Matterhorn: a novel of the Vietnam War Page 6

  Mellas watched the shadows moving back up the hill. The familiar washboard thumping could be heard in the valley below them as the chopper fought for altitude, skimming over the tops of trees beneath the low cloud cover. Then the NVA .51 opened up. It was followed almost immediately by the chopper’s two .50-caliber machine guns, firing blindly into the dark jungle to try to suppress the fire. The chopper loomed out of the darkness and slammed into the zone; its crew chief immediately jumped out and yelled at the Marines to get the stretcher on board.

  Cassidy, Hawke, Fitch, and FAC-man run across the LZ with the stretcher and up the ramp of the chopper, the sound of the NVA .51’s bullets cracking through the air. Mellas crouched to the ground, thankful he was just below the lip of the LZ, defiladed from the fire. The chopper was moving before the four stretcher bearers were even out of it. It was already airborne as the last dark figure jumped for the ground and ran for the lip of the LZ.

  The shadowy bulk of the chopper merge into darkness, the faint glow of its instrument panel disappearing with it into the night. The firing stopped. Mellas rose to a half crouch and glanced back inside the CP hooch. The senior squid was still kneeling over the now deserted space, the front of his utility shirt soaked with urine and blood, his knife in his hand. He was crying and praying at the same time.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The light died. Voices were silenced. Darkness and fear replaced light and reason. The whisper of a leaf scraping on bark would make heads turn involuntarily and hearts gallop. The surrounding blackness and the unseen wall of dripping growth left no place to run. In that black wet nothingness the perimeter became just a memory. Only imagination gave it form.

  Mellas shivered in his hooch and listened to the whispers of the company communications network. Through the mud he could feel Hamilton shaking but couldn’t see him, curled up in a greasy nylon poncho liner. Mellas’s own wet undershirt clung to him. At home, he’d snapped at his mother for dyeing it too pale a color. “I’ll be spotted a mile away.” She had bit her lip to hold back the tears. Mellas had wanted to hug her but didn’t.

  He had hole-check at 2300 and 0300 to make sure those on watch were awake. Meanwhile, he sat like someone who needs to urinate but doesn’t want to leave a warm bed. A rat crept through the vegetation, and Mellas could hear it rustling through discarded C-ration containers. He imagined it dragging its wet belly on the ground. He watched the minute hand on his watch creep its luminous route toward eleven. At exactly eleven, far to the east, he heard what he surmised was an Arc Light mission, B-52s from Guam, flying far to the east and so high they couldn’t be seen, dropping hundreds of 500- and 1,000-pound bombs. The bombing could make a small area of suspected enemy troop concentration a furnace of pain and death, but to Mellas it seemed like only sterile thunder without rain. He watched the minute hand creep past eleven. The inner voice of duty won. He strapped on his pistol, put on his helmet, and crawled outside.

  Invisible rain struck his cheeks. The warmth from his poncho liner drifted away like a thin cry over stormy water. He headed downhill, slipping in the mud. Then, after groping his way for what seemed far too long a time, he grew frightened that he would overshoot the lines and be killed by his own men. He tripped face forward over a root, grunting, hurting his wrist as he broke his fall. Cold water from the mud worked through his clothing. Blinded, he crept forward on hands and knees, hoping to find the machine-gun position directly downhill from his own hooch. He tried to imagine its occupant, Hippy, who had questionably regulation hair and wore, hanging from his neck, a silver peace medallion that looked curiously like a passenger jet.

  A voice, barely audible, floated through the darkness: “Who’s that?”

  “It’s me,” Mellas whispered. “Character Mike.” He was afraid that if he said “lieutenant” a North Vietnamese soldier lurking just outside the lines would fire on him.

  “Who the fuck’s character Mike?” the voice whispered back.

  “The new lieutenant,” Mellas responded, frustrated and realizing that he’d probably made enough noise to be shot anyway. Mellas crawled toward the voice. Suddenly his hand encountered freshly turned clay. He must be near a fighting hole. He felt, rather than saw, a shadowy shape inside his small circle of awareness, barely a foot from his eyes.

