13th Valley

by John M. Del Vecchio

  “My pecker’s freezin off,” Marko whispered over.

  Earlier Jax had been more enthusiastic. When the L-T had asked him for the name of his Rover Team, Jax had cooed, “I’s be Jax, they’s my Jills; Jax en Jills goes up the hills ta fetch nine pail a mud; Jax come back, the Jills got sack; carryin nine pail wid gook blood.”

  Rover Team Jill was the farthest east of any Alpha element and long into the night they seemed to be in the quietest locale. They had set up in a hollow in a bamboo thicket three meters from a narrow trail. They had left Campobasso on schedule at 1930 hours and had reached, found, their night position by 2100. For five hours they had sat still, cold, waiting. They had gone out with great anticipation and enthusiasm for the tactic, had gone with the expectation of a first-time fisherman, and with the same patience.

  Jax could no longer control his arms, legs and chest from shaking. He was wet, had been wet for what seemed like forever. The hot dry interlude at resupply was forgotten. Jax’ teeth began to chatter. Hoover snuggled up to him on one side, Marko on the other. They each wrapped an arm over Jax’ back. The warmth felt good but it was not enough.

  “Fuck it,” Marko said. “Just say fuck it. Don’t …”

  “The fuck it doan,” Jax whispered wildly, standing up. “We gotta …”

  At that there was an explosion perhaps thirty feet away. They froze, solidified like statues. Jax’ chillchatter vanished. The sound had been a loud pop, a giant explosive cork blasting from a bottle. POUAHK. A second mortar round was launched. Jax turned to Marko then siezed a grenade from his belt. “Frags,” he whispered. Hoover and Marko immediately grabbed two each. Jax stepped forward, one pace, two, three, to the edge of the trail. Hoover was to one side, Marko to the other. The sound of the mortar team chattering in Vietnamese came from their close right front. “Throw two, then hit it,” Jax whispered. “On go.” He paused to give them time. Then he whispered, “Go.” They cocked and threw.

  Another mortar round was launched.

  Jax, Marko and Hoover each immediately depinned and threw their second fragmentation grenade. Then they hit the ground. Marko’s first frag went beyond the NVA, Jax’ to the left, Hoover’s also behind. All exploded simultaneously. An enemy soldier screamed. The second three frags exploded. There was scurrying in the brush, there was the sound of a body being dragged. Then all was silent. Rover Team Jill lay perfectly still until first light. Jax smiled the rest of the night.

  In the center of the Khe Ta Laou River valley nothing moved before first light. The NVA had called a halt to routine early morning moves. During the preceding afternoon and night they had been in contact five times with unknown elements of the American battalion that was stamping around in the hills and most probably sending a coordinated series of ambush teams into the valley on a one-shot attempt. All five contacts had resulted in North Vietnamese losses with no apparent American losses. The situation could not be serious. Americans never stayed in one area for long without building an outpost. They had not built one so they must leave soon. Sit tight, the NVA command ordered. Sit tight until tonight.

  During that same pre-dawn Cherry had his last rational thoughts. Rover Team Stephanie had moved from the trail they had crawled up, into a tangle of debris, vines and bamboo. They spoke not a word. They breathed the smell of burnt explosive and the smell of blood hour after blackrain hour. Chill set into every bone. Egan took it in stride. He always did. His sense of easiness, almost casualness, permeated the others and they too relaxed. Denhardt breathed slowly, deeply. The war odor was pleasant to him. Stuck in that remote rotting valley of death one had either to accept the smell and be pleased with it or accept the smell and abhor it. Either way, sanity fled.

  Earlier at Campobasso Cherry had been nearby while Brooks questioned the platoon sergeant. He had heard snatches of speech and had wanted to comment but he had not been invited into their circle. In his mind he now pictured Egan and him in serious discussion. Suddenly he found himself with Egan. They were at a CP, chatting softly, almost intimately.

  Every day since they first encountered each other at Phu Bai Cherry and Egan spent more and more time together. They were now almost older brother, younger brother. Hadn’t Egan even called him Little Brother earlier that very day?

  “Yer such a cherry,” Egan’s image laughed to the image of Cherry.

  “I thought you were on the other side of that,” the Cherry-image answered firmly.

  “A man’s got a right to have more than one opinion,” Egan whispered. “Goddamn, if I believed everything I’ve ever said I’d be so mixed up I’d be crazy.”

