Fallen Angels (23 page)

Lobel was sitting against a tree. When I saw him I froze. His eyes were open but there was no expression in them.

“Lobel!” I called to him.

“Wha?”

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit, I thought you were dead.”

He smiled. His face was caked with dirt, and the smile showed his teeth. The blank expression in his eyes never changed.

We waited until almost 1200 hours before Gearhart signaled for us to move out. We moved back down the hill. We backed down the best we could. We got to the bottom and then ran the distance back to the paddy. Then we started back through it. It began to rain lightly.

The trip back through the paddy went faster than it did the other way. We got away from the paddy and started moving toward the LZ. Stewart was already there when we got there. He was pissed.

He told Gearhart to “get over to the command post.” Gearhart glanced toward us and then left.

“What was that all about?” Lobel and Walowick came over to where the rest of the squad was already sitting.

“All I know is that Gearhart got the order to regroup here,” Jamal said.

“It’s my lunch time,” Peewee said. “So we had to break.”

“Check your weapon,” Dongan said to Johnson.

“It’s okay,” Johnson said, not moving.

“I said check your fucking weapon!”

Johnson looked up at Dongan and then started stripping the sixty.

“What makes you such a hotshot?” Monaco asked Dongan.

“When you were still pissing your pants I was kicking ass, kid,” Dongan said. “This ain’t no fucking war. These slants can’t fight. You go up against the Koreans, then you got your damn hands full.”

We listened to Sergeant Dongan talk about how hard things had been in the Korean war, and how tough the Koreans had been. I didn’t care. I hadn’t been in Korea, and I hadn’t been in any other wars. I was in Nam, here and now, and here is where my war was.

Gearhart came back. Brunner, kissing ass as usual, got up from a box he was sitting on so Gearhart could sit on it. Gearhart sat on it. I didn’t think Lieutenant Carroll would have done that.

“The Vietnamese officer, Colonel Hai, has changed his mind,” Gearhart said. “Now he wants his men to take the hill.”

“We was on the damn hill already,” Peewee said. “That’s why Stewart is pissed,” Gearhart said. “After we reached the hill without drawing fire, Hai thinks it’s safe. So he’ll send his men up, then he’ll write up his report and take credit for the body count.”

“What we do, stay here?”

“No, we follow them back up the hill,” Gearhart said.

The ARVNs had an ONTOS, an antitank weapon, that was supposed to lead the way. But there was no way the tracked vehicle was going to get through the mud. And if it did get to the base of the hill, there was no way it was going up the hill through the trees unless somebody chopped out a path for it. At least we didn’t have to do that.

The ARVNs got into a staging area and started moving out. We sat and watched as what looked like almost a full company of little soldiers moved out. They were bunched too tightly, and they were moving too quickly.

They left a small headquarters contingent behind as they moved out. Charlie Company moved out after the tail end of the ARVNs, which were mostly mortar teams. We followed Charlie Company.

It was 1320 hours.

The first fire came from the flank. Two squads of ARVNs moved out to suppress it.

“I don’t like it,” Dongan said. “That’s about where we were on the first trip. I bet you got the Second over there.”

He was talking about the Second North Vietnamese Regiment. I had heard about them. They had been operating in Quang Ngai and just southeast of Tam Ky, but the marines had beaten them pretty badly. If it was the Second Regulars, they would be more disciplined, and better armed than the VCs.

The flank fire seemed to move the whole battalion toward it and toward the paddies. I didn’t want to go through the paddies again.

“Incoming!” Monaco yelled and we hit the ground.

The mortar shells landed behind us. They were long again. Long but walking. They had spotters who saw where the shells were landing, and who were directing the fire. They kept shortening up the range to get closer and closer to us. And the shells were coming fast.

The noise was terrible. Every time a mortar went off, I jumped. I couldn’t help myself. The noise went into you. It touched parts of you that were small and frightened and wanting your mommy. Being away from the fighting had weakened my stamina. It did even more to my nerves. I was shaking. I had to force myself to keep my eyes open.

The South Vietnamese ahead of us had just cleared the paddies when the whole damned hill seemed to explode with gunfire.

