Matterhorn (8 page)

The rain, propelled by a sudden gust of wind, blew into his face briefly and then subsided into a slow, steady patter on his
helmet. He was crawling through mud on his hands and knees in total darkness, knowing that he had missed his first and second
squads completely and would have to double back to pick them up. He sensed another mass. “Chadwick?” he whispered, hoping
that Parker had told him the right name. No answer. “Chadwick, it’s me, Lieutenant Mellas.” His whisper floated across the
silence.

It was greeted with a clearly audible sigh of relief. “Jesus fuck, sir, I thought I’d die. I was about to blow your ass away.”

It took two hours to cover his platoon’s 140 meters of the perimeter. He came back exhausted, his clothing soaked and clotted
with mud, leeches clinging to his arms and legs. Twice a night, 389 nights to go.

Several hours later the leader of Mellas’s Third Squad, Corporal Jancowitz, watched gray gradually infiltrate the blackness.
He was not happy to see morning, because he knew he had to go out on patrol. But he wasn’t unhappy, either, because it meant
one less day until his R & R in Bangkok, where he’d see Susi again. It also meant that the predawn 100 percent alert was over
and he could fix breakfast. He told the squad to stand down and stationed his third fire team on watch.

He took out a can of chopped eggs, added some chocolate from a Hershey Trop bar—a high-melting-point chocolate developed for
the jungle—and mixed in some Tabasco and A1 sauce, both of which he’d carefully hoarded from his last R & R. Then he added
apricot juice, throwing the apricots and the can into the jungle. He ripped off a small piece of C-4 plastic explosive, placed
it on the ground, set the can on top, and lit the explosive. A white hissing flame enveloped the can. Thirty seconds later
Jancowitz was spooning the contents into his mouth and thinking about Susi, the Thai bar girl for whom he had extended his
tour another six months. The extension had earned him thirty days’ leave in Bangkok. They were the best thirty days of his
life. Now he’d been back in Nam long enough to earn another week of R & R with
Susi, just days away. When he got back he’d up for his second six-month extension. That would get him thirty more days with
Susi. Six months after that and he’d be done, really done, out of the Crotch—the corps—and married, with more than two years’
savings to start them out.

Here he was, nineteen, a corporal, and a squad leader. He was up for meritorious promotion to sergeant for the Wind River
op. The Jayhawk said he’d try and get his ass sent back to the rear to serve out his second extension, and that looked a lot
better than going home to the assholes waving signs and shouting at him. Besides, there wasn’t going to be anybody waiting
for him. Three months stateside to muster out, then back to Bangkok with nearly three years of pay. Things could be worse.
Bass had even said he was counting on Jancowitz to help break in the new lieutenant, now that Fisher was gone.

The new lieutenant was breaking in his new .45 by working the action back and forth. His radio operator, Hamilton, was eating
breakfast: ham and lima beans mixed with grape jelly. Mellas wasn’t hungry.

“Don’t worry, sir, it’ll work,” Hamilton said, his mouth full.

Mellas looked at the weapon, then put it back in his holster.

“Besides,” Hamilton went on, pointing at it with a white plastic spoon, “it ain’t worth a fart in a shit fight. I’d have a
sawed-off twelve-gauge if I could get one.”

Mellas didn’t know how to answer. The standard table of equipment, the document that authorized which weapons went to which
military occupation specialty, allocated only pistols to officers, on the theory that officers were supposed to be thinking,
not shooting. He looked down at his pistol and then over at Fisher’s carefully oiled M-16 and bandoleers of magazines, each
with eighteen bullets. A magazine was supposed to hold twenty, but kids had died learning that the springs came from the factory
too weak to properly feed into the rifle the twenty that were specified. The standard table of equipment was beginning to
look impractical. Mellas took Fisher’s rifle and started working the mechanism.

“Don’t worry, sir, it’ll work too,” Hamilton said.

Mellas flipped him the bird.

Hamilton ignored this. He chewed contemplatively for a moment and then reached into his pack for the highly treasured Pickapeppa
sauce that had been mailed to him from home. He carefully added two drops to the cold ham, grape jelly, and lima beans, stirred
them in, and retasted. The new lieutenant still wasn’t hungry.

