Matterhorn Page 20

  Vancouver pulled another belt of ammunition from the metal box on his chest and slapped it into the gun’s receiver. He heard Connolly shouting for Gambaccini, the M-79 man, and Rider, his first fire team leader. He saw the lieutenant, who’d moved forward and was shouting something at Hamilton and reloading a magazine himself. Then Gambaccini popped up and let loose with a grenade over Vancouver’s head. There was a crashing sound in the brush to his left. He almost fired, but it was Rider moving his team up; all four were abreast and to the left of the trail in the jungle. They began laying down disciplined fire, pouring bullets into the unseen enemy.

  To Mellas, the whole thing happened so quickly that he didn’t even remember thinking. There was the sudden burst of Vancouver’s machine gun, and Mellas dived for the ground and immediately started crawling forward to find out what was happening. Automatically, he started shouting for Mole to get the gun up front and heard the command being relayed back down the line. Fitch’s excited voice was screaming over the radio. Mellas shouted at Hamilton—“Tell him I don’t know. I don’t know”—and crawled furiously forward.

  He had just crawled around a bend in the trail when Vancouver’s gun stopped and he saw Connolly roll out, firing in front of him while Vancouver was scrambling backward. Mellas shoved his face into the dirt just behind Vancouver’s right knee, poked his rifle blindly down the trail, and opened up over Vancouver’s head. Almost simultaneously, it seemed, the M-79 grenade launcher shot off a solid thump that sent a round of fléchettes down the trail. Then a whole fire team crashed through the jungle on his left and opened up on full automatic. All this time, Connolly was also shouting for Mole and the machine gun, crawling backward.

  Mole came scrambling up the trail, gun cradled in his arms, crawling crablike, awkwardly, but very fast. His A gunner, Young, the only white kid in the machine-gun teams except for Hippy, crawled behind him, dragging the heavy steel boxes of machine-gun belts. Mole slammed the gun down on its bipod just off the trail and immediately started laying disciplined bursts of fire down the dark green corridor. Tracers sped down the tunnel of jungle like the taillights of receding cars. Young crawled up next to the barrel, fresh belt in hand, eyes wide with fear, ready to reload.

  Mellas rolled back and grabbed the hook from Hamilton, panting for air. “Ambush. I knew this fucking trail. Death trap. Vancouver spotted them. Before we got into the kill zone. I think they dee-deed. Over.”

  “Casualties? Over.”

  “That’s a neg. Over.”

  “Thank God,” Fitch replied, forgetting radio procedure.

  Mellas was quivering with excitement and with a strange exultation, as if his team had just won a football championship. No casualties. He’d done well. It was over too quickly, though. Somehow, it should be prolonged. He wanted to tell Fitch and Hawke all about it. He wanted to go running down the long line of excited Marines, telling the story of the fight over and over again. They’d broken up an ambush. His platoon. Killed two, maybe three of the enemy, and suffered not a scratch. A perfect job.

  “Bravo Six, this is Bravo One. Over.”

  “Bravo Six,” Fitch answered.

  “We need artillery,” Mellas pleaded excitedly. “The goddamned gooners are dee-deeing right out of the fucking area. Where’s the goddamn mortars? Let’s get some.”

  “Roger that, Bravo One. Character Delta’s working up an arty mission right now. It’s a little hard on the mortar squad to fire shells into the tree limbs over their heads. You copy? Over.” Mellas was too excited to notice Fitch’s sarcasm.

  He crawled over to where Connolly was lying beside Mole, peering down the shadowy trail. Connolly, too, was quivering and breathing hard. Vancouver was to Connolly’s left, and Rider’s fire team to the left of Vancouver, pulled back now in echelon, forming the left side of a wedge. The rest of the squad, without being told, had formed the right side of the wedge at the head of the column to get maximum fire in the direction of the ambush but still allow fire to their sides to protect their flanks.

  “I think they drug the body away, sir,” Connolly said. “Just as we was crawling back, I thought I caught some movement. Did you see them?”

