Matterhorn (61 page)

Up at the CP, Fitch was sick with dread. All the radio net could do was sing, “Fucky you, Bahvo, fucky you,” jamming all transmissions.
He scrambled out of the bunker to find out what was happening. Pallack and Relsnik followed after him, dragging the radios.

Down at Third Platoon, Lieutenant Kendall was crouched in his hole. The roar of the firefight at his listening post drowned
out every thought in his head. Genoa, his radio operator, watched him anxiously, wishing Samms were still alive. He hoped
the lieutenant would stay in the hole and give him an excuse to do the same thing.

Goodwin grabbed his rifle and headed downhill to his center squad’s machine-gun position. There, even if he couldn’t talk
on the radio, he could at least direct the fire of one of his three biggest weapons and be in the middle of the fight. His
radio operator, not knowing what Goodwin had in mind, scrambled after him shouting, “Friendlies, friendlies! It’s Scar and
Russell.”

Goodwin had doubled the size of his listening post to increase its odds of survival and hold down the jitters. The four kids
on the LP, hearing the sound of firing on both sides of them, bolted for the lines. They ran uphill, flailing at the thick
brush and tree limbs, panting, their legs cramped from lying on the damp ground, guided forward by eerie green and white flashes
that brought brush and trees into and out of their sight. They broke out into the cleared field of fire below the lines and
started shouting the password just as one of Goodwin’s men threw an M-76 fragmentation grenade. It bounced down the hill toward
them. The kid who threw it immediately shouted, “Jesus. I’m sorry. It’s a fucking grenade.” None of the four heard him as
they kept panting up the slope. Three seconds later the grenade exploded. One kid from the LP caught the bulk of the shrapnel
along his right side. The three others crawled over and dragged him up the hill shouting, “Corpsman! Corpsman!” Goodwin stood
up and waved his arms, forgetting that they couldn’t see a thing in the dark, and shouted, “Over here, you stupid motherfuckers,
over here.” Guided by Goodwin’s voice, they dragged the wounded Marine into the machine-gun hole. The platoon corpsman
crawled over to work on the first of the many wounded who were to come. No one gave a damn about what had caused the explosion
that wounded the boy. The Marines were all too grateful to be inside the lines with their friends.

The firefight with Kendall’s LP died out. The Marines stared into the dark and fog. Goodwin crawled from the machine-gun position
to a point about ten meters to the left and behind it, his radiomen crawling after him, the radio still spewing nonsense.
Then Goodwin lay on his back and shouted at the sky, “Remember it’s claymores first, then grenades and Mike-seventy-nines.
And don’t waste your shotgun rounds.” Goodwin’s voice steadied nervous movements all around the hill. “Nobody fires a rifle
until you hear mine,” he continued. “Any of you fuckers give away a machine-gun position before we need it, you won’t draw
KP for the rest of your tour.” Then he whispered to Russell, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.” He broke into a scrambling
crawl, heading for the machine gun again, Russell right behind him, just as brilliant flashes of light erupted from the jungle,
the bullets hitting where Goodwin and Russell had lain on their backs.

Then the entire hill was quiet. Everyone waited. The silence hung like smoke over their heads.

Mellas crawled back to his hole and waited for Jackson to return with the new radio frequency. He toyed with the safety on
his M-16, wondering if he’d be killed, feeling very alone and afraid, wishing Jackson would hurry back, worrying about him,
worrying about getting the company up on the new frequency.

Kendall crouched in his hole thinking of his wife, wondering if the kids on the LP were still alive, wishing that Fitch would
tell him what to do. He imagined Genoa’s disdainful stare. He looked up over the edge of his hole into the blackness.

Jackson, with the new frequency on the radio, crawled back toward Mellas’s hole, praying no one would hear him and shoot him
accidentally.

A very frightened Pallack, who had to carry the new frequency down the lines, followed him out of Fitch’s hole. “Hey, it’s
Pallack,” he whispered, hoping he was near someone. There was no answer. No one
wanted to give away his position. “Goddamn it, now, it’s me, Pallack, d’ Romeo carrier. Don’t shoot my ass. OK?”

No one answered.

“Hey, Scar. I’m coming down. OK?”

No answer.

Pallack lay flat in the mud, face buried, wanting never to move. The cold fog moved across his back. Why in the fuck was he
the fucking company radio operator? He swallowed and continued crawling downhill, gravity pulling the blood to his face.

