Matterhorn: a novel of the Vietnam War Read online

  The company’s position was so precarious that neither Hawke nor Mellas could sleep. All night, they sat huddled on a boulder, shivering in their damp clothes. Hamilton, however, lay sleeping on the rocks below them, his boots in the water.

  “Imagine,” Hawke said. “The first use of the column in the defense. We’ll all get jobs at the Naval War College. We’ll go down in military history.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Mellas said. “Going down.”

  The cliff rose behind them. The moon occasionally broke through the cloud layer, and a cold wind blew on their backs. The conversation came and went. Girls they knew. What they would do after they got out. Building a fortress on Matterhorn and then abandoning it. Whether the Rolling Stones were better than the Beatles. Anything but cerebral malaria.

  “Did you hear that Parker tried to kill Cassidy?” Mellas asked.

  “Yeah. Conman told me. It’s all over the fucking company. Cassidy denies it. Says it’s all black power bullshit, that Parker just wanted to show off.”

  “You believe Cassidy?”

  “I believe Parker.”

  “Is there going to be trouble?” Mellas asked.

  “Don’t know. Depends a lot on whether Parker did it on his own.”

  “You mean China?”

  “I mean China if Parker didn’t do it on his own. But I don’t know.”

  They listened to the water rushing past them. Hawke, looking sad, repeatedly traced a small pentangle on the rock beside him.

  “You feel bad about not getting the company?” Mellas asked.

  “I don’t know. Sure. Sure, I wanted the company. But now I just want out of the fucking bush.”

  “Have you tried? Like getting a job at the operations center, like Stevens?”

  “Do I look like a fucking Dictaphone? What the fuck you trying to do, Mellas, get rid of me?”

  Mellas felt himself color slightly. He said nothing.

  “Don’t worry, Mellas,” Hawke said, “you’re so fucking boot, you’ll still be here when I’m sucking down cool ones at O’Day’s Bar. You’ll have plenty of time to get a fucking company. For starters, you’ll probably be Bravo Five if I ever do get my freckled ass out of here. Kendall’s leaving in a few weeks. And Goodwin.” Hawke chuckled softly. “Shit, Jack,” he mimicked. “Scar. His lines are a mess, his paperwork’s all fucked up, his radio procedure’s a disaster, but the troops will follow him anyplace. Anyplace.” Hawke blew some air through his lips. “That’s the problem with him. He’s a fighter.”

  “That’s a problem?” Mellas felt envious of Goodwin again, but his envy fought against the warmth evoked by the image of Goodwin tugging on an earlobe and cackling about a third Purple Heart.

  “In this war it is,” Hawke said. “That’s probably why it’s so fucked up. What you need in war is warriors, fighting, not little boys dressed up in soldier suits, administrating.”

  “Then why don’t you make Scar the fucking Five?” Mellas asked, a little more hotly than he’d intended.

  “Because Goodwin would be eaten alive in three minutes. And not by the fucking NVA. You wouldn’t, and you know it. In fact, I think you’d thrive on the fucking politics.”

  They lapsed into silence.

  After a while Hawke asked, “You know why we’re really strung out in this fucking death canyon?”

  Mellas didn’t know, so he just grunted.

  “Because Fitch doesn’t know how to play the fucking game. That’s why. He’s a good combat leader. I’d literally follow him to my death. But he’s not a good company commander in this kind of war. He got on Simpson’s bad side because he got his picture in the paper too often and never gave Simpson credit, which by the way he doesn’t deserve, but that’s the point. The smart guy gives the guy with the power the credit, whether he deserves it or not. That way the smart guy is dangling something the boss wants. So the smart guy now has power over the boss.”

  Mellas kept his mouth shut.

