Matterhorn (26 page)

Mellas only nodded and continued forward, feeling more exposed with each step. He reached Jermain, the M-79 man, who was lying
prone on the trail, trying to peer through the thick bamboo all around them. Mellas and Hamilton crawled up to him. “Where’s
Robertson?” Mellas whispered. Robertson was the leader of Jacobs’s first fire team.

Jermain turned his face, red with the heat and excitement, toward Mellas, and motioned with his hands in a wide arc. Robertson
had chosen to move around to come up behind any possible enemy.

“He went by himself?” Mellas whispered. Jermain nodded and shrugged, still looking straight ahead. Mellas was struck by Robertson’s
bravery.

The radio hissed. Hamilton quickly muffled the handset against his shirt, but he listened to the words. He tapped Mellas’s
boot. “It’s the skipper. He wants to know what the fucking holdup is.”

Mellas grabbed the handset. “Bravo Six, we’re checking it out, goddamn it. Over.” He had barely controlled the volume of his
voice.

“Roger, Bravo One. I got Big John on my ass about the ammo getting blown. I’ll give you five more minutes. Over.”

“Roger. Out.” Mellas gave Hamilton the handset. “The colonel’s in a hurry,” he said to Hamilton bitterly. “Start moving forward,
Jermain.”

Jermain turned to look at him in surprise. “We got to cover for Robertson,” he said, exasperated. “Someone’s got to care.”

Mellas started crawling forward past Jermain, who took a deep breath and crawled out in front of him, his honor having been
challenged.

“Jermain?” a voice whispered from the jungle ahead of them.

“Yeah. Right here,” Jermain whispered back.

There was a rustle in the bushes, and then Robertson’s sweating face emerged. He was duckwalking. “Oh, hi, Lieutenant,” he
said, and smiled. He remained there in a squat, his little body looking perfectly at ease in its folded-up position.

Mellas turned to look at Hamilton. “‘Hi, Lieutenant,’ he says.” He shook his head and turned to Robertson. “See anything?”
he asked.

Robertson shook his head, obviously unfazed by Mellas’s sarcastic tone. “I got the feeling, though, that they’re just in front
of us keeping tabs somehow.”

Mellas became serious. “Why do you feel that?”

“I don’t know. Little things. I just feel it.”

Mellas reached for the handset. “Bravo Six, this is Bravo One Actual. We checked out negative up here. I’ll be rotating squads
and then we’ll be moving. I’m sending Arran back. Pat’s done and we’ll have big Victor”—he meant Vancouver—“on point anyway.
Over.” Fitch acknowledged and Mellas stood up in the trail. “Pass the word back for Conman’s squad to move up. You guys take
tail-end Charlie,” he told Jake. “Tell Arran to wait on the CP group.”

Pretty soon Vancouver’s large frame could be seen moving up the trail, his modified M-60 hanging from his neck. Connolly was
just two men behind him. Mellas told the lead fire team and Connolly about the situation and the need for haste. “But don’t
go any faster than feels OK, Vancouver,” he added. “I don’t care how much of a hurry the colonel is in to move his little
pins in the map.”

“I got you, sir.”

Vancouver stared down the trail, constantly scanning it, his eyes jerking with tension. Walking down a trail to save time,
he knew, was an invitation for an ambush. Also, Robertson had smelled something. He was a good fire team leader and had been
around a while. If Robertson was being cautious, there was good reason. But on point there are always good reasons to be cautious,
even if there’s no hurry. The point man is all alone. It makes no difference if there’s a fire team or an entire battalion
behind him. He sees no one—only shadows. At every turn lurks
the possible ambush—and the point man is the first to go. Or, if the ambushers are particularly successful, they let the point
man by and cut him off when they open up on the lieutenant and the radio operator. It’s like walking a hundred feet up on
a bending two-by-four with the wind blowing in sporatic gusts from different directions. There’s no help. No rope. No friend
to lean on. The point man is also blindfolded by the jungle. His ears are confused by every tiny sound behind him, obscuring
the one sound that might save him. He wants to scream for the whole world to shut up. His hands sweat, making him worry that
he won’t be able to pull the trigger. He wants to piss even if he just pissed five minutes ago. His heart thumps in his throat
and chest. He waits out the eternity before the squad leader says it’s time to rotate back into safety.

Vancouver stopped thinking. Fear and exposure drove thought from his head. Only survival remained.

