One to Count Cadence (36 page)

But when the cowcatcher caught a mine and the convoy slammed to a halt, no one said a word. A single drawn breath robbed the truck of air, and we gasped like dying men. One man farted, another belched. Stomachs grumbled, guts contracted and growled in protest.

A few rounds were fired in front, then steady chatter and little pops as if from toy guns, then silence again. The Trick tried to climb out of the truck over me, Franklin leading the way, shouting that he had to pee. I pushed him back into the crowd, kept pushing until they all were down, faces hugging the sandbags. Fear rose like a visible cloud from the huddled bodies, but I made them stay, while I dropped out the back and crouched under the truck. Inside, Franklin groaned, trying to hold his bladder, and Quinn shouted not to pee on him, but no one laughed, not even Quinn.

The road, a track through a jungled forest, was gray in the light from a moon as big and bright as a searchlight.
No one ambushes by moonlight,
I thought, never thinking that those who would would do it in a way I wasn’t ready for yet. Murmurs, shrouded by canvas, seemed to fill the space between the darkened trucks. Bodyless voices swept on a ghostly wind, turned, then turned back, till they seemed my voice drifting away from me. For an instant I was drunk with fear, and I knew the only way I could control it was to do something, but there was nothing to do but hold my bladder, keep my peace, and wait. Someone ran down the road toward me, stopping at each truck, then angry, frightened whispers sawed the night like the alarm cries of huge insects. Tetrick ran flatfooted like an old cop chasing a young pickpocket, but an old cop who firmly intended to catch that pickpocket. I stood, whispered an order to stay down inside the truck, then stepped out to meet him, already feeling better.

“What’s up?” I asked, my tone calmer than I expected.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just a mine. No real damage, but it will take about half an hour to get the truck going again.”

“Who fired?”

“Nervous fingers. One ARVN squad ran into another. One dead, four wounded, and lucky at that. Idiots,” he said. “Let the troops out for piss call or they will be pissing all over themselves. Tell ‘em, for God’s sake, stay on the road; the ditches may be mined.” But as he said this, two squads of ARVN troops ran past in both ditches heading toward the rear of the convoy.

“Guess not,” I said. As I looked, I saw a white track disappearing quickly in the forest, a trail. “But I guess we’re lucky.”

“Keep ‘em on the road anyway. Then get down to the weapons truck — first one in front of the vans — and get yours. Okay?” he asked, then ran off without an answer, his feet slapping against the dry road.

“Okay, you old ladies,” I said, unlacing the canvas, “pull down your bloomers, and come out to pee-pee. Trouble’s all over, but stay on the road. Novotny, keep them on the road.” As I trotted away, I heard Franklin’s voice, high and loud with relief, “Sgt. Krummel, Quinn tried to rape me while I was laying down,” and Quinn’s answer, “And I woulda, if you hadn’t been shaking like a twelve-year-old virgin,” and then his raw laughter. “Knock it off,” I shouted over my shoulder, not even hoping that they would.

Coming back, I tried to be casual, carrying the Armalite by its handle like a suitcase, four grenades bagging the thin pockets of the civilian suit, two full clips sticking out of my back pockets like fifths of cheap whiskey. Morning commented, of course, “Mamma Krummel back to protect his little brood,” but I laughed at him. He expected push-ups and an ass-chewing, and grumbled, “It wasn’t a joke,” and I said, “Yes, I don’t think so either.” We smoked and talked quietly, our talk like the chatter from behind the other trucks, relaxed, confident, safe, but this cool babble couldn’t cover the raw grunt and moan which slipped out of the forest to the right. No one spoke, then everyone, but the metallic clang of a round snapping into the Armalite stopped the noise. I sent Cagle for Tetrick, Morning to the truck cab for a flashlight, and the men into the opposite ditch, then gave Novotny two of the grenades.

Quinn’s tooth flashed in the moonlight as he said, “Frankie. Frankie? Where you at, you ugly bastard.”

One of the new men mumbled that he had been seen drifting down the moonlit trail. I gave Quinn the third grenade, then Morning the last when he came back with the flashlight.

“Five yards apart on me,” I said. “Quinn last. No light yet. Morning behind me. Let’s go,” I said, then stepped off down the trail.

The trail seemed twice as white as I moved between the dark walls of foliage, following the faint trail of sharp prints made by new shoes in the dust, then the wavering serpentine track where he had peed as he strolled. The trail bent to the left, and as I cautiously slipped around the corner, I didn’t need Morning’s flash to see.

