Matterhorn Read online

  The familiar camouflage of the Marine jungle utility emerged, back first. Amarillo was pulling a shrapnel-mutilated body out of the bunker behind him. The shots had all been fired into the man’s skull.

  Then a ricochet from the NVA machine gun spun crazily over their heads. “OK, Cortell. Get going,” Mellas said.

  Cortell crawled off to join his squad. Mellas poked his head above the hole he and Jackson shared with the two dead North Vietnamese boys. He pulled one of the bodies down, stuffed it into the bottom of the hole, and stood on it to get a slightly better view. The LZ was deserted save for Robertson’s body, which lay sprawled by the side of the blasted machine-gun bunker.

  No trees remained on Matterhorn. The thick bushes that he and Scar had first tumbled into when they arrived were burned away. The entire beautiful hill was shorn, shamed, and empty.

  Mellas saw Goodwin poke his head briefly above the lip of the LZ. Goodwin ducked down again when machine-gun and rifle fire from some nearby positions opened up on him. Goodwin radioed Mellas.

  “How we gonna get that fucker, Jack?”

  Mellas explained that Cortell was working his way behind the position. It would be a matter of time. The remaining enemy were trapped.

  Occasionally a Marine would pop up, apparently desultorily, unload half a magazine in the direction of the enemy machine gun, and get back down.

  Mellas saw Cortell’s red smoke. He stood up, shouting, “Don’t shoot. Cease firing. Cease firing.” Goodwin did the same.

  Cortell’s bandaged head appeared momentarily above the crest. The seven kids left in the squad jumped above the lip of the LZ, threw seven grenades at the machine-gun position, and jumped down, out of sight. The gunner started to turn the barrel to meet the new threat. The grenades went off in and around the shallow pit, causing a series of shock waves that hammered Mellas’s eardrums.

  Immediately Goodwin was rushing across the LZ toward the smoke from the explosions. A stunned NVA soldier struggled to turn the machine gun on Goodwin but couldn’t move fast enough. Goodwin, like a panther making a kill, was on top of him, firing his M-16. The remaining NVA in nearby gun pits stood up, weaponless, eyes filled with terror, and raised their hands. They were cut down in seconds as every available weapon on the hill turned on them.

  Mellas, still standing on the dead boy’s body, slumped his head forward and rested his bloody, stinging face on the cool clay. Jackson leaned back, resting his radio against the side of the hole. “We won,” Jackson said.

  Mellas simply nodded inside his helmet liner. His helmet was motionless against the clay. He reveled in the feel of the cool earth against his chin and mouth. Soon, however, the wind made his damp utility shirt too cool for comfort. He dragged himself from the hole and started shouting at various fire team leaders to organize the defense in case of a counterattack. Then he remembered Hamilton, waiting in ambush down below.

  “Bravo One Three, Bravo One. Sorry I rushed you in so much. Why don’t you get up here and set in from eight to ten. Twelve is due north. Over.”

  There was a long silence.

  “One Three, this is One Actual. Did you copy? Over.”

  Mole’s voice came over the radio, trembling. “Character Hotel is Coors. Over.”

  Mellas’s hands started shaking. “Any others? Over.”

  “We got two minor Oleys. Over.”

  “Can you get everyone in without help? Over.”

  “Yeah. Over.”

  “One out.” Mellas handed Jackson the handset.

  The hill was theirs.

  Jackson leaned over and put his head in his hands.

  Mellas limped to the edge of the LZ and watched Mole struggle up the hill with Hamilton slung over his back.

  Mole dumped Hamilton at Mellas’s feet. “Sorry, sir. I know you was tight.” He walked away, leaving Mellas standing over Hamilton’s body.

  Mellas silently emptied Hamilton’s pockets. He found a letter from Hamilton’s mother. In it she’d written, “Don’t you worry, Buster, you’ll be home soon and it will be all over.” Mellas hadn’t known Hamilton’s nickname was Buster. He felt he had never known Hamilton at all—and never would know him.

  Mellas’s left leg throbbed with the shrapnel, and his right leg burned. Blood caused his trousers to stick. He felt a sharp, pulsing pain in his blinded eye. If only he could sit down, just sit down and do nothing. But the defenses had to be set in.

