“Didn’t do it on purpose,” Wren said.
“Bullshit!”
“I think you guys have been together too long,” Finn said.
“Person didn’t know better, he’d think you were married.”
Wren grunted. “His tits ain’t big enough for that.”
DiUlio, who took such pride in his conditioning regimen that to maintain it he had fabricated an entire free-weight system out of steel pipes and tin cans filled with concrete, puffed up his chest. “Lots bigger’n yours,” he said.
Finn left them there to continue their good-natured bickering, having decided between themselves to alternate turns with the weapon. In truth there was such a closeness between the men in the Special Forces that wives did often accuse them of loving their teammates more than they did their spouses. It often manifested itself in arguments like those endlessly engaged in by DiUlio and Wren, who had served back-to-back tours in the same camp.
Sometimes the affection was overt, particularly when the men were around outsiders. An SF trooper, seeing a buddy enter the room, would jump up, grab him, and kiss him squarely in the ear, sometimes with so much tongue you felt as if it were going to come out the other side. The kiss would be accompanied by “You sweet motherfucker! Don’t you ever die! Don’t you even catch a cold.”
Or the closeness could lead to fistfights that looked as if they were going to result in the death or the maiming of both participants. Followed by heavy drinking and the swearing of eternal friendship.
The friendship was what kept them here, volunteering for tour after tour, when they could safely have returned to the States, gotten a job in a basic-training outfit somewhere. The primary worry then being how to avoid trying to beat some sense into a stupid-ass trainee.
No one would have questioned the decision. No one would have looked down on them, talked about their losing their nerve, scoffed at the cushy life they’d be leading back in the world.
A man had only to answer to himself. And for most, the fact that his friends were still there, fighting the good fight, was enough. How could you not be there too?
Finn continued his rounds, ending up back on the north wall, where Olchak had rejoined Sergeant Young. “Got three more,” Young said. “Now nothing for the last thirty minutes.”
That meant one of two things. Either the NVA had gotten wise, stopped sending men to certain death, and would wait until the main assault to take out the bunkers, or they didn’t know what was happening at all. Finn would have bet on the latter. The North Vietnamese were perpetually short on means of communication—the men in the wire would have had no way of telling the ones outside what was happening.
Instead of depending upon radios, as the Americans and now the South Vietnamese did, the men would have been given their orders and expected to carry them out. They should have been in position by now, ready to throw the satchel charges, blow the bangalores. The first that the platoon and company commanders outside would know they had failed was when the signal for the attack was given and nothing happened.
He’d have liked to have seen their faces.
Shut up, he told himself. You will, soon enough.
In the command bunker on the south side, Lieutenant Sloane ignored Specialist Fourth Class Theodore “Teddy Bear” Noonan, who was so intent upon spotting for targets through his own starlight that he ignored being ignored. Teddy Bear—he hated that nickname, but since he was named Theodore and was big and soft-looking, he didn’t think he’d ever get rid of it—had already killed four sappers and was now drawing a bead on a fifth. He pulled the trigger and the weapon chuffed, the bullet on its way to a rendezvous with death.
Maybe someday I’ll write a poem about it, he thought as he settled the scope back on the target, seeing a brighter green where the blood was flowing from the top of the sapper’s head. Bright blossom of death—what rhymed with death? Better free verse.
He did not, of course, let anyone know he wrote poetry. He couldn’t even have imagined what his nickname would have been, if he had.
After the war he would perhaps send some of it to one of the literary magazines. He allowed himself a bit of fantasy. Would they regard him as the Graves, the Sassoon, the Wilfred Owen of the Vietnam War?
Probably not, he admitted. No one cared. About the war. Or about poetry.
It was enough that he did. It had to be.
He scanned the perimeter again, seeing only the bodies now. No other targets. At least not at the moment. He decided he could relax for just a few minutes, stretch as much as he could in the cramped bunker.
