Fields of Fire (32 page)

27

Villages survived on Go Noi, great wasted remnants of the old towns that once sprawled thick and wide as railroad stops in French times, now flattened and redone in thin, scattered groups of humpbacked hootches where the remnant families hid from what it had all become. Stone pagodas stood here and there, left over from the railroad days, now pockmarked with machine-gun memories and broken by dead bombs. When the railroad ran, the stone was cheap and each village built its own pagoda. Now the railroad bridge was a blackened memory and the wooden track ties held up the insides of family bunkers and the stone pagodas died a little bit each battle.

And the most notable remark that one could make of Go Noi was how fine the family bunkers were, with railroad-tie supports.

The villages began just beyond the first great sea of elephant grass. From that point they twined and intermingled with the grass, like islands. They were as bleak, as desolate and deprived, as the Arizona. The shattered, dirt-floor hootches appended to a mound of earthen bunker, surrounded by uprooted trees and huge pocks of rended earth, populated by motionless, staring zombies, permeated with trains of scurrying rats. Experiencing them was as enriching, as stimulating, as strolling through the empty, blackened caverns of the moon.

But better than the killer grass. It was a relief to reach the villages and walk their relative openness. The hootches and the mamasans, the pecking chickens and the wirehaired, ugly dogs, struck comforting chords, even in their misery. They were recognizable, familiar sights.

For three weeks the company wound slowly through the villages, across more sawgrass fields, and through still other villages, searching absently for some sign of Phu Thuan, looking more closely during the days for some corner that had good fields of fire, where they could spend the night.

On this day, Third Platoon had Tail-End Charlie. No big trip, as Ogre said. They sauntered along mindlessly at the rear of the column, confident that all danger was well forward of them, that any initial contact would be made by the point. Tail-End Charlie was a skate.

For all but Cat Man. He was in such harmony with the subtleties of combat, was such a natural master of those things that others had to struggle to assimilate and use, that he would have had to force himself not to prowl. He walked with his head slightly tilted, his sensuous, small-boned face constantly in motion, examining bends and crevices, piles of litter around hootches, contours of bomb craters. The regularities of even devastated earth were so understandable to him that they could be suspicioned and inspected.

The village ended and a sawgrass field began again. Just at the edge of the ville, next to a bomb crater that had scooped out a deep sawgrass divot, under melted shards of earth, there was a flat-green stretch of metal. Unnatural. It just broke the surface of the earth, as if the earth were a huge brown sea and it had floated to the top like a dead fish, and now showed a small stretch of belly.

Cat Man glanced at it, then called ahead. “Hold it up.”

Slowly, like an accordion expanding, the half-mile of men halted. Most of the column rested uncomfortably in the middle of the field. Sergeant Sadler moved back, and Snake forward, to where Cat Man stood.

Cat Man pointed to the smooth underbelly. “Bomb.”

Sadler stared at it, and was tempted to leave it. It was late afternoon and the company would have to be dug into its new location by dark. But he knew that abandoned bombs provided explosives for grenades and booby traps to the enemy. The bomb was a 250-pounder.

Sadler decided. “We better blow it in place. I'll call up fo’ the Engineers.”

Snake spoke tiredly, anxious to be moving. “Let Baby Cakes do it, Sarge. He's had Mine Warfare School.” Snake nodded ironically over to Baby Cakes. “Hell. That's why Top sent him back out to the bush.”

Sadler shook his head decisively. “He doan’ need no two-fifty to break in on.” He mulled it for a moment. “We need security back here, anyway. Leave him for security an’ he can watch. He can blow the next one.” There would be others. Dud rounds were scattered like toadstools on the Basin floor.

In a few moments the engineer wound his way to the rear of the column from the company command section. He walked jauntily, a cigarette dangling out of one corner of his mouth, a box of blasting caps carried in the breast pocket of his flak jacket. He carried a large green bag of explosives that swung freely under his shoulder, on a strap. He recognized Sadler and nodded nonchalantly. “Where is it?”

Cat Man pointed. The engineer walked over, knelt down next to it, and caressed its exposed parts expertly. “We'll have to dig it out a little and get a charge under it. It's pretty deep.” He poked the dirt tentatively, like a surgeon examining a prospective patient, then turned to Sadler.

“Better get the company out of the way, Sarge. This thing is gonna blow up and out. I'd say two hundred, maybe two hundred fifty meters. Better get 'em out of the way now. I'll set the fuse and catch up.”

