Anyway, there we were in the bush.
“What’s the situation?” Thurman asked.
Barber coughed quietly into his hand. “They were a little vague on that. Just that no one comes out of there.”
Thurman shrugged. “Just gooks. Grease ’em and get on out. Fuck ’em.”
I didn’t like it, didn’t like any of it, but I was in too deep and had too much blood on my hands by then to pull out.
I remember Barber looking at me and I swear something passed between us. He didn’t like any of this either and I could see that. There was something weird going on. He had a camouflage bandana pulled tight over his head, his face painted black and green. It was hard to say where cloth ended and flesh began.
Thurman was chuckling; he was always chuckling. “Find ’em, fix ’em, and fuck ’em,” he said, fingering the blade of his K-Bar knife.
He was this tall, blonde psychopath with a shrapnel-pitted face and a scarf of napalm burns at his neck, arms sleeved with tattoos of serpents and scorpions. Six foot four, two-hundred fifty pounds of death. I think maybe that ghoulish little laugh of his reinforced this… and the necklace of sun-dried ears. Thurman was scary. No one really liked him, but he was a badass boonierat and he was good to have around. A natural born killer.
I noticed Roshland was looking about nervously.
“What’s up, Tommy?” I asked.
He shook his head side to side very slowly, spitting a ribbon of mucus at a leaf spider. “I don’t know. I just feel strange. Something wrong about this place.”
“Charlie?”
“No, not that, man. I don’t know. Imagination. Beaucoup bad vibes.” He didn’t seem to be sure of his diagnosis. “Maybe it’s just this daylight shit.”
I had to agree with him on that.
I didn’t care for daylight insertions. We usually went out at night. But for some reason, intelligence wanted us to hit the vil in broad daylight. In fact, when Barber was briefed by the Admiral and his spooks in Saigon, they said if it was getting dark, to scrub the operation. Under no circumstances were we to approach the village in the darkness. Go figure. Those spooks were funny sometimes. Or maybe not funny at all.
In about five minutes, Barber finished with his funny papers—maps—and we moved out. I took point. The jungle was thick and swampy. Mosquitoes and biting gnats were landing on my face and neck despite all the bug juice I’d smeared on with my cammo paint. I didn’t even bother swatting at them—for each one you killed, six more would take its place. You patrolled enough jungle like I had, you didn’t waste time with the local wildlife. You just acclimated yourself. Things like insects and jungle rot became as much a part of you as your skin.
I was starting to sweat a lot, so I took a salt tab. It was very quiet. Just the way I liked it, jungle birds screeching and monkeys chattering. The day had become oppressively hotter as we approached the river, a finger of the Mekong Delta system. I kept thinking about beers in frosted mugs. The farther we went, the more an uneasy feeling began to grip me. I couldn’t put a finger on it, but it left me cold.
We reached our first target before long.
Map coordinate Q-14. Supposedly, there was a supply route running through here for the slopes. We found a few footpaths beaten through the brush, but they were mostly overgrown. We canvassed the entire sector in every direction, but found nothing worth noting. Thurman, however, picked up an old French bayonet. It was rusted to shit and had probably been there for fifteen, twenty years since the Frenchies got their asses kicked out of that neck of the woods by the Viet Minh.
Finally, we called it quits.
Back into the bush, humping through swamp and hacking through jungle. I was on point again. The Rung Sat was a large area, true, but I was still somewhat unnerved that we hadn’t come across anyone at all. Not even a band of drug smugglers. Strange.
Then, just after sunset, we came upon a small village.
Not the village, but a little clearing with a couple thatched huts and a bonfire blazing away. I moved in cautiously to take a look. Thurman and the others hung back and checked out the huts. There were seven men and one old woman around the fire. The men had AKs and black pajamas on. VC, all right. Hardcore pricks spoon fed off Uncle Ho’s bullshit wagon. They were giving the regular Army and Marine units nothing but trouble, but they were no match for us. We’d proved that again and again.
Thurman came back and told us the huts were empty. He’d found one VC sleeping and slit his throat. Barber decided we were going to waste them. Thurman and I made a sweep around camp to see if there were anymore dinks around. Fifteen minutes later we came back. Nothing. It was cool.
Barber signaled us to form a killzone.
Roshland took his sixty to a small copse directly across from them. Barber, Thurman, and I spread out. Thurman carried an AK like me, Barber had a Stoner LMG. Dinks didn’t know it yet, but they were meat. Night, night.
Barber open up first.
He took out two of them before Thurman and I even fired. Together we cut down three more before they knew what the fuck was happening. The other two gooks rolled away and tried to scramble into the jungle, but Roshland cut ’em in half with his sixty.
We slipped from the jungle and went to the fire.
I didn’t like it: standing there in the flickering light it would have been easier than shit for someone to draw a bead on us. The old woman had gotten hit in the leg and shoulder by stray rounds. She was bleeding pretty good.
She looked up at us, spoke in English. Her face was a maze of wrinkles, her eyes shiny and wet. “You go into land of dead, Joe… you don’t come back… you numba ten, you numba ten thousand…”
We all chose to ignore her meaning.
“Bitch speaks pretty good,” Thurman said. “Want me to see what I can get out of her?”
Barber shook his head. “Negative. No time.”
“Won’t take me long.”
“Intel doesn’t want that. No interrogation of unfriendlies in this area.”
And that was weird. Interrogation was pretty much SOP with a unit like ours. We’d been extensively trained in procedures of that type… nice ways and not so nice ways. We all spoke Viet and French, some better than others. Barber could speak Russian and Chinese, too.
But orders were orders.
“Well, we can’t leave the cunt,” Thurman said. He was pissed—Barber had cheated the sadist out of a good hour of cruelty.
Before Barber could answer, the old bag pulled a skinning knife out of her pants and made a lunge for him. We were all caught momentarily off-guard… except Thurman. A split-second after she pulled the knife, his boot connected swiftly with her temple, sending her sprawling senseless in the dirt.
“Crazy fucking mamma-san,” he said.
“Get moving,” Barber whispered. “Thurman, take point. Haul those bodies into the jungle and strip ’em.”
We stripped the bodies of everything they had—weapons, ammo, food, personal items—and dumped them in the bush. That way it would look like bandits got ’em and not American guerrillas. We scattered the ammo and sabotaged the AKs so they wouldn’t work. Thurman took a couple ears for his collection and some greasy photos of the soldiers’ girlfriends. He had quite an assortment of both. There was a well back near the huts and I dropped a vial of poison into it so any VC getting a drink would die a painful death. It was SOP to leave little presents like that behind. Deny the enemy the essentials of life.
Before we moved out, I looked back once and saw Barber break the old woman over his knee and stick his K-Bar into the side of her throat. I’m glad he did it. I hated doing women, particularly old ones.