“Number One assault platoon, advance one hundred meters to the left; Number Two assault platoon, provide covering fire during the movement; weapons platoon, set up mortar units to be ranged at 150 meters on the hill at 1000 hours to our front. Machine gun platoon, set up automatic weapons one hundred meters to the right.”
He waited for the sniper to kill him.
But instead, an astonishing thing happened. No bullet came at all. The sniper lit a torch and began waving at him, as if to say, Here I am. Come kill me. He could see the man, surprisingly close, waving the torch.
“There he is; kill him! You see him. Kill him,” Huu Co shouted.
As he came out of the grass, another flare popped, low this time, filling the night with white light. The spectacle was awesome through the scope, jacked up three times: he saw men run in panic, he saw the blind fire directed outward, he saw men in the center of the position yelling desperately.
Commanding officer, he thought.
Oh, baby, if I can do you, I can call this one a day!
Three men stood. The center of the scope found one and he pulled the trigger with—damn!—enough jerk so the shot went high and he knew he hit high, in the neck; in the perfect circle of the scope, his target sank backward, stiff and totaled. Bob cocked fast, but the flare died. He could hear nothing. The fire lashed outward pointlessly, unaimed, mere fireworks as if the terrified were trying to drive demons away.
Another flare popped: low and bright and harsh.
Bob blinked at the brightness of it, saw another man stand, fired, taking him down. As he pivoted slightly, he went past a second man to a third, fired quickly, hit him off center and put him down. Then he came back to the second man as he rushed through the bolt cycle.
Got you.
You’re it.
You’re the man.
He caught his breath, steadied himself. The flare seemed to be falling right toward this brave individual, and Bob saw that yes: this was him, whoever he was.
The officer alone stood, taking the full responsibility of the moment. He called directions so forcefully, Bob could hear the Vietnamese vowels through the noise of the fire. He was fortyish, small, tough, very professional looking, and on his green fatigues he wore the three stars of the senior colonel, visible only now because the light was so bright as the flare descended.
Bob took a second’s worth of breath, noticing that in the brightness of the instant, the reticle had even materialized; the crosshairs stood out bold and merciless upon the colonel’s chest, and in that second Bob took the slack out and with the snap of a piece of balsa wood shattering, the trigger went, the rifle recoiled, death from afar was sent upon its way.
But something was wrong; instead of a sight picture, Bob saw bright lights, bouncing balls of sheer incandescence, his night vision shattering as he blinked to clear but the world had caught on fire. Flames ate the darkness. It made no sense.
Then he realized what had happened. The jury-rigged suppressor, sustained in its nest of tape, had finally yielded to the hammering of muzzle blast and flash, slipped down into the trajectory of the bullet, deflected it and, exposed directly to the detonation of flash, the canvas exploded into flame. The rifle had become a torch signaling his location. He stared at it for an oafish moment, realized it was his own death, and threw the whole mad blazing apparatus away.
Now there was nothing left except the remotest possibility of survival.
He turned to flee, as bullets clipped about, whacking through the stalks. He was hit hard, on the back, driven to the earth. The pain was excruciating.
He saw it very clearly: I am dead. I die now. This is it. But no life sprung before his eyes; he had no sense of wastage, loss, recrimination, only sharp and abiding pain.
He reached back to discover not hot blood but hot metal. A bullet aimed for his spine had instead hit the slung M3 grease gun, driving it savagely into him, but doing him no permanent harm. He shucked the disabled weapon, and began to slither maniacally through the grass as the world seemed to explode around him.
He didn’t know what direction; he just crawled, pathetically, a fool begging for life, so far from heroic it was ludicrous, thinking only one phrase like a mantra: I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die.
He kept going, through his terror, and came at last to a little nest of trees, into which he dove and froze. Men moved around him in the darkness; shots were fired, but the action, after the longest time, seemed to die away, and he slipped in another direction.
He got so far when someone shouted, and then, goddamn them, the NVA fired their own flares. Theirs were green, less powerful, but they had more of them: the sky filled with multiple suns from a distant planet, sparky green, descending through green muck as if it were an aquarium.
