13th Valley

by John M. Del Vecchio

  “You know why I’m heah, Sir?” Pop rasped. “I’m heah, Sir, because I am a soldier. An I’m a good soldier. I’m a better platoon sergeant than you’ll find anywhere. Except for that dumb son of a bitch, Mohnsen, I’d have a near perfect record.”

  “But what keeps you here?” Brooks asked. “What keeps you as a soldier here?”

  “Sir,” Pop’s face twitched. “We have a mission. An I can accomplish that mission better’n anyone else. Better en with less loss of life.”

  “Do you really believe that, Pop?” Brooks asked. He asked it sincerely without the slightest skepticism.

  “Yes Sir,” Pop answered.

  “Good,” Brooks said. “Who’s going with you?”

  “Sergeant Egan en his cherry.”

  “Good,” Brooks said.

  Pop, Egan and Cherry had volunteered for the first MA mission. From Campobasso Brooks had already sent out six LP/ OPs. Recon patrols were being organized. Ambush teams would come later. Brooks called them all Rover Teams and the name excited the boonierats. At dusk they would go out in every direction to determine the enemy situation and feed information to the commander for the planned assault on the headquarters complex, if they could find it, if it existed. But first, Brooks decided, we must disrupt NVA movement all about us. We’ll set MAs on the red balls.

  The three men of the first team emptied their pockets. They removed all excess equipment. Using only light webbing Cherry strapped his radio tightly against his back. Egan carried five claymore mines in a towel. Pop carried a used radio battery, rolls of det cord and trip wire, a slide-type trigger mechanism and blasting caps. All three carried their 16s, bandoleers of magazines and four fragmentation grenades each.

  “Break squelch twice,” El Paso instructed Cherry. “Then all’s cool. Three times you sittin tight waitin for trouble to pass. Four, you comin back in. We’ll notify the perimeter.”

  “Right on, Bro,” Cherry whispered.

  Rover Team Stephanie departed north, moving quickly beyond the perimeter, out beyond the LP/ OP toward the enemy road below the north escarpment. Wind and rain covered their movement and the sound of their footfalls. Pop led them unmercifully under the heaviest thickets, through the most vile muck, into the stench of sewer-decay humus, a path the NVA would never choose, would never expect Americans to attempt. Much of the time they crawled. Between each motion they lay flat, listening. They moved more and more slowly, crossing trails only when necessary, skirting them when possible. They lay motionless, face-in-the-muck prone for ever-increasing periods. Then they crawled again. The road/ red ball was north, they had only to avoid enemy and head generally north and they would hit it. “If they can’t see you, they can’t shoot you,” Egan had said to Cherry before they had left. “They aint goan see us,” Pop winked.

  Now they lay before the road, in a foul quagmire. They lay prone beneath brambles. They observed. They listened. Their ears were stimulated just below their threshold of recognition. Had an enemy squad just passed? Had they almost been stepped on? It reminded Cherry of summer night hide-and-seek when he was young. His favorite place to hide had been in the thick grass below the quince trees. There he would watch his brother Vic walk by, almost step on him. Cherry laughed silently to himself. Can’t find me, mothafuckas. His body trembled.

  Egan looked at Cherry. That dumb mothafucker, he thought. He’s got to experience it all. Can’t tell him a fuckin thing. Egan wanted to shake him. Cherry, he wanted to say, for godchristsakes can’t you listen and learn? Can’t you see all I’m tryin ta do is teach you, speed up your learning so you don’t have to make the same mistakes I made? It’s a wonder mankind’s gotten as far as it has, Egan thought. It’s a wonder we’re not all still learning and relearning that fire burns. Fuck it. Maybe we are.

  L-T’s goan nuts, Pop thought, though he could not describe it to himself. Tactically their maneuver was perfect. He had never seen such an AO and he had never known a commander to direct and execute an infiltration so superbly. Yet something was not right. L-T en his questions, Pop scrunched up his face thinking. L-T goan nuts.

