Matterhorn: a novel of the Vietnam War Page 22

  “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 upset 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.

  “Simpson,” he said. “I’m going to have to disappoint you. We’ll have to abandon the Matterhorn area for good. I can’t afford to give up any of Mutter’s Ridge. Lookout and Sherpa keep me covered in the Khe Sanh region. Division wants a new fire support base opened at Hill 1609 just beneath Tiger’s Tooth. We’ll have to bring in those two companies in the Matterhorn area and then send one of them out close enough to open 1609.”

  “But, sir.” Simpson stood up, excited, already believing the numbers he’d “estimated” for his report. “We’re just beginning to find what’s really up there.” He turned to look to Blakely for support.

  Blakely didn’t miss his cue. “I’m sure the regimental commander realizes,” Blakely began, “that with the latest findings of Bravo Company, combined with the intelligence estimates of division, there’s a high probability that the NVA is becoming quite active in the far northwest. It would be a real shame after having given those reports to division to have no follow-through on them.”

  Mulvaney almost exploded. The last goddamned thing on his mind was following up on some fucking report he’d turned in to division. Then he remembered his wife. He counted to five. Then he counted five more.

  His mind went back to that night at Camp Lejeune—it must have been 1954 or 1955; he was still a captain in any case; he had Alpha Company, Second Marines. Maizy had come back from bridge with Neitzel’s wife, Dorothy, and some of her cronies. Neitzel was already a major and was heading for Amphibious Warfare School and a big staff job. Mulvaney had been painting the living room, little James slung in a beach towel hanging from his neck.

  “My God, Mike,” Maizy said. “You’re getting paint all over him—and the fumes. The girls’ bedroom must be full of them.” She was smiling and shaking her head, at the same time removing her impeccable white gloves and placing them where they always resided, in her grandmother’s crystal bowl, the only thing she had ever inherited. She grabbed the apron that always hung on the kitchen door hook, and tossed it over her shoulder to protect her only suit. She took the baby from him. “Wouldn’t sleep again?” she asked.

  “Eeyep.”

  “Girls go to bed on time?”

  “Eeyep.”

  “Can you put the roller down?”

  “Uh-oh. Serious scuttlebutt.” He put the roller in the tray and watched her watching little James so that she wouldn’t have to look him in the eye. He knew that she never wanted to hurt his feelings, but he also knew that she didn’t shirk from delivering bad news if it meant a better life for her kids. That same drive had her memorizing bidding rules, with him quizzing her from a book while she ironed clothes so she “wouldn’t make a damned fool of herself in front of the other wives.” That same anxiety had also had her agonizing with her sister at Christmastime about what suit to buy when she had first been invited to the bridge table, as if her sister knew more about suits than Maizy did because she worked in a real office.

  “Dorothy Neitzel did it as a favor, so I don’t want you to take it in the wrong way. She really is trying to help.”

  He watched her glance up at him and then quickly back down at James. “Help how?” Might as well get it over.

  “You know, what do you guys call it, back-channel communication.”

  “Gossip.”

 
; She laughed. “That’s what we call it.” Then she looked at him seriously. “Oh, Mikey,” she said, her eyes pleading. “Dorothy says you stood up for that awful alcoholic First Sergeant Hanford who got caught trying to divert base water to some sort of . . . some sort of swimming hole or something that he’d dug out with a bulldozer that he’d, what do you call it, requisitioned, from the engineering battalion without asking them for it. We call that stealing.”

  “It gets goddamned hot in those stupid squad bays, and those kids loved it. I told the colonel that all Hanford needed was an off-the-record chewing out. Instead they busted him. He’s got four kids. All he was doing was looking out for the troops. You know what I told you that day you picked me up from the hospital.”

  “Yes, I know. That you’d always take the side of the bush Marine.” She sighed. “Mikey, of course you’re right, but on that very same day, in my father’s 1939 Chevy—I was driving because your leg still wouldn’t work from Okinawa—I told you that there might be times that you could be a little more circumspect. You can do a lot more good for your bush Marines as a colonel than as a captain.”

  He took a quick God-help-me look at the ceiling. “Hanford did the right thing the wrong way. No harm, no foul.”

  “The harm, Michael, was telling the colonel that if he ever got his fat ass out of his air-conditioned office he’d understand what Hanford was trying to do.”

  Mulvaney tightened his lips and folded his arms across the chest.

  “Don’t you get stubborn with me, Michael Mulvaney. You were wrong to do it. Can’t you think of your own family, your own kids, for once?”

  “That’s unfair.”

  She breathed, softened. “Yes, it was.” She reached out to touch his arm. “But Mikey, please, you’ve got to hold your temper.” His temper had been an issue ever since he’d gotten back from the Pacific. She moved her hand back to the baby. “Do you want to know what else Dorothy told me?”

  “I can’t wait.”

  “She is doing us a favor, Mikey, for God’s sake.”

  Mulvaney sat down on the tarp-covered couch and looked up at her. “Go ahead. All ready on the firing line.”

  She sat down beside him, scrunching sideways, her tight skirt riding up to show the welt of her stocking, something that always distracted Mulvaney. She tugged, unsuccessfully, at the skirt with her right hand, trying to keep James on her shoulder with her left and Mulvaney on task. She solved both problems by putting the baby and the apron across her lap. She pointed a finger at him, eyes merry. “You are always horny.”

  “So? I’m on the firing line anyway. Shoot me.”

  “Later.” She smiled down at the baby and said in a quiet singsong, “Daddy wants to make you a little sister.” Then she looked up at Mulvaney, her large green eyes suddenly serious. “Dorothy says that they all think you’re . . .” She hesitated.

  “Go on.”

