Matterhorn Read online

  “Sir,” China said. “Lieutenant Hawke told me to tell you this too.” China stopped.

  “Well, what the fuck did he say?”

  “He said, sir, to make sure I tell you both things. That you ought to solve you own fuckin’ problems and not dump them on other people.” China paused. Mellas kept his lips compressed. “And that you’d better get you ass back here when the shit’s over so he can kick it for you.” Mellas broke into relieved laughter.

  China snorted. Mellas noticed that he didn’t have his pistol, which all machine gunners carry for protection. “China, where’s your fucking forty-five?”

  “It got ripped off, sir.”

  Mellas and China looked at each other a moment.

  “Goddamn it, China, why lie now?” Mellas said sadly. He’d heard the rumors about the blacks sending parts back to the States. He pulled his own pistol and holster off his belt and threw it to China. China looked at it and started strapping it on. He turned without saying anything.

  Sergeant Ridlow, who had just returned from a final check of his platoon—tightening loose straps, saying a gruff, encouraging word—had watched the last part of the exchange with China. “He’s not chickenshit,” Mellas said, watching China checking out his machine gun.

  “None of them are, Lieutenant,” Ridlow said.

  Mellas looked down the rows of heli teams, feeling cut off from his old platoon as he watched Bass and Fracasso making sure everyone was ready. Just days before, he had been their platoon commander, lifting off from Sky Cap. War made a mockery of his previous concept of time. He watched the leaden sky for the arrival of the helicopters. Anne’s face floated into his memory. He knew she never wanted to see him again, but here she was, perhaps the last good thing on his mind.

  “Here they come,” somebody shouted.

  Suspended in the sky were tiny black dots. The sight sent a trembling, sick dread into Mellas’s guts. His knees wanted to collapse and his body wanted to run. The black dots peeled off as they came closer, turning into twin-rotor CH-46s, coming around in a single line to land from the south. Mellas wanted them to crash, to fall out of the sky. They were coming to kill him. For no reason. And he was going to step aboard. Again he felt the conveyor belt carrying him toward the cliff.

  The first chopper settled in on its rear wheels. Kendall and the first heli team jogged across the mud and disappeared into the tailgate. A second chopper dropped its ramp and another heli team from Kendall’s platoon ran aboard. Then a third chopper pulled up, and a fourth, and the choppers kept coming and the kids kept disappearing. Then there were no more heli teams left but Mellas’s and one other, and then Mellas was running, the weight of his pack thumping against his back. He ducked his head beneath the rotor blades, pounded past the crew chief, and settled on the metal deck. It was still cold from the altitude.

  The chopper shuddered with increased power and became clumsily airborne. That moment of false security, waiting on the airstrip, was cut off forever.

  It was about thirty-five kilometers northeast to the red circle on Fitch’s map. Mellas watched the Rock Pile and the Razorback, two towering rock formations that dominated the landscape around VCB, slip behind them. He kept taking compass readings, trying to keep his bearings straight. He wondered what would happen if he just refused to get off the helicopter. They’d have to fly him back to Quang Tri. He’d be tried and convicted. But he’d be alive. He worried anxiously about whether or not the LZ would be hot.

  The chopper lurched sideways. Mellas pushed himself to his knees, fighting against the acceleration of the turn and the slanting deck. He stumbled to one of the shot-out portholes and stuck his head out, squinting against the rushing air, trying to see why the pilot was making such fast turns. The machine gunner on the starboard side was leaning out into space, the big .50-caliber pointing downward. The crew chief was on the port side on a second machine gun, craning his neck to see, but tilted too far above the horizon to do any good. The bird suddenly righted itself, then went into a sickeningly fast descent. The roar increased. Then Mellas heard the whiplike sound of bullets snapping through the air. The starboard .50-caliber opened up. Then the gunner spun backward, the plastic of his helmet shattered, his face a mess. He slumped to the floor, his throat tangled in his intercom wire.

  Everyone wanted out of the chopper, including Mellas.

