A River in May

by Edward Wilson

  As soon as Ly started translating the instructions, Ho Cuc said, ‘Khong – no.’ Lopez asked him what he meant by ‘khong’, but Cuc ignored him. The top of Hill 38 was crisscrossed by a network of shallow trenches. Without another word Ho Cuc slid into the deepest trench like a snake and emerged a few minutes later with four hand grenades that had been attached to concealed trip wires. Cuc was naked except for his dressings and bandages; his clothes and boots had been cut away to tend his wounds. His drained body was pale against the dark; as he searched the trenches his paleness rose and fell like a hovering wraith in a cemetery. When Cuc had finished clearing the hill his sling and bandages were stained with mud and blood. He dragged his shattered leg delicately behind him like a cat crawling away after being struck by a car. Ly gave a signal and the remainder of the column slowly moved forward and occupied the hilltop.

  Lopez and Bobby lay in a section of monsoon-eroded trench that was only eighteen inches deep and hardly provided protection for one person. The hilltop was virtually bare of vegetation or other cover. As day dawned it began to drizzle. The moaning of two of the wounded had become an incessant antiphonal counterpoint that ground in Lopez’s brain like the unset ends of fractured bones. Cuc maintained a stoical silence, but his face was as pallid as stale cold coffee. The medevac helicopter was taking forever. Vietnamese casualties were always low priority. And if there were no Americans with them, they were no priority at all.

  It was nearly an hour after first light before they heard the helicopters. Nothing had happened since the explosion. It seemed to Lopez to have happened a century ago, in a different country, the country of the night known to the ancient Greeks as Chaos. There were two helicopters, but they were both escort gunships. The big Chinook helicopter for evacuating the wounded was nowhere to be seen. Lopez radioed the gunships. They told him that because it was Sunday the Chinook pilot had slept late and hadn’t finished eating his breakfast. Lopez shouted into the handset, ‘Who does that cunt think he is?’

  ‘Say again, over,’ said one of the pilots. There was laughter in the background.

  ‘Our casualties are serious – dying, in fucking fact. They can’t wait.’

  Lopez listened to the pilots arguing with each other and complaining about Foxtrot 58 not having his ‘ass in gear’. Finally one of the pilots offered to pick up the wounded with his gunship even though he had no medical facilities on board. The helicopter landed on a grassy saddle that linked Hill 38 to a neighboring hill. The wounded were carried in poncho liners, except for Cuc who crawled on under his own strength. The two most seriously wounded had serum albumin drips. Bobby handed one bottle to a door gunner and said, ‘If the tissue around the needle starts swelling up, the fluid isn’t getting into the vein. You need to pull it out and start it again.’ The gunner grinned and nodded, but he obviously had no intention of doing a thing if the drip went wrong. His job was putting 7.62mm bullets into Oriental people, not plasma substitutes. Lopez gave the other casualty’s drip to Ho Cuc. Just before the helicopter pulled pitch to take off, he grabbed Cuc’s free hand and said, ‘Why did you do it? Why did you save us?’

  There was no contact. Lopez felt Ho Cuc’s blank stare pass through his head and out the back of his skull. Cuc was more than a person – he was, it seemed to Lopez, a whole culture. His unrelenting stare held more than bravery, something other than words. Lopez felt the down-blast of the rotors as the helicopter began to take off. It only lasted a fleeting fragment of a second, but Lopez had felt Ho Cuc squeeze his hand. It was so fleeting and subtle that he might have imagined it.

  As the helicopters left the river valley Lopez requested some fire support. There was a bamboo thicket along their withdrawal route from Hill 38 that he was worried about. He asked the pilot who hadn’t picked up the casualties to give the thicket a strafing run. There was little risk involved, but little risks accumulate. The pilot replied, ‘Go fuck yourself, dipshit.’