  He struggled to his feet. An explosion slammed against him. He hit the dirt, rolling next to Jackson. They both looked up to see greasy smoke drifting across the LZ. Someone was shouting for a corpsman. “Mine! A mine,” someone shouted from Goodwin’s sector. “The place is fucking mined!”

  “Jesus shit,” Mellas muttered.

  He stood up again. The land around him had become toxic. He didn’t know where to step.

  Still, the company had to be set in. Mellas went to his knees, crawling so he could see the signs of a buried mine or trip wire as he went from hole to hole. The kids, too, just wanted to sit. Mellas joked with them, cajoled them, threatened them. Eventually they started to dig into the hill, throwing dead bodies from holes, re-digging half-buried trenches. Others were struggling up the hill with dead Marines or helping to move the wounded so they could be evacuated. Fitch called for volunteers to clear a small section of the hilltop for a medevac bird. Soon a line of Marines formed and slowly crawled across the area with their K-bars in front of them, probing for mines, watching for trip wires. One kid was blown open from the abdomen when his knee set off a pressure device his knife had missed. They threw what remained of him onto the pile.

  Fitch called an actuals meeting. Mellas made his way around the rim of the LZ. Smoke choked and nauseated him. It drifted sluggishly from the hill to join the heavy gray clouds rolling endlessly away toward Laos.

  “Nice work, Mel,” Fitch said. He was haggard and drawn. Hawke and Goodwin were both sitting with their elbows resting on the inside of their knees. They were staring into space.

  “Hamilton got killed,” Mellas answered. “He used to carry my radio.” He had no idea why he was talking. He just had to tell someone. “Is Conman OK?” he asked Hawke.

  Hawke nodded.

  Fitch looked at Mellas more closely. “You need to be medevaced,” he said.

  Mellas didn’t answer. With his good eye, he was looking across at Helicopter Hill. He saw people with bright green uniforms looking at them through field glasses.

  “The fucking bastards cheered,” Mellas said very softly.

  “Hey,” Hawke said, touching Mellas’s shoulder. “It’s OK. They didn’t know.”

  Relsnik walked over with the radio and gave Fitch the handset. “Big John Six, Skipper,” he said.

  The colonel’s voice was crisp, businesslike. “Roger, Bravo Six. I want a full body count and after-action report. We have your medevac birds standing by. That zone of yours safe yet? Over.”

  “Not yet. Over,” Fitch said flatly.

  “Magnificent. I wish I’d had a movie camera, that’s all I can say. Big John Six out.”

  Fitch tossed the handset onto the ground next to Relsnik. “He wishes he’d had a fucking movie camera,” he said. He stared across the little dip toward Helicopter Hill.

  Mellas followed Fitch’s gaze, his mind filled with tumbling images. The company too weary to go on, but going on. Watching helplessly as the bombs fell on the far side of the hill. The stupid cheering—as if combat were a Friday night football game. Simpson’s incredible order, on the long march to Sky Cap, that there would be no more medevacs. Hippy, crippled. The insane pushing. The stupidity. The blood pumping from the new machine gunner’s leg. Jacobs’s throat. For what? Where was the meaning?

  Mellas’s good eye focused on the little figure in the clean jungle utilities. He saw only the colonel. The 600 meters separating them shrank to nothing. Mellas decided to kill him.

  He limped slowly away from the group. “Hey, Jack,” Goodwin shouted, but Fitch put a hand on his arm, holding him down. Hawke watched Mellas, a puzzled expression on his face. Mellas walk
ed down the hill through Hawke’s lines. He barely acknowledged the greetings of Conman and the Third Platoon as they dug in.

  Just beyond the lines, Mellas chambered a round and put the rifle’s selector on safety. He pushed into the brush, down onto the finger, moving closer to the other hill, not caring about the danger. He found a log and adjusted his sights for the distance, taking pleasure in the fact that he was doing just what he’d been taught on the rifle range. He settled in. The flat gray morning seemed eternal. Time was meaningless. There was only the small figure of the colonel, high above him now on the defoliated hillside. He pushed the selector to full automatic. With the tracers, Mellas was sure to get him. He leaned over the rifle, twisting his neck sideways so his good eye was sighting down the barrel. The colonel turned away from him. Mellas waited. He wanted the bastard to see the tracers coming at him before they ripped him apart, so he’d know, just as Jacobs had known. The colonel was still talking. Mellas waited as patiently as an animal. Time stopped. Only this one task. Wait for the bastard to turn around so he could see the bullets coming. Then Simpson started to turn.