  The bird hit the deck and the ramp swung down. The Marines started to hurtle out. The pilot panicked and took off before all of the Marines were on the ground. When Mellas reached the exit the bird was already six feet off the ground and gaining speed. He was shouting at the crew chief, “Keep this fucker on the ground, goddamn you. Keep this fucking bird on the ground.” He leaped off into space and hit the ground hard. The bird continued roaring for altitude behind him. The last kid on the chopper looked anxiously behind him, gulped, and hurled himself into space to join his friends. He and his pack, which weighed almost 100 pounds, hit with a sickening thud. Mellas watched the leg bone give way and bulge out beneath the trouser leg. The kid’s scream could be heard above the roar of rifle and machine-gun fire.

  Mellas shouted. “You bastard, you fucking bastard.” He lifted his rifle to fire a burst at the disappearing helicopter, but some inner strength froze his finger before he pulled the trigger. He ran instead to the hurt kid, shouting for a corpsman, and began to drag him and his gear away from the landing zone. Another Marine came up to Mellas and together they pulled the writhing kid into the relative cover of some elephant grass. They left him and ran on ahead, catching up to the advancing platoon, which Goodwin had spread out on line. He was moving it in quick squad rushes toward the enemy.

  The firing stopped. Two Huey gunships that had been laying down machine-gun fire just to their north looped up in a curve and roared over their heads. There were a couple of desultory shots from M-16s. An M-79 grenade launcher fired. Then came another random burst of fire. Then silence, except for occasional shouts. Mellas went running behind Goodwin’s platoon, crouching low, fighting his way through the thick elephant grass. Everyone had stopped, waiting, sweating, panting. Mellas met Goodwin coming the opposite way. There was a burst of M-16 fire, but nothing answered it.

  “Everything’s OK back there, Scar,” Mellas said. “One Oley with a broken leg.” Mellas had automatically shifted into radio code.

  “Fitch stopped us,” Goodwin said. “I think the little fuckers dee-deed.”

  It was over.

  Mellas kept jogging along parallel to the company’s line. Everyone lay tensely on the ground, M-16s and machine guns pointed ahead. As he reached the left end of the line, he started passing his old platoon. They smiled at him. He ran past. Chadwick was on his back, blood covering his chest. He gave Mellas a thumbs-up and grinned, knowing he was on his way home. Mellas ran past him. He came upon Doc Fredrickson, who was working on a new kid Mellas had never even met. Mellas kept running. He reached Fitch, who was on the radio.

  “They pulled out. Over. No, I can’t tell which way, Stevens, goddamn it. We can’t see shit in this stuff. Over. To the north. I understand that. It would be suicide chasing them in this shit. Over. They’re not running, goddamn it, they’re retreating. They’ll be laying on the ground and we’ll be standing. They’ll chew us up.”

  There was a pause. Mellas heard another voice come on the radio but couldn’t understand what it was saying. Then Fitch said, “My mission priority is to get that team out safely and our wounded medevaced. We can’t chase them, sir, if we have to carry bodies with us. Over. Aye, aye, sir. Bravo Six out.” He turned to Daniels. “You got the fucking fire mission going yet?” Daniels was talking on the hook and just nodded. “We got to circle them up, Mellas,” Fitch said. “The recon team has five Oleys. That’s out of six and the other one is Coors. I’m sending Scar to pick them up. We’ll lift them out of the zone. Big John Six is going bug fuck. How’s it look down there?”

  “OK. I didn’t see any Coors. A couple of bad Oleys.”

  Fitch grunted, relieved.

  Mellas set the company in around the LZ a
nd soon had everyone digging holes. Goodwin took two squads and reached the reconnaissance team in ten minutes. It took them twenty minutes to make it back to the zone, struggling under the weight of the dead body and one kid who was shot through both knees. The rest of the team managed to walk out under their own power. The leader, a big lieutenant, had grenade fragments in his left leg. He came up to Fitch and Mellas.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I thought I’d kissed my ass good-bye.”

  “It’s OK,” Fitch said. “What the fuck happened?”

  “It was my fault.” The big man let out a long quivering sigh. He started shaking, the pressure off.

  “Want a smoke?”

  The lieutenant shook his head. “Up there.” He pointed to Matterhorn, its base looming above the valley, the top hidden by clouds. “I spotted some movement two nights ago. I thought I could work in closer to see what it was.”

  “Tubing! Tubing! Incoming!” The cry resounded throughout the circle. People scrambled for cover.

  “Oh, fuck,” Fitch said. The three of them lay flat on the ground, none having had time to dig a hole.

