13th Valley (6 page)

For this class the students were instructed in the stringing of barbed wire and the installation of claymore mines, trip flares and rattles. The class was asked to construct a simulated perimeter defense. Chelini was one of six men chosen to build the position and he took extra care to make the wires taut and to keep the strands close to each other. In the wires they implanted trip flares and stone-can rattles. Behind the first set of tanglefoot and under a coil of concertina Chelini hid a claymore in a clump of grass. “That'll get em,” he chuckled to the other volunteers.

After the perimeter was completed Chelini and the class watched quietly. Phan approached the exterior of the newly laid position. He was clothed only in a loincloth. With him he carried a small pair of wire cutters, a dozen sachel charges, a blade of grass in his mouth and on a string around his neck a small flat piece of wood. He lay very still in the grass before the wire. Slowly he moved his left arm forward then his right leg, his right arm, then left leg. As he inched forward like a lizard Chelini watched in awe. If Ralston was talking Chelini did not hear. They could come in like that anytime, he thought.

Phan reached the first wire which was about two inches off the ground; he removed the blade of grass from his lips. Slowly, cautiously he stroked the area before the wire, then above the wire and finally as far past the wire as he could reach. He was satisfied there were no trip wires for flares. Again, very slowly he slithered over the wire, one arm, one leg at a time. He slithered into the heart of the entanglement. Phan went over the lowest wires and under the rest, never seeming to touch any, always keeping his body suspended only minutely off the earth by his fingers and toes. He was incredibly agile—almost liquid. As he flowed through the defensive concertina strands his sinuous muscles rippled. Between each movement he placed the flat piece of wood on the earth, placed an ear to it and listened for the movement of the defenders. When he found a trip wire with the blade of grass he moved his cutters—first checking the wire for tension to insure that some alert GI had not spring-loaded the trigger mechanism—and snipped the wire in two.

He proceeded through the emplacement until he came face-to-face with Chelini's claymore mine. The sapper removed the electrical blasting cap from the mine, turned the mine around and aimed it at the audience. Once inside the perimeter he crawled to the instructor and placed his sachel charges carefully about and between the instructor's feet. Finally like a serpent Phan slid back through the wire, re-arming the claymore on his way out. Once out of range he threw several stones into the perimeter.

“GENTLEMEN!” The instructor screamed. Chelini jumped. “MOVEMENT IN THE WIRE! BLOW YOUR CLAYMORES!… You will eliminate your own life-support systems by aerating your lungs and heart group with six hundred tiny holes. Gentlemen, a hand for the master.” There was a long round of applause.

Most men received their unit orders the last day of the SERTS training course and reported directly to their units of assignment. Will Ralston was sent to division headquarters as a supply clerk. On 12 August Chelini was returned to Phu Bai to obtain his unit assignment which had been intercepted and audited because of the earlier loss and delay of his records. The new mimeographed orders—DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY, Headquarters 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile), APO San Francisco 96383—assigned James Vincent Chelini to Company A, 7th Battalion, 402d Infantry.

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A glossary of military acronyms and terms appears on page 571.

C
HAPTER
2

E
GAN

For a long time, long enough for the other passengers to move from sight, Daniel Egan stood by the landing strip. The warm air against his skin felt thick. The pervasive pollution of burning fuel oil and feces that came from bubbling waste cauldrons tended by motionless papa-sans clung to the sweat on his neck. I'm back, he said to himself. Unintelligible screeches from unseen children split in his ears. Back, he nodded. Back in Nam. There was a feeling of disgust in the pit of his stomach. It was not the air; it was something else. He grabbed his suitcase, swung it off the ground, up, over him then allowed the bag to crash down atop his head. He balanced the suitcase and began slowly ascending the slight incline toward the cluster of buildings. He heard a clashing of gears, mental gears grinding. “Fuckin place hasn't changed,” he said softly. “Fuckin place never changes.”

