Matterhorn Page 46

  Goodwin had doubled the size of his listening post to increase its odds of survival and hold down the jitters. The four kids on the LP, hearing the sound of firing on both sides of them, bolted for the lines. They ran uphill, flailing at the thick brush and tree limbs, panting, their legs cramped from lying on the damp ground, guided forward by eerie green and white flashes that brought brush and trees into and out of their sight. They broke out into the cleared field of fire below the lines and started shouting the password just as one of Goodwin’s men threw an M-76 fragmentation grenade. It bounced down the hill toward them. The kid who threw it immediately shouted, “Jesus. I’m sorry. It’s a fucking grenade.” None of the four heard him as they kept panting up the slope. Three seconds later the grenade exploded. One kid from the LP caught the bulk of the shrapnel along his right side. The three others crawled over and dragged him up the hill shouting, “Corpsman! Corpsman!” Goodwin stood up and waved his arms, forgetting that they couldn’t see a thing in the dark, and shouted, “Over here, you stupid motherfuckers, over here.” Guided by Goodwin’s voice, they dragged the wounded Marine into the machine-gun hole. The platoon corpsman crawled over to work on the first of the many wounded who were to come. No one gave a damn about what had caused the explosion that wounded the boy. The Marines were all too grateful to be inside the lines with their friends.

  The firefight with Kendall’s LP died out. The Marines stared into the dark and fog. Goodwin crawled from the machine-gun position to a point about ten meters to the left and behind it, his radiomen crawling after him, the radio still spewing nonsense. Then Goodwin lay on his back and shouted at the sky, “Remember it’s claymores first, then grenades and Mike-seventy-nines. And don’t waste your shotgun rounds.” Goodwin’s voice steadied nervous movements all around the hill. “Nobody fires a rifle until you hear mine,” he continued. “Any of you fuckers give away a machine-gun position before we need it, you won’t draw KP for the rest of your tour.” Then he whispered to Russell, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.” He broke into a scrambling crawl, heading for the machine gun again, Russell right behind him, just as brilliant flashes of light erupted from the jungle, the bullets hitting where Goodwin and Russell had lain on their backs.

  Then the entire hill was quiet. Everyone waited. The silence hung like smoke over their heads.

  Mellas crawled back to his hole and waited for Jackson to return with the new radio frequency. He toyed with the safety on his M-16, wondering if he’d be killed, feeling very alone and afraid, wishing Jackson would hurry back, worrying about him, worrying about getting the company up on the new frequency.

  Kendall crouched in his hole thinking of his wife, wondering if the kids on the LP were still alive, wishing that Fitch would tell him what to do. He imagined Genoa’s disdainful stare. He looked up over the edge of his hole into the blackness.

  Jackson, with the new frequency on the radio, crawled back toward Mellas’s hole, praying no one would hear him and shoot him accidentally.

  A very frightened Pallack, who had to carry the new frequency down the lines, followed him out of Fitch’s hole. “Hey, it’s Pallack,” he whispered, hoping he was near someone. There was no answer. No one wanted to give away his position. “Goddamn it, now, it’s me, Pallack, d’ Romeo carrier. Don’t shoot my ass. OK?”

  No one answered.

  “Hey, Scar. I’m coming down. OK?”

  No answer.

  Pallack lay flat in the mud, face buried, wanting never to move. The cold fog moved across his back. Why in the fuck was he the fucking company radio operator? He swallowed and continued crawling downhill, gravity pulling the blood to his face.

  “Hey, it’s Pallack,” he whispered again, tentatively. Jesus fuck, the lieutenants do this every night? No wonder they’re so fucked up. “Hey! It’s me. Character Poppa from d’ CP,” he whispered again.

  “Goddamn it, Pallack, what do you fucking want?” someone hissed.

  “Tell Scar to come up on fifteen point seven,” he whispered.

  “Fuck, Pallack.”

  Pallack was already crawling away as fast as he could.

  The main attack started with an explosion at the far end of First Platoon’s lines, not small arms fire. “Zappers!” Fredrickson whispered. He swallowed. NVA sapper units were elite troops who carried satchel charges filled with several pounds of TNT that they used to clear paths through barbed wire and destroy bunkers. They also hurled these into fighting holes. Satchel charges didn’t leave a corpsman much to work with.

