by Chris Lynch
“I am going to be all right and I can drive. What is it?”
“We have to go back. The truck, the driver. Man’s alive.”
“You know that?”
“I saw him. As we were pulling away. I looked; he was in the cab, at the wheel, faking it. He signaled to me. Waved. Should have seen. We can’t leave him. I waved back. We gotta get him. Can’t leave him to those people. If they find him out … We just can’t. Don’t know who else is gonna be coming up the road, if anybody. We gotta do it.”
“That’s right,” I say. “We do. Any spare automatic weapons up there?”
He disappears for a couple of seconds and returns to chuck his sidearm down to me.
Depth perception is different now, I realize as the weapon practically clobbers me. I thought I had it clean, but it grazes my arm and thumps my shoulder on its way down. I pick it up and as soon as I look again he’s tossed me a small metal lockbox with ammunition.
“There’s a new cartridge in the gun. You got a few more full clips in the box,” he says. “Very unlikely you’ll get the chance to use them up, but hey, we can hope, right?”
“Right,” I say, throwing the ammo box onto the seat.
I am leaning into the cab once more when he calls me back.
“Hey!” he barks. “You got a name?”
I smile at him, thinking he’s really rushing things, since we just met and all.
“No, I don’t,” I say, and jump back into the truck.
“DelValle,” he calls as I’m about to shut the door behind me. “Nice to know you.”
The slam of the door rocks my hurting head and I try to think why that name rings, and how it lifts me briefly to better things.
But the grinding of the gears and the straining of the truck’s engine drag me right back down to the horror of this. I spin the wheel all the way right to start the arc that starts the dash back into the pit of the impossible, just down that hill.
As we are rumbling down I glance right at my still crumpled, collapsed associate and think — because I am trying to think about anything other than the zero odds we are galloping into — that nobody rides for free in the United States Army in wartime.
Death is no excuse.
I lean way over and grab a fistful of the bloody shoulder of his shirt, and with a mighty heave I haul him over to my side. Then, with a second effort, I pull him up onto my lap. I maneuver him into his old driver’s seat while I shimmy partway over to the shotgun side. I am driving, awkwardly, from this off-center angle, but as far as my one working left eye is concerned, the view looks as straight on as it should. I am leaning hard with my left shoulder into the guy to keep him roughly in place as a dummy driver when we round that critical bend in the other direction. The wind slapping us through the glassless windshield frame is just about enough to revive me, if not my partner, and I feel as ready as I can be for this.
The sound of a relentless firefight persists as if they never stopped shooting at our memory.
But as we roar down, guns a’ blazin’, we realize that they are firing downhill, at the intrepid second gun truck and the sole cargo vehicle to have persevered this far. The VC are caught completely off guard by our return — and why wouldn’t they be?
We drive straight and crazy toward the crippled cargo truck with the faking-dead driver at the wheel. DelValle launches one grenade at the nest of gunners firing downhill and it explodes ten feet behind them, blasting two of them toward heaven along with a dense cloud of earth and rock. Several others are blown tumbling sideways with the impact, and when they stop rolling they reset flat on the ground and point our way.
DelValle opens fire on them with the machine gun and draws their fire in return. I grip the wheel with my right hand and try to aim the automatic pistol with my left, but it’s too awkward to aim this way, so I shift back to behind the steering wheel, with my bloody buddy now jammed tight right in front of me.
We’re swooping down on their position as I join DelValle in pouring automatic gunfire down on top of these guys. The body in front of me jerks and judders and reverberates with the dozen and more and then more rounds pounding and penetrating this unknown soldier who has not yet stopped giving for his country. I feel a piercing pain in my neck and my collar bone as the body is annihilated, thrown harder and harder up against me with the force. But all the while I keep firing rounds straight into the spot where the bullets are coming from until the clip is empty.
From downhill, the other gun truck’s remaining two gunners are also firing on them, and the VC are caught frazzled for the first time I’ve ever seen. I seize the moment, jumping the truck off the side of the road and cruising right down alongside the looted vehicle.
Its driver sits straight up in his seat and clambers over to the opposite side and out the window. He falls awkwardly with a thud to the ground between our vehicles, while the sound of gunfire continues to crackle and whistle in the air all around us. In a few seconds that feel like a week, the soldier appears on the other side of my truck, pulls open the door, and flops himself onto the seat. I tear away immediately but he manages to get upright and just about pull the door shut with his one hand that does not look as if it’s been run through an industrial sausage maker.
He says nothing as I execute a reasonable doughnut maneuver in circling all the way around his truck on my way back to the road. My human shield flops his pulpy self back over into the lap of our new guest, who receives him silently and graciously.
Around the other side of the truck we are hit again with a smattering of bullets.
But they are from our guys.
The gun truck’s last fighter and one guy with a machine gun on top of the cargo truck have continued to hold out against the machine-gun nest. They abruptly hold fire on seeing us roar into their view and their line of fire, and we cut back toward the road and right over the spines of unblinking and unaware Vietcong shooters. I feel the bumps in sequence this time, as one and two and three bodies crush under my wheels before they can shoot one single more anybody.
