Matterhorn Page 49

  “Luck, I’ll grant you,” the general said, not picking up on Mulvaney’s sarcasm. “If Sweet Alice hadn’t gotten into the shit we’d have never launched the Bald Eagle. Bravo would never have assaulted the ridge. Shit, Mike, I know you’re worried about Bravo up there. Sure it’s risky, but that’s what the gooks don’t expect of us. We’ve been too cautious. War is risky.”

  He sat down in his stuffed leather chair and leaned back, looking at the operations map, his hands clasped behind his head. “I don’t think Nagoolian has the slightest fucking idea what we can deliver around that hill once we get these batteries shifted around. The whole fucking sky is going to fall on him.” He looked up at Mulvaney. “Can Bravo hold?”

  Mulvaney knew that Neitzel knew what was being asked. He also knew why. They were here to kill their country’s enemies. If this worked, they were going to kill a lot of them. “They’ll hold,” he said.

  Neitzel watched Mulvaney intently for a moment; then he stood and walked over to the map. “Nagoolian thought he’d trapped a company,” he said to no one in particular. He planted a large fist on the map right over Matterhorn. “We’re about to trap a regiment.” He turned to face the three men. “Let’s just pray the bad weather and Bravo hold for one more day.”

  While the paperwork and helicopters shifted artillery batteries, matériel, and tired Marines through leaden skies, First Lieutenant Theodore J. Hawke collapsed on his bunk in the BOQ tent. Exhausted as he was, he couldn’t sleep. He went over in his mind the myriad of details. Nowhere could he find a spot where he could be of any use.

  Hawke sat up suddenly. Stevens, who was unlacing his boots and about to pass out, looked at Hawke, puzzled, but said nothing. Hawke began to drag equipment out from beneath his bunk.

  “What the fuck you doing?” Stevens asked, yawning. He sat there with a boot in one hand.

  “Packing.”

  “What for?”

  “It’s like the nesting instinct. I get it once a month.”

  “Be that way,” Stevens said. He dropped his boot to the floor and lay back with a sigh. “My aching fucking feet,” he moaned.

  Hawke smiled as he began to put on his old bleached-out jungle boots. He picked up his .45, which had been lying on the floor in its holster and was already rusting. He looked at it disgustedly. He took it out and worked the action, then snorted. From the sound of it, there would be plenty of spare rifles. He slung on his cartridge belt with its canteens and belt suspenders and reached for his helmet and flak jacket. He carefully rolled his old stateside utility cover and put it in one of the voluminous pockets on the sides of his trousers. He attached his pear-can cup to the outside of his pack.

  Stevens sat up. “You’re not going up on the hill, are you?” he asked. Hawke was stuffing his poncho liner into his pack and didn’t bother answering. “What will the Three say? I mean, did you clear it with him? Leaving your post without permission is serious shit, Hawke.”

  “Stevens, the Three needs a Three Zulu like a fucking satyr needs a dildo. There’s two boot lieutenants up there and zero staff. Count them: zero. And a fucking herd of newbies scared shitless down here at the LZ. Besides, I already asked the Three.”

  “Jesus,” Stevens said, obviously surprised. “Hard to believe he let you go.”

  “He didn’t.”

  Hawke walked out the door into the rain. He trudged down the muddy road toward the landing zone, feeling the familiar weight of the pack, the rain beginning to seep into his clothing, the mud and water squeezing in through the metal eyelets in his boots, making his socks wet. Mulvaney could keep his fucking company, he thought sadly and bitterly. There was only one company as far as he was concerned, and it was being destroyed while he did nothing but watch.

  The feeling of action lasted the ten minutes it took Hawke to get down to the large LZ. Two CH-46 twin-bladed helicopters sat side by side on the airstrip, their fuselages scarred and pockmarked from hard use, their long rotor blades drooping in the rain. They looked abandoned. On the ground nearby were about forty replacements, huddled miserably beneath their ponchos.

  Hawke could barely see across the little airfield. The clouds were so low to the ground that the rain seemed to materialize in the air around their heads. He realized that a chopper couldn’t even find this airfield, much less Bravo Company, more than 3,000 feet higher in the mountains. And in five hours it would be dark.