Malayan Gates, they call them, a bamboo pole tied to a tree beside the trail, a bamboo pole with three or four twelve-inch bamboo stakes lashed to its end, then bent away from the trail and tied to another tree and a trip wire. Franklin hadn’t finished, and urine still dripped into the black pool at his feet where he knelt, his grey face turned back toward me, one arm pegged to his stomach where he had been holding himself, and the points of the stakes gleamed out of his back two inches above his belt. His eyes were wide and alive when I first saw him, but before I could move, they were wide, white and dead in his face. A muscle spasm gripped his mouth, and a rumbling, sputtering release from the large bowel mocked the prayer his mouth seemed to form, but his eyes were dead in his face. Morning quietly said “Jesus Christ” behind me. Novotny, stricken, mumbled “Told him to stay on the road. Told him… Told him… Told…” Quinn dropped his grenade and started to run. I laid the butt of the rifle into his stomach as he reached my side, laid it harder than I should have, but a rage clutched at my muscles, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if I had started firing into Franklin’s offending body. Quinn dropped to his knees and gagged.

“Take him back,” I said, my voice colder than I could remember it ever being. “Take the son of a bitch back.” I slapped Morning’s shoulder and pushed Novotny. Their eyes came back to me from Franklin, then they started to stumble toward him. “No, you bastards, no! Quinn! Quinn! Take him back. Take the son of a bitch back.”

Lake two owls dazed by sudden lightning, they asked, “Who?”

“Quinn,” I said once more. “Take him back. Have someone sit on him. Bring me a poncho and a roll of field wire. Now, goddamn you, now! Move!” I shoved at them until they moved, cursed them in various tongues, then they moved back down the trail, Quinn between them.

I waited with Franklin’s body. God, he stunk. He offended me with his rankness, his malodorous halo clinging to the trees. He stunk worse than any animal I’ve ever gutted. If I hadn’t been sure that he lay on a pressure release mine, I would have kicked him until he stopped emitting that fetid, slimy, smell. I might have anyway, but Tetrick ran up, two sergeants behind him.

He stopped, clicked on the safety of his grease gun, then said, softly, “The bastard.”

We stood there, looking and feeling guilty for looking, until Novotny came back with the roll of wire and Morning with the poncho. I made a loop, then tossed it over Franklin’s head, around his neck.

“Not his neck,” Morning said, but nothing more.

We rolled the wire back to the road and made the troops lie back down in the ditch. Then I tried to pull the wire, flinching like a nine-year-old kid firing his first shotgun, flinching as he does until he learns that it is the flinch not the shotgun which hurts him. The second time I didn’t flinch.

Nothing happened. The wire jumped toward me like a slim black snake. Each of us, in our own way, jerked away from it.

“It came untied,” Tetrick said. “Or broke. I’ll get it.”

“I will.”

Once more down that white trail dividing the darkness, the moon still bright in the sky, still searching, stars twinkling ordinarily, even the small sounds of the jungled forest peeping out once more. I tied a knot that would not slip, then walked back.

I pulled again, huddled with the others in the ditch. The explosion was lost, soft among limbs and leaves, but a naked flash climbed the sky, and the earth trembled under us. Novotny and I went for the body, but there was none: A charred log, not hard like wood, but soft and rubbery as we rolled it on the poncho, and it squeaked, rubber against rubber. Warm rain fell on my hands as I bent over the body, and it would be the next day before I remembered crying.

“Told him, told him to stay, stay on the road,” Novotny gasped as we carried the surprising load, too light for man, too heavy for whatever it was.

“You told him; he didn’t; forget it.”

“Don’t know how,” was all he answered.

The troops, officers, non-coms and all, here is the first loss, forgot the standing orders against bunching up, bunched like cattle in the rain, lowing, and chewing their fearful lips.

“You?” Capt. Saunders said to Tetrick. Saunders stood among the troops, but they moved away when he spoke. He moved back among them.

Tetrick’s head gleamed in the moonlight and his words were half lost under a dropped face. “Too tired,” he said. “Krummel, Krummel will.”

Sure, sure, Krummel will. Yes, Krummel, savior of his brood, mother-hen to the world and that miscarriage in the poncho. Fuck yes, Krummel will!

I stripped back the poncho, and waited until the sight stuck in every mind, then said, not too loud but loud enough:

“Not much to send home to Mamma, is it?”