I was thirty meters into the paddies. The shells exploding in the paddy sent water in huge cones into the air. The ARVNs on the far edge of the paddy, and those who were trapped in the open space between the paddy and the hill’s wood line were being cut down in waves. Some started to come back into the paddy. Others, in the paddy, were trying to get out to dash across the open space to the wood line.

“Get back! Get back!” Gearhart had turned around and crouched over, one hand holding his helmet.

We started moving back. The ARVNs around us didn’t seem to know what to do. I didn’t know what to do, either.

I slipped in the mud and went straight down. I tried to hold my piece out of the water, but I wasn’t sure if I did or not. Then there was fire from our rear. We were trapped in the paddy! I was on my knees, water up to my waist.

“Stay away from the dikes and work back toward the staging area!” Gearhart called out.

Suddenly there were jets in the skies above us. I watched one as it dove toward the hill, and pulled up just after releasing a bomb. I turned to see the napalm explode and then roll up the hill in a billowing cloud.

An ARVN soldier was struggling to keep moving. He had been hit and the water around him was red with blood. I put my arm under his and lifted him the best I could. Monaco grabbed him by the other side, and we dragged him along.

“Keep going! Keep going!” Lieutenant Gearhart’s voice.

We reached the wood line and laid the ARVN guy down. A medic came over, looked at him, and pulled him into a sheltered space.

“Hit that line!” It was Peewee’s voice. “Johnson, hit that line!”

I turned to see what he was pointing at. There was a row of bushes that almost completely hid the muzzle flashes coming from their midst. Johnson got down in a prone position and started stitching the bushes. We all went down and started firing.

There were Congs on the hill behind us, and Congs to our flanks. We kept moving toward the line of bushes, and I saw some of them moving out. Johnson cut them down as they ran.

There were stands of trees every hundred yards or so along the rice paddies leading to the hill. We hit the first stand and fought from tree to tree. I got behind a tree and took clips from my belt. They were wet, and I shook them and blew on them to get the water off.

There were hundreds of ARVNs still in the paddies. They were being cut up pretty bad. Many were wounded and screaming. Some of the ARVNs had just stopped where they were and were holding their hands to their heads. They had freaked out completely. Some guys from Charlie Company had tried to get out along the dikes and now lay dead on them. One kept waving his arm in the air. He was still alive.

Another guy from Charlie Company started out after him. I turned away and started firing at the wood line.

“Move it out! Move it out! We’ll get pinned here!”

Get pinned shit, we were pinned. The wood line was alive with Congs, but we kept moving toward them.

The jet above saw what was going on and came down and raked the wood line. He dropped a bomb that shook the ground. I flinched as the heat from it came over me like a rush. Gearhart was screaming something. I got up and started moving toward the wood line again.

There were fifty, maybe sixty, meters to the next stand of trees. When I got to it, I went down and pushed along on my belly. I saw Lobel pushing along a few meters from me.

The flak jacket caught on everything. I couldn’t move with it on. I took it off.

I felt a hundred pounds lighter. We pushed through the wood line until we reached a clearing.

The firing stopped. For a few seconds there was absolute silence, and then everything started up again as heavily as it had been. It was as if somebody had changed channels and then switched back to the war. From the paddies I could hear the screaming of wounded men, mostly Vietnamese. They cried out in high-pitched voices that sounded almost like cats wailing.

We were under cover and held our position.

Gearhart was running by, saw Johnson, and ran to him. He didn’t say anything, he just collapsed near him. I saw him feel his chest, and I thought he might have been wounded. Then I saw him pull out a cigarette. His hands were shaking too badly to light the cigarette, and Johnson took it and lit it for him.

Gearhart took a deep draw on the cigarette, then seemed to pull himself together.

I looked around for Peewee and saw him and Monaco together. They had got another sixty from somewhere and were firing it across the clearing.

I looked for the soldier from Charlie Company who had been waving his arm at the dike. I saw him, just his shoulders and an outstretched arm out of the water.

Captain Stewart was coming over toward us. Beyond him I saw guys moving out across the open space. We were getting the hell away from the hill, but I didn’t know where we were going. Stewart had blood on his face, but I couldn’t see if he was hit or not.