In a moment of primeval fear, Bob simply turned and ran. He ran like a motherfucker. He ran crazily, insanely to escape the cone of light, but even as it promised to die, another blast of candlepower lit the night as another dozen or so green Chicóm flares popped.
This seemed to be the place. He ran upward, screaming madly, “Julie is beautiful, Julie is beautiful!,” saw Donny rise above him with his M14 in a good, solid standing offhand and begin to fire on his pursuing targets very professionally. Bob ran to the boy, feeling the armies of the night on his butt, and dove into Donny’s shallow hole.
“Claymores!” he screamed.
“They’re not close enough!” Donny responded. Bob rose: more flares came, and this time a whole company seemed to be rushing at them to destroy them.
“Now!” he screamed.
“No!” screamed Donny, who had the three firing devices. Where had this kid got this much cool? He held them, the shots cracking up the hill, tracers flicking by, the green flares floating down, the screams of the rushing men louder and louder until he fell back, smiled and squeezed the three firing devices simultaneously.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Donny had three M14 mags left, with twenty rounds each; Bob had seven rounds in his .45, one loaded magazine, and seven rounds in his .380 with no extra magazines. Donny had four grenades. Bob had his Randall Survivor. Donny had a bayonet.
That was it.
“Shit,” said Donny.
“We’re cooked,” said Bob.
“Shit,” said Donny.
“I fucked up,” said Bob. “Sorry, Pork. I could have led them away from here. I didn’t have to come back up this hill. I wasn’t thinking.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Donny.
The NVA scurried around at the base of the hill. Presumably they’d carried off their dead and wounded, but it wasn’t clear yet what their next move would be. They hadn’t fired any flares recently, but they were maneuvering around the hill, Bob supposed, for the last push.
“They may think we have more Claymores,” he said. “But probably they don’t.”
It was dark. Donny had no flares. They crouched in the hole at the top of the hill, one facing east, the other west. The dead M57s with their firing wires lay in the hole too, getting in the way. The stench of C-4, oddly pungent, filled the air, even now, close to an hour after the blasts. Donny held his M14, Bob a pistol in each hand. They could see nothing. A cold wind whipped through the night.
“They’ll probably set up their 81s, zero us, and take us out that way. Why take more casualties? Then they can be on their way.”
“We tried,” said Donny.
“We fought a hell of a fight,” said Bob. “We hung ’em up a bit. Your old dad up in Ranger heaven would be proud of you.”
“I just hope they find the bodies, and my next of kin is notified.”
“You ever file that marriage report?”
“No. It didn’t seem important. No off-post living in the ’Nam.”
“Yeah, well, you want her to get the insurance benefits, don’t you?”
“Oh, she doesn’t need the money. They have money. My brothers could use it for school. It’s okay the way it is.”
Nothing much to say. They could hear movement at the base of the hill, the occasional secret muttering of NCOs to their squads.
“I lost the picture,” Donny said. “That’s what bothers me.”
“Julie’s picture?”
“Yeah.”
“When?”
“Sometime in the night. No, the late afternoon, when I went after that flank security unit. I don’t remember. My hat fell off.”
“It was in your hat?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, tell you what, I can’t git you out of here and I can’t git you the Medal of Honor you deserve, but if I can git you your hat back, would you say I done okay by you?”
“You always did okay by me.”
“Yeah, well, guess what? Your hat fell off your head, all right, but you been so busy, and now you’re so tired you ain’t figured out that you was wearing a cord around the hat to pull it tight in the rain. It’s still there. It’s hanging off your neck, across your back.”
“Jesus!”
Donny reached around his neck and felt the cord; he drew it tight, pulled the hat up from around his back and removed it.
“Shit,” he said, because he could think of nothing else to say.
“Go on,” said Bob, “that’s your wife; look at her.”
Donny pulled at the lining of the hat and removed the cellophane package, unpeeled it and removed, a little curled and bent, slightly damp, the photograph.
He stared at it and could see nothing in the darkness, but nevertheless it helped.