  “That you’re some kind of a throwback to World War II. The word is that Mulvaney will never get out of the jungle, but he’s good in a fight.”

  “That’s bad?”

  “Oh, Mikey, don’t be deliberately dense. You know as well as I do that it’s the planners that get ahead, not the fighters.”

  “And the politicians.”

  “Yes!” She stamped one black pump on the floor and rose to her feet. Putting the baby back on her shoulder, she walked quickly into their bedroom where the crib was next to the bed, her two-inch heels punctuating every step.

  He had watched the way her tight wool skirt beautifully molded her rear end.

  The briefing room swam back into consciousness, a layer above the memory of his home and his wife. God, how he missed her now. He saw everyone waiting for him to say something.

  He knew Blakely was right. With promising reports coming in from Bravo Company, it would look foolish not to follow through. “But where in hell am I supposed to get the men to follow up on your fucking reports?” he asked. He was uncomfortably aware that his strangled anger at Blakely and the ARVNs made his voice sound petty and whining.

  Blakely thought quickly. “Why not let Bravo Company sweep the area and move up to 1609 on foot, sir.”

  Mulvaney looked at the map. It looked like a little over twenty kilometers as the crow flies, but the small squares were almost completely brown with the thick mass of twenty-meter contour intervals. They could barely fit next to each other and still be distinguishable. He remembered parts of Korea that looked like this, and he shuddered—there hadn’t been any jungle there. “What’s their condition?” he asked Simpson. “They’ve been out in the bush a long time, if I remember.”

  “Top-notch, sir. They could be there in four days.”

  If Simpson said four days, then it would probably take eight. “Food? Power sources for the radios? Ammo? With this Cam Lo op, you know I’m short on birds for resupply.”

  “No problem, sir,” Simpson replied, enjoying the chance to show the other battalion commanders how ready his battalion was.

  Blakely paled and swallowed. He hadn’t bothered to tell Simspon that Bravo had given half its food to Delta almost a week ago to cover the error of pushing Delta off inadequately supplied.

  “What do you think, Major Blakely?” Mulvaney asked.

  Blakely didn’t hesitate. “One Twenty-Four can do the job, sir. You know what they say about the impossible.”

  “Yes,” Mulvaney said quietly, turning to look at the map. “It takes a little longer.” Sick, frostbitten Marines crowded into his memory, struggling up frozen hills, their backs bent under mortars and ammunition, the wounded strapped on litters bound to fenders and in the backs of jeeps and small trucks, clenching their teeth at each painful jolt. Then his mind contrasted that image with one of thin, sore-ridden bodies with barely enough energy to fight the jungle, let alone fight the Japanese. He forced his mind back to the brightly lit briefing room and the map in front of him. He figured it would be a fucking hump at that. Still, he could live with it. They had ten days before 1609 had to be secured. That left Bravo two real days of wiggle room. Something, however, nagged at him. It was like a lump beneath a sleeping bag that he couldn’t quite flatten. But with that much ammo in that dump, and if he didn’t follow through on it as Blakely had suggested . . . He knew he had a reputation for being too impetuous. In this new Marine Corps of careful staff work and covering your ass with paper, it just wasn’t the same. His old friend Neitzel had blended right in with the new Corps; that was why Neitzel had a division and Mulvaney didn’t. If they hit pay dirt, it couldn’t hurt his chances of becoming a general. He smiled, imagining his wife pinning on his stars. “Oh, hell,” he growled at himself.

  “Sir?” Major Adams responded.

  “Nothing, Adams. OK, Simpson, you’re on. Don’t let me down.”

  The frag order that appended their original order to destroy the supply dump reached Bravo Company one hour after the regimental briefing broke up. It consisted of a series of checkpoints and times of arrival, nothing more, some in deep draws, others high on ridges. The line of march took no heed of the wild terrain.

  Hawke began the actuals meeting. “Gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to our new leader, Captain Meriwether Lewis. My name is Clark, but you can call me Wm for short. We won’t be skying out for a while.”

  Fitch explained the frag order. “We’ve got about three hours of daylight left, so we might as well get a couple of hours humping. Otherwise there’s no chance of making checkpoint Alpha.”

  “Shit,” Mellas said. “We just dug in. That body stinks and my platoon’s out of food.”

  “You ain’t the Lone Ranger, Mellas,” Hawke said, “but you might be Sacajawea. You still got point.”

  Mellas gritted his teeth and took his map out of his pocket, but he had to smile at Hawke’s joke. “I don’t see any point in it, that’s all,” he said. People groaned and Mellas felt better. “What about this funny-looking three-cornered hill for a position for tonight?” he said. “We might make it before dark. Jesus, though, the river looks like it runs right through a fucking canyon.”

  They discussed it briefly and Fitch ga
ve the go-ahead. He ordered the food redistributed but would allow anyone to keep one C-ration can if he had one, mitigating any resentment on the part of those who had saved their rations. Most of the kids, like Mellas, had already eaten all the food they had. The platoon sergeants collected everything that remained. The redistributed food, now held in common, equaled about three-quarters of a can per person. Twenty minutes after redistributing the food, the company wound out of the ammunition dump, Jacobs’s squad leading, Jackson’s struggling with Williams’s body.

  They moved slowly northeastward, following a rushing stream, higher into the mountains, closer to the DMZ. The terrain grew wildly beautiful, with steep jungle-covered peaks and rushing torrents of water from the monsoon rains. Occasionally, someone would slip on a glassy, water-smoothed rock and his entire body would be covered in swift white water that immediately soaked into his pack, wetting his poncho liner. Unable to regain his feet against the force of the stream because of all his heavy gear, he would be pulled up by laughing companions. Those who got soaked, however, knew that they’d be fighting the cold all that night, trying to use body heat to dry their clothes and poncho liners.