Matterhorn: a novel of the Vietnam War Read online

  “How’s the wire coming?” Mellas asked. He didn’t really care about the task of stringing the barbed wire in front of the holes, but he knew he should appear interested.

  “Not bad, sir,” Bass said. “Third Squad’s been working on it all day. We’re close to finished.”

  Mellas hesitated. Then he plunged into the problem he’d avoided that morning by going out on patrol. “That kid from Third Squad come to see you about going to the rear again?” He was still overwhelmed, trying to remember everyone’s name.

  “Name’s Mallory, sir.” Bass snorted. “Malingering fucking coward.”

  “He says he has headaches.”

  “And I’ve got a pain in the ass. There’s two hundred good Marines on this hill want to go to the rear, better ones than that piece of shit. He’s had a headache ever since he came out to the bush. And don’t give me any of that ‘Watch out ’cause he’s a brother’ shit, because there’s a lot of good splibs out here that don’t have headaches. He’s chickenshit.” Bass took a long drink and then exhaled steam into the cool damp air. “And, uh,” Bass added, a slight smile on his lips, “Doc Fredrickson has him up by his hooch. He’s been waiting for you to get back.”

  Mellas felt the hot sweet coffee move down his throat and settle into his stomach. He wriggled his water-wrinkled toes to keep from nodding off. The warmth of the coffee through the can felt good against his hands, which were beginning to run pus, the first symptoms of jungle rot. “Shit,” he said to no one in particular. He placed the cup against the back of his neck where the strap of the magazine bandoleer had rubbed it raw.

  “Drink it, Lieutenant,” said Bass. “Don’t make love to it.” Bass took out his pocketknife and began carving another elaborate notch on his short-timer’s stick. Mellas looked at it with envy. He had 390 days left to go on his own tour.

  “Do I have to deal with it now?” Mellas asked. He instantly regretted asking the question. He knew he was whining.

  “You’re the lieutenant, sir. RHIP.” Rank has its privileges.

  Mellas was trying to think of a witty comeback when he heard a scream from Second Squad’s area. “Jesus! Get the squid! Get Doc Fredrickson!” Bass immediately threw down his stick and ran toward the voice. Mellas sat there, so stupid with exhaustion he couldn’t will himself to move. He looked at Hamilton, who shrugged and finally took a sip of his coffee. He watched Jacobs, the fire team leader with the stutter from Second Squad, run up the hill and disappear inside Fredrickson’s hooch. Mellas sighed and started pulling his bloody socks and wet boots back on as Jacobs and Fredrickson, the Navy medical corpsman, went sliding and skidding back down the hill. Several minutes later, Bass came walking slowly up the hill, stonily impassive.

  “What is it, Sergeant Bass?” Mellas asked.

  “You’d better go have a look, Lieutenant. It’s the damnedest thing I ever saw. Fisher’s got a leech right smack up the hole in his cock.”

  “God,” Hamilton said. He looked up at the clouds and then back down at the steaming coffee in his hands. He raised the coffee. “Here’s to fucking leeches.”

  Mellas felt revulsion, but also relief. No one could hold him responsible for something like that. Without lacing the boots, he headed down the hill toward Second Squad’s position, slipping in the mud, worrying about how he would replace a seasoned squad leader like Fisher when he knew hardly anyone in the platoon.

  An hour earlier, Ted Hawke had also been worrying about replacing an experienced leader. But Hawke was worrying about Mellas, who had replaced him as First Platoon commander when Hawke had been moved up to the company’s number two spot, executive officer. Hawke had been in-country long enough to be accustomed to being scared—that came with every operation—but he was not used to being worried, and that worried him.

