Allen took first watch for their stretch of the perimeter. It was an odd night, the jungle quieter than usual, without the usual shift and rustle of the wildlife. The clouds cleared for a while, revealing a quarter moon lying peacefully in the blackness. Something about its distance made him think of home—not the dry California valley where he’d lived the last few years, but his real home, the string of islands lying in the straits between Canada and the state of Washington. Jerry and he used to sneak out on moonlit nights, creep down to the dock and climb silently into the family rowboat. They’d go out into the strait, draw the boat up onto one beach or another, maybe make a little fire and cook some hot dogs. That must be why he was thinking of those nights: The moon had been like this the night he and Jerry shared a can of watery cocoa heated over a fire on the cove beach at Sanctuary, one of the uninhabited islands everyone said was haunted by ghosts. Cocoa, silence, and ghosts; yes, that was Vietnam all right.
Shortly before the end of his watch, he heard the thump of a flare, followed by the pop overhead and then the wavering light. He brought his rifle up, hearing the line of M16s similarly responding to the alarm. Two guns fired, but there was no answering fusillade from the night, and after a minute Allen thumbed his safety back on; somebody probably heard a wild pig, or a rat.
Still, there was a sensation as of the jungle holding its breath, and it made him edgy. On the stroke of midnight, Mouse, who had an extraordinary sense of time even if he never wore a watch, stirred in his sleeping trench, paused to take a piss, and shambled over to the fighting hole the squad had dug for itself. Hearing every sound the big man made, from the rustle of the poncho liner to the last spatter of drops hitting the ground, Allen nearly laughed aloud. When Mouse climbed down beside him, Allen put his head close to his squad-mate’s and whispered, “I was getting all freaked out at the bad vibes, nearly talked myself into sending up flares to check for VC in the wires before I realized it’s only because the damn rain has stopped.”
“Know what you mean. I kept wakin’ myself up with my breathin’.”
“Well, everything seems okay. Alpha Squad sent up a flare a while ago, but nothing there.”
“Maybe Charlie’s spooked with the rain stoppin’, gone home to wash his socks. Sleep good, man.”
Allen went back to his hole behind the sandbags. Before he lay down, however, he studied the darkness again: There were people out there, he could feel them. Still, there was nothing he could do sitting here. Might as well sleep.
It began an hour later with a scream, a sound of distilled mortal terror that jerked every man upright, hair on end and gun in hand, a sound that seemed to last a lot longer in the memory than the two or three seconds before the grenade exploded. A man in Alpha Squad had been peaceably in his hole, either dozing or staring out into the night, when a grenade dropped out of nowhere and he had felt Death rolling around between his boots. That explosion was followed rapidly by three more, then Move move MOVE! and a mounting wall of noise, bursts and firing and yelps of pain. Allen caught a snatch of Flores shouting into his radio and braced himself for the resulting artillery, but for what came, there could be no bracing. Two of the shells came to earth twenty feet from the perimeter, the concussion slamming into any person still above ground. There were four men in the fighting hole Allen’s squad had dug for two, a press of elbows and gun butts, and the sides of the hole half collapsed into them with the incoming shell. All four crouched over each other’s knees and shoulders, hands gripping their helmets. Allen, squeezed in against Mouse, had a crazy image of what a passing bird would see: four round rocks jammed together in a hole. Then the third shell landed, nearly on top of the first; for several long seconds, he couldn’t think, couldn’t even breathe.
Did he imagine a high, panicky voice screaming instructions to correct the distant guns? He must have imagined it, he couldn’t have heard anything in the cacophony of explosions, screaming men, and gunfire that followed. Flares and smoke filled the air, flashes of launched grenades shot more or less blindly into the dark, the flares throwing dancing shadows from the trees, shadows that hid the enemy. Both sides flung death at each other across the cleared ground; inside the perimeter, men died.