  “How’s everything?” Mellas whispered.

  “I keep hearing something down the finger.”

  “How far?”

  “Can’t tell.”

  “If it gets close and you want to throw a Mike-26, make sure you tell me or Jake.” Jacobs had replaced Fisher as leader of Mellas’s Second Squad.

  “I’m in Third Squad.”

  Mellas was suddenly confused. He peered intently in the direction of the man’s face but couldn’t make out who it was.

  “Who’ve I got here?” Mellas finally whispered.

  “Parker, sir.”

  Mellas was aghast. He’d crawled in a totally different direction from what he had intended. He tried to visualize Parker and then he remembered that Parker was the one who felt he’d been passed over for his R & R in Bangkok. Sullen.

  Then both of them were silent, trying to see in the dark. The spattering rain precluded any hope of hearing somebody moving in the jungle. Mellas felt it plastering his shirt to his back and began to shiver. The noise of his shivering made hearing even harder. Parker shifted his weight impatiently.

  Mellas tried to think of something to say to make a connection. “Where you from, Parker?” he whispered.

  Parker didn’t answer.

  Mellas hesitated. He didn’t know if Parker was being defiant or was simply afraid to make any more noise. He made a choice, though.

  “Parker, I asked you a question.”

  Parker waited a full three seconds before answering. “Compton.”

  Mellas didn’t know where that was. “Oh,” he said. “Is it nice there?”

  “I wouldn’t call it that.”

  “Sir,” Mellas appended.

  “I wouldn’t call it that, sir.”

  Mellas didn’t know how to answer. He felt the chance to make a connection with Parker slipping away. He gave it a last shot. “I’m from Oregon, a little logging town on the coast called Neawanna.”

  “Neawanna?” There was a hesitation. “Sir.”

  “Yeah. Funny name, huh? Indian name.”

  Silence.

  “I’ve got to move on,” Mellas whispered, sensing Parker’s discomfort. “Who’s in the next hole to your right?”

  Parker did not respond immediately, and Mellas wondered if he too was having a problem keeping all the names straight. Finally Parker whispered, “Chadwick.”

  “Thanks, Parker.” Mellas crawled off toward the next hole. That hadn’t gone well, he thought. He felt awkward and incompetent.

  The rain, propelled by a sudden gust of wind, blew into his face briefly and then subsided into a slow, steady patter on his helmet. He was crawling through mud on his hands and knees in total darkness, knowing that he had missed his first and second squads completely and would have to double back to pick them up. He sensed another mass. “Chadwick?” he whispered, hoping that Parker had told him the right name. No answer. “Chadwick, it’s me, Lieutenant Mellas.” His whisper floated across the silence.

  It was greeted with a clearly audible sigh of relief. “Jesus fuck, sir, I thought I’d die. I was about to blow your ass away.”

  It took two hours to cover his platoon’s 140 meters of the perimeter. He came back exhausted, his clothing soaked and clotted with mud, leeches clinging to his arms and legs. Twice a night, 389 nights to go.

  Several hours later the leader of Mellas’s Third Squad, Corporal Jancowitz, watched gray gradually infiltrate the blackness. He was not happy to see morning, because he knew he had to go out on patrol. But he wasn’t unhappy, either, because it meant one less day until his R & R in Bangkok, where he’d see Susi again. It also meant that the predawn 100 percent alert was over and he could fix breakfast. He told the squad to stand down and stationed his third fire team on watch.

