Keeping Watch (10 page)

Lacking heavy earth-moving equipment, it was all but impossible to push through the wet, high grass. The platoon was forced to use the faint trails used by the locals—the same locals who knew they were coming. Allen was point man for the squad when a battle broke out somewhere ahead, and all they could do was hunker down on the trail and hope the bullets passed over their heads. Mouse squatted onto his heels, lit up a cigarette, and stared morosely at the wall of green pressing in on them. Chris sat on his pack and played with his M16's safety. Penroy took out a tin of tobacco and rolled himself a smoke, but did not light it. Allen listened to the dueling M16s and AK47s up ahead, punctuated by grenades and shouts, and tried not to feel like the grass was about to wash over his head and drown him. He'd never had much of a problem with claustrophobia; however, the thick growth overhead, moving to and fro in the slight breeze, began to resemble the tentacles of a huge sea anemone, wafting with the tides and waiting to curl in on their prey. He took his eyes off the grass and looked at his neighbor, and saw the little new guy sweating, his dark eyes wide and staring at the narrow strip of blue sky between all that green—Jesus, Allen thought; if they didn't move soon, the guy was going to freak out completely.

“Hey, uh, deRosa,” Allen said. “You ever have to mow the lawn when you were a kid?”

The guy tore his gaze from the far-off sky. “What?”

“The lawn. Your folks make you mow the lawn when you were a kid?”

“Yeah. I used to do that.”

“And maybe take the old mower down the street to the neighbors?”

“What the fuck you talking about, Carmichael?”

“Did you?” Allen insisted.

“Sure, sometimes. The old fart in the next block had this huge yard, couldn't do it himself 'cause he had the emphysema or something. What's that got to do with shit?”

“You ever think at the time all those lawns might be planning their revenge? Like, ‘We got this big brother named Elephant Grass, one day when you get in his neighborhood, he's gonna pound you stupid.' ”

Allen had hoped he might laugh, but deRosa just stared at him as if he'd sprouted a second head.

“Jesus, you're nuts, you know that, Carmichael?”

Mouse spoke up. “Why d'you think we call him ‘Crazy'?”

The shooting from in front had slowed to a sporadic crack now and then, all from M16s. Mouse dropped his cigarette butt to the ground; the squad shouldered their packs and continued on into the field.

They came out of the grass in the afternoon, walked up a finger of ground, and, half an hour later, prepared to enter another field. Allen trotted forward to talk to Sergeant Keys, out of the lieutenant's hearing.

“Sarge, we're not going to spend the night in that stuff, are we?”

“Looks like.”

“Oh sweet Jesus, won't someone tell him what that means?”

“Lieutenant Brennan's big on not giving way to the enemy,” Keys replied, but Allen could hear the apprehension in his voice. This was the Sarge's third tour here; like Allen, he knew exactly what they could expect.

“Are you having a problem, Carmichael?” It was Brennan, his face striped beneath the black glasses where the grass had whipped him, his uniform crumpled, but his back still straight, the generous mouth still quirked in private amusement.

“If we dig in out there, sir,” Allen told him, “a lot of us are going to die.”

“This is war, soldier. Men die.”

Allen tried to control his voice. “Not uselessly, sir.”

“You think what we're doing is useless?” Brennan didn't even sound threatening, merely interested.

Of course it's useless, you stupid piece of shit,
Allen wanted to scream.
You should know, you've already lost one platoon—this whole fucking war is useless.
“If we give ourselves to the enemy in that grass, then yes, those deaths will be useless.”

“Soldier—” the sergeant tried to cut in, but Allen overrode him.

“Sir, there's no way we can guard a perimeter in there. They'll pick us off one by one.”

“Losing your nerve, Carmichael?” Brennan asked lightly.

“I'm concerned with losing men. Sir.”

Both corners of Brenda's mouth curled up. “You have something to say to me, soldier?”

“No, sir. Just that there's no point in risking men's lives for no reason.”

“Are you refusing this order, soldier?” The glasses really were impenetrable; all Allen saw was himself, his distorted face motionless.

Allen shook his head and turned away, muttering to himself through clenched teeth, “Man, you go a long way in explaining the high death rate of new officers in the field.”

That, finally, got through to Brenda. He barked out, “Carmichael!” Allen turned back, to see the man's slim hand come up to yank the glasses away from those ethereal eyes. “Was that a threat I heard, Carmichael?” He sounded almost happy at the thought.

“A threat?” Allen repeated, startled. “No, sir. All I meant was . . . Oh, never mind.”

He turned and walked away, feeling the touch of his officer's pale gaze on his back, aware that he'd probably just made matters worse.

Chapter 11

When it came right down to the reality of night in the grass, however, either Brenda's nerves gave way or his platoon's feet grew wings, because they hacked, shoved, and sweated their way through the field in record time, emerging well before dusk at the coordinates of the next ville.

Most of them emerged, at least. Ten minutes up the trail, a guy from one of the other squads trotted up.

“Anyone here seen Dixon?” he panted.

“Don't know him,” Allen told him.