By the time Jancowitz came trudging up the slope to Mellas’s hooch, Mellas had his gear on: three canteens, two filled with
Rootin’ Tootin’ Raspberry and one with Lefty Lemon; five hand grenades; two smoke grenades; a compass; a map coated with plastic
shelving paper from home; bandages, battle dressing, and halazone; water purification tablets; his pistol; two bandoleers
of M-16 magazines; and food cans stuffed into extra socks that were in turn stuffed into the large pockets on the sides of
his utility trousers. Some people just hung the socks filled with cans on their backpacks.

He carefully bloused his trousers against his boots with the steel springs to keep the leeches out and stuck a plastic bottle
of insect repellent into the wide rubber band circling his new green camouflage helmet cover. He looked at his watch as the
tail end of Goodwin’s patrol disappeared into the jungle below. He’d never convince Fitch that he was any good if his patrol
didn’t leave on time.

Jancowitz grinned at Mellas. “Sir, I’d, uh …” He hesitated and then tapped the side of his soft camouflage bush cover.

Mellas looked at Hamilton. “The insect repellent,” Hamilton said. “The white stands out in the bush. Makes a great target.”

“Then what’s the rubber band for?” Mellas asked, shoving the bottle into his pocket.

“Beats me, sir,” Hamilton answered. “Holds the fucking helmet together, I guess.”

“You could put things in it like branches for camouflage,” Jancowitz said carefully.

Hamilton giggled, and Mellas smiled tightly. It wasn’t fair. He’d seen Marines on television with squeeze bottles of repellent
strapped to their helmets. He’d carefully noted the details. Suddenly it dawned on him that the television shots were all
around villages, where the
people with cameras were more likely to be, and there was no wall of dark green jungle on all sides.

“We’re all set, sir,” Jancowitz said. “Just waiting for Daniels.” Lance Corporal Daniels was the enlisted FO, the artillery
battery’s forward observer. Fitch assigned him to the patrols that he felt might need what little support they could get from
Andrew Golf, the distant battery at fire support base Eiger.

As Jancowitz led the way down to Third Squad’s sector, the sound of Marvin Gaye singing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”
broke the morning stillness. Mellas could see the Marines of Third Squad standing around, some nervously fiddling with their
gear, all apparently ready before Jancowitz had gone to get Mellas. A group of black Marines were huddled together smoking
cigarettes. At their center was a well-built, serious-looking young man who was squatting over a portable 45-rpm record player.

“OK, Jackson, cut the sounds,” Jancowitz said briskly.

Without looking up, Jackson raised his hand, palm toward Jancowitz. “Hey, man, cool off. The a.m. show ain’t over yet.”

Several of the group laughed softly, including Jancowitz, who quickly glanced at Mellas to see if Mellas objected.

Mellas didn’t know whether he should object or not. He looked back at Jancowitz and Hamilton for a cue.

Bass broke the momentary impasse by walking up behind them. “Why don’t you play real music, like Tammy Wynette, instead of
that fucking jungle music?”

“Beats washtubs and broomsticks,” Jackson said, waiting for the laughter that followed. Mellas joined in awkwardly. Jackson
looked up, hearing an unfamiliar voice. Recognizing Mellas, he immediately turned off the record player and stood up. The
small group got serious, attentive, all business, crushing cigarettes in the mud.

“Sorry, sir,” Jackson said. “I didn’t know you were there.”

What struck Mellas about Jackson was that he clearly wasn’t sorry. He was just being polite. He looked at Mellas with an openness
that declared he was quite capable of defending himself, without being defensive. Mellas smiled. “That’s OK. Hate to stop
the show.”

Bass, satisfied that Mellas was in good hands with Jancowitz, grunted and moved off to join Second Squad to bird-dog Jacobs
on his first day leading a patrol.

“Where’s Shortround?” Jancowitz asked, looking around.

Jackson sighed and pointed toward a pair of ponchos that covered a hole dug into the side of the hill. “He had listening post
last night. I guess he’s still eating.”

“Shortround!” Jancowitz shouted. “Goddamn it. Get your ass down here.”

There was a grunt. A head, still unseen, poked clumsily into the low-hung poncho. Two short legs, covered by large dirty trousers,
backed out of the hooch. A short kid with curly brown hair and an oversize nose grinned at Jancowitz. Spaghetti sauce was
smeared on his face. He wiped it off with large hands stained dark brown with ingrained dirt.