Years later, when Allen happened to step into a discotheque with its pounding music and pulsing strobes, he was instantly snatched back to that night in the jungle. The flash of shells and sweep of tracers, the weird harsh light of the flares, the heat and confusion and the noise of all-out battle overwhelmed the senses, leaving a man with no choices but to curl up in a fetal position, or rise to his feet and hurl mad defiance out at the terrifying dark with all the breath in his lungs and all the ammunition in his possession.
One of their radios was still working, or perhaps the distant artillery had found its error. The next rounds hit lower ground; one thin scream, indistinct words over and over again, proved that the response had been to some degree effective. The attack slowed. After a few minutes, Allen eased over the top of the sandbags so the others could shovel out the dirt that had collapsed in. He heard ThreeG calling for a damage report, and he answered that his guys were okay. The hole closer to the misfires had not fared so well.
“They’re dead, Carmichael,” came a choked voice. “We’re all fucking dead, oh fuck, oh God, we’re dead.”
Allen squirmed over the ground, dragging his gun after him. He couldn’t see a thing, not until another flare went up, and even then all he could make out was a black hole until a hand shot up and seized his, scaring him half to death. Its owner pulled himself up until the gleam of wire rims was inches from Allen’s face.
Allen turned to hiss over his shoulder, “Mouse! I need a hand here, man.”
Mouse was there in an instant, the whites of his eyes the only thing visible, but his strength hauled Chris up from the hole. The surfer’s hands came up automatically to straighten his glasses, his skin pouring out the musky aura of old marijuana.
“Where you hit, man?” Allen asked him.
“Everywhere, shit, I can’t feel my legs. No, wait,” he said, and kicked first one boot, then the other. “Did I move them?”
“Damn right you moved them, asshole, you kicked me in the face,” Mouse objected.
Allen had been running a tentative hand over Chris’s body, feeling for breaks in the fabric of the uniform or for warm pools of blood, praying he didn’t encounter some really gross protruding organ or bone fragment. The cloth had soaked patches, but seemed to be whole.
“See if you can crawl,” he suggested. “We’ll take you down to the medic.”
Instead, Chris braced himself on their shoulders and stood up, swaying but obviously intact. “Shit,” he said. “I thought I was cut in half.”
For some reason, the statement struck Mouse as funny, and he began to emit a gurgling sound. “Really sorry to disappoint you, dude,” he finally choked out, and crawled back over to finish digging out the collapsed fighting hole.
The other two men in Chris’s hole, however, made no effort to stand. One would never stand again, since most of his head was gone. The other man lay groaning quietly, one arm twisted and useless. He also seemed to be bleeding, although it was hard to tell what was his and what had belonged to the dead man. Allen patted the guy’s good shoulder and told him, “You hang in there, man. I’ll get you a medic, he’ll give you something that’ll make you feel better. Chris, you think you can go find us some kind of stretcher? Tell the medic to come when he has a chance?”
“Sure. Shit, man, I thought I’d get my ass medevacked outta here.”
“We just love you too much to let you go,” Allen told him, and dropped into the hole between the dead and the wounded. The limp corpse in the bottom of the hole was a bitch to move, and would have been impossible if Allen had had to think of it as a person, but treating it as a really awkward wet log with sprawling extremities meant that he could just shove away at the thing, propping his shoulder under it, cursing it all the way up the side of the hole until it floppe
d onto level ground. He scrubbed his hands on his shirt and left the body lying along the top of the hole; when shooting resumed, he didn’t think the guy would mind reinforcing the sandbags for his squad.
It didn’t take long for the shooting to start again. He could still hear the rapid clink and scrape of the entrenching tools in Mouse’s hole when the rattle of an AK47 brought his M16 up to prop on the body of the dead man. Who the hell was it, anyway? He’d have to check the tags when it was light, he thought, and then he was too busy.
If it hadn’t been for the gunships, Second Platoon would have been overrun—give them their due, First Cav might have twitchy fingers when it came to their own side, but the bastards had balls. Near dawn, the besieged platoon was an island in a lake of fire, napalm on one side and mortars on the other, but once the jets came in, ripping the air with the sound of a stupendous bolt of silk tearing and leaving in their wake the superheated mushrooms of serious firepower, Charlie called it quits, and left the shaky GIs to lick their wounds.
