A mechanized unit had yesterday discovered seven bunkers and two tunnels in the area just to the rear of us, and had captured twelve 81-mm rounds as well as 11,200 small-arms rounds, more than a ton of rice, and a Russian-made radio. A recon patrol filing out into the jungle had reported back with the information that a V.C. base camp with two dozen buildings was located a mile to the southwest. Our march this morning was intended as an encircling maneuver, similar to the procedure we used in a vill sweep, where we surrounded a suspect hamlet during the night and then attacked at first light, hoping to catch Charlie before he left his woman and his rice bowl to go off into the jungle again. The difference here was that this was 0905 in the morning, and we were still a half-mile away from the enemy position, and Charlie had obviously known we were coming, Charlie had closed the trail and lined it with rifles and machine guns, and was determined now to annihilate each and every one of us. I heard Lloyd yelling for aid again, but nobody seemed to be going to him, and so I assumed our medic had been hit in the initial burst. Somewhere off on the left of the trail, I heard Jerry Randazzo, our RTO, radioing back for help, and then there was renewed intensive fire, and Jerry’s voice stopped. The jungle was still.
(Wat Tyler is wearing a fiberglas flak jacket over his cotton jungle shirt and field pants, leather-soled, canvas-topped jungle boots with holes for water drainage, black nylon socks, a helmet liner, and a steel pot with a camouflage cover on it. Hanging from his belt suspender straps are a first-aid kit containing gauze, salt tablets, and foot powder; an ammo pouch containing magazines for his automatic rifle; a Claymore pouch containing six M-26 fragmentation grenades and two smoke grenades; a bayonet, a protective mask, and two canteens of water. He is dressed for war, but he is frightened. He thinks he will be killed this morning.)
“Wat...” the voice was Lloyd’s, a whisper in the jungle stillness. “I’m hit,” he said, and the V.C. opened up again. There was no question of marksmanship here, the jungle was too dense, they fired only at the sound of his voice, spraying the undergrowth with automatic bursts, pausing only long enough to reload and doing that in an overlapping pattern so that the fire was constant. They had the machine gun going in there, too, adding its heavier clatter to that of the rifles, ripping through the leaves on this side of the trail some fifteen meters ahead. I did not think Lloyd had a chance, he was too deep inside the trap.
(Wat Tyler docs not want to consider the possibility that the entire squad has been annihilated, and yet he docs not hear any answering fire from this side of the trail, and he knows that an ambush such as this calls for heavy return fire, blind return fire, spray the bushes, spray the trees, rip the jungle apart, keep firing, keep hurling grenades, keep everything going until help arrives or until it becomes possible to withdraw. But no one else is firing.)
“Cover me!” I heard Lloyd shout up ahead, and suddenly a grenade exploded on the V.C. side of the trail, and Rudy and I began firing again as Lloyd pushed free of the hanging vines, stepping out of the tangled brush in a long loping stride, one arm bloody and dangling, the other pulled back to toss a second grenade. The V.C. machine gun opened up, cutting him down before he’d moved six inches out of the jungle, the grenade dropping in the center of the trail not a foot from where he fell. The explosion tore a hole in the ground and ripped off one of his legs. There was a tick of time, a hiatus the length of a heartbeat between the explosion and the renewed Vietcong fire. Lloyd was lying motionless in the center of the trail. The bullets kept striking his body, nudging it slightly with each soft steady plopping hit, as though trying in concert to roll him off the trail and back into the jungle. The ground around him was covered with blood.
(Wat Tyler is frightened. The one thing he docs not want to do is get killed in this stupid fucking war. In the eye of the camera, he sees himself as a terrified child crouched on the edge of a jungle trail, trembling on the narrow brink of death in the company of an idiot from Newark, New Jersey. He suspects that even now the Vietcong are moving their machine gun further up the trail so that they can fire directly across it into the thicket where he and Rudy are waiting. He docs not want to die this morning.)
“Let’s get the nigger before they do,” Rudy whispered to me.
“What?” I said.
“Your buddy. Let’s get him off the trail before these motherfuckers butcher him.”
“He’s dead,” I said.
“You want them to slice him up like a piece of meat?”
“He’s dead.” I said, “it’s too fucking late.”
“It could be you out there,” Rudy said.
“It isn’t,” I said.
“You coming or not?”
“I’m not.”
There were two things you did not do in Vietnam. I had learned both of those things from Lloyd Parsons, who had been my closest friend and who now lay dead on the trail fifteen meters ahead, with one of his legs blown off besides. The first thing you did not do was leave a dead or wounded buddy, it did not make any difference, dead or alive the Vietcong or the NVA would hack him to pieces and throw him in an open pit. The other thing you did not do was get yourself into a situation that looked suicidal. Suicide was for heroes, and there were hardly any heroes in Vietnam, there were only guys wasting time till they were short, only guys trying to stay alive. I was not a hero, and everybody else in the squad was dead, and going out there to get Lloyd’s body would be suicide. I was too scared to think.
“You coming, Tyler?” Rudy said.
His helmet was very close to mine, he nodded his head for emphasis as he whispered to me, and metal clicked against metal, and for an instant I thought of a Talmadge playing field and a football huddle, thought I would call a Roger-Hook-Go, after which we would run out there with rifles blazing and pull Lloyd off the trail before they cut him limb from limb, though one limb was already gone, wasn’t it, and Lloyd was dead. I wanted to stay alive. I did not want to die this morning.
“Let’s go, Tyler,” Rudy whispered.
On the other side of the trail, I heard movement in the underbrush, the snapping of twigs, the rustling of leaves. There was a small mechanical click.
“No,” I said.
(Wat Tyler remembers that he would not have died for Larry Peters in Mississippi in the summer of 1964, either, and suddenly wonders if there is anything in this world that he would die for, and realizes just as suddenly that there are a hundred things, a million things he would live for, but none that he would care to die for, thank you. To Rudy Webb perhaps, it was important to pull the body of a black man off a jungle trail after he had been shot to tatters and had his leg blown off, but Wat Tyler does not see how he can help Lloyd now except by staying alive. He knows for certain that if he steps out of these bushes he will be killed in an instant. There is too much to do, he thinks, too much to live for. Go fuck yourself, Rudy Webb, he thinks, you and all the Rudy Webbs of America.)
“Up, Tyler,” Rudy said. “Up or I’ll put a bullet in your head.”
I looked at him in amazement. He had turned the muzzle of his rifle toward my chin, and his finger was curled around the trigger. He was wearing a two-week beard stubble caked with jungle grime, and the armpits of his shirt were stained with sweat, and there was a thin line of spit running from one corner of his mouth, a dull glitter in his eyes. From across the trail, there came another small mechanical click.