Matterhorn: a novel of the Vietnam War

by Karl Marlantes

  “Goddamn you, Hawke. Goddamn you to hell!”

  Hawke said nothing, watching Mellas, on his guard.

  Mellas began shrieking. “That bastard killed all of them. He sent us up here without air so he could watch a show. He watched us while we died. That bastard doesn’t deserve to live. God damn you, Hawke. God damn you and your fucking—your—oh, God damn us all.” He sank to the ground and stared at nothing.

  Hawke put his hand on Mellas’s shoulder. “Come on, Mel, the counterattack could hit us any minute.”

  Mellas followed Hawke back up the hill.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The counterattack never materialized. The NVA were heading to Laos, covering their retreat with well-placed infantry and mortar units. A medevac bird beat its way up the valley, and Pallack talked it in. Three NVA mortar rounds bracketed the chopper, sending the Marines who were dragging the wounded aboard to the ground. They immediately rose and got the wounded aboard and then ran for their holes, holding their helments against the rotor wash. The helicopter dived off the edge of the LZ and soared downward into space, picking up airspeed. Another bird made it in and took the last of the emergency cases. Then the fog returned. This stopped the shelling, but it also stopped any further medical evacuations.

  The day was spent in weary stupefaction, hauling dead American teenagers to a stack beside the landing zone and dead Vietnamese teenagers to the garbage pit down the side of the north face.

  The senior squid told Fitch that Mellas’s right eye was seriously injured. If the eye wasn’t already lost, it would be without immediate surgery. The only place where that could happen was on one of the hospital ships. Mellas told Fitch that with Conman probably needing to take Third Platoon when Hawke went back to battalion staff, he didn’t feel comfortable turning First Platoon over to either Jackson or Cortell. No matter how much combat experience they had, they were still only nineteen. Besides, Fitch and Goodwin would be the only officers in the company. In reality, although he didn’t say it aloud, Mellas had simply grown too fond of everyone to leave the platoon facing danger without his help. He refused to go. Fitch knew that Mellas was right about the lack of leaders, and as far as he could tell the eye was already lost. So he let Mellas stay.

  That evening Mellas and Jackson pulled some splintered plywood over their hole, shivering like two wounded animals in the cold wind that moaned out of Laos. Jackson would occasionally shudder with stifled sobs. Mellas stared with his good eye into the blackness, enduring the pain in his leg and the throbbing in his other eye. He had tried reading the C-ration boxes earlier, and it felt awkward and uncomfortable. He consoled himself by imagining what he would look like in a Hathaway shirt ad. Then the sense of fear and loss coiled up from his stomach where it had lain waiting and he wished fervently that he had taken Sheller’s advice and tried to save the eye. He prayed.

  Mellas crawled out of the hole to check lines at 2030. He returned at 2230, dragging his leg. At 0030 he started out again.

  “I’ll go, Lieutenant,” Jackson said. “I can keep someone awake just as good as you can.” Mellas didn’t argue. He immediately dozed off with the radio against his cheek.

  Jackson crawled from beneath the plywood into a cold wind. He could sense that the clouds were higher, moving swiftly eastward, even though he couldn’t see them. In the blackness around Matterhorn the jungle lay breathing quietly after the convulsive fury of the morning. Jackson felt as if the jungle were resting, preparing to make its own assault on Matterhorn when these destructive insects left it to clean its own wounds. The jungle would slowly creep up the hill, covering it with new green skin, once again sheltering the exposed clay and rock, hiding the garbage thrown down its sides, softening the artificial lip of the LZ, and rounding Matterhorn smooth once again.

  Jackson squatted there, close to the solid sleeping earth, feeling its healing powers. Unexpected tears came to his eyes. “Hamilton,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry, man.” He was openly weeping now. He knew it was foolish to talk out loud to a dead person, but he felt that he somehow had to apologize to Hamilton for still being alive and so happy about it. Hamilton had wanted to get married and have children. Now he wouldn’t and Jackson would.