No one misunderstood. Now we were ready.

For the next ten hours, until the convoy reached Hill 527, I sat in the stifling darkness of the truck, glad of the darkness, pleased with the heat of my own body. None of the ordinary things, none of the expected emotions came to me; no vomiting, only those few warm tears no more real than the glycerin dripped on an actor’s cheeks. First there had been cold anger, then calculated madness, and now nothing, so much nothing that I was glad when Morning noted my silence and said, remembering that I knew his secrets, hoping that I would now have a secret guilt too, “What’s the matter, Krummel? War not to your taste? The intellectual warrior get sick to his dilettante stomach? Don’t be sick, man, that’s your war back there, your lovely war incarnate in that sliver of flesh. People die in wars, you idiot…”

Even then I couldn’t raise an answer, a spark of feeling.

Oh, I had things to say: No, Morning, not my war, baby, but yours; he wasn’t killed in a war, he was murdered.

But these were thoughts without feeling.

* * *

Of course it must rain our first two days at Hill 527, air mattresses and shelter halves must leak, and men sweat and stink in ponchos, or stand naked in hard, cold rain, or fall prey to malaria and cat fever and fungus. Boots must mildew, and meals be cold, and mud ball at our feet and creep up our legs and stick to our fingers and clog in our eyes. Sleep must come in nightmare snatches, and guard be stood, and waiting drift in long cross hours, and of course it must rain without pause for two days and two nights square in the middle of the dry season. And of course the sun must shine, eventually. And it all must be endured.

* * *

Hill 527 and its twin, 538, were not really big hills, but tall rises in the middle of a large clearing where a jungled forest encroached on a grassy plain. Five hundred and thirty-eight was a gentle rise, an easy slope up and down from all sides, and 527 was the same except for a flat triangular peak like a surrealistic nipple smack in the middle of it. The sides of the nearly equilateral triangle were approximately one hundred yards long. A forty degree slope separated the flat nipple-top from the more gentle slopes below it. On the first two muddy days we laid wire around the steeper slope, dividing us from the two companies of provincial militia already entrenched in a rough circle about fifty yards further out and down. Outside of their wire and their mud and sandbag parapets, the grass and the occasional patches of brush had been cut down for about one hundred yards. The jungle was on three sides of the clearing, east, west, and north, but on the open side the land sloped away in rolling, grassy hills. The jungled forest came to within four or five hundred yards of the compound on the north and east, but because of Hill 538, it was between nine hundred and one thousand yards away on the west. Our antenna field was to be built on 538, and then the whole hill mined.

All in all, it wasn’t a bad position. The peak was high enough so that we, if we had to, could fire on the lower slopes without chewing up the protective coating of Vietnamese militia. The militia had good wire out, and we had wire ten yards wide, two fences and four rows of concertina on the slope off the peak. (The harried American major who advised the Vietnamese major commanding the militia said he wished that we hadn’t strung the wire between our two forces. The Vietnamese major thought it an insult to both the patriotism and the fighting ability of his men. Capt. Saunders showed them his orders signed by the admiral in charge of American forces in the Pacific, the area military commander, and the major’s commanding officer, so the wire stayed, and we stayed alive.) We dug a four-foot deep trench along the inner edge of the wire with twenty rifle positions on each side of the triangular peak, then put machine gun bunkers at each point of the triangle, a communication trench midway across the triangle, north to south, connecting to the ammo and gas bunkers, then dug mortar pits at the four corners of the trapezoid formed by the communication trench and one behind the eastern point. A spotting tower was erected over the mid-point of the communication trench, and a CP and guard mount bunker dug under it. All the trenches were dug in a regular wavering curve so that a man could step around half a curve and be away from a grenade explosion. After this was done, we began slit trenches all over the compound, laid Claymore mines to protect the western side and gate, and constructed a concrete landing pad for choppers, south and west of the gate, inside of the outside wire.

All this work, which was not nearly the total work we would do, took the first week, a hard week of digging and filling sandbags, of sleeping on the ground under shelter halves, of cold rations, and lots of heavy guard duty. Thirteen men had left on med-evac choppers, ten with fevers and/or malaria, two with infected shovel cuts, and one who couldn’t stand the waiting; but we were beginning to feel secure, as if hard work could keep death away, as if dying could be endured like manual labor, but Capt. Saunders set us straight.