“Hey, it’s Pallack,” he whispered again, tentatively. Jesus fuck, the lieutenants do this every night? No wonder they’re so
fucked up. “Hey! It’s me. Character Poppa from d’ CP,” he whispered again.

“Goddamn it, Pallack, what do you fucking want?” someone hissed.

“Tell Scar to come up on fifteen point seven,” he whispered.

“Fuck, Pallack.”

Pallack was already crawling away as fast as he could.

The main attack started with an explosion at the far end of First Platoon’s lines, not small arms fire. “Zappers!” Fredrickson
whispered. He swallowed. NVA sapper units were elite troops who carried satchel charges filled with several pounds of TNT
that they used to clear paths through barbed wire and destroy bunkers. They also hurled these into fighting holes. Satchel
charges didn’t leave a corpsman much to work with.

Another series of satchel charges were hurled by the North Vietnamese sappers as they rose from where they’d been silently
creeping forward in the dark. At the sound of the satchels going off, the NVA infantry burst from the cover of the bush and
came running uphill, heavily laden with grenades, rifles, and ammunition, fighting the same gravity that the Marines fought,
their lungs gasping for the same damp air, their bodies hurled forward by the same adrenaline and fear.

Goodwin opened up with his M-16, not waiting for Fitch’s orders, and the entire hill went off like a chain of gunpowder. The
night turned phosphorescent orange and green, and the roaring sound of the weapons seemed to squeeze everyone’s brain down
to the size of a fist. First
the entire line erupted with the claymores going off, detonated by the Marines in their holes, spewing wide arcs of steel
balls at groin height. Then the Marines rolled grenades beneath the legs of the advancing enemy. Tracers, green for the NVA
and orange for the Marines, crisscrossed in front of the lines.

Mellas crammed his fists against his ears, not to block the overpowering sound but to try and hold thoughts in his head, figure
out what to do, and not let fear send him quivering into the bottom of his fighting hole, hoping for the mercy of God. No
intelligible sound could be heard above the sustained explosion of a Marine rifle company fighting for its life.

The machine gunners laced fire horizontally across the lines, setting up a curtain of moving steel through which the advancing
NVA soldiers had to struggle as if in slow motion. Still they came forward, silently, laboriously, bravely. Some made it to
the line of fighting holes. The rest were slaughtered by staggering firepower.

The North Vietnamese who’d survived the storm of fire were crawling and darting among the holes, hurling satchels, firing
their rifles. The entire hill disintegrated into the confusion of 300 human animals, white, brown, and black, trying to kill
each other to save their skins.

Then the sound of the battle changed. The explosive roar dissolved into sporadic bursts; cries of excitement and pain, previously
drowned out by the noise, could be heard; and there was the occasional explosion of a grenade. Fitch, who could hear nothing
until now, was immediately asking for situation reports. Mellas and Goodwin reported in. There was nothing from Kendall.

“Where the fuck’s Three Actual, Pallack?” Fitch fumed. “They should’ve been up by now.”

“Fucked if I know sir. I gave ’em d’freak.”

“You’re sure they got it?”

“I heard Genoa tell me he had it.”

Genoa had indeed heard the frequency, but in the darkness he couldn’t see clearly enough to switch the dials, and Kendall’s
red flashlight was
in his pack at the bottom of the ridge, where they’d left it three days earlier. Genoa had twirled the knobs as fast as he
could but still couldn’t pick up the frequency. When the fight erupted, he forgot the numbers. Kendall hadn’t listened in
the first place, expecting the radio operator to take care of it. Genoa kept trying different combinations, futilely turning
the tens counter one way, the ones counter the other.

“I can’t get Bravo on the hook, sir,” he said desperately.

Kendall nodded, his lips pressed together. “We’ve got to find out what’s going on,” he whispered.

Genoa didn’t answer. He had no desire to find out what was going on.

“We got to find out what’s going on and report to the skipper,” Kendall said. He took a deep breath and crawled out of the
hole. Genoa watched in dismay, then crawled after him, as was his duty.

Flurries of sporadic fire and occasional explosions still erupted in the night. The NVA were trying to get back out, now that
their satchel charges had been delivered.

“Campion,” Kendall whispered to his second squad leader.

No one answered.

“Campion, it’s me, the lieutenant,” Kendall called out softly.

