Matterhorn (13 page)

Mole continued cleaning the weapon. “Gun’s gotta be babied, sir,” he mumbled, “’specially when we can’t get the fucking parts
we order.”

Mellas squatted down next to him. “You pissed off about something, Mole?”

“No, sir. Just doing my job.” Mole scrutinized the gun’s heavy receiver.

Not wanting to confront the haircut issue, Mellas looked at his watch. “Look, Mole, we’re five minutes late already. Try and
hurry it up, OK?”

Mole grunted and clamped the belt-feeder assembly into place.

Mellas joined Connolly and Vancouver, as well as Daniels, the artillery FO; the German shepherd, Pat; and Corporal Arran,
Pat’s handler. They were all checking their weapons, adjusting straps, stuffing favorite C-rations into pockets for lunch,
and taking final drinks of water before topping off their canteens—all the nervous rituals one does to keep the ego functioning
in the face of imminent death.

Mellas felt a surge of pride that Vancouver was in his platoon. Although he hadn’t known who Vancouver was at the time, he
remembered clearly their first encounter. It had been at VCB while he was waiting for a helicopter to take him and Goodwin
out to Matterhorn. It was mostly a time of cold drizzle, boredom, and nervous energy amid rifled boxes of C-rations gone soggy
and the smell of JP-4 fuel and urinal pipes stuck in sodden clay, but Mellas could have spent the rest of his days lying there
in the mud. That squalid landing zone at VCB was a place where he could stay alive, where the dreaded bush lay in the future,
beyond the helicopter’s ramp. At VCB you could watch the helicopters leave without you. There, you never had to step through
the dark aluminum-ringed portal to the unknown terror of the bush.

Still, by midafternoon, even Goodwin had been worn down by the rain and the boredom. They all dozed in the gray light, drizzle
falling on them, stupefied by waiting and by their desire to forget what they were waiting for. Then the monotony broke.

A single Marine jumped off the back of an incoming helicopter and walked slowly across the landing zone toward the dirt road
that led to the regiment’s rear area. The Marine stood six-three or six-four, but his size wasn’t nearly as interesting as
the sawed-off M-60 machine gun dangling from two web belts hung over his shoulders. An M-60 usually took two men to operate.
The book assigned a crew of three. A crude handle had been welded onto the barrel so the Marine could control the kick without
resting it on a bipod. Two cans of machine-gun ammo lay against his chest, suspended from his shoulders. In addition to all
this weight, Mellas guessed that he also carried the usual full pack of the bush Marine: sleeping gear, food, extra clothes,
hand grenades, books,
letters, magazines, ponchos for shelter from the rain, shovel, claymore mines, bars of C-4 plastic explosive, trip flares,
handmade stove, pictures of girlfriends, toilet articles, insect repellent, cigarettes, rifle-cleaning gear, WD-40, jars of
freeze-dried coffee, and maybe a package or two of long-rats: freeze-dried trail food designed as rations for long-range patrols
but more often used by the grunts for special occasions. On the Marine’s head was an Australian bush hat, left brim folded
up at the side. Matted blond hair, discolored with grime, showed beneath it. His uniform was a mass of tattered holes and
filth. One trouser leg had been torn off just below the knee, revealing pasty white flesh covered with infected leech bites
and jungle rot. His hands, face, and arms were also covered with jungle rot and open sores. You could smell him as he walked
by. But he walked by as if the LZ belonged to him, seemingly unaware of the hundred or more pounds he carried. He was a bush
Marine, and Mellas wanted fervently to be just like him.

What Mellas didn’t know then, but knew now, was that Vancouver had made the usual swap for the most tattered clothing in his
platoon—he would be able to get all new clothing back in the rear—and that Lieutenant Fitch, acting on Fredrickson’s recommendation,
had sent him to VCB to clean up his NSU—nonspecific urethritis. Vancouver had contracted this medical problem when the company
was at VCB some weeks before, waiting to lift out on the next operation. Instead of staying where he should have been, he
had sneaked off one night through seven kilometers of unsecured territory to a Buru village near Ca Lu. Rumor had it that
Vancouver was secretly married to a girl there.

