Matterhorn: a novel of the Vietnam War Read online

  He threw down the rest of the whiskey, grabbed his utility cap, and pushed through the blackout curtains into the night. Guided by the whitewashed stones that lined the path, he crossed over to the COC, the combat operations center. He pushed open the heavy door, surprising the watch officer, who was reading Playboy, and the three radio operators, two of whom were playing chess. The third was listening to the top-forty countdown from AFVN, the Army radio station in Quang Tri. Everyone scrambled to his feet.

  “Get me Bravo Six,” Simpson barked.

  One of the radio operators began calling. Pretty soon Pallack’s voice answered, and then Fitch came up. His voice was faint as a wraith.

  “This is Big John Six. I want to know why you deliberately disobeyed an order and are sitting on your ass at checkpoint Alpha a full day behind schedule. I want a fucking good explanation or goddamn it you can explain yourself to somebody on Okinawa, because by God I’ll have any commander’s ass that can’t do the job. Over.”

  The radio operators glanced sideways at one another. The watch officer began going over radio messages that had come in from division.

  There was a long pause. “Did you copy me, Bravo Six?” Simpson insisted. “Over.”

  “Roger, sir. I copied.” There was a break in the transmission. “We were fogged in all day. I kept waiting for that bird I’d requested. I have some bad cases of immersion foot, a body, and we’re out of food. It was my judgment we could move faster if we had those problems taken care of. I’ll take full responsibility for the delay. Over.”

  “You bet your ass you will. But that don’t help me explain it to Bushwhacker Six. Over.”

  “I understand, sir. Perhaps if we knew what our mission was it would help the men move. Over.” The distance and weak batteries made Fitch’s voice waver and break.

  “Your mission is to find, close with, and destroy the enemy. That’s the mission of every fucking Marine.” Simpson unconsciously pulled back his shoulders. He was aware of the staff watching him. “Now goddamn it you get to finding and destroying or I’ll have you relieved for cause. You copy me, Bravo Six?”

  “Roger. Copy.”

  “It’s imperative—imperative—that you reach Checkpoint Echo by noon on Thursday. You’ll await further orders there. Imperative. You understand? Over.”

  The radio was silent. Checkpoint Echo was where two rivers joined, the one coming from the mountains over which they were struggling and the other rushing down from another chain of mountains to their east. Fitch came up. “Sir, I’m looking on my map here and Checkpoint Echo is across the other side of some very steep stuff. Look, in this terrain I just don’t think we can make it that soon. Over.”

  “Wait one.”

  Simpson darted over to the map, putting one finger on Bravo’s position, neatly indicated by a pin with a large letter B on it. He then put his finger on the coordinates of Checkpoint Echo. His two fingers were approximately eight inches apart. Fitch was obviously shirking.

  Simpson picked up the handset. “What are you trying to pull on me, Bravo Six? You be at Echo by noon or you’ll spend your first month in Okinawa getting my foot out of your ass. You copy?”

  “I copy.”

  “Big John Six, out.”

  In the damp and cold, thirty kilometers from VCB, Fitch lightly tossed the handset to the ground and stared into the dark. Relsnik fumbled for it and picked it up.

  Hawke whistled. “Maybe when he sobers up he’ll forget what he said.”

  Fitch grunted.

  “Hey, forget it,” Hawke continued. “What’s he gonna do, Jim, cut your hair off and send you to Vietnam?”

  Fitch smiled, grateful for Hawke’s support, and wondered why he wouldn’t be happy to be relieved. Just get out of everything. Still, he felt terrible. His fitness report would kill him. Any hope of getting a decent assignment once he left Vietnam would be crushed. To have started out so well, a company commander, and then be shit-canned back to the rear was something he couldn’t bear. Fitch knew the Marine Corps well enough to realize that the word would get around. And in an organization as small as the Marines, he’d never be able to outrun it. No amount of explaining would help. It would only look like excuses. The real story, known by Hawke and the platoon commanders, would remain locked up in the jungle until they rotated home. By then it wouldn’t matter. Fitch would be a joke.

  Down on the lines Mellas and Hamilton sat on the back edge of their fighting hole. Hamilton had borrowed Mellas’s red-lens flashlight to fill in another square on his short-timer’s chart. It was a drawing of a delicate Vietnamese girl, her right leg cocked up above her head, exposing her vagina. Two hundred small numbered segments twisted around the girl in a spiral, ending with day zero on the sweet spot. “You know, Lieutenant,” Hamilton said, “I truly think this girl here is beautiful. I mean I really do. She looks just like a girl I used to know back home.”

  “Get back, Hamilton. They all look the same from that angle,” Mellas said, remembering a joke he’d heard. Then he felt that he’d somehow profaned the beautiful girl on Hamilton’s short-timer’s chart.

