War Year (6 page)

“I don't see anybody at
all.
It's only seven o'clock—maybe they don't fight until after lunch.”

“That must be the place.” Willy pointed at a tent with a sign that had the Fourth Division cloverleaf and said ENGIN. B CO. We went into the tent.

Inside, there was a guy asleep in a chair in front of a radio set. Willy went over and shook his arm. “Hey, fella, wake up.”

He sat up straight and looked around. “Jesus Christ—was I asleep?” He looked at his watch. “Captain'd have my ass in a sling… thanks. Who are you guys, anyhow?”

“I'm Willy Horowitz and this is John Farmer. New guys.”

“Just two? They said five or six… you just get in?”

“'Bout fifteen minutes ago.”

“Hey, do me a favor, the mess tent's just across the street. Get us some coffee, OK?”

“Sure.” Willy went out the flap.

“Take off your pack and have a seat. I gotta find the papers for you guys.”

I sat down and took out a cigarette, decided to wait and smoke it with my coffee. “How is it out here?”

“Here? Oh, pretty much like base camp. Not as much spit-'n-polish. Three hots a day and beer at night, if we're lucky. Only had two attacks all the time I've been here. Nobody hurt.”

“Sounds pretty good.”

“Oh, it is—hell of a lot better than where
you're
goin'.”

“We aren't gonna stay here?”

“Nah, you're goin' out to either Brillo Pad or, uh, two-one-two-four.”

“Where's that?”

“Hills nearby. Fire bases.”

“Fire bases. So what's a fire base?”

“Man, a
fire
base. That's where they keep the big guns, artillery. Safest place in the world, forty, fifty big guns and mortars, two grunt companies—two hundred men, man, no way Charlie's gonna fuck around with you. That's a fire base.”

“How come one has a name and the other has a number?”

“Oh, the number
is
the name—the ‘2' means infantry; ‘21' means A Company and ‘24' means D Company, that's the two infantry companies on the hill.”

Willy came back with the coffee. It tasted terrible.

A tall man, the first guy I'd seen with creases in his pants, came into the tent. “Morning, David.”

“Morning, Captain.” Willy and I started to come to attention but saw that the guy at the radio stayed in his seat. We stood up anyhow.

He grabbed my hand while I was still deciding whether to salute. “I'm Cap'n Brown, your company commander.” He shook hands with Willy, too. “You must be replacements—where are the others, getting chow?”

“Uh, sir, we're the only ones they sent.”

He bit his lower lip and picked up a clipboard. “I see. What're your names?”

We told him. “Yes, you're on this list. But so are four others.” He sat down on the table and leafed through the papers. “We're under strength. Way under. Those God-dern base camp commandos. We need men out here for
soldier
work—and they grab half our replacements for permanent KP and paper-shuffling.”

Why couldn't I have been one of those lucky four? I can wash a mean dish.

“Well, you-all go get some breakfast. Then get a couple of cases of beer from the mess sergeant and head out to the helicopter pad. Tell the pad man to put you on a slick to 2124.”

Breakfast wasn't too awful, but we had to go back and get a note from the captain before the mess sergeant would give us any beer.

The pad was quite a ways away from the trains area. That case of beer was getting mighty heavy by the time we got there.

No helicopters, just a bunch of supplies lying around, and the dirtiest guy I'd ever seen, sitting on a crate, drinking beer.

“You the pad man?”

“Nah, he went to get some chow.” He gave us the once-over. “New guys?”

“Yeah,” I said, “Bravo Company engineers.”

“You won't be clean again for a long time. Better enjoy it while you can—pull up a box and crack a beer.”

It sounded like a good idea. He let us use his church key. It was on a chain around his neck, all wrapped up in green tape. His dog tags were wrapped the same way; I asked him about it.

“That's so they won't jingle, man. You gotta be quiet. Don' want to jingle in the jungle.” He laughed, a dry cackle. “Where you two goin'?”

“Place called 2124.”

“2124? Oh yeah—2124!” He cackled again. “That's where I'm headed, too—but that's not what we call it.”

“Place has a name?”

“Yeah.” Cackle, cackle.

“Alamo. Alamo Hill.”

