Sand in the Wind (52 page)

There was nothing to do but to try and cover the body. They had left their packs at camp, and therefore their ponchos and poncho liners. The first hootch was only twenty yards away. Appleton started to walk towards it, but Kramer shouted, “
Wait!
There may be some more booby traps.”

“I ain't goin’ nowhere,” Appleton called back harshly. An old man was sitting on the floor of the hootch. Appleton screamed, “
Lai dai!
” the Vietnamese words for “come here.” The old man didn’t move. “
Lai dai!
” Appleton screamed again. Still the old man sat motionless. Appleton aimed his rifle and emptied a magazine above the old man’s head. “
LAI DAI!
”

The old man rose to his feet with great effort, and tottered towards Appleton. The frightened look in his eyes clearly indicated that he thought he would be killed. When the trembling old man reached him, Appleton spun him around and shoved him towards the hootch. Appleton followed a few yards behind until they reached it. He grabbed a straw mat off the floor and began shoving the old man back towards Redstone’s corpse. By this time Trippitt had reached the front of the column. Appleton threw the old man to the ground at Trippitt’s feet.

Now that he was standing above the corpse, Appleton hesitated. He couldn’t figure out what to do. His eyes avoiding as much of the sight as possible, he finally turned over Redstone’s legs and pushed them against his upper torso. He still could not look at the grotesquely shortened form, so he laid the straw mat on top of it. With great effort, and some help from Kramer and Ramirez, he rolled the mat around it.

Trippitt yanked the old man violently to his feet, at the same time ordering his men to round up all the villagers and burn their hootches. They did so with vengeance. Old people and mothers were pulled from their hootches, children still clinging to them. The soldiers shoved and kicked them from hootch to hootch, at all times making sure the villagers walked in front of them as a shield against booby traps. Constant screams from the children and moaning cries from the elderly added to the madness. Grenades continued to explode as each bunker was fragged, every hootch burned, and the peasants were herded into the center of the ville. Those too elderly to walk were dragged by their arms or legs. As more and more peasants were shoved, kicked, and dragged to the center of the ville, the moaning and screaming increased. This seemed to further incense the soldiers. Those few villagers who had tried to bring some of their valuables — a battered pot, a bag of rice, a wooden bowl — had them grabbed away and flung to the ground.

Soon the entire ville was in flames, and all of the inhabitants pressed into a frightened mass at its center. A few of the Marines spat on them as they walked by. The elderly sat cowering, glancing up at their tormentors, wondering if they would soon see their own deaths and those of their grandchildren who now pressed against their mothers, bewildered and crying, too frightened to ask “Why?” maybe sensing that even their elders wouldn’t be able to answer them. Only the younger mothers sat stoically, never having known anything but war and never having possessed illusions that life could be something more than what they were now enduring.

Trippitt called in a medivac chopper for Redstone’s corpse and Ramirez. He also called for a helicopter to evacuate the villagers. Chalice was one of the men assigned to guard them until it came. The pathetic scene before him was enough to temporarily obscure the memory of Redstone’s death and their complicity in it. He knew they would be sent to Due Due, a resettlement camp — not a village but straight rows of tin-roofed hootches no more than four feet apart. His mind ignored the stench of it, and he kept telling himself that it was for the best, anything would be better than living in a free-fire zone. Chalice knew they feared much worse. When no one was standing near him, he told them not to worry, that they wouldn’t be harmed. His words had no effect on them. It was not only fear that they were suffering. They looked at those standing before them with guns, these men with the watery eyes; and they knew there was a difference between themselves and these men. Yet they were not sure what this difference was. They were cruel, yes; but still different. They could not know that it was impossible for these men to think of a thatch-covered shack as a home, to see any difference between one piece of high ground and another, to find meaning and importance in the simple graves of unknown ancestors and remembered parents, to look upon battered pots and straw mats as valuables, or to know they were unwanted and terrifying strangers.