  “Sometimes, yer such an ass,” Cherry joked.

  “And yer such a cherry,” Egan retorted and he grabbed Cherry’s head and mussed his hair playfully. Then he said seriously, “Ya know, Cherry, all my life everybody’s been tellin me how nice I am and that kinda shit. And all my life I been tellin myself what an ass I am. Then I came to Nam. And I discovered I wasn’t a fuckhead. I discovered I was okay. Now everybody tells me I’m an ass. Cherry, yer a cherry ta life. People want you ta be an asshole so they tell ya when yer being an ass how good ya are and when yer bein okay what an ass ya are. It makes em feel superior. Fuck em. Fuck it an drive on, Breeze. It don’t mean nothin.”

  “Eg,” the Cherry-image said lightly, good-naturedly, the way only the closest of friends can laugh during serious conversations, “Eg, you gotta live with people.”

  “Fuck em all,” Egan said.

  “Man. Man, you are doomed. Man, you are doomed to being a lonely person. Shee-it, when a dude can do everything for himself, when he don’t need anybody, he’s goina be lonely. Nobody can please you, Mister Egan. Nobody’s good enough for you. You gotta do it all yourself and that’s lonely, Eg. Lonely.”

  “Yeah,” Egan’s image agreed. “But here, in Nam, here it’s alive too. You can’t trust somebody else with your security cause aint nobody goina look out for you as well as you. You remember that when I’m gone.”

  Cherry dozed. He awoke in despair, in agony. Something from the very depths of his body was screaming. The sky hinted at becoming light. Cherry snapped his head toward Egan. The platoon sergeant was there where he should be. Egan nodded to the trail. Cherry looked. Something in his mind snapped. Cherry stared at the darkened rain-blurred scene. He stared at the carnage only feet away. Egan motioned for Denhardt to recon the trail to their east. Egan snaked through the grass west. Cherry continued staring. The sky lightened in imperceptible stages. Cherry’s body twisted. He snarled then laughed to himself. “Fuck it. Really don’t mean nothin. Drive on.”

  Cherry rose slowly. He rose to full height and stretched. He threw his shoulders back, stretching out the night cramps. He arched his back, he wiggled his toes and fingers. He felt for his frags. They were in a pouch on his belt as was right. His rifle was in his left hand. He ran his fingers over it. He aimed the muzzle downward and slowly withdrew the bolt carrier halfway, draining any water which might have entered the barrel during the night. Noiselessly he let the bolt slide back closed and he shoved hard to insure it seated completely. Then he looked up again. They, it, was still there.

  Cherry took a half step forward. He advanced without his ruck. He looked left for Egan, right for Denhardt, then stepped among it on the road. He laughed quietly, apprehensively. He looked up and down the road and he looked straight up at the woven canopy, beyond into the rain into the lighting sky into heaven. He half-stepped forward and he stepped on a half head, a half face. He jolted back nervously and giggled. An eye was looking at him from the mud. Cherry stared back. The eye looked at him. Cherry’s leg snapped out reflexively. He felt the eye pop beneath his heel. There were at least five bodies, perhaps six, strewn over forty feet of road. Cherry smiled. How could Egan have placed the claymores so perfectly? How had he known the first man would miss the trip wire allowing the squad to completely enter the kill zone? That cunning mothafucker. Mangled them all. Must have gotten em all, too, Cherry thought. No one le
ft to collect their weapons. Cherry bent down and lifted a Soviet AK-47 assault rifle from the mud. A hand came up with it. A hand and four tattered inches of wrist and arm. He carefully pulled the fingers from the trigger guard. The skin was cold, stiff, slimy. The stock of the rifle was splintered. Cherry dropped it back onto the piece of hand and arm and maybe a chunk of abdomen.

  That raggedy-ass mothafucker don’t look so bad, Cherry thought advancing to the next body. He unsheathed his bayonet and removed two NVA ears. As he hacked off the second there was movement at the corner of his eye. He spun and sprawled flat amongst the dead, aimed his 16 up the road, flipped to automatic and began to squeeze on an advancing blur.

  “SKYHAWKS,” came an immediate whispered call. Cherry toyed with the idea of squeezing the trigger anyway. “SKYHAWKS,” Denhardt’s whispered call came again.

