Matterhorn Read online

  There were perhaps fifteen minutes of silence. Then, from all around them, tiny muffled clinks came from the jungle. It was the sound of digging.

  Mellas called Goodwin on the radio. “Hey, Bravo Two, you hear people digging? Over.”

  “You ain’t lying, Jack. Over.”

  Fitch’s voice came up on the net. “Bravo Three, this is Bravo Six. How about you? Over.”

  Kendall answered softly. “Yeah. Down on the finger that Two came up the other day. Over.”

  “Shit, Jack,” Goodwin broke in. “We just got our asses surrounded. Over.”

  “You’re a military genius, Scar. Over,” Fitch grumbled.

  “How many Purple Hearts you got, Jack? That’s the sign of a fucking military genius. Over.”

  Kendall shut his eyes and tried to remember every small detail of his wife’s face, her body.

  Mellas started praying silently so Jackson wouldn’t hear him. “Dear God, I know I haven’t prayed except when I’m in trouble, but dear God, get me out of here, please get me out of here.” All the time he was praying, his mind was racing, casting about for an escape route, deciding he’d leave the wounded, leave the platoon, anything, just to reach the protection of the jungle.

  Mellas was hit by the overwhelming, shattering knowledge that it was very likely he was going to die. Here on this filthy piece of earth. Now. Life had barely started, and so terribly and surprisingly soon it would be over.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  In the morning, when the fog turned to dull gray, the Marines began to shift in their holes. Some had laid their ponchos out behind their holes to collect dew. That didn’t work, but they licked the ponchos anyway. A couple of jokes were passed. Mellas scrambled across the top of the hill to Goodwin’s hole. Goodwin was standing upright in it, only his head and shoulders exposed. He wore his belt suspenders and was testing the springs on his magazines. His face was troubled.

  Mellas squatted down next to Goodwin’s hole. “Going after your LP?” he asked softly.

  “Yep.” Goodwin climbed out of his hole and worked the action of his M-16.

  “The gooners can’t be more than a hundred meters from here,” Mellas said.

  “I know, Jack.” Goodwin turned and looked into the fog.

  It was the first time Mellas had seen Goodwin so serious. A sudden rush of feeling swept over him. “Hey,” Mellas said. “Take it easy out there, huh?”

  Goodwin turned and looked at Mellas. “We going to get our asses out of this shit sandwich?”

  Mellas shrugged his shoulders. “All we need is a clear day.”

  They both looked up at the clouds, just visible in the early light. Goodwin looked at Mellas. “I don’t know about you, but I’m fucking thirsty.” He then put two fingers to his lips, gave a shrieking whistle, and shouted out, “Hey, you gunjy fuckers. Get your asses up here.” He turned to Mellas and grinned. “I asked for volunteers and they all said they’d go. But Roscoe and Estes were both from First Squad, so First Squad will go get them.”

  He hollered out again. “Goddamn it, Robb, get them up here.” He turned back to Mellas. “Knowing how scared they were last night, I figure they couldn’t have gone more than thirty or forty meters outside the lines.” The squad moved silently and slowly up to Goodwin’s hole.

  China was sliding the bolt on his M-60 slowly back and forth. Part of him was crying out about how stupid it was to risk his life going to retrieve a couple of dead chucks, but another part of him was making sure the machine gun worked perfectly. He looked toward the top of the hill and saw the religious nut, Cortell, sitting by the dead bodies. The fool just couldn’t see that he’d adopted the white man’s religion. But there was something about Cortell that China envied—Cortell was sure where Parker had gone. China slammed home the bolt and looked at Goodwin. Jesus, the white cracker moonshine hillbilly son of a bitch took this Semper Fi shit seriously. Here he was about to get his ass shot off doing Semper Fi bullshit while Henry was back at VCB doing business. The image of Parker trying to hold back his fear swam into China’s consciousness. He saw Vancouver heading off in the night to work his way down to the river, and Doc Fredrickson wiping Parker down to keep him cool.

  He watched Goodwin silently counting them, pointing his index finger at each one as he did. It occurred to him that Goodwin probably mouthed the words when he read, too. Goodwin nodded to the squad leader, Robb, and then crouched low. Ten meters beyond the holes, Goodwin went directly to ground and started crawling. Robb was three meters behind him. Then it was China’s turn. He went.