  He picked up a splintered stick and began to doodle absentmindedly in the mud, tracing the pattern of a five-pointed star over and over again, a habit from grade school days that he fell into when he was trying to think. The stick was one of thousands, all that remained of the huge trees that had once stood on this jungle hilltop, just three kilometers from Laos and two from the DMZ. The hill, one of many similar unnamed hills in the area, all of them over a mile high and shrouded by cold monsoon rain and clouds, had the misfortune of being just a little higher than the others. For this reason, a staff officer sitting fifty-five kilometers to the east at Fifth Marine Division headquarters in Dong Ha had picked it to be flattened and shorn of vegetation to accommodate an artillery battery of 105-millimeter howitzers. The same officer had also named it Matterhorn, in keeping with the present vogue of naming new fire support bases after Swiss mountains. The orders soon worked their way down through regiment to the First Battalion, whose commanding officer selected the 180 Marines of Bravo Company to carry them out. This decision dropped Bravo Company and its weary second in command, Lieutenant Theodore J. Hawke, into an isolated valley south of Matterhorn. From there it took a three-day slog through the jungle to reach the top of the hill. Over the course of the next week they turned it, with the help of nearly 400 pounds of C-4 plastic explosive, into a sterile wasteland of smashed trees, tangled logging slash, broken C-ration pallets, empty tin cans, soggy cardboard containers, discarded Kool-Aid packages, torn candy bar wrappers—and mud. Now they were waiting, and Hawke was worrying.

  There were smaller worries than the competence of Lieutenant Mellas. One was that the hill was at the extreme range of the lone 105-millimeter howitzer battery at Fire Support Base Eiger, over ten kilometers to the east. This problem was somewhat related to the waiting, because before they could be dropped into the valley to the north of Matterhorn, they had to await the arrival of Golf Battery, the artillery unit that was supposed to occupy Matterhorn’s now bald hilltop in order to cover infantry patrols operating beyond the protective cover of the howitzers on Eiger. It was all very simple back at headquarters. Alpha and Charlie companies go into the valley first. When they get beyond the artillery cover from Eiger, Golf Battery moves to Matterhorn. Bravo and Delta companies replace Charlie and Alpha companies down in the valley, but they are now under the cover of artillery on Matterhorn. All of this allows the First Battalion to push farther north and west, continuing its mission of attacking the intricate web of roads, trails, supply dumps, and field hospitals that support the NVA’s 320th and 312th steel divisions.

  What wasn’t in the plan was the NVA unit that shot down, with the accurate fire of a .51-caliber machine gun, the first CH-46 supply chopper that tried to reach Matterhorn. The chopper crashed in flames on an adjacent hill that the Marines in Bravo Company immediately named Helicopter Hill. The entire crew died.

  Since then the clouds had lifted only one other time, four days earlier, when another helicopter from Marine Air Group 39, struggling in the thin mountain air, worked its way up to Matterhorn’s landing zone from the valley to the south. It arrived with some food and replacements and departed with a number of new .51-caliber holes and a wounded crew chief. Soon afterward, word came down that MAG-39 wanted the gook machine gun eliminated before Golf Battery was brought in, particularly since the operation would entail dangling ponderous howitzers on cables beneath choppers already straining because of the altitude—choppers that would hardly be able to dodge bullets. This problem, along with another of Hawke’s worries—the monsoon rain and clouds that had made air support impossible and resupply almost impossible—had thrown off the operation’s timetable by three full days and brought down the wrath of Lieutenant Colonel Simpson, radio call sign Big John Six, First Battalion’s commanding officer.

  Hawke stopped doodling and stared down the steep hillside. Wisps of fog obscured the gray wall of jungle just beyond the twisted rolls of barbed wire at the edge of the cleared ground. He was standing just behind the line of fighting holes that belonged to First Platoon, which he had just turned over to the main source of his worry, Second Lieutenant Waino Mellas, United States Marine Corps Reserve. One of the company’s outposts had radioed in that Mellas’s patrol had just passed it on the saddle between Matterhorn and
Helicopter Hill and would be coming in shortly. Hawke was here to get some feel for Mellas when he was exhausted after the adrenaline-pumping tension of a patrol that hadn’t found anything. Hawke had learned long ago that what really mattered in combat was what people were like when they were exhausted.

