Matterhorn (59 page)

“Believe me, Jake, if I get word about a fucking bird being able to land here, even so much as a tiny sparrow, or even a tufted
nuthatch, or a hairy-chested widow maker, I’ll let you know.”

Then Mellas noticed that there was an ear stuck in the rubber band on Jake’s helmet. He went cold. “What’s that on your helmet?”

“An ear, sir,” Jake said offhandedly.

“Get rid of it.”

“Why the fuck should I?” Jacobs asked hotly. “This f-fucking b-bastard killed Janc, and I know because I threw his goddamned
b-body down the hill.”

“You know you could go to jail for mutilation.”

“Go to jail? F-fucking jail. Who’s going to go to fucking jail for k-killing Janc? Th-they ought to go to jail, the ones that
made up the fucking rules.”

“Throw it away right fucking now. And you’ll bury the bodies, too.”

“I ain’t burying no g-gook body. No sir.”

“Come on Jake, let’s go look at them.”

Jacobs silently followed Mellas down to the lines. They looked down the steep slope where the bodies of the dead North Vietnamese
kids had all been thrown after the assault. They lay there, some with eyes open, arms and legs askew, rigid, seeming oddly
uncomfortable. One body had been hacked at with a K-bar . It also had one ear missing.

“Who hacked the body up, Jake?” Mellas asked softly. “Look, I know they killed some of us, but we killed some of them, didn’t
we?”

Jacobs nodded, looking down at the ground. Mellas remembered laughing once with him about how they’d both been altar boys.
“I hacked it,” Jacobs said. He reached up and tore the ear from his helmet and hurled it down at the bodies. “I just r-ran
down the hill and hacked it. I don’t know why.”

They stood together watching the fog. Jacobs’s eyes glistened with tears, but he held them back. “Fucking Janc,” he said.

Gambaccini came up. Two ears were pinned to the crown of his bush cover. “I cut ears too, sir,” he said. “If you put Jacobs
in the brig, then I did it too.”

Mellas shook his head slowly. “Gambaccini, I don’t give a rat’s ass about the dead gooks. Just get rid of the ears so you
don’t go to jail.” Mellas started to walk away. “But you can help Jake bury the fucking bodies.”

When Mellas had moved some distance, he glanced back. The two of them were still standing there, looking down at the corpses.
Then Gambaccini took the two ears and, curling a finger around each like a skipping stone, sent them sailing one after the
other into the fog.

There came a moment during the lull when Mellas, lost at the center of the swirling fog, knew beyond any ability to lie to
himself that he had, indeed, killed Pollini—and he was overwhelmed by an emptiness that knocked him to his knees. Slumped
in his wet hole, cocooned by two flak jackets, he broke. He was the butt of a cruel joke. God had given him life and must
have laughed as Mellas used it to kill Pollini, to get a
piece of ribbon to show proof of his worth. And it was his worth that was the joke. He was nothing but a collection of empty
events that would end as a faded photograph above his parents’ fireplace. They too would die, and relatives who didn’t know
who was in the picture would throw it away. Mellas knew, in his rational mind, that if there was no afterlife, death was no
different from sleep. But this cruel flood was not from his rational mind. It had none of the ephemerality of thought. It
was as real as the mud he sat in. Thought was just more of the nothing that he had done all his life. The fact of his eventual
death shook him like a terrier shaking a rat. He could only squeal in pain.

His mind jumped in. We’ll escape. Play dead when they finally overwhelm us. Don’t use the knife—play dead and use the confusion
of that last assault to cover your escape. You’ll be alive! Leave these Marines and this false notion of honor. Get into the
jungle with the rest of the animals and hide and be alive. Alive!

But the terrier shaking him by the neck laughed. And then? A career in law? A little prestige? A little money? Perhaps a political
office? And then, dead. Dead. The laughter turned him inside out, exposing his most secret parts. He lay before God as a woman
opens herself to a man, with legs apart, stomach exposed, arms open. But unlike some women, he did not have the inner strength
that allowed them to do such a thing without fear. There was no woman’s strength in Mellas at all.