FIVE

The first “slick”—that's a helicopter big enough to hold about six people—was headed for the Alamo. He didn't even shut off the engine; we three just piled in and he lifted off again.

The bird was equipped with sliding doors for both walls, and both of them were open (imagine riding in a convertible going 100 miles an hour, a half-mile up in the air). Door gunners were strapped on either side, leaning on .30 caliber machine guns. They looked bored. The pilot and copilot looked bored. I was scared shitless.

After about fifteen minutes we dropped down to treetop level and roared up the side of a hill. It was green bamboo jungle all the way up to the top, and all of a sudden, dirt—Alamo, a brown scab covering the mountaintop. Barbed wire and bunkers. Heavy artillery all over. On a low-level patch not much bigger than the helicopter, a guy was waving his arms. The helicopter set down gently and kept roaring away, kicking up dust while we helped unload two flame throwers, a mailbag, and lots of C-rations.

So I got my first good look at a fire base through a cloud of whirling dust, dry sticks, and bits of paper kicked up by the helicopter blades. Most people do, I guess.

First, it was really filthy. Everything and everybody was covered with that reddish dust. It had a temporary look; no buildings except for a couple of steel tocks that were probably dropped in by helicopter. I guessed people lived in the bunkers, holes in the ground with crude log roofs piled high with sandbags.

The artillery pieces were clean, black metal shiny with oil, and I could see why; half the crews seemed busy wiping rags over the metal. Looked to be about twenty real artillery-type guns, plus another dozen mortars, each one a black stovepipe about waist-high.

There wasn't any order to the place; the bunkers seemed to be just scattered around all over the hill. The guns were all together in one place, though, and so were the mortars.

Finally the slick lifted and fell away, down the side of the hills. Everything was eerie quiet, like cotton stuffed in your ears.

Speaking, I realized I was more than half-deaf from the noise. “Hey, buddy,” I asked the pad man, “where do the engineers hang out around here?”

He pointed up the hill to what looked like a wooden shack on wheels, with a tattered American flag fluttering above it.

“If you swallow hard a couple of times, you'll be able to hear OK,” Willy said. I did and it worked.

Right by the shack (which turned out to be a trailer with walls and a roof built over it), there were four guys digging a hole and filling sandbags.

“This Bravo Company engineers?”

An old guy, about thirty-five, dropped his shovel and climbed out of the hole. “That's us.” He stuck out his hand. “Sergeant Pobanovitch, call me Pop. Which of you is Farmer and which is Horowitz?”

We got straightened out and he introduced us to the others. “The tall one's Doc Jones, the medic.” Jones was the only Negro in the bunch. “Guy with the pick is Fats—Fats, what the hell is your real name?”

“Don't matter. Fats is OK.”

“And I'm John Williamson,” the last one said. “They call me Professor.” He
looked
kind of like a professor, too; horn-rimmed glasses and bald halfway up his head. But he was just as dirty as the rest, and unshaven to boot.

“All right, men, take a break,” Pop said. “We'll help you get rid of some of that beer.”

“Yeah, it's lunchtime anyhow.”

“You ever think about anything else, Fats?”

“You betcher sweet ass I do!” He went over to a cardboard box and fished out a green tin can. “None of them around, though.”

“Let me show you guys how to eat C's,” the Professor said. He pulled out three C-ration cans and started opening one with a P-38 Army issue miniature can opener. “You don't want to open it all the way—leave enough so you can use the top as a handle.” He bent the top over so it made a kind of messy handle. “Then you find yourself a stove, like this.” He picked up another tin can with both ends removed to make a hollow stand, with holes punched in the side. “Now. You take some C-4”—he took a stick of the white plastic explosive out of his pocket—“pinch off a piece the size of a marble, put it in the stove and light it.” It flared up with an orange flame, and he put the C-ration can on top of the stove. “It heats up real fast but you've got to stir like mad to keep it from burning on the bottom.”

The can he brought over for me turned out to be frankfurters and beans; Willy got spaghetti and meatballs. Not bad. For dessert, we opened cans of fruit.