  Mellas watched until the entire squad had crawled into the fog and disappeared. The entire hill waited for the firefight. An hour dragged by. Goodwin wasn’t talking on the radio. Cortell came and sat next to Mellas, saying nothing.

  Eventually Mellas spoke. “You pray about shit like this, Cortell?”

  Cortell looked at Mellas from under the bloody bandage around his head. “Sir, I pray all the time.”

  Within an hour the squad was back, dragging two bodies. Mellas noticed that the LP’s radio was gone. When they reached the lines, Goodwin gave the senior squid the dead kids’ water and then went through their pockets. “Hey,” he shouted, holding up a single dark green C-ration can, “fucking beef stew.”

  Being besieged is like any other variation of war. Behind the immediate terror of killing one another is tedious, spirit-destroying boredom. The fog remained thick that morning, and the NVA shelled them only a few times. The NVA were probably afraid of hitting their own men who were dug in around the Marines. This gave everyone a lot of time to think.

  Mellas wandered alone to the stack of bodies on top of the LZ. All he could see were the bleached boots of the veterans, with their sickly yellow nylon tops, and the black boots, with the dark green tops, of the new guys. Paper tags had been wired to boots and wrists.

  The senior squid squatted beside Mellas. He was holding what looked like photographs in his hand.

  “What you got there, Sheller?” Mellas asked.

  “Snapshots. Off the bodies. I need your OK to throw these. Division standing order is to make sure nothing risqué goes home with the corpse.”

  “Risqué?” Mellas asked through clenched teeth.

  Sheller hung his head, embarrassed. “It’s just something they say to do, sir.”

  Mellas went slowly through the photographs, his hands trembling. There were pictures of dead North Vietnamese: blasted, blackened bodies. One picture was of a body with no head, sitting bolt upright in a fighting hole. A kid from Goodwin’s platoon was posing next to it, smiling, with the head in the crook of his arm. There was a picture of three dead American kids all squeezed into one fighting hole. On it, written with a ballpoint pen, was “Snake, Jerry, and Kansas.” One picture was of a beautiful Thai girl lying naked on a bed in a hotel room. Mellas looked at it for a long time, noticing her black hair floating across the sheets, her smooth brown legs modestly hiding her vulva. The fragile beauty amid the carnage took his breath away.

  “That one bothered me,” Sheller said.

  “He extended, didn’t he, to see her again?”

  Sheller nodded.

  “Burn ’em all.”

  Sheller calmly took out a Zippo and lit the snapshots. They watched the photos slowly curl in the heat, change color, then burst into flames. And they watched the naked body of a bar girl in Bangkok do the same. No one knew her name, other than Susi, so no one could tell her that Janc had died. She would find that out when her next letter came back stamped DECEASED.

  Mellas went back to his fighting hole and scrunched down inside it, trying to stay warm. The two flak jackets provided little help. Jacobs came up to him to ask if the birds were coming.

  “Believe me, Jake, if I get word about a fucking bird being able to land here, even so much as a tiny sparrow, or even a tufted nuthatch, or a hairy-chested widow maker, I’ll let you know.”

  Then Mellas noticed that there was an ear stuck in the rubber band on Jake’s helmet. He went cold. “What’s that on your helmet?”

  “An ear, sir,” Jake said
offhandedly.

  “Get rid of it.”

  “Why the fuck should I?” Jacobs asked hotly. “This f-fucking b-bastard killed Janc, and I know because I threw his goddamned b-body down the hill.”

  “You know you could go to jail for mutilation.”

  “Go to jail? F-fucking jail. Who’s going to go to fucking jail for k-killing Janc? Th-they ought to go to jail, the ones that made up the fucking rules.”

  “Throw it away right fucking now. And you’ll bury the bodies, too.”

  “I ain’t burying no g-gook body. No sir.”

  “Come on Jake, let’s go look at them.”

  Jacobs silently followed Mellas down to the lines. They looked down the steep slope where the bodies of the dead North Vietnamese kids had all been thrown after the assault. They lay there, some with eyes open, arms and legs askew, rigid, seeming oddly uncomfortable. One body had been hacked at with a K-bar. It also had one ear missing.