  The burst of crying passed. Jackson stayed there a little longer, feeling the damp wind on his wet face. He wiped his face with his hands, which were hot and cracked from dirt, dehydration, and infection. He couldn’t shake off a persistent gnawing anxiety as he crawled away to check the lines. Why did Hamilton die and he live? When he finished checking all the holes, he didn’t feel like going back to the hole under the plywood. Something compelled him to climb upward to the deserted LZ.

  When Jackson tripped the mine, the explosion jerked Mellas back to the darkness and the cold. At first he thought it might be someone from the CP group. Then he heard Jackson’s frightened wild cry. “Help me! God help me! Please—someone help!”

  Mellas slung the radio on his back and crawled toward Jackson’s voice, whispering “no” over and over. He reached Jackson just after Fredrickson, who was holding Jackson down, trying to get hold of his thighs. Jackson was screaming.

  “Help me hold the fucker down, Lieutenant,” Fredrickson said. “Goddamn it, Jackson, stop moving.”

  Mellas lay down over Jackson’s heaving chest, whispering, “You’re going to be all right, Jackson. You’re going to be all right.”

  “Sheller,” Fredrickson shouted to the senior squid, who was already crawling through the blackness. “I need some goddamned IV fluid and something to cut off these arteries.” Sheller appeared with a bottle and IV tubes as well as his kit. While Fredrickson was doing what he could to stanch the bleeding, Sheller jabbed a catheter into Jackson’s arm and held the glass of fluid as high in the air as he could. Jackson calmed down, his terror and panic diminishing as the two corpsmen got his faltering system working again. Mellas glanced down Jackson’s body. Fredrickson was working on pulp below Jackson’s knees. There were no feet.

  “You’re going to be all right, Jackson,” Mellas kept repeating. “You’re going to be all right.” Jackson moaned and passed out.

  Mellas didn’t pray, but his mind once again soared above the landing zone, seeing all of I Corps below him, and went looking for something better than God—a good chopper pilot.

  At the MAG-39 airfield just outside Quang Tri, First Lieutenant Steve Small was losing at acey-deucey to his copilot, Mike Nickels. It seemed to Small that the present game of acey-deucey had never started and never ended. It was as much part of life at MAG-39 as the sand, sweaty flight suits, ten-cent bourbon, gritty sheets, guilty masturbation fantasies, crappy movies, and underlying anxiety that the next flight was the one where the gook .51 was going to rip a hole right up your anus and out of your mouth.

  Small’s CH-46 waited in the dark, its twin rotor blades drooping with their own weight. Crew members dozed on canvas stretchers amid machine-gun ammunition and boxes of IV fluid. Small’s chest armor, hanging from his shoulders, seemed heavier than usual. Maybe he had overdone it at the O-club. On the other hand maybe he hadn’t drunk enough. He’d flown that damned bird so many hours it didn’t make any difference if he flew it fucked up or not. The thing seemed to fly itself. Its whirling blades and sickening lunges entered his dreams at night, along with its beauty when it slipped off a mountaintop or slid in to a perfect landing in a small zone, the grunts grinning at him, rushing up to get their goodies, or staring dull-eyed in relief as they threw on board what remained of their friends.

  The ready-room radio squawked, and the man on watch put down his hot rod magazine to answer it. Small and Nickels listened tensely. Small checked his watch. It was 0217. No hope of daylight. Big John Bravo again. One Emergency. Matterhorn. Weather terrible. The same fuckers that had carved out that goddamn canary perch on Sky Cap. The same dumb sons of bitches he’d flat-hatted over all of western Quang Tri Province to take that crazy redheaded grunt lieutenant and his overloaded replacements up to the biggest shit sandwich he’d seen in almost ten months of comba
t flying. And the bastards were still at it. Jesus fucking Christ, he thought. Then he wondered why the Christian deity was so much more satisfying as a swearword than the Jewish deity of his childhood. It had all started when he found out that Art Buchwald was in the Fourth Marine Aircraft Wing in World War II. What was he fucking thinking? All this was running through his head as he and Nickels ran for the door. There was no question of not trying.

