by J. M. Graham
The young door gunner opened his mouth and pointed into it with a dirty finger. “Bad tooth,” he said. “Infected. Swelled his jaw like a wad of chew.”
Strader nodded, remembering the nervous boots in the dentist’s chair.
The copilot stomped his foot on the deck between the cockpit seats to get attention in the rear. He slapped his hand against his helmet, and the gunner went to the door and pulled on his own helmet. The rotor speed increased and the helicopter shook. The young Marine whistled at Strader and pointed to the gun in the port window. Strader set his M14 on the floor against the bulkhead and pinned it there with his foot, grabbed the butt of the M60, and pressed it into his shoulder, grateful for the sturdy gun mount that would steady his stance when the deck pitched. Chopper crews developed sea legs to compensate for the undulating surface beneath their feet, but Strader would stagger around the deck like a drunken sailor without something solid to hold on to. Having a position at the M60 was a blessing.
The windsock on the pole by the tower scooped what little breeze there was, and with a change in the collective, the big machine’s tail drifted around to face the wind head on. An aureole of dust billowed out beneath the chopper, and with a gradual adjustment of the cyclic pitch it moved forward and climbed away from its little corner of the runway.
Strader watched the base drop away over the barrel of the M60 and pulled himself closer to the opening to see the full expanse of the west side of the perimeter. The chopper increased speed and banked in a wide arc above the base, climbing as it went. It was best to gain as much altitude as possible before crossing over the wire, not so much to discourage VC snipers from taking a shot as to make the inevitable shot as difficult as possible. After making a wide loop over the base, the 34 leveled out and headed its grasshopper nose toward the muddy brown gash the Song Thu Bon made in the landscape, and the Arizona beyond.
From his spot at the gun port Strader could see the straggling wisps of morning mist and dissipating clouds rising in the heat. Had he not been a thousand feet in the air in a shuddering machine with nothing between him and a smoking hole in the ground but the fabled Jesus nut on the main rotor, he would have enjoyed the scenery like a tourist. He peeked through the gun port at the paddies and villages and rivers far below that consolidated into a patchwork quilt of greens and browns, but the height stirred a flutter in his stomach and he dropped down into a jump seat and leaned back against the bulkhead, content to watch the door gunner pop C ration Chiclets into his mouth until his cheeks bulged.
13
The slope of the Ong Thu eased as Corporal Middleton’s reinforced squad got downgrade from the bulk of 1st Platoon. The heat of the morning sun striking the top of the jungle canopy pushed the temperature on the ground to a greenhouse level, and the squad members were drenched in sweat from the strain of their loads. Where the grade was steepest, they slid and stumbled, barely maintaining control of their charges. The Marines carrying the bodies took the lead and moved at a quicker pace, fully aware that the ones they carried could no longer be harmed. The six carrying the Chief worked under different constraints. They chose their footholds carefully, and when gravity overpowered their efforts, they froze or adjusted their path, or simply set the nylon litter down so Doc Brede could check the Chief’s vital signs and peer under his eyelids. When they were on the move, the corpsman stayed at the top end of the litter and tried to stabilize the Chief’s head when the terrain had the bearers fighting to stay upright. Once they crossed the stream—the same one that had repeatedly blocked their path the previous day—the landscape leveled out some and the Marines could focus on dealing with the weight alone, without the distraction of dangerous footing.
With the stream behind them, Sergeant Blackwell called a halt. He checked his watch. “Take five,” he said, “but don’t get comfortable.”
The litters immediately went to the ground and canteens were hoisted while the corpsman bent over the Chief. Bronsky found the sergeant and handed him the radio handset. “It’s Lieutenant Diehl,” he said.
The sergeant took the handset and squatted down, spreading his map at his feet. His heart was still beating rapidly from the descent and his breath was labored. “Sir,” he said.
“Yes, sir. We’re at valley level now.” He looked at the map then consulted his watch. “I estimate LZ Mike in ten.” He gathered the map awkwardly with one hand and stood, listening intently. “Wait one,” he said. From where he stood he could see the corpsman pressing his fingertips to one of the Chief’s brachial arteries. “Doc?” he said with trepidation in his voice.