  “Who hacked the body up, Jake?” Mellas asked softly. “Look, I know they killed some of us, but we killed some of them, didn’t we?”

  Jacobs nodded, looking down at the ground. Mellas remembered laughing once with him about how they’d both been altar boys. “I hacked it,” Jacobs said. He reached up and tore the ear from his helmet and hurled it down at the bodies. “I just r-ran down the hill and hacked it. I don’t know why.”

  They stood together watching the fog. Jacobs’s eyes glistened with tears, but he held them back. “Fucking Janc,” he said.

  Gambaccini came up. Two ears were pinned to the crown of his bush cover. “I cut ears too, sir,” he said. “If you put Jacobs in the brig, then I did it too.”

  Mellas shook his head slowly. “Gambaccini, I don’t give a rat’s ass about the dead gooks. Just get rid of the ears so you don’t go to jail.” Mellas started to walk away. “But you can help Jake bury the fucking bodies.”

  When Mellas had moved some distance, he glanced back. The two of them were still standing there, looking down at the corpses. Then Gambaccini took the two ears and, curling a finger around each like a skipping stone, sent them sailing one after the other into the fog.

  There came a moment during the lull when Mellas, lost at the center of the swirling fog, knew beyond any ability to lie to himself that he had, indeed, killed Pollini—and he was overwhelmed by an emptiness that knocked him to his knees. Slumped in his wet hole, cocooned by two flak jackets, he broke. He was the butt of a cruel joke. God had given him life and must have laughed as Mellas used it to kill Pollini, to get a piece of ribbon to show proof of his worth. And it was his worth that was the joke. He was nothing but a collection of empty events that would end as a faded photograph above his parents’ fireplace. They too would die, and relatives who didn’t know who was in the picture would throw it away. Mellas knew, in his rational mind, that if there was no afterlife, death was no different from sleep. But this cruel flood was not from his rational mind. It had none of the ephemerality of thought. It was as real as the mud he sat in. Thought was just more of the nothing that he had done all his life. The fact of his eventual death shook him like a terrier shaking a rat. He could only squeal in pain.

  His mind jumped in. We’ll escape. Play dead when they finally overwhelm us. Don’t use the knife—play dead and use the confusion of that last assault to cover your escape. You’ll be alive! Leave these Marines and this false notion of honor. Get into the jungle with the rest of the animals and hide and be alive. Alive!

  But the terrier shaking him by the neck laughed. And then? A career in law? A little prestige? A little money? Perhaps a political office? And then, dead. Dead. The laughter turned him inside out, exposing his most secret parts. He lay before God as a woman opens herself to a man, with legs apart, stomach exposed, arms open. But unlike some women, he did not have the inner strength that allowed them to do such a thing without fear. There was no woman’s strength in Mellas at all.

  The terrier shook him again and Mellas was painfully alive. Stripped to a scream, undressed to a cry of pain, he sobbed his anger at God in hoarse words that hurt his throat. He asked for nothing now, nor did he wonder if he’d been bad or good. Such concepts were all part of the joke he’d just discovered. He cursed God directly for the savage joke that had been played on him. And in that cursing Mellas for the first time really talked with his God. Then he cried, but his cries were the rage and hurt of a newborn child, at last, however roughly, being taken from the womb.

  Mellas’s new insight didn’t change anything, at least on the outside, but Mellas knew he wouldn’t play dead. He’d been playing dead all his life. He would not slip into the jungle and save himself, because that self didn’t look like anything worth saving. He’d choose to stay on the hill and do what he could to save those around him. The choice comforted him and calmed him down. Dying this way was a better way to die because living this way was a better way to live.

  The senior squid came crawling into Mellas’s hole, covered with blood and vomit from the wounded. “I just had to get away,” he said. He slid in next to Mellas to watch the jungle and the fog. Mellas knew that his own existential crisis didn’t mean shit to Sheller. And he suddenly knew where Hawke got his sense of humor. He got it from observing the facts. What a great joke—that Mellas would probably get a medal for killing one of his own men. It seemed appropriate that the president would probably get reelected for doing the same thing on a far larger scale. Then a new voice within him started to laugh with God.