  He took out a can of c
hopped eggs, added some chocolate from a Hershey Trop bar—a high-melting-point chocolate developed for the jungle—and mixed in some Tabasco and A1 sauce, both of which he’d carefully hoarded from his last R & R. Then he added apricot juice, throwing the apricots and the can into the jungle. He ripped off a small piece of C-4 plastic explosive, placed it on the ground, set the can on top, and lit the explosive. A white hissing flame enveloped the can. Thirty seconds later Jancowitz was spooning the contents into his mouth and thinking about Susi, the Thai bar girl for whom he had extended his tour another six months. The extension had earned him thirty days’ leave in Bangkok. They were the best thirty days of his life. Now he’d been back in Nam long enough to earn another week of R & R with Susi, just days away. When he got back he’d up for his second six-month extension. That would get him thirty more days with Susi. Six months after that and he’d be done, really done, out of the Crotch—the corps—and married, with more than two years’ savings to start them out.

  Here he was, nineteen, a corporal, and a squad leader. He was up for meritorious promotion to sergeant for the Wind River op. The Jayhawk said he’d try and get his ass sent back to the rear to serve out his second extension, and that looked a lot better than going home to the assholes waving signs and shouting at him. Besides, there wasn’t going to be anybody waiting for him. Three months stateside to muster out, then back to Bangkok with nearly three years of pay. Things could be worse. Bass had even said he was counting on Jancowitz to help break in the new lieutenant, now that Fisher was gone.

  The new lieutenant was breaking in his new .45 by working the action back and forth. His radio operator, Hamilton, was eating breakfast: ham and lima beans mixed with grape jelly. Mellas wasn’t hungry.

  “Don’t worry, sir, it’ll work,” Hamilton said, his mouth full.

  Mellas looked at the weapon, then put it back in his holster.

  “Besides,” Hamilton went on, pointing at it with a white plastic spoon, “it ain’t worth a fart in a shit fight. I’d have a sawed-off twelve-gauge if I could get one.”

  Mellas didn’t know how to answer. The standard table of equipment, the document that authorized which weapons went to which military occupation specialty, allocated only pistols to officers, on the theory that officers were supposed to be thinking, not shooting. He looked down at his pistol and then over at Fisher’s carefully oiled M-16 and bandoleers of magazines, each with eighteen bullets. A magazine was supposed to hold twenty, but kids had died learning that the springs came from the factory too weak to properly feed into the rifle the twenty that were specified. The standard table of equipment was beginning to look impractical. Mellas took Fisher’s rifle and started working the mechanism.

  “Don’t worry, sir, it’ll work too,” Hamilton said.

  Mellas flipped him the bird.

  Hamilton ignored this. He chewed contemplatively for a moment and then reached into his pack for the highly treasured Pickapeppa sauce that had been mailed to him from home. He carefully added two drops to the cold ham, grape jelly, and lima beans, stirred them in, and retasted. The new lieutenant still wasn’t hungry.

  By the time Jancowitz came trudging up the slope to Mellas’s hooch, Mellas had his gear on: three canteens, two filled with Rootin’ Tootin’ Raspberry and one with Lefty Lemon; five hand grenades; two smoke grenades; a compass; a map coated with plastic shelving paper from home; bandages, battle dressing, and halazone; water purification tablets; his pistol; two bandoleers of M-16 magazines; and food cans stuffed into extra socks that were in turn stuffed into the large pockets on the sides of his utility trousers. Some people just hung the socks filled with cans on their backpacks.

  He carefully bloused his trousers against his boots with the steel springs to keep the leeches out and stuck a plastic bottle of insect repellent into the wide rubber band circling his new green camouflage helmet cover. He looked at his watch as the tail end of Goodwin’s patrol disappeared into the jungle below. He’d never convince Fitch that he was any good if his patrol didn’t leave on time.

  Jancowitz grinned at Mellas. “Sir, I’d, uh . . .” He hesitated and then tapped the side of his soft camouflage bush cover.

  Mellas looked at Hamilton. “The insect repellent,” Hamilton said. “The white stands out in the bush. Makes a great target.”

  “Then what’s the rubber band for?” Mellas asked, shoving the bottle into his pocket.

  “Beats me, sir,” Hamilton answered. “Holds the fucking helmet together, I guess.”