“Farmer, you and Horowitz are going out with the Prof tomorrow to relieve the engineer squad with A Company, First of the Twelfth. Prof'll be in charge, and your squad's code name is Two-One-X-ray. That's what we'll call over the radio when we want to talk to you.

“Reminds me—we've gotta get code names for both of you. Can't use real names over the air. Either of you have a nickname?”

I remembered Smitty at Cam Ranh Bay. “Anything but Tex. Call me Okie.”

“Okie it is.” Pop wrote it down in a little notebook. “Horowitz?”

He puffed on his cigarette. “Hmm… how 'bout ‘Whore'?”

“Fine.” He wrote it down. “Now—good thing you came so early; didn't think we'd get this bunker done by nightfall. Fats, you get a chain saw and Doc, get an ax; go out an' get us some overhead. Rest of us'll keep digging here. Including the lieutenant, if he ever gets back from that goddamn meeting.”

“Meetin'!” Doc snorted. “You
know
they's up there drinkin' beer and tellin' dirty stories. Lieutenant's not comin' back 'til the work's all done.”

“‘RHIP' Doc—remember what that means?”

“Yeah… ‘rank has its privileges'—too many fuckin' privileges, if y' ask me.”

“So who asked you? Take a couple of beers, but don't let any officers see you drinkin' on the other side of the perimeter. If they do, I'll swear I don't know where you got 'em.”

“OK, Pop.” Doc put a beer in his leg pocket and tossed one to Fats.

“Also, don't fuck around out there, y'hear? Get
big
logs—you two're gonna be stayin' in this bunker.”

“We know, Pop,” Fats said. “The life you save…”

“… may be your own. Goddamn right.” Pop watched them gather up their tools and start down the hill, then turned to us.

“So that's the way we run things around here. Free an' easy, no bullshit. Long as everybody follows orders. Anybody starts to fuck around, we lean on him. I lean on him. The lieutenant leans on him. And life can get pretty sorry. Understand?”

We both nodded. “OK—Farmer, get on the pick for a while, break up the ground in the bottom of the hole. Horowitz, shovel the dirt onto that pile. Me an' Prof'll fill sandbags.”

I picked away for half an hour and my palms started to blister. Willy traded with me, and the shovel seemed to put blisters everywhere the pick hadn't. After an hour we took a break for a beer.

“Pop,” I said, “how dangerous is it out in the field? Many engineers get hurt?”

“No, not many. Too many, but not many compared to the infantry … you'll be part of the ‘command group,' always in the middle, infantry all around you.”

“It's like this,” the Professor added. “The company moves through the jungle in three lines, right flank, left flank, and center file. We'll be in the middle of the center file. Charlie's got to get through a flank before he can get to us.”

“But sometimes he does,” Willy said.

“Sometimes.” The Prof took a big swig of beer. “And sometimes he pops mortars or rifle grenades into the center file. But it's nothing like being on the line, smelling his breath.”

“How often?” I asked.

“Hmn?”

“How often do you run into Charlie?”

“Oh, we make contact, what, about twice or three times a month, on the average. A Company hasn't made any contact in two weeks or so, now.”

“Means they're due?” Willy asked.

“Doesn't mean anything, except they've been lucky for two weeks. Maybe they'll be lucky for two weeks more. Maybe for the rest of the year.”

“Still sounds bad,” Willy said.

“Ah, don't sweat it, Horowitz. I'm
glad
I'm goin' out in the field again. One heck of a lot safer than it is here—Alamo's been hit twice this week.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“Not all that bad, just mortars. Couple of guys hurt, but nobody's been killed yet. They're bound to try a ground attack, though. I'd just as soon be someplace else when it comes.” Prof wiped his forehead with a filthy rag.

“Ain't gonna be no fuckin' ground attack,” Pop said.

“That's what they said on Brillo Pad, Pop.”

“Tell y'what, Prof. Those Intelligence boys been sayin' we're gonna have a ground attack, three days in a row now. I'll bet you ten bucks there won't be an attack tonight, ten there won't be one Friday night, and ten there won't be one Saturday night.”

“I'd hate to collect, Pop.”

“You won't collect. Intelligence's got its head up its ass, as usual—hi, Lieutenant. How'd the meeting go?”