behind the medic, Numbnuts’ whisper seeped into the quiet. That guy won’t ever learn, Cherry said to himself. An uneasy feeling came upon Cherry. He looked left then right. Somebody was watching. He looked over his shoulder again at McCarthy. The mist was so thick it blurred his image. Cherry could feel eyes on the back of his neck. He glanced around anxiously. He could see nothing but dense walls of elephant grass. Maybe it’s better not to look, he thought. He tried to ignore it. His stomach tightened. He felt as if something was about to reach out and grab him. “Fuck it,” he whispered. The breeze swayed the top of the grass again. He fidgeted apprehensively. Trail watchers? Timidly he turned left gaping into the grass. Slowly he looked right. His hand played with the trigger mechanism of his weapon. He shortened his neck. His helmet touched his ruck. He waited for the spell to break, for the column to move. Maybe I oughta tell McCarthy, he thought. He hesitated. It’s too unfounded. I haven’t seen anything. He tried to relax but still he could feel eyes focusing on the back of his neck. Again he turned. He was very low on the ground. The eyes were still behind him. His arms trembled, his fists clenched, his mind lost awareness. He stared vacantly at his fatigue pants—wet and filthy. His boots were coated with slime and splinters of grass. Cherry shut his eyes, shrunk lower for protection. Colors, all shades of green, swirled in strange geometric kaleidoscope clouds. Forms precipitated. At the base he could see ankles congealing, his ankles, his knees. He was suspended in blackness with only his legs illuminated by the geometric green glow. Slowly the kaleidoscope turned. The vision focused. Baggy green fatigue pant legs unclouded. The image cleared upward to his waist. He was not sure if his eyes were open or shut. He could see his shirt, his shoulders. Every minute segment, every stitch, was in perfect focus. Cherry could see his neck. Then the head appeared. It was large. Too large. Then the face. It was not Cherry’s face. It was the face of the enemy soldier. It stared at Cherry. It had Cherry’s body. The face contorted. Cherry’s body took one cautious step forward, stepped right through Cherry lying on the trail. Behind him eyes bore down on his back, burned hate into his neck. It was not a man. It was a bird, some sort of hawk. Falcon. Cherry’s heart pounded. His eyes crushed tight. The falcon hovered unseen behind him—invisible and waiting, waiting to strike, waiting to split the air with lightning speed, to swoop down invisible—The Talons of God!

  The man stood between Cherry and God. He glared into Cherry’s eyes from atop Cherry’s own body.

  We got to move. I can’t sit here. Cherry was frozen. Thoughts flashed through his head but they could not penetrate the image before his eyes. Don’t let the talons get me, he prayed. Cherry cowered lower into the foul muck. Oh God. Oh God. I’m sorry. I had to do it. Titanic wings beat creating wind in the valley, gusts bending the wretched grass. God, you could have turned him around. He was coming at me. Tears welled to Cherry’s eyes. The valley blackened and for protracted seconds Cherry’s heart ceased to beat.

  The soldier took shape again, smiling laughing behind thick vegetation. He snarled and stepped forward. Cherry could see the head, the soldier’s taunting face above the sight of Cherry’s own weapon. The face became Cherry’s face. Cherry squeezed his weapon, he tried not to squeeze, he squeezed, the muzzle flashed, the rifle kicked, the face erupted, the forehead burst red, exploding. The body dropped into the darkness twitching in violent spasms. Crimson gore dissolved to chalkypale hollow, then to sallow complexed bone, an emaciated skull. The skull’s eyes glared green, glared into Cherry’s soul.

  Cherry’s body twitched. He opened his eyes. He looked around. He stood. He clenched his teeth. “Fuck it,” he cussed bitterly. “Don’t mean nothin.” Cherry moved up to Egan. “Let’s get this God fucken show on the road.”

  Brooks orchestrated the river crossing. He sent 2d Plt’s 3d Sqd upriver thirty meters and dire
cted them to stay ten meters away from the riverbank. 2d Sqd he sent downriver. 1st Sqd he held to be sent straight ahead. Between the squads he sent the extra gunteams. “Don’t approach the water,” he emphasized to every squad, every rifle team. The squads worked to their positions then sat and watched and waited. Brooks made them sit and observe for a full fifteen minutes.

  “Move up,” El Paso radioed on Brooks’ command. All elements moved to within viewing distance of the water and sat again, still concealed by valley floor vegetation. Again, for fifteen minutes they observed. They watched the river, the near bank and the far. Fog hung about them, over them, in the grass. But it did not lie on the water’s surface. The water was dark and appeared still, almost stagnant. Rain textured the surface with thousands of minute expanding ringwaves. On both sides the riverbank rose as vertical black muck rims topped with cowlicks of green grass. Elephant grass and bamboo encroached to the water’s edge and variously overhung the river where the bank was collapsing. At the point where Alpha intersected the river, the Khe Ta Laou was about twenty-five meters wide.

  The security squads up and down river set up half-arc perimeters with the machine guns facing the river and the back of the arcs open to the column. The machine gunners opened and extended the bi-pod legs of the 60s and laid their ammo out in preparation for a fight. Behind them thumpermen mock registered their grenade launchers. Riflemen opened tiny holes in the grass to aim through.

  “Let’s go,” Brooks motioned. 1st Sqd and the company CP and all of 2d Pit moved to the river’s edge. The column moved up behind them. Old Pop Randalph climbed down and into the deceptive current. Even at the very edge it caused him to stagger as the black water suddenly gurgled and surged against his legs. Pop retreated, slipped out of his ruck, removed his boonie hat and web gear and laid his weapon down. Again he waded into the water, cautious, aware that there might be enemy gunners on the far side. The water was running very fast. Four paces out the bottom dropped and Pop was over his head, paddling back toward shore. He was 10 meters below where he had slipped by the time he could stand. He returned to point. He consulted with the L-T and with De Barti and with Camillo Baiez. Pop removed his boots and his shirt and climbed back into the water. He took two steps out, dove in and began stroking with all his strength, kicking and splashing like a miniature paddlewheel riverboat. The current grabbed him and swept him downstream at twice the speed he was swimming across. He was swept past the downstream security team before he was halfway. Mohnsen, Jones, Smith and Garbageman set out after him, noisily, nervously trampling the vegetation as they raced along the bank.