Matterhorn: a novel of the Vietnam War Page 4

“Do I have any choice?”

  “My boy, you’re green but you learn fast.” It came out as an imitation of W. C. Fields, which irritated Mellas, but clearly the kids liked it.

  “I always was quick.”

  Hawke turned to the Marine waiting for his R & R. “Hey, Lindsey, go down and get the senior squid.”

  Lindsey wearily got to his feet and looked down at Fisher. “What’ll I tell him?” he asked Hawke.

  “Tell him Fisher’s getting bad.” Hawke didn’t seem to mind explaining what Mellas considered to be fully apparent facts.

  Lindsey jogged off down the hill toward the command post.

  “How come Lindsey gettin’ out of the bush and not Mallory?” The Marine who asked the question was round-faced, black, with a droopy Ho Chi Minh mustache and small light patches on his face from some skin problem. Everything got quiet. Mellas’s political antenna was fully extended.

  “You say ‘sir’ when you’re talking to an officer,” Cassidy said. His voice held the authority of a Marine drill instructor combined with plain dislike.

  The Marine swallowed, hesitated. Hawke cut in quickly, looking at him steadily. “China, this isn’t the time or place.”

  “That’s right. They’s never no time, no place for the black man.”

  “Sir,” Hawke said quietly, before Cassidy could say anything. Mellas could see that Cassidy was visibly angry but keeping his mouth closed because Hawke had taken control.

  There was a moment of inner battle on China’s part. “Sir,” he finally answered.

  Hawke was silent. He simply looked at China. China stood his ground, obviously waiting for an answer to his question. Two of Fisher’s friends, who were black and stood nearby, unconsciously moved closer together.

  “Sir,” China said. “With all due respect, sir, the Marine is askin’ why Lance Corporal Mallory, who is sufferin’ from headaches and possible brain damage, isn’t being skyed out a here with Lance Corporal Lindsey, who is sufferin’ from lack of female companionship.”

  The question hung in the darkening gray air. Cassidy put his knuckles on his hips and leaned slightly forward, about to explode, when Hawke broke into a chuckle, shaking his head. Someone else tittered. “China, goddamn it, why are you breaking our balls up here in the fucking rain when you know full well that”—Hawke held up a finger—“first, none of us are sure if Mallory actually has headaches, including you, unless you got a medical degree recently and I missed it, and second”—he held up a second finger—“even if he did, he can still function fully in combat, or at least as fully as Mallory was ever able to function in combat, and three”—now his thumb was added—“as I was saying about calling in medevacs when they aren’t really needed, and four”—he folded his thumb back and switched to four fingers—“adding an extra hundred-sixty pounds plus his gear at this altitude with no idea what the loading is on the bird already could mean risking that no one gets out of the bush.”

  “Lindsey weigh a hundred sixty pounds.”

  “Sir,” Hawke added. Hawke’s insistence on the “sir” had as little personal animosity in it as a mother’s insistence on “may I” in place of her child’s “can I.”

  “Sir,” China said.

  “He’s kind of got a point,” Mellas said. It couldn’t hurt to have the blacks know he wasn’t prejudiced.

  Hawke turned to look at Mellas, his mouth dropping open. China looked at Mellas, too, his own surprise evident but better concealed. Still, Mellas could see that he’d scored a point there. He could also see that he’d lost one with the gunny, Cassidy. Cassidy’s face had paled and his eyes looked like small blue stones.

  Hawke did not try to conceal his exasperation. He addressed both Mellas and China. “Lindsey’s been in the bush eleven months, Mallory three. Lindsey’s been waiting on the LZ for three days and if he doesn’t get out before we push off on the op, he’ll miss his R & R altogether. Lindsey’s never complained about shit and all we’ve heard from Mallory is nothing but complaints. If we let Mallory go, then anyone else can go to the rear anytime they tell us that they hurt someplace. Christ, we all hurt someplace. You know as well as I do why it ain’t gonna nevah hoppin.” Hawke’s last three words, a parody of a Vietnamese accent, were spoken slowly and directly to China.