  “It used to be if you were out in the bush operating independently like we are, no one would second-guess the skipper. They didn’t have the radio power back then. Now they do, and the fucking brass think they’re out on patrol. And now the smallest units are run by the colonels and generals, hell, right up to the president. Colonel and above used to be the level where people dealt with all the political shit like congressmen on junkets, television, reporters, you name it. But now those guys are running the show right down to this fucking river canyon and we’re in the politics too. And the better the radios, the worse it’s going to get. The politics is going to come right down to the company level, and people like Fitch and Scar are going to be culled out and people like you will take over.”

  “What do you mean ‘like me’?” Mellas asked quietly.

  Hawke sighed. “Shit, Mellas. I mean a fucking politician.”

  Mellas stiffened. “Is that what you think of me?”

  “Yeah. That’s what I think.”

  Mellas said nothing.

  “Shit, Mellas, don’t get your feelings hurt. I didn’t say I didn’t like you, for Christ’s sake, or you’re some sort of bad person. Although I will grant you the company you’ll keep is going to be sleazier than average. Just accept that you’re a fucking politician. So was Abraham Lincoln, and Winston Churchill. So was Dwight Eisenhower.” He paused. “It ain’t like they’re bad people. And they all ran a pretty good war.”

  Mellas smiled ruefully. “You really think it’s all about politics?”

  Hawke blew air upward. Mellas could see his breath. “No,” he said. “You better believe it ain’t all about politics.” He tossed a pebble into the stream and then looked directly at Mellas. “Simpson’s right. All these arms caches we’re uncovering can only be a tiny percentage of the total. That means there’s a lot of gooks around here. A lot. How the fuck do you think all that shit gets carried in without trucks except by a lot of fucking backs?” He checked to see if he had Mellas’s attention. “The caches we’ve found are stashed in a line pointing east from Laos to the flats. To pull off that political op at Cam Lo we had to pull back from Laos and the DMZ. Matterhorn controls the west end of Mutter’s Ridge. Whoever controls Mutter’s Ridge controls Route 9. If the NVA control Route 9 they can cut off Khe Sanh and VCB from the coast. They cut off Khe Sanh and VCB and they can take Camp Carroll. Then the gooks come down Route 9 with tanks and you can kiss fucking Quang Tri, Dong Ha, and Hue good-bye. That ain’t politics.”

  The company started moving at dawn. It would be the eighth day without food. The kid with the broken leg was carried fireman style by friends who took turns. The senior squid gave the kid all the pills he felt his system could stand, to keep him from screaming. As the company moved forward, everyone passed a message scratched into the rocks: FIRST THEY SHAVED HIM. THEN THEY HUMPED HIM TO DEATH.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The canyon ended. The company stared upward at a wall of jungle-covered cliffs and terraces that rose out of sight in the fog. The top of the wall was Hill 1609. Their job was to turn it into Firebase Sky Cap.

  Mellas’s helmet fell from his head when he leaned backward and tried to see the top. He let it lie behind him and stared, stupefied, having no idea how they were going to climb the wall by nightfall. Fitch’s voice came over the radio. Still deep in jungle, he could see nothing of what Mellas saw. “Come on, Bravo One,” he said impatiently. “Let’s move it up there.”

  Mellas waved a hand at Jackson, pointed firmly upward with one index finger, and put his helmet back on. Jackson, at the base of the cliff, nodded to Cortell and Broyer. Cortell gave him the finger. Broyer shoved his black plastic glasses back on his nose and took a deep breath, looking up the cliff a long time before he exhaled. Jackson slipped the squad’s coil of nylon Goldline rope off his pack and passed it up to them. The two of them roped up, and Broyer started moving, his face against the cliff, pulling the rope up after him as Cortell paid it out. There seemed no place to go. Then Broyer found a root and tugged on it. It held—but vegetable holds were dangerous, and he knew it. He hauled himself shakily up to a narrow sloping ledge and tried to get secure
with his butt up against the cliff and his boots on a nubbin of rock. He passed the rope around his waist in a hasty belay and then whispered as loud as he dared, “OK, I’m ready.”

