Matterhorn Read online

  Daniels grinned. He already had his map out, and now he reached for the handset of his radio.

  “Andrew Golf, this is Big John Bravo. Fire mission. Over.”

  In his imagination, Mellas saw the battery scrambling into action as the call for a fire mission came crackling in to its fire control center.

  Moments after Daniels relayed the map coordinates and compass bearings, the first shell came through the jungle, sounding like a train speeding through a tunnel. There was a dull thud transmitted through the ground, then a louder shattering crash through the air. Then there was the sound of brush cracking and the movement of heavy frightened bodies. Daniels made a quick adjustment, and a second shell roared. Again the earth moved and the air shattered. After that, the muffled sounds could be heard no more.

  Daniels called off the mission. “They’ll be to fuck and gone by now,” he said, smiling with satisfaction.

  Jancowitz didn’t want to bother checking for results, since it meant going all the way down in the ravine. To climb back out again would take hours. Mellas agreed.

  When they finally struggled back inside the company perimeter, the squad immediately began cleaning weapons and fixing dinner, getting ready for the evening alert and the long night of watch. Jackson started his record player and Wilson Pickett’s voice floated across the tiny man-made clearing in the jungle. “Hey, Jude, don’t make it bad . . .”

  Mellas could barely drag himself up to the CP to report to Fitch. He simply wanted to collapse and sleep. Bass was already in with nothing to report—as was Goodwin, except for some tiger tracks. Ridlow, Goodwin’s platoon sergeant, however, had discovered some footprints near a stream. It was impossible to tell how many people had left them. He figured they couldn’t be more than two days old; otherwise, the rain would have washed them away.

  Mellas listened while Fitch relayed the negative reports to battalion. An entire day of patrols, and all they had proved was that someone was in the jungle, as if a downed helicopter and a bunch of dead crewmen hadn’t already proved that. He also listened while Fitch turned in the coordinates of the footprints to the artillery battery for harassment and interdiction—H & I.

  When Fitch got off the hook, Mellas asked, “What happens if it’s a montagnard?” referring to the indigenous people who had been pushed into the mountains centuries earlier by the invading Vietnamese.

  Fitch pursed his lips. “If it is,” Fitch said carefully, “then he’s got to be working for the NVA. Otherwise, he’d have cleared out or come in to the position.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe,” Mellas said.

  Hawke was listening while he poured powdered coffee and sugar into a battered cup that he had fashioned from a C-ration pear can by leaving the lid attached and folding it back to make a handle. He poured water from his canteen into the can and placed it on a small wad of C-4 plastic explosive. The cup’s lower half had turned steel blue from many heatings.

  “There’s leaflets all over the fucking place telling people it’s a free-fire zone,” Fitch said.

  “You know they can’t read,” Mellas said petulantly.

  “Shit, Mellas,” Hawke cut in. “He knows it. You going to call off your H & I because it might fuck up some lost mountain man?”

  “I don’t know. I’m the new guy around here,” Mellas snapped. He was so tired that he was beginning to regret he’d even brought the subject up.

  Hawke lit the C-4 and a brilliant white flame engulfed the can, turning it cherry red and bringing the water to a rapid boil almost instantly. The action stopped the conversation until the flame died. Hawke gingerly touched the makeshift cup, now filled with boiling coffee. “Well, I’ll tell you, then,” Hawke said. “You don’t. Jim’s fucked either way. If we get attacked, and he didn’t call in H & I, he’s shit-canned. If he does call them in and kills a montagnard, he’s shit-canned too. Things have changed since Truman left. The buck’s sent out here now.”

  Fitch smiled, thankful for Hawke’s support.

  Mellas looked at the ground, sorry he’d lost his temper. “You never did say why,” he said.

  “So you don’t get your fucking ass blown away, that’s why,” Hawke said, softening when he saw Mellas look at the ground. He dabbed at the handle of the cup again and, feeling that it was safe, picked it up with his thumb and forefinger.

  “You call off H & I,” Fitch said, “and the gooks have access to this mountain like a freeway ramp. It’s my fucking troops over any lost mountain man, and it’ll stay that way. I decided that a long time ago.” Fitch looked quickly up at the darkening sky, seemingly embarrassed over his sudden speech.

