Matterhorn Read online

  Still, by midafternoon, even Goodwin had been worn down by the rain and the boredom. They all dozed in the gray light, drizzle falling on them, stupefied by waiting and by their desire to forget what they were waiting for. Then the monotony broke.

  A single Marine jumped off the back of an incoming helicopter and walked slowly across the landing zone toward the dirt road that led to the regiment’s rear area. The Marine stood six-three or six-four, but his size wasn’t nearly as interesting as the sawed-off M-60 machine gun dangling from two web belts hung over his shoulders. An M-60 usually took two men to operate. The book assigned a crew of three. A crude handle had been welded onto the barrel so the Marine could control the kick without resting it on a bipod. Two cans of machine-gun ammo lay against his chest, suspended from his shoulders. In addition to all this weight, Mellas guessed that he also carried the usual full pack of the bush Marine: sleeping gear, food, extra clothes, hand grenades, books, letters, magazines, ponchos for shelter from the rain, shovel, claymore mines, bars of C-4 plastic explosive, trip flares, handmade stove, pictures of girlfriends, toilet articles, insect repellent, cigarettes, rifle-cleaning gear, WD-40, jars of freeze-dried coffee, and maybe a package or two of long-rats: freeze-dried trail food designed as rations for long-range patrols but more often used by the grunts for special occasions. On the Marine’s head was an Australian bush hat, left brim folded up at the side. Matted blond hair, discolored with grime, showed beneath it. His uniform was a mass of tattered holes and filth. One trouser leg had been torn off just below the knee, revealing pasty white flesh covered with infected leech bites and jungle rot. His hands, face, and arms were also covered with jungle rot and open sores. You could smell him as he walked by. But he walked by as if the LZ belonged to him, seemingly unaware of the hundred or more pounds he carried. He was a bush Marine, and Mellas wanted fervently to be just like him.

  What Mellas didn’t know then, but knew now, was that Vancouver had made the usual swap for the most tattered clothing in his platoon—he would be able to get all new clothing back in the rear—and that Lieutenant Fitch, acting on Fredrickson’s recommendation, had sent him to VCB to clean up his NSU—nonspecific urethritis. Vancouver had contracted this medical problem when the company was at VCB some weeks before, waiting to lift out on the next operation. Instead of staying where he should have been, he had sneaked off one night through seven kilometers of unsecured territory to a Buru village near Ca Lu. Rumor had it that Vancouver was secretly married to a girl there.

  The memory of seeing Vancouver at VCB gave Mellas a deep yearning to be back in its comparative safety. From VCB, Matterhorn had looked like the bush. Now Matterhorn itself felt like VCB. In the distant valley below Mellas were unseen trails, connecting base camps and supply dumps, crisscrossing the border into North Vietnam and Laos, a spidery network that carried the supplies and replacements for the NVA’s operations against the population centers in the south and along the coast. The battalion’s job was to stop them. Soon, he knew, he’d be down there—no perimeter, no artillery battery, no landing zones, no Matterhorn. The real bush.

  Mellas’s mind snapped back to the task at hand. They were going on another routine patrol to protect the artillery battery.

  When Mole finished cleaning his machine gun, he walked over to Connolly and nodded. Connolly broke into activity, calling out the starting order of the fire teams in the patrol. Vancouver moved quietly down toward the intricate maze that was the only way through the barbed wire. Skosh, normally Bass’s radio operator, had been sitting against a stump with his eyes closed the whole time. He rose and joined Mellas behind the first team. He and Hamilton had traded jobs to help relieve boredom. The scout dog, Pat, sniffed at each Marine as he went by, memorizing his smell. Once in the jungle, Pat would be alert to any smell that was different. Arran said Pat could memorize well over a hundred individual scents.

  In five minutes they were down the steep hill into the jungle, away from the litter, tangled wire, garbage, and barren mud. A bird called. They heard its wings as it flapped away from the squad’s path. The canopy rose high above them, 100 to 150 feet, blocking out sunlight, casting the squad into shadow. Down they went, like divers in a gray-green sea.

  Pat was alert almost immediately, but Mellas and Corporal Arran were both expecting one of three two-man outposts that sat outside the company perimeter during the day. The squad wound silently by Meaker and Merritt from Second Platoon, acknowledging them with silent smiles. Outpost, or OP, duty was easy except that the OP was likely to be sacrificed warning the company of an attack.