  Their running steps awoke the crew. Small immediately began going through start-up procedures while Nickels radioed for artillery clearance so they wouldn’t get shot out of the air on their way past the big Army 175s at VCB and the eight-inchers firing night missions out of Red Devil.

  The engines whined. The blades turned clumsily. Instruments glowed in front of the two pilots. Small taxied out onto the runway. The fuselage trembled; the roar increased to the point where only the radios inside their helmets could be heard. The bird moved forward in the darkness and lifted gently from the earth. Stray lights rapidly grew dim behind them in the mist, then disappeared. They were in total blackness save for the dim green glow of the instrument panel.

  Small was sweating but not from heat. It was going to be a pisser.

  He got a bearing from Nickels and settled in at 6,000 feet. Black clouds obscured the sky above him. Below, unseen but clear in his imagination from countless daylight missions, were the plains with their elephant grass, bamboo, and slow sluggish rivers. Then came the mountains.

  “Try and get Bravo up on their company push,” Small told Nickels over the intercom. He was straining to catch a glimpse of anything familiar, to let him know how close to the ground he was—how close to death.

  “Big John Bravo, Big John Bravo, this is Chatterbox One Eight. Over.” Silence. Maybe the stupid grunts didn’t know that Group had changed the call from Magpie, standard operating procedure to keep gook intelligence guessing. Small didn’t like Chatterbox. It sounded too cute. He didn’t feel cute.

  “Big John Bravo, Big John Bravo, Chatterbox One Eight. Over.”

  There was a burst of static. “They must be able to hear us,” Nickels said. “Too weak to reach us on their company push.”

  Small looked at a dog-eared card on a clipboard strapped to his leg. He dialed to the battalion frequency, knowing that the battalion operator would probably have the big aerial up. “Big John Bravo, Chatterbox One Eight. Over.”

  Relsnik’s voice, amplified by the Two-Niner-Two antenna, came out of the blackness into the helmets of the two pilots. “Chatterbox, this is Big John Bravo. We got you Loco Cocoa. How you? Over.” Small smiled at hearing Loco Cocoa for loud and clear. That was new to him. Lemon and Coke last week. Lickety Clit two weeks before.

  “I got you fine. I don’t know where in hell you are. Over.”

  “We’re on Matterhorn, sir. Over.”

  Small cursed under his breath. Goddamn kids on the fucking radios. Where was the goddamn FAC-man? He took a deep breath to control his temper and fear. “I know you’re on Matterhorn, Bravo. I mean I can’t see you. It’s fucking dark up here. Turn on a goddamn light.”

  There was a long pause. A new voice came up on the radio. “Chatterbox, this is Bravo Six. We’ve been taking mortar fire all day and we’re a little reluctant to light fires. Over.”

  Well, I’m a little reluctant to fly fucking blind in the goddamned mountains, Small thought to himself. He knew Bravo had had the shit beat out of it lately. “What’s your ceiling like there? And where’s your FAC? Over.” There was another pause. Leave it to a fucking grunt to have no idea how high the clouds were.

  The answer was more like a question. “Hundred and fifty feet, Chatterbox? Over.”

  “Fuck.”

  Inside the dimly lit bubble the two pilots looked at each other. One hundred fifty feet at 100 miles an hour took less than a second.

  Fitch’s voice came over the radio. “We got your sound, Chatterbox. You’re to our Sierra Echo. Bearing one-four-zero. Can you come up on the company freak? Over.”

  “Roger. See you there. Over.”

  Small immediately corrected the helicopter’s direction and twisted knobs back to Bravo’s frequency, clearing the battalion net for other traffic.

  They got back in contact again. “You give me a mark when I pass overhead. OK?” Small radioed. “How am I doing for course? Over.”

  “Still to our Sierra Echo,” Fitch returned. “Keep coming. Over.”

