Fields of Fire (42 page)

The company set up in a hasty perimeter around the tank. Hodges joined the conference with the tank commander, who was talking with Captain Crazy. The tank commander was a Gunny. He was very thick, with rolls of fat around his bare midsection, faded tattoos on both arms, and folds of loose skin on his face and neck. He kicked the tank and looked fearfully at the treeline in front of it.

“This ain't no goddamn place for a tank is all. I been driving tanks for eighteen years, I know where tanks should be. And this ain't no place for tanks.” He turned to Captain Crazy. “I'll be honest with you, Captain. I'm surprised we made it this far. Yup. I'm damned surprised. You take these choppy little fields, all these damn hedgerows. No damn roads. And the treelines—hell, there's only certain places we can make it through those damn treelines. Shit, Captain, it was just a matter of time is all. They were waiting for us. Yessir, they were just sitting there waiting. We were lucky it was the tread.” He eyed the Skipper tentatively. “Anyway, we'll be here all damn night, I guess. We can't get parts in till tomorrow. I called. They'll have the part out to Marble Mountain first thing. Yup.” He surveyed the shadowed treelines that loomed in all directions, near and far, like bleak promises. “This ain't no place at all.”

It was midafternoon. The sky descended again, as the day before, turning white and then gray as the rain formed spontaneously without the ceremony of threatening clouds. The rain fell in shivering sheets, catching them hot and sweating with its suddenness. A helicopter powered through the wet air, moving lazily toward them. It descended inside their exhausted perimeter, pausing for one moment as it discharged its cargo, then powered off, whipping them with wet wind.

Hodges peered at its leavings. The battalion commander, new to Vietnam, had jumped a portion of his command post in from Liberty Bridge. He stood in the wet mud with three radiomen, a Major who was his operations officer, and a scowling, jowly First Lieutenant.

Kersey.

36

“I don't give a damn what your Lieutenant said, I said move your holes out! When battalion CP is in your perimeter, it controls it. Now, don't give me a bunch of your wise-ass shit, Corporal. Move your holes out.”

Snake stood on the traveled paddy dike that was the village's edge, looking out into the open field. He had set his squad in behind the dike, where it would have a natural abutment, impenetrable by even B-40 rockets. A position in the paddy itself would be mercilessly exposed to the treeline that ran in front of the lines. He remembered the last time he had caved in to Kersey's demands, when Speedy's team was destroyed at Liberty Bridge.

“There ain't no way, Lieutenant. That's stupid.”

Kersey was enraged. “Listen, you little shit. This perimeter is so goddamned screwed up there's only one family hootch inside it—”

“We didn't ask to set up in a paddy around no goddamn tank.”

“—and the Colonel's gonna have that hootch!” Family hootches were highly prized by staffs. There were the bunkers when mortars fell. There was the thatch when it rained. The hootch was just down from Snake's hole, right on the edge of the lines. “And that means you're going to move your lines out to protect it.”

Snake suppressed a grin as he stared back into Kersey's hating eyes. What are you gonna do if I say no, Lieutenant? Cut my hair off and send me to Vietnam? He remembered earlier battles with Kersey, ten and eleven months before, when Wild Man Number One had finally run out of patience and ended Kersey's bush tenure with a bullet in each of his legs. Before, every day, it was like this. The nonsensical battles, the jockeying for status inside the platoon and between Kersey and the other platoon commanders. This dude, mused Snake again, is a sick puppy.

“I ain't doing it unless my Lieutenant tells me to.”

Kersey's lips went tight. “All right. Go get him.”

Snake stared deep into Kersey's face. The rain poured down from his helmet, in front of it, like a veil. Snake pointed. “He's setting up a platoon CP, if you wanna talk with him. Sir.”

“I gave you a direct order to go get him.” Kersey paused, as if remembering. “But before you do, there's another thing. And this can't wait. The Major saw three gooks running down that treeline about five minutes ago. Get a team and go check it out. Now.”

Snake peered into the treeline. It merged with the perimeter just down from his squad lines. The company had set up in the paddy, around the tank, with one small section of lines in the village. The treeline was the continuation of the village. It was a natural avenue of attack. Snake and Hodges had already decided to place a listening post inside it after dark. It was thick and gloomy, ominous under wet, shadowed skies. Kersey's right, Snake decided. We better check that out, put an OP in it.

“All right. Sir.”

“And then go get your Lieutenant.”

Snake nodded, heading toward Goodrich. Yeah. I'll go get my Lieutenant. And after I tell him what you got in mind he's gonna personally take a bite outa your ass. And if you want somebody in that paddy, you're gonna have to go out there yourself.