  Cherry relaxed. “SKYHAWKS,” he whispered as Denhardt materialized from the mistdarkness. Cherry returned to the NVA corpse and retrieved the ears. “These are for Whiteboy and Silvers,” he whispered to Denhardt. Then he went back to the half head and cut the ear from it. “Here,” Cherry said. “This one’s for you.”

  When Egan returned from his recon west he directed Rover Team Stephanie to police up the MA site. There were four AK-47s and an RPG launcher, ammunition, letters and documents. The boonierats split the load, Egan retrieved the trigger mechanism for the MA. Then they dissolved into the thickets to hide and to eat and to wait for dawn. “Wait til Pop hears of this,” Cherry said happily to Egan. “Pop’ll be just so proud.” Egan looked at Cherry and nodded.

  Cherry ate a C-ration meal of Spaghetti and Meatballs in Tomato Sauce. He ate it ravenously. His stomach was still empty. He opened another can. This one was pork slices. Cherry plucked a thick firm slice from the can with his mud-crusted fingers. He jammed the slice into his mouth. He chewed twice, swallowed, jammed in another slice. He drained the juice from the can into his mouth then dropped the can beside the spaghetti tin.

  Egan reached over and picked the cans up and signaled for Cherry to put them into his ruck. No signs of American presence were to be left by the rover teams. “Pack it back here to Campobasso,” Brooks had directed the team leaders. “Pack everything out that you pack in,” he had said. “Except your shit. Bury that deep and camouflage the spot.”

  Cherry ate a B-2 unit tin of Crackers and Cheese and washed it down with water from the blood-stained blivet that had been Leon Silvers’. The pimples that had formed days earlier on his arms and legs and face and back and had then turned to sores and then oozing ulcerations were now filth-covered jungle rot. The sun and drying at the LZ on Hill 636 had accomplished little. The treatment had been too short and the patient had returned too quickly to the wet rotting valley floor.

  Cherry did not care. He aped Egan, washing carefully in a puddle but it was for show, for camaraderie, not for cleanliness. He wasn’t concerned about the sores. They were beyond the point of hurting. “Like my shoulders,” Cherry would have said had he even thought of it. “My shoulders hurt like hell from the ruck at first but they toughened up. Now they don’t hurt at all. My skin’s the same. It’s getting tougher.” Indeed, Cherry was becoming callused hands, shoulders and mind. The wetness softened the calluses on his hands and shoulders and they rubbed off. The wetness had no effect on the calluses of his mind except to make them thicker.

  Combining with the toughening of his mind were new abilities, the new keenness of ears, sharpness of eyes, the education of his nose to jungle smells. Cherry developed a new acuteness of these senses which allowed him to know the primitive world which extended all about him, to know it more quickly and more fully, he was certain, than any other boonierat, even Egan.

  But Cherry did not think of these things now. They did not really matter. Cherry only thought of two things. He thought of eating and he thought of killing. “Let’s go,” he pleaded to Egan when Egan dawdled over his morning coffee. “Let’s set up another one. I got an idea just where.”

  The MA Cherry set up under Egan’s watchful direction was similar to the first booby-trapping of the road beneath the cliffs except that it used only three claymores. It did not need more and they did not have an unlimited supply. Cherry picked the site. It was beneath the woven canopy of the road at a spot where the ceiling needed repair. “This’ll be a riot,” he told Denhardt. “Wait’ll they try to fix this one.”

  Cherry worked as methodically as Egan and Pop had worked setting the first MA. He set and aimed the claymores from one point, in three directions. He hid the mines on the road corridor wall aiming across, up and down the trail. He imagined the enemy crew carelessly approaching the site, their security out, their work about to begin. Cherry set the trip wire in the canopy so it would be triggered when the repair team began reconstructing the roof. “Let em get in a good close clusterfuck,” he laughed.

  “Oing douk mann cowy?” Doc tried.

  “Ông duoc mahn khoe?” Minh repeated.

  “Ông douk manh cowee?” Doc tried again.

  “Da, Cām on,” Minh said.

  “Ya, cam urn,” Doc repeated.

  “Oh, that is very good,” Minh said. “Tôi lā Minh.”

  “Tôi lā Alexander,” Doc said.

  “Oh yes, very good,” Minh said. “Now, môt, hai, ba, bôn, nam, sáu, bay, tám, chin, múoi.”

  “Mot, hi, ba, bon, nam, sow-oo, bay …”

  “No, no, no. Môt, hai, ba. Ba,” Minh intonated. “Not baa. Ba.”