Baby Cakes and a grinning, fascinated Ogre joined the engineer. Baby Cakes provided an entrenching tool. Ogre watched curiously, making periodic comments about the engineer's expertise.

“You ain't gonna blow us up, now?”

The engineer nodded importantly. “Nope.”

“You sure this ain't a booby trap?”

The engineer peeped Ogre. “Nope. I ain't sure. We gotta dig it out some more.”

“Well, kiss my ass! I ain't gonna stand here while you dig around any damn booby trap!”

Baby Cakes slapped Ogre on the chest. “Shut up, man. If you wanna learn how to do this, just watch the dude, O.K.? He ain't gonna blow us up. If you don't pay attention, next time you might, though. Just watch, shit-for-brains.”

The company crawled forward, out of the blast radius of the two-fifty, leaving the engineer, Ogre, and Baby Cakes. Third platoon sat on the trail in the sawgrass, waiting for the three to catch up.

Five minutes. Nothing. Ten minutes. Snake peered anxiously at his watch. God damn. Wish they'd hurry up. Five o'clock already. We gotta find a new pos, make a perimeter, figure out night acts, dig the hell in, and eat, all before dark.

For a moment he cursed Cat Man's proficiency. Like Phony used to say, Old Snoop and Poop and his bent grassblades. Then he reconsidered. Cat Man was worth his weight in dope.

BoomBoom! Down the trail there was a large explosion, followed by a huge secondary, uninterrupted by a pause. That should do it, thought Snake. He scanned the trail. Still no Baby Cakes and Ogre. Well, he reasoned. They prob'ly found a hole next to it so they wouldn't have to trip all the way back down there if the fuse went out on 'em. Pretty good thinking.

Five more minutes. Still no Baby Cakes. Snake had become uneasy, but would not allow himself to think the gruesome thought. He fought it for a few more minutes, and then had to admit it. Christ Almighty, he grieved. They done blown themselves to bits.

Snake scampered over to Sadler. “Something's wrong, Sarge. We better get down that trail, right goddamn now. ”

The platoon mounted up and rushed down the trail, leaving the company to move to its night position without them. Two bends in the sawgrass and the village revealed itself before them. At its near edge, where the bomb had been found, the air was lightly hazed by dust and smoke. And in the air, clinging to each particle of haze, settling with the dust on grass and tree leaves, was the rich, wet aroma of recent blood.

But there were no bodies. And the bomb had not been blown. It lay ominously where Cat Man had discovered it, partially excavated toward one end, but undetonated. For a moment the whole platoon stared numbly at the empty scrape of dirt before the bomb, as if they had collectively discovered a haunted building or a ghoul itself. The undercurrent ran through all of them like a shiver: what the hell is going on?

Sadler was mystified. If it was gooks, he reasoned, there would have been a firefight. And what about the second explosion? And where the hell are they? He became spooked, and yelled to Snake and the other squad leaders.

“Set up security! Hurry up!”

The platoon deployed into a perimeter, and began searching out the area. There were few clues. The dirt in front of the bomb was raw, but there were no blood trails, no signs of the three men. Nor were there any mattings in the grass that might be followed.

Snake walked slowly around the grassy edges of the dirt area, massaging scraps of cloth in the fingers of one hand. The scraps clung like fuzz to the grass. In a moment Cat Man brought him a dark green strap that he had found on the other side of the bomb.

Snake approached Sadler. “I'll tell you what happened, Sarge. I'll bet my ass on it.” He showed Sadler the scraps. “Some gook fragged 'em, getting ready to hit 'em, and he got a secondary off that engineer's goody bag.”

Sadler pondered it, intense. It sounded logical. “So what happened to 'em? Couldn't have blowed 'em all to bits.”

Snake calculated, his chin in one hand. “Nah. There was maybe five or six pounds of C-four in that bag, plus the man's blasting caps. Prob'ly did a royal job on the engineer. But there couldn't be any shrap metal.” He looked at Sadler. “I bet it didn't do nothing but knock Baby Cakes and Ogre out from the concussion. Yup. I'll bet it didn't. And I bet those gook bastards picked up all their trash and skyed out with 'em.”

Snake looked amazed, as if he had never contemplated such a fate. “Jesus Christ. They're POWs.” He scanned the narrow ville, and the seas of sawgrass that ran virtually unbroken for five miles to the mountains. “Well. They can't be very far away. It's only been fifteen minutes. We better chase 'em.”