He reached Goodrich. “Senator.” Goodrich was asleep, totally exhausted. His face was uncovered as he lay on his back, oblivious to the rain that washed it. “Hey, Senator. Wake up.” Snake booted Goodrich in the chest.

“Get your team together. Hurry up.”

Goodrich lay, his head back in wet weeds, trying to awaken. Rain pattered on his face but instead of a cold irritant it was a lullaby. He felt his dull mind drifting back toward sleep's warm escape and then was stunned by the sharp jolt of a hard, rough hand. He sat up quickly, suddenly chilled and angry.

“You didn't have to hit me!”

“I'm sorry. I forgot to set your snooze alarm. Now wake the fuck up. We got movement. Get your team. We need an OP out there in that treeline, right now.”

“I thought you said we had the LP tonight.”

“Change of plans. Take the OP, and I'll have Cat Man's team take the LP tonight. They're digging in. You can have their fighting holes. Now, get going. Take your team and check the treeline out, maybe a hundred meters down it. Be careful. We seen some gooners in there just a minute ago. Then drop back a little and set in. Let us know where you are, and Cat Man can relieve you just before dark.”

Goodrich searched out his team, rubbing the parts of his skin that were becoming numb from the wetness. He measured it out, trying to concentrate through the dull fear that fogged his logic. An outpost was better than a listening post. After what had happened on the Bridge, and after his visit to Regimental Legal, he dreaded the thought of spending a night in front of his own lines. Too easy for accidents, he mused. It's bad enough when you have to worry about what's in front of you.

THEY stood in a weathered huddle at the edge of the treeline, peering into it, searching for chimeras. The rain had soaked them so thoroughly, was such a part of them and so inescapable, that they were no longer even conscious of it. They feared the shadowed caverns of the treeline, though, and were conscious of every menace, each clump or bend that threatened them.

Goodrich searched the gloom before them on the trail. He was so tired that his mind felt numb. He was nonetheless petrified of the treeline, especially following the morning's revelations, and the hump to the tank. They're really out there, he thought numbly. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them, waiting to kill us. He looked at the uncomprehending faces of his fire team, made up entirely of new arrivals. How can they understand? It's still like TV to them. They don't know what can be in that treeline. Uh-uh.

The rain was now so loud on their helmets that Goodrich almost had to shout to be heard. “That's a badass treeline. We could get hit from five feet away in there.” The team stared naively at him, awaiting his logic.

Next to the treeline, a thin cemetery ran the length of the trees. The cemetery was in a field bordered on three sides by similar thicks of trees and hootches, the open end toward where they stood. Goodrich pointed toward the cemetery. “Let's move through the cemetery and check out the treeline from inside the mounds. We could see into the trees, and we'll have good cover. We won't get ambushed in there.”

JoJo, tall and thin, wiped rain off his nose with a huge black hand. “Snake say put it in the treeline, man. He goan’ get on yo’ case if he knows we in the cemetery.”

Goodrich was mildly rankled, no longer in awe of Snake. “You let me worry about that. We'll let 'em know where we are when we get set in. If they don't like it, they can come out here and change us.”

They walked across high wet grass and moved inside the mounds, paralleling the treeline, peering into it from thirty yards away. Halfway through the cemetery Rodeo grabbed Goodrich, his eyes scrutinizing a clump of bushes inside the trees. “I saw movement in there! No bullshit! Something moved, man!”

They knelt behind the mounds, silently watching. Three minutes. No movement. They moved cautiously along the mounds now, watching the treeline carefully.

Finally they reached the end of it. The treeline they were watching met another one that passed in front of the mounds until it joined yet another treeline that paralleled the other side, like a great, upside-down U at the end of the cemetery.

Goodrich was spooked. The whole sky hovered, gray and ominous, weeping on them. The treelines loomed, thick with vegetation, each inch holding promise of some unseen danger. And they cowered insignificantly among the mounds, inches from the forever dead of the valley. Goodrich shuddered, then turned. “Let's get out of here. Let's move on back to the other end of the cemetery.”

New Mac was frozen behind the end mound, watching carefully to his front. “Wait a minute! Something moved, man! Right out there!”

In a fraction of a second, a whole hour of events occurred. Goodrich spun around to see New Mac shoulder his weapon behind the mound, aiming in on a target. He peered across the wet grass and noticed that the target was a babysan, a little girl perhaps seven years old. The girl waved happily, smiling to New Mac's rifle.