  Cortell followed, pulled up by Broyer. Squeezing together on the ledge, leaning back on the cliff, they tied-in to exposed roots and put a friction loop over a barely adequate bump of rock. They then dropped the rope end down again and belayed Jackson, who was followed by Mellas, then Hamilton, then Mallory’s machine gun, then Mallory, then the boxes of ammunition that Mallory and Barber, his A gunner, had been carrying, and so on until the next squad arrived with its own rope. Then Jackson’s squad moved ever higher, repeating the process, but with different people leading. Soon the platoon was strung out in stages all along the cliff face. Fitch kept the rest of the company hidden in the jungle just in case there were NVA on top. Mellas knew it was the right thing to do, but he now regretted that his map skills had put First Platoon at the lead so often. His face and nose were pressed against the wet cliff, and he inhaled the smells of moss and dirt. A single NVA squad on the top could kill half the platoon before the kids could scramble down to safety. A single NVA machine gun across from the canyon could probably get them all. They were fucked.

  Five hours later they were still climbing, surrounded by fog. Robertson and Jermain from Second Squad were now on point, with Jacobs close behind them, stuttering encouragement. Jermain had the squat M-79 loaded with fléchettes so he could at least spray anyone looking down at them and fire the weapon one-handed without having to aim. Robertson, who as a fire team leader could have ordered someone else to take point, hadn’t had the heart to give the job to anyone but himself. He was now separated from his team by Jacobs, who himself had moved closer to the point position from his normally safer one behind the first fire team. Robertson was wondering whether to keep the safety of his M-16 off or on. If it was on and he fucked up, he’d be very likely to kill Jermain, who would certainly fall off the cliff, and, being roped into Robertson, take Robertson with him. On the other hand, if the enemy peered over the edge and Robertson didn’t fire instantly on full automatic, because again he’d be one-handed, he might as well not even be carrying the damned weapon. He resolved the dilemma by nervously switching the safety on and off every minute or two.

  Moving up the steep face of the cliff made silence impossible. If the NVA were waiting, Robertson thought, the two of them for certain—and probably the entire squad, including the lieutenant and Hamilton—would have to be written off in order to get the company out. Compared, however, with the constant draining pull against gravity and hunger, and the obstinate rock face the jungle now presented to them, death didn’t seem so bad.

  He saw that Lieutenant Mellas had reached a flat spot below him and was looking up. Robertson heaved himself and his heavy pack over a large rock formation. He stopped, breathing hard, perched precariously next to Jermain, who was sitting with his back against the cliff, looking upward, holding his M-79 above his head. Clearly, the small space was safe for only one of them. There seemed no place he could move. His face was flushed and felt hot and full. He knew that he was crying, because he had to keep wiping tears away to look for his next handhold.

  The lieutenant pointed a thumb upward, nodding encouragingly. God knows how the guys behind us with the machine guns and mortars are doing, Robertson thought. Or the poor fucker with the broken leg and the ones carrying him. He turned to look upward into the fog. The cliff stood above him, unmovable, impossibly steep, its unseen top seemingly beyond reach. Slowly, with each breath, his anger grew: at the cliff, the bullshit, the hunger, the war—everything. He erupted in a frenzy of activity. He pumped his legs madly against the side of the cliff, scrambling for all he was worth on friction alone, moaning as he half-suppressed an angry scream. When he took off, he nearly shoved Jermain off the cliff, and Jermain actually raised the M-79 to club him but must have realized that he had Robertson on belay and didn’t. Jermain paid out rope so that Robertson wouldn’t be jerked short and fall. Robertson reached safety, just a few meters above Jermain, and apologized. Both of them were crying openly, like small children who needed to be fed and tucked into bed.

  They reached the summit just before dark. It was a narrow razorback ridge of solid limestone, just wide enough for a single person to step along carefully, balanced between sheer drops on both sides. Obviously, no one had bothered to recon it. There was no possible place for a helicopter to land, much less an artillery battery.