It was the oddly bent piece of bamboo about ten meters down the trail that caused the rush of dread that saved him. Vancouver
dropped to his knees and opened up. The roar of the machine gun and the spewing of hot casings turned the silent world of
the jungle upside down. Everything was motion—Marines rolling off the trail, seeking cover in the foliage, scrambling, praying,
crawling for their lives. Vancouver saw only shadows, but the shadows were screaming back at him with AK-47 automatic rifles.
Bullets spun past him in the trail, kicking up mud, churning the place where the Marines had been a split second before. Connolly
rolled into the brush, coming faceup on his back, his M-16 clutched to his chest. He was holding his fire, just as they had
discussed so many times.

The sawed-off M-60 stopped firing. The belt had run out. Vancouver dived for the side of the trail, and Connolly rolled over
into it on his stomach. He let loose on automatic just as an NVA soldier emerged from the wall of jungle to finish Vancouver
off. Connolly’s bullets caught the NVA soldier full in the chest and face. The back of the man’s head exploded. Connolly rolled
over again, fumbling wildly for another magazine. An M-16 opened up on Vancouver’s right, almost
on top of him, the bullets screaming past his right ear. Then another M-16 followed almost immediately to his left. Vancouver
was crawling backward, along with Connolly, as fast as he could. Connolly was pushing a second magazine into place, shouting
for Mole. “Gun up! Gun up! Mole! Goddamn it!”

Vancouver pulled another belt of ammunition from the metal box on his chest and slapped it into the gun’s receiver. He heard
Connolly shouting for Gambaccini, the M-79 man, and Rider, his first fire team leader. He saw the lieutenant, who’d moved
forward and was shouting something at Hamilton and reloading a magazine himself. Then Gambaccini popped up and let loose with
a grenade over Vancouver’s head. There was a crashing sound in the brush to his left. He almost fired, but it was Rider moving
his team up; all four were abreast and to the left of the trail in the jungle. They began laying down disciplined fire, pouring
bullets into the unseen enemy.

To Mellas, the whole thing happened so quickly that he didn’t even remember thinking. There was the sudden burst of Vancouver’s
machine gun, and Mellas dived for the ground and immediately started crawling forward to find out what was happening. Automatically,
he started shouting for Mole to get the gun up front and heard the command being relayed back down the line. Fitch’s excited
voice was screaming over the radio. Mellas shouted at Hamilton—“Tell him I don’t know. I don’t know”—and crawled furiously
forward.

He had just crawled around a bend in the trail when Vancouver’s gun stopped and he saw Connolly roll out, firing in front
of him while Vancouver was scrambling backward. Mellas shoved his face into the dirt just behind Vancouver’s right knee, poked
his rifle blindly down the trail, and opened up over Vancouver’s head. Almost simultaneously, it seemed, the M-79 grenade
launcher shot off a solid thump that sent a round of fléchettes down the trail. Then a whole fire team crashed through the
jungle on his left and opened up on full automatic. All this time, Connolly was also shouting for Mole and the machine gun,
crawling backward.

Mole came scrambling up the trail, gun cradled in his arms, crawling crablike, awkwardly, but very fast. His A gunner, Young,
the only white kid in the machine-gun teams except for Hippy, crawled behind him, dragging the heavy steel boxes of machine-gun
belts. Mole slammed the gun down on its bipod just off the trail and immediately started laying disciplined bursts of fire
down the dark green corridor. Tracers sped down the tunnel of jungle like the taillights of receding cars. Young crawled up
next to the barrel, fresh belt in hand, eyes wide with fear, ready to reload.

Mellas rolled back and grabbed the hook from Hamilton, panting for air. “Ambush. I knew this fucking trail. Death trap. Vancouver
spotted them. Before we got into the kill zone. I think they dee-deed. Over.”

“Casualties? Over.”

“That’s a neg. Over.”

“Thank God,” Fitch replied, forgetting radio procedure.

Mellas was quivering with excitement and with a strange exultation, as if his team had just won a football championship. No
casualties. He’d done well. It was over too quickly, though. Somehow, it should be prolonged. He wanted to tell Fitch and
Hawke all about it. He wanted to go running down the long line of excited Marines, telling the story of the fight over and
over again. They’d broken up an ambush. His platoon. Killed two, maybe three of the enemy, and suffered not a scratch. A perfect
job.