The instinctive reaction, brought on by months of frustration, of fighting with himself and the others over just such predicaments, exerted itself before Goodrich could even comprehend his own movements. Lunging, seemingly so slowly, in that slow motion which adrenaline causes minds to assimilate lightning acts. Pushing New Mac's rifle down, even as Mac's finger slowly pulled the trigger with a jerk that would have seemed rapid to the uninvolved observer. Falling facedown next to the mound, beyond periphery, three feet outside the cemetery. Standing quickly, intent on New Mac, not the girl, New Mac leaning to help him, then aware that New Mac was watching the babysan with wide, horror-filled eyes, but not seeing the girl himself, seeing only Mac's eyes as they widened terribly at the sight of something they had only nightmared about. Then watching the center of Mac's face erupt gently with the entry of the bullet, even noticing the back of Mac's head fly apart, pieces of red and gray dripping from the back end of Mac's helmet before Goodrich finally realized that he had erred, that the babysan had dropped into a ditch, disappeared, that the roar he heard was not his own heart pumping blood madly in fear, but a cacophony of weapons aiming at him and the others from three sides, devouring them as they waited deep inside the U.

And even, not more than a second or two having passed, being able to observe with a sort of haunted, detached objectivity, his own frantic effort to retreat behind the mounds again, as if the two feet he had to run were a hundred-yard dash, a cross-country mile. And almost laughing at himself when he did not make it, when the tremendous explosion occurred in one leg, as if the inside of the leg itself was self-destructing from its effort to make the stride that it failed to accomplish. Then rolling in the wet grass in front of the mounds, thinking almost humorously that he would die like a duck on a shooting-gallery pond, squirming in front of the ambush only to give them a bit more challenge before they made mincemeat of his body.

But suddenly feeling the wondrous, welcome muck, the slant of slope, and literally swimming inside it. Bomb crater. Oh, you beautiful mudhole. He crawled inside the crater, lying at the bottom of it, inside a pool of water. The rounds passed fiercely over him, a relentless attack on Rodeo and JoJo, who did not yet fire back. He wondered numbly at his own luck, discounting the fact that he was still outside the cemetery, across an unreachable, two-foot plain of meadow. He looked up the mud slope of the crater and noticed slivers of red along the trail where he had slid down the bank. And in the grass where the mud groove began, lying motionless, was a dead part of Will Goodrich. The boot was blonded by months of misery, scuffs of dirt and wet stream crossings. The calf was mildly athletic, perfectly formed but for angry tears at its top, from the explosion.

He looked down at his left leg. Most of it was gone.

37

They were still digging their fighting holes when the cemetery erupted. They lay down flat behind the traveled dike, thinking they were being hit. They peered tensely at each other, trying to find a target to shoot back at.

Snake listened attentively. Rounds were high, mostly. Hundred meters out, maybe more. He shouted. “They ain't hitting us! That's Senator's team!”

Down the dike, Cat Man nodded affirmatively, his ears antennas. “They ain't in the treeline, man! That's the cemetery. It comes from over here, too!”

Snake screamed again. “They're getting their asses kicked. We better get out there, man!”

He chided them. He mothered them. He helped them. He scolded them. In moments they were creeping under stray rounds, fierce even at that distance, toward the cemetery. They worked in two teams, using fire and movement to get across the waste of grass into the mounds. Cat Man's team laid down a base of fire, and Cannonball's team rushed into the mounds. Cannonball's team shot into both treelines and Cat Man's team bolted. They crept through the mounds toward the end of the cemetery, under merciless fire now, but protected by the chest-high hills from direct fire. They moved quickly, sucked along as if in a vacuum, aware that this was periphery, that for all the talk of dangling bait, they now were consciously setting the hook on themselves.

Halfway to the stranded team the cemetery bottle-necked, its thinness reduced to one mound. They groped, staring at the far side. Rodeo and JoJo were visible fifty meters to their front, cowering inside the mounds, occasionally lifting a rifle and firing an unaimed burst.

Bagger huddled behind a mound, staring at the single grave in front of them. No cover. He screamed to Snake, his voice filtered by rain and rifle fire. “We can't! They know we have to cross that! Let's wait here for the React! We can cover Senator's team from here.”

Snake stared at the mound. “We can go over the top. One man at a time. Now. Put out rounds!” Cannonball fired blooper rounds steadily into both tree-lines, alternating his shots. They made flat booms in distant, wet earth. Termite and Cat Man put out LAAWs, standing quickly and shoulder-firing them. Snake ran at the mound and took a flying leap, sailing over it, bouncing just on the other side and rolling into the sanctum of more graves. He huddled against a mound and called to the squad.

“Come on! Let's go!”