  Six explosions, almost simultaneous, rocked the area just outside the perimeter.

  “They’re up there, all right,” the lieutenant said. “I saw two machine guns. They’re dug in on that hill to the right. There’s a burned-out helicopter on it. With that many heavy machine guns my guess is we may have a company up there. I wanted to check out the other hill, but—”

  “Incoming!” someone shouted.

  Mellas was digging furiously. Six more explosions walked across the interior of the company perimeter. The NVA gunners had the range. There was no doubt in his mind that there was a company. No smaller unit would hump the mortar ammo.

  “Get the fucking fire mission going, Daniels!” Fitch shouted. “They’ve got our fucking number.” Fitch immediately switched to the two circling gunships and directed them to find the mortars if they could.

  “We can’t get a mission going if the choppers are in the way,” Daniels shouted, frustrated. “And the rate of fire will be slow because of the range. They’ll burn their barrels up if they shoot too fast with max charges.”

  “I don’t give a fuck about their barrels. You call in the goddamn mission.”

  Everyone was throwing dirt, cursing, scratching at the earth. Again there were six explosions. Someone screamed.

  Mellas dug. At the same time he was timing the pattern. He figured at least two mortars firing three rounds, or maybe even three firing two. With barely enough dug out to get his body in lengthwise, he pushed his face into the soil, feeling naked and exposed.

  “Here come the birds!”

  Two Huey medevac slicks came shooting in over their heads from the south. FAC-man popped a green smoke grenade and was moving with his radio on his back, talking to the lead bird as it swung up away from the ground and made a looping turn to come back into the zone. Off to the north, muffled by the distance, they could hear the deepthroated roar of machine gun fire from one of the two gunships that Fitch had sent over toward Matterhorn.

  The big lieutenant ran, limping, across the landing zone. The lead chopper hit the earth hard. Marines loaded the wounded. The lieutenant waited for the second chopper, helped more of the wounded aboard, threw the dead body inside, and climbed on the skids. The chopper was just getting airborne, its nose tipped down as it gained forward speed, when six more mortar rounds hit. The explosions hid the chopper from view. Then it cleared the smoke at the far end of the zone and lifted into the air.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Fitch said. “Goddamn it, Daniels, get us some fucking smoke.” Daniels already knew that he couldn’t effectively counter the mortars. His only hope was to lay a smoke screen between the company and the ridgeline to the north. The shells, however, weren’t striking where he’d called for them. With Eiger abandoned, he was forced to use the 8-inch howitzers on Sherpa, but they were at the edge of their range. At that distance the shells were subject to winds and temperature differentials he could only guess at. He hoped that where they did land would be good enough. He looked uneasily at the clouds hiding the tops of the ridges.

  Bravo Company split into three columns and moved into the protection of the jungle. A final NVA mortar shell found the tail of Kendall’s platoon before they reached the cover of the trees, and two more Marines were wounded, but these weren’t emergency medevacs and could be carried. The company had medevaced six kids, none of whom had died, and had rescued Sweet Alice, the reconnaissance team. If they got their other two wounded out by morning they’d have lost no one. They all felt proud. Drained, yet oddly content, they dug in, feeling protected by the thick jungle. In the morning they would be skying out, mission accomplished.

  Colonel Simpson, too, felt proud and flushed with success. “I knew the little bastards were there,” he kept crowing. He and Blakely had just returned to the combat operations center from the regimental briefings, where congratulations had been warm and plentiful. He reached for the hook, calling Bravo Company once again.

  Hawke heard Relsnik’s voice over the squawk box that enabled everyone in the COC to hear the conversation. Hawke imagined Fitch’s eyes rolling. It was at least the fifth time since the fight that the colonel had wanted to talk with Fitch.

  Hawke continued plotting air observer and sensor sightings. He didn’t like the look of them. Too much activity, right where the colonel wanted it, right where Bravo Company was.

  Simpson asked, “You say you can see them? Over.”

  “We sent our Foxtrot Oscar up a tree to call in fire and he says they’re digging in on Helicopter Hill. Matterhorn’s covered with clouds. We can’t see anything on it.” There was a slight pause filled with background static. “Sweet Alice told me they’re probably well entrenched on Matterhorn in our old bunkers. Over.”

  Hawke looked to see if Blakely and Simpson had any reaction to Fitch’s statement. They didn’t show one.