  Another series of satchel charges were hurled by the North Vietnamese sappers as they rose from where they’d been silently creeping forward in the dark. At the sound of the satchels going off, the NVA infantry burst from the cover of the bush and came running uphill, heavily laden with grenades, rifles, and ammunition, fighting the same gravity that the Marines fought, their lungs gasping for the same damp air, their bodies hurled forward by the same adrenaline and fear.

  Goodwin opened up with his M-16, not waiting for Fitch’s orders, and the entire hill went off like a chain of gunpowder. The night turned phosphorescent orange and green, and the roaring sound of the weapons seemed to squeeze everyone’s brain down to the size of a fist. First the entire line erupted with the claymores going off, tripped by the Marines in their holes, spewing wide arcs of steel balls at groin height. Then the Marines rolled grenades beneath the legs of the advancing enemy. Tracers, green for the NVA and orange for the Marines, crisscrossed in front of the lines.

  Mellas crammed his fists against his ears, not to block the overpowering sound but to try and hold thoughts in his head, figure out what to do, and not let fear send him quivering into the bottom of his fighting hole, hoping for the mercy of God. No intelligible sound could be heard above the sustained explosion of a Marine rifle company fighting for its life.

  The machine gunners laced fire horizontally across the lines, setting up a curtain of moving steel through which the advancing NVA soldiers had to struggle as if in slow motion. Still they came forward, silently, laboriously, bravely. Some made it to the line of fighting holes. The rest were slaughtered by staggering firepower.

  The North Vietnamese who’d survived the storm of fire were crawling and darting among the holes, hurling satchels, firing their rifles. The entire hill disintegrated into the confusion of 300 human animals, white, brown, and black, trying to kill each other to save their skins.

  Then the sound of the battle changed. The explosive roar dissolved into sporadic bursts; cries of excitement and pain, previously drowned out by the noise, could be heard; and there was the occasional explosion of a grenade. Fitch, who could hear nothing until now, was immediately asking for situation reports. Mellas and Goodwin reported in. There was nothing from Kendall.

  “Where the fuck’s Three Actual, Pallack?” Fitch fumed. “They should’ve been up by now.”

  “Fucked if I know sir. I gave ’em d’freak.”

  “You’re sure they got it?”

  “I heard Genoa tell me he had it.”

  Genoa had indeed heard the frequency, but in the darkness he couldn’t see clearly enough to switch the dials, and Kendall’s red flashlight was in his pack at the bottom of the ridge, where they’d left it three days earlier. Genoa had twirled the knobs as fast as he could but still couldn’t pick up the frequency. When the fight erupted, he forgot the numbers. Kendall hadn’t listened in the first place, expecting the radio operator to take care of it. Genoa kept trying different combinations, futilely turning the tens counter one way, the ones counter the other.

  “I can’t get Bravo on the hook, sir,” he said desperately.

  Kendall nodded, his lips pressed together. “We’ve got to find out what’s going on,” he whispered.

  Genoa didn’t answer. He had no desire to find out what was going on.

  “We got to find out what’s going on and report to the skipper,” Kendall said. He took a deep breath and crawled out of the hole. Genoa watched in dismay, then crawled after him, as was his duty.

  Flurries of sporadic fire and occasional
explosions still erupted in the night. The NVA were trying to get back out, now that their satchel charges had been delivered.

  “Campion,” Kendall whispered to his second squad leader.

  No one answered.

  “Campion, it’s me, the lieutenant,” Kendall called out softly.

  There was a long wait, then a tense whisper. “Here.”

  Kendall rose to a crouch and started running toward the sound. Genoa followed him.

  The two NVA sappers lying on the ground knew the English word “lieutenant” and opened up with their AK-47s as soon as they heard the movement. Unable to see their target, they both sprayed their bullets in an arc about four feet off the ground. Two of the bullets caught Kendall and Genoa across their chests. They fell to the earth, gasping in pain, each with one lung collapsing and filling with blood, but neither of them was dead.