He paced up the path slowly, the suitcase shading his head. Without altering his metered pace he produced a package of Ruby Queen Vietnamese cigarettes. The package was pale turquoise. On one side was a drawing of a family—the father wearing a helmet, the mother in a conical straw hat and the child bareheaded. On the other side there was a charging infantryman in silhouette. He removed a short fat cigarette with his lips and returned the pack to his pocket. The smell of the tobacco was harsh. With his right hand he took a book of OD moisture-resistant matches from another pocket, bent the cover back, rolled a match so the tip was on the striking surface and snapped his fingers to strike. He lit the cigarette and blew the match out. “Fuck it,” he whispered. “Don't mean nothin.”

He continued his perfectly metered pace all the while scanning the installation before him, the path he walked on, the sides of the trail. Don't nothin move, he snarled. Don't nothin fuckin move. The thought felt good.

Egan had spent the preceding six days on R&R in Sydney, Australia. From King's Cross he had returned to Phu Bai via Tan Son Nhut and Da Nang. In his new civilian clothes he felt clean and the Nam atmosphere disgusted him. Yet it was not the air. Nor was it the war. He shook his head almost imperceptibly. “Drive on, Mick,” he whispered.

Daniel Egan was a thin man, five-ten but only 150 pounds. He had played football in college at 185 but he'd lost much of the bulk of a linebacker after he'd quit playing in his junior year. He'd lost twenty more pounds on the boonierat diet. What remained was bone and tight muscle, a shock of red hair on a head where freckles had sunburnt to large brown blotches and light blue eyes that seemed to say, “Don't ask.”

In Sydney, with a bitchy little Sydneysider, he had discovered moments when the Nam was forgotten. There was nothing in Sydney to evoke thoughts of Nam. His thoughts there had been of other things and the only reminder of Vietnam had been himself.

He searched the trail automatically now, unconscious of the scrutinizing jerkiness of his eyes. At Sammy Lee's Cheetah Room on Pitt Street he had found a lady. The moment had been awkward but then he had always had awkward moments with ladies. He smiled inwardly. How quickly he had adjusted to the civilized world. It had startled him each time he remembered the appropriate thing to say or to do. It was there, he thought, with her, that I got this feeling. But it wasn't her. He started. Suddenly he realized he was searching the trail, searching for booby traps. The gears of his mind chattered, resisting for another moment, then meshing, changing. Healthy animal paranoia returned; he felt comfortable.

When Daniel Egan originally arrived in-country he did not understand what he was seeing. The contrast between Nam and the World did not seem immense. Now the contrast was numbing. He stared at the Nam around him. Much of it was beautiful. It had been a long time since he had seen the beauty. In February of '69 as a new Shake'n'Bake sergeant, Egan had walked up this same path for his initial in-processing to the 101st. He had been apprehensive but he was determined to make a good showing of himself. At that time terrorist/sapper probes of the perimeter at Phu Bai and in the surrounding villages were not uncommon. Enemy rocket and mortar explosions bi-weekly disturbed Phu Bai life. By August 1970, with the ever-increasing effectiveness of the 101st and its Vietnamese counterpart, the 1st ARVN Infantry Division, Phu Bai was nearly totally secure. The last 122mm rocket had landed within its perimeter on 11 November 1969. Except for the grunts in from the line units, who were seldom without their M-16s, no one carried weapons. Phu Bai had become a casual post, a place where permanent personnel wore starched jungle fatigues and spit-shined jungle boots and worked an eight-to-five day.

As Egan approached the buildings of the personnel center he became aware of the ever-present thumping of unseen helicopters and then of the strange feeling in his gut.

He had first gone into the jungle in March of '69 with Company C, 1st Battalion, 502d Infantry. It was the beginning of Operation Kentucky Jumper, an assault on NVA base camps and supply areas in the A Shau Valley. The first day with his unit his company was mortared and seven men were killed. The next day they were mortared again and he swore he'd never stay in the field. For thirty-three days his unit made regular contact, culminating with the Battle of Dong A Tay, Bloody Ridge, 26 April '69, where ninety NVA soldiers were killed. US casualties had been reported only as “heavy” but Egan found 50 percent of his platoon no longer existed.