  After the helicopters flew off, Lopez took out his binoculars and watched the column of refugees and soldiers as they threaded their way eastward along the river. They seemed to be meeting no opposition. Mr Kim’s platoon had been given the task of searching and clearing Phu Gia village while Lopez’s element secured Hill 38. The platoon were making a lot of noise as they swept through the village, firing their weapons blindly into hedges, banana plantations, thickets, and any other places likely to provide cover for enemy troops. The idea was to panic concealed enemy into giving away their location by firing back. The tactic never worked, but was popular because it vented frustration and allowed the soldiers to lighten their load of heavy ammunition.

  Lopez was worried about looting. Mister Kim usually controlled it, but discipline and morale were getting worse and worse. He scanned the column and began to see that many of the CIDG had already loaded their rucksacks with marrows, fruit, chickens, ducks, and any other plunder that came to hand. Lopez was more worried about the civilians. It looked like Kim’s troops had rounded up just over a hundred. There were, of course, no men of military age in the civilian column, only the old, the young, and women with children. He scanned back along the column again, and paused, focusing on a little girl carrying her younger brother on her back. Even in the chaos of the evacuation, she was laughing, her face alight. Probably Dusty’s water buffalo girl, he thought.

  Lopez was sure that Kim’s CIDG would treat the civilians well. The soldiers themselves had been uprooted by war and the faces of the Phu Gia civilians probably reminded them of their own families. But Lopez also knew that if there were a firefight, the civilians would be human shields; if they came across land-mines, they would be human mine detectors.

  There still wasn’t any resistance. Maybe the enemy were afraid of shooting their own families. Progress was slow because most of the civilians were too old, too young or too ill to move quickly. And too burdened with the weight of all their worldly possessions – rolls of bedding, sleeping mats, pots, bowls, chopsticks, blackened kettles, and all the other sad baggage of the war homeless. Lopez put down the binoculars. He didn’t want to see any more, it was too depressing.

  As soon as the sweep element were clear of the village, Lopez’s position on Hill 38 came under heavy fire. At first it all seemed to be coming from Hill 110, but then one of the CIDG spotted movement on the next hill, less than a hundred meters away. It looked to Lopez like the people on Hill 110 were trying to pin them down so that another element could close in for the kill. He knew he and Bobby had been picked out by the snipers. Lopez hated being shot at; it terrified him. There was a big difference between being ‘under fire’ and being ‘shot at’. One is general, the other is personal. There was something nauseating, like unwanted physical intimacy, about the knowledge that a few hundred meters away a complete stranger was lying in a well concealed hole and taking careful aim at his body in the hope of puncturing its soft organs, rupturing its arteries and shattering its bones.

  The bullets were making a sharp popping noise as they passed overhead. Lopez curled himself even tighter into the trench. A bullet cracked so loud past his ear that it must have missed by only inches – then a few seconds later two more bullets cracked twice as loud as they whip-snapped past. Lopez’s RTO was scrunched up in the trench behind him. The radio antenna was making the RTO a target too. Lopez grabbed the handset and requested fire support. ‘We’re under heavy fire. Put some ordnance on 110 ASAP.’

  Boca told him they couldn’t do it. ‘110’s out of range!’

  Lopez wanted to smash his stupid face in. ‘For the mortars, I know. I meant, get some artillery from An Hoa'

  ‘You’ll have to contact them direct.’

  ‘We tried – both frequencies – but they don’t answer.’

  ‘Did you try six-seven?’

  Lopez tried six-seven, but there was still no reply. He was shaking with fear and frustration. ‘Seeing action’, he thought, was such a funny phrase to describe being in a war: the only thing he could see were the soles of Ly’
s boots. The noise from the CIDG had stopped again. Lopez shook Ly by his ankle.

  ‘What you want, Trung Uy?’

  ‘Ly, tell them to keep shooting back.’

  The first CIDG to uncurl from the fetal position were the machine-gun team. They fired a few bursts at Hill 110 and then at a squad of Viet Cong who were running across some paddy fields towards the base of Hill 38. Suddenly their firing stopped; a bullet had struck the machine-gun’s breach and jammed the gun. The gunner had been slightly cut below the eye by a shard of metal. He was smiling, the machine-gun was now useless and he had nothing left to do. He and his assistant crawled out of the trench and took off in a crouching run down the side of Hill 38 toward safety. Lopez watched them as they raced down the hillside like schoolboys released early from a tedious lesson.

