Matterhorn (6 page)

“Where you from, brother?” the visitor asked when they had finished.

“Baltimore.” Broyer looked down at his very small hole, feeling pressure to get it dug before the light faded and he would
be left exposed. His plastic glasses slipped down his nose again and he quickly pushed them back up.

“Don’t worry about the fuckin’ hole, man. You dig enough of those motherfuckers in the next thirteen months to fill a lifetime.
Got a cigarette?”

“Yeah.” Broyer reached into his pocket and pulled out a small C-ration cigarette package. He offered it to the stranger, who
was smiling at him as if enjoying some sort of joke. He noticed that the stranger was afflicted with vitiligo, which left
pigmentless white patches on his face and arms.

“M’ name’s China,” the stranger said. “Just thought I’d get around
seein’ some a the new brothers.” China lit the cigarette and took in a slow breath. “What’s you name, brother?”

“Broyer.”

“Shit, man. You real name, not you slave name.”

“Tyrell,” Broyer said, wondering if that was a slave name, too. He was relieved when China said nothing. “You in First Platoon?”
Broyer asked.

“Naw. Second Herd. Gun Squad. I get around a lot, though. Sort of the welcome wagon, you know?” China laughed a wheezy giggle.
“What you think of those two chuck lieutenants come in with you the other day?”

“Don’t know them. They came into VCB on the chopper after we already got there on the convoy.”

“Figures,” China said offhandedly. He waited for Broyer to go on.

“They didn’t seem too bad. The one’s sort of a country dude, talking about hunting and stuff. The other one seems decent.
Sort of has a stick up his rear though. Joe College dude.”

“Uh-huh.” China looked out at the jungle, barely ten meters downhill from where they were talking. Broyer followed China’s
gaze to the wall of foliage. It was being laboriously pushed back with K-bars and entrenching tools by other members of Broyer’s
platoon. A few stood guard in their holes, rifles and magazines carefully laid out in front of them, scanning the dark tree
line.

“You think we’ll get hit here?” Broyer asked.

“Shit, man. You think the gooks crazy ’nough to want this motherfuckin’ place? They got better things to do with they time.
Shit, man.” China smiled at him.

Broyer laughed softly, looking down at his entrenching tool.

“Look brother,” China said. “Don’chew worry. I got one more new brother to see ’fore the actuals meeting is over and I gotta
get back to my poz, but I see you later, OK? You settle down soon. We all scared, but you get used to bein’ scared. You need
to talk with a brother, you come on over.” They went through the handshake dance. Broyer was glad he’d asked a friend at boot
camp to teach it to him one night when they were both on fire watch and everyone else was asleep.

The actuals assembled in the twilight outside First Lieutenant Fitch’s hooch. A light mist obscured the distinction between
their shadowy silhouettes, further intensifying Mellas’s discomfort in not being able to remember their names.

Mellas had barely spoken to the Third Platoon commander, Second Lieutenant Kendall, recently of the Fifteenth Motor Transportation
Battalion. This was not by any choice of his own: there simply had been no time to talk. Kendall had sandy curly hair and
wore yellow-tinted wraparound glasses that he kept touching as he talked. Mellas noted that he wore a simple gold wedding
band.

Second Lieutenant Goodwin, who had been with Mellas at the Basic School and had come in with him on the chopper, was jostling
up against his platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Ridlow, muffling a guffaw about something. Goodwin was wearing a bush cover
on his head. Mellas felt a small pang of envy. The first day Mellas and Goodwin had drawn their gear in Quang Tri, Goodwin
had exchanged his stateside billed cap for the floppy camouflage bush cover and looked as if he’d worn it all his life. Mellas
had put one on, too, stared at himself in the mirror, and, feeling he looked foolish, stuffed it in a seabag to take home
as a souvenir if he made it back. Several days later, just moments after they had arrived at Matterhorn, Mellas again confronted
his envy of Goodwin. It happened when the skipper, Lieutenant Fitch, crisply announced that Mellas would go with Sergeant
Bass. Fitch added that Bass had done a hell of a job running the platoon in the interim between Hawke’s moving up to executive
officer and Mellas’s arrival. Fitch then assigned Goodwin to Second Platoon with Staff Sergeant Ridlow, whom he described
as competent but a little lax. Mellas knew instantly that Fitch thought Goodwin was the better officer because he’d given
Goodwin the tougher assignment. Fitch hadn’t even asked about their Basic School records, where they went to college, or anything
else. It seemed unfair.