  “Yeah,” Mellas lied, without intending to. “You’re right.” In his imagination, fueled by the excitement, this mention of an NVA soldier pulling a body back into the cover of the jungle was enough to convince him that he’d actually seen it happen. “Why doesn’t the skipper send a platoon around in an envelopment?” he asked, staring down the trail.

  Connolly looked at Mellas. “In this shit?”

  Mellas stopped gazing straight ahead and looked at Connolly. For some reason, that comment had brought him down. Once more he saw tangled jungle on both sides of a narrow muddy path. “Yeah, it’d take forever. They’d be sitting ducks. You’d hear them for miles.”

  “There it is, sir.”

  “Maybe we can get it on with the artillery.” Mellas wanted to keep talking about the incident. “You’re sure about the gook you zapped in the head?” he asked.

  “I saw his fucking face disappear,” Connolly said grimly.

  “We’ll call it a confirmed, even if we don’t have the body. I mean, there’s no way the gooner can still be alive. Vancouver must have greased at least another one or two.” Mellas turned to Vancouver. “Hey, Vancouver, how many you think you got?”

  Vancouver looked down at his steaming weapon. “Jeez, sir, all I saw was fucking bushes and all this shit came flying at me. I maybe hit a couple of them, though.”

  “We’ll look for blood trails soon as the arty mission’s over. But we must have got at least one confirmed and two probables.”

  Mellas turned around to where Hamilton was lying with the heavy radio pressing him into the dirt, its small bent antenna waving in the still air. He proudly reported the score. “Bravo this is One. We got one confirmed up here and two probables. Over.”

  “Roger, one confirmed and two probables,” Pallack’s voice answered. “Heads down. I just heard character Delta say ‘shot.’ He’ll be working it in close. Over.”

  “Incoming,” Mellas called out in a loud voice. “Friendly incoming.”

  He looked around to see if his men were reasonably safe. Then it occurred to him that everybody already had his head down and had been that way for the past three minutes. He buried his own head in the earth as the first anguished scream of the 105s came through the sky from Eiger.

  It was again Third Squad’s turn to take point. They handed off Williams’s body to Second Squad and moved quietly forward. Cortell kept taking his helmet off and putting it on, rubbing his high, glistening forehead. Everyone hurried through the would-be kill zone, breathing a thank-you for Vancouver’s eyes and reaction time.

  Jackson found two rice cakes hanging from a man’s bloody web belt that had been removed and tossed beside the trail. He happily stuffed them into his large trouser pockets, as all of his squad’s food was gone. He quickly cut the brass buckle with its red star from the belt, knowing it would bring some good money from souvenir hunters in Da Nang, and passed it back to Vancouver. A little farther down the trail they found a bloody cap. That also was passed back to Vancouver, who silently gave it to Connolly. Connolly stuffed it into his pocket.

  Mellas’s whole body was zinging. His hands quivered. He started at nearly every noise and talked too rapidly, and too much, on the radio. He kept mentally replaying the scene, wondering how he could have reacted faster and killed more of them, wondering if Connolly was aware that, while he was changing magazines, Mellas had saved him by firing. He wondered if people outside the company would hear about his action and how his platoon had succeeded when Alpha Company had lost so many in a similar ambush. He remained charged up until they reached the ammunition dump that afternoon as the light began to fade from the gray sky.

  At the dump, Mellas was bitterly disappointed.

  He couldn’t believe that all the reports he’d read about the Air Force and Navy destroying bunkers had referred to what he saw before him: three large holes dug in the dank ground, covered with logs and earth.
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  Inside the three bunkers were ten 120-millimeter rockets, several hundred 82-millimeter mortar shells, eighty small 61-millimeter mortar shells, enough AK-47 ammunition to supply a platoon for one firefight, and a few medical supplies donated by the English Red Cross.

  Hawke seemed strangely happy. He broke into the hawk dance, then climbed on top of one of the bunkers and tossed bandage rolls in the air like streamers, shouting at the top of his lungs, “The fucking English! I knew it was the fucking English behind this war!” He laughed and tossed another bandage, looping it in the trees. The whiteness looked out of place against the dark canopy.

