Matterhorn (72 page)

Mellas didn’t answer. With his good eye, he was looking across at Helicopter Hill. He saw people with bright green uniforms
looking at them through field glasses.

“The fucking bastards cheered,” Mellas said very softly.

“Hey,” Hawke said, touching Mellas’s shoulder. “It’s OK. They didn’t know.”

Relsnik walked over with the radio and gave Fitch the handset. “Big John Six, Skipper,” he said.

The colonel’s voice was crisp, businesslike. “Roger, Bravo Six. I want a full body count and after-action report. We have
your medevac birds standing by. That zone of yours safe yet? Over.”

“Not yet. Over,” Fitch said flatly.

“Magnificent. I wish I’d had a movie camera, that’s all I can say. Big John Six out.”

Fitch tossed the handset onto the ground next to Relsnik. “He wishes he’d had a fucking movie camera,” he said. He stared
across the little dip toward Helicopter Hill.

Mellas followed Fitch’s gaze, his mind filled with tumbling images. The company too weary to go on, but going on. Watching
helplessly as the bombs fell on the far side of the hill. The stupid cheering—as if combat were a Friday night football game.
Simpson’s incredible order, on the long march to Sky Cap, that there would be no more medevacs. Hippy, crippled. The insane
pushing. The stupidity. The blood pumping from the new machine gunner’s leg. Jacobs’s throat. For what? Where was the meaning?

Mellas’s good eye focused on the little figure in the clean jungle utilities. He saw only the colonel. The 600 meters separating
them shrank to nothing. Mellas decided to kill him.

He limped slowly away from the group. “Hey, Jack,” Goodwin shouted, but Fitch put a hand on his arm, holding him down. Hawke
watched Mellas, a puzzled expression on his face. Mellas walked down the hill through Hawke’s lines. He barely acknowledged
the greetings of Conman and the Third Platoon as they dug in.

Just beyond the lines, Mellas chambered a round and put the rifle’s selector on safety. He pushed into the brush, down onto
the finger, moving closer to the other hill, not caring about the danger. He found a log and adjusted his sights for the distance,
taking pleasure in the fact that he was doing just what he’d been taught on the rifle range. He settled in. The flat gray
morning seemed eternal. Time was meaningless. There was only the small figure of the colonel, high above him now on the defoliated
hillside. He pushed the selector to full automatic. With the tracers, Mellas was sure to get him. He leaned over the rifle,
twisting his neck sideways so his good eye was sighting down the barrel. The colonel turned away from him. Mellas waited.
He wanted the bastard to see the tracers coming at him before they ripped him apart, so he’d know, just as Jacobs had known.
The colonel was still talking. Mellas waited as patiently as an animal. Time stopped. Only this one task. Wait for the bastard
to turn around so he could see the bullets coming. Then Simpson started to turn.

Mellas heard someone yell hoarsely behind him. Hawke landed on him in a headlong dive, forcing the rifle forward as Mellas
jerked the trigger. The bullets tore the earth in front of them. Mellas, in a fury, reached out to hit Hawke. Hawke rolled
away, kicking hard, knocking the rifle from Mellas’s hands. Mellas swung his fist, hitting Hawke square in the face, and stood
up to look for his rifle. Then Hawke was on his feet, standing in front of him, breathing hard, his rifle pointed just to
Mellas’s side but obviously ready to defend himself.

“Goddamn you, Hawke. Goddamn you to hell!”

Hawke said nothing, watching Mellas, on his guard.

Mellas began shrieking. “That bastard killed all of them. He sent us up here without air so he could watch a show. He watched
us while we died. That bastard doesn’t deserve to live. God damn you, Hawke. God damn you and your fucking—your—oh, God damn
us all.” He sank to the ground and stared at nothing.

Hawke put his hand on Mellas’s shoulder. “Come on, Mel, the counterattack could hit us any minute.”

Mellas followed Hawke back up the hill.

T
he counterattack never materialized. The NVA were heading to Laos, covering their retreat with well-placed infantry and mortar
units.