  Mellas heard someone yell hoarsely behind him. Hawke landed on him in a headlong dive, forcing the rifle forward as Mellas jerked the trigger. The bullets tore the earth in front of them. Mellas, in a fury, reached out to hit Hawke. Hawke rolled away, kicking hard, knocking the rifle from Mellas’s hands. Mellas swung his fist, hitting Hawke square in the face, and stood up to look for his rifle. Then Hawke was on his feet, standing in front of him, breathing hard, his rifle pointed just to Mellas’s side but obviously ready to defend himself.

  “Goddamn you, Hawke. Goddamn you to hell!”

  Hawke said nothing, watching Mellas, on his guard.

  Mellas began shrieking. “That bastard killed all of them. He sent us up here without air so he could watch a show. He watched us while we died. That bastard doesn’t deserve to live. God damn you, Hawke. God damn you and your fucking—your—oh, God damn us all.” He sank to the ground and stared at nothing.

  Hawke put his hand on Mellas’s shoulder. “Come on, Mel, the counterattack could hit us any minute.”

  Mellas followed Hawke back up the hill.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The counterattack never materialized. The NVA were heading to Laos, covering their retreat with well-placed infantry and mortar units. A medevac bird beat its way up the valley, and Pallack talked it in. Three NVA mortar rounds bracketed the chopper, sending the Marines who were dragging the wounded aboard to the ground. They immediately rose and got the wounded aboard and then ran for their holes, holding their helments against the rotor wash. The helicopter dived off the edge of the LZ and soared downward into space, picking up airspeed. Another bird made it in and took the last of the emergency cases. Then the fog returned. This stopped the shelling, but it also stopped any further medical evacuations.

  The day was spent in weary stupefaction, hauling dead American teenagers to a stack beside the landing zone and dead Vietnamese teenagers to the garbage pit down the side of the north face.

  The senior squid told Fitch that Mellas’s right eye was seriously injured. If the eye wasn’t already lost, it would be without immediate surgery. The only place where that could happen was on one of the hospital ships. Mellas told Fitch that with Conman probably needing to take Third Platoon when Hawke went back to battalion staff, he didn’t feel comfortable turning First Platoon over to either Jackson or Cortell. No matter how much combat experience they had, they were still only nineteen. Besides, Fitch and Goodwin would be the only officers in the company. In reality, although he didn’t say it aloud, Mellas had simply grown too fond of everyone to leave the platoon facing danger without his help. He refused to go. Fitch knew that Mellas was right about the lack of leaders, and as far as he could tell the eye was already lost. So he let Mellas stay.

  That evening Mellas and Jackson pulled some splintered plywood over their hole, shivering like two wounded animals in the cold wind that moaned out of Laos. Jackson would occasionally shudder with stifled sobs. Mellas stared with his good eye into the blackness, enduring the pain in his leg and the throbbing in his other eye. He had tried reading the C-ration boxes earlier, and it felt awkward and uncomfortable. He consoled himself by imagining what he would look like in a Hathaway shirt ad. Then the sense of fear and loss coiled up from his stomach where it had lain waiting and he wished fervently that he had taken Sheller’s advice and tried to save the eye. He prayed.

  Mellas crawled out of the hole to check lines at 2030. He returned at 2230, dragging his leg. At 0030 he started out again.

  “I’ll go, Lieutenant,” Jackson said. “I can keep someone awake just as good as you can.” Mellas didn’t argue. He immediately dozed off with the radio against his cheek.

  Jackson crawled from beneath the plywood into a cold wind. He could sense that the clouds were higher, moving swiftly eastward, even though he couldn’t see them. In the blackness around Matterhorn the jungle lay breathing quietly after the convulsive fury of the morning. Jackson felt as if the jungle were resting, preparing to make its own assault on Matterhorn when these destructive insects left it to clean its own wounds. The jungle would slowly creep up the hill, covering it with new green skin, once again sheltering the exposed clay and rock, hiding the garbage thrown down its sides, softening the artificial lip of the LZ, and rounding Matterhorn smooth once again.

