The medals, reduced to ribbons, stood out on his chest—nothing spectacular, for the Marines are a dour bunch, not into show: only a smear of red denoting the very hot day when he’d slithered through rice water and buffalo shit with half the world shooting at him to pull a wounded PFC back into the world, to life, to possibility. The blur of purple was for the bullet that had passed through his chest a few weeks later. The rest was basically crap: a National Defense Ribbon, the in-service RSVN award, the Presidential Unit Citation for the overall III Marine Amphibious Force presence in the Land of Bad Things, the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry and expert marksman in rifle and pistol with second awards. It was no chest of fruit salad, but it did say, This man is a Marine, who’s been in the field, who was shot at, who tried to do his duty.
He adjusted the white summer cover until it came low over his blue eyes, then turned and went to face Commander Bonson.
He left the barracks and headed toward the captain’s office, where he was to be picked up. The XO wandered by and he snapped off a quick salute.
“Fenn, is that the uniform of the day?”
“For what I have to do, sir, yes, sir.”
“Fenn—Never mind. Go ahead.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Two NCOs, including Case, watched him go. By the time he reached Troop Walk, by some strange vibration in the air, everyone knew he was in his full dress blues. The men, in their modifieds, watched him with suspicion, maybe a little hostility, but above all, curiosity. The uniform, of course, was not the uniform of the day, and for a Marine to strut out in so flagrant a gesture of rebellion was extremely odd; he could have been naked and caused less of a ruckus.
Donny strode down Troop Walk, aware of the growing number of eyes upon him. He had a fleeting impression of men running to catch a glimpse of him going; even, across the way, when he passed by Center House, the base’s BOQ, a couple of off-duty first lieutenants came out onto the porch in Bermudas and T’s to watch him pass by.
He turned into the parking lot, where a tan government Ford, with a squid driving, waited by the steps; he then turned left, climbed and walked across the porch and into the first sergeant’s office, which led to Captain Dogwood’s office. The first sergeant, holding a cup of coffee with Semper Fi emblazoned on the porcelain, nodded at him, as orderlies and clerks scurried to make way.
“They’re waiting on you, Fenn.”
“Yes, First Sergeant,” said Donny.
He stepped into the office.
Captain Dogwood sat behind his desk, and Bonson and Weber, in their summer khakis, sat across from him.
“Sir, Corporal Fenn, reporting as ordered, sir,” Donny said.
“Ah, very good, Fenn,” said Dogwood. “Did you misunderstand the uniform of the day? I—”
“Sir, no, sir!” Donny said. “Sir, permission to speak, sir?”
Another moment of silence.
“Fenn,” said the captain, “I’d consider carefully before—”
“Let him speak,” said Bonson, eyeing Donny without love.
Donny turned to face the man fully.
“Sir, the corporal wishes to state categorically that he will not testify against a fellow Marine on charges of which he has no personal knowledge. He will not perjure himself; he will not take part in any proceedings involving the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Sir!”
“Fenn, what are you pulling?” asked Weber. “We had an agreement.”
“Sir, we never had an agreement. You gave me orders to investigate, which I did, against my better instincts and in contravention to every moral belief I have. I did my duty. My investigation was negative. Sir, that is all I have to say, sir!”
“Fenn,” said Bonson, fixing him with a mean glare, “you have no idea what forces you’re playing with and what can happen to you. This is no game; this is the serious business of defending the security of our nation.”
“Sir, I have fought for our nation and I have bled for our nation. No man who hasn’t has the right to tell me about defending our nation, whatever his rank, sir! Finally, sir, may I sincerely say, sir, you are an asshole and a creep and you haven’t done one thing for the United States of America, and if you want to meet me out back, let’s go. Bring Weber. I’ll kick his ass too!”
“Fenn!” said Dogwood.
“All right, Captain Dogwood,” said Bonson. “I see this is the kind of Marine you have here at Eighth and I. I’m very disappointed. This reflects on you, Captain, and my report will so state. Fenn, if I were you, I’d start packing. Don’t forget your jungle boots.”
He turned and walked out.
“That was stupid, Fenn,” said Weber.