“Little guy from Jersey?” Mouse asked. “Mole on his face, really shitty poker player?”

“That's him.”

“Ain't seen him since we stopped for lunch.”

“He's missing?” Allen felt the stupidity of his question as soon as he'd asked it. Why else would the guy be searching the platoon for him?

“Nobody remembers him coming out of the last field.”

The elephant grass could swallow a man with ease. Hell, it could swallow a damn army.

“Aw fuck,” Mouse said with feeling. “Sucker owes me ten bucks.”

“I am not going back in there,” deRosa declared flatly.

“The Loot's sending Dixon's squad.”

“Thank you, God,” said Chris.

“They lost him, they can find him,” deRosa said.

But Dixon's squad-mates, though they pushed nearly halfway through the vast field before they turned back, found no trace of him.

In the meantime, the rest of the platoon dealt with the next ville. The artillery did its stuff on the far side of the hooches, the villagers washed out toward them, Brenda and the translator turned their attentions on the more likely suspects. A Huey landed to throw out food, mail, and the squad's other FNG, a complete virgin who looked scared to death. Penroy, who spoke some Vietnamese, was assisting with the interrogation, and told Allen to deal with their new guy, a skinny black kid with a Georgia accent that flowed like honey. Since everyone was pushing hard to finish checking out the ville before they found themselves digging in for the night in the pitch black, Allen just told the kid to stick with Mouse and not touch a thing.

It wasn't twenty minutes later that Allen heard Mouse's raised voice, climbing higher in a frantic tumble of words, and Allen knew in a flash what the sound meant. FNGs were so absolutely clueless, he should've made the kid sit on a log, he should've kept the guy with him and watched him every instant, he should've tied the poor bastard to a—then came the
whomp!
Penroy abandoned the prisoners to come running, and men began popping out of the hooches to see who'd got it.

“Mouse!” Allen was bellowing before the air cleared enough to see where the hooch had stood. “Mouse, oh God damn it—Medic!”

He skidded to a halt before the smoking pile of sticks and dust. Somewhere in there was at least one body. Although, judging by the extent of the damage, there would be no nice neat corpse to retrieve. There would be pieces of new guy, and assuming the stupid kid had followed the other half of his orders and been sticking close to his more experienced squad-mate, somewhere under there would be Mouse. “Medic!”

And then, like a spirit rising from its grave—an enraged spirit bellowing obscenities—a portion of the hooch floor shook itself upright.

“Ah, fucking hell,” the dark spirit shouted furiously. “You stupid shit, ain't got the sense of my retard cousin, ‘What's this?' the lil' fucker says. Ah, Crazy, you ever give me a new fucker to baby-sit again, I'm a gonna shoot you dead, swear to Jesus.”

Mouse stood bent over, hands working to clear the dirt from his eyes. Allen tried to help, pulling the wounded man's hands away so he could pour water across his face, but Mouse only struck out in anger, nearly knocking Allen's canteen to the ground.

“Stop it,” Allen ordered, but when the curses continued unabated, he pressed his canteen into Mouse's hands and let the man pour the water himself. Eventually the eyes were clean and red, and, Allen was glad to see, whole. In fact, other than a bloody gash on his arm and a scattering of punctures on the back of his legs, Mouse had come through the booby-trapped hooch unscathed. “You okay then, man?” Allen asked, lightheaded with relief. Mouse continued to grumble and curse, so he repeated his question, then finally he grabbed Mouse's shoulder to get his attention. “Are you okay?”

Mouse shook his head, sending a drift of dirt and straw down his flak jacket. “Can't hear a fuckin' thing, Carmichael,” he said loudly. “Stone deaf—I'm gonna have to join the fuckin' artillery.” Allen and Penroy looked at each other, and the leader went back to his interrogation. Allen walked over to see what else the booby trap had done.

Charred hunks of flesh were scattered over a twenty-foot radius. The new guy's helmet was still strapped under its chin, but one of the shoulders had no arm, and the torso lay in two pieces, separated at the waist. He must have bent over to pick up some provocative object, the trapdoor of a hidden bunker or a gun sticking out from under the family's bed, the sort of thing anyone with an ounce of experience would treat with great respect. Thank God he hadn't taken Mouse with him.

“Anyone know the new guy's name?” Allen asked, although he really didn't want to know. Nobody spoke up, so he turned to Mouse, who had come over to scowl at the damage. He shouted in Mouse's ear, “He tell you his name?”

“What?”

“Name?” Allen said, shaping the word with his mouth and nodding at the remains. He really didn't want to dig through that to find the dog tags.

Mouse got the question, but shook his head to express both ignorance and disgust. “And that,” he said loudly, “
that
is why they're called ‘new meat.' ”

Watching the big man spit on the ground and walk away, Allen felt a familiar rising sensation inside. A few months earlier, the result would have been nausea, and he would have bolted for the shrubs to vomit out the brutal joke. Now, what rose up was a laugh, black as the blood-soaked earth of the hooch and every bit as corrosive on the throat. He laughed until the tears came, then mentally slapped himself, and went to help bag the chunks of new meat, so that what was left of a boy named Paul Michael Stevens might be returned to a family on the other side of the world.