  Jackson squatted there, close to the solid sleeping earth, feeling its healing powers. Unexpected tears came to his eyes. “Hamilton,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry, man.” He was openly weeping now. He knew it was foolish to talk out loud to a dead person, but he felt that he somehow had to apologize to Hamilton for still being alive and so happy about it. Hamilton had wanted to get married and have children. Now he wouldn’t and Jackson would.

  The burst of crying passed. Jackson stayed there a little longer, feeling the damp wind on his wet face. He wiped his face with his hands, which were hot and cracked from dirt, dehydration, and infection. He couldn’t shake off a persistent gnawing anxiety as he crawled away to check the lines. Why did Hamilton die and he live? When he finished checking all the holes, he didn’t feel like going back to the hole under the plywood. Something compelled him to climb upward to the deserted LZ.

  When Jackson tripped the mine, the explosion jerked Mellas back to the darkness and the cold. At first he thought it might be someone from the CP group. Then he heard Jackson’s frightened wild cry. “Help me! God help me! Please—someone help!”

  Mellas slung the radio on his back and crawled toward Jackson’s voice, whispering “no” over and over. He reached Jackson just after Fredrickson, who was holding Jackson down, trying to get hold of his thighs. Jackson was screaming.

  “Help me hold the fucker down, Lieutenant,” Fredrickson said. “Goddamn it, Jackson, stop moving.”

  Mellas lay down over Jackson’s heaving chest, whispering, “You’re going to be all right, Jackson. You’re going to be all right.”

  “Sheller,” Fredrickson shouted to the senior squid, who was already crawling through the blackness. “I need some goddamned IV fluid and something to cut off these arteries.” Sheller appeared with a bottle and IV tubes as well as his kit. While Fredrickson was doing what he could to stanch the bleeding, Sheller jabbed a catheter into Jackson’s arm and held the glass of fluid as high in the air as he could. Jackson calmed down, his terror and panic diminishing as the two corpsmen got his faltering system working again. Mellas glanced down Jackson’s body. Fredrickson was working on pulp below Jackson’s knees. There were no feet.

  “You’re going to be all right, Jackson,” Mellas kept repeating. “You’re going to be all right.” Jackson moaned and passed out.

  Mellas didn’t pray, but his mind once again soared above the landing zone, seeing all of I Corps below him, and went looking for something better than God—a good chopper pilot.

  At the MAG-39 airfield just outside Quang Tri, First Lieutenant Steve Small was losing at acey-deucey to his copilot, Mike Nic
kels. It seemed to Small that the present game of acey-deucey had never started and never ended. It was as much part of life at MAG-39 as the sand, sweaty flight suits, ten-cent bourbon, gritty sheets, guilty masturbation fantasies, crappy movies, and underlying anxiety that the next flight was the one where the gook .51 was going to rip a hole right up your anus and out of your mouth.

  Small’s CH-46 waited in the dark, its twin rotor blades drooping with their own weight. Crew members dozed on canvas stretchers amid machine-gun ammunition and boxes of IV fluid. Small’s chest armor, hanging from his shoulders, seemed heavier than usual. Maybe he had overdone it at the O-club. On the other hand maybe he hadn’t drunk enough. He’d flown that damned bird so many hours it didn’t make any difference if he flew it fucked up or not. The thing seemed to fly itself. Its whirling blades and sickening lunges entered his dreams at night, along with its beauty when it slipped off a mountaintop or slid in to a perfect landing in a small zone, the grunts grinning at him, rushing up to get their goodies, or staring dull-eyed in relief as they threw on board what remained of their friends.

  The ready-room radio squawked, and the man on watch put down his hot rod magazine to answer it. Small and Nickels listened tensely. Small checked his watch. It was 0217. No hope of daylight. Big John Bravo again. One Emergency. Matterhorn. Weather terrible. The same fuckers that had carved out that goddamn canary perch on Sky Cap. The same dumb sons of bitches he’d flat-hatted over all of western Quang Tri Province to take that crazy redheaded grunt lieutenant and his overloaded replacements up to the biggest shit sandwich he’d seen in almost ten months of combat flying. And the bastards were still at it. Jesus fucking Christ, he thought. Then he wondered why the Christian deity was so much more satisfying as a swearword than the Jewish deity of his childhood. It had all started when he found out that Art Buchwald was in the Fourth Marine Aircraft Wing in World War II. What was he fucking thinking? All this was running through his head as he and Nickels ran for the door. There was no question of not trying.