  Hamilton leaned back on his elbows. “I wanted to marry her ever since the eighth grade.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “She married some guy who’s an engineer at the plant. He had a draft-exempt job.” Hamilton drifted off into his own world for a while, then returned. “I was with this friend of mine, Sonny Martinez. We’d come down from Camp Lejeune to their wedding. Sonny speaks pretty good English, but still a little fucked up. Anyway he gets Margaret’s husband’s attention at the reception and asks him, ‘You been in Army before, hey?’ ‘No, I haven’t’ this guy answers. ‘Why you not go to Army?’ Hamilton’s voice turned pompous and slow. ‘Well, you see I have a very important job and, well, it’s too important a job for me to go in the Army.’ Well Sonny just shut up the rest of the day and I wanted to jump across the table and beat the bastard’s eyeballs out.”

  Mellas laughed.

  Hamilton raised his invisible toast glass. “Here’s to Margaret and her fucking husband.” He was silent for a moment. “Why is it that assholes like that always end up marrying the outstanding chicks?”

  “I guess girls want security. Guys like you and me aren’t too good a risk.”

  “Somehow I can’t help thinking we’re better guys, though.”

  “Unfortunately, women don’t,” Mellas said. He remembered the night Anne told him that she couldn’t go along with this weird concept of morality he’d come up with about keeping his promise to the president. It had started as a wonderful meal in the New York apartment that Anne shared with two of her friends from Bryn Mawr, both of whom had made themselves descreetly absent. Anne had gone all-out, not only with the bacon-wrapped teriyaki chicken and water chestnuts, but with real French-press coffee from a real French-press coffeepot that she’d brought home from her junior summer in Paris. Mellas had never seen one before. He thought that the best time to tell her about sending in his letter to the Marine Corps would be over coffee.

  There was no best time. Mellas found himself standing with an empty coffeepot in one hand and two empty mugs in the other, looking at her beautiful backside. She was wearing the salmon-colored miniskirt that emphasized her small waist and hugged her bottom—the one that she knew drove him wild.

  “You don’t even like the president,” she said. Exasperated, she whirled back to face the sink of dirty dishes. “You told me yourself that he’s just a manufactured image. It’s not like making a promise to a person.”

  “Yeah, but he’s the president. American presidents don’t lie to Americans.” He felt foolish talking to her back. “He’s like the representation of the—I don’t know, of the Constitution, for Christ’s sake. I swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States. I raised my hand and swore, so help me God.”

  She twisted around, her hands still on the edge of the sink. “You were a high school kid. You were seventeen.”

  “I was still me.”

  She turned back. “Oh, God,” she said to the wall.

  He looked dumbly at the pot and cups in
his hand. Why was she mad at him? It was a sacred oath—and two of the guys he’d gone through training with at Quantico were already dead.

  “Waino,” she said, still looking at the wall, “Johnny Hartman got his doctor to say that knee he hurt in football would go out all the time. Jane’s brother got his doctor to say that he was gay.”

  He said nothing.

  She let out a long sigh. Her shoulders moved just that little bit back down to where they normally sat. He realized that she’d been holding her breath. She went into her quiet voice, the one that he knew there was no arguing against. “You got into Yale Law School. You were deferred . In three years the war could be over, and if it isn’t, you’ll do your time as a lawyer. People would kill to get to where you are.”

  “People are getting killed. Better people that Johnny Hartman and Jane’s brother.”

  She turned, this time slowly. She was trembling. The tears welling from her green eyes struck him dumb and made him feel guilty. “Yes!” she hissed. “Yes, yes, yes, yes! And you sent in the letter without even talking to me about it. You didn’t even think to talk to me about it.”

  A month after that he was at the Basic School in Quantico, Virginia. He found it difficult to write to her, knowing that Marine training was totally foreign to her. She responded infrequently, saying that her new career kept her busy. Once, after he’d been in Quantico nearly three months, he called her to say that he could get up to New York on a three-day pass. She said that she had already planned something in Vermont. Two months after that he had his orders to Vietnam. He called her and said he had to see her before he shipped out. She said OK, but warned him not to plan on spending the night.

  Beefed up from the training, hair cut to the skull, and in the uniform of a Marine second lieutenant, he made the long train ride from Virginia to New York. When he got to her apartment, her roommates told him that she was out on a date. He waited awkwardly, knowing that her roommates were trying to entertain him. Finally they went to bed. When she got home, she made tea. After an awkward half hour she told him he could sleep on the couch and she went to bed.

  He’d been so frightened and desperately in need of comfort that he crawled into bed with her anyway. After two uncomfortable hours with her back to him, he gave up on sleep. He got up in the dark and struggled into his uniform in the over-heated apartment, the wool sticking to the sweat on his body. She watched him silently. He called a cab and packed his Val-Pak. When he was folding it together on the floor, he looked up to see her sitting on the side of the bed. She was wearing a long man’s shirt. It didn’t hide her panties. Apparently she didn’t care.

  “When’s your plane?”

  “Oh-five-thirty.” He wished that he hadn’t slipped into military time.

  “You hungry?”

  He stood up, pulled the Val-Pak upright, and lifted it. “No.”

  “Well . . .”