  Lopez looked back towards Nui Hoa Den and saw a plume of black smoke rising from the camp. They were burning the shit. The latrines were wooden seats placed above 55-gallon drums cut in half and filled with waste oil. Twice a week, on Sundays and Wednesdays, the drums were wheeled out and the shit and oil burnt off. For Lopez, that smoke signaled their own utter insignificance: they were pinned down on a barren hill and likely to die, but three miles away it was just another Sunday morning and they were burning the shit.

  Lopez told the others that they were going to have to run for it. He leapt out of the trench and ran crouching and weaving off the crest of the hill to the relative safety of the rear-facing slope. He looked back and saw Bobby kneeling upright on the top of the hill trying to see what was happening. ‘Get down here. Now, you stupid fuck!’

  Bobby slid down next to him. ‘We’re trapped. They’re coming up the other side of the hill. If we run for it, they’re gonna pick us off before we get to the bamboo thicket.’ The safety of the thicket, their nearest cover, was a dash across three hundred meters of open ground.

  ‘We need some fire support.’ Lopez looked around for the radio, but it was nowhere to be seen. ‘Where’s the RTO?’

  ‘There.’ Bobby pointed down the hill. The RTO had lightened his load by leaving the heavy radio behind and was bounding along gaily in the wake of the other two CIDG.

  Lopez looked back up the hill. The RTO had left the radio on the crest of the hill in the middle of an open space. Lacking human targets, the enemy had started firing at the radio instead. Lopez ran back up the hill. He no longer felt that he was inside his body: his body was playing a role in some corny war movie and Lopez was watching it. The bullets couldn’t really hurt because it was only a movie. It was all an adrenaline blur. When he grabbed the radio, it seemed weightless.

  Lopez started shouting into the handset while still scrambling back to Bobby: ‘Hill 38, white phosphorus, fire for effect and repeat.’ White phosphorus had been outlawed by the Geneva Convention because, not needing oxygen to burn, it seared into the flesh and continued to burn its way through the tissues like acid. Lopez was hoping that they could get off the hill before the shells impacted, and that the enemy and the white phosphorus would arrive on Hill 38 at the same time.

  It started to rain as they ran down the hill towards the thicket. ‘Please,’ he prayed, ‘please.’ As the first shells exploded Lopez could hear the sound of air being sucked into the fireballs, like he had at Lang Khe. The white phosphorus spewed plumes of white billows on and around the hill as they ran towards the bamboo thicket. He thought it oddly pretty: the barrage of white phosphorus was decorating the hill with white floss, like an insane wedding cake.

  The only thing left to do was make their way over low bare hills towards Hill 60, the rendezvous point where they would join up with the other two elements. As they made their way up the valley, a lone CIDG turned around and emptied half a magazine at Hill 38 in a gesture of pointless bravado. A few seconds later Lopez received a radio call from the marine artillery battery at An Hoa offering fire support – equally pointless, and late. He gave them the grid co-ordinates of a hill behind them where there might be snipers. The 155 shells passing overhead sounded like Volkswagen Beetles being slung out of a giant catapult.

  Lopez felt drained. The exhilaration of escaping from Hill 38 had quickly worn off. It seemed that Bobby had also gone quiet. They trudged along in silence. Lopez thought he heard something, but wasn’t sure. He noticed Bobby had stopped and was listening.

  ‘Did you hear something?’ said Bobby.

  ‘Not sure. What about you?’

  ‘I don’t know. It sounded like a dull thud from the direction of Hill 60.’

  A few seconds later there was a radio call. Kim reported that a CIDG had stepped on a mine near the top of the Hill 60, and there were three casualties. Lopez put the handset back on his webbing. ‘Just what we don’t fucking need.’ They hurried their pace. A short time later there was the sound of another muffled explosion and another radio message. This time three civilians, including a young boy, had been injured. Lopez now understood the signal shots of the previous evening: the Viet Cong had known they were coming and had spent the night laying minefields.