  Hawke held the steaming coffee up toward Mellas. “Here. Take it.”

  “No, it’s yours,” Mellas said.

  “I make the fastest cup of coffee in I Corps. This little cup’s been with me ever since I got here. It’s the ever-flowing source of all that’s good and the cure of all ills.” He smiled and gestured again for Mellas to take it. “It even cures hot tempers.”

  Mellas had to smile. He took the cup. The coffee was sweet and good.

  Later that night, outside the perimeter in the blackness, Private First Class Tyrell Broyer of Baltimore, Maryland, on his first listening post, lay shivering, flat on his stomach, the rain seeping through his poncho. Jancowitz had paired him with Williams, from Cortell’s fire team, a steady kid who’d been raised on a ranch in Idaho. Williams’s muddy boots were next to Broyer’s face and vice versa, so they protected each other’s backs. “What’s that noise?” Broyer whispered.

  “The wind. Shut up.”

  Broyer was tempted to start keying the radio’s handset frantically, just so someone would talk to them. He didn’t care if he made one of the lieutenants mad at him for getting scared. He shivered again. There was a whirring noise. Instantly the two of them stiffened, their rifles pushing out slowly.

  “What is that noise?” Broyer whispered. “High in the air.”

  “Don’t know. Bats? Shut up, goddamn it.”

  Williams shifted and his boot hit Broyer’s face. Broyer stifled a curse and pushed his glasses back on his nose, aware of an irony—he couldn’t see a thing anyway. He slowly pushed Williams’s boot away. He put his forehead on his fists to keep his glasses clear of the ground and smelled the damp earth, feeling the cold edge of his helmet against his neck. He grabbed a handful of clay and squeezed it as hard as he could. He wanted to squeeze his fear into the clay so he could throw it away. A gust of wind hit his wet utility shirt, sending a cold shiver along his back. He started praying, asking God to stop the wind and the rain so he could just hear something. It was then that Williams reached out a hand in the dark and gently patted him on the back.

  That night, God didn’t stop the wind or the rain. The next day, however, the rain did stop for two hours, and six choppers made it in without incident, dumping Marines who were returning from sick leave and R & R, replacements, water, food, and ammunition. Along with that came a large amount of C-4 explosive to help prepare the top of the hill for the arrival of Golf Battery, which was why Bravo Company was on Matterhorn in the first place.

  Mellas grew accustomed to the tense monotony of patrolling. Days slid by, mercifully without enemy contact. Eventually the artillery battery came in, blasting out gun pits from the clay, digging in bunkers for their fire control center. Matterhorn was barren, shorn of trees. Nothing green was left in what was slowly turning into a wasteland of soggy discarded cardboard C-ration boxes, cat-hole latrines, buried garbage, burned garbage, trench latrines, discarded magazines from home, smashed ammunition pallets, and frayed plastic sandbags. Whole stretches of what had formerly been thick jungle were now exposed, the shattered limbs and withered stumps turning ashen like bones of dead animals under the overcast sky above. A small bulldozer made the top of the hill perfectly flat. Then came the howitzers, which were flown in dangling from helicopters like fishing weights. Within hours of their arrival the big guns were firing, their harsh explosions hurting ears, thudding through bodies, and, at night, shattering precious sleep.

  An intense
salvo of the entire battery firing a single time-on-target jerked Mellas awake. It had been just over an hour since he had crawled into his hooch after the last hole-check of the night. Adrenaline pumped through his body. He tried to slow it down, taking deep slow breaths. Rain fell in heavy sheets in the total darkness, and the comm-wire moorings of the hooches snapped with each gust of wind. Mellas pulled his soggy nylon poncho liner tighter around him, rolled over on one side, and tucked his knees up against his chest, trying to keep what remained of the warm dampness from disappearing into the dark.

  No patrol today. It was like a reprieve.