The corpsman looked back over his shoulder and nodded.
“That’s affirmative, sir,” Blackwell said, clearly relieved. Though the Chief still showed no signs of consciousness, it was good to know they hadn’t killed him on the trip down. He listened again. “Roger, sir. Out.” He returned the handset to Bronsky and checked his watch again. “Saddle up in two minutes,” he announced to a squad just beginning to appreciate the illusion of weightlessness they were experiencing.
The pulse in the Chief’s wrist seemed stronger than it had up on the mountain, and Doc Brede laid his hand on the Chief’s chest and timed his respirations. The heat on the valley floor seemed to have increased, probably from their proximity to the jungle’s edge, the corpsman guessed. The beads of perspiration dotting his face formed into rivulets, and as he bent over the Chief, a drip that had blazed a path to the end of his nose fell free and struck the Chief’s face at the inner fold of his right eye . . . and the Chief flinched. It was nothing more than an involuntary tic, a reflex spasm, but it was enough. It was a positive sign, an unexpected sign that allowed the doc to dare to be optimistic. He grabbed the Chief’s hand again and pushed his thumbnail down hard on one of the Chief’s cuticles. The arm jerked under the belt restraints and the hand pulled free of the doc’s grasp. He quickly looked back over his shoulder. “Sergeant,” he said, unable to hide his enthusiasm.
Sergeant Blackwell moved in his direction. “We have to get goin’, Doc. How’s he doin’?”
“I’m starting to get a response from the Chief. I think he may be coming to.”
The sergeant looked down at the body banded in web belts and motionless as a corpse. “Are you sure?” he said.
“As sure as I can be under the circumstances.”
As long as the Chief was unconscious, the sergeant was content to see him as a medical problem, an inert package that presented no more difficulty than the logistics of transport. But if the Chief came out of it, there was a good chance the situation would change. “Can’t you keep him out?”
The corpsman shook his head. “I can’t keep him out just like I’m not waking him up. I’m only an interested party watching things happen I can’t control.”
“That’s my concern, Doc. I don’t want anything to happen I can’t control, and if he wakes up pissed off, I’m going to have a problem.” The sergeant looked around. “Middleton,” he said. “Move your people out.”
The corporal got his squad going; the men raised the litters with a chorus of groans and followed the point man away from the mountain.
The sergeant walked alongside the corpsman. “The sooner we get the Chief to the LZ the better,” he said.
The corpsman watched as the Chief bounced along between the struggling Marines. “Maybe we should try to wake him up, Sergeant, for his own sake.”
“Negative, Doc. They can deal with that at battalion aid. Let’s just worry about getting him on that chopper.” Rather than enter into an argument with the corpsman, the sergeant moved ahead until all three litters were behind him.
The docs had the upper hand in the platoon’s medical matters. They were responsible for the physical well-being of the men, and their medical opinions were seldom questioned. Technically, they could even evacuate men over the objections of officers, though Blackwell had never actually seen it happen. He knew waking the Chief up for his own good could surely be problematic, and if th
ere was going to be a battle on the way to the LZ, he was going to do all he could to make sure it wouldn’t go into the records as an Indian war.
Arc lights burst behind the Chief’s eyelids like a mad minute of misfiring synapses. He was vaguely aware of movement, and the pain in his head was sharp and hot, piercing his thoughts with fire. Sounds were far away and came in drones and unintelligible growls. He was at the bottom of a black lake with refracted daylight faint and far away. He wanted to kick and claw his way to the surface, but he felt constricted and helpless. The same murderous clamp that squeezed his skull wrapped his body in a claustrophobic cocoon that smelled of burning wood and tasted like copper pennies in his mouth.
The burning odor stimulated a memory, and he found himself looking across the glow of a campfire on the high desert of New Mexico. His father and grandfather looked back, their familiar stoic faces bathed in golden light, and spoke to him of the expanse of stars that splashed the heavens from horizon to horizon and the need for the trek to the great tree. Sparks rose on erratic thermals above the fire, and the round, youthful face of Noche Gonshayee watched them spiral skyward in streaming coils that stayed alive as negative strips of ghost light when he closed his eyes.