  The squad continued down the trail. The OP disappeared behind them. About ten minutes later, Arran went down on one knee, his hand on Pat’s quivering back, trying to read Pat’s message. The squad halted, and everyone tensed, looking to the sides of the trail. Arran pointed off the trail to the right and then pointed down. Mellas raised an eyebrow to Conman, and Conman nodded. Mellas put his thumb up—OK—and Conman tapped the kid in front of him and pointed right. The squad slipped off the trail that followed the crest of the finger and began working down a steep draw toward the valley floor. Suddenly, they were engulfed in bamboo. The top of the bamboo was about three feet above their heads, and they had to thread their way cautiously, moving aside stalks to build their own tunnel through the solid green mass.

  Vancouver, on point, started going too far into the bottom of the draw. Mellas threw a pebble at Conman. Conman turned, and Mellas gave him a negative sign and pointed upslope. The word passed up front to Vancouver, and the squad quit going downhill into the draw, staying mid-slope on the finger that led down to the valley. Walking down a draw was an invitation to an ambush.

  The sign came for the machetes. One was passed up from behind Mellas and soon everyone could hear the dull thwack of the blade as an impassible tangle was cut away so the squad could move again. With each sound, rifles were held tighter, and eyes and ears strained a little more. Finally the sound ceased. The squad began moving again, everyone ready to fire at the slightest noise or movement in the jungle.

  The squad crawled, slid, sweated, and muttered its way through the dark jungle. Machetes had to be passed forward again. Again their dull thwacking echoed down the line. Kids bit their lower lips, fingered their safeties off and on. Yet without the machetes they couldn’t move; and if they couldn’t move, they couldn’t return to the safety of the perimeter.

  Conman rotated the lead fire team as each team became exhausted from the tension of being on point and the backbreaking work of swinging the machetes. Everyone, even Mellas, took his turn with a machete. Mellas knew it was foolish for him—it hindered tactical control—but he wanted to show that he could share some of the burden. He was acutely aware that the squad could be heard hundreds of meters away. Yet the patrol was going to certain checkpoints to make sure the NVA were kept well away from approach paths to Matterhorn. This literal bushwhacking let the patrol accomplish its mission without walking down established trails where the odds of getting ambushed were greatly increased. As he was finding out, no strategy was perfect. All choices were bad in some way.

  Within minutes Mellas’s hands were raw and blistered, and his arm felt weighted down. The whole time he was hacking at the bamboo he felt naked, aware that his rifle was in his left hand, and that his finger was not on the trigger. If he was fired on he would have to rely on the kid behind him to take out the enemy. Finally, after an eternity, someone tapped him on the shoulder and he dropped back behind Conman, where Skosh was with the radio. Mellas was sweating profusely, from both his labor and his fear. A voice within his head began mocking him, asking him why in hell any NVA would be anywhere near the middle of this damned bamboo patch they’d stumbled into.

  Two more hours went by before they were out of the bamboo and back into the relative ease of walking through jungle, sweating, fighting insects, groping, as blind as the leeches against which they waged their real war. Lieutenant Fitch asked for pos reps—position reports—every twenty minutes or so.
Mellas dutifully radioed them in, feeling frustrated and useless because they barely changed. In two hours the patrol had gone perhaps 300 meters.

  Then, in an instant, the dullness and fatigue were swept away, leaving clean, cold terror.

  Conman dived to the dirt in front of Mellas. Skosh too hit the dirt, before Mellas could even fold his knees. The entire squad was flat on the ground, rifles alternating sides all along the line, as they were assigned. Conman peered intently forward, then he started to hunch and wriggle backward on his belly and forearms toward Mellas. He turned and held up three fingers, then held out an open palm with a questioning look on his face. At least three, maybe more. Mellas’s heart started to pound painfully in his throat. He was trying to remember what he’d been told to do, back at Quantico. His mind seemed empty. Conman squirmed back farther. Mellas could see no one else. All alone. All alone, and maybe about to die.

  “Pat alerted,” Conman whispered. “Arran says at least three gooks, by the way Pat’s acting. Probably more.”

  “Maybe it’s the machine-gun team,” Mellas whispered, thinking, Why me?