  He sat in the mud, knees pulled up beneath his poncho, and wondered what he’d just done. He was disobeying a direct order, throwing away a career, to sit helplessly on this fucking piece of wet earth. He pulled his poncho tighter around his neck.

  After about ten minutes he realized that two pairs of very black, very new boots were standing in front of him. He looked up. Two kids were shifting their weight back and forth, uncertain about the protocol of interrupting what was obviously a bush Marine in what was obviously an attempt to enter oblivion.

  “You with Bravo Company?” one of them finally asked.

  Hawke contemplated them quietly, noting how well-fed they looked. Finally he said, “Can either of you think of any other fucking reason why someone would be sitting here in the rain?”

  That brought two tentative smiles.

  Then Hawke noticed something. “You got any machine-gun ammo someplace?”

  One of the kids said, surprised, “No. I’m an oh-three-eleven,” referring to the military occupational specialty code of a Marine rifleman rather than the code of a machine gunner.

  “I don’t give a fuck if you’re a goddamned nuclear weapons expert. Did anyone give you any fucking machine-gun ammunition to carry?” Hawke was no longer lethargic.

  “Uh, no, uh—”

  “Lieutenant,” Hawke filled in for him.

  “Sorry, sir. I didn’t know. I just—”

  “Who’s in charge of this cluster-fuck?”

  “Uh, I am, sir. There’s none of us above PFC, but I shot expert at Pendleton, so the guy with the radio—the one that has Shore Party on his sweatshirt—he put me in charge.”

  “You’re through being in charge.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “From now on you will be known as Jayhawk Zulu.”

  “Uh, yes sir. Jayhawk Zulu.”

  “Can you find the battalion COC bunker?”

  “I think so, sir.”

  “I want you to find a staff sergeant named Cassidy. You tell him the Jayhawk wants him down on the LZ as soon as he can get here with as much machine-gun ammunition as forty very well-fed boot motherfuckers straight out of ITR can carry.” He paused. “And I mean barely carry. He’ll do the interpreting.”

  The kid started to leave, but Hawke stopped him.

  “And a hundred sixty canteens full of water.”

  “One hundred and sixty, sir?”

  “Do I have to do the fucking math for you? Four times forty. OK? Counting the two everyone has on now, that’s only six each.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “If you don’t get Cassidy here before this fog lifts, I’ll kick your boot ass into Laos.” He smiled at the kid and then gave him the curled talons sign and roared out, “Hawk power!” The kid gave his friend a quick glance and ran for the COC.

  Within an hour Cassidy had joined Hawke at the LZ and every replacement was laden with machine-gun ammunition and water to the point where he could barely move. Hawke or Cassidy would walk up to each one and have him jump up and down. If the kid looked too lively they’d throw another belt of ammo across his shoulders until his knees were just short of buckling. Then Cassidy left and they were all sitting in the mud again, covered with ammunition and canteens.

  “Don’t fucking worry,” Hawke joked with them. He began to speak in a sonorous monotone. “Come unto me all you who are burdened and heavy laden.” Smiles appeared. He quickly turned on them. “But I ain’t giving you fucking sinners any rest.” He turned to one of the replacements who had cracked a smile. “You think I’m fucking Jesus or something? Do I look like Jesus to you?”

  “Uh, no sir,” the kid said. But others were now also trying to hide smiles.

  “
Maybe you think I look like the Virgin Mary?”

  “No, sir. Not even—no, sir!”

  “Not even a little bit?”

  “No, sir,” the kid roared out.

  “Shit. And I even shaved this morning.”

  Smiles were breaking out.

  Then Hawke turned serious. “You’ll be relieved of all your burdens, believe me. All you have to do is make it from the back of the chopper to someone’s hole. I don’t think you’ll find that too difficult under the circumstances.”

  As usual, the combination of Hawke’s sarcastic Boston twang and his natural empathy had the crowd well in hand. He kept staring out beyond the airstrip, however, looking for a break in the weather.

  He saw a break at about 1500. The constant rain let up, and soon he saw the base of the hills, about a kilometer from the airstrip. He stood up, ran over to the CH-46s that sat at the runway’s edge, and roused a crew member who was asleep inside.

