A Rumor of War (36 page)

“Two, read you… say again all over…”

“Say again Delta Six.” Another shell came in. “Delta Six, say again.”

“… say again all after impacting, Charley Two, over.”

“I say again, impacting rounds…” A fourth shell crashed into the riverbank and I thought of Lance Corporal Smith’s fire-team, who were on a listening post near there. “Delta Six, you probably could hear that last one. Could be Victor Charlie one-twenty mike-mike mortars. Interrogatory: is our own arty firing a mission near this position? Over.”

“Reading you weak and garbled, Two. Say again all after mortars.”

“Aw, Jesus fucking Christ…” I started to repeat the message, then rolled over, burying my head in my hands, holding it up just far enough to keep my mouth out of the water. It had become academic as to whether the shells were our own or the enemy’s. For the full concentration was coming in with a crazed howling and someone was again yelling “INNCOMMIIING!” The shells seemed to take forever to fall. For what seemed a long time, we heard the lunatic chorus wailing in the sky, our bodies braced for the coming shock, hearts constricted, all thoughts suspended.

Then the storm struck. The shells, impacting about twenty-five yards from the perimeter, exploded one right after another, creating one enormous blast that went on for five minutes. Shrapnel flew overhead with a sound like that of taut steel wires snapping. Jones and I, huddled beside each other like two frightened children, pressed ourselves against the earth. I tried to become part of the quaking earth and wished we had dug the foxhole deeper than three feet. I wanted God to shut that roaring out of my ears. Make it stop. Please God,
make it stop
. One shell struck very close. I could not tell exactly where. It seemed to explode just outside the platoon’s small perimeter, and I thought we were going to be blown out of the hole, out and up into that lethal space where the shrapnel scythed the air. The ground slammed against my chest, bouncing me up an inch or so, and a part of me kept going up. I felt myself floating up out of myself, up to the tops of the trees. Hovering there, I felt an ineffable calm. I could see the flashing shells, but they no longer frightened me, because I was a spirit. I saw myself lying face down in the foxhole, my arms wrapped around the back of my neck. I felt no fear, just a great calm and a genial contempt for the puny creature cringing in the foxhole below me. I wondered if I was dying. Well, if I am, I thought, it is not so bad. Dying is actually pleasant. It is painless. Death is an end to pain. Rich the treasure, sweet the pleasure, sweet is pleasure after pain. Death is a pleasure. The Big D is the world’s most powerful narcotic, the ultimate anesthetic.

Then the shelling stopped, and my spirit, reluctantly leaving the peace of its elevated plane, slipped back into my body. I was whole again. I was a whole man. The Jesuits at college had stressed that: the purpose of a Jesuit education is to create a whole man. And I was a whole man again in my foxhole; a whole in a hole.

I crawled out to the edge of the perimeter and called to Smith’s fire-team.

“Yes, sir,” Smith said in a whisper.

“You guys all right?”

“Outside of being cold, wet, miserable, hungry, and scared shitless, we’re just fine, sir.”

“No casualties?”

“No, sir. Because I’m black, the shells couldn’t see me.”

I laughed to myself, thinking, They’re all right, the best you could ask for. They’ve been through a fire-fight and a shelling and they’re making jokes about it.

The platoon survived the shelling. There was a brief period of total quiet, then the sniping started again.
Crack-crack-crack
. In the wet dawn, we brewed tins of C-ration coffee and shivered ourselves warm while Jones worked on the radio. I sat sipping the coffee on the parapet of the foxhole. Sergeant Pryor walked over and slumped down next to me, a sweat-yellowed cigarette hanging from his lips. He looked like the others, his sunken eyes rimmed with the blackness of fatigue, his face and hands lumpy masses of insect bites.

“Well, sir, I don’t mind saying that yesterday and today were the longest day and night of my life. Especially last night. That was the longest night of my life.”

“How long’ve you got to go?” I asked, as one convict to another.

“Seven, eight months. Seven, eight more months of this shit. I’m so goddamned tired. Is the radio working yet, sir?”

“No. We’re still out of contact.”

“Shit.”

“Without that radio, we might as well be on the dark side of the moon.”

Pryor laughed mirthlessly. “Might as well be?” He field-stripped his cigarette, scattering the paper and tobacco as an old man might scatter birdseed in a park. “Might as well be? Where do you think we are, lieutenant?”