  Cherry’s thoughts skipped. We could talk about our home lives and our upbringing. I could tell Jax or Doc about my family and they could tell me about theirs. I’d say, ‘I never had a black friend. I mean, like, I never truly knew a black person.’ I could say, ‘I grew up with blacks. You know, we went to school together, played together. Every once in a while we went to each other’s homes. But it was always like another world to me, as if I didn’t understand the language or wasn’t allowed. It was as if there was a law against getting to know a black.’ And then his imagination filled with Doc saying, ‘Fo blacks, it is a law.’ Squelch broke twice on Cherry’s radio, El Paso signaling for a situation report. Cherry keyed his handset twice and stared at the road. All was still except the rain and the wind.

  Pop stealthily slipped from the muck and slid to the road. Egan signaled Cherry to stay put. He followed Pop onto the road. Without an utterance they commenced to deploy the ambush. Egan set one claymore two feet off the road, below brush, ten feet up the road. He angled the mine slightly upward, up and across the road. Pop unscrewed the plastic fastener used to secure a blasting cap, inserted an end of det cord and screwed the fastener back in place. Then he unrolled the cord and brought it across the road to where Egan was aiming a second claymore. Pop measured the cord, cut it and returned to the road. Carefully he camouflaged the cord, burying it in the road mud, being extra careful to reconstruct the cartwheel grooves after burying the cord. Egan waited until Pop was finished. The two worked methodically, steadily. Egan inserted and secured the cord to one side of the second claymore connecting the first two mines. Pop took over and secured the new end of the det cord roll to the second insert on the mine and unrolled and weaved the cord through the brush down the trail to where Egan was aiming a third claymore directly across toward Cherry. Pop connected this mine to the second. Egan set up a fourth and fifth down the road, one on each side. Pop daisy-chained the remaining mines to the first three. At the center of the MA, opposite Cherry, Egan stretched a monofilament trip wire line across, three inches above, the road. He fastened the trip wire to one side of a slide trigger. Egan secured the other side of the trigger to a rigid brush stump and camouflaged it. From one side of the trigger he ran a blasting cap wire to one terminal of the battery. Pop removed an electrical blasting cap from his shirt pocket, unwound the wires, attached one to the trigger slide and inserted the cap into the first claymore. Egan checked the slide mechanism, checked the trip wire and camouflage for the mines and the battery. Then he retreated to Cherry. Cherry watched fascinated, a smile on his face, twinkles in his eyes. Pop signaled for them both to withdraw. He quickly visually rechecked the booby trap then armed it by attaching the second blasting cap wire to the second terminal of the battery.

  While Pop, Egan and Cherry were north on the road, Rover Team Claudia—Snell, Nahele and McQueen of 3d Plt—worked their way south to the river then upstream 200 meters. They sat immobile observing the river and across to the knoll. Within twenty minutes of set-up they spotted an NVA squad on the south riverbank. The enemy squad began unloading materials from a long wooden sampan. Snell radioed El Paso, spoke with Brooks, then called Armageddon Two. “Fire mission. Over.”

  Rounds landed in the river and on the swamp valley floor geysering riverwater and valley mud up with the flash and cordite smoke. The next three salvos were airbursts and geysered down showers of explosion-propelled shrapnel. The arty raid killed, all members of Rover Team Claudia agreed, at least five NVA. They were credited with a body count of four.

  “¿Que pasa?” Brooks asked El Paso. “You are, L-T,” El Paso smiled.

  “What are you thinking?” Brooks asked staring intensely at his senior RTO.

  “I was thinking of my mother,” El Paso answered. “You know, L-T, she used to say to me, ‘Rafael, come in and stay with your mother. Today, I am very tired.’ She used to say that to me all of t
he time.” Brooks rubbed his hand up under his baseball cap, wiped rain from his forehead, and continued searching El Paso’s face. “I should have taken her advice,” El Paso said.

  Brooks smiled. He and El Paso were the very center of Alpha and he liked that. He liked his RTO. Here they sat together on one poncho, under one poncho, wet together, in control together. They had spoken very little for days. Most of their interaction had been official. Earlier this day they had briefly discussed left-right politics but each time they began they had been interrupted by demands of the mission. Brooks opened his notebook carefully under the poncho.

