The first charlies were in the killing zone. I waited. I wanted to pull the trigger. I knew they were passing the claymores. I heard them talking. My hands were sweating. We had the upper hand. We had them in the killing zone. I was waiting for Lieutenant Gearhart to open up with the claymores. The claymores would waste them. They were terrible.
Nothing happened. The charlies were going through the killing zone and out the other side. What the hell had happened? Where the hell was the squad? I heard the charlies go off into the night. They must have passed the ARVNs, too.
“What the fuck happened?” Peewee’s voice in the darkness.
“Shut up!” Gearhart.
Peewee mumbled something to himself, and was quiet.
Okay, it was cool. We weren’t going to do the ambush. We would wait until morning and then split. Maybe Gearhart was scared. He had made a mistake before, and we had lost a man and had one wounded. Now he was playing it safe.
I relaxed. My wrist stung. It felt like the leech was still on it.
Voices. More charlies. They were talking again, taking a stroll through the woods. They entered the killing zone. I kept telling myself not to think about the wrist, and I kept thinking about it.
The voices continued. How many of them were there? The nearly full moon drifted from behind some clouds, and I got my head down. I looked up. There were the charlies. Only instead of the four or five I had imagined there seemed to be an endless line.
I opened my mouth so I could breathe quietly. I had to pee.
Voices behind us. The woods were crawling with charlies.
Our Father, who art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy name… .
Don’t think. Don’t even think of God. I thought. I thought of all the good things I had done in my life. I didn’t deserve to die. I didn’t want to die.
The voices went on for another ten minutes. If we had sprung the ambush, we wouldn’t have stood a chance.
“Let’s get out of here!” Brunner.
“Shut up!” Gearhart.
Quiet. More voices. They kept coming.
It lasted nearly fifteen minutes. It was only fifteen minutes, but it seemed like an eternity. Still, we didn’t move. A half hour passed after we heard the last one move, before I heard Gearhart calling us together. Simpson went out and got the claymores and we started going back, careful not to take the route the charlies had taken in case they mined it.
Jamal was shaking so badly I wondered how he could have stayed still all that time.
“How you doing, man?”
He didn’t answer. I looked at him and he was crying. I made a note to tell Simpson. If Jamal was that shaky, he was going to get us all killed.
There had been too many charlies to pull an ambush; they would have wiped us out. I wasn’t sure how many there had been, and I thought that Gearhart was only estimating.
“There had to be at least a battalion.” Gearhart was on the radio as soon as we got back to the base.
Peewee was trying to bum what was left of the leech off my wrist with a cigarette. The damn thing was disgusting.
“What did they say?” Sergeant Simpson looked at Gearhart when he put down the phone.
“They wanted to know if we saw any identifying patches on them,” Gearhart said.
“How did you figure there were so many?” Walowick asked.
“They were talking too much,” Gearhart said. “Too confident.”
If it had been me, I thought, I would have screwed it up. I would have.
Sergeant Simpson extended for thirty days. Nobody wanted to look at him, nobody wanted to see him. It was as if he had decided to die. That’s what we all felt. They gave him another stripe. He was a Master Sergeant. Big deal.
Most of the guys that extended in Nam did it for the rank, but some had other things in their heads.
It was as if the idea that any moment they could be killed excited them. I knew a kid on 119th Street off Eighth Avenue like that. He had run with a gang and was always in a knife fight or something. When he finally got killed — gunned down outside the Showcase Bar on 125th — nobody went to his funeral.
We could tell the action was picking up all over. The air strikes were picking up. The rumble of the big guns started as soon as it was light enough to see and sometimes lasted far into the night. Most of it was outgoing, but not all of it. Once in a while a mortar shell would land near the base, and then we would all run out into the trench built in front of the tent.
We reinforced that sucker with some two-by-fours that Lieutenant Gearhart had had flown all the way up from Saigon. Most of the patrols going out were Vietnamese, and Johnson said that he didn’t think most of them were really patrolling.
“They ain’t out a kilometer before you hear popping,” he said.
He was right. Half the time the ARVNs would go out, especially at night, they would be back within a half hour saying that they had been hit by a company of charlies. Then we would go on alert and send out a few rounds and spend the rest of the night in the trenches.
I won thirty dollars in the football pool. I had Green Bay and a point total of forty-eight, which
was closer than anybody else. I sent the money to Mama.
I got a rash or something on my feet. Peewee wanted me to put some of the salve he had bought from the old woman on them but I said no. I remembered how his face had broken out. At the new camp we had been working more in higher ground, and I thought the small cracks between my toes would heal. They didn’t. A medic from Tam Ky came by with the pills and gave me some powder for my feet and told me to keep them as dry as possible.
“Your feet get messed up and you’re going to end up with a profile.”
Yeah, thanks.
Lobel damned near dragged Jamal into our hooch.
“Go ahead, tell him what you heard,” Lobel said to Jamal.
“Sergeant Simpson and Captain Stewart got into a fight,” Jamal said. “Captain Stewart told Sergeant Simpson that if he didn’t shut up and get out he was going to bust him down to private.”
“Who the hell does he think he is?” Brunner asked.
“What they fighting about?” Johnson asked.
Brunner got up and walked away.
“He found out that Captain Stewart is volunteering Alpha Company all over the place. He asked him what he’s doing that for, and Captain Stewart said that if he didn’t want to fight he shouldn’t have extended.”
What Jamal said went down hard. We didn’t mind doing our part because it had to be done, even though we always didn’t have answers to why we were doing it.
But nobody wanted to go out and risk their lives so that Stewart could make major.
The mortars started coming in more regularly over the next three days, and the ARVN patrols started staying out shorter and shorter times. We didn’t go out for almost a week, but when I saw Captain Stewart talking to Gearhart I figured something was up. I was right. We were headed for another patrol.
The “patrol” turned out to be a company-sized sweep. We were supposed to take off at 1000 hours. At 0930 hours three Hueys, escorted by two Spook-ies, huge C-47 gunships, came in. It was the rest of our outfit.
Lobel wrote a long letter to his father, telling him that he was sorry about joining the army. He put it in his gear at the hooch before we went on the sweep.
“You really sorry?” I asked.
He shrugged, and I dropped it.
I wondered how my father would take it if I got killed. I told myself that I didn’t care. The more I thought of it as we waited to load up, the more I began to understand how Lobel felt. Having people care about you was probably the only thing that made any of it right. Having them not care made your whole life wrong.
The company hit the landing zone at 1117 hours. Some squads from Second Platoon went in first. They didn’t get any fire, but they looked confused on the ground. We soon got the word that there were punji sticks in the tall grass we were jumping down into. They were sharpened sticks stuck into the ground or in pits. Usually they were covered with shit, either human shit or animal shit, so when they stuck you, you got infected. No one in our squad hit the punji sticks as we landed, and we started moving out toward the wood line. There was no resistance.