“Fuck you, Weber, you ass-kissing creep.”
Weber swallowed and turned to Dogwood.
“Restrict him to quarters. His orders will be cut by four.”
Then he turned and walked out.
Dogwood went to the phone and talked in an intimate voice with someone. Then he hung up.
“Sit down, Fenn,” said Dogwood, turning back to Donny. “Do you smoke?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, I do.” Shaking a little, he lit up a Marlboro and went to the door.
“Welch, get in here!”
Welch scurried in.
“Yes, sir.”
“You have until four, Welch, to get liberty papers cut for Corporal Fenn; get ’em back here for my signature. Seventy-two hours. If you have to run over to personnel at Henderson Hall, you take my car and driver. Don’t stop for traffic. Do you understand?”
“Uh, well, sir, I, it’s highly irregular, I’m not—”
“You heard me, Welch,” said the captain. “Now get going.”
He turned back to Donny.
“Okay, Fenn, I can’t save you from Vietnam, but I can get you some time off before you have to go if I can get your orders cut before Bonson’s paperwork catches up with you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You go change into civvies now. You be ready to take off as soon as possible.”
“Yes, sir. I— Thank you, sir.”
“Oh, just a moment. Yes, here she is.”
A woman walked into the room, pleasant, in her late twenties. Donny recognized her from the picture on the desk as Dogwood’s wife.
“Here, Mort,” she said, handing an envelope over. She turned to Donny. “You must be very foolish, young man. Or very brave.”
“I don’t know, ma’am.”
“Fenn, here. It’s six hundred dollars, cash. It’s all we had in our quarters. It’ll take you and your girlfriend someplace for a few days.”
“Sir, I—”
“No, no, go ahead, son. Take it. Enjoy yourself. Pay it back when you can. And when you get to the ’Nam, keep your ass down. That shithole isn’t worth another Marine. Not a single one. Now go. Go, go, son. And good luck.”
PART II
SNIPER TEAM
SIERRA-BRAVO-FOUR
RSVN, I Corps
February–May 1972
CHAPTER NINE
The rain fell in torrents in I Corps. It was the end of the rainy season and no rainier season is rainier than the one in the Republic of South Vietnam. Da Nang, the capital of this dying empire, was wet, but some further hundred klicks out, wetter still, lay the fortified fire base a few of the Marines left in the Land of Bad Things called Dodge City, a ramshackle slum of sandbags, 105mm howitzers, S-shops, bunkers, barbed wire and filthy, open four-holers. It was the tail end of a lost war and nobody wanted to get wasted before the orders were cut that got these sad boys home.
But there were Marines even beyond Dodge City, out in Indian Country. There, in a tangle of scrub trees near the top of a hill identified on maps only by its height in meters—Hill 519—two of them cowered in the downpour, watching the drops accumulate on the rims of their boonie caps, gather and finally drop off, while the rain beat a cold tattoo against the ponchos that covered both of them and their gear.
One of them dreamed
of home. It was Lance Corporal Donny Fenn, and he was getting very short. In May, his four-year enlistment was up; he was home free. He knew his DEROS by heart, as did every man in the ’Nam, the ones who first came in 1965, the ones who were still there: Date of Estimated Return from Overseas Service. Donny’s was 07 May 1972. He was a two-tour guy, with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star, and though he no longer believed in the war, he did believe, passionately, that he was going to make it. He had to.
On this wet morning, Donny dreamed of dry pleasures. He dreamed of the desert, from where he’d come, Pima County, Arizona, the town of Ajo, and the hot dry air that pulsed down from the Sonoras out of Mexico, dry as the devil’s breath. He dreamed of baking in such a place, going back to college, on to law school. He dreamed of a house, of a family, a job. Most of all, he dreamed of his young wife, who had just written him, and the words were inscribed in his mind now as he sat in the downpour: “You keep your spirits high, Marine! I know you’ll make it and I pray for that day. You are the best thing that ever happened to me and I cannot live without you, so if you get killed, I am going to be plenty angry! I might never talk to you again, I would be so mad.”