  Mellas felt his face redden and wished it wouldn’t, making it redden even more. He saw China glance quickly at the two brothers, but he could see that they had gone neutral. Then China looked at him. Mellas kept his face expressionless, his lips pressed shut.

  After a moment’s hesitation, China gave in. “Just pointin’ out a inconsistency, Lieutenant Hawke,” China said.

  “Yeah, I heard.”

  Fisher began to moan and Hawke and China both turned to look at him, glad to use the moaning to pull back from the confrontation. Cassidy turned his back on the group and walked off the LZ.

  “Oh, goddamn it, Lieutenant Hawke, I have to piss bad. Oh, shit. Why aren’t they here?” Fisher was barely short of crying. “Oh, fuck those bastards. Fuck those bastards.” He tried to rise, attempting to relieve the pressure, then gave a short fierce cry that he clamped off with his teeth. Hawke caught him before he fell over. Fisher grimaced and said, “Shit. I can’t stand up or lay down neither.”

  “Hang on, Fisher, they’ll have you out in no time,” Hawke said. He sat down on Fisher’s pack, putting his hands under Fisher’s armpits, supporting him halfway between lying and standing, taking most of Fisher’s weight.

  Mellas felt left out again—and stupid. He knew full well why he had stuck his foot in his mouth, but he hadn’t thought ahead that by putting in his two cents’ worth of racial equity he would invite Hawke’s rather solid rebuke in front of so many people. Still, he guessed that his comment would work its way around the company. He didn’t regret that he’d laid out his politics; he just regretted that he’d been so inept. Then he started to question whether it would look better to be up on the LZ with Fisher or back down on the lines with his platoon or doing something with the company commander, Lieutenant Fitch, to help the medevac. He decided that it would be best to keep quiet and not ask too many questions.

  Hawke looked anxiously at the lowering clouds, then down the hill toward the lines. “Got all your mail ready to go?” he asked without looking at Mellas.

  It took a moment for Mellas to realize that Hawke was talking to him. “Yeah,” he said. “You’re sitting on it. It’s all in Fisher’s pack.”

  A few minutes later Sheller, the senior squid, and Lieutenant Fitch, the skipper, came up on the LZ from the company command post. Fitch looked small, almost catlike, next to Sheller. When they reached Fisher, Fitch looked at him briefly and then turned to Mellas and Hawke. He was wearing his half-merry, half-mischievous look, accentuated by the dapper mustache he was cultivating. “Looks like Fisher’s gone and fucked himself up good, doesn’t it?” he said. He turned to Fisher. “How’d you manage to do this after what you brought back in your dick from Taipei? I’ve heard of being a carrier, but you’re something else.” He turned back and waited with the others as Sheller timed Fisher’s pulse.

  When Sheller joined them, his face was troubled. “Skipper, if we don’t get him out in another hour it’s going to be dark and he’s going to come apart. His heart is already racing, even with the morphine. I don’t have anything to give him except more morphine and, well, too much of it . . . you know. So I’m holding off on a second syrette. In case.”

  “In case what?” Fitch asked.

  “In case I have to do something here.”

  No one said anything until Fitch broke the silence. “What do you do if the chopper doesn’t make it?” he asked.

  “The only thing I can think of is try and cut a hole so’s he can relieve the pressure. He isn’t going to like that.”

  “I don’t think in another hour he’ll care very much,” Hawke said.

  “What’s the story on the bird?” Mellas asked.

  “Same-same,” Fitch replied. “The only way they’ll get here is to flat-hat under the clouds right up the side of the mountain. Let’s hope they have enough room.” He paused. “And light,” he added softly. />
  “I’m going to need a place to work on him that’s cleaner than the LZ, Skipper,” Sheller said. “I can’t do it in the mud.” He looked pale and was breathing shallowly. “Also, I’ll need lots of light, so it’ll have to be pretty lightproof.”

  “Use my hooch. Snik and I can rig something else if he has to stay the night,” Fitch said, referring to Relsnik, the battalion radio operator.

  “Oh, Jesus no, Skipper.” It was Fisher, who had been listening to them all along. “They got to get me out.”