When he was born, everyone at White Mountain remarked on the shape of his face, and his grandfather took to calling him Kle-ga-na-ai, Moon. Before long everyone on the reservation used the nickname. But the name was a personal thing, a construct of his people, and when he left White Mountain he found little use for it. Whites’ propensity to call him Chief seemed to resolve the name issue, though not to his satisfaction.
Every crack and crease in his grandfather’s weathered face seemed like an old map of home that soothed his mind, and the warm light of the remembered fire was relaxing as it held the night at bay. Moon knew the place and time as a journey from his youth. His father had made this trip when he was young, as his grandfather had in his time. Now it was Kle-ga-na-ai’s turn to make the family pilgrimage to the tree. Usually the trek was made by father and son, but Benito’s pickup truck was available, so his grandfather rode in the cab while Kle-ga-na-ai and his father sat in the bed and watched Arizona turn into New Mexico. He could feel the jolts and jars as the old Dodge hauled them past Coyote Canyon to Tohatchi, then on to Naschitti.
Kle-ga-na-ai’s great-grandfather, recounting the history of his people to the younger generations, told of his band of Chiricahua raiders who led a detachment of cavalry and an angry mob of ranchers on a merry chase. But the Apache knew the desert—they were the desert—and the Army broke off the pursuit, effectively deflating the resolve of the ranchers to carry on.
After crossing a wide, scorching mesa, the Apache finally made camp at the foot of a lone butte that bore a great tree at its head. When Kle-ga-na-ai’s great-grandfather climbed the butte to survey the land for their pursuers he was struck by the power of the lone tree. Wind and heat had bent and twisted the trunk, forming knobby branches and deformed tendrils that pointed at the heavens in green defiance. The gnarled roots clung to the butte with steely tenacity. He ran his hands over the bark, blasted smooth by sand, and knew that among all trees, this one was truly Apache. It fought the world with an Apache heart. It was a brother.
When Benito dropped off his passengers, a good twenty-five dry, hot miles on foot lay ahead, an unforgiving distance in the high desert. They carried bedrolls, water, and dried, salted meat—enough for five days. They expected to feel privations and to suffer as a necessary component of the trip. Their tenacity would be an offering to the tree, a tribute to its own tenacious heart. And they wanted the feeling of accomplishment, a feeling the world often denied the Apache.
They wrapped their heads in traditional style. Kle-ga-na-ai’s head wrap felt wet; and the sun must have been especially fierce because his head could barely contain the drumbeat that was trying to pound its way out. They slept among the sagebrush under the infinite expanse of distant worlds and rested at midday, thwarting the sun’s plan to exhaust their water, and in two days’ travel stood at the foot of the great butte, looking up at the proud, misshapen tree. The arduous trip sapped the grandfather’s reserves of vitality, but the sight of the lonely mound, so familiar in his youth, brought back energies of that distant time and made him anxious to climb, as though his greatest need was to erase the distance between himself and a long-estranged friend.
Kle-ga-na-ai’s father led, skirting patches of cliffrose and fernbush, circumnavigating the grade so they arrived at the plateau by a kinder slope and came at the tree across a bald surface swept clean by the same winds that had sculpted the tree. As the older men walked across the top of the butte at a casual pace, Kle-ga-na-ai couldn’t contain his anticipation and ran ahead to claim the honor of arriving first, an accomplishment that would give him great cachet among his friends at White Mountain. But being first left him confused. Up close, the tree was gray and dry with long, twisting cracks where the relentless sun had sucked all the moisture away. The ground was littered with brittle branches and twigs. Once flagged with legions of obstinate leaves, they now lay scattered among the roots like so much kindling. He looked back to where the others had stopped and marked the disappointment on their faces.
What was expected was not always what had to be endured.