He had written her back just before this boonie jaunt: “Oh, you sweet thang, I do miss you so. Things are fine here. I didn’t know spiders could get big as lobsters or that it could rain for three solid months, but these are useful facts and will come in ever so handy back in the world. But the Sarge will keep me alive, because he’s the smartest Marine that ever lived or breathed and he said if I got wasted, who the hell would he pick on and that would be no fun at all!”
Rolled into his hatband, swaddled in cellophane, was a picture of Julie, now out of her hippie phase, though she worked at the Tucson Veterans Hospital among the wounded from another war and was even talking of a nursing career now. In the picture, Julie’s beauty was like a beam in the night for a man lost and starving.
A shiver rose through Donny’s spine, a deep and relentless cold. The world had liquified: it was mud, fog or rain; no other elements existed. It was an almost incandescent world, whose low lights yielded no hint to time of day. The vapors simply floated in gray murk, a kind of universal declamation of misery.
Under his poncho he felt the coldness of one of the few M14s left in Vietnam, with a twenty-round magazine leaning into his leg, ready for instant deployment if Sierra-Bravo-Four were bounced, but that would never happen because the sergeant was so skilled at picking hides.
He carried two canteens, a 782-pack full of C-rats, mostly barbecued pork, four M26 grenades, a Colt .45 automatic, an M-49 spotting scope, a black phosphate-bladed K-Bar, ten extra twenty-round 7.62 NATO mags, three Claymore mine bandoleers, one M57 electrical firing device, a canvas bag full of flares and a flare launcher, and, enemy of his life, bane of his existence, most hated of all objects on the face of the earth, a PRC-77 radio, fourteen pounds of lifeline to Dodge.
“Commo check,” said the sergeant, who sat a few feet from Donny, gazing at the same rain-blasted, foliage-dense landscape, the plains and paddies and jungles and low, mean hills. “Get on the horn, Pork.”
“Shit,” said Donny, for deploying the radio meant moving, moving meant breaking the steamy seal the poncho had formed around his neck, which meant cold water would cascade down his neck into the sweaty warmth of his body. There was no colder place than Vietnam, but that was okay, because there was no hotter place, either.
Donny stirred in the tent of his poncho, got the Prick-77 up and on, knew its freak was preset accurately, and managed somehow, leaning it forward precariously, to let its four feet of whip antenna snap forward and out into the wet air.
He brought the phone to his ear up through his poncho and pushed the on-off toggle to ON. And, yes, a shivery blade of water sluiced down between his shoulder blades, underneath his jungle cammies. He shivered, said “Fuck” under his breath and continued to struggle with the radio.
The problem with the Pricks wasn’t only their limited range, their dense weight, their line-of-sight operational capabilities but, more critically, their short battery lives. Therefore grunts used them sparingly on preset skeds, contacting base for a fast sitrep. He pressed SEND.
“Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four, over?”
He pressed RECEIVE, and for his efforts got a crackly soup of noise. No big surprise, with the low clouds, the rain, and the terrain’s own vagaries at play; sometimes they got through and sometimes they didn’t.
He tried again.
“Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four, do you read? Is anybody there? Hello, knock, knock, please open the door, over?”
The response was the same.
“Maybe they’re all asleep,” he said.
“Naw,” said the sergeant, in his rich Southern drawl, slow and steady and funny as shit, “it’s too late to be stoned and too early to be drunk. This is the magic hour when them boys are probably alert. Keep trying.”
Donny hit the send button and repeated his message a couple more times without luck.
“I’m going to the backup freak,” he finally stated.
The sergeant nodded.
Donny spread the poncho so that he could get at the simple controls atop the unit. Two dials seemed to grin at him next to the two butterfly knobs that controlled them, one for megahertz, the other for kilohertz. He diddled, looking for 79.92, to which Dodge City sometimes defaulted if there was heavy radio traffic or atmospheric interference, and as he did, the radio prowled through the wave band of communications that was Vietnam in early 1972, propelled by the weird reality that it could receive from a far greater distance than it could send.