  Hawke was twenty-two, with freckled skin and thick dark hair with an undertone of red that matched his large red mustache. He wore a green sweatshirt, turned inside out so the nap showed matted and dirty, like old fustian. It was stained with sweat and had dark smudges from his armored flak jacket. His trousers were caked with mud and had a hole in one knee. He wore a billed cap, eschewing the floppy camouflage bush hats as being pretentiously gunjy. He kept scanning the tree line, his eyes darting back and forth in the search pattern of the combat veteran. The hillside was steep enough that he could see over the trees to the top of a dark layer of cloud that hid a valley far below him. That valley was bounded by another ridge of high mountains to its north, just like the ridge to Matterhorn’s south. Somewhere in that valley to the north, Alpha Company had just taken four killed and eight wounded. It had been too far from Eiger for effective artillery support.

  Hawke sighed heavily. Tactically, the company was out on a limb. It was a long way from help and was about to go into combat with all three of its platoons being led by corn-fed rookies. Very quietly he said, “Fuck it,” whirled, and launched the splintered stick into the mass of pushed-over trees and brush that separated the landing zone from the line of holes protecting it. Then the bluegrass tune that had been invading his mind all day came back again. He kept hearing the Country Gentlemen—high harmonies, Charlie Waller’s fast wrists flat-picking his guitar—singing about an entire expedition that had died in an early attempt to climb the Matterhorn in Switzerland. When Hawke put his hands to his ears to stop it, pus from an open jungle rot sore on his hand got smeared on his right ear. He wiped his hand on his filthy trouser leg, blending new pus with old pus, blood from squashed leeches, grease from a spilled can of spaghetti and meatballs, and the damp clay and greasy plant matter that coated the rotting cotton of his camouflage jungle utilities.

  The patrol emerged one by one from the jungle, the Marines bent over, drenched with sweat and rain. Hawke gave a silent snort of approval when he saw that Mellas was right behind Corporal Fisher, where he was supposed to be until Lieutenant Fitch, the CO, said that Mellas was ready to take the lead. Hawke didn’t know how to react to Mellas. He was someone you expected to be in the wrong place, but here he was in the right place. Top Seavers, the company first sergeant, had passed the word over the battalion radio net from Quang Tri that Mellas had gone to some fancy private college and graduated second in his class at the Basic School. The fancy college fit with the good grades from the Basic School, but it made Hawke worry that they might have inherited someone who thought that school smarts trumped experience and heart. More worrisome was Top Seavers’s comment that when Mellas had first shown up at division personnel on New Year’s Day, just six days ago, he had asked for a weapons platoon instead of a rifle platoon. Seavers had concluded that Mellas was trying to avoid going out on patrols, but Hawke wasn’t sure. He read Mellas not as a coward but possibly just as a politician. The commander of the weapons platoon, which traditionally had the three 60-millimeter mortars and the company’s nine machine guns, lived with the company command group. So he had constant contact with the company commander—unlike the rifle platoon commanders, who were isolated down on the lines. But there weren’t enough lieutenants to cover even the rifle platoons now, and with most of the action involving only a platoon or a smaller unit the machine guns were permanently farmed out to the rifle platoons, one to a squad, leaving only the mortars, which could be handled by a corporal. But Mellas didn’t fit the stereotype of an ambitious officer. For starters, he didn’t look any older than the kids he was supposed to command. Also, he didn’t look particularly squared away, everything in its proper place, sails at perfect right angles to the wind, cultivating what an ambitious officer would call command presence. On the other hand, looking careless could just be privileged give-a-shit Ivy League attitude, like wearing duct tape on loafers and jeans with holes in them, knowing all along that they were headed straight to Wall Street or Washington and three-piece suits. Mellas was also handsome to the point of bearing what Hawke’s Irish uncle, Art, would have called the marks of God’s own handiwork, a plus in civilian life but almost a handicap in the Marine Corps. Moreover, he stood in marked contrast to the other new second lieutenant, Goodwin, a much easier read. Goodwin’s record at the Basic School was undistinguished, but Hawke knew he had a natural hunter on his hands. That judgment had been made during the first ten seconds he’d seen the two new lieutenants. The chopper that delivered them to the hill had taken machine-gun fire all the way into the zone. Both lieutenants had come barreling out of the back and dived for the nearest cover, but Goodwin had popped his head up to try to figure out where the NVA machine gun was firing from. Hawke’s problem with Goodwin, however, was that while good instincts were necessary, in modern war they weren’t sufficient. War had become too technical and too complex—and this one in particular had become too political.