  The arrival of the battery had considerably increased the payoff for an attack by the NVA, so Fitch had increased the patrolling radius to cover more territory. This forced the patrols to leave at dawn and left them almost no daylight when they returned. The combination of tension from the possibility of making contact and the stultifying fatigue left everyone drained and irritable by nightfall. Kids were falling asleep on watch. To fight the boredom, Mellas found himself making up patrol routes just to see various features of the terrain. He paid less and less attention to where an NVA sniper or observation team might be hiding. In fact, he was torn: he didn’t know whether to plan his patrols to avoid finding anyone or to find the NVA machine gun and bring himself to the notice of the colonel. He shifted to his other side, still not wanting to leave the poncho liner. He saw himself taking an NVA machine-gun team by surprise while they were eating their rice, surrounding them silently, and capturing the entire group. Then he was marching them back, finding out a great deal of information, and afterward being commended in front of the colonel and his staff. Perhaps there would be a newspaper story at home about the exploit—name recognition was important—and a medal. He wanted a medal as much as he wanted the company.

  Another salvo ripped sound through the ground and air, breaking off his daydream. He stared into the blackness, now totally awake, his mind focused on the problem of replacing Jancowitz, who was about to go on R & R. He had map classes to teach, jungle to clear, and more barbed wire to lay, but no patrol. No patrol today.

  He threw aside the thin nylon liner and sat up, his head touching the ponchos strung above him. The greasy camouflage liner smelled like urine. He did, too. Mellas smiled. He untied his soggy bootlaces in the dark and pulled at a wet boot. It came loose, leaving a damp sock, parts of it stiff with decaying blood from old leech wounds. He pulled the sock off carefully—especially in places where the wool, skin, and blood had clotted together over the leech bites and jungle rot. He imagined, from the feel of his foot, that it must look like the underside of a mushroom. A sudden gust of wind spattered more rain against the hooch. He began rubbing his feet, trying to stave off immersion foot. He’d seen pictures of it during training. When the foot was constantly in cold water, blood deserted it. Then it died, still attached to the leg, and rotted until either it was amputated or gangrene killed the rest of the body. He felt guilty suddenly for not having checked the platoon’s feet. It would look bad on his fitness report if he had a lot of cases of immersion foot.

  Two hours later Mellas was leading a map-reading class for Third Squad, feeling good about being in his own element.

  “All right,” he said, “who knows the contour interval?” A couple of hands shot up. Mellas was pleased; the kids seemed to enjoy the class. “OK, Jackson.”

  Jackson looked around shyly at his friends. “Uh, it’s twenty meters, sir.”

  “Right. If you went across three contour lines, then how far would you have walked?”

  Parker, not to be outdone by Jackson, raised his hand. “That’d be sixty meters.” He smiled, pleased with himself.

  Jackson snickered. “You got no brain whatsoever. Sixty meters, shit. Man, you are a stupid individual.”

  “What is it then, smart-ass?” Parker shot back.

  “No way you can tell. Contours go up and down. You maybe went up sixty or maybe down sixty, but you maybe walked to fucking Hanoi before you did.” The rest of the squad was laughing, and Parker finally joined in.

  Mellas envied Jackson’s natural ability to blunt the harshness of his words simply by the way he delivered them. How could you get mad at someone who neither needed to attack nor was at all worried about being able to defend? It was like getting mad at Switzerland. Mellas watched Jackson throughout the rest of the class, seeing that the blacks gravitated toward him for more than his portable record player.

  Later that afternoon, Mellas crawled into Bass’s hooch. Skosh was reading Seventeen magazine by candlelight and wearing an Incredible Hulk sweatshirt. Bass was lying on top of his air mattress, generally called a rubber lady, writing another long letter to Fredrickson’s cousin.

  “Heavy stuff, Skosh,” Mellas said.

  “Hey, Lieutenant, look at her,” Skosh said quietly, showing Mellas a teenage girl modeling winter fashions, her face glowing beneath tossed-back satin hair. “You think if I wrote the magazine they’d tell me who she was?”

  “Are you shitting me, Skosh? Every horny bastard in the United States would be writing to those girls if magazines did that.”

  Skosh withdrew the magazine and continued to look at the girl. “Maybe if they knew we was over here in Vietnam and couldn’t do no harm or nothing . . .”