Gearhart waved me over. He told me to keep an eye on Jamal. I said I would.

“This is too hot for a dust-off area,” Stewart was saying to Gearhart. “There’s a little village down this road. The VC must have it, but their main force is on the hill. The squad the ARVNs chased went back to the mountain.”

“That the Second?”

“I guess so,” Stewart said. “But we can’t sit out here. We need to get to the village and get picked up from there. We can’t hold these positions much longer.”

Stewart told Charlie Company to move out first, but when he saw what was left of it he had us all move out together. Jamal had hurt his hand, maybe even broken it, but he was okay except for being winded.

We went on a forced march for ten minutes toward the village. We knew when we reached it as the first men started to fall.

The ARVN troops, still not reorganized, caught up with us as we formed a perimeter and tried to get into the village. Some of them ran past us. We watched them get hit and start running back. I was afraid they would start firing on us. Then I saw that many of them had even dropped their weapons.

I saw the area that Captain Stewart had been talking about. It would make an iffy dust-off area at best. Choppers could get in and out fairly quickly, but it would be easy for the Cong guns on the hill to hit. Maybe our artillery could keep them quiet. But there was no way the choppers could move in if we didn’t take the village.

Colonel Hai finally got what was left of his outfit together and attacked the village. They went on what looked like a suicide charge into the village. As they ran they began to fall. They fell according to how they were hit. If they were hit in the head they bent backward or whirled around. Sometimes a man hit in the head would go several more stumbling steps before falling.

If they were hit in the body they would just lean forward, as if they were reaching for the ground, and then collapse.

“Let’s go!”

We moved out. Johnson and Monaco were behind us covering us with the sixty. They had given the other sixty to an ARVN squad.

We ran forward, desperately searching for something to get behind as the bullets whined about us, kicking up dirt and snapping branches. A fresh company of ARVNs had swung around the flank. We were closing in on the village.

I was on the ground. I was hurting. My arms and shoulders ached. I loaded another clip, and started firing. It was a hamlet, the same thatched roofs, the same smell of burnt bamboo. We fired into the village, trying to chop down anything we could see.

Johnson moved the sixty up and got it into place. Monaco loaded again. It was time for the rest of us to get up, to charge again.

I was tired, so tired. There was nothing to do but to go on. It came to me that we had the hamlet surrounded, so there was nothing for the Congs to do but to defend the village. We were here, and they were here, and the only thing to take care of was the dying.

I ran on. I saw Peewee throwing a grenade. A good idea. I snatched a grenade from my belt and threw it through the window of a hut. Shit. I had forgotten to take the damn pin out. I started firing through the window when I saw the grenade come out. I jumped away, twisting my body as I saw it bounce. It bounced toward me. My hands went up. I tried to turn my chest away. I didn’t want to see it, but I couldn’t turn away. I looked. It still wasn’t armed.

I grabbed it and pulled the pin out, arming it. I threw it again. It went through the same window. This time it exploded.

I was on my feet. Running toward the hut, firing at nothing, at everything.

So tired. I couldn’t get my arms up. We went from hut to hut. I wanted to rest. Just for a moment. I saw two ARVNs and a GI go into a hut, their pieces ready. Another GI was outside; he tossed a grenade through the window. The explosion ripped away a side of the hut.

It happened in an instant. A split moment of pain and confusion. A guy had just nailed the two ARVNs and the GI who had walked in the door of the hut. In another instant I swung my rifle toward the soldier who had thrown the grenade. He turned right and moved toward another hut as I lowered my weapon and turned left.

A cart, one wheel blasted off, sat in front of a low building that could have been made out of concrete. A soldier sat on the ground, leaning against the wheel. There was an irregular circle of blood spreading over his T-shirt. He seemed to be trying to wipe it away with his hand.

We reached the far end of the hamlet. Monaco was in front when we reached the last hut. I caught up with him. Johnson was lugging the sixty. We flattened ourselves against the sides of the hut, and then Johnson peppered one side of it with the sixty. Monaco took out a cigarette lighter and lit the roof.