Bad news. A patrol from Echo Company went out on a pacification thing to the same hamlet we went to, and two guys got hit. They were on their way into the place when it happened. They searched the whole place but didn’t find any VC. Everybody felt bad about that. Then we were told we had to go to the hamlet again.
“What the VC do is to go in when we leave and mess up anybody that got help from us. If they see they got some grain from us or some pills that they didn’t turn over to them, then they kill the head of the village,” Sergeant Simpson said.
“What we got to do,” Sergeant Simpson went on, “is to lay an ambush outside the hamlet. If they come in, they got to fight their way out.”
“How about the people in the hamlet?” Brew asked.
“We got to show them that we can be peaceful if they peaceful with us, or we can mess them up,” Sergeant Simpson said.
“Pacify them to death!” Peewee said.
“Something like that,” Sergeant Simpson said.
Chapter 10
It was a platoon thing, but not really a full platoon thing. Our squad was cool, but the other squads were all cut down to four or five men. It was a platoon on paper, but it was just paper, not men. We mounted the choppers an hour before nightfall. We were at the LZ in a little over ten minutes. Sergeant Simpson laid out a new route to the hamlet.
We cut through some dense underbrush for a half hour before we got near the hamlet. Sergeant Simpson laid out the ambush. It was simple enough. We were on one side of a small cemetery. The reports had it that the VC came past the cemetery into the hamlet at night. They terrorized the people in the hamlet, taking what they called a “tax” and killing anybody they thought might have been informing on them. We were supposed to surprise them, to make them pay for coming to the hamlet.
Monaco, as usual, was point. He was about forty meters beyond the cemetery. The way we figured they had to pass him to get to the cemetery. We had claymore mines at the end of the cemetery, and then the rest of the platoon stretched out in a straight line along what we had been told was the path the VC took. Johnson and Brew would be at the end of the line we formed.
We moved in quietly, with Sergeant Simpson placing each of us, and making sure that we knew where the others were.
“Try not to kill each other if you can help it,” he said.
We dug in. I had five sandbags, which I filled and put in front of me. Suddenly they weren’t big enough, or solid enough. I wanted something else, a wall, maybe. I could rest my piece on the sandbags, but it didn’t look very convincing.
Silence. There wasn’t to be any communication between us in case the VC had lookouts.
Suppose, I thought, they had spotted us already?
The only radio we had, a PRC-io, or Prick 10 as they called it, was near Lieutenant Carroll. Brew had it. I didn’t want the radio. The antenna made you stick out like a sore thumb, and drew a lot of fire.
It got dark. There were bugs. Somewhere in the distance I heard frogs. The night was filled with noises. After a while it dawned on me that I couldn’t see anything. There was a moon above us, but it didn’t give us enough light. I wanted each VC to have his own light shining right on him.
It was 2230 hours. Back home in Harlem it would have been ten-thirty. The eight o’clock parties would be just hotting up. Kenny would be fighting with
Mama about going to bed. Maybe he would wonder about what I was doing. If he was in bed already, he would be reading comics under the blanket with a flashlight. I wondered if he would feel anything if I got nailed? Would he wake up in the middle of the night, wondering what was wrong? Would he feel uneasy, knowing that halfway around the world his brother was hurting?
Kenny, I love you.
We waited. I told myself that I was bored.
I wondered if Mama was getting the allotment checks. I wondered how she felt about them. Did she think I was doing something for her, or just that it was part of my being in the army? I didn’t know myself.
At 2300 hours I had to pee. Actually, I had to do more than that but no way I was taking my pants down out in the boonies. I felt around me to see if I was on an incline, decided I wasn’t, and lay on one side and peed as quietly as I could.
It was grave dark and quiet except for the things that crawled in the night. Suppose everyone else was gone? Suppose I was out here by myself? Forget that. Think about something else. Think about Diana Ross waking me up in the morning, begging me not to get out of bed. No, wait, her and Juliet Prowse were secretly sisters trying to get me to make love to them.
The thing was I was a virgin. I didn’t tell anybody because I wasn’t supposed to be a virgin. I was supposed to be hip. Everybody knew how blacks were, how soldiers were. Everybody knew, and I was still lying in behind a few inches of sand halfway around the world from anything I knew without having loved anything deeply, or spent time with anyone in a bed alone. Maybe it wasn’t important.
Insects chirped, moved through the night. There were shadows all around me, laughing, jerking, mocking.
A sound. I raised my head slightly to hear better. Voices. Vietnamese voices. I brought my hand to the weapon, my finger played with the safety. Shadows ahead of me. They were coming out of the cemetery.
They moved about, talking quietly, calm, singsong rhythms. What were they talking about? The lousy chow they got in the army? Their families?
Someone opened up. A scream. We were all firing. It was too dark to aim, I just fired in what I thought was the right direction.
They began to answer fire. I could see faces over the light from the muzzle blasts. I fired faster, trying to space my rounds in a sector. I heard a bullet whine past me and flinched even though I knew it was already gone. A grenade went off, and then another. I kept firing. I didn’t know where my rounds were going.
“Cease fire!” Simpson’s voice.
“Take cover!” Lieutenant Carroll.
A small pop, and a flare went high into the air. A moment later the entire area was lit up. There was nothing in front of us. I looked from side to side. Then I saw a body, and another. Thin arms not much different in color than mine. A hand waving slowly in the night air, trying to push away the death already there. One body lay facedown. There was a tremendous wound on the back. It’s what a blast from an M-16 can do.
We kept shooting at the bodies even though they were already dead.
“Get another flare up!” Sergeant Simpson’s voice cracked as he spoke.
Brunner sent another flair into the sky as the rest of us searched the area with our eyes, not moving from the spot we were in.
“What the fuck happened?” Monaco came through the trees.
“They pass by you?”
“No.”
“Here!”
Peewee called us over and we went. He had found one of them lying a few feet from the entrance to a tunnel. The tunnel was near the comer of the cemetery, covered by a low, sprawling bush.
Sergeant Simpson took a grenade, pulled the pin, and threw it into the opening as hard as he could. We stepped back, and a moment later the grenade went off.
“Okay, let’s hit it!” he said.
We were starting off. Backing out of the village toward the pickup zone. I felt sick. My stomach churned. I looked for Peewee and found him. There was nothing to read in his face.
A pop. Nothing more. A small pop, almost lost in the sounds of the jungle around us. We hit the dirt, the mud. We returned fire. Someone sent up a flare that was defective. It burned for a second and then went out quickly. To my left I heard someone crying out. Not loudly — there was no panic — but a gentle cry of surprise.I turned just as the last of the light from the flare was dying. It was Lieutenant Carroll.