  “Yeah.” He couldn’t take his eyes off her. He never could. “Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  He walked out the door, closing it quietly so he wouldn’t disturb her roommates, and went down the stairs.

  The cab was pulling up when he heard her running barefoot down the street, still in her long shirt. He stood there, paralyzed. She reached him, eyes brimming with tears, and gave him a hug and a quick kiss and then pulled back.

  The cabby had picked up his Val-Pak and was back behind the wheel, giving them some time.

  Anne sat down on the curb. “Go on,” she said softly, looking across the empty street. “Go.”

  His last view of her was through the rear window of the cab. She was sitting on the dirty curb, bent over, her hands wedged between her face and her knees, shaking with sobs.

  When they pulled out of sight of her, the cabby asked, not unkindly, “Going to Vietnam?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tough good-bye.”

  Hamilton was saying something that brought Mellas back to the present. “There must be some women, someplace, that think it’s OK to be over here.”

  “You know any?” Mellas asked. He was uncomfortably aware of how bitter he was getting. It was as if some other person inside him sometimes used his vocal cords. He really hated women at some level, maybe because they stayed home and couldn’t get drafted. Maybe it was the power they held over him because of his yearning to be with one, just to talk with one.

  “No,” Hamilton said.

  “There it is,” Mellas said softly to the dark wall of jungle. He turned to Hamilton. “Fuck it. I’m going to check lines.” He left. Hamilton resumed staring at his short-timer’s chart.

  Around three-thirty that morning Fitch informed the actuals of the task ahead of them, the colonel’s threat to relieve him, and the underlying threat of a court-martial. Mellas, enraged, offered to resign and go on trial with Fitch. “You get this thing out in the open and the Marine Corps would never stand for the bad publicity. They’d back down.”

  “Mellas,” Hawke said, “this isn’t some fucking sequel to The Caine Mutiny.” Kendall and Goodwin laughed and Mellas had to smile in spite of his anger. “We got to be at Checkpoint Echo by tomorrow noon,” Hawke continued. “That gives us about eight hours absolute maximum humping time to make Bravo, Charlie, and Delta.” He turned to Fitch. “Ain’t no way, Jim. I’d lose comm. Blame it on the batteries. Just skip a couple of checkpoints. We’ll be fucking lucky if we get there by tomorrow night with straight beelining.”

  Fitch again began to bite his lower lip. “You don’t think we can make them all, huh?” he asked.

  “Jim, have you seen Hippy’s feet?”

  Fitch sucked in his cheeks, saying nothing.

  “Maybe we could prep our route with the sixties,” Kendall put in, “and lighten up on the mortar rounds.”

  “The last thing you’ll shit-can is ammunition, goddamn it,” Hawke said.

  Kendall began to redden.

  “That’s all we’ve got left,” Mellas said.

  “That’s right. And your life.” Hawke took in a deep breath. “I want to impress on you boot motherfuckers just how far our asses are hanging out. All the grunts go to Cam Lo. So where does the artillery go, especially with no grunts to run security? Not only did they pull them out of Matterhorn, but yesterday we abandoned Eiger. That means all we’ve got is the eight inchers out of Sherpa. That’s at their extreme range. Things get very wobbly at extreme range.” He wiggled his hand for emphasis. “We all know the chances for air support in a monsoon: zilch point shit. So keep your fucking ammunition.”

  This was the first time Mellas understood that Hawke was afraid. It sent a tremor of fear through him. He imagined the company strung out in one of the rocky canyons, getting ripped apart by mortars, or struggling up a steep hillside, a .51-caliber machine gun across the valley raking them as they scrambled for cover where there was none. Mellas erupted. “Big John Six and his fucking Checkpoint Echo, that cocksucking son of a bitch. He’ll actually fucking kill some of us just to make his goddamned checkpoint.”

  “There it is, Jack,” Goodwin said. “You don’t make general if you don’t make checkpoints.”

  The rest of the day Mellas raged inwardly against the colonel. This gave him energy to keep moving, keep checking on the platoon, keep the kids moving. But just below the grim tranquillity he had learned to display, he cursed with boiling intensity the ambitious men who used him and his troops to further their careers. He cursed the air wing for not trying to get any choppers in through the clouds. He cursed the diplomats arguing about round and square tables. He cursed the South Vietnamese making money off the black market. He cursed the people back home gorging themselves in front of their televisions. Then he cursed God. Then there was no one else to blame and he cursed himself for thinking God would give a shit.

  The day ended in despair. The country had become a series of jagged limestone cliffs that weren’t shown on the map. It was impossible to get a bearing on anything in the dark forest. They couldn’t even find the sun through the clouds. Hunger made their stomachs hurt and drained their limbs of strength, but they knew the only way to reach
food and safety was to keep moving.

  The next day was the same. As their resistance lowered, the jungle rot got more severe. Pus erupted from skin. Ringworm spread more rapidly, and several kids began to walk without trousers to avoid the painful irritation and chafing. That caused more cuts from the bushes and more exposure to leeches.