A medevac bird beat its way up the valley, and Pallack talked it in. Three NVA mortar rounds bracketed the chopper, sending
the Marines who were dragging the wounded aboard to the ground. They immediately rose and got the wounded aboard and then
ran for their holes, holding their helments against the rotor wash. The helicopter dived off the edge of the LZ and soared
downward into space, picking up airspeed. Another bird made it in and took the last of the emergency cases. Then the fog returned.
This stopped the shelling, but it also stopped any further medical evacuations.

The day was spent in weary stupefaction, hauling dead American teenagers to a stack beside the landing zone and dead Vietnamese
teenagers to the garbage pit down the side of the north face.

The senior squid told Fitch that Mellas’s right eye was seriously injured. If the eye wasn’t already lost, it would be without
immediate surgery. The only place where that could happen was on one of the hospital ships. Mellas told Fitch that with Conman
probably needing to take Third Platoon when Hawke went back to battalion staff, he didn’t feel comfortable turning First Platoon
over to either Jackson or Cortell. No matter how much combat experience they had, they were still only nineteen. Besides,
Fitch and Goodwin would be the only officers in the company. In reality, although he didn’t say it aloud, Mellas had simply
grown too
fond of everyone to leave the platoon facing danger without his help. He refused to go. Fitch knew that Mellas was right about
the lack of leaders, and as far as he could tell the eye was already lost. So he let Mellas stay.

That evening Mellas and Jackson pulled some splintered plywood over their hole, shivering like two wounded animals in the
cold wind that moaned out of Laos. Jackson would occasionally shudder with stifled sobs. Mellas stared with his good eye into
the blackness, enduring the pain in his leg and the throbbing in his other eye. He had tried reading the C-ration boxes earlier,
and it felt awkward and uncomfortable. He consoled himself by imagining what he would look like in a Hathaway shirt ad. Then
the sense of fear and loss coiled up from his stomach where it had lain waiting and he wished fervently that he had taken
Sheller’s advice and tried to save the eye. He prayed.

Mellas crawled out of the hole to check lines at 2030. He returned at 2230, dragging his leg. At 0030 he started out again.

“I’ll go, Lieutenant,” Jackson said. “I can keep someone awake just as good as you can.” Mellas didn’t argue. He immediately
dozed off with the radio against his cheek.

Jackson crawled from beneath the plywood into a cold wind. He could sense that the clouds were higher, moving swiftly eastward,
even though he couldn’t see them. In the blackness around Matterhorn the jungle lay breathing quietly after the convulsive
fury of the morning. Jackson felt as if the jungle were resting, preparing to make its own assault on Matterhorn when these
destructive insects left it to clean its own wounds. The jungle would slowly creep up the hill, covering it with new green
skin, once again sheltering the exposed clay and rock, hiding the garbage thrown down its sides, softening the artificial
lip of the LZ, and rounding Matterhorn smooth once again.

Jackson squatted there, close to the solid sleeping earth, feeling its healing powers. Unexpected tears came to his eyes.
“Hamilton,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry, man.” He was openly weeping now. He knew it was foolish to talk
out loud to a dead person, but he felt that he somehow had to apologize to Hamilton for still being alive and so happy about
it. Hamilton had wanted to get married and have children. Now he wouldn’t and Jackson would.

The burst of crying passed. Jackson stayed there a little longer, feeling the damp wind on his wet face. He wiped his face
with his hands, which were hot and cracked from dirt, dehydration, and infection. He couldn’t shake off a persistent gnawing
anxiety as he crawled away to check the lines. Why did Hamilton die and he live? When he finished checking all the holes,
he didn’t feel like going back to the hole under the plywood. Something compelled him to climb upward to the deserted LZ.

When Jackson tripped the mine, the explosion jerked Mellas back to the darkness and the cold. At first he thought it might
be someone from the CP group. Then he heard Jackson’s frightened wild cry. “Help me! God help me! Please—someone help!”

