Back on the hill, resupply choppers wop-wop down to earth like monster grasshoppers while mortar shells rip up the steel carpet of the airstrip.
We lock and load.
Our minds sink into our feet.
On a stump inside the treeline someone has nailed a scrap of ammo crate with crude letters that are black through the ground fog: ALL HOPE ABANDON, YE WHO ENTER HERE. We do not laugh. Our eyes stay on the trail. We have seen the sign a hundred times and believe it.
We meet some guys from India Three-Five humping down from their night ambushes. Scuttlebutt is, nobody got in the shit. No VC. No NVA. Outstanding, we all agree. Decent, we say, and we ask them if any of their sisters put out. They offer to buy us free beer if we promise to pee down our legs and we're to be sure and write if we need any help.
Dawn.
We come to the last two-man listening post. Cowboy waves his hand and Alice takes the point.
Alice is a black colossus, an African wild man with a sweat rag of green parachute silk tied around his head; no helmet. He wears a vest he has made from the skin of a Bengal tiger he wasted one night on Hill 881. He wears a necklace of Voodoo bones--chicken bones from New Orleans. He calls himself "Alice" because his favorite record album is Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant. Cowboy calls Alice "The Midnight Buccaneer" because Alice wears a gold ring in his left ear. Animal Mother calls Alice "The Ace of Spades" because Alice sticks poker cards between the teeth of his confirmed kills. And I call Alice "Jungle Bunny" because it mocks Alice's truly savage nature.
Alice has a blue canvas shopping bag slung over his shoulder. The blue canvas shopping bag is filled with foul-smelling gook feet. Alice collects enemy soldiers; he shoots them dead, then chops their feet off.
All clear, says Alice with a hand signal. Alice's hands are protected by pigskin gloves. He hacks the jungle with his machete.
Cowboy waves his hand and we move along the trail, Indian-file.
Cowboy steps off the trail, jabs his gray Marine-issue glasses with his forefinger. In the gray glasses Cowboy does not look like a killer, but like a reporter for a high school newspaper, which he was, less than a year ago.
Humping in the rain forest is like climbing a stairway of shit in an enormous green room constructed by ogres for the confinement of monster plants. Birth and death are endless processes here, with new life feeding on the decaying remains of the old. The black earth is cool and damp and the oversized greenery is beaded with moisture, yet the air is thick and hot because the triple canopy holds in the humidity. The canopy of interwoven branches is so thick that sunlight filters through only in pale, infrequent shafts like those in Sunday-school pictures of Jesus talking to God.
Beneath mountains like the black teeth of dragons we hump. We hump on a woodcutter's trail, up slopes of peanut butter, over moss-blemished boulders, into God's green furnace, into the hostile terrain of Indian country.
Thorny underbrush claws our sweaty jungle utilities and our bandoliers and our sixty-pound field packs and our twelve-pound Durolon flak jackets and our three-pound camouflaged helmets and our six-and-a-half pound fiberglass and steel automatic rifles. Limp sabers of elephant grass slice into hands and cheeks. Creepers trip us and tear at our ankles. Pack straps rub blisters on our shoulders and salty water wiggles in dirty worm trails down our necks and faces. Insects eat our skin, leeches drink our blood, snakes try to bite us, and even the monkeys throw rocks.
We hump, werewolves in the jungle, sweating 3.2 beer, ready, willing, and able to grab wily Uncle Ho by his inscrutable balls and never let go. But our real enemy is the jungle. God made this jungle for Marines. God has a hard-on for Marines because we kill everything we see. No slack. He plays his games; we play ours. To show our appreciation for so much omnipotent attention we keep Heaven packed with fresh souls.
Hours pass. Many, many of them. We don't know what time it is anymore. In the jungle there is no time. Black is green; green is black--we don't even know if it's night or day.
Cowboy strides up and down our line of march. He reminds us to maintain ten yards between each man. Frequently he stops to check his compass and acetate map.
We hurt. We ignore the pain. We wait for the pain to become monotonous; it does.
Our New Guy sweats and stumbles and looks like he could get lost looking for a place to shit. A heat casualty for sure. The New Guy eats pink salt tablets like a kid eating jelly beans, then gulps hot Kool-Aid from his canteen.
Monotony. Everything samey-same--trees, vines like dead snakes, leafy plants. The sameness leaves us unmoored.
The fuck-you lizards greet us: "Fuck you...fuck you..."
A cockatoo laughs, invisible, laughs as though he knows a funny secret.
We hump up rocky ravines and I can hear Gunny Sergeant Gerheim bellowing at Private Leonard Pratt on Parris Island:The only way to reach any objective is by taking one step at a time. That's all. Just one step. One more. One more. One more
One more.
We think about things we will do after we rotate back to the World, about silly high-school capers we pulled before we were sucked up into the Crotch, about hunger and thirst, about R & R in Hong Kong and Australia, about how we are all becoming Coca-Cola junkies, about picking popcorn kernels out of our teeth at the drive-in movie with ol' Mary Jane Rottencrotch, about the excuses we'll have to invent for not writing home, and especially and particularly about the numbers of days left on each of our short-timer's calendars.
We think about things that aren't important so that we won't think about fear--about the fear of pain, of being maimed, of that half-expected thud of an antipersonnel mine or the punch of a sniper's bullet, or about loneliness, which is, in the long run, more dangerous, and, in some ways, hurts more. We lock our minds onto yesterday, where the pain and loneliness have been censored, and on tomorrow, from which pain and loneliness have been conveniently deleted, and most of all, we locks our minds into our feet, which have developed a life and a mind of their own.
Hold. Alice raises his right hand.
The squad stops, now, within rifle shot of the DMZ.
Cowboy flexes the fingers of his right hand as though cupping a breast. Booby trap?
Alice shrugs. Just cool it, man.
Our survival hangs on our sniper bait's reflexes and judgment. Alice's eyes can detect green catgut trip wires, bouncing betty prongs, tiny plungers, loose soil, crushed plants, footprints, fragments of packaging debris, and even the fabled punji pits. Alice's ears can lock onto unnatural silences, the faint rattle of equipment, the thump of a mortar shell leaving the tube, or the snap of a rifle bolt coming home. Experience and animal instincts warn Alice when a small, badly concealed booby trap has been set on the trail for easy detection so that we will be diverted off the trail into a more terrible one. Alice knows that most of the casualties we take are from booby traps and that in Viet Nam almost every booby trap is designed so that the victim is his own executioner. He knows what the enemy likes to do, where he likes to set ambushes, where snipers hide. Alice knows the warning signals that the enemy leaves for his friends--the strips of black cloth, the triangles os bamboo, the arrangements of stones.
Alice really understands the shrewd race of men who fight for survival in this garden of darkness--hard soldiers, strange, diminutive phantoms with iron insides, brass balls, incredible courage, and no scruples at all. They look small, but they fight tall, and their bullets are the same size as ours.