  “Hey Man, I aint never gonna learn it. You say ba not ba. There aint no difference.”

  “Yes, yes. Listen. Ba. Here, we shall write it and then say it.”

  “Minh,” Doc said. “I gotta get these dudes up. Lazy fuckas. Half em still crashed.”

  “We should write. Viêt, dó lá môt cách noí không bi ngat lái.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “That is a quote from Renad. ‘Writing is a way of speaking without interruption.’”

  “No shit.” Doc chuckled. “Minh, you my main man. Here, eat this.”

  “Daily-daily?”

  “Daily-daily.”

  Doc slithered from beneath the poncho he and Minh had strung eighteen inches above the earth the afternoon before. They had covered the sides of the hootch and one end with palm and bamboo scraps and had camouflaged the top with a tangle of bramble branches. After they had set up they had simply crawled in and rested and let the valley, the rover teams and the war go on about them. The whole idea of hiding an infantry company in a valley and breaking it into ambush teams was, to both Doc and Minh, insane. With the sounds of each explosion reaching their hootch Doc had squirmed out into the rain and had edged over to El Paso to find out what was happening and if he was needed. El Paso and the L-T had set up a similar though smaller rain shelter less than five feet away. Brown and Cahalan’s hootch made a triangle of the three. Each time Doc found El Paso, El Paso had nothing to report and Doc had returned to his hootch and rested. Restlessness came with first light. Minh and Doc traded words, English for Vietnamese, for half an hour. Then Minh began in earnest to try to teach Doc Vietnamese.

  Doc looked at the sky in disgust. Rain. Fog and rain. His boonierats were melting. Doc shook his head. He stepped lightly to the rear of his hootch, relieved himself, then went to check in with El Paso and Brooks.

  “Daily-daily,” Doc whispered cheerfully handing in two tiny white anti-malaria pills. “Up ya go, L-T. Hey, your boys soundin like they done a J-O-B las night. What the score?”

  “We got at least ten,” El Paso beamed. “It’s like shootin tacos in a barrel a refried beans.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  “Nooo shee-it?”

  “No shit, Man. I shit you not.”

  “Shee-it!”

  “No shit.”

  “Shit, Man. I think you shittin me.”

  “I shit you not, Bro.”

  “Will you guys cut that shit out?” Brooks laughed and the three o
f them giggled. Doc shimmied in beneath their poncho with them and the three lay on their backs looking up at the damp plastic coated ceiling less than an arm’s reach above.

  They were silent for a moment then Doc said, “No shit,” very quickly and the three of them burst into giggles again. “I gotta get Minh,” Doc said sliding back out into the rain. He stood up and walked the two paces to his hootch then returned and ducked his head in and whispered, “Sshheeee-yit.”

  Soon there were four beneath the single poncho. They lay like packed sardines, not moving, not talking. Brooks was half outside on one side and Doc was half out on the other. After perhaps four or five minutes Doc and Brooks and El Paso whispered, starting very low and building to a whispered crescendo, “ssshheeEEE-YYITT.”

  They found it hilarious and forced fingers into their mouths to keep from laughing loudly. Minh did not get it and they found that even funnier. “What is so funny about shit?” Minh asked seriously, a smile coming to his face.

  “Don’tcha get it?” El Paso chuckled.

  “No,” Minh said.

  “No Shit,” Doc said and the four of them giggled.

  “Hey,” Brooks called a pause to the laughter. “I want to ask you some shit …” The laughter became uncontrollable again. “Come on,” Brooks said. He was feeling better this day than he had for many days past. “Come on,” he repeated. “No shit.” Giggles, suppressed giggles. “Anybody want some mocha? I got a hot cupful.”

  “Ooooh shit, that is hot,” Doc laughed grabbing the cup, spilling the hot liquid on Minh.

  “Ouch!” Minh screamed suppressed, bolting upright, hitting the top of the poncho, snapping a line on the roof and caving in the head end which held a puddle in a swale. The water splashed onto El Paso’s laughing face.

  “Augh fuck,” El Paso said shaking his head violently.

  “Oh, now we goan from shit ta fuck,” Doc teased him but he did not laugh. The laughing was over.

  Brooks, Minh and Doc moved to Doc’s hootch for the discussion. As he had with the others Brooks opened with the question, “What causes conflict?”