The memory of seeing Vancouver at VCB gave Mellas a deep yearning to be back in its comparative safety. From VCB, Matterhorn
had looked like the bush. Now Matterhorn itself felt like VCB. In the distant valley below Mellas were unseen trails, connecting
base camps and supply dumps, crisscrossing the border into North Vietnam and Laos, a spidery network that carried the supplies
and replacements for the NVA’s operations against the population centers in the south and along the coast. The battalion’s
job was to stop them. Soon, he knew, he’d be down there—no perimeter, no artillery battery, no landing zones, no Matterhorn.
The real bush.

Mellas’s mind snapped back to the task at hand. They were going on another routine patrol to protect the artillery battery.

When Mole finished cleaning his machine gun, he walked over to Connolly and nodded. Connolly broke into activity, calling
out the starting order of the fire teams in the patrol. Vancouver moved quietly down toward the intricate maze that was the
only way through the barbed wire. Skosh, normally Bass’s radio operator, had been sitting against a stump with his eyes closed
the whole time. He rose and joined Mellas behind the first team. He and Hamilton had traded jobs to help relieve boredom.
The scout dog, Pat, sniffed at each Marine as he went by, memorizing his smell. Once in the jungle, Pat would be alert to
any smell that was different. Arran said Pat could memorize well over a hundred individual scents.

In five minutes they were down the steep hill into the jungle, away from the litter, tangled wire, garbage, and barren mud.
A bird called. They heard its wings as it flapped away from the squad’s path. The canopy rose high above them, 100 to 150
feet, blocking out sunlight, casting the squad into shadow. Down they went, like divers in a gray-green sea.

Pat was alert almost immediately, but Mellas and Corporal Arran were both expecting one of three two-man outposts that sat
outside the company perimeter during the day. The squad wound silently by Meaker and Merritt from Second Platoon, acknowledging
them with silent smiles. Outpost, or OP, duty was easy except that the OP was likely to be sacrificed warning the company
of an attack.

The squad continued down the trail. The OP disappeared behind them. About ten minutes later, Arran went down on one knee,
his hand on Pat’s quivering back, trying to read Pat’s message. The squad halted, and everyone tensed, looking to the sides
of the trail. Arran pointed off the trail to the right and then pointed down. Mellas raised an eyebrow to Conman, and Conman
nodded. Mellas put his thumb up—OK—and Conman tapped the kid in front of him and pointed right. The squad slipped off the
trail that followed the crest of the finger and began working down a steep draw toward the valley floor. Suddenly, they were
engulfed in bamboo. The top of the bamboo was about three feet above
their heads, and they had to thread their way cautiously, moving aside stalks to build their own tunnel through the solid
green mass.

Vancouver, on point, started going too far into the bottom of the draw. Mellas threw a pebble at Conman. Conman turned, and
Mellas gave him a negative sign and pointed upslope. The word passed up front to Vancouver, and the squad quit going downhill
into the draw, staying mid-slope on the finger that led down to the valley. Walking down a draw was an invitation to an ambush.

The sign came for the machetes. One was passed up from behind Mellas and soon everyone could hear the dull thwack of the blade
as an impassible tangle was cut away so the squad could move again. With each sound, rifles were held tighter, and eyes and
ears strained a little more. Finally the sound ceased. The squad began moving again, everyone ready to fire at the slightest
noise or movement in the jungle.

The squad crawled, slid, sweated, and muttered its way through the dark jungle. Machetes had to be passed forward again. Again
their dull thwacking echoed down the line. Kids bit their lower lips, fingered their safeties off and on. Yet without the
machetes they couldn’t move; and if they couldn’t move, they couldn’t return to the safety of the perimeter.