  “Don’t worry,” Fitch said. “If we have to operate we’ll take a picture of it before we start. That way you’ll have some proof to back up your stories.” Fisher managed to grin. Mellas was fidgeting, moving his weight from foot to foot.

  Fitch turned to Mellas. “It’ll be dark pretty soon. We’d better have our actuals meeting in about zero five so we can at least see to write.”

  “OK, Skipper,” Mellas said, again feeling unsure whether he should stay with Fisher or go with Fitch. He took another look at Fisher. “You take it easy, Fisher,” he said. Fisher nodded. Mellas followed Fitch.

  They slid sideways on their boots, skiing in the mud down the steep hill, and arrived in front of the company command post. The CP was a hooch like all the others, two ponchos draped over communication wire. This one, however, was distinguished from the rest by dirt piled up against its lower edges to stop wind and light leaks, and by a large two-niner-two radio antenna waving slightly in the monsoon air.

  Fitch was combing his hair before a steel shaving mirror wedged in a crack in a blasted tree stump. Rain started to fall with more intensity. Fitch put the comb in his back pocket and crawled into the entrance of the hooch, followed immediately by Hawke. Mellas hesitated, unsure if he was invited.

  “Jesus Christ, Mellas,” Hawke shouted. “Ain’t you got enough sense to come out of the fucking rain?”

  Mellas squeezed into the small shelter. Two radio operators were also inside, one manning the battalion radio net, the other the company net. A single candle cast flickering shadows on the sagging poncho roof. Three rubber air mattresses covered with camouflage poncho liners lay side by side. The edges of the hooch were filled with rifles, canteens, ammunition, and packs. A Seventeen magazine, a month-old Time, and a Louis L’Amour western lay scattered near the radios. Mellas didn’t know where to put his muddy boots. He eventually sat back against a pack with his feet sticking out of the hooch’s opening.

  Fitch introduced the two radiomen to Mellas, who immediately forgot their names, and asked one of them to call the platoon commanders for the actuals meeting. The subsequent radio exchange between the company headquarters and the three platoons, from Fitch’s request to its completion, took less than twenty seconds. Mellas, who had been feeling that the company radio operators needed more discipline, was impressed.

  Hawke turned to Fitch. “Conman just slipped me the word that China’s stirring up the brothers again and just now I had a little one-on-one with him up at the LZ.” He looked at Mellas. “Along with some help.” Mellas looked down at the mud.

  “Ahh, fuck,” Fitch said. “What now?”

  “Right now, R & R quotas. It’s all bullshit.” Hawke turned to Mellas. “Hey, Mellas, did Top Seavers say anything to you about Top Angell over at Charlie Company swapping two Taipeis for a Bangkok for Parker?”

  Mellas’s stomach gave a lurch. He vaguely remembered Seavers asking him to pass along something about R & R quotas to Hawke, but at the time it had been meaningless and he didn’t want to look foolish by asking to clear it up. “No, I don’t recall him saying anything about it,” he lied coolly. He also didn’t want to look foolish again in front of Hawke.

  “Huh. Well, maybe we can get through to him on Big John Relay tonight.”

  “Have you had racial problems here in the company?” Mellas asked, switching the subject.

  “Naw, not really,” Hawke answered. “Oh, a couple of numbnuts bitch a lot and keep things stirred up. Out here the splibs can’t bitch any more than the chucks. We’re all fucking niggers as far as I can tell.”

  “Who’s this China?”

  “He’s our local H. Rap Brown, our very own black radical,” Fitch said, smiling, “otherwise known as Lance Corporal Roland Speed. But he doesn’t like anyone to call him that. Cassidy hates him, but he’s a good machine gunner and he hasn’t caused any real trouble yet. We got our white bigots, too.” Fitch was looking at his two radio operators.

  The operator who talked to the battalion, Relsnik, looked at Fitch. “I can’t help it, sir. You didn’t grow up next to them like me and Pallack did back in Chicago. If you did, you’d hate ’em too. I mean most of the black guys out here are decent. I even like some of them. But they’re individuals. As a race, I hate ’em.”

