13th Valley (60 page)

His dream convoluted. The warmth vanished. The fragrance became the odor of jungle rot and dead men. The sky's glow dimmed, became dark and ugly. A harsh glint chased Stephanie's image from the screen of his mind. Egan was petrified. He was tied down, staked out, unable to react. The sapper squatted by his side. The silver machete was in his right hand. Egan tried to move. The rope restraints cut into his wrists, his ankles. He arched his back, lifted his belly. Moonlight sparkled upon the blade and in the sapper's eyes as the dark foe raised the knife. The enemy cocked his wrist, aimed the blade for Egan's eyes, began the downward killing stroke. Egan craned his neck to avoid the slashing blade. The blade touched … Egan bolted upright panting, paranoid. Rain streamed down his face. He grabbed his forehead, his nose, his cheeks. He tasted the stream to insure it was not blood.

SIGNIFICANT ACTIVITIES

THE FOLLOWING RESULTS OF OPERATIONS IN THE O'REILLY/BARNETT/JEROME AREA WERE REPORTED FOR THE 24-HOUR PERIOD ENDING 2359 16 AUGUST 70:

AT 0950 HOURS, VICINITY YD 191298, RECON, CO E, 7/402 ENGAGED AN UNKNOWN SIZE ENEMY FORCE KILLING ONE NVA. CO B, 7/402 CONTINUED TO EXPLORE THE NVA HOSPLTAL COMPLEX THEY UNCOVERED 15 AUGUST. THE COMPLEX CONTAINED A TOTAL OF 18 BUNKERS SCATTERED OVER A SQUARE KILOMETER. SEVERAL OF THE BUNKERS WERE INTERCONNECTED BY A TUNNEL NETWORK CUT DEEPLY INTO THE MOUNTAINOUS TERRAIN. THIRTY-FOUR MEDICAL KITS AND 1100 POUNDS OF MEDICAL SUPPLIES WERE EVACUATED. A CACHE CONTAINING 100 NVA UNIFORMS AND 2400 POUNDS OF RICE WAS DESTROYED. IN AN EVIDENT INTENSIVE CARE INFIRMARY BUNKER A BODY WAS DISCOVERED ALONG WITH ONE VERY SERIOUSLY WOUNDED ENEMY SOLDIER. THE PRISONER WAS EVACUATED TO PHU BAI.

AT YD 193273, THE 1ST BN, 3D REGT (ARVN) RECEIVED RPG AND SMALL ARMS FIRE FROM AN ESTIMATED ENEMY BATTALION SURROUNDING THEIR POSITION. THE ARVN ELEMENT RETURNED ORGANIC WEAPONS FIRE RESULTING IN 38 NVA KIA AND ONE POW CAPTURED. 13 ARVN SOLDIERS WERE WOUNDED IN THE ACTION.

AT MIDDAY, FOUR KILOMETERS SOUTHWEST OF FIREBASE BARNETT, ONE US SOLDIER FROM CO A, 7/402 WAS KILLED BY A SNIPER. THE UNIT RETURNED FIRE WITH UNKNOWN RESULTS.

C
HAPTER
23

17 A
UGUST
1970

Cherry had changed, had been changing. He had begun changing long before but now the alteration accelerated. He had changed from play-soldier to trainee, then from state-side soldier to REMF soldier and then to cherry soldier. They were changes which happened to him, not changes of him, changes which occurred because the army had moved him. Those changes were not great. On 17 August he changed greatly, he changed to just plain soldier.

“We're startin back,” Cherry radioed Quiet Rover. It was not yet first light. “We're on our way back,” he lied.

“Ah, roger that Two Two,” El Paso replied. At the CP El Paso was on radio watch again. He rolled and woke Brooks. “Ambush team comin back in.”

“Uh! What time is it?”

“Oh five-four-eight,” El Paso said.

First light was approaching. Cahalan stirred beside El Paso. Above them Doc was going through his aid bag. The sky's blackness softened. It was still raining. Brooks got up and relieved himself against a tree below their position.

