Fields of Fire (41 page)

35

The river was high and swift, cool from recent rain. Goodrich slid clumsily through wet grass down the steep bank, squinting at the wavy line of figures that disappeared in mist and darkness halfway across the water, then stepped carefully into the current. The water filled his boots, coldly shriveled his groin, tickled his armpits. He held his weapon over his head. His cigarettes were in his mouth. Every other part of him and his equipment was soaked. In front of him New Mac stumbled, going underwater briefly, and lunged to catch his helmet as it began to float off his head. He succeeded, but his cigarettes bobbed quickly downstream in their waterproof container. New Mac swore after them.

On the far bank cobwebs of limbs and roots from shattered trees reached through the mist. Goodrich approached them, haunted by their shapes, by the craggy pocks of sand and earth below them, by the very silence that greeted his first step onto the Arizona shore. Where are they? The valley's filled with them, they know we're here. It will only be a moment and then they'll kill us all. None of us knows where the other is except for the ones just in front and behind. Why haven't they hit us? Maybe just beyond this curve, behind that mound.

But there was nothing. Only a forest of devastated trees, its floor so deeply rent that it seemed they walked through sand dunes. For an hour they experienced the moon, following a winding trail. The column was continually halted. Men fell into craters that they did not see. They tripped over trees and lost the man in front of them. The point squad lost the trail once, and had to double back to find it.

Then the trail broke north. To the west, their front, was a ridge that dropped into a wide river of sand. The sand separated Football Island, to the south, from the rest of the Arizona Valley. They dropped down the ridge and walked in the sand, thankful to be out of treelines, away from near ambushes. The sand was loose, like walking on thick, wet sponges. They walked it for two hours, stopping periodically and resting in its openness, some of them now collapsing on it when the column stopped, mindless of the grainy irritants that stuck to all parts of them because they were still wet.

Abruptly, in the middle of the sand, as if by divine command, the column moved north. No landmarks guided it. They reached the ridge again, and climbed back into thicks and stumps and mounds and also hootches this time. They fought a thick treeline that was interlaced with trails and deep trenches, moving through it rather than along it, and finally reached its northern edge. There before them, like a seashore swallowed in its evening fog, was a wide, seemingly endless paddy, blanketed with mist. They took positions along it, making a thin, elliptical perimeter with the back side on a nearby trail, and awaited first light.

HODGES lay dozing in the mud of a bomb crater, supposedly on radio watch. The radio was an uncommunicative hiss against his ear. Mosquitoes hovered and swarmed lazily around his face, whole flocks of them in motion after the drenching rains. Ten yards away a group of rats played on the porch of an abandoned hootch. Across the crater, Sergeant Sadler snored, occasionally slapping a mosquito or slumbering against the crater's mud. There were slaps and mutterings in all directions, punctuated by exhausted groans. Just through the trees was the black and silver gloom of paddy.

Then the booms began. The crunch and whump of artillery digging out some distant earth, round after round, a dense bombardment, like rolls of thunder and deep drum crescendos. Ten minutes. Fifteen. The ground vibrated gently. Hodges was fully awake now. He crawled from the crater and made his way to the edge of the tree-line, watching. Two miles away flashes that resembled storm clouds lit the mist.

As the prep fire continued the black lid of sky lifted, allowing an eastern gush of blue. The awakening fields now creaked and moaned. Tanks. Then, from where the tanks creaked, there came other new sounds: machine guns rattled doggedly, rhythmically, steadily.

The sweep was on.

The sky lit and the mist began to lift and the fields were lush, rain-soaked, and green. Hodges peered along the tree-line and could see the other Marines of the company set in at its edge, watching also. They lay in the mist and weeds, faceless in their distance, and it struck him that he was watching a timeless vision: the taut stillness of a hundred men frozen by their individual fears. This part of it, at least, was eternal. They could have been anywhere—in a jungle clearing on Saipan, a quarter-century before. In the sweet spring grass at Shiloh. No matter. These were his people, passed down by time to fill a warrior's conduit, and this was where he belonged. He dreaded what the rumbling tanks, the sputters of machine guns would bring, but at the same time the very prospect energized him with awe and determination.

Bred to it, like a bird dog.