  It took him a few minutes to persuade the man to call the pilots. At one point the man asked Hawke who the fuck he thought he was.

  “I’m Captain Theodore Hawke, Twenty-Fourth Regiment assistant operations officer,” Hawke lied, “and goddamn it, if you don’t get some fucking pilots in these birds ASAP I’m going to have you and them standing tall in front of Colonel Mulvaney explaining why they let one of his companies get overrun because they wouldn’t fly in some ammunition when we requested it.”

  “Yes, sir,” the crewman answered. By this time several other crewmen had shown up and were watching the scene silently. “I don’t know the call sign for the O-club, sir.”

  It took a few minutes, but the crewman got the frequency and call sign and raised a bored bartender. After some initial confusion about who was calling for what, a voice came on the radio that the crewman had switched over to speaker mode. “What the fuck’s going on, Weaver?”

  “Sir, I got the Twenty-Fourth Regiment’s assistant Three here wondering why we’re not flying. Over.”

  “Tell the son of a bitch that we’re not flying because those fucking clouds have rocks in them. Over.”

  “Uh, sir, he’s right here listening in. Over.”

  There was a pause. “Who is he? Over.”

  “He’s, uh, Captain Hawke, sir. Twenty-Fourth Marines’ three shop. Over.”

  “Captain? Put him on. Over.” The voice sounded confident.

  Hawke was handed the crewman’s earphones with their attached microphone. “What the fuck is going on here, Captain? This is Major Reynolds.”

  Outranked, even if he really had been a captain. In for a penny, in for a pound. “Sir, I have a company of Marines that need resupply and the weather’s cleared. Colonel Mulvaney wants these birds flying right now.”

  “Captain, the weather hasn’t cleared. I’m looking at it right here, right now. And these birds aren’t flying if we don’t have the weather hold lifted by Group. I don’t care what the fuck some grunt colonel thinks. I’ve got several million dollars worth of aircraft at risk here. Is that clear? Over.”

  Hawke didn’t answer. He’d heard the shit about “several million dollars worth of aircraft” before. He handed the headset back to the crewman and began running across the airstrip for the O-club. In three minutes he burst through the screen door, dripping with sweat because of the heat trapped by his poncho. Faces turned from drinks, dice games, and cards to look at him. It wasn’t hard to spot the pilots. Four of them, all in flight suits, were at the same table. Just right for bridge.

  He walked over to their table. “Is one of you Major Reynolds?”

  A rather overweight man with a florid face pushed back his chair and looked up at Hawke. “I’m Major Reynolds.” Then in a mocking tone, “Captain Hawke, I presume?”

  “Sir, I can see the foothills. That’s one klick of visibility.”

  “And I can see about a hundred feet of those fucking hills, and that’s a hundred feet of visibility—up,” Reynolds answered, pointing at the ceiling. “And that’s here at two hundred fifty feet above sea level. Your fucking company is at over five thousand feet above sea level. No fucking way, Captain. Not until we get VFR and a weather clear from MAG-39.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like at five thousand feet unless you go there.”

  “I don’t need to go there to know what it’s like. We had a weather bird out there an hour ago and it’s souped in from here to fucking Burma.” He looked at his three comrades with a slight smile. “We’re in constant contact with Captain Bainford from First Battalion, and it’s his guys up there, not yours. He’s also got an enlisted forward air controller right on the spot. I think between us we’ll get the job done”—he paused slightly—“when it’s possible. Now just kindly let us do the flying, Captain.”

  The sudden rage of the combat infantry veteran flashed through Hawke. His hand went to the butt of his .45, but the pistol was hidden beneath his poncho. The fact that he would have to hike up the poncho to reach the weapon slowed him down just enough. For some reason, the image of Hippy, his M-60 cradled on his flak jacket, struggling through the bush on those ravaged feet, hit him. Breathe, he thought. He did. Then he thought again. Then he plunged.

  “I’m not a captain and I’m not the assistant Three at Regiment. I’m Lieutenant Hawke, First Battalion S-3 Zulu and the former executive officer of Bravo Company. My guys are out of water and out of ammo and they’re dying up there. They need help.” Eyebrows went up from all four of the pilots. “I don’t know fuck about flying, but I do know fuck about trying. You guys going to sit here playing cards or you going to try?”