Sadler scanned the impenetrable, unsearchable sea. “If they want to keep 'em alive, they'll take 'em to the mountains. If they don't, well—” He shook his head, still mystified by the whole occurrence. “And anyway, we better hurry.” Sadler checked his watch: five-thirty. “We'll sweep on up to the edge of the ville real quick, maybe check a couple trails, too. If we doan’ find nothin’, we'll come back tomorrow. We'll call Division, too.” He noted Snake's disappointment. “I'm sorry, Snake-man. That's all we can do.”

“Hey, Sarge, you better come over here!” Wolf Man, from guns, held up a helmet. He and Cronin were straddling an unviewable object in the sawgrass. “It's the engineer. He is all fucked up.”

The god of night pulled his shade across the sky, unleashing all his demons as the gray set in. The platoon moved quickly down the sawgrass trail, racing him, hurrying to beat the black. The black belonged to those others, the night god's children, who frolicked, even murdered under the romance of starbright. Night for the platoon was hiding time, time to dig deep holes and wait in fear for the loneliest of deaths, the impersonal, shattering projectile that would just as soon kill tree or air as man. In their middle, dragged between two poles, was the mangled body of the engineer. Back in the village, or in the grass, or maybe only in their memories, were the other two. No trace of them was found. Ogre and Baby Cakes had evaporated.

THE next morning two platoons from the company searched the village, hootch by hootch, and followed the trails toward the mountains. They found nothing. Word was passed to all operating units in the area to be on the lookout for signs of the two men. There was no immediate response. Helicopters and observation aircraft patrolled, swooping low, seeking possibilities inside the sawgrass. There were none. Baby Cakes and Ogre had vanished. It would take a miracle to find them.

In the company perimeter the squad gathered at Snake's hootch, as if summoned, upon its return from the exhausting, many-houred patrol. Snake sat in the grass next to his poncho hootch, smoking a cigarette, mechanically throwing a bayonet knife into the dirt. He would throw it into the dirt, look at it for a frowning, contemplative moment, then slowly retrieve it and repeat the process. The others sat, stripped to tiger shorts or utility trousers, shirtless, watching him. Bagger drank thirstily from a canteen. Cat Man lit a smoke.

Finally Snake threw the knife hard. It entered the dirt up to its hilt. He took a long drag on his cigarette, and surveyed the four men who were left in his squad. Cat Man, sitting stolid as a gook, deeply upset because another of his discoveries had gone afoul. Cannonball, sweating profusely from the patrol, now drinking the remainder of Bagger's canteen. Bagger, his face completely drained, looking as if he had lost twenty pounds over the past three weeks. And Goodrich, nervous, egocentric even at this moment, fretting over an ulcerous gook sore on his arm. All of them, each in his own way, awaiting Snake's wisdom.

Snake picked the knife up again and studied it as he spoke. “We been together a long damn time. And we're all that's left.” Names and faces flashed in every mind, unspoken. All the dozens that had poured through the conduit, now down to five. Drop by drop, drained down to this sediment, these exhausted dregs. We're all that's left. Out here, forgotten but for momentary hurricanes of helicopters, left to be killed or maimed, dreg by dreg, for the honor of possessing Trailbend or Banana Clump or nothing.

Snake lit another cigarette. No one said anything. “We can't leave Baby Cakes and Ogre out here.” The tenor voice was soft, reasoned, modulated, but filled with underlying strength. “Baby Cakes ran straight at ten damn gooks to try and save Vitelli. Baby Cakes would still be out there looking for you.” He stared at each man. Each man nodded self-consciously, agreeing. “Well. As long as there's a chance, we gotta try and find 'em.”

Cat Man shook his head bitterly. “It's my fault, man. I always see too many things. I see bananas and Phony gets blown away. I see a bomb and Baby Cakes is gone. I should never see these things. It don't do no good to try, man. I quit. I don't try no more.”

“It ain't your fault, Cat Man. Don't let it get you down.”

Bagger eyed Snake hesitantly. “Well, what can we do? We're only five damn people.”

Snake threw the knife back into the dirt. “We been on Go Noi almost a month. Company's pulling out of here tomorrow or the day after. We gotta get another look at that ville, maybe talk to the mamasans and babysans. If we can get some good scoop outa somebody, we might be able to help find 'em.” He scanned the group again. “Who knows? They just might be out there in the weeds somewhere.”