Mellas slung the radio on his back and crawled toward Jackson’s voice, whispering “no” over and over. He reached Jackson just
after Fredrickson, who was holding Jackson down, trying to get hold of his thighs. Jackson was screaming.

“Help me hold the fucker down, Lieutenant,” Fredrickson said. “Goddamn it, Jackson, stop moving.”

Mellas lay down over Jackson’s heaving chest, whispering, “You’re going to be all right, Jackson. You’re going to be all right.”

“Sheller,” Fredrickson shouted to the senior squid, who was already crawling through the blackness. “I need some goddamned
IV fluid and something to cut off these arteries.” Sheller appeared with a bottle and IV tubes as well as his kit. While Fredrickson
was doing what he could to stanch the bleeding, Sheller jabbed a catheter into Jackson’s arm and held the glass of fluid as
high in the air as he could. Jackson calmed down, his terror and panic diminishing as the two corpsmen got his faltering system
working again. Mellas glanced down Jackson’s body. Fredrickson was working on pulp below Jackson’s knees. There were no feet.

“You’re going to be all right, Jackson,” Mellas kept repeating. “You’re going to be all right.” Jackson moaned and passed
out.

Mellas didn’t pray, but his mind once again soared above the landing zone, seeing all of I Corps below him, and went looking
for something better than God—a good chopper pilot.

At the MAG-39 airfield just outside Quang Tri, First Lieutenant Steve Small was losing at acey-deucey to his copilot, Mike
Nickels. It seemed to Small that the present game of acey-deucey had never started and never ended. It was as much part of
life at MAG-39 as the sand, sweaty flight suits, ten-cent bourbon, gritty sheets, guilty masturbation fantasies, crappy movies,
and underlying anxiety that the next flight was the one where the gook .51 was going to rip a hole right up your anus and
out of your mouth.

Small’s CH-46 waited in the dark, its twin rotor blades drooping with their own weight. Crew members dozed on canvas stretchers
amid machine-gun ammunition and boxes of IV fluid. Small’s chest armor, hanging from his shoulders, seemed heavier than usual.
Maybe he had overdone it at the O-club. On the other hand maybe he hadn’t drunk enough. He’d flown that damned bird so many
hours it didn’t make any difference if he flew it fucked up or not. The thing seemed to fly itself. Its whirling blades and
sickening lunges entered his dreams at night, along with its beauty when it slipped off a mountaintop or slid in to a perfect
landing in a small zone, the grunts grinning at him, rushing up to get their goodies, or staring dull-eyed in relief as they
threw on board what remained of their friends.

The ready-room radio squawked, and the man on watch put down his hot rod magazine to answer it. Small and Nickels listened
tensely. Small checked his watch. It was 0217. No hope of daylight. Big John Bravo again. One Emergency. Matterhorn. Weather
terrible. The same fuckers that had carved out that goddamn canary perch on Sky Cap. The same dumb sons of bitches he’d flat-hatted
over all of western Quang Tri Province to take that crazy redheaded grunt lieutenant and his overloaded replacements up to
the biggest shit sandwich he’d seen in almost ten months of combat flying. And the bastards were still at it. Jesus fucking
Christ, he thought. Then he wondered why the Christian deity was so much more satisfying as a swearword than the Jewish deity
of his childhood. It had all started when he found out that Art Buchwald was in the Fourth Marine Aircraft Wing in World War
II. What was he fucking thinking? All this was running through his head as he and Nickels ran for the door. There was no question
of not trying.

Their running steps awoke the crew. Small immediately began going through start-up procedures while Nickels radioed for artillery
clearance so they wouldn’t get shot out of the air on their way past the big Army 175s at VCB and the eight-inchers firing
night missions out of Red Devil.

The engines whined. The blades turned clumsily. Instruments glowed in front of the two pilots. Small taxied out onto the runway.
The fuselage trembled; the roar increased to the point where only the radios inside their helmets could be heard. The bird
moved forward in the darkness and lifted gently from the earth. Stray lights rapidly grew dim behind them in the mist, then
disappeared. They were in total blackness save for the dim green glow of the instrument panel.