  “They’ve split their forces.” Simpson turned excitedly to Blakely. “I think we ought to exploit the situation.”

  Blakely picked up the hook. “Bravo Six, this is Big John Three. What do you estimate the enemy size at? Over.”

  “Like I said, the Oscar type from Sweet Alice told me he thinks maybe a company. We can only see maybe fifty or so on Helicopter Hill, but there’s got to be at least twice that on Matterhorn just to cover the perimeter. Besides, the mortar rounds come in sixes. Over.”

  “How many do you see, Bravo Six?” Blakely replied. “Not how many do you guess. Over.”

  “Fifty,” was Fitch’s terse reply. The handset keyed off and then on again. Fitch’s voice was controlled and without intonation. “Sir, one of my O types did a lot of patrolling down here and he says we’ve got a good Lima Zulu at—from Comiskey Park—up two-point-two, left one-point-seven.” Fitch was telling them the location of a landing zone using the radio brevity code for the day. “We can hump over there, it’s below the cloud layer, and get out without exposing the wingies to a lot of mortar fire from Matterhorn or Helicopter Hill. Over.”

  “Wait one, Bravo Six.” Blakely turned to Simpson. “You say anything about lifting them out, sir?”

  “Fuck, no. Not with the gooks with their tails between their legs and me with three companies ready to kick ass.”

  Hawke stopped putting marks on the map.

  “Bravo Six, this is Big John Three. Hold off awhile. I want you to wait at your present pos until you receive a frag order from us. You copy? Over.”

  “Roger, copy, Big John Three. Bravo Six out.”

  Blakely walked briskly over to the map. Simpson followed him. They stood looking at it, aware that everyone’s eyes were on them.

  “We’ve got a known platoon-size unit, maybe more,” Blakely said. “A fresh company of Marines who know the enemy territory like the back of their hands. And damn near a battalion in reserve.”

  “I knew the bastards were there,” Simpson said. “No one would listen to me. I’m ordering Bravo Company into the assault. I’ll go confirm with Mulvaney right now. I bet he’s just
eating boiled crow.” Simpson laughed, high on excitement and success.

  Blakely could see that this was an opportunity. He knew they had only a little time before the enemy consolidated on the two hills, but he also knew Fitch couldn’t leave his wounded behind without protection and this would weaken his assaulting force. If there was a company up there, as Fitch suspected, attacking it would be foolish. They had no surprise, no local superiority, and no real firepower, with all the artillery batteries pulled back because of the Cam Lo operation. It would take time to shift a couple of batteries back out that way, but that would of course leave the other battalions with less support, and that wouldn’t be done unless Mulvaney agreed.

  On the other hand, it was the first time in a couple of months they actually knew where a sizable unit was. If he could keep Simpson under control, they might be able to do some real damage. Meanwhile, they had to keep Nagoolian fixed. And they would have to commit the battalion, for which they needed Mulvaney’s OK. That wouldn’t be easy. Mulvaney had been criticized before about getting too aggressive, and his bitching about the Cam Lo operation hadn’t scored him any points with the brass.

  But people also got criticized for not being aggressive enough, and that was far worse. The log would show a unit of fifty on Helicopter Hill. Blakely had learned that younger officers tended to overestimate the size of the enemy force they were facing, so maybe there were thirty gooks up there. But the enemy was digging in, probably with machine guns, and certainly had mortars. Thirty on Helicopter Hill meant at least seventy or eighty on Matterhorn. Still, with air support, a fresh company of Marines could easily take them. A vague thought about the difficulty of fixed wing support with monsoon clouds surfaced in his mind but was quickly repressed by the thought that helicopter gunships could get in there. They’d done it earlier today, after all.

  Obviously they didn’t need the fucking hill. They’d abandoned it themselves. But Blakely knew that the fight was no longer about terrain; it was about attrition. Body count. That was the job, and he’d do it. If there was a company up there, a battalion couldn’t be too far away. And if he could fix that battalion in place using the battalion’s three remaining rifle companies and any others that Mulvaney could spare, they’d have a field day. They could bring in the B-52s from Guam, flying well above the monsoon clouds, and cream the little bastards whether they could see them or not. There would finally be something tangible to report instead of these infuriating dribbles of kills and casualties they’d been turning in for weeks.