I don’t stop to listen to the reassuring silence behind me. I continue on my intended route, up the bank and onto the road to Pleiku with the people who need to be dead dead on the ground behind me. Lying down and flat like that, who could tell how big or small they were, if that even mattered. All the same, lying down and trying to kill us. All the same.
I hear the other two vehicles, the only other two remaining of the entire convoy, it turns out, rev right up close behind me as we see our mission through to the end together, in a formation of sorts.
Have I stopped talking at all?” I ask Rudi as our final flight touches down. I know the answer, I know I have not been able to stop because every mile closer to home makes me more anxious and I don’t know what to do but keep talking, talking to Rudi. I count on him being too polite to tell me to shut up.
I feel it bubbling up in my stomach now, the nerves that are all about the horrors of home. I was exactly this scared when I first arrived in Vietnam, and it probably stands as a perfect summary of the whole experience that I am bringing it all the way home with me. Perfect, and perfectly wrong.
I talked from Honolulu to Norton Air Force Base in California. I talked from Norton all the way to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, which is where we are finally touching down for good.
“Thanks, Rudi, man,” I say as I hear the preparations outside for receiving us, processing us, and sending us on a train ride to Boston. My voice sounds hoarse and strange, not like me at all, but that would be expected, I suppose. I have talked out my concerns over my next posting, and about what kind of reception active military personnel could expect coming back from the war, and I talked about our mothers, Rudi’s and mine, and I believe it was right about there that my voice kind of snapped.
What I did not talk about was Ivan. Or Beck. I didn’t even venture back into stories from when we were kids, even though I thought about it and badly wanted to. Minefields there, I fear. World of h
urt there.
It sounds like more than just overuse. It sounds changed, and I am not comfortable with the change. It freaks me out and makes me, finally, want to just be quiet.
“Is that the wisdom-of-the-dead thing?” I say, laughing with ol’ Rudi as the cargo door is opening and the world prepares to intervene in our last-ever time alone together. “You couldn’t tell me to shut up, so you just went and zapped my power of speech?”
I am raspy-laughing when I turn to the open door to find an Army officer standing in the light and smiling generously at me.
I may have slightly mistimed my last private moment with Rudi.
“Nothing to be embarrassed about, sailor,” he says, offering me his hand to shake. “I know as well as anyone just how chatty these comrades can be when they get you alone.”
I take his hand as I hop down out of the plane. Then we step aside and let the detail of six Air Force personnel board and take our comrade down.
Dignified transfer is what they pride themselves on here, and that is what we experience. I feel like I am a war widow or something with the careful and respectful way I’m treated. The officer, Captain Morrison, has to make sure that identification, transfer orders, and assorted papers are all in order before he can send us on. But when I realize his duties are diverging from the path the airmen are taking my friend, I go into a small fret-fit over not being able to go both directions. Captain Morrison needs me, over at his office. But Rudi needs me, over at the transfer depot at the far end of the hangar building.
And so, I freeze right there in the middle of the sprawling and busy facility, helping nobody, accomplishing nothing.
I am overcome right now with indecision, and weakness, and loss and fear and a bottomless sadness, and I am just about to pick the worst setting any member of the armed forces has ever picked to fall completely to pieces. I want to go with Rudi. But I see him being taken away and I am physically unable to respond in any way.
I feel like I’m abandoning him.
“Yes, indeed,” Captain Morrison says in my ear, “this is the largest mortuary facility in the entire United States Armed Services. It can be a bit overwhelming, I know. Have you slept, son?” he says, with an arm so skillfully around my shoulders I hardly know he’s moving me until I am there, in his office. “Since you left Vietnam? What was that, three, four days?”
All I can manage is to shake my head, no, even though I could be answering one of those questions by accident and not the other.
“Eaten?”
When I try to smile at him and then look over my shoulder and out his office window toward Rudi’s absence, he draws his own conclusions. He gets on the phone and rattles off some quick orders while plowing through the paperwork. Within minutes somebody in cook’s whites is placing a hot roast-beef sandwich, fries, potato salad, and dill pickle wedges on the desk in front of me. There is a drink I believe to be ice tea. A Hershey’s chocolate bar.
I look across the table at the captain while he barrels through all the formalities.
“This is a lot of food, sir,” I say.
He stops what he’s doing, rests his chin on his entwined fingers.
“You know, there are lots of crazy regulations in this part of personnel management. Some of them so crazy you might be tempted to think somebody like me just made them up himself. One of those is, we do not release precious cargo such as our friend out there to the care of men suffering from starvational dementia. And we also clean our plates, because waste is a sin. So, in order for me to put you two servicemen onto that train, at least one of you has got to eat that. It probably should be you.”
I am chewing roast beef before he has even picked his pen back up.