There was a long wait, then a tense whisper. “Here.”

Kendall rose to a crouch and started running toward the sound. Genoa followed him.

The two NVA sappers lying on the ground knew the English word “lieutenant” and opened up with their AK-47s as soon as they
heard the movement. Unable to see their target, they both sprayed their bullets in an arc about four feet off the ground.
Two of the bullets caught Kendall and Genoa across their chests. They fell to the earth, gasping in pain, each with one lung
collapsing and filling with blood, but neither of them was dead.

Campion had seen the muzzle flashes of the two NVA and opened up on automatic. His partner did the same, and they each threw
a hand grenade. Then they waited tensely. They heard nothing except the lieutenant and his radio operator gasping for air.

“Corpsman!” Campion shouted. He and his friend crawled out to find them.

The firefights died down. The cries for the corpsmen ceased. People waited for the morning light, their ears straining to
hear the one broken stick or swish of cloth against grass that would save their lives. The North Vietnamese who remained inside
the perimeter crawled desperately, slowly, rifles in front, trying to beat the sun, trying to make no sound at all. Tension
and fear bound the different men on the hill together like wire.

Every so often a North Vietnamese soldier tried to make a break for it. There would be the slapping sound of an AK opening
up, followed by the sound of a hand grenade or an M-16.

The night wore on. Marines stretched their ponchos out beside their fighting holes, hoping to collect a little of the mist
that swirled around them. Down below the lines, a wounded NVA soldier began to moan.

After brief whispers to make sure it wasn’t a Marine, Jacobs and Jermain threw a couple of grenades at the sound. “That’ll
sh-shut the f-fucker up,” Jacobs said. It did.

Mellas, still suffering from diarrhea after the long march to open Sky Cap, felt an urgent churning inside his intestines.
He tried to control it, not wanting to shit inside the hole but afraid to leave it. “I got to shit,” he finally whispered
to Jackson.

“Shit? We ain’t eaten for two days, Lieutenant. I always knew you were full of it.”

Mellas tried squeezing his buttocks together with all his strength. “I can’t hold it,” he said.

Jackson didn’t say anything. Mellas dragged himself cautiously over the edge of the hole, his rifle in his hands. He duckwalked
about two feet from the edge and pulled his trousers down, staring into the darkness, listening through the wind. He was facing
uphill. The feces flowed from him like liquid paste, spattering the back of his trouser legs. He realized that the continual
shitting, even of paste, meant he was losing fluid faster than those without diarrhea.

Then he heard a scrape. He squatted there, the shitty paste running down his thighs, too frozen with terror to move or make
a sound.

A soft light was gradually beginning to filter through the fog. Mellas could make out the darker outline of his and Jackson’s
hole three feet to his right. Again there was a faint scrape. Mellas could barely discern a wounded North Vietnamese soldier.
His clothing clung to his chest, sticky with blood. Mellas could see that the hand holding the rifle was back by the NVA soldier’s
hip, just starting to come forward in the crawl. The soldier had run out of darkness at the wrong moment.

Mellas threw his legs out behind him, landing in his own feces, and fired on full automatic. The M-16 flashed. At first the
bullets did not seem to reach the man, whose eyes stared, frozen, at Mellas. But then the man’s chest shuddered and his head
snapped back unnaturally. Mellas moaned, his face in the earth, thanking God he was still alive, not caring that he’d killed
a man.

Jackson had spun around, rifle ready to fire. “You all right?” he whispered.

“Yeah,” Mellas answered. He crawled away from his shit, trying to keep the rest of his body from being covered with it. He
wiped it off his stomach and thighs with his hand, then rubbed his hand in the mud to clean it. He moved to his knees and
pulled his fouled wet trousers back on.

Mellas crawled up to the dead man. He’d hit him right between the eyes and twice in the tops of the shoulders. Mellas himself
felt too shaky to stand but forced himself into a crouch. Everything seemed to work fine. He felt proud of himself. Right
between the eyes.

When it got lighter, he and Jackson moved down the lines, going from hole to hole to evaluate the damage. The little open
bunker that Young had constructed of logs and branches to house his machine gun had been destroyed by one of the satchel charges.
Mole was sitting on the pile of logs and leaves. He stared into the hole, tears streaming from his eyes. “It’s Young, sir,”
he kept repeating. “Little Young.”