  “Skosh, they don’t give a shit where you are,” Mellas said softly. He thought about Anne.

  “I suppose not. Before I quit high school last year there was this girl looked just like her. Of course she was a senior, and me a junior, so I couldn’t ever really, you know,” his voice trailed off, “get to know her or anything.”

  “Hang in there, Skosh,” Mellas said, “You’ll be home—”

  “In a hundred eighty-three fucking days and a wake-up,” Skosh said quietly.

  Mellas settled himself cross-legged on the end of Bass’s rubber lady. The luxury of having one of the rare air mattresses was reserved for those with more rank or time in-country. Everyone else slept on the ground. “Class went pretty well today,” he started off. “They seemed interested.”

  “Even fucking grunts get tired of digging holes.”

  Mellas nodded, smiling. “Hey, I’m thinking of Jackson for squad leader when Janc goes on R & R.” He felt he might as well come to the point right away.

  “I don’t like it, Lieutenant. I don’t want him and his fucking buddies all buddy-buddying each other around their jungle music all the time. He’s too buddy-buddy, sir.”

  “You mean he’s a brother.” Mellas looked at Bass closely to see how he would react. There wasn’t a flicker on Bass’s face.

  “Yes, sir, but not like you think. There ain’t one color in the Marine Corps but green, and I believe that. I don’t think Jackson does. I mean, I think he’d favor the splibs.”

  “Yeah, but he’s smart. People like him. Chucks and splibs both.”

  “You don’t want a squad leader people like,” Bass said emphatically.

  “Bullshit, Sergeant Bass. You get a squad leader they don’t like and you’ve got a shitty squad.”

  “People didn’t like me too much when I became a platoon sergeant.”

  “You’re different.”

  “He’s a fucking lifer,” Skosh put in.

  Mellas laughed.

  “You stick to your fucking radio or I’ll volunteer your ass for CAG,” Bass retorted. “You’ll wish you had some fucking lifers around when the fucking gooks desert you.”

  Skosh hunched his shoulders and went back to his magazine. “I should be so lucky,” he mumbled. Radio operators had it easier in set positions, mainly because they were able to stand their night watches inside whatever shelter they managed to build. The longer they were in a set position, the better their shelters. On the patrols and operations, however, they more than made up for that comfort. Not only did they have to pack the heavy radios in addition to the ammunition and equipment that everyone else packed, but they were primary targets because they were the communication links and walked next to the leaders, the other primary targets.

  “What’s CAG?” Mellas asked.

&n
bsp; “Some harebrained cluster fuck thought up by some asshole civilian in an air-conditioned office in Washington.”

  Mellas waited. Skosh wasn’t listening.

  “It means combined action group, sir,” Bass continued. “Good fucking Marines are supposed to fight with South Gook militia and defend the villages. Only what happens is good Marines end up fighting all by themselves when the South Gooks dee-dee on them.”

  “I heard that tagging Marines alongside the villagers was working. Or had been, anyway,” Mellas said. He suddenly felt very far away from his government; he had a gnawing suspicion that he, too, could be out in the jungle, abandoned like those Marines.

  He forced the qualm down and assumed a “let’s get back to business” tone of voice. “Anyhow, what do you think about Jackson, Sergeant Bass?” He rushed on without letting Bass reply. “I don’t think he’d be too buddy-buddy. You can talk to him about it. Besides, who else have we got? With Fisher gone I’ve got to use Jake to fill in for him at Second Squad. Vancouver won’t do anything but walk point, you know that.” Bass nodded. Everyone knew that Vancouver, a big kid who’d actually left Canada to volunteer for the Marines, was probably the best fighter in the company. He just always refused leadership roles, preferring to be the first man in the column, the most dangerous job in any rifle company. Everyone else reluctantly took point only when it was their turn. Mellas made one more effort. “Jackson already knows everyone.” He stopped. He could see that Bass wasn’t really listening. He was just politely waiting for Mellas to finish.

  “Lieutenant, I think a lot of guys are going to think you put him there because he’s a brother.”

  “What do you think?” Mellas asked.