  The company mostly shrugged at the Jayhawk’s antics. Cassidy organized a work party, and soon the ammunition was hauled into a pit where he, Samms, Bass, and Ridlow joyfully collaborated in blowing it up.

  Everyone buried his head in the earth and they set off the charge. There was a tremendous explosion, but not even a quarter of the ammunition went off. The rest twisted skyward, tumbling end over end, and scattered across the area. The kids booed. Cassidy laughed and immediately put the booers to work collecting the ammunition. The Marines on the work detail grumbled. “We must have the only fucking lifers in the Crotch that can’t blow up a fucking ammo dump.” They waited for an hour to make sure there were no cook-offs in the pit and once more set the charges. This time they covered the ammo with rocks and earth to contain the explosion.

  The platoon sergeants themselves were laughing about the incongruity of the situation. Most people would think they couldn’t light a match around an ammo dump without setting it off. Basically, everyone was happy. They would probably clear an LZ the next morning and sky out by afternoon, their mission accomplished with no casualties other than Williams.

  Mellas, however, felt a curious malaise, anxiety, and an emptiness beyond hunger—he had been on half rations for five days and had eaten nothing at all today. Four thoughts kept hammering at him. First, how could the English, seemingly the most civilized of people, the people with whom they’d fought side by side against the Nazis, be aiding their enemy, the North Vietnamese Army? Every penny that the North Vietnamese saved by receiving donations could be spent on ammunition that could kill him. Every life saved was a life that could kill him, too. Mellas felt betrayed. Second, he was still trying to reconcile those tiny log-covered pits referred to as bunkers with the images in his mind of bombs smashing concrete and steel, the Siegfried Line, the Guns of Navarone. Third, why in hell had they walked all this way, sacrificed Williams, and nearly killed the entire First Squad but for Vancouver’s uncommon alertness, for no more ammunition than could be hauled off with a couple of trucks?

  These thoughts nagged at him as he struggled to dig his hole for the night. When he finished, he sat down to face the fourth question. Should he make his last cup of coffee now or in the morning? The platoon was just about out of food. He decided to wait. He went off to find Hawke and Fitch to talk about medals for the action, half hoping that maybe he’d get one, too, but at the same time realizing that all he’d really done was show up for the party. He also hoped Hawke and Fitch would be fixing coffee.

  Fitch was on the hook with the Three, who had questions of his own—to which Fitch had the wrong answers.

  “I was informed that there were three ammunition bunkers in this complex. These numbers you’ve given us just don’t jibe. Over.”

  Fitch took a deep breath and looked at Hawke before answering. Pallack rolled his eyes.

  “That’s affirmative. Three bunkers. We got them all. The numbers you got are everything that’s in them. They’re little bunkers. Over.”

  “I copy.” There was a burst of static as Blakely released his transmitting button. Fitch waited nervously. Static burst out again. “Stand by for a frag order, Bravo Six. Over.”

  “Roger your last. Bravo Six out.”

  “A fragment order on the original?” Mellas asked, uneasy about any change. “Does that mean we’re not skying out tomorrow?”

  Fitch shrugged. “Maybe something to do with Delta Company over the ridge. Hell, we can’t go far with everyone out of food.”

  “Not quite everyone,” Hawke said, digging into the side pocket of his utility trousers. He held up a single can of apricots. Everyone looked at it longingly. “And I ain’t opening it.” Hawke stuffed it back into his pocket. “I got a bad feeling about that frag order.”

  At the regimental briefing that afternoon, Major Adams was particularly snappy. Whap. “And at coordinates 768671, elements of Bravo One Twenty-Four destroyed the ammunition dump uncovered by Alpha Company and believed to be one of the supply sources for elements of the Three Hundred Twelfth steel division now known to be operating in our TAOR. Approximately five tons of ammunition consisting of one-hundred-twenty-millimeter rockets, small arms and automatic weapons ammunition, and mortar rounds were destroyed along with approximately one thousand pounds of medical supplies.”

  “Better leave the medical supplies out of the report,” Mulvaney said. “No sense getting somebody riled up about destroying medical supplies.” Somehow the public felt it was OK to kill men with tumbling bullets and flaming jelly, but to kill them by denying them medical supplies was against some societal notion of decency.