  Fitch shrugged his shoulders and looked at Mellas. “You can’t beat the position for logic.”

  The two radiomen went back to their magazines.

  Down at the lines, Private First Class Tyrell Broyer, who had come in on the same chopper as Mellas and Goodwin, threw his small folding shovel into his fighting hole and gave it the finger. His hands and fingers, still not hardened to the bush, were cut from stringing barbed wire, blistered from hacking with the machete, and crisscrossed with infected cuts made by sharp jungle grasses. He’d returned from stringing wire down below the line of fighting holes to find his own hole half filled with a small mudslide.

  He looked up at the darkening sky, readjusting his heavy plastic glasses on the bridge of his nose. Fear that he would be caught without protection in the dark quickly moved him back into the hole. He immediately felt ashamed of his fear. He could be lying up on the LZ like that poor guy from Second Squad. He resumed shoveling, trying to ignore the pain from a ripped fingernail, until he sensed that someone was squatting on the ground above his hole. He turned to find a pair of bleached-out jungle boots. His eyes moved upward to a dark-skinned knee showing through a small hole in faded utilities. His gaze stopped on the face of a stocky black Marine with a drooping Ho Chi Minh mustache. The visitor clenched his right fist and greeted him, and they went through the handshake dance that was the common greeting between all black Marines, an elaborate rhythmic touching of fists, both knuckles and tops and bottoms, that lasted several seconds.

  “Where you from, brother?” the visitor asked when they had finished.

  “Baltimore.” Broyer looked down at his very small hole, feeling pressure to get it dug before the light faded and he would be left exposed. His plastic glasses slipped down his nose again and he quickly pushed them back up.

  “Don’t worry about the fuckin’ hole, man. You dig enough of those motherfuckers in the next thirteen months to fill a lifetime. Got a cigarette?”

  “Yeah.” Broyer reached into his pocket and pulled out a small C-ration cigarette package. He offered it to the stranger, who was smiling at him as if enjoying some sort of joke. He noticed that the stranger was afflicted with vitiligo, which left pigmentless white patches on his face and arms.

  “M’ name’s China,” the stranger said. “Just thought I’d get around seein’ some a the new brothers.” China lit the cigarette and took in a slow breath. “What’s you name, brother?”

  “Broyer.”

  “Shit, man. You real name, not you slave name.”

  “Tyrell,” Broyer said, wondering if that was a slave name, too. He was relieved when China said nothing. “You in First Platoon?” Broyer asked.

  “Naw. Second Herd. Gun Squad. I get around a lot, though. Sort of the welcome wagon, you know?” China laughed a wheezy giggle. “What you think of those two chuck lieutenants come in with you the other day?”

  “Don’t know them. They came into VCB on the chopper after we already got there on the convoy.”

  “Figures,” China said offhandedly. He waited for Broyer to go on.

  “They didn’t seem too bad. The one’s sort of a country dude, talking about hunting and stuff. The other one seems decent. Sort of has a stick up his rear though. Joe College dude.”

  “Uh-huh.” China looked out at the jungle, barely ten meters d
ownhill from where they were talking. Broyer followed China’s gaze to the wall of foliage. It was being laboriously pushed back with K-bars and entrenching tools by other members of Broyer’s platoon. A few stood guard in their holes, rifles and magazines carefully laid out in front of them, scanning the dark tree line.

  “You think we’ll get hit here?” Broyer asked.

  “Shit, man. You think the gooks crazy ’nough to want this motherfuckin’ place? They got better things to do with they time. Shit, man.” China smiled at him.

  Broyer laughed softly, looking down at his entrenching tool.

  “Look brother,” China said. “Don’chew worry. I got one more new brother to see ’fore the actuals meeting is over and I gotta get back to my poz, but I see you later, OK? You settle down soon. We all scared, but you get used to bein’ scared. You need to talk with a brother, you come on over.” They went through the handshake dance. Broyer was glad he’d asked a friend at boot camp to teach it to him one night when they were both on fire watch and everyone else was asleep.