In his mind, she was there. One more time. He wanted to cry. She was so sweet, and he remembered the three days they’d had. They got married in Warrenton, Virginia, and drove up to the Skyline Drive and rented a cabin in one of the parks. They spent each day going for long walks. That place had paths that ran along the sides of the mountains, and you could look down into the Shenandoahs or, if you were on the other side, into the Piedmont. It was green, rolling country, checkerboard farms, as far as you could see; beautiful, all right. Maybe it was his imagination, but the weather seemed perfect. It was early May, spring, and life was breaking from the crust of the earth with a vengeance, green buds everywhere. Sometimes it was just them alone in the world, high above the rest of the earth. Or was it just that all soldiers remember their last leave as special and beautiful?
“Here, look,” said Donny.
“It’s too dark.”
“Go on, look!” he commanded, the first time he had ever spoken sharply to his sergeant.
Swagger gave him a sad look, but took the picture.
He looked at Julie, but saw nothing. Still, he knew the picture. It was a snapshot taken in some spring forest, and the wind and the sun played in her hair. She wore a turtle-neck and had one of those smiles that made you melt with pain. She seemed clean, somehow, so very, very clean. Straw blond hair, straight white strong teeth, a tan face, an outdoorsy face. She was a beautiful girl, model or movie-star beautiful. Bob had a brief, broken moment when he contemplated the brute fact that no one nowhere loved him or would miss him or give a shit about his death. He had no one. A middle-aged lawyer in Arkansas might shed a tear or two, but he had his own kids and his own life and the old man would probably still miss Bob’s father more than he’d miss Bob. That was the way it went.
“She’s a great-looking young woman,” Bob said. “I can tell she loves you a lot.”
“Our honeymoon. Skyline Drive. My old captain gave me six hundred dollars to take her away when I got my orders cut. Emergency leave. He got me three days. He was a great guy. I tried to pay him back, but the letter came back, and it was stamped, saying he had left the service.”
“That’s too bad. He sounds like a good man.”
“They got him too.”
“Yeah, they get everyone in the end.”
“No, I don’t just mean ‘them, they.’ I mean a specific guy, with influence, who set about to purify the world. We were part of the purification process. I’d still like to look that guy up. Commander Bonson. Here’s to you, Commander Bonson, and your little victory. You won in the end. Your kind always does.”
Flare. Green, high. Then two or three more green suns descending.
“Git ready,” said Bob.
They could hear the ponk-ponk-ponk as a few hundred yards away, three 81mm mortar shells were dropped down their tubes. The shells climbed into the air behind a faint whistle, then reached apogee and began their downward flight.
“Get down!” screamed Bob. The two flattened into the mud of the shallow hole.
The three shells landed fifty meters away, exploding almost simultaneously. The noise split the air and the two Marines bounced from the ground.
“Ah, Christ!”
A minute passed.
Three more flares opened, green and almost wet, spraying sparks all over the place.
Bob wished he had targets, but what the hell difference did it make now? He lay facedown in the mud, feeling the texture of Vietnam in his face, smelling its smells, knowing he would never see another of its dawns.
Ponk-ponk-ponk.
The shells climbed, whispering of death and the end of possibilities, then descended.
Oh, Jesus, Bob prayed, oh, dear Jesus, let me live, please, let me live.
The shells detonated thirty meters away, triple concussions, loud as hell. Something in his shoulder began to sting even before he landed again in Vietnam, having been lifted by the force of the blast. Acrid Chinese smoke filled his eyes and nostrils.
He knew the drill. Somewhere a spotter was calling in corrections. Fifty back, right fifty, that should put you right on it.
Oh, it was so very near.
“I was a bad son,” Donny sobbed. “I’m so sorry I was a bad son. Oh, please, forgive me, I was a bad son. I couldn’t stand to visit my dad in the hospital, he looked so awful, oh, Daddy, I’m so sorry.”
“You were a good son,” Bob whispered fiercely. “Your daddy understood, don’t you worry about it none.”
Ponk-ponk-ponk.