“We're at the blue feature,” Cherry radioed in a fictitious progress report fifteen minutes after his first call. All the soldiers at the CP were up, folding ponchos, cleaning weapons, brushing teeth. The guards were up too. They had humped to the NDP in lights which meant they had not brought food. Some of them bitched about being hungry. Doc Johnson passed amongst them handing each man a Monday Pill, a large, orange quinine anti-malaria tablet. Everyone swallowed one. The Monday Pill was very seldom discarded. It was a big bright orange pill, it looked important, and it marked the passing of another week. That gave it ritual significance.

At 0625 Cherry radioed the CP again to give his position and determine theirs. They were very close. In fact they were less than fifty meters from 1st Plt.

After the ambush squad had blown its cover by engaging suspected enemy movement on the LZ, they had backed off Hill 636 and, in the dark, had wormed back down to the ravine. “Fuck the L-T,” Silvers had said. “We aint stayin here. That'd be suicide.” They all agreed. At the ravine they crossed the stream, discussed setting up but decided to move up. Silvers had followed the trail down but he had not known where to go up. He had simply set a compass course and stumbled in one general direction mumbling to himself the entire time, “God don't let the gooks be here. God don't let the gooks be here.” Quite by accident they had found a small indentation in the hill, which was partially protected from the elements and in the dark appeared very defensible. They had devised a guard/ radio watch schedule—two awake, seven asleep—and, exhausted from the day's work, had slept. Every two hours the guards changed. Every hour the CP called for a situation report. For Cherry, for all of 1st Sqd except Silvers who bore the responsibility of their move, it had been the best night of sleep since stand-down.

The ambush team stood up and marched in silently.

Whiteboy, Egan and Thomaston greeted them. “What'd you guys fire up?” Egan asked.

“Gooks,” Lairds laughed.

“Let's go over it,” Thomaston said. He pumped them with questions, received vague answers about movement and asked them if they would like to return for a first light check, “Which you shoulda done before you left.”

“Augh, Man,” Silvers groaned, “we just humped back.”

“I'll go,” Egan volunteered. “Who wants to tricky-trot up there with me?”

In lights the recon element, Egan, Whiteboy, Moneski and his gun team and Hoover with the radio, moved very quickly. They were to the LZ and back in forty minutes.

“Hey,” Egan laughed when they returned. “Hey Silvers. Here's your gook. Here's the gook you got last night.” On the end of his rifle Egan had an American fatigue shirt that had been blown to hell. Half the platoon clustered close to see. They were all laughing.

Whiteboy guffawed. “Yer squad finally got a body count.” Whiteboy threw the shirt up into a tree. “It was just a dang-a-lin lahk that,” he laughed.

“Ah, that don't prove nothin,” Numbnuts protested. Everyone laughed at him.

Egan grabbed the shirt and tossed it at Silvers playfully. “Here's your gook, Leon.”

They were uncharacteristically loud. Cherry laughed along with them all, not saying a word.

1st Plt and the company CP retraced their steps across the ridge, into the ravine and up, and rendezvoused with 2d and 3d Plts. The unit's field force now stood at eighty-three, down from ninety on the morning of 16 August if the PIOs and correspondent and the dog team and Ridgefield were included: eighty-three men with the mission of descending into the Khe Ta Laou to assault the suspected Headquarters of the 7th NVA Front, eighty-three soldiers assigned to search out and destroy a suspected, long occupied, extensively developed and heavily defended supply base and staging area.

The company moved in column down a finger toward the valley. 2d Plt led followed by the CP and then 3d. 1st Plt hung back as rear security. The column moved quickly at first; then, as the point element hit thicker and thicker vegetation, the column barely edged forward. The terrain became steeper. Standing was exhausting. Rucks dug deeply into shoulders. The straps pulled at shoulder skin made resistant by the continuing rain. The skin distorted from the pressure and felt as if it were ripping. Arms became weary from holding weapons, from grasping small trees for handholds to keep from sliding, from pushing and lifting bodies and rucks back up after they had fallen. The point pulled his machete and selectively sliced a trail. Behind point one hundred and sixty-six boots mulched the cuttings into the mud and sections of the trail became slides. Alpha came to a series of cliffs. 1st Plt sent forward the ropes Egan had used at the tunnel. The point rigged them for rappeling and the column descended.