  Doc Fredrickson had Fisher flat on his back with his trousers pulled down, in the mud in front of Fisher’s hooch. Those Marines from Second Squad who weren’t on hole watch were standing in a semicircle behind Fredrickson. Fisher was trying to joke but his grin was very tight. Doc Fredrickson turned to Jacobs, Fisher’s most senior fire team leader. “Go tell Hamilton to radio for the senior squid. Tell him we’ll probably need an emergency medevac.”

  “E-e-emergency,” Jacobs repeated, his stutter more pronounced than usual. He immediately started up the hill. Fredrickson turned to Mellas, his eyes serious and intent in his narrow face. “Fisher’s got a leech in his penis. It crawled up the urethra during the patrol and I don’t think I can get it out.”

  Fisher was lying back with his hands folded behind his head. Like most bush Marines he wore no underwear, in order to help stave off crotch rot. It had now been several hours since he had peed.

  Mellas looked up at the swirling fog and then down at Fisher’s wet smiling face. He forced a laugh. “You would have to find a perverted leech,” he said. He checked the time. Less than two hours until dark. A night medevac this high up and in this weather would be impossible.

  “You might as well put your trousers on, Fisher,” Fredrickson said. “Don’t drink any water. It’d be a bad place to have to amputate.”

  Jacobs came slipping back down the hill, breathing hard. He was stopped by Bass, just outside of the immediate circle of Fisher’s curious friends. “I p-passed the word, Sergeant Bass.”

  “OK,” Bass said. “Get Fisher’s gear packed up. Split up his ammo and C-rats. Give the lieutenant his rifle so he doesn’t have to keep borrowing mine. Did he have a listening post tonight or anything?”

  “N-no, we had the p-patrol today,” Jacobs said. His long but normally tranquil face now had a worried look and his broad shoulders had slumped forward. He’d been a fire team leader a few seconds before; now he had the squad.

  Mellas opened his mouth to say that the decision about who would temporarily take over the squad was up to him, but he could see that it had already been made by Bass. He shut his mouth. Mellas knew that if he pulled rank he’d lose what little authority he seemed to have.

  Fredrickson turned to Mellas. “I think we ought to move him up to the LZ. He’ll be starting to feel it pretty soon. No telling when the chopper’s going to make it in.” He looked up at the dark swirling mist. “If it don’t get here quick, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I guess something inside’s got to give and if it screws up the kidney or busts loose inside of him . . .” He shook his head and looked down at his hands. “I just don’t know that much about people’s insides. We never got it in Field Med.”

  “What about the senior squid?” Mellas asked, referring to Hospital Corpsman Second Class Sheller, the company-level corpsman, Fredrickson’s boss.

 
“I don’t know. He’s an HM-2 but I think he worked in a lab the whole time. He’s only out here because he pissed someone off at the Fifth Med. He’s been out here a week longer than you.”

  “He’s worthless,” Bass spat.

  “Why do you say that?” Mellas asked.

  “He’s a fat fucker.”

  Mellas made no reply, wondering what it took to get on Bass’s good list. On the first day Mellas had arrived, desperately wanting everyone to like him, Bass hadn’t made it easy. Bass had been running the platoon for close to a month without any lieutenant, and he was quick to point out that he had been doing his first tour in Vietnam when Mellas was starting college.