  “What were you telling me about Spanish?” Brooks asked after a pause.

  “You mean the con?” El Paso asked.

  “Yes,” Brooks said eagerly.

  “It is like this,” El Paso began in a voice easy to listen to, as if he were telling a story. “You see, a Chicano is with something. Anglos, they are for something. We do not say I am for this or for that, we say con, with this or with that. When you say you are for something you disassociate yourself from it. You and it are different. Don’t you agree? But Spanish-speaking people, we are with an idea or an issue. We say I am with this candidate or with this policy. It is we and we are it. It does not exist by itself as it does for the Anglos. When my people talk about the government it is not to be an entity by itself that we must serve. It is us and it must serve us.”

  Brooks made a few notes then said, “I hear you yet I don’t see that in reality.”

  “Maybe you do not know enough about Spanish-speaking people. It is the con, why we are so passionate.”

  “The con,” Brooks repeated to himself attempting to assimilate the concept. He repeated it again.

  “Before we were talking about right and left governments,” El Paso said, “and right or left factions. I don’t think that is a realistic representation of American politics. L-T, you are interested in words as symbols and how they affect our thoughts. If we continually use right-left dichotomies to describe a particular polarization, does the description become part of the cause for the polarization?”

  “I don’t know,” Brooks said writing the question down.

  “This is what I think. Politics are not lineal. The left-center-right line is a poor descriptive symbol. Let’s put a policy decision, a topic like this war, in the center. The right demands that we remain here, that we redouble our effort. And the right criticizes the government for not following a rightist course. From the left there are others pulling at the government. They want all American troops withdrawn now. They criticize the government not following a leftist course. And we only have two alternatives. Maybe that is because that is the rules we set up for ourselves. But it is not the real situation.

  “What we, the government and the people of the United States, do could be better represented by a sphere with a dot at the center. The dot is our policy. On the surface of the sphere are all the interested parties. There’s Dow Chemical with a big line to the dot and there’s Irma Dinkydau from Lost City, Nevada, with a thread, and there are a hundred million others. Everybody’s pulling the dot in different directions and it’s staying pretty close to center.”

  “Hey,” Brooks smiled. “And true polarization occurs only when the surface participants are pushed to the poles. Perhaps when you have heavy concentrations of interest groups. Or maybe one side polarizing forces the other side to polarize.”

  “Yes,” El Paso agreed. “But in a free society you do not get complete polarization because the interest groups are capable of wandering around anywhere on the surface of the sphere.”

  “If they know it a sphere,” Doc said sliding under their poncho. He had overheard fragments of their conversation from his wet hole only an arm’s reach away. “What happen, Mista, when somebody come long an purge an entire pole? Huh? Then your dot gonna be way outa whack.”

  Egan and Cherry materialized silently from the mistblur. “Rover Team Stephanie reports,” Cherry whispered.

  “Yeah,” El Paso said attempting to disarm Doc’s argument, ignoring the return of the rover team. El Paso liked his model and he wanted to defend it. “However, we don’t have purges in our society. Not great purges like they’ve had in Russia or China. See, there people are forced off the sphere. There people can’t stabilize the policy dots in the center because they aint allowed to wander about and pressure and pull the dot from all angles.”

  “What you mean we don’t got great purges? What happened to the red race, Mista? You fogettin somethin. White fuckas always have purges.”

  “Hey,” Egan jumped right in, “we got repression of minorities and we got some purged people but it’s not like in the Soviet Union or in China or even in North Vietnam. Asian fuckas,” Egan mocked Doc’s voice, “always have purges. You can’t name a great American purge.”

  “We couldn’t have one now,” Cherry said. “Too many people would stand up and object.”

  “Exactly,” El Paso stated firmly. “Free criticism is good. It keeps government honest and stable.”