  Conman shrugged. “What’ll we do, Lieutenant?”

  Mellas didn’t have the slightest idea.

  He wanted to radio Bass and the Jayhawk and ask them. At the same time, he knew that this idea was ridiculous. His mind was turning over possibilities so fast that he felt dizzy. Meanwhile, Conman waited, open-mouthed, for Mellas to come up with a plan of action. If it was just three, he could send in the squad on line and wipe them out. If it was a three-man OP, an outpost for a larger unit, that unit could be anything from a platoon to a company. If he went in with the squad, they’d walk right into the deep shit and be lucky to come out with anybody alive. Then again, if it was only three there would be no excuse for not going after them. But someone would probably get killed. It might be Mellas, unless he sent two fire teams in without him. But what would the others think of that? He’d have to go. But he could get killed. It was only three. How could he be afraid? The odds were so much in their favor. Mellas suddenly saw himself and the fourteen squad members lined up against a wall, facing a firing squad of fifteen men, only one of whom had a bullet in his rifle. The odds would be very much in his favor there as well. But suppose the one bullet hit him. He suddenly knew that odds became meaningless when everything was at stake.

  Mellas decided to assume it was an outpost for a larger group until he knew otherwise. That meant he’d have to find out. His training took over. His mind started inventorying his available weapons.

  “Gun up,” he whispered to Skosh. The word went back to invisible kids lying on the jungle floor. “Set it in here,” Mellas whispered to Conman. “Put Vancouver with his machine gun one-eighty from it.”

  “He won’t like it.”

  “To hell with him. Send a fire team around to the left. We’ll cover with Mole if they get into the shit. Who do you want to go?”

  Now it was Conman’s turn to play God, at age nineteen. He shut his eyes. “Rider.”

  So some are chosen to die young.

  Mellas turned to Skosh. “Rider up.” Skosh crawled back toward the next man. “Rider up.” The whisper passed along.

  “Your seventy-nine man have any shotgun rounds?” Mellas asked Conman.

  Conman held up three fingers.

  Mellas cursed under his breath. The rounds, so useful in the jungle where nothing could be seen, were always in short supply. The M-79 men hoarded them like misers.

  “He’ll go with the team.”

  Conman nodded.

  “Set the gun in so Rider can get his ass back if he runs into trouble. I’ll go and pick him up.”

  “What about artillery?” Conman asked.

  Mellas felt a sudden sinking in his stomach. He’d forgotten all about it. “I’ll see Daniels on the way down,” he said, saving face.

  Conman gave him a thumbs-up and started crawling to the nearest person to set up the perimeter.

  Mellas passed Skosh. “Stick with Conman. I’ll be with Daniels and on the arty frequency if the Six wants me.” Mellas continued crawling down the line of intense questioning faces. He kept whispering, “Three gooks. Maybe more. Conman’ll set you in,” all the while motioning them forward. He met Mole and Young, Mole’s assistant gunner, moving forward, both of them sweating heavily. Mole looked grim. Young gave a wan smile, dragging the heavy machine-gun ammunition beside him on the ground, trying very hard to move without making noise.

  “You’ll block for Rider,” Mellas whispered to Mole. “See Conman.” Mole nodded, continuing in a low crawl, the large gun cradled across his arms as he worked his way forward. Rider came crawling forward behind Mole and Young, his face glistening, his eyes slightly wild. The two frightened kids in his fire team crawled behind him. Yet no one questioned that they would do what they were told. “Three gooks,” Mellas whispered. “We have to find out if that’s all. Could be an OP. Tell Connolly that I said for you to take Gambaccini and his M-79 with you.”

  Rider licked his lips and looked quickly at his two friends. One nodded. The other was staring into the jungle as if the intensity of his gaze could reveal its secret. But the undergrowth revealed nothing. The secret could be revealed only by crawling into the jungle and meeting it there.

  Rider nodded and pointed uphill, looking at his team. The three of them crawled toward the head of the column, disappearing almost immediately. Mellas continued down the line, sending kids forward to form the perimeter.

  Daniels crawled up, his radio slipping awkwardly from side to side on his back.