The remainder of the squad stared at each other, waiting to see who would be next. Finally Cannonball shrugged, set up like a halfback, and ran for the mound. He made to leap and slipped in the wet earth, the weight of his blooper bag having caused him to slip. He fell belly-first onto the mound, his powerful legs still churning, moving him only inches at a time.

The firing increased. Bagger screamed incoherently and rushed for Cannonball, trying to push him over the mound. The blooper bag erupted with tear gas, a bullet having pierced a gas-crystal projectile, exploding it. Bagger took the brunt of the explosion in his face, which was positioned near the blooper bag. Snake had reached for Cannonball from the other side. He also was covered with the crystals. The projectile, which was designed to saturate an area and make it unlivable for six months, covered the whole squad with the powder. Bagger persisted, however, and pulled Cannonball off the mound, back to the starting side. Then he collapsed in the grass, holding his face.

The squad vomited. It ceased its covering fire. Cannonball groaned inside the mounds, shot through the leg, tear gas scorching the inside of his wound. The men huddled against the mounds as the rounds became more intense, punctuated with B-40 rockets.

Snake was alone on the other side of the single mound. He vomited twice. He cried blearily, finally clearing his eyes. All parts of his skin burned. The crystals had melted into his clothing and now sought his pores. They raged along his crotch. They filled the inside of his nose and mouth.

He made his way to the end of the cemetery, crawling along the bottom of the mounds. Rodeo and JoJo were huddled together, terrified. He crawled to them, noticed New Mac's body lying on the foremost mound, and did not see Goodrich. He screamed to the two men.

“Where's Senator?”

Rodeo screamed back, pointing to the front. “Out there!”

“Is he dead?”

“He's in a crater. He was alive a minute ago. I was talking to him. I think he's hit. I couldn't understand him.”

“Where's the crater?”

JoJo elbowed the mound he was against. “On the other side of this, man. I doan’ know how far. Senator was standin’ next to Mac.” Mac lay dead on top of the mound.

Snake crawled to the mound. Rodeo sensed his intent and sought to change his mind. “React's on the way.” He tapped the radio. “I just talked to 'em. Where's the rest of the squad? What happened?”

Snake was on top of the mound, snuggled next to Mac's body. From there he could see the far edge of the crater. It was just beyond the mound, no more than three feet away at its near edge.

“Put out rounds, man. Boo-coo rounds.”

He climbed off the mound, moved to one side of it, and made a running dive in front of it. Bandoleers sailed, hanging in the air as his body fell. The treelines erupted more fiercely. He bounced once in the grass, just at the edge of the crater, then slid down its mud embankment, bumping into Goodrich. There was a pool of water at the bottom of the crater. The water was chalky brown with mud, and streaked deeply with large amounts of blood.

Snake examined Goodrich's leg, which Goodrich had managed to tie off with a belt in one of his more lucid moments. Snake pulled the belt tighter, cutting off most of the blood flow, lacking a stick or bayonet with which to make a proper tourniquet. He lay next to Goodrich and slapped him in the face.

Goodrich turned to Snake, smiling just a bit, coming out of shock again. He had drifted on the fringes of consciousness since tying himself off. Snake turned him around, placing his head at the bottom of the crater, near the pool of water, to lessen the bleeding and bring Goodrich out of shock.

Goodrich noticed the blood streak and the deep stains in the water. He smiled again to Snake, somewhat drowsily. A B-40 rocket exploded above them. Rodeo and JoJo fired back. “Blood and water mix. It doesn't matter.”

Snake lit a cigarette, waiting for the React patrol. He huddled next to Goodrich. The cigarette was wet. Another B-40 ripped the earth above them. More small arms rounds to and from the cemetery.

“Want a smoke, Senator?”

“No. It's all the same.”

Snake puffed on his cigarette, almost languidly. “Hold on, Senator. You're gonna be O.K., man. React's almost here.”

Goodrich shook his head from side to side, his helmet gone, each wave of his head scraping off more mud in his hair like a mop. “No no no it's clear now. Blood and water mix it's all the same like paddies empty without rain and when it rains you think it's always wet but when the rain stops it's gone and you never even know. It's like blood. I know now. They mix.”

Snake took another drag from his smoke. “You hit anywhere else? How'd that happen? Did you fuck something up, Senator? I'll bet you did.”

“It doesn't matter.” Goodrich came out of shock briefly, the blood having returned to his head as he lay upside down in the crater. “It isn't far. They could run out here and kill us.” He rolled his head in the mud again. “We're going to die.”

“Nah. They'd have to cross the paddy twice. React's coming, hear it? They won't do that. Besides. We're the bait, Senator. They want us here.”