Kle-ga-na-ai’s grandfather sat on the ground and crossed his legs stiffly. The shadow cast by the tree fractured the sunlight and coated his image in a mosaic of shapes created in concert by both the victor and the vanquished. “The tree is dead,” he said, announcing the fact to the world.
Kle-ga-na-ai’s father stood silently as sunlight and shadows played across his face. But the boy’s round face held eyes with the acuity of a hawk’s. He pointed into the twist of branches above his head. “No, it’s not,” he said. His position at the trunk shaded his eyes from the sun, and he could see one branch where small pennants of green fluttered in the wind. The men came close and followed the youngster’s direction. The tough old tree had marshaled its resources, concentrating what sustenance it still possessed on the living tissue it had left.
The weathered lines in the grandfather’s face formed into a broad smile, and he apologized to the tree for having doubted. The tree was alive and Apache to the core, as it always had been.
They camped on the plateau and made their fire from the tree’s cast-offs, and in the middle of the night, when the thirst of the sun was blocked, they poured their canteens into the roots at the base of the trunk.
The trip back across the arid mesa was more difficult than anything Kle-ga-na-ai had ever experienced or even imagined. Their thirst could not be quenched and came in spasms. The sun cracked their lips, and they traveled as much as possible after sundown, erecting shade tents made from their bedrolls during the day. They hoped to come upon an errant barrel cactus that would give up its juices, but they tripped only through endless sage interspersed with four-wing saltbush and desert spoon. The occasional Apache plume brought smiles that tested the lost elasticity of their lips. Kle-ga-na-ai’s grandfather had made a walking stick from one of the old tree’s fallen branches, and he waved it in the air when Benito’s pickup appeared along the distant road, looking like a rust-colored boulder in the Painted Desert.
They had provoked the Usun and the sun he created and won a gamble, but each felt the wager was worth it. They had reached their destination and given sustenance to an old friend, and now the three Apache walked the last steps side-by-side, equal in their effort and their discomfort and bonded by the experience. But every step under the sun’s dispassionate assault snapped glaring spots in Kle-ga-na-ai’s vision, and he hoped that Benito had thought to bring plenty of water. Maybe a drink would ease the pain in his head.
He could still feel the old truck wobble over the uneven ground as he lay on the bed listening to his name being called again and again. He looked up into his father’s face, but the pain clouded his vision and he tried to blink away the apparition he was finding it difficult to recognize. His
father seemed to have forgotten his name.
“Chief, Chief.”
The upside down face that hovered over him was lined with fatigue, had stubble on its chin, and wore glasses that reflected light into his eyes. “Chief,” it said again.
His mind scrambled through the pain, trying to find some cohesion, some connection with the blur wavering over him while other voices pressed in, hollow and faint, echoing with an annoying reverberation. “He hates being called that, Doc,” one of the voices echoed.
The visage above him fractured into a grotesque, shimmering mask. “I know that,” it said. “Chief,” the voice said with intentional emphasis.
Doc Brede had noticed that the Chief’s eyelids were fluttering as though they were fighting to open. Either that or the head trauma was causing a seizure. He had the Marines lower the litter to the ground.
Kle-ga-na-ai felt the truck stop rocking. Hands gripped his face, and he felt they had a magic that froze his entire body. He tried to focus his thoughts. His consciousness floated between two worlds and he tried to speak, but the desert world had dried the words on his tongue. He felt he could find his place with a drink of water. “Tu,” he said in a whisper so dry it barely crossed his lips. “Tu.”
The face leaned in, framed by a covered helmet with a frayed edge along the rim. The Kle-ga-na-ai of childhood began to dissolve like a morning memory of a dream, and the Chief squeezed his eyes closed and willed his mind to find a reality he could hold on to. “Water,” the Chief said in a dry croak, choosing a place, or letting the place choose him.
The corpsman tipped his canteen and soaked an end of his towel, then squeezed drips into the Chief’s mouth. He couldn’t risk having him choke on too much water. A fit of coughing with a brain injury could be catastrophic. The Chief opened his mouth like a hungry bird, and Brede squeezed in more.