  Campion had seen the muzzle flashes of the two NVA and opened up on automatic. His partner did the same, and they each threw a hand grenade. Then they waited tensely. They heard nothing except the lieutenant and his radio operator gasping for air.

  “Corpsman!” Campion shouted. He and his friend crawled out to find them.

  The firefights died down. The cries for the corpsmen ceased. People waited for the morning light, their ears straining to hear the one broken stick or swish of cloth against grass that would save their lives. The North Vietnamese who remained inside the perimeter crawled desperately, slowly, rifles in front, trying to beat the sun, trying to make no sound at all. Tension and fear bound the different men on the hill together like wire.

  Every so often a North Vietnamese soldier tried to make a break for it. There would be the slapping sound of an AK opening up, followed by the sound of a hand grenade or an M-16.

  The night wore on. Marines stretched their ponchos out beside their fighting holes, hoping to collect a little of the mist that swirled around them. Down below the lines, a wounded NVA soldier began to moan.

  After brief whispers to make sure it wasn’t a Marine, Jacobs and Jermain threw a couple of grenades at the sound. “That’ll sh-shut the f-fucker up,” Jacobs said. It did.

  Mellas, still suffering from diarrhea after the long march to open Sky Cap, felt an urgent churning inside his intestines. He tried to control it, not wanting to shit inside the hole but afraid to leave it. “I got to shit,” he finally whispered to Jackson.

  “Shit? We ain’t eaten for two days, Lieutenant. I always knew you were full of it.”

  Mellas tried squeezing his buttocks together with all his strength. “I can’t hold it,” he said.

  Jackson didn’t say anything. Mellas dragged himself cautiously over the edge of the hole, his rifle in his hands. He duckwalked about two feet from the edge and pulled his trousers down, staring into the darkness, listening through the wind. He was facing uphill. The feces flowed from him like liquid paste, spattering the back of his trouser legs. He realized that the continual shitting, even of paste, meant he was losing fluid faster than those without diarrhea.

  Then he heard a scrape. He squatted there, the shitty paste running down his thighs, too frozen with terror to move or make a sound.

  A soft light was gradually beginning to filter through the fog. Mellas could make out the darker outline of his and Jackson’s hole three feet to his right. Again there was a faint scrape. Mellas could barely discern a wounded North Vietnamese soldier. His clothing clung to his chest, sticky with blood. Mellas could see that the hand holding the rifle was back by the NVA soldier’s hip, just starting to come forward in the crawl. The soldier had run out of darkness at the wrong moment.

  Mellas threw his legs out behind him, landing in his own feces, and fired on full automatic. The M-16 flashed. At first the bullets did not seem to reach the man, whose eyes stared, frozen, at Mellas. But then the man’s chest shuddered and his head snapped back unnaturally. Mellas moaned, his face in the earth, thanking God he was still alive, not caring that he’d killed a man.

  Jackson had spun around, rifle ready to fire. “You all right?” he whispered.

  “Yeah,” Mellas answered. He crawled away from his shit, trying to keep the rest of his body from being covered with it. He wiped it off his stomach and thighs with his hand, then rubbed his hand in the mud to clean it. He moved to his knees and pulled his fouled wet trousers back on.

  Mellas crawled up to the dead man. He’d hit him right between the eyes and twice in the tops of the shoulders. Mellas himself felt too shaky to stand but forced himself into a crouch. Everything seemed to work fine. He felt proud of himself. Right between the eyes.

  When it got lighter, he and Jackson moved down the lines, going from hole to hole to evaluate the damage. The little open bunker that Young had constructed of logs and branches to house his machine gun had been destroyed by one of the satchel charges. Mole was sitting on the pile of logs and leaves. He stared into the hole, tears streaming from his eyes. “It’s Young, sir,” he kept repeating. “Little Young.”

  The satchel charge had left very little of the three kids who’d shared the position. Flesh was plastered against the logs and sides of the hole. The machine gun was twisted.

  Mellas could only stare at it as if it were a picture puzzle, unable or unwilling to make sense of it. Jackson stood behind Mole, put both hands on Mole’s shoulders, and gently rocked him as he sat there, his feet dangling into the pit.