  Half the blocking force element were waiting at the base of Hill 60. They had decided not to go up the hill when they found it was mined. It was obvious to Lopez that everything had turned into a mess again. That the CIDG and the Phu Gia civilians had managed to get trapped in the middle of a minefield. That they badly needed a medevac. That Kim’s troops were close to mutiny and had probably started using the civilians as human mine detectors.

  Lopez didn’t want to go up the hill, but there was no other way. He knew that American medevac pilots wouldn’t land if a Vietnamese directed them. He explained the situation to Tho, who somehow had ended up with the blocking force. Tho provided ten volunteers who had experience of clearing mines. Ly also agreed to come. Lopez found it bizarre: the CIDG were all laughing and miming macabre jokes about getting blown up. Just before they started up the hill there was another explosion from the top: two more CIDG had managed to blow themselves up. ‘Why the fuck,’ said Lopez, ‘don’t they just sit still?’

  Nothing happened until they were two-thirds of the way to the top. It was a small mine. It blew off the foot of the CIDG who was leading the way and slightly wounded the man behind him. Bobby injected the amputee with Lopez’s last but one morphine syrette. They tried to improvise a litter out of a hammock, but it was difficult for the hillside was bare and there were no bamboo or other trees for poles. In the end, they had to drag him like a sack of potatoes.

  The next point man was more observant. He detected another mine only a few minutes after taking over. He dug it up, defused it, and popped it into his rucksack. They carried on for another fifty meters and the column halted again. The point man had discovered another mine. By now he was quite near the top of the hill. He quickly unearthed that mine as well, defused it and stowed it in his rucksack. Lopez was becoming annoyed with the delays. He wanted the point man to lead on, but instead he was digging up yet another mine. Bobby said, ‘This is stupid, really stupid. This guy is supposed to be finding a way around the mines, not through the middle of the them.’

  ‘Maybe he needs the money. He gets a 200-piastre bonus for each one, almost a week’s wages.’ Boca had introduced a system of prize money for captured weapons and explosives. An anti-personnel mine was worth about the equivalent of a can of Coca-Cola.

  Lopez saw that the point man was holding the mine against his chest and struggling with what seemed to be a safety slide. It must have been rusty and stiff. Lopez shouted at him to leave the mine. Just then, the CIDG stepped back with his right foot to steady himself for another go at whatever was wrong with rendering the mine safe. The hill shook and the soldier disappeared in a dark geyser of earth. The concussion set off the mine he was holding as well as the ones in his rucksack.

  Lopez didn’t want to get up from the ground. He just wanted to go on lying there. Bobby shook him to see if he was all right. Lopez was splattered with blood and pieces of flesh from the victims, but he wasn’t hurt. He took off his
glasses to try to clean them, but his hands were shaking too much to wipe them. He handed them to Bobby who cleaned them and handed them back.

  A minute passed and no one did a thing. The less badly wounded were crying for help, but they would have to wait. Lopez turned to Bobby and gave him his last morphine syrette and one of his field dressings. He had no intention of helping the wounded. He didn’t even want to look at them: they were Bobby’s business. Lopez knew that his business was to find a way to the top of the hill and call in a medevac. He shuffled forward past the casualties; he tried not to look – there was only an impression of lumps lying on the ground.

  Lopez found Ly beside him. They took turns leading and together groped their way to the crest of the hill like a pair of drunks. It began to drizzle again. Two of Kim’s men came down to lead them the rest of the way. Lopez found it all so absurd: it was like a game at a children’s party – they were all holding hands and each person had to put his feet in exactly the same place as the one before. When they got to the top the guides went back down to help Bobby bring up the dead and wounded.

  Phong, Kim’s RTO, led Lopez along a cleared path to where the Phu Gia civilians were herded close together and squatting on the edge of the hill. There must have been a hundred of them, all motionless, faces hidden by straw hats, the huddled mass exuding a low murmur. How, thought Lopez, do you say you’re sorry? Kim was squatting next to an old man and talking to him. A squall of rain blew in over the valley and the mass of displaced people swayed and flattened like tall grass in a summer storm. Lopez explained to Kim that they needed to clear a landing zone that was absolutely safe before he could call in a helicopter.