The terrier shook him again and Mellas was painfully alive. Stripped to a scream, undressed to a cry of pain, he sobbed his
anger at God in hoarse words that hurt his throat. He asked for nothing now, nor did he wonder if he’d been bad or good. Such
concepts were all part of the joke he’d just discovered. He cursed God directly for the savage joke that had been played on
him. And in that cursing Mellas for the first time really talked with his God. Then he cried, tears and snot mixing together
as they streamed down his face, but his cries were the rage and hurt of a newborn child, at last, however roughly, being taken
from the womb.

Mellas’s new insight didn’t change anything, at least on the outside, but Mellas knew he wouldn’t play dead. He’d been playing
dead all his life. He would not slip into the jungle and save himself, because that self didn’t look like anything worth saving.
He’d choose to stay on
the hill and do what he could to save those around him. The choice comforted him and calmed him down. Dying this way was a
better way to die because living this way was a better way to live.

The senior squid came crawling into Mellas’s hole, covered with blood and vomit from the wounded. “I just had to get away,”
he said. He slid in next to Mellas to watch the jungle and the fog. Mellas knew that his own existential crisis didn’t mean
shit to Sheller. And he suddenly knew where Hawke got his sense of humor. He got it from observing the facts. What a great
joke—that Mellas would probably get a medal for killing one of his own men. It seemed appropriate that the president would
probably get reelected for doing the same thing on a far larger scale. Then a new voice within him started to laugh with God.

He became aware that he was laughing out loud when he saw Sheller looking at him quizzically. “What?” Mellas asked, still
laughing.

“What’s so funny, sir?”

Mellas laughed again. “You’re a fucking mess, Sheller. You know that?” He kept laughing, shaking his head in wonder at the
world.

Tedium marked the passing of the hours. The kids fought their desire to sleep. Just before noon the fog lifted slightly, hovering
a few feet above Matterhorn and giving enough visibility for a bird to get into Helicopter Hill. Fitch immediately radioed
for the resupply birds.

Helicopter Hill, however, was also in plain sight of the NVA mortarmen, who started firing, easily adjusting their shots.
When the Marines heard the projectiles leaving the tubes, they knew they had only a few seconds to get deep while the rounds
were making their large arcs over to Helicopter Hill. The mortar rounds came down, the ground shook, and the pressure hit
eardrums and eyeballs. It wasn’t sound or noise, because it wasn’t heard. It was felt. It was pain.

The Marines huddled in their holes and felt the concussions. They held their ears. Dirt rained on their helmets and stuffed
their nostrils. One kid from Third Platoon was hit by a shell that landed on the lip of
his hole. They dragged him into the bunker that held the few canteens of water being saved for the wounded. Everyone else
was out.

The birds were on their way when the fog closed in again. The helicopters were unable to find the landing zone and turned
back after running short of fuel.

The shelling stopped.

Boredom, fatigue, and thirst set in again.

Goodwin was restless and moved down below the line of holes facing Matterhorn. Occasionally, through the fog, he could see
the bunkers First Platoon had attacked the morning before. He sat down with his rifle and adjusted its sights. Resting it
against a log, he settled in to watch and wait.

An hour passed. Goodwin had the patience of a born hunter. He lived in no-time, leaving it only briefly to shift his body.

The fog moved in and closed Matterhorn from his view. Twenty more minutes passed. The fog lifted again. A tiny figure could
be seen trudging between two bunkers. Goodwin squeezed off a round. The bullet kicked up dirt below the figure. The man started
running. Goodwin aimed above him to compensate for the distance and fired three more quick shots. The third one clipped the
man in the leg and he went down. Excitement coursed in Goodwin’s throat. He quickly adjusted his sights for the distance and
wind and fired two more rounds. He couldn’t tell where they hit. That was a good sign, because if they hit flesh they wouldn’t
kick up mud. Small arms opened fire from Matterhorn. Goodwin heard the crack of the bullets in the air around him before he
heard the sound of the discharges. The bullets thudded into the hill above him, sending the Marines diving for their holes,
joking and cursing Goodwin, who was hidden below them, readjusting his sights again.

Two figures darted out of a bunker and dragged Goodwin’s target away. Goodwin, enraged, opened up on full automatic, but the
M-16 rode up with the recoil. He saw a tracer bullet make a flat orange arc that seemed to be sucked quickly into the hill
above the three NVA soldiers. “Fuck. We need a fucking M-14, Jack.”