Mellas was brought back to the present when he noticed a pale ash-colored German shepherd with odd reddish ears that was lying
in the mud panting, head up, and staring at him. The dog’s handler, a lean Marine with a large drooping mustache like that
of an ancient Celtic
warrior, was asleep next to the dog, a camouflage bush cover pulled over his eyes. Others in the CP group—the enlisted forward
air controller, always called FAC-man; the senior squid, Sheller; and the enlisted artillery forward observer, Daniels—were
sitting in a small group, eating C-rations, just close enough to hear what was going on in the actuals meeting but far enough
away to not be part of it.

“All right, let’s get going,” Hawke said. “The weather forecast is more of the same shit.” Hawke paused. “Again.” People laughed.
“We still don’t know what the fuck Alpha and Charlie companies are doing in the bush, or when Delta and us are supposed to
flip-flop with them. You’ve all probably got the word that Alpha did take four Coors.” Coors was radio code for dead. “Don’t
know any names yet. Word is they got hit strung out in a river.” Hawke hurried on, paging through a pocketsize hard-covered
green notebook. “No word on R & R quotas yet. Who’s got palace guard tomorrow? I nearly got drowned in the trash when the
wind picked up this afternoon.”

Kendall raised his hand.

“OK, Kendall. Police it up. We’ll have rats if we don’t.” Hawke looked up at the sky, squinting against the drizzle. “Correction.
More rats. It’s already Rat Alley up here.” He looked down at his notebook, sheltering it close against his damp sweatshirt.
“I hear battalion wants to set up here once we get the cannon cockers in, so get everyone shaved and looking decent before
they show up and start screaming.”

Goodwin’s platoon sergeant, Ridlow, exploded. “If they’d fly in some fucking water maybe we’d be more likely to clean up.”
His gravelly voice faded off into a mutter about how fucked up it was to always be short of water in a fucking monsoon, and
how fucking fucked up the fucking country was. He spat at the ground and wiped a week’s growth of beard with the back of one
large hand. His other hand rested on his hip next to his Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum revolver. The first thing Goodwin had done
when they’d been introduced was ask to see it; they’d hit it off immediately.

Hawke was looking at the sky, letting Ridlow get it out of his system. “Well,” he said, “since there’s no
pertinent
comments, I guess that’s about all I’ve got. Oh, yeah, get your needs lists in to Gunny Cassidy so
when the birds do start bringing in the arty battery we can get some supplies. Gunny Cassidy?”

“Nothing, sir,” Cassidy said. “Just you people give me your head count before you leave.”

“Senior Squid?” Hawke asked.

“Uh, no, sir. Just make sure the platoon corpsmen get their medical supply needs down on your lists so I can get the battalion
aid station to put them on the chopper.”

Bass snorted. “They do that automatically.”

Sheller looked at Bass and pressed his lips together tightly. In the moment of hesitation Hawke cut in. “OK, any bitches,
gripes, grievances, needs, or solicitations before the skipper goes?”

“Mallory wants to request mast again,” Bass said. “Says he’s got a headache that won’t go away and the squids are fucking
with him by keeping him in the bush.”

“If the puke didn’t play that goddamned jungle music so loud he wouldn’t have a sore head,” Cassidy muttered.

“That’s Jackson with the music,” Bass said. “From my herd. He’s a good Marine.” Cassidy looked steadily at Bass, and Bass
looked steadily back at Cassidy. Cassidy said nothing more but gave an almost imperceptible nod that said, If you say it’s
so, Sergeant Bass, then it’s so. Mellas, his antennae up, knew instantly that these two men were cut from the same green cloth.

“Maybe we ought to just do Mallory a favor and break his head all the way for him,” Ridlow muttered. He looked quickly at
his platoon commander, Goodwin, and then broke into a cackle. The other sergeants and Goodwin did as well. Mellas smiled,
although he didn’t like the overtones.