They heard a lost truck driver trying to get back to Highway 1, a pilot looking for his carrier, a commo clerk testing his gear, all of it crackly and fragmented as the signals in their varying strengths ebbed and flowed. Some of it was in Vietnamese, for the ARVN were on the same net; some of it was Army, for there were more soldiers than Marines left by fifty-odd thousand; some of it was Special Forces, as a few of the big A-camps still held out to the north or west; some of it was fire missions, permission to break off search, requests for more beer and beef.
Finally, Donny lit where he wanted.
“Ah, Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four, do you copy?”
“Sierra-Bravo-Four, Foxtrot-Sandman-Six here; yes, we copy. What is your sitrep, over?”
“Tell ’em we’re drowning,” said the sergeant.
“Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, we’re all wet. Nothing moving up here. Nothing living up here, Foxtrot, over.”
“Sierra-Bravo-Four, does Swagger want to call an abort? Over.”
“They want to know, do you want to call an abort?”
The hunter-killer mission was slated to go another twenty-four hours before air evac, but the sergeant himself appeared to be extremely low on the probability of contact at this time.
“Affirmative,” he said. “No bad guys anywhere. They’re too smart to go out in shit like this. Tell ’em to get us the hell out of here as soon as possible.”
“That’s an affirmative, Foxtrot-Sandman-Six. Request air evac, over.”
“Sierra-Bravo-Four, our birds are grounded. You’ll have to park it until we can get airborne again.”
“Shit, they’re souped in,” said Donny.
“Okay, tell ’em we’ll sit tight and wait for the weather to break, but we ain’t bringing home any scalps.”
Donny hit SEND.
“Foxtrot, we copy. We’ll sit tight and get back to you when the sun breaks through, over.”
“Sierra-Bravo-Four, roger that. Out.”
The radio crackled to silence.
“Okay,” said Donny, “that about ties that one up.”
“Yeah,” said the sergeant, with just a hint of a question in his voice.
“Pork,” he said after a second or two, “was you paying attention while you were going to the backup freak? You hear anything?”
The sergeant
was like a cop who could understand and decipher the densest code or the most broken-up sound bits on the radio.
“No, I didn’t hear a thing,” said Donny. “The chatter, you know, the usual stuff.”
“Okay, do me a favor, Pork.”
He always called Donny “Pork.” He called all his spotters Pork. He’d had three spotters before Donny.
“Pork, you run through them freaks real slow and you concentrate. I thought I heard a syllable that sounded like ‘gent.’ ”
“Gent? As in gent-lemen prefer blondes?”
“You got a blonde, you should know. No, as in urgent.”
Donny’s fingers clicked slowly through the chatter on the double dials as a hundred different signals came and went in the same fractured militarese, made more incomprehensible by radio abbreviations, the tangle of codes and call signs, Alpha-Four-Delta, Delta-Six-Alpha, Whiskey-Foxtrot-Niner, Iron-Tree-Three, Rathole-Zulu-Six, Tan San Nhut control, on and on, Good morning, Vietnam, how are you today, it’s raining. It meant nothing.
But the sergeant leaned forward, his whole body tense with concentration, unshivery in the wet, hardly even human in his intensity. He was a thin stick of a man, twenty-six, with a blond crew cut, a sunburn so deep it had almost changed his race, cheekbones like bed knobs, squinty gray squirrel-shooter’s eyes, 100 percent American redneck with an accent that placed him in the backwoods of some underdeveloped principality far from sophisticated living, but with an odd grace and efficiency to him.
He had no dreams, not of desert, not of a farm or a city, not of home, not of hearth. He was total kick-ass professional Marine Corps lifer, and if he dreamed of anything, it was only of that harsh and bitter bitch Duty, whom he’d never once cheated on, whom he’d honored and served on two other tours, one as a platoon sergeant in sixty-five and another running long-range patrols up near the DMZ for SOG. If he had an inner life, he kept it to himself. They said he’d won some big civilian shooting tournament and they said his daddy was a Marine too, back in World War II, and won the Medal of Honor, but the sergeant never mentioned this and who would have the guts to ask? He had no family, he had no wife or girlfriend, he had no home, nothing except the Marine Corps and a sense that he had been produced by turbulent, hardscrabble times, of which he preferred not to speak and on whose agonies he would remain forever silent.