  They pulled ponchos off the dead Marines’ belts, which were still attached to their pulped torsos, to provide body sacks. They had no idea if the correct body parts would make it home to the correct wives or parents. The best they could do was put together one head, two arms, and two legs. Helping to haul the dead up to the edge of the little LZ, Mellas noticed kids licking their ponchos. His own tongue felt thick and cottony. He looked down to see if any moisture had collected on the ponchos of the dead he was hauling, but quickly repressed the impulse. He reached the pile and dropped the body parts with the rest. Mellas wondered if it had eventually been like this in the concentration camps. Had they reached the point where horror had no force? He hurried back to his hole and licked his own poncho, tasting the rubber, getting no satisfaction.

  Mole volunteered to take over the critical machine-gun position, now known to the NVA. He moved his own gun from a less critical point to Second Squad’s position. He had to scrape blood and pieces of flesh from the walls of the pit with his K-bar.

  The bodies of the dead North Vietnamese were tossed down the side of the hill with those from the previous fights. They stiffened into awkward angles as rigor mortis set in. Soon the flies were at them.

  After checking everyone for immersion foot, making sure everyone took his malaria pills in spite of the difficulty of swallowing, and redistributing ammunition from the dead, Mellas stopped at the bunker where Kendall and Genoa were panting for air. In the candlelight inside the dark bunker, Kendall’s smooth face was chalky white. His eyeglasses had been pulled off and he looked younger without the protective yellow lenses. He lay on his side, gasping like a fish out of water. Genoa was the same.

  Kendall tried to smile. “I guess—someone shouted—or I did.” The words came in short tortured gasps, but Kendall wanted to talk, to forget the fact that he was dying.

  Mellas looked at Genoa, who was barely conscious although his eyes were wide and terrified. He was wheezing steadily. Sheller, who was working on another wounded kid behind the two of them, caught Mellas’s eye, looked up meaningfully at the fog and then at Genoa, and slowly shook his head.

  Kendall gasped again, then went on. “And I—I said—It’s lieutenant —hah—” He tried to laugh but spat up blood instead.

  Mellas gently wiped the blood and spittle away. Then he wiped it on his trouser legs, which were still damp from his own shit.

  “Now,” Kendall continued, “wasn’t that—stupid—fucking thing.” He gasped for air. “Genoa, too—my fault—sorry.”

  “You’re forgiven,” Mellas said, smiling. “I guess some people just got to learn the hard way. Besides, it couldn’t be too stupid. Y
ou’ll get to go home and see Kristi, and Genoa will be fucking his brains out in California.” He reached out, took Kendall’s wrist in his left hand, and put his right hand on Kendall’s forehead, as if checking a child’s temperature.

  Kendall looked at Mellas, his eyes moving rapidly back and forth. He felt so alone. He looked at Genoa. They were on their sides so that the blood and fluid would collect in the bad lung, leaving the good one to struggle for air. But the good lung had to pump twice as fast to get enough oxygen. Both he and Genoa were straining with the effort.

  “You think—any birds—today?” Kendall gasped.

  Mellas grinned and sat back on his knees. “Everyone thinks I’m the fucking air traffic control around here,” he replied gently. “Sure they’ll get in. As soon as the fog burns off.”

  “Fog,” Kendall gasped. He went back to concentrating on his breathing. He wheezed, pulling in the air, panting as if he’d just run a footrace. Sudden fear swept across his face. “I—always wondered how I’d—die,” he wheezed.

  “Hell,” Mellas said. “You won’t die. A fucking chest wound is nothing to fix up.”

  “Mellas—I—don’t even have a kid. I don’t—hardly know—what—it’s like—to be married—only—four fucking weeks.” It was taking Kendall an intolerably long time to get through his thoughts. Mellas wanted to leave him and get back to redistributing ammunition and figuring out how to cover the approaches now that Young’s machine gun was gone along with most of the ammo.

  “Mellas?”

  “Yeah, Kendall.”

  “Mellas—don’t shit me. No choppers—I’m dead.”