Lieutenant Sloane was busying himself by stacking up ammunition at one of the M60 machine guns. Noonan frowned. The LT was being all too helpful. Not like before, when all he’d do was watch—and sometimes sneer—when the enlisted men were doing physical labor. Maybe that bullet had knocked some sense into him, Teddy Bear thought. Realizes how much he needs us. Wants to stay on our good side now. Too damned late, LT.
He went back to the scope, once again focused on the outside world.
Maybe, Death’s bright blossom.
But what rhymed with blossom? Possum?
Nah. That won’t get me an anthology.
Unnoticed by Noonan, Sloane left the bunker. He was carrying two ammo cans of linked 7.62mm ammunition, each can containing two hundred rounds. He stashed them in one of the shell craters from the earlier barrage, then went back and got two more. These he stashed in yet another crater.
Defense in depth, isn’t that what they called it at West Point? Though I hardly think they had this in mind. Two up, one in reserve, the mantra went. Look for the military crest. Reverse slope defense. Retrograde. The now meaningless words ran through his head, somehow soothing the thoughts that gathered in his tortured mind.
How come they never taught us anything about this? Did they think it would all be just like it had been in the “Big One,” as the older officers called it? Did they never consider that we’d be down here with no place to retrograde to, the only military crest the one the enemy is occupying, the only defense in depth the distance you could run before they cut you down? Reserve? We’ve got a thirty-man recon platoon.
He wanted to laugh, avoiding it only because he didn’t want to draw attention to himself. The Americans would think he’d gone nuts probably because of the head wound. The Montagnards would think he’d gone nuts, too, but probably because the night creatures from the forest had sneaked into him.
Maybe they had. What he planned was certainly crazy.
But who cared? They were all crazy. Otherwise they wouldn’t be here.
He stashed yet more cans of ammunition. Now for the grenades.
“How long you been in the army, Curtis?” SFC Washington asked.
“Four years,” Sergeant (E-5) Leonard Curtis replied.
“You re-up?”
“Extended. I was with the Ninth Division, down in the Delta. Wanted to get the hell out of there.”
“And they sent you to Group?” Washington was amazed. It was a sign of the times, and not a good one, that people were being assigned to the Special Forces without having been trained for it. Good troops, most of them in any case, but they should at least have been sent back to the States for a stint in Training Group.
“Needed the bodies, I guess,” Curtis replied. Once again he felt the acute sense of inferiority that had plagued him ever since he had been assigned to the camp. While he thought himself a good soldier and had proved his bravery in actions throughout the watery Delta, he more than anyone else realized just how much a fish out of water he was here among the seasoned Special Forces troops.
They had assigned him as a light weapons specialist, and while he knew enough about the M16s, M60 machine guns, and M-79 grenade launchers with which his platoon in the Ninth had been armed, he was brought up short the first time he ever saw an M-2 carbine, brought to him by a Montagnard who expected him to fix it. And as for the 1919A6 machine guns and the BARs and the M-1 rifles, forget
about it. Much less the cast-off weapons from at least three armies—the Kar-98 Mausers, MAT-49 submachine guns, MAS-36 rifles, Swedish-K submachine guns, among others—that the Regional Force Popular Force (RF PF) outposts guarding the villages were armed with.
Sergeant Stankow had tried to give him a crash course in weaponry, but there had been so little time!
“Where you from?” Washington asked, seeing the young sergeant’s discomfort and deciding to change the subject.
“L.A.,” Curtis replied.
Washington looked at him in clear disbelief. “With an accent like that?”
“Lower Alabama,” Curtis replied, grinning.
“Thought so.” Washington smiled back, his teeth gleaming like a beacon in his black face. “Lots of good folks come out of Alabama.”
“And some not so good ones too. You ever go down there?”
“Went through there once. As fast as I could.”
Curtis understood. People like he used to be, and his family still was, wouldn’t have made it pleasant for a man like Sergeant Washington.