Fitch sighed, realizing he’d have to deal with it. “I’ll talk to Mallory,” he said. “But you warn him, Mellas, that he’d better
have a good story.”

“Mallory’s already up for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction with his last story,” Hawke said. Hawke looked around. “Anything
else?” No one said anything. He turned to Goodwin. “Try and keep your machine gunner, China, busy. OK? The less visiting time
he has the better.”

Cassidy snorted. “They want to see black power? Tell them to look down the black barrel of my fucking Smith & Wesson Model
29.” Ridlow cackled again.

Hawke looked wearily at Cassidy and Ridlow. “China may be a dumb kid, but I’d take him seriously.” Ridlow glanced sideways
at Goodwin, then over to Cassidy. No one said anything. “It’s all yours, Skipper,” Hawke said.

“Right.” Fitch’s head came up. He’d been sitting on a log, dangling his feet. His small, handsome face looked tired. “Big
John Six went bugfuck over the radio again about the gook machine gun.” Big John Six was Lieutenant Colonel Simpson, the battalion
commander and Fitch’s boss. He’d promised his own boss, Colonel Mulvaney, the regimental commander, that Mulvaney could move
a howitzer battery to a secure zone. Losing the supply chopper after he said the zone was safe was embarrassing enough, but
he’d then promised he’d fix the problem pronto and it was now two full days after the promised date and the zone was still
not secure.

“What’s he going to do?” Ridlow boomed out. “Cut your hair off and send you to Vietnam?”

Fitch laughed politely at the standard retort, looking down at his swinging feet. “I suppose he could banish me to Okinawa.”
Okinawa was universally known as the worst possible place to get for R & R. Relations with the Japanese had gotten so tense
that the brass had forbidden nearly every activity for which anyone went on R & R. When the laughter died down, Fitch pointed
into the fog that swirled over the trees to the southwest and said, referring to the enemy, “I think Nagoolian is going to
head over to that ridgeline tomorrow. He used it on the first day, and he’s never used the northwest one, so he probably figures
we’ll be looking on the northwest one for him. Bass, you were down there. What’s that southwest finger look like?”

“It’s like the rest of the fucking place. Took us three hours to make eight hundred meters. Had to use machetes to get through.
Pretty goddamn hard to sneak up on someone like that.”

“That’s why he’ll be there. Mellas, send a baseball team over the top of the ridge and look around. If you don’t find them,
at least it’ll move them out away from the main approach path.”

“Aye, aye, Skipper.” Mellas was jotting down notes in his own green notebook and mentally reviewing the current company radio
code, which was often used for direct conversation. A baseball team was a squad of twelve men, a basketball team was a fire
team of four men, a football team a platoon of forty-three men. “Can I get some maps for my squad leaders?”

Everyone burst into laughter. Mellas reddened.

“Mellas,” Hawke said, “it’d be easier for you to date Brigitte Bardot than to get any more maps than we’ve got. You don’t
want to know what I had to trade for the one you’ve got, and I don’t want to have to say it in front of the skipper.”

“It’s true,” Fitch added. “Maps are in short supply. Sorry. Just another inch of the green dildo.” He quickly went on. “Goodwin?”

“Yeah, Jack?” Mellas winced at Goodwin’s casualness in addressing the company commander as Jack, especially since that wasn’t
his name. If Fitch noticed, he didn’t let on.

“I want one of your baseball teams out on the south finger, then work up the draw between there and the east ridge. I want
you to check out the crashed bird on Helicopter Hill on the way back. See if Nagoolian’s been nosing around. You other two
platoon commanders send your red dogs out wherever you want,” he said, using the radio brevity code for any squad-size patrol.

Fredrickson broke in on the circle, breathing hard. “He’s starting to scream. Lindsey’s got a shirt stuffed in his mouth.
It’ll be too loud to keep down in a few minutes. We’re going to have to cut.”

Mellas looked at Fitch and then over at Sheller, whose throat was working underneath his double chin. Sheller rubbed his hands
together as if to warm them. Fitch was looking at him, hard, his lower lip over his upper.