After Dong A Tay the battalion was extracted and moved to the rear for a brief stand-down and in typical guerilla style the NVA retaliated as hard and as fast as they could. In the middle of the first afternoon of relaxation Egan's company area was hit by fifteen 122mm rockets and he came closer to getting blown away than when he was in the boonies. The rockets were indiscriminate, impersonal and impossible to stop once they were incoming. Egan and his friends low-crawled, scrambled, dove into the trenches. A man named Simpson, lying next to Egan in the trench, was hit by a stone ricocheting from the blast of a 122 exploding only feet away. The stone shattered Simpson's left knee and the joint lubricating fluid reacted within his veins, clotting the blood. Within minutes Simpson was dead.

Egan freaked. He cussed out his company commander. He screamed at the battalion commander and he told the first sergeant he was going to scatter his shit to the wind.

Two days later he found himself back in the boonies, humping a ruck with Company B, 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry, and within ten days he was a squad leader on the Laotian side of the A Shau. Operation Apache Snow commenced. It took Egan up Hill 937, Dong Ap Bai, Hamburger Hill. That battle pitted one ARVN and three US battalions against the reinforced 29th NVA Regiment. The 29th was dug into the mountain's crest. Enemy resistance was softened by a thousand tons of bombs and sixteen thousand rounds of artillery but the NVA tunnel and bunker complex was deeply buried and the final infantry sweep required bloody, close-in fighting.

With his platoon pinned down by intense automatic weapons fire Egan maneuvered his squad close to the enemy bunkers. Then under the suppressive fire of his fire teams he insanely charged the bunkers with fragmentation grenades. He destroyed two emplacements and killed four NVA soldiers. His thoughts began to slide backwards, to become primitive. His behavior became guided by a more fundamental code. Months later he was awarded a Bronze Star medal with V-device “for heroism in ground combat against a hostile force.” He spat at it.

Egan's eyes darted back and forth across the Phu Bai base. Keep yer ass covered, Mick, he told himself. Keep yer eyes en ears open, yer mouth shut. Just cause yer paranoid don't mean they aint out to get ya.

After Hamburger Egan began to feel that he had become a machine. He had seen new friends die: six men from his company, two from his platoon, one from his squad. And the wounded. That was worse. But he did not freak—not immediately. He became the machine, hard and invulnerable. “Don't mean nothin,” he had learned to say. “Just say, ‘Fuck it,' and drive on.”

On the third night of the stand-down after Dong Ap Bai Egan got very drunk and very stoned and his old indignation revived and he stood in front of the brigade officer's club screaming. “FUCKERS. MOTHER FUCKERS. COCKSUCKIN MOTHER FUCKIN REMFS. I'M HOLDIN YOU PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR GREER EN MILLS. EN FOR KANSAS CITY. I'M HOLDIN COURT. ME EN GOD. RIGHT FUCKIN HERE, FUCKERS. RIGHT FUCKIN NOW. YOU FUCKIN PIGS. YER GUILTY. YER GUILTY OF SENDIN KANSAS CITY EN MILLS EN ME UP THEM FUCKIN HILLS.

YER GUILTY OF SENDIN MILLS EN GREER UP INTO THEM FIFTY ONE CALS. I'M SENTENCING YOU ALL TO DEATH BY M-A. FUCKIN LIFER PIG REMFS …”

Someone had hit Egan from behind and had carried him off to a bunk. The next morning he had found himself an E-2 Private with a choice of standing court-martial for attempted murder or of transferring to the 7th of the 402d. He chose the transfer. Over the next few months he became more paranoid, more defensive, more closed. He became sly. They called him The Boonierat. When men got together during stand-down they would swap stories of the things they had seen him do. “You wanta see something beautiful, Man?” an infantryman would say to another when they were drinking. “Then you oughta see Egan in contact. Him and maybe Pop. Nothin can touch em. Man, Egan is so fast, so powerful … Man, it's like … it's like beauty. It's just beautiful.” And the second soldier would say, “I know. I seen him once. That 16's like his hand, like he was born with it. I seen him kill four dinks with four rounds. And they was firin at him. I shit you not.”