He’d seen just how far his own attitudes had changed while home on extension leave. His two brothers and father kept going on and on about nigger this and nigger that, wondering how he managed to keep from shooting the black bastards himself while in combat—be a pretty good time for it, wouldn’t it, everybody thinking the Veet Cong did it?
He’d wanted to protest that it wasn’t like that. That the black guys in his platoon were his buddies, that they shared the same hardships, the same dangers, and when you did that, you found out they were people just like you. With their own fears, their own attitudes, and, yes, their own prejudices. Which you found were just as strong, and as ill-founded, as yours.
But he hadn’t. He’d just nodded his head and kept his mouth shut. And was ashamed at being such a damned coward.
It hadn’t made it any better when his father had dragged him down to the local VFW, insisting that he wear his uniform with the Bronze Star with V Device prominently displayed on his chest.
First of all, the middle-aged World War II vets who inhabited the hall had let him know in no uncertain terms that theirs was a real war, with real enemies. Not like those pissant Veetnamese—and how come they were having so much trouble with a little bunch of gooks, anyway?
And, of course, the subject of race had quickly reared its ugly head. Maybe the problem, one of the vets—now a sheriff’s deputy—had said, was that they had so goddamn many niggers. Not like in his day, by God. Niggers then had their own place, and they kept to it. Truck drivers, cooks, maintenance men. Not down in the goddamn combat battalions. Cowards, all of them. Couldn’t be trusted. Hell, you’d have more trouble keeping them on the front line than you would keeping the enemy out of it.
From the lack of a combat infantryman’s badge on the VFW cap the deputy wore, as well as no sign of a Purple Heart, Leonard Curtis suspected the vet had never come close to the front lines himself.
But still he’d said nothing, nursing his beer and listening to the stories that got more wild with each telling. And silently vowing he’d never set foot in the place again.
Nor would he return to Alabama. If the army had taught him one thing, it was that he didn’t belong among people like these.
The personnel officer in Nha Trang had promised him that after his extension was up, he would be reassigned to Fort Bragg, there to get the training he needed. Then he’d be slotted in one of the Groups—the First in Okinawa, Tenth in Germany, Eighth in Panama perhaps. Or the Seventh right there at Bragg.
But first he had to get through this. And people like Sergeant Washington made it slightly more likely that he would. The big man moved with practiced ease, checking the guns, tweaking this or that sight, sending ’Yard assistant gunners outside to move the limit stakes slightly to ensure overlapping fire with the next bunker. He talked as he worked, an ongoing rap about what to expect, how he wanted Curtis to react to this or that, what to do in the eventuality that one thing or another happened.
“You got all that, my cracker friend?” Washington finally asked.
“Got it, Sarge,” Curtis answered. “Only one thing?”
“And what’s that?”
“How come they call you Spearchucker?”
Washington grinned. “ ’Cause they know I’d kick their lily-white asses, they called me a nigger.”
Outside the wire, in a bunker dug so deep even the 175 delay shells hadn’t touched it, the North Vietnamese colonel checked his watch. The timepiece, taken from a dead Legionnaire at Dien Bien Phu, ticked steadily on.
Time seemed to be passing so slowly!
But it would not be long.
Chapter 13
The waiting was the hardest part. He checked his watch: only ten minutes later than when he had checked it before. His palms were wet, and his mouth was dry. He wiped his hands on his fatigues and took a swig from the canteen propped up next to the radio.
Becker was sitting in a corner, reading a dog-eared paperback—a Travis McGee novel, Finn noticed. One he’d already read. For a moment he toyed with the idea of telling Becker the ending, but realized the young sergeant probably already knew it. Out in the camps you read, and reread, anything you could get your hands on. Finn had read this particular book three times.
Come on! He silently told the men outside the wire. Get it over with. Anything but this infernal waiting.