  The bubble vibrated green and red in the darkness. Small pictured an imaginary Bravo Six, somewhere below him, in a muddy hole, straining to hear the faint lawnmower rattle that meant life or death for a wounded grunt. The radio spat out “Mark!” Small banked immediately but saw only blackness.

  “I didn’t see a fucking thing, Bravo. Over,” Small radioed back, already straightening the bird to horizontal and coming back toward the place where he had heard “mark,” all the while watching his altimeter and his roll and pitch indicator. “How high above you do you think we were? Over.”

  Again the long pause. Again the tentative answer. “Six hundred feet? Over.”

  “We got any other fucking mountains to worry about around here?” Small snapped to Nickels.

  Nickels answered immediately. “Dong Sa Mui at fifty-one hundred feet. About two klicks to the northeast. Other than that, Matterhorn’s about it for four klicks.”

  Small muttered under his breath.

  He asked the grunts to try artillery illumination rounds. They lit up only the fog.

  “What the fuck’s wrong with your emergency case, Bravo? Over,” Small asked, almost absently, as he was trying to think what to do.

  “He’s got both his legs blown off. Over.”

  Why even bother?

  “I can’t find you fuckers without any lights on the LZ. Isn’t there some way you can hide some? Over.”

  Again the silence. “We could put some heat tabs in helmets. Over.”

  Jesus, a fucking grunt that could think. A fucking miracle. “Good. Put them in a twenty-meter circle. You got it? Ten meters radius, exactly. Otherwise I won’t know how far above the fucking thing I am. Over.”

  There was a wait. Then Bravo Six came up again. “Chatterbox, it’ll have to be thirteen and a half meters diameter. The rest of the area is mined and we can’t guarantee it.” There was a pause and blip of static as Fitch let up on the key. Then he was back. “But if you want to risk it, we’ll risk making the circle. Over.”

  Small switched over to the intercom and spoke to Nickels. “Mined? Can you believe this fucking shit? They want me to hit the top of a fucking mountain in the dark, in the fucking fog, and the goddamned LZ is mined? And all this to get some poor bastard that probably would rather be dead anyway. At least I would. Jesus Christ. Both fucking legs.”

  “Better than both balls.”

  “I ain’t so sure. What’s he going to do back home? Fuck cantaloupes for the rest of his life?” Small was trying to imagine what thirteen and a half meters would look like compared with twenty, and trying to get that into his head so if he did see it he could guess how high above the LZ he was.

  “OK, Bravo. Don’t risk the mines, but get the fucking circle made. I don’t have all night. And when I say pop a Willy Pete, I don’t care if they mortar the fuck out of you, you pop a goddamned Willy Pete. You got one? Over.”

  Bravo Six said they did.

  They collected heat tabs from all over the company and placed their helmets in a circle around Jackson and the two corpsmen. When the pilot gave the word, China and Conman ran from helmet to helmet with cigarette lighters, igniting the heat tabs. A blue circle of light, ghostly in the fog, grew around Jackson, the helmets hiding the flickering blue flame from all directions except directly above.

  The huge helicopter rushed in just a few feet above their heads. The rotor wash tipped over two of the helmets, and dark figures rushed to hide the two heat tabs, throwing them back in with bare hands.

  Mellas heard the pilot mutter over the radio. “Jesus Christ, Bravo. I’m right on top of you fuckers. OK, coming around. Get that man ready. I got your heat tabs. Over.”
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  “Can you believe this, Nickels?” Small said, switching to the intercom. “I actually said ‘I got your heat tabs.’” Holy shit, he thought to himself, thirteen and a half meters.

  “OK, Bravo, coming around,” he radioed. “You pop that Willy Pete when I tell you. Over.” Small looked over his shoulder into the blackness behind the chopper, but the dim circle was lost in the clouds again. Totally blind, he felt, more than he piloted, the big bird around to come at the LZ again, keeping that faint picture of glowing blue in his mind. He straightened the chopper out slowly and came back down to the same altimeter reading. He changed the pitch and attitude. The helicopter roared alone in the blackness.