They got the emergencies off in the medevacs, then the priorities and the body bags, and when the wounded were safely off their hands they went outside the perimeter to see what the enemy had left for them.
Most of them were NVA, with tire-soled sandals and flat-top haircuts. They went over the dead like ghoulish scavengers, emptying pockets, gloating over information (and, occasionally, souvenirs), feeling nothing at the sight of the dead but satisfaction that it was someone else.
Allen, standing with his M16 in his arms while the sergeant rifled a man’s pockets, noticed a patch of something light in the bushes.
“Another one over there, Sarge,” he said. Sergeant Keys used the dead soldier’s AK47 to lift up the branch, revealing a crumpled figure even smaller than the men they’d been seeing on the battlefield.
“It’s a kid,” Keys said.
Allen went down on one knee.
“Hang on.” The sergeant put out a hand to stop him. “Under the bushes like this, damn thing could be booby-trapped.”
Allen nodded, and bent his head to examine the front of the child’s garment without touching it.
The boy wore a long, ragged T-shirt that had once been printed with a picture of the Eiffel Tower.
“Ah, damn it,” Allen said. “This kid followed us from that last ville.”
“Followed us, or came back?”
“He disappeared during the afternoon.”
It was all he needed to say. The two men gazed at the dead child who had brought the enemy to their wire. The Snakeman’s words ran through Allen’s mind like a song’s refrain: Even the babies’ll kill you. Never trust a kid. Even the babies’ll kill you.
What remained of Second Platoon was finally lifted out that afternoon, abandoning the hard-fought hill to its dead guardians, one of them a handsome child who had gleefully scrounged chocolate bars from the passing Americans.
But Hill 117 wasn’t quite through with them.
One by one the Hueys lifted off. Someone on the ground gave them a farewell fusillade, pings off their side that made the men inside cringe, but which did no harm.
Except for the round that passed through one small but vital part of the last chopper off the ground.
Allen was in the air when he felt the man beside him go stiff, and he whirled around, thinking his companion had taken a bullet through the floor. But the man’s face and outstretched hand had Allen whipping back the other way, leaning to see out the Huey’s open door, past the gunner to the copter behind them. The last Huey leaving the LZ was in trouble; every man there knew it was the one in which Lieutenant Woolf was riding. It faltered and tipped in the air, its stuttering rotors fighting for control, then tipped farther. A figure separated from the dying ship, jumped or shaken loose, and then the machine gave a shrug and dove after him, falling from the sky like a dropped house. The jungle where it came down erupted, a huge paw of flame that reached up for anything else it might grab, stretching out and out—until with an inaudible pop the cloud of flame collapsed back on itself and winked out, leaving only a wide circle of black vegetation and the first exploratory tendrils of smoke.
The body of the door gunner was the only one later recovered from the smoldering wreckage. Even it was charred beyond recognition by the heat of the fire.
Chapter 10
Bravo Company’s captain came to the platoon that night, offering up his words of praise for their valiant actions and the company’s mourning for one of its fallen leaders. Second Platoon stood in silence while he talked to them, because The Wolf would expect them to show respect, but that was as far as it went. The captain looked at their closed faces and their postures of reserve, and saw insolence.
Chris dug out his stash and they all got hammered, so high that they were still buzzed the next morning. Sitting in a tight group in the mess tent, the squad chowed down mechanically until Mouse threw down his fork.
“I’m gonna go find me that fuckin’ Huey gunner. Anyone wanna come?”
“Mouse, you can’t do that, they’re based about ninety miles away from here, you can’t just take off,” Allen told him.
“You gonna try an’ stop me?”
“Mouse, you’ll get your ass thrown in the brig. You’ll get a dishonorable discharge.”
“Fuck ’em. And fuck you. I’ll go myself.”