In a few minutes he’d go out and make his rounds again. Make sure no one was sleeping, though in the last couple of rounds no one had been. He suspected he was being regarded as a pain in the ass, but couldn’t help it. He was tired—it had been a very long day—and had tried to grab a couple of minutes of sleep himself earlier. And had realized that he was simply wasting his time. Thoughts chased one another through his head—have I done everything I needed to do? What have I forgotten? What if this, or that, or the other?
So he had gotten up, brewed a quick cup of C-ration coffee on the little camp stove Becker had set up in a corner of the commo bunker, cursed as always when he burned his lip on the canteen cup. The bitter liquid coursed through him, but not nearly as fast as did the adrenaline when this or that report came in, telling about the movement of figures—just out of range—seen through the starlight scopes.
He felt a sudden chill, hoped it wasn’t the malaria coming back to visit. That’s all I need right now, he thought. He tried to remember if he’d taken his chloroquine/primaquine tablet that day. Don’t know. Take another one now? He popped one out of the little blister pack he carried in his personal first-aid kit, swallowed it without water. He didn’t take the dapsone that the medical establishment insisted upon. While it might supplement the effects of the chlor/prime, as they said it would, it also gave him the screaming shits. Not exactly a condition to be in when expecting a full-scale attack.
He’d come down with a full-blown case of falciparum malaria on his second tour, had spent a month in the malaria ward in the hospital in Cam Ranh Bay. Alternately burning up as the sporozites invaded his red blood cells and reproduced therein, and shaking with chills so violent he sometimes fell off his cot when the cells burst and the new spores went out to find new hosts.
They’d pronounced him cured, but he knew that the disease still lurked in the bloodstream, waiting for the defenses to go down so they could once again raid his body like the NVA were getting ready to raid the camp. It happened when he came down with some other disease, or when he drank too much and left his body defenseless, or when under great stress.
Like now.
Not gonna happen, he told himself, willing the chills to go away. Think of something else. Last R&R in Sydney. The redhead with the incredible green eyes, who’d been very willing to help him forget the war for just a little while. He closed his eyes and could see her face, lightly sheened with sweat as she moved rhythmically above him.
He opened his eyes and smiled. Worked every time. Something about impending combat that wonderfully sharpe
ns the mind, cuts through all the extraneous worries to bring into focus what was really important. And great sex was right up at the top.
Becker caught his grin in the corner of his eye, dog-eared his place in the book, stood, stretched, and yawned. His hands brushed the heavy beams of the ceiling of the bunker.
“Something funny, Dai Uy?” he asked.
Finn shook his head. He was unwilling to break the moment by sharing his thoughts with anyone. What was her name, anyway? Eileen, that was it. He wondered what she was doing at that moment.
Probably got herself another guy on R&R, he thought. Lucky bastard. Wish it was me.
The tactical net radio, an old PRC-25, hissed as someone keyed a mike. Finn recognized Olchak’s voice, a bare whisper.
“They’re coming,” he said.
Finally.
Olchak saw the huge flash somewhere just inside the tree line, had just enough time to scream “Down!” and hit the floor himself before the round from the Chinese-made 75mm recoilless rifle smashed into the dirt just in front of the embrasure. Shrapnel whined through the air above them, embedding itself harmlessly in the sandbags at the back. The acrid smell of cheap explosive assaulted his nostrils.
“Stay down!” he commanded when one of the Montagnards tried to cautiously raise his head. “More coming.”
Four more rounds hit, doing little more than shaking dirt down on them. Unless one of the rounds went through the embrasure and exploded inside, they were in little danger as long as they kept low.
Between the recoilless rifle strikes he could hear the steady thump of mortar rounds exploding, some in front of the bunker, some behind, and some directly atop it.
The NVA commander had gone to plan two, he surmised. The sappers had obviously failed—there were no huge explosions inside the camp as the satchel charges did their work—so now he had to do it the hard way. Lay down suppressive fire, hope that he could take out at least a few of the defenses, but mainly provide cover for the troops who would now be massing somewhere just outside the wire.
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