I feel unfeasibly better as the captain walks me across the facility floor to be reunited with the other member of my party. I still have the apprehension of what awaits in Boston, but I don’t feel anything like the helplessness that was overtaking me pre-meal.
“I appreciate it, sir,” I say.
“Magic beef they serve here, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir, it is that.”
“Try and get some sleep on the ride up, please?” he says. “You may well find you need whatever resources you can store up.”
“I’m thinking listening to you in this instance is preferable to listening to myself right now so, yes, sir, I will sleep, sir.”
“Good,” he says as we reach the truck that will take us to the train station. There are three men in the front seat so I know I’m back in the bed with Rudi. I circle around to get in and see that now, we are really there.
The coffin is draped. The United States flag is blanketing our fallen Marine, in the proper fashion with the blue over his face. He’s not hiding what he is now, not just a crate of cargo or a Rudi-in-the-box.
“It is a hard business, this,” Captain Morrison says, giving my back a firm pat as if I might not make it up there into the truck on my own. “And you are doing something important beyond words, for his family as well as ours. Thank you.”
“Thank you,” I repeat in my raspy, foreign voice.
It’s really it now. We won’t be waking up.
This was not supposed to be my war.
It was supposed to be me and my rifle, alone, stalking the enemy, dependent on no one. Bringing the maximum of death to the minimum of people.
I should never have left the highlands.
And for what? There’s no such thing as a reunion.
“I’m sorry, lieutenant,” says the soldier who arrives at the foot of my bed. “I checked on that and I’m afraid he didn’t survive.”
“Didn’t survive,” I repeat from behind my faceful of bandages.
“No, sir.”
I nod. He leaves.
I wonder if anything survives Vietnam.
I wonder what on earth I am doing here now.
It’s the same as before Chu Lai. I am flight engineer on an AC-47 gunship, a “Spooky.” We still fly close-support missions for ground troops when they radio in for help. We still swoop in, flying low in great big left-handed loops, firing down on the area until our boys can either advance or retreat safely due to our eliminating trouble for them. Just the same as before Chu Lai.
Except that nothing is the same as before Chu Lai.
I returned to Da Nang to be reunited with my refurbished Spooky and then we flew it immediately back to Phu Cat. All through that trip I wondered to myself what I was going to do with the rest of my tour. Less than two months left, making me that precious creature we all wanted to be — the “two-digit midget” who has under a hundred days left in-country. I always figured no matter how bad things got here I would be able to persevere once I got to this stage.
That certainty did not accompany me back from Chu Lai.
And now we are back up in the air and cruising to another hot spot because somebody on the ground has called for close air support and Captain Gilroy was only too happy to tell me not to bother settling in because I was going right back up.
I hate Captain Gilroy.
I hate this war and I hate this plane and I hate my job and I hate this Air Force and the armed services and all armed services, and I may have been able to patch over all those small obstacles to doing my duty before Chu Lai but there is serious doubt as to whether I can do it now.
Everything on board is functioning factory fresh on the tuned-up plane, so my jobs are presently minimal and I slip to a small observational window as we reach our designated area. I can just see the firefight below when we start banking into the elliptical pattern from which we will pummel our enemy.
All to protect our boys.
My ears start ringing as the heavy guns of the Spooky erupt and the air fills with our firepower.
It sounds so much louder than I remember it. It’s as if there is a gunfight going on inside the plane with us. I cover my ears and watch the battle on the ground.
And I wonder who the fighters down there might be.
Before
Chu Lai, when the captain forced me to man one of the guns, I could believe that there was a chance I was directly defending my old pal Rudi from harm, and that got me through my reservations about killing, about war, about pointless aggression. Because there was a point.
If I thought I might be protecting Rudi, then I could shoot somebody to do that, no doubt about it. But Rudi’s not down there; he’s dead.
If I thought I might be protecting Morris, snaking up-country on some tiny tributary surrounded by banks of bloodless VC killers, then I could do that. But Morris isn’t down there anymore, either; he’s rotated back home.
And if I thought Ivan was down there now?
What if I thought Ivan was down there now?
“Beck!” Captain Gilroy screams as I continue to watch the action unfold with my hands insufficiently covering my ears. “Beck!”
What am I doing here?
“Beck!”
My, how I hate that guy.
Rudi and I have our own carriage on the train. It is easily the most royal treatment either of us has ever had. But it’s coming to an end now as we make the approach into South Station.
I slept probably an hour in total, which is probably less than Captain Morrison had in mind, but I am feeling sharpish. It is the pounding of my heart, not the nap, that is the more likely cause of my readiness. Not that I feel ready. I don’t believe I am ready at all.
We come to a stop. From outside, somebody pulls the door open and I step to the edge of the carriage to see what I can see, must see.
I’m a bit stunned to see The Captain, Ivan’s dad, saluting me from the platform, and behind him an honor guard of Marines.
“Oh,” I gasp, as unmilitary a sound as any military escort has likely ever made. But I manage to return his salute before stumbling down the steps.