In front of them another treeline bent, perhaps two hundred yards away. Hodges peered through lingering wisps of fog and felt his eyes enlarge. A rush that resembled passion crept from the insides of his guts and somehow drew the skin from every part of his body toward that center of his joy and fear, so tight that when he smiled it made his cheeks burn.

Gooks. Hundreds of them, trapped in the treeline, swarming with all the apparent order of a mob catching a subway.

We got you! You bastards, we got you! He felt like standing and screaming at them, slapping the others in his platoon on the back, declaring the war finally over. Artillery crumped in the treeline and the sweep from the west roared with tanks exploding 90-millimeter shells.

The enemy, a North Vietnamese Regiment, had left outposts to delay the sweep, and was searching for a point to consolidate and regroup. Later, in their best tradition, they would attempt to chew up the sweeping companies piecemeal, after the sweep expended itself. But now, they were indeed trapped.

A group of perhaps twenty soldiers bolted south out of the treeline, which was becoming saturated with artillery. They ran wildly toward Hodges and the others. Closer, closer they came, and Hodges felt a joy and anticipation so hard to contain that he found himself bobbing up and down inside the trench where he hid. Come on, you bastards. After all the months, all the bullshit. Come on! Ten more meters and you die.

The soldiers ran to within fifty meters of the company.

Abruptly, the machine guns signaled the beginning of the ambush. The NVA were caught between two paddy dikes, and had no cover. Some fell immediately. Others ran or crawled back toward the paddy dike behind them. The company unleashed a fierce barrage of machine-gun and rifle fire, gunning down most of the soldiers before they could even return fire.

Above the roar of a hundred weapons, like a curdle in the blood that had been passed down to him from some other dust-filled field, Hodges could hear the Marines screaming. He joined them. It seemed appropriate, a century later and half a world away: a chorus of Rebel yells.

In five minutes it was over, and the company lay spent, watching other enemy groups pour out of the far treeline, moving east, across another open paddy. “Bronco” observation planes arrived and dove busily at the fleeing enemy, firing rockets and mini-guns, then stayed on station to direct artillery strikes, generous with air-bursting antipersonnel rounds, into the open fields.

They remained in the treeline as the sun crawled over them, watching the Broncos work out, in awe of the sheer numbers of enemy soldiers who were still fleeing the sweep. There were now literally hundreds of North Vietnamese soldiers crossing the paddies from west to east in large droves. They did not flee toward the company again. They had begun moving in a large circle, unbeknownst to the Marines. They moved south until they were almost in range of the company. They moved east until they were almost in range of the other blocking companies. They moved north to the far fringe of the valley. Then they moved back to the west, escaping through a crease in the sweeping battalion's coverage caused by thick foliage. Even in their fleeing there was order. Later, with eight Marine companies converged haphazardly in the eastern section of the valley, they would attack, choosing their own targets. They had taken casualties determining the location of the blocking companies. They were taking continual casualties from artillery and air strikes. But they had already broken out.

For two hours aircraft zoomed and dove, artillery made continuous eruptions in the dirt and air, and the tanks pressed east. Finally the targets were gone. The regimental commander, somewhere back in An Hoa (sitting on top of his command bunker in a lawn chair, sipping on a highball, watching it all through field glasses, maintained Bagger) then ordered all companies to sweep northward immediately. Consolidate. We Swept East, the logic ran. They Fled The Sweep. Somewhere Between The Sweep And Block There's Got To Be A Regiment.

The company was the furthest unit south. They left the treeline in a wide, sweeping line, moving cautiously across the open paddy. They waded through waist-high, brushy grass, then stepped into wet, green fields where fresh hectares of rice had recently sprouted. The mud soaked their boots. The low dikes tripped them. They were exhausted.

They reached the group that had fled toward their blocking position. The dead soldiers lay in no particular order on the glistening mud, some weighted with large packs, some carrying only weapons, some dressed in uniforms and some in villagers’ clothes. They checked the bodies quickly, with little excitement now. The weapons were taken, unwillingly due to their weight. Some Marines souvenired packs from the dead North Vietnamese soldiers: NVA packs were the most comfortable of all varieties carried. Ornaments from uniforms were quickly pocketed, lest the men be required to surrender them to Battalion Intelligence for scrutiny—and unearned souvenirs.