  There was a long moment of silence. The pilots knew better than Hawke what was being asked of them. Under these conditions, groping nearly blind just above the trees because that was the only airspace in which they could see, one slight error in navigation, one second of inattention, one slight temperature shift that turned clear air into impenetrable fog, and they would see the side of the mountain for about one second before it killed them and all the Marines on board.

  Hawke made one last desperate stab. “Marines are in trouble. You afraid to help them?”

  A younger first lieutenant pushed back his chair. “That fucking does it,” he said. He slapped his cards down and stood up. Hawke feared that he’d pushed too hard. But the pilot looked over at his bridge partner, obviously his copilot. “What do you think, Nickels?”

  “Fuck.” Nickels threw his cards on the table, faceup, and rose to his feet, followed by the first lieutenant.

  “Well, Major?” the lieutenant asked. “I believe we’ve been called chickenshit.”

  The florid man sighed and threw his cards onto the table. He rose from his chair, calling out to no one in particular, “Anyone got a fucking jeep? I don’t feel like walking to my own funeral.”

  And that was the true origin of the story, which later made the rounds of the Twenty-Fourth Marine Regiment and the Fifth Marine Division, that a grunt lieutenant had walked into the regimental O-club and pulled his pistol on four zoomies and threatened to kill them if they didn’t fly the mission to save his old outfit.

  The story that made its way around Marine Air Group 39 and the Fifth Marine Air Wing was that four pilots disobeyed a weather hold to snake their way up a 7,000-foot mountain with only thirty or forty feet between their wheels and the trees in a driving monsoon rain to rescue a Marine company that was surrounded by an NVA regiment.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  FAC-man picked up the radio calls from the two birds long before they could be heard. He was amazed. It didn’t seem possible for a chopper to find them. He had just told Bainford the ceiling height, and Bainford had told him they’d have to wait, that it was too dangerous to fly.

  Mellas ran crouching behind FAC-man up to the LZ, where they both piled into a nearby hole. A single sniper round passed over their heads. “I don’t know what the fuck’s going on, sir, but we got two birds down in the valley trying to find us. They say they got reinforcements and ammo. Captain Bainford told me they were all on weather hold.” Just then the radio hissed.

  FAC-man listened. “That’s a neg, sir
. Still can’t hear you. Over.”

  He and Mellas sat silently. Mellas motioned for FAC-man’s radio and switched quickly to the company frequency. Pallack answered.

  “This is Five Actual,” Mellas said. “Tell everyone we have a bird trying to find us. I want total silence. Over.” Soon the entire perimeter was quiet, everyone waiting in the fog, not wanting to hope.

  After a few minutes Mellas saw FAC-man tense, look to the south, and pull out his compass. Mellas’s ears were so damaged by the recent combat that he heard nothing except a high-pitched ringing that seemed to have settled permanently inside his head. “Magpie, Magpie, this is Big John Bravo. I have rotor noise bearing one seven niner. I repeat, bearing one seven niner degrees.” FAC-man looked at Mellas, then shook one clenched fist in excitement. He was grinning. Something came over the radio. “That’s affirmative, sir.” There was another pause. “Magpie, this is Big John Bravo FAC. We have about”—he squinted, looking up at the clouds—“forty feet.” Then he hung his head. Mellas realized that by telling the truth, FAC-man might doom the company because the choppers would turn around, but that not telling the truth might doom the choppers. He caught FAC-man’s eye and gave an understanding nod. The FAC-man smiled and looked up at the sky again. “There it is, sir,” he said quietly.

  Then FAC-man tensed again, sighted on his compass, and keyed his handset. “Magpie, I have rotor noise now bearing one eight five. Over.”

  In his mind’s eye, Mellas watched the choppers moving westward past the spot where FAC-man had first heard their rotor noise, then turning north to try to come back. That would probably put them just west of the Laotian border. If they could get up to altitude and stay on their northward course, they’d miss the hills to their south. But they would probably overfly Helicopter Hill and Matterhorn in the clouds. If they stuck close to the ground, they could crash into either hill. Mellas hoped fervently that they were flat-hatting across the top of the jungle.