  Mellas, too, was crying with exhaustion and frustration when he radioed Fitch that there wasn’t room for the rest of the company on top. Fitch regrouped the company on a small saddle just below the final cliff, packing it into a space that would normally have been occupied by a platoon. The company dug in and spent the night there. The next morning they climbed the trail blazed by First Platoon, using the ropes that had been tied in place—just as tired, but more confident, knowing First Platoon held the summit.

  It took the entire day, using every piece of explosive the company had left, to blast a small niche for an LZ out of the solid rock edge of the massive sweeping cliff that plunged more than 2,000 feet into a river canyon on the north side of the mountain. They blew their final bars of C-4 just as darkness closed out any possibility of resupply.

  The next morning they were hacking away at the rock with their E-tools. At around midday the fog temporarily cleared and Fitch radioed to VCB. Thirty minutes later they all silently watched a CH-46 come chundering up the long valley they’d taken days to get through. The perch they’d blasted and scraped from the limestone was just large enough for the chopper to put down its rear wheels. The front two-thirds of the helicopter hovered dangerously in midair as the pilot fought to hold the machine long enough to unload its cargo. This maneuver drew murmurs of respect for the pilot’s skill. The tailgate came down, and a group of Marines ran out holding their helmets in the blast of air. No supplies came with them.

  Marines from Third Platoon helped the kid with the broken leg aboard. The tailgate closed and the helicopter simply fell off the cliff, picking up airspeed until it could fly. It curved away and faded into the mist.

  The Marines in the new group were full-fleshed and excited. Their camouflage helmet covers were conspicuously unripped, their jungle utilities bright green and brown. Hawke and Fitch walked up to them. They could see pickaxes, power saws, large new shovels, bundles of C-4, even a surveyor’s transit. A stocky first lieutenant, his silver bars gleaming on his collar, came over and shook hands. “Hi!” he said cheerily. “We’re the Pioneers from Golf Battery.”

  Hawke and Fitch stared at him. Finally, Hawke spoke. “Well, if you’re the pioneers, then we’re the fucking aborigines.”

  An hour later the same helicopter returned, an external load of C-rations, ammunition, and explosives swinging beneath it in a net that streamed out behind it on a cable. The helicopter released the net on the tiny LZ, then, as before, looped around the mountain to hover with its rear end almost touching the LZ and the rest of it hanging in space over the edge of the cliff. The tailgate flopped down to the ground and another group of replacements came tumbling out, wondering where to run. They were followed by Jancowitz, who was wearing crisp new camouflage utilities and a red silk scarf that smelled of perfume. He was holding a case of canned steaks.

  “I heard you guys might be hungry,” he said.

  Mellas could have kissed him but started stabbing at one of the cans with his K-bar instead.

  The next day the choppers delivered hundreds of pounds of explosives, a tiny bulldozer, and three Marine engineers. It took the engineers several days to correct what the Marines of Bravo Company had thought was the mistake of selecting Sky Cap for an artillery base. What they didn’t know was that long ago General Neitzel had figured out that he had the raw power to make the crooked places straight and would put his Marines where he wanted, not where nature would have allowed. The engineers simply blasted the top of the mountain down with plastic explosive and dynamite until it be
came wide enough to do the job.

  The normal backbreaking routine of providing security for a fire support base was resumed. The long hungry march, now dubbed the Trail of Tears Op, faded into the past. Days were filled with the nerve-racking tedium of patrols and nighttime listening posts, the stupefying work of laying barbed wire, hacking out fields of fire with K-bars, digging holes, improving positions, eating, shitting, drinking, pissing, nodding off, trying to stay awake. Still, it beat humping.

  Sometimes Mellas would find time to sit alone at the edge of the cliff. On days when the peak was out of the clouds, he would look into North Vietnam. Black clouds moved slowly before him at eye level. Far below, he could see the jungle-covered impression of a small river that surely joined the Ben Hai River to the north. Along the way it gathered the rainfall from Sky Cap and Tiger Tooth, the huge mountain that towered above them to the southeast.