CANNONBALL walked listlessly, weighted by his pack and by nearly a hundred blooper rounds that he carried strapped to his thigh in a large bag, at almost a pound apiece. Ah need me a target, he thought mournfully. Ah need to shoot off 'bout half these things. They give me all this ammo, we see all these damn gooks—never seen so many damn gooks in all my life, an’ Ah only shoot about ten rounds all day. Ten damn rounds.

In front of him, behind a low dike, was a sprawled body, dressed in black. Cannonball squinted, awakening from his numbness. Hmmmph. Ah got this one. He's mine. Mebbe Ah'll get me a pack. Or one o’ them SKS rifles. This one's mine.

He squinted again. The sprawling body's rifle pointed straight at him. He walked closer, to perhaps five meters away. The eyes behind the rifle were open, glaring hotly, feverishly, into his. Cannonball halted quickly, sucking a lungful of wind through clenched teeth.

The rifle erupted, its rounds so close that he was sure he felt them pass near his head. Automatically, without deciding, he braced himself and popped off a blooper round. Thunk. The round dug deeply into the dirt just next to the hotly staring figure. It was spin-armed, and had to travel several yards before it would go off. Cannonball was too close to his target.

The two men stared quietly at each other, separated by what seemed only inches, two strides and the distance of the paddy dike. The man in black watched Cannonball with animal intensity, like a cornered fox that faces certain death in the only manner his instincts will allow, prepared to fight all overwhelming comers because his senses inform him there is no other exit but to die clawing. Cannonball stared back, waiting for the next blast from the rifle that pointed toward his innards, aware that his own weapon was a single-shot type that had to be broken open in order to be reloaded, and realizing that his first move to break the weapon would summon the burst from the pointed rifle, knowing also that he would have to search his packed blooper bag for a buckshot round, the only type of ammunition he carried that would kill his adversary from that distance. Both men sensing they were doomed, and yet neither having the wherewithal to prevent his own destruction. Or, as it turned out, the means to bring about the other's death.

A blast rang out from Cannonball's right. The man in black slumped to his side, dead. Bagger jogged up to the body, pumped a half-dozen more bullets into it, then knelt next to it. He looked up to Cannonball, who was breathing rapidly now, shaken by the standoff.

“God
damn,
Cannonball. You scared the shit outa me.”

“Outa you? Hey. That man had me cold. Why din’ he pull the trigger?”

“Because he liked you. And besides, he was outa ammo.” Bagger broke off the magazine from the AK-47 and showed Cannonball. “He was prob'ly too weak to change magazines. Or too gone to think about it.”

Cannonball strode over the dike and knelt next to the body. The soldier lay in a huge bloodpool, having been shot through the lower waist several hours earlier. Cannonball shook his head. “Ha-a-ard core, what Ah mean.”

They searched the body. The man was older, perhaps forty. Inside his pack there was a letter. Cannonball showed it to Snake, who brought it to Hodges. Hodges called Captain Crazy and asked for the interpreter, Sergeant Thuan. Thuan strode over to the platoon, and dutifully translated the letter in his nasal, academic English. He would read a paragraph, then look up to the cluster of Marines, smiling fraternally to all of them, seeking their approval.

“He is same-same Gunny.” The men brightened. “He write letter to North Vietnam, to—how you say, same-same Congressman.” Collective “no shits.” “He say, he fight French, then he fight in South for four years now, he want to go home. He say, he been in Army since 1949, time to get out. Say he got five babysans, time to go home.”

Sergeant Thuan beamed, nodding graciously, and returned to the company command group with the letter.

Bagger stared at the riddled body. “Well. We got ourselves a Gunny. A lifer. No shit.”

Snake shrugged the dead soldier off. “Hey, man. They are all lifers.”

THEY swept through open fields, intermittent villages and treelines, past hundreds of bodies littered randomly, as if sown across the valley floor like seeds by some Great Hand. Finally they reached the tank. It rested humbly in a paddy, between two lush treelines, a great dragon felled by a slingshot: a shoulder-fired B-40 rocket had blown one of the treads off. A platoon from Second Battalion departed immediately when the company arrived, anxious to catch up with its own company, which had swept northward. The company had been ordered to provide security for the tank until repair parts arrived.