The medivac chopper arrived in a half hour, but the Marines had to wait another two hours before a helicopter came for the detainees. When the company headed back to camp, it wasn’t necessary for Trippitt to push his men. The fear of being caught in the open at night kept them at a fast pace. They reached camp just before dusk. Not enough time remained to heat C-rations, and it was another hour before they had finished digging their foxholes and were able to eat their food cold from the cans in the dark.

Tired as they were, no one in Second Platoon found it easy to sleep that night. It was just as well. Shortly after one o’clock in the morning, they were awakened by a series of explosions inside their perimeter — too small to be mortars or rockets, they had to be blooker rounds. The men scrambled into their foxholes, now wishing they had dug them deeper. They had no idea where the rounds were coming from. All that was left for them to do was sit cringing beneath the lips of their foxholes.

Forsythe and Chalice were in the same hole, both of them thinking that sooner or later one of the rounds would land in somebody’s foxhole, hoping it wouldn’t be theirs. They knew that their hole was deeper than most of those on the perimeter, and they were thankful. Chalice pressed his back against the wall of the foxhole. The smell of damp earth, once nothing more than a repugnant odor, a reminder of the filth he’d learned to accept and live in, was now something reassuring. Unconsciously, he rubbed his fingers into the dirt. The feel of it somewhat calmed him, promised protection. He could ask for no more, except maybe a deeper hole to burrow himself into.

The intervals between explosions increased to twenty and thirty minutes. During the long waits for a new explosion, the newer men would continually tell themselves, ‘That might have been the last,’ but an additional explosion seemed always to prove them wrong. Those who had been through this before, though just as frightened, were outwardly calmer. They knew the “odds” were with them. There was also the strange, added comfort that the Phantom Blooker was no longer a stalking shadow, but rather a tangible force that had finally seen fit to declare itself. They knew that even when the barrage ended, it would only be for the night; and if they were “lucky,” they would witness this same scene many more times.

Though he continued to react with the same flinching tenseness in his muscles, Chalice almost grew accustomed to the recurrent explosions. The barrage had lasted too long without any apparent damage. He began trying to locate the rounds in his mind, following their sound from one point in the perimeter to another. Awed by the skill with which each round was aimed, he identified with whoever was firing the blooker, as if he himself were doing the firing. With each additional round, Chalice began to experience the barrage more as an event of mysterious interest than one of great danger.

Trippitt had called in Puff the Magic Dragon. It slowly circled the perimeter, spraying thousands of machine gun bullets around it. The roar of Puff’s guns seemed always an afterthought to the dotted red line of fire that sprang from its invisible underside. As if to taunt both the Marines on the ground and those above, the Phantom Blooker continued his barrage unaffected. Puff circled the perimeter for over an hour without being able to silence the incoming blooker rounds. They continued landing with undiminished accuracy. A round exploded to the side of Chalice’s hole. Globs of mud fell into it. Just as Chalice started to whisper “That was close,” an anguished moan sickened him.

“I’m hit. Help me,” a voice called out in pain and disbelief.

This same cry was repeated. It came from the position ten yards to the left of Forsythe’s. Chalice started to climb out of the foxhole, but Forsythe pulled him back. “What are you doing?”

“Help! I’m hit.”

“Pm gonna help him.”

“Shhh,” Forsythe warned. “We’ve got to stay —”

“Corpsman! Corpsman!”

“— in our positions.”

“But he’s hurt bad.”

“You don’t know who’s out there. If a Gook gets inside the perimeter, there’ll be a lot more people yelling for —”

“Help me. I’m hit.”

“— help.
  
.
 
.
 
. What could you do anyway?”

“We’ve gotta do something,” Chalice said nervously.

“Just take it easy.” Forsythe turned to the foxhole on his left. “Payne, get a corpsman over there.”

Hamilton’s angry voice replied, “Shut up! One’s on the way.”

Chalice realized that merely for his sake, Forsythe had wrongly called to Payne.

“Corpsman, get me a corpsman.”

“Do you recognize his voice?”

“No,” Forsythe answered irritably. “He’s from Third Platoon.”

Chalice heard someone running towards the wounded man’s foxhole. The moaning continued, but more quietly and without words. He heard the same voice say in a calmer but still distressed tone, “See if Cox is all right.”