  He became aware that he was laughing out loud when he saw Sheller looking at him quizzically. “What?” Mellas asked, still laughing.

  “What’s so funny, sir?”

  Mellas laughed again. “You’re a fucking mess, Sheller. You know that?” He kept laughing, shaking his head in wonder at the world.

  Tedium marked the passing of the hours. The kids fought their desire to sleep. Just before noon the fog lifted slightly, hovering a few feet above Matterhorn and giving enough visibility for a bird to get into Helicopter Hill. Fitch immediately radioed for the resupply birds.

  Helicopter Hill, however, was also in plain sight of the NVA mortarmen, who started firing, easily adjusting their shots. When the Marines heard the projectiles leaving the tubes, they knew they had only a few seconds to get deep while the rounds were making their large arcs over to Helicopter Hill. The mortar rounds came down, the ground shook, and the pressure hit eardrums and eyeballs. It wasn’t sound or noise, because it wasn’t heard. It was felt. It was pain.

  The Marines huddled in their holes and felt the concussions. They held their ears. Dirt rained on their helmets and stuffed their nostrils. One kid from Third Platoon was hit by a shell that landed on the lip of his hole. They dragged him into the bunker that held the few canteens of water being saved for the wounded. Everyone else was out.

  The birds were on their way when the fog closed in again. The helicopters were unable to find the landing zone and turned back after running short of fuel.

  The shelling stopped.

  Boredom, fatigue, and thirst set in again.

  Goodwin was restless and moved down below the line of holes facing Matterhorn. Occasionally, through the fog, he could see the bunkers First Platoon had attacked the morning before. He sat down with his rifle and adjusted its sights. Resting it against a log, he settled in to watch and wait.

  An hour passed. Goodwin had the patience of a born hunter. He lived in no-time, leaving it only briefly to shift his body.

  The fog moved in and closed Matterhorn from his view. Twenty more minutes passed. The fog lifted again. A tiny figure could be seen trudging between two bunkers. Goodwin squeezed off a round. The bullet kicked up dirt below the figure. The man started running. Goodwin aimed above him to compensate for the distance and fired three more quick shots. The third one clipped the man in the leg and he went down. Excitement coursed in Goodwin’s throat. He quickly adjusted his sights for the distance and wind and fired two more rounds. He couldn’t tell where they hit. That was a good sign, because if they hit flesh they wouldn’t kick up mud. Small
arms opened fire from Matterhorn. Goodwin heard the crack of the bullets in the air around him before he heard the sound of the discharges. The bullets thudded into the hill above him, sending the Marines diving for their holes, joking and cursing Goodwin, who was hidden below them, readjusting his sights again.

  Two figures darted out of a bunker and dragged Goodwin’s target away. Goodwin, enraged, opened up on full automatic, but the M-16 rode up with the recoil. He saw a tracer bullet make a flat orange arc that seemed to be sucked quickly into the hill above the three NVA soldiers. “Fuck. We need a fucking M-14, Jack.”

  The fire died down. Goodwin went back to the lines and began trading straight bullets for tracers, alternating one for every four in his magazines. Then he and a couple of others slipped just below the holes and set up at a different location. At that distance, the tracers, being lighter, wouldn’t impact exactly where the bullets did, but he could estimate about where the heavier bullets would go and knew he’d still have a better chance of correcting for range and wind. He also knew that the tracers would give away his position.

  Mellas wandered down to see what was happening. Goodwin was sitting there, leaning over his rifle, as patient and as still as a cat waiting by a mouse hole. Fifteen minutes passed. Mellas got bored and went back to his side of the hill.

  Two hours passed. The fog closed back in again, making it safe to walk or sit aboveground. Kids talked, whittled, and dug elaborate shelves and steps in their holes. Several went down and helped Gambaccini and Jacobs dig graves for the dead NVA, simply for something to do. Many dozed, thankful to have nothing to do but wait in their holes. All of them looked at the sky every few minutes, like cargo cultists waiting for deliverance.

  Two and a half hours more passed. Mellas crawled down to check on Goodwin. Goodwin was still waiting over his rifle. Mellas lay down beside him. Goodwin talked without taking his eye from the rear sight. “That little bastard’s just about to poke his head out that hole. I can feel it.”