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Adams answered.

  Mulvaney turned stiffly in his chair to look back at Colonel Simpson and Major Blakely, who were seated behind him. “Maybe you do have some gooks out there, Simpson,” he said.

  Blakely smiled and looked up at Adams, whose face revealed a twinge of jealousy. Mulvaney turned back to face the briefing officer. He was trying to figure how many men and how long it would take to haul five tons to such a remote location. Through terrain like that, it was quite an accomplishment. He had to admire the North Vietnamese Army. But why were they stacking ammunition there? Was it a way station for moving the ammunition farther south? They could hit Hue again. Now that would be a fucking propaganda disaster. Let the politicians chew on that for a while. But then they might also be preparing a move in force straight across Mutter’s Ridge, where they’d control Route 9 and then starve out VCB. Now that they’d abandoned Matterhorn to get enough troops to do the stupid fucking Cam Lo political operation, that would be what he’d do if he were a gook. He suddenly felt, in the middle of his back, the uneasiness that had saved him so often in Korea and the Pacific. Then he noticed Major Adams waiting nervously to continue, sighed, and nodded his large head. He couldn’t cover everywhere.

  Whap. The pointer moved to the left, three-quarters of an inch, the distance it had taken Bravo Company half a day to move. “As the colonel is aware, Bravo made point-to-point contact with an undetermined-size unit of North Vietnamese Infantry at grid coordinates 735649 earlier today. Two confirmed kills and three probables with no casualties suffered by Bravo Company. The bodies were searched with negative findings.”

  Mulvaney turned to look at Blakely and Simpson. “Someone must have really been on their toes out there,” he said. “Was it a point-to-point or an ambush?” In fact Mulvaney already knew that it was the big blond Canadian kid with the sawed-off M-60 who had busted up an ambush. His jeep driver had the story from one of the First Battalion radio operators. Bravo’s skipper must have been in an awful hurry to be barrel-assing down a trail another company had already been hit on. That young lieutenant was lucky. Probably hadn’t learned when to charge and when not to. Mulvaney would have to talk to him about it if he got the chance.

  Simpson cleared his throat, his face reddening. “In answer to your question, sir, Bravo’s point man apparently fired first and the lead squad pulled back and set up. We called it a point-to-point contact because it seemed the most conservative.”

  Mulvaney grunted and turned to endure the remainder of the briefing. Why in fuck Simpson should worry about breaking up an ambush was beyond him.

  After suffering through hearing the Navy doctor tell how many Marines went through his sick bay, the congressional inquiries officer tell how many letters he’d handled from upset congressmen responding to letters from u
pset mothers and wives, and the Red Cross liaison man tell about dependents who were not getting pay allotments, Mulvaney could finally rise from his chair to address his officers.

  “As you already know, gentlemen, the Fifth Marine Division continues to be involved in a combined cordon and search operation with the First ARVN Division. Our major objective, as you also know, continues to be Cam Lo.” Mulvaney turned to the large map and began outlining the next day’s plan of the ongoing operation, all the while feeling that somehow he had let his regiment down. Working with the goddamned gooks wasn’t his idea of fighting a war, particularly when all that would probably happen was a few old political scores would get settled in Cam Lo. Some SEAL teams had been operating in the villages for several years now, assassinating “known Vietcong leaders,” but where the fuck did that information come from? Supposedly from the CIA, but then none of those spooks were hanging out in the villages. Christ, they’re all six-foot-two white boys from Yale. So where did the spooks get their information? Probably from one of the damned secret societies who were just fingering a leader of another secret society over the control of some drug market and getting their dirty work done courtesy of the United States Navy. Any Vietcong leadership, if the Vietcong existed in any force there at all after their buddies from the north set them up to be obliterated by American firepower during Tet, would be long gone by the time all the security leaks from the ARVN trickled down. Yes, Mulvaney mused, power in the secret societies would definitely shift after Cam Lo, and the spooks would be played for suckers, and his Marines would pay the price. He wanted to kick the CIA’s ass and break the fucking ARVN’s scrawny necks.