“Hi, Janc,” Shortround said brightly, grinning.

Jancowitz turned to Mellas. “Sir, this is Pollini, only we call him Shortround. And it ain’t because he’s small and fat.”
A short round was an artillery shell that fell short by mistake, often killing its own men.

Pollini quickly stuffed several Trop bars into his pockets, grabbed his rifle, and joined the group just as Daniels came down
the hill from the CP, carrying his radio on his back. Jancowitz introduced him to Mellas, then took the handset from Hamilton’s
radio and called the CP. “Bravo, this is Bravo One Three. We’re moving.”

The squad wound its way into the jungle in one long snake—Jancowitz three from the front; Mellas behind him, watching Jancowitz’s
every move; Daniels behind Mellas. No one spoke. Mellas was thinking that Jancowitz had been in the bush nearly nineteen months.
He probably knew more about staying alive than anyone else in the company.

Once the kids were under the trees, the leeches started dropping on them. They tried to knock each leech off before it dug
in and drew blood but were usually too late because they were focusing more attention on the jungle, straining to hear, see,
or smell the clue that would give them, and not the North Vietnamese, the first shot.

The leeches made full use of their victims. Mellas watched some fall onto the kids’ necks and slide under their shirts like
raindrops. Other
leeches would wriggle on the damp humus of the jungle floor, attach to a boot, then go up a trouser leg, turning from small
wormlike objects to bloated blood-filled bags. Occasionally someone would spray insect repellent on a leech and it would fall
squirming to the ground, leaving blood trickling down the kid’s arm, leg, or neck. During the patrol, Mellas began to take
great pleasure in killing the little bastards and watching his own blood spurt out of their bodies.

The fourteen-man snake moved in spasms. The point man would suddenly crouch, eyes and ears straining, and those behind him
would bunch up, crouch, and wait to move again. They would get tired, let down their guard. Then, frightened by a strange
sound, they would become alert once again. Their eyes flickered rapidly back and forth as they tried to look in all directions
at once. They carried Kool-Aid packages, Tang—anything to kill the chemical taste of the water in their plastic canteens.
Soon the smears of purple and orange Kool-Aid on their lips combined with the fear in their eyes to make them look like children
returning from a birthday party at which the hostess had shown horror films.

They stopped for lunch, setting up a small defensive perimeter. Jancowitz, Mellas, and Hamilton lay flat on the ground next
to the radio, eating C-rations. They littered the jungle with the empty cans. Flies and mosquitoes materialized from the heavy
air. Mellas doused himself again with repellent. It stung fiercely as it got into his cuts and bites. He found two leeches
on his right leg. He burned them alive with paper matches while he ate canned peaches.

Already tired from lack of sleep, Mellas now struggled with physical fatigue from fighting his way through nearly impenetrable
brush, slipping up muddy slopes to gain a ridgeline, searching for tracks, searching for clues. He was wet from both sweat
and rain. Effort. Weight. Flies. Cuts. Vegetation.

He no longer cared where they were or why. He was glad he was new and Jancowitz was still more or less in charge, though he
was ashamed of feeling that way. Three hundred eighty-nine days and a wake-up to go.

At one point they hit a wall of bamboo they couldn’t avoid. It lay between them and a checkpoint, a ridgeline where the NVA
machine
gun might be. They had to hack through it. All security was lost as the kid on point took out a machete and smashed a hole
in the bamboo. Soon they were in a bamboo tunnel. The ground sloped upward. It got steeper. They began to slip. The kid with
the machete tired and another took his place. They needed an hour to go about 200 meters.

Suddenly, Williams, the point man, went rigid, then slowly sank to one knee, rifle at his shoulder. Steam rose from his back.
Everyone froze in position, ears straining, trying to stop the noise of their own breathing. Jancowitz quietly moved forward
to find out what was happening. Hamilton, a good radioman, moved up too, as if he were part of Jancowitz’s body. Mellas followed.

“You hear that, Janc?” Williams whispered. He was trembling and his forehead was tight with tension. They had stopped on the
side of a ridge. A rivulet trickled through thick brush and plants with broad leaves. Mellas strained to hear over the sound
of his breath and his pounding heart. Soon he could distinguish soft snorts, muffled coughlike noises, and a cracking and
tearing of branches.

“What is it?” Mellas whispered.