After trying for half an hour, Jones reached D Company. Miller ordered the platoon to move northward to Hill 92, in the foothills, and set up a patrol base.

It took us six or seven hours to get there. The column wound through a labyrinth of draws and ravines, through the knee-deep muck of the marshes, and over narrow jungle tracks. We walked always in the rain and were constantly harassed by snipers. Halfway to the hill, the platoon was held up by a brush and log barricade the Viet Cong had thrown across the trail. The barricade was in a gully where the trail was hemmed by two steep hills, both covered with jungle so thick we could not have gone through it with a bulldozer. Unable to go around the barricade, we would have to blast through it with grenades. Walking up to it with Lance Corporal Crowe, I saw a strand of spider’s silk glistening in the mass of brush and leaves. Only a few inches of it showed, and it was straight and taut and did not move in the wind blowing through the gully. Fear shot through me like a jet of liquefied gas.

“Crowe,” I said, “move real careful around that barricade. It’s booby-trapped. I can see part of the trip wire.”

“Yes, sir.”

I did some quick, basic arithmetic: the hand grenades would go off four to five seconds after we released the spoons. There was a culvert thirty, perhaps forty, feet behind us, where the trail started to curve around one of the hills. We would have to pull the pins, place the grenades where they would have the most effect, being careful not to put the slightest pressure on the trip wire, then run and take cover in the culvert. I spelled it out to Crowe and asked him if he thought we could make it.

“We’ll have five seconds max.”

“I think we can do it, sir. If we don’t, they’ll mail us home in envelopes.”

Each of us took out a fragmentation grenade. Smooth-surfaced, egg-shaped, and about the size of pears, they did not look capable of blowing a man in half.

“Crowe, we’re going to do it by the numbers. When I say pull the pin, we’ll pull the pins, keep the spoons down, and then set the grenades down. You set yours under that log on the left. I’ll put mine on the right. Don’t touch a thing. Set it down real easy. Then you take off first, so we don’t bump into each other. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

I wiped the slick film of sweat off my palm and straightened the pin so it could be pulled quickly. (No, you do not pull grenade pins with your teeth, the way it’s done in the movies. If you did, the only thing to come out would be your teeth.)

“Pull the pin.”

We pulled them and, keeping the spoons depressed in the web of our hands, set the grenades down. I tried not to look at the thin, shining strand of spider’s silk. Crowe took off running, with me behind him. We dove into the culvert, covering our heads with our hands. I counted: “Thousand-one, thousand-two, thousand-three…” Silence. “… Thousand-four, thousand-five, thousand-six.

“Son of a goddamned bitch, they’re both duds. Nothing works, Crowe. Radios, grenades, nothing. Goddamnit.”

“We’ll have to do it over, sir.” It was more a question than a statement.

“Yes, we will.”

Walking back up the trail, my legs felt semiparalyzed, the way they feel in nightmares of pursuit and helpless flight. There was no guarantee that the grenades would not blow up in our faces. Perhaps they had defective, slow-burning fuses. My legs kept getting heavier and heavier, and then I felt the worst fear of all: the fear of fear. For I seemed very near the point of total paralysis, and that terrified me more than anything.
Hey, didja hear about Lieutenant Caputo? He froze out on that patrol. Dude just froze up because of a booby trap. Sheee-hit, fuckin‘ worthless officers
. I talked myself into covering the last twenty feet to the barricade, as a father might talk to a toddler taking its first steps. First the right foot. Now the left. Now the right again. That’s it. Almost there, little fella.

“Pull the pin, Crowe.”

We set the grenades down. The four of them looked like a nest of olive-green eggs.

“Okay, take off!”

We pounded down the trail and made swan dives into the culvert. The grenades and the booby trap went off with a shattering boom. Debris sifted down on us. Crowe smiled victoriously.

The platoon reached Hill 92 in the midafternoon. The men were worn out by that time, their shoulders aching from the weight of rifles, packs, and flak jackets. They had been under one kind of fire or another for twenty-four hours and were dazed with fatigue. Rigging shelters against the drumming rain, they lay down to rest. Some did not bother to build shelters. They had ceased to care even for themselves. I walked around, checking their feet. A few had serious-cases of immersion foot, their shriveled skin covered with red pustules and blisters. It amazed me that they could walk at all. We ate lunch. Our rations were the same as the Viet Cong’s: cooked rice rolled into a ball and stuffed with raisins. The riceballs were easier to carry than the heavy C-ration tins and alleviated the diarrhea from which we all suffered. Eating the rice on that desolate hill, it occurred to me that we were becoming more and more like our enemy. We ate what they ate. We could now move through the jungle as stealthily as they. We endured common miseries. In fact, we had more in common with the Viet Cong than we did with that army of clerks and staff officers in the rear.