The fire died down. Goodwin went back to the lines and began trading straight bullets for tracers, alternating one for every
four in his
magazines. Then he and a couple of others slipped just below the holes and set up at a different location. At that distance,
the tracers, being lighter, wouldn’t impact exactly where the bullets did, but he could estimate about where the heavier bullets
would go and knew he’d still have a better chance of correcting for range and wind. He also knew that the tracers would give
away his position.

Mellas wandered down to see what was happening. Goodwin was sitting there, leaning over his rifle, as patient and as still
as a cat waiting by a mouse hole. Fifteen minutes passed. Mellas got bored and went back to his side of the hill.

Two hours passed. The fog closed back in again, making it safe to walk or sit aboveground. Kids talked, whittled, and dug
elaborate shelves and steps in their holes. Several went down and helped Gambaccini and Jacobs dig graves for the dead NVA,
simply for something to do. Many dozed, thankful to have nothing to do but wait in their holes. All of them looked at the
sky every few minutes, like cargo cultists waiting for deliverance.

Two and a half hours more passed. Mellas crawled down to check on Goodwin. Goodwin was still waiting over his rifle. Mellas
lay down beside him. Goodwin talked without taking his eye from the rear sight. “That little bastard’s just about to poke
his head out that hole. I can feel it.”

Mellas squatted there, looking across the hill, which came into and went out of view in the swirling gray. Ten minutes passed.
He thought about the man inside the bunker across the way. The bunker was one that Jacobs had built. It was dug in deep, with
eye-level just aboveground, logs interspersed with dirt, runway matting, sandbags—unless it was hit right on top, even a 500-pound
bomb wouldn’t hurt someone inside. Infantry would be required. Mellas didn’t want to think about this anymore.

He got bored again and left. Close to 1500—half an hour after he’d left Goodwin the second time—he heard the single crack
of the M-16, then two more shots in quick succession. “Scar got one.” The cry came floating over the hill. Mellas ran across
the top, ducking in case there was return fire.

“I got the little fucker,” Goodwin said as Mellas threw himself down beside him. One of the kids providing security with Goodwin
handed Fitch’s binoculars to Mellas. Through them, he could see the dead soldier being dragged back into the bunker. “I got
him right in the high part of the throat,” Goodwin said matter-of-factly. “I knew he’d have to come out and piss sometime.”

“Nice shot,” Mellas said. “You gonna try for another one?”

“Beats humping.”

The fog cleared for a moment, exposing the top of Helicopter Hill to the NVA again. A single AK-47 rattled briefly. The Marines
scrambled into their holes. But the AK-47 was even less accurate at long range than the M-16.

Mellas lay flat on the ground, thirst battering his brain. His lips and tongue felt like cotton. He noted the obvious fire
discipline of the NVA. They could reach quite accurately with their 7.62 machine guns but didn’t fire them: like the Marines,
they did not want to give away key defensive positions. But the NVA had no compunction about firing their SKS rifles and AK-47s,
particularly from the little finger running northeast from Matterhorn.

Goodwin poked his head over the log after the firing stopped. “They don’t know where we’re at, Jack,” he said quietly. He
crouched and duckwalked away from the log, screened by the dead bushes; then he stood straight up and, looking directly at
Matterhorn, took a piss. Then he walked back and settled on his stomach behind the log. He rested the rifle on the log and
leaned his cheek against the stock. “See that fucking bunker with the little bush to the left, two over from where we shot
the gook?” he said to the kid with the binoculars.

“Yeah,” the kid answered. They were both ignoring rank and the usually obligatory “sir.”

“I saw someone move in there and I’m going to kill him.”

Mellas looked at Goodwin, then across at Matterhorn. He exulted in Goodwin’s prowess. He wanted to kill as well, but knew
he wasn’t nearly as good a shot and would embarrass himself. Nor did he have Goodwin’s uncanny patience. Mellas didn’t hate
the NVA. He wanted to kill the enemy because that was the only way the company would
get off the hill, and he wanted to live and go home. He also wanted to kill because a burning anger inside him had no place
to go. The people he had hated—the colonel, the politicians, the protesters, bullys who’d shamed him in childhood, little
friends who’d taken his toys when he was two—weren’t available, but the NVA soldiers were. At a very deep level, Mellas simply
wanted to stand on a body that he had laid low. Watching Goodwin with more than a little envy, he had to admit that he wanted
to kill because part of him was thrilled by killing.