“I’ll go with you,” Chris offered. Allen stared at the pacific surfer in surprise. “Hey, I can’t let my bro’ here go alone.”
“You ain’t no brother ‘a mine, man,” Mouse retorted.
“Sure as shit, man. I’m turning into a black man,” Chris declared, and lifted his shirt to display the purple-plum blotches that covered half his torso. “I’m even darker under my pants. Dig it—I’m gonna be as black as you, Mouse. Want to see?” He stood and laid his hand on his belt buckle, but the table was loud and unanimous in discouraging the display. He sat down to finish his eggs.
“Come on, guys,” Allen pleaded. “You two do this, that’s the end of the whole damn squad. No offense,” he said to the new guys.
“Then you better come too, Crazy. Keep us outta trouble.”
Allen looked from the black face to the suntanned one, and saw only conviction. “Shit,” he said, with feeling.
“That’s my man,” Mouse said. It was the first time he’d grinned in days.
They would have to wait until night to be relatively certain of finding their crew at base instead of in the air. Mouse had found out that the gunner’s name was Perry, which could have been either a first or a last name, and he knew where Perry was serving—one of First Platoon’s soul brothers had caught a ride in the man’s gunship a month or two before and had recognized the face looking out the door over the streambed. Mouse dug up a friend in the transport crew who would allow them to stow into the back of his deuce-and-a-half, so long as they left him out of it if they were caught. To Allen’s relief, talk of fragmentation grenades had been replaced by plans for a good old-fashioned beating: The threat of discharge was one thing; the brig for life was another.
However, as the day wore on, Mouse took on a mood of expansive gaiety. Allen, watching him joke with men he would have cut dead the week before, began to wonder if this was the big man’s way of dealing with the loss of their lieutenant, and his apprehension grew, along with the conviction that when the time came, Mouse was not going to stop at a mere beating. He hoped that some hitch would come to delay the plans for revenge, even that one of the squad would rat on them, but when afternoon came and the night convoy set off, there was room for the three of them in the last truck. Shit, Allen said to himself. Shit, shit, shit. And went to borrow a handgun from Flores, just in case.
No operation laid out in Army headquarters went off more smoothly than Mouse’s ill-conceived plan. No one challenged them as they left the company perimeter, checkpoint guards seemed blind, and the three strangers slipped into the First Cav base as slick as wet trout, where they asked a few questions, then walked straight into gun
ner Perry’s tent.
Only problem was, the gunner wasn’t there, just three men playing cards and drinking beer to the Mamas and the Papas.
“Little Greggie? He’s not here,” the dealer told them.
“Shoot himself in the foot, did he?” Chris asked.
“What? No, he’s fine. Came back from the last mission, cleaned himself up, took off. In a truck, not taking off, you know.” The card players snickered at the joke; the grunts did not.
“Where did he go?” Allen asked, feeling Mouse bristle.
“See a man about a dog,” the first player replied, and took a swig of the beer—or started to take a swig of the beer, except that Mouse was suddenly at the guy’s throat. Cards and beer flew in all directions as the others upturned the makeshift table and went for their weapons—but Allen was there first, fumbling the borrowed sidearm out of his clothing.
“Hold it,” he shouted, keeping the heavy revolver pointed halfway between the two men. “We just want to know where your buddy went, and then we’ll be gone. Mouse, the guy can’t answer if you don’t give him some air.”
The big hand relaxed a fraction under the clawing fingernails, and the man choked out, “I don’t know where he went. I swear. He’s been moping around here for days, I told him to go get himself laid or something.”
“So he’s gone down to the camp for a whore?”
“Why’d he clean up for that, put on his good shirt and ribbons, for Christ sake? He was looking for a ride, said if he wasn’t back in the morning to cover for him if I could.”
“Fucker’s gone AWOL?” Mouse said incredulously.
“Fuck if I know, I’m not his baby-sitter.”
Mouse looked about to shake the man like a dog with a rat, but Allen grabbed his shoulder. “This isn’t getting us anywhere, man. Let go.”