“Bravo Six, this is Bravo One. Over.”

“Bravo Six,” Fitch answered.

“We need artillery,” Mellas pleaded excitedly. “The goddamned gooners are dee-deeing right out of the fucking area. Where’s
the goddamn mortars? Let’s
get
some.”

“Roger that, Bravo One. Character Delta’s working up an arty mission right now. It’s a little hard on the mortar squad to
fire shells into the tree limbs over their heads. You copy? Over.” Mellas was too excited to notice Fitch’s sarcasm.

He crawled over to where Connolly was lying beside Mole, peering down the shadowy trail. Connolly, too, was quivering and
breathing hard. Vancouver was to Connolly’s left, and Rider’s fire team to the
left of Vancouver, pulled back now in echelon, forming the left side of a wedge. The rest of the squad, without being told,
had formed the right side of the wedge at the head of the column to get maximum fire in the direction of the ambush but still
allow fire to their sides to protect their flanks.

“I think they drug the body away, sir,” Connolly said. “Just as we was crawling back, I thought I caught some movement. Did
you see them?”

“Yeah,” Mellas lied, without intending to. “You’re right.” In his imagination, fueled by the excitement, this mention of an
NVA soldier pulling a body back into the cover of the jungle was enough to convince him that he’d actually seen it happen.
“Why doesn’t the skipper send a platoon around in an envelopment?” he asked, staring down the trail.

Connolly looked at Mellas. “In this shit?”

Mellas stopped gazing straight ahead and looked at Connolly. For some reason, that comment had brought him down. Once more
he saw tangled jungle on both sides of a narrow muddy path. “Yeah, it’d take forever. They’d be sitting ducks. You’d hear
them for miles.”

“There it is, sir.”

“Maybe we can get it on with the artillery.” Mellas wanted to keep talking about the incident. “You’re sure about the gook
you zapped in the head?” he asked.

“I saw his fucking face disappear,” Connolly said grimly.

“We’ll call it a confirmed, even if we don’t have the body. I mean, there’s no way the gooner can still be alive. Vancouver
must have greased at least another one or two.” Mellas turned to Vancouver. “Hey, Vancouver, how many you think you got?”

Vancouver looked down at his steaming weapon. “Jeez, sir, all I saw was fucking bushes and all this shit came flying at me.
I maybe hit a couple of them, though.”

“We’ll look for blood trails soon as the arty mission’s over. But we must have got at least one confirmed and two probables.”

Mellas turned around to where Hamilton was lying with the heavy radio pressing him into the dirt, its small bent antenna waving
in the
still air. He proudly reported the score. “Bravo this is One. We got one confirmed up here and two probables. Over.”

“Roger, one confirmed and two probables,” Pallack’s voice answered. “Heads down. I just heard character Delta say ‘shot.’
He’ll be working it in close. Over.”

“Incoming,” Mellas called out in a loud voice. “Friendly incoming.”

He looked around to see if his men were reasonably safe. Then it occurred to him that everybody already had his head down
and had been that way for the past three minutes. He buried his own head in the earth as the first anguished scream of the
105s came through the sky from Eiger.

It was again Third Squad’s turn to take point. They handed off Williams’s body to Second Squad and moved quietly forward.
Cortell kept taking his helmet off and putting it on, rubbing his high, glistening forehead. Everyone hurried through the
would-be kill zone, breathing a thank-you for Vancouver’s eyes and reaction time.

Jackson found two rice cakes hanging from a man’s bloody web belt that had been removed and tossed beside the trail. He happily
stuffed them into his large trouser pockets, as all of his squad’s food was gone. He quickly cut the brass buckle with its
red star from the belt, knowing it would bring some good money from souvenir hunters in Da Nang, and passed it back to Vancouver.
A little farther down the trail they found a bloody cap. That also was passed back to Vancouver, who silently gave it to Connolly.
Connolly stuffed it into his pocket.

Mellas’s whole body was zinging. His hands quivered. He started at nearly every noise and talked too rapidly, and too much,
on the radio. He kept mentally replaying the scene, wondering how he could have reacted faster and killed more of them, wondering
if Connolly was aware that, while he was changing magazines, Mellas had saved him by firing. He wondered if people outside
the company would hear about his action and how his platoon had succeeded when Alpha Company had lost so many in a similar
ambush. He remained charged up until they reached
the ammunition dump that afternoon as the light began to fade from the gray sky.