From the top of the first cliff Cherry glared down at the valley. It was the closest he had come. He, all the boonierats, had been looking at it for four days, glimpsing it through breaks in the vegetation, through a waxing and waning fog shroud. Cherry glared down upon it. Beneath the fog there would be a different world. Over he went, rappeled.

The column continued to descend. The morning was quiet except for the rain and the noise of men slipping and falling, and the bursting of artillery far to the northeast. By noon the point element of the column reached the first rolling hills, mounds, between the steep slope of the finger and the valley floor. The boonierats set up a defensive perimeter and rested. The 1st Sqd of the 1st Plt, the farthest extreme of the column, was only halfway down the finger, still in the cliffs. For them the trail had become so mushed by the preceding troops, they had to crawl backward and dig their fingers into the thick slop to keep from tumbling off the trail and into the jungle below.

The column expanded into an elongated egg about the first mound as the troops at the rear completed the steep descent. Alpha was half-in, half-above the valley fog, a thick sticky-feeling mist through which the rain continued to fall but through which no one could see. The vegetation about them was as different from the trees and vines of the ridge as it would have been if they had crossed space to another planet. It was gray scraggle brush, low, only five to ten feet high, and it was so incredibly dense, except on paths, it was impossible to even shove an arm deeply into it. With the mist it made the boonierats uneasy and frightened. It was another world, the NVA's world. Hand signals passed unnecessarily: maintain strict noise discipline, keep movement to a minimum. Egan moved a thumb toward his open mouth signaling to Cherry, eat. Cherry passed the signal to Doc McCarthy behind him and slipped from his ruck.

Along with all his other aches and stiffness, Cherry found the skin of his thighs was raw. Shit, Man, he said to himself, what if I got a case of the black syph. Oh shit. Maybe I got it from movin them barrels of shit down at Cam Ranh. Cherry glanced about him then unbuttoned his pant fly. He looked at his legs. Patches of skin on his inner thighs from his testicles down about four inches were brightly inflamed. The rainwater dripping from his hands onto the chafed skin burned. “Oh God,” Cherry moaned. He did not want to tell anyone because he was embarrassed by the location of the sores and also because he feared it might be something serious. He had heard stories about strains of venereal disease immune to penicillin and all other modern drugs. There were rumors of an American colony on Guam of infected men from Vietnam that the government would not allow to return to the States. He looked at the rash again. It was on his balls too. Oh shit. Oh shit, oh shit. Cherry tried to recall from his biology classes what the incubation period for syphilis was. He looked down. Goddamn, each day it gets worse, he thought. He thought about how it had progressed, spoke it to himself as if he were telling a medic. “Doc,” he said to himself, “it's really gettin bad. I don't know where I could a got it. I aint even sure what it is but I can hardly walk with it.”

Lt. Brooks had been working his way around Alpha's perimeter. He very quietly asked questions and advice. When he reached Egan he squatted. Egan was sitting in a puddle. He appeared comfortable. The L-T and Egan tapped fists. “If you were a little people,” Brooks asked, “where would you be?”

“If I knew somebody was comin after me?” Egan asked.

“Yeah,” Brooks said.

“Are you rulin out the tunnels in the hills?”

“Yep. Down here. Where?”

“I'd be leavin a trail so you'd follow me to my battleground.”

“Where?”

“Away from my headquarters.”

“Where would you put your headquarters?”

“Away from the trail I'd want you to follow.”

Brooks pulled out his topo map. “Show me.”

Egan looked at the map. He studied it. “Not in the foothills, we might come down on them. Not on the flat, too easy for the birds to fire em up. Ah, unless they got some Russian tanks in here, ya know, L-T …”