  The conversation turned away from racial problems and back to war. El Paso delivered a lecture on the legality of the war. “There are very sound arguments holding this war to be unconstitutional,” El Paso said. “Like when Nixon decided to send troops into Cambodia. That was not legal. He reigns over our lives, he reigns over the country. He makes decisions by himself without regard to anyone else pulling on the policy dot, almost as if he were a dictator. It simply cannot be legal. Not under these circumstances. The president can order invasions if our country is threatened. The Constitution says that that is okay. And there are legal precedents for similar action. FDR sent Americans into North Africa and then into Europe without congressional approval but the power to declare war does not rest with the president. That power is in the hands of Congress. Congress must declare war and the president must approve.

  “There are many precedents in our history which extend the president’s original war powers. President Polk attacked Mexico in 1845 without congressional approval. Only after the fact did Congress declare war. President Wilson, he had the navy bombard Vera Cruz and he sent American troops into Mexico after Pancho Villa. But no earlier president ever stretched his powers like Johnson in 1965. He completely usurped all the war-declaring power from Congress.”

  “Hey, what about the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution?” Brooks asked.

  “That only authorized the president to retaliate to that one attack. It can’t be used to justify half a million men and full-scale war. Besides, under the Constitution, Congress cannot give its powers away.”

  “What about the SEATO treaty?” Cherry asked.

  “That treaty states that all countries involved must act in accordance with their constitutional processes. A treaty cannot supercede the constitution.”

  “Then why are you here?” Brooks asked.

  “L-T, if I did not come, I’d be in jail,” El Paso said.

  During the discussion Brooks had been watching first El Paso, then Egan, then Cherry, then Doc. His mind jumped back to earlier statements. “Do we each have within us,” Brooks asked, “a dot which we pull in many directions, a dot which determines our personal policy and course?”

  There was contact to the south. A single burst of fire, a silent second, then answering fire and mingling fire. Then all was quiet. At Campobasso Brooks and El Paso waited for the report while the others prepared themselves. The report seemed a long time coming. Then Rover Team Danielle, four boonierats from 1st Plt, 2d Sqd led by Moneski, radioed its report. They had made Alpha’s first direct contact since the river crossing. It had been short, small, sweet. Danielle ambushed a two-man NVA trail watcher unit. The Americans had set up moments before in an NVA position off one trail. The NVA had come from behind, unsuspecting, ready to move into their own position. One enemy soldier had been killed instantly. The other was hit and had fled. Rover Team Danielle pursued, caught the wounded man, took and returned fire, blowing the NVA soldier to p
ieces. The team sustained no casualties.

  The nightly CP meeting on the 21st took place before dusk. Rain had fallen all day, the monotonous pattering drops being sporadically disrupted by cloudbursts. The sky had again settled back, it seemed in response to Brooks’ meeting, to the dark gray of steady rain. The meeting was brief. Eighteen platoon members attended, all the platoon sergeants and leaders and the platoon CP RTOs and all of the squad leaders or a stand-in for those on patrol. The soldiers sat close together, almost in each other’s laps, to hear Brooks give the operational orders for the next two days.

  The NVA were not accustomed to American units working at night, moving at night and setting up during the day. They were not accustomed to it because so few American units did it. Brooks had been consulting his advisers individually since resupply and he was now convinced Alpha was in position and could pull it off. “We’re going to pick them apart from right here,” Brooks said. “Hide and hit. Melt into the mud and ambush them. If this is as important a supply area as S-2 says it is, they’ve got to be moving. It’ll be no different than our usual nightly ambushes except that we’re going to have twelve ambush teams out at once. This time, you’re not ambush teams. You’ll be Rover Teams. And you’ll be out for two days.” Brooks detailed the operation. Half of every squad would go; half would stay in or near Campobasso. The company and platoon CPs would provide men for three teams and radios for four. Brooks assigned each Rover Team a specific Area of Operation. He suggested ambush locations in each area. He rose and climbed among his men, pointing out to each leader, on the individual’s map, the spots he thought looked promising, the trails in each area he had marked on his map from the first circuit they had made about the knoll. “Hide and hit,” Brooks said coldly. “Hit and run. Evade detection. Don’t engage more than you can kill immediately. Ambush.”

  “Ambush,” Moneski repeated. “Just like earlier today. It’s a dream.”