  “The angle is the shits for Golf Battery,” Daniels whispered. “The ridge is between them and the gooners. The one-oh-fives will have to shoot nearly straight up to come straight down on them and Golf is so far away the rounds won’t reach. If they shoot a flatter trajectory to make the distance, they’ll hit the ridge’s front side or fly right over the target. I think you ought to use the company’s sixties. The rounds are a tenth the weight, but they’ll hit the target. I’ve got them up on the net now.”

  Mellas nodded his head, thankful for Daniels’s foresight. “Good,” he said.

  Daniels started forward again, twisting the frequency knob at the same time to tell his battery to stand by, that he’d be using the mortars; then he switched frequencies again and started talking to the company mortar squad. Mellas and Daniels met Vancouver lying in front of them, his own machine gun cradled on a rotten limb. Skosh was crawling toward Mellas, holding out the handset. Mellas grabbed it, waiting for Daniels to finish with the mortars. He noticed that Rider’s fire team and Gambaccini and his M-79 grenade launcher were already gone. “It’s the skipper,” Skosh whispered.

  “I’ll need a pos rep,” Fitch said. “Over.”

  “We haven’t moved squat since the last one,” Mellas whispered. “Over.”

  “Bravo One, I want a pos rep. You copy?”

  “Wait one.” Mellas’s hands were shaking as he dug out his map. The jungle made it impossible to see any landmarks. He tried to remember the terrain they’d walked over, estimate the distances. It was like navigating underwater. He stabbed a finger at the most likely spot, still feeling it was the same place he’d radioed in last time. He looked at Daniels, raising his eyebrows. Daniels moved his finger to a point on his own map with his own peculiar pencil marks and dogears, not trusting anyone else’s. He looked at where Mellas was pointing on his own map. Thumbs-up. Mellas radioed in the position. If he was wrong, the shells could hit Rider’s team, or them, instead of the enemy.

  Fitch got off the hook and let Corporal Devon, the squad leader of the 60-millimeter mortars, come back up on the net.

  Daniels started talking. “Bravo Whiskey, Bravo One One, fire mission. Over.”

  And Mellas had nothing to do.

  He sat down while Daniels called in the mission. He noticed that there were ants on the ground where they had set in. He could barely see the backs of some of the kids as they lay beneath the foliage. A bird chirped. He didn’t know if the whole thing wasn’t just a foolish exercise.

  The
thunk of mortar shells leaving the tube jarred him. For all the hours they’d walked, he was surprised to hear the sounds of tubing so close to him. There was a sudden rush and a loud crash as the 60-millimeter shells came nearly straight down. The sounds were muffled and seemed far away. Mellas wondered if they’d read the map that badly.

  “Right fifty. Drop one hundred,” Daniels whispered, correcting by sound alone. The second salvo came down right on the ridge above them. The sounds were magnified tenfold, no longer masked by the earth. Daniels called for four salvos. Then he adjusted to the right and called in four more. Mellas was amazed: it was all mechanical, yet people were probably getting killed.

  Pat was lying quietly next to Arran, who was sitting against a log. The dog was panting and so seemed to be grinning. His odd reddish ears were standing up.

  The radio whispered. Skosh handed Mellas the handset. “I have to know the word on the basketball team.” It was Fitch, using the radio code for a fire team. “Big John Six wants to know. Also Golf Six wants to know why he’s standing by and not firing the mission. Over.”

  “Tell him character Delta thinks the angle is bad. We’re masked by a ridge and the mortars have a better shot at it. And I can’t walk out and ask the damned basketball team what the score is because I don’t exactly know where they are. Which is another reason why we don’t want the artillery right now. Over.”

  Fitch came back up laughing. “OK. Let me know ASAP. Six out.”

  An ant bit Mellas, who suppressed a yelp. He noticed Pat pressing his paws on the ground, holding his head back as if to push the ants away. Several of the kids were squirting insect repellent on their faces and legs. He looked at his wristwatch. Only five minutes had passed. More mortar shells crumped into the jungle; the explosions moved the ground beneath them yet seemed somehow far away. Mellas slapped at a fly and missed. It circled off and landed on Skosh, who did exactly the same thing. Two more minutes went by. Daniels told the mortars to hold off for a minute. One of the kids was cautiously moving his leg back and forth, probably trying to get the blood back into a foot that had fallen asleep. The fly landed on Mellas again. Then the jungle ripped apart.