“Quiet. Don’t worry about him,” came the reply.

“He’s all right?”

“He’s all right.”

A round hit the opposite side of the perimeter. Chalice heard a faint, distant voice cry for help. No longer was he looking upon the blooker barrage as something to be experienced. Scared for his own life, horrified by the cries around him, and anguished by his inability to do anything but cringe within his foxhole, Chalice became increasingly nervous and agitated. He watched Puff shoot its line of fire directly in front of his hole, gritting his teeth and hoping that this would silence the Phantom Blooker.

It wasn’t until an hour before dawn that the blooker barrage ceased. A few minutes later the sergeant of Third Platoon found two of his men dead in their hole. At first light, a helicopter was already circling above the perimeter. Someone set off a smoke grenade to guide it in. The wounded man in the foxhole next to Chalice’s was carried aboard unconscious. The other man from this hole went with him, wrapped in a poncho. Three more bodies were carried aboard. Five wounded men, who now regretted that they hadn’t dug their holes deeper, were also helped to the copter. Numerous other men walked around inside the perimeter wearing bandages for less serious wounds. It was not until he saw all this, that Chalice was able to comprehend fully the damage done during the night.

Trippitt told his platoon commanders that they would march all day, covering as many tree lines as possible. The men put their gear on lethargically, their minds on the previous night instead of the day that was to follow. These survivors knew they had merely had a warning, a glimpse of a scene that would be repeated again and again.

After a few minutes of marching, the men’s thoughts shifted to their own discomfort. Fuller no longer spoke of how glad he was to be in the “Arizona Territory, right off.” Each march left him more tired than the previous one. At first Rabbit had believed the men who kept telling him he’d get used to the marching, but he now had lost all hope of this and was continually amazed by what he misconceived as the superior stamina of those around him. It was too soon for him to realize that this was merely a stoic acceptance of the torture they were all enduring combined with the will to take one more step.

Shortly after twelve o’clock, Trippitt halted the column on a sparsely vegetated patch of high ground and passed word for the men to “take thirty.” They received this order with gasps of relief as they dropped their gear on the ground. Only a few men remained standing as they all began arching their now unweighted backs and rubbing their shoulders. Knowing that they would continue marching until dusk, the men comforted themselves with the thought that at least they would be able to leave their packs behind. While they were enduring it, all degrees of pain seemed equally torturous; but now as they thought ahead, they were thankful that for the rest of the afternoon they would be enduring a lesser degree of torture. These thoughts merely increased their distress when they learned a few minutes later that the rest of the march would be “with packs.”

No one really wanted to eat, but they knew their strength would have to come from somewhere. Only a few of the men bothered to heat their food because of the added trouble and the realization that as tired as they were, nothing could possibly taste good. Kramer ate his spaghetti cold from the can. After a few mouthfuls, he was no longer conscious of the greasy, doughy taste. It was the flies that were bothering him — something about Vietnam he knew he would never get used to. They swarmed like mosquitoes around him and his men. As they ate, everyone would continually shake their heads and arms to scare them off. The flies buzzed suspended a few inches away until the men stopped moving, then landed again.

Kramer watched three flies perched upon the lip of his C-ration can. Knowing the futility of it, he still blew them away with a short burst of air. One buzzed in front of his eye and another landed on the spoon as he drew it towards his mouth. Kramer flicked the spoonful of spaghetti to the ground, thinking of this act as an inadequate bribe, an offering. He began to jiggle the spoon each time he drew it towards his mouth. The flies seemed to hang around the can waiting for the short ride on the spoon. Soon he even stopped bothering to look and see if he was eating them along with the spaghetti, figuring that he could always spit them out if he felt one in his mouth. Kramer half smiled when he heard Forsythe say, “Hey Hamilton, how ’bout moving over. I think you’re attracting these flies.”

“Sorry, I forgot to take a shower this morning.”

Childs said in his normally sarcastic tone, “Don’t worry about the flies. They’re gonna get theirs no matter what you do.”