I was putting on dry socks when Captain Neal called on the radio. A Christmas cease-fire had gone into effect. The operation had been secured. My platoon was to return to friendly lines as quickly as possible. Why not lift us out with helicopters? I asked. No, Neal said, that was out of the question. I passed the word and the troops cheered. “Hey-hey. We’re gonna get some slack. Merry fuckin‘ Christmas.”

“No, no. I want to stay out here,” said PFC Baum. “I just love it out here in the mud and the rain and the shit.”

Shouldering our packs, we tramped down to Purple Heart Trail, the quickest route back. The trail forked near Dieu Phoung, a hamlet several hundred yards west of Charley Hill. The right fork led along the river, the left over the foothills toward the outpost. We took the latter because it was shorter and less likely to be mined or ambushed.

Outside the hamlet was a flooded rice paddy with a steep embankment at its far end. A barbed wire fence, anchored at one end to a dead tree, ran along the length of the embankment. The trail climbed through a hole in the fence near the tree. The lead squad, Sergeant Pryor’s, Jones, and I crossed the rice paddy. The water was cold and chest-deep in places, and the rain dimpled the water in a way that reminded me of an evening rise on a trout stream. That was how the Ontonogan River looked in the evenings, in the place where it made a slow, wide bend around a wooded bluff upstream from the rocky, white-water narrows at the Burned Dam. There, the river had been deep and smooth where it curved, and the big trout rising made rings in the copper-colored water. Bill, my fishing buddy, and I used to cast for browns in the deep pool at sunset. We never caught many, but we had a fine time, casting and talking about the things we were going to do when we left school, about all that awaited us in the great outside world, which seemed so full of promise. We were boys and thought everything was possible. The memory sent a momentary pang through me: not so much a feeling of homesickness as one of separation—a distancing from the hopeful boy I had been, a longing to be like that again.

Pryor’s squad climbed the embankment, the men slipping on the muddy trail, slipping and falling into each other until they were bunched in a knot. The rest of the platoon waded through the rice paddy behind us, holding their rifles in the air. A snake made a series of S’s in the black water as it slithered between two men in the column. On dry ground again, Pryor’s marines picked up their interval and hiked up the ridgeline that rose above the embankment. The Cordillera loomed in the distance, high and indomitable. The last two squads started to struggle up the bank, bunching up as one man after another slipped and slid into the man behind him.

Standing by the dead tree, I helped pull a few marines up the trail. “Pass it back not to bunch up,” I said. To my left, a stream whispered through a brushy ravine. “Don’t bunch up,” a marine said. “Pass it back.” On the other side of the paddy, the rear of the column was filing past a hut at the edge of the hamlet. Smoke started to roll from the hut and a woman ran out yelling.

“Bittner,” I called to the platoon sergeant, who was bringing up the rear, “what the hell’s going on?”

“Can’t hear you, sir.”

“The hut. Who the hell set fire to the hut?”

“Somebody said you passed the word to burn the hut, sir.”

“What?”

“The word came back to burn the hut, sir.”

“Jesus Christ. I said, ‘Don’t bunch up.’ DON’T BUNCH UP. Put that fire out.”

“Yes, sir.”

I stood by the leafless tree, watching the marines douse the fire with helmets full of water. Fortunately, the thatch had been wet to begin with and did not burn quickly. Turning to walk back toward the point squad, I saw Allen stumbling on the trail.

“Allen, how’re you doing?” I asked, extending my arm. Taking hold of it, he hauled himself over the lip of the embankment.

“Hackin‘ it, lieutenant. I’m hackin’ it okay,” Allen said, walking beside me. Ahead, I could see Pryor’s squad trudging up the ridge and the point man briefly silhouetted on the ridgeline before he went down the other side. “But this here cease-fire’s come along at the right time,” Allen was saying. “Could use a little slack. This here cease-fire’s the first slack…”