  “You could put things in it like branches for camouflage,” Jancowitz said carefully.

  Hamilton giggled, and Mellas smiled tightly. It wasn’t fair. He’d seen Marines on television with squeeze bottles of repellent strapped to their helmets. He’d carefully noted the details. Suddenly it dawned on him that the television shots were all around villages, where the people with cameras were more likely to be, and there was no wall of dark green jungle on all sides.

  “We’re all set, sir,” Jancowitz said. “Just waiting for Daniels.” Lance Corporal Daniels was the enlisted FO, the artillery battery’s forward observer. Fitch assigned him to the patrols that he felt might need what little support they could get from Andrew Golf, the distant battery at fire support base Eiger.

  As Jancowitz led the way down to Third Squad’s sector, the sound of Marvin Gaye singing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” broke the morning stillness. Mellas could see the Marines of Third Squad standing around, some nervously fiddling with their gear, all apparently ready before Jancowitz had gone to get Mellas. A group of black Marines were huddled together smoking cigarettes. At their center was a well-built, serious-looking young man who was squatting over a portable 45-rpm record player.

  “OK, Jackson, cut the sounds,” Jancowitz said briskly.

  Without looking up, Jackson raised his hand, palm toward Jancowitz. “Hey, man, cool off. The a.m. show ain’t over yet.”

  Several of the group laughed softly, including Jancowitz, who quickly glanced at Mellas to see if Mellas objected.

  Mellas didn’t know whether he should object or not. He looked back at Jancowitz and Hamilton for a cue.

  Bass broke the momentary impasse by walking up behind them. “Why don’t you play real music, like Tammy Wynette, instead of that fucking jungle music?”

  “Beats washtubs and broomsticks,” Jackson said, waiting for the laughter that followed. Mellas joined in awkwardly. Jackson looked up, hearing an unfamiliar voice. Recognizing Mellas, he immediately turned off the record player and stood up. The small group got serious, attentive, all business, crushing cigarettes in the mud.

  “Sorry, sir,” Jackson said. “I didn’t know you were there.”

  What struck Mellas about Jackson was that he clearly wasn’t sorry. He was just being polite. He looked at Mellas with an openness that declared he was quite capable of defending himself, without being defensive. Mellas smiled. “That’s OK. Hate to stop the show.”

  Bass, satisfied that Mellas was in good hands with Jancowitz, grunted and moved off to join Second Squad to bird-dog Jacobs on his first day leading a patrol.

  “Where’s Shortround?” Jancowitz asked, looking around.

  Jackson sighed and pointed toward a pair of ponchos that covered a hole dug into the side of the hill. “He had listening post last night. I guess he’s still eating.”

  “Shortround!” Jancowitz shouted. “Goddamn it. Get your ass down here.”

  There was a grunt. A head, still unseen, poked clumsily into the low-hung poncho. Two short legs, covered by large dirty trousers, backed out of the hooch. A short kid with curly brown hair and an oversize nose grinned at Jancowitz. Spaghetti sauce was smeared on his face. He wiped it off with large hands stained dark brown with ingrained dirt.

  “Hi, Janc,” Shortround said brightly, grinning.

  Jancowitz turned to Mellas. “Sir, this is Pollini, only we call him Shortround. And it ain’t because he’s small and fat.” A short round was an artillery shell that fell short by mistake, often killing its own men.

  Pollini quickly stuffed se
veral Trop bars into his pockets, grabbed his rifle, and joined the group just as Daniels came down the hill from the CP, carrying his radio on his back. Jancowitz introduced him to Mellas, then took the handset from Hamilton’s radio and called the CP. “Bravo, this is Bravo One Three. We’re moving.”

  The squad wound its way into the jungle in one long snake—Jancowitz three from the front; Mellas behind him, watching Jancowitz’s every move; Daniels behind Mellas. No one spoke. Mellas was thinking that Jancowitz had been in the bush nearly nineteen months. He probably knew more about staying alive than anyone else in the company.