Conman rotated the lead fire team as each team became exhausted from the tension of being on point and the backbreaking work
of swinging the machetes. Everyone, even Mellas, took his turn with a machete. Mellas knew it was foolish for him—it hindered
tactical control—but he wanted to show that he could share some of the burden. He was acutely aware that the squad could be
heard hundreds of meters away. Yet the patrol was going to certain checkpoints to make sure the NVA were kept well away from
approach paths to Matterhorn. This literal bushwhacking let the patrol accomplish its mission without walking down established
trails where the odds of getting ambushed were greatly increased. As he was finding out, no strategy was perfect. All choices
were bad in some way.

Within minutes Mellas’s hands were raw and blistered, and his arm felt weighted down. The whole time he was hacking at the
bamboo he felt naked, aware that his rifle was in his left hand, and that his finger was not on the trigger. If he was fired
on he would have to rely on the
kid behind him to take out the enemy. Finally, after an eternity, someone tapped him on the shoulder and he dropped back behind
Conman, where Skosh was with the radio. Mellas was sweating profusely, from both his labor and his fear. A voice within his
head began mocking him, asking him why in hell any NVA would be anywhere near the middle of this damned bamboo patch they’d
stumbled into.

Two more hours went by before they were out of the bamboo and back into the relative ease of walking through jungle, sweating,
fighting insects, groping, as blind as the leeches against which they waged their real war. Lieutenant Fitch asked for pos
reps—position reports—every twenty minutes or so. Mellas dutifully radioed them in, feeling frustrated and useless because
they barely changed. In two hours the patrol had gone perhaps 300 meters.

Then, in an instant, the dullness and fatigue were swept away, leaving clean, cold terror.

Conman dived to the dirt in front of Mellas. Skosh too hit the dirt, before Mellas could even fold his knees. The entire squad
was flat on the ground, rifles alternating sides all along the line, as they were assigned. Conman peered intently forward,
then he started to hunch and wriggle backward on his belly and forearms toward Mellas. He turned and held up three fingers,
then held out an open palm with a questioning look on his face. At least three, maybe more. Mellas’s heart started to pound
painfully in his throat. He was trying to remember what he’d been told to do, back at Quantico. His mind seemed empty. Conman
squirmed back farther. Mellas could see no one else. All alone. All alone, and maybe about to die.

“Pat alerted,” Conman whispered. “Arran says at least three gooks, by the way Pat’s acting. Probably more.”

“Maybe it’s the machine-gun team,” Mellas whispered, thinking, Why me?

Conman shrugged. “What’ll we do, Lieutenant?”

Mellas didn’t have the slightest idea.

He wanted to radio Bass and the Jayhawk and ask them. At the same time, he knew that this idea was ridiculous. His mind was
turning over possibilities so fast that he felt dizzy. Meanwhile, Conman waited,
open-mouthed, for Mellas to come up with a plan of action. If it was just three, he could send in the squad on line and wipe
them out. If it was a three-man OP, an outpost for a larger unit, that unit could be anything from a platoon to a company.
If he went in with the squad, they’d walk right into the deep shit and be lucky to come out with anybody alive. Then again,
if it was only three there would be no excuse for not going after them. But someone would probably get killed. It might be
Mellas, unless he sent two fire teams in without him. But what would the others think of that? He’d have to go. But
he
could get killed. It was only three. How could he be afraid? The odds were so much in their favor. Mellas suddenly saw himself
and the fourteen squad members lined up against a wall, facing a firing squad of fifteen men, only one of whom had a bullet
in his rifle. The odds would be very much in his favor there as well. But suppose the one bullet hit him. He suddenly knew
that odds became meaningless when everything was at stake.

Mellas decided to assume it was an outpost for a larger group until he knew otherwise. That meant he’d have to find out. His
training took over. His mind started inventorying his available weapons.

“Gun up,” he whispered to Skosh. The word went back to invisible kids lying on the jungle floor. “Set it in here,” Mellas
whispered to Conman. “Put Vancouver with his machine gun one-eighty from it.”