Bob thought of his own daddy. He wished he’d been a better son too. He remembered his daddy pulling out in his state trooper cruiser that last night in the twilight. Who knew it was a last time? His mother wasn’t there. His daddy put his hand out to wave to Bob, then turned left, heading back to Blue Eye, and would there go on out U.S. 71 to his rendezvous with Jimmy Pye and his and Jimmy’s deaths in a cornfield that looked like any other cornfield in the world.
The explosions lifted them, and more parts of Bob seemed to go numb, then sting. This triple shot bracketed the position. This was it. They had them; they had merely to drop a few more shells down the tube and the direct hit would come out of statistical inevitability, and it would be all over. Fire for effect.
“I’m so sorry,” Donny was sobbing.
Bob held him close, felt his young animal fear, knew there was no glory in any of it, only an ending, a mercy, and who would know they lived or died or fought here on this hilltop?
“I’m so sorry,” Donny was sobbing.
“There, there,” Bob said.
Someone fired an orange flare over on the horizon. It was a big one, it hung there for the longest time, and only far past the moment when reasonable men would have caught on did it at last dawn on them that it wasn’t a flare at all, it was the sun.
And with the sun came the Phantoms.
The Phantoms came low, screaming in from the east, along the axis of the valley, their jet growls filling the air, almost splitting it. They dropped long tubes that rolled through the air into the valley beneath, and blossomed oranger than the sun, oranger and hotter than any sun, with the power of thousands of pounds of jellied gasoline.
“God!” screamed Bob. “Air! Air!”
They peeled off, almost in climbing victory rolls, and a second flight hammered down, filling the valley with its cleansing flame.
Then the gunships.
Cobras, not like snakes but like thrumming
insects, thin and agile in the air: they roared in, their mini-guns screaming like chainsaws ripping through lumber, just eating up the valley.
“The radio,” Bob said.
Donny rolled over, thrust the PRC-77 at Bob, who swiftly got it on, searched for the preset band that was the air-ground freak.
“Hit eight, hit eight!” Donny was screaming, and Bob found it, turned it on to find people looking for him.
“—Bravo-Four, Sierra-Bravo-Four, come in, please, immediate. Where are you, Sierra-Bravo-Four? This is Yankee-Niner-Papa, Yankee-Niner-Papa. I am Army FAC at far end valley; I need your position immediate, over.”
“Yankee-Niner-Papa, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four. Goddamn, ain’t you boys a sight!”
“Where are you, Sierra-Bravo-Four, over?”
“I am on a hill approximately two klicks outside Arizona on the eastern side of the valley; uh, I don’t got no reading on it, I don’t got no map, I—”
“Drop smoke, Sierra-Bravo-Four, drop smoke.”
“Yankee-Niner-Papa, I drop smoke.”
Bob grabbed a smoke grenade, pulled the pin, and tossed it. Whirls of angry yellow fog spurted from the spinning, hissing grenade, and fluttered high and ragged against the dawn.
“Sierra-Bravo-Four, I eyeball your yellow smoke, over.”
“Yankee-Niner-Papa, that is correct. Uh, I have beaucoup bad guys all around the farm. I need help immediate. Can you clean out the barnyard for me, Yankee-Niner-Papa, over?”
“Wilco, Sierra-Bravo. Y’all hang tight while I direct immediate. Stay by your smoke, out.”
In seconds, the Cobras diverted to the little hill upon which Bob and Donny cowered. The mini-guns howled, the rockets screamed; then the gunships fell back and a squadron of Phantoms flashed by low and fast, and directly in front of Bob and Donny, the napalm bloomed hot and bright in tumbling flame. The smell of gasoline reached their noses.
Soon enough, it was quiet.
“Sierra-Bravo-Four, this is Yankee-Zulu-Nineteen. I am coming in to get you.”
It was the bird, the Huey, Army OD, its rotors beating as if to force the devil down, as it settled over them, whipping up the dust and flattening the vegetation. Bob clapped Donny on the back of the neck and pushed him toward the bird; they ran the twenty-odd feet to the open hatch, where eager hands pulled them away from the Land of Bad Things. The chopper zoomed skyward, into the light.