He was glad, in the end, that he'd come across the kid's name—if Stevens had died without anyone there knowing who he was, it would feel as if he'd never existed.

The next day they left the burned-out ville and turned north. The platoon medic had picked out the bits of shrapnel from Mouse's legs and buttocks, dousing them with iodine and slapping some bandages on the larger holes. Mouse's hearing improved slowly as the day went on, but the others resorted to rudimentary sign language or scribbled messages to communicate with him. No one wanted to shout in a VC jungle.

Their goal was a large ville two hills over, a ville that Intel had decided was too close to a branch of the Ho Chi Minh Trail for comfort. The entire area had been declared a free-fire zone; their orders were to clear the ville of its innocent inhabitants.

At first it went according to plan. Artillery barrage on the far side, gathering up the fleeing residents, initial interrogation getting them not much, then accompanying the villagers back to their hooches to gather their possessions for relocation. Some hooches had food stores larger than the family would require, so they had a rice bonfire to send the residents on their way. Hooches were torched, livestock slaughtered, same old thing. They came across a few printed papers and some sketches that might be maps, three rifles so old they might have been the first generation after the flintlock, some cartons of American C-rations, and a handmade mortar that looked more likely to take off the head of the man firing it than to actually reach a target. Everything pointed to VC, but nothing to be too worried about.

Then they pulled out of the smoldering ville, and the hills came alive at their backs. In thirty seconds they went from a nearly full-strength platoon marching away from a job well done to a collection of thirty-two targets trying desperately to burrow into the earth. Furious gunfire, far too close in for artillery response, grenade launchers and small rockets slammed down among them. Men cried out for their mothers and their medics, squad leaders yelled to restore order, no one paid any attention to Brenda, and the radio operator screamed for assistance, as unable as Mouse was to hear any answer down the line. When the gunships responded, laying down a hail of bullets and tracers in the trees surrounding the smoke canisters, the attack ceased as abruptly as it had begun. Second Platoon picked itself up, counted heads, radioed for a medevac, and returned to the ville.

This time they probed the hillsides behind the ville, and uncovered a network of tunnels and holes that showed signs of hasty retreat. An entire underground village had lived here, larger by far than the population living over their heads, and it took them the rest of that day and most of the next to strip it of equipment and stores. They even found two wounded NVA, lying feverish in the airless dirt cave that was the settlement's hospital ward. Brenda was ecstatic at the trophies, although from the looks of them, neither prisoner would live long enough to be of much use to Intel.

Late on the second day, with the farthest reaches of the tunnels emptied out, the platoon returned to open air. They sat among the trees, grateful for air and sky, while the sappers laid their charges. They had to retreat to the other side of the ville remnants, but the men cheered when the C4 went off and the entire hillside shivered and settled into itself. Their reward was a hot meal, a flurry of visits from the colonel, Intel, and press, followed by the luxury of a night's camp without having to dig new holes.

Chris got it during the night.

They'd been expecting an attack—after all, the men who had lived in those tunnels were out there somewhere, biding their time. They deepened the holes before settling into them, made sure their magazines and grenades were instantly to hand, and dozed with one eye open.

The ghosts came on them later than they'd expected, nearly at dawn, just as everyone was beginning to think they were safe for the time.
Clever move
was Allen's waking thought the instant the firing started; men who had been waiting all night were tired before the day began. The ghosts also came, somewhat unusually, all at once, a wave of small-arms fire and mortars from all around the perimeter, giving the platoon a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree line of fire. Within half an hour the sun was lighting the sky, giving shape to the night's ghosts, turning them into small men moving across the landscape. And then they were gone, leaving Chris bleeding silently from a bullet wound through his belly, a wound that came out nearly on top of his spine. His glasses had disappeared somewhere, leaving his face strangely naked, and he came halfway to consciousness before the medevac arrived, focused on Mouse's face a foot from his, and smiled sweetly.

“Wipe out, dude,” he drawled.

The black man's ears had cleared enough to hear him, or maybe he was just reading Chris's lips. “You be back on that surfboard before any of us DEROS, man.”

“I don't have any legs, Mouse.”

“Sure you do, man. They there, okay.”

“Funny thing, a surfer without legs . . . Mouse, do me a favor and check my equipment, will you? If my dick's shot off, I don't want you to put me on that medevac.”

“Your dick's fine, man, don't be stupid.”

“You didn't look. Mouse, I need to know.”

Without another word, Mouse unfastened the boy's trousers and peered inside, then rearranged the flap shut again. “Your dick's there. Ain't no less of it than there was yesterday. ‘Course, that ain't sayin' much.”

“You promise?”

“Look, dickhead, there's nothing wrong with your fuckin' equipment. And I ain't gonna give it no tug to prove it to you.”

“Thanks, Mouse. Look me up sometime, when you get home.”

“Yeah, right,” said Mouse under his voice. “That's gonna happen.” But he rested his black hand against Chris's blond hair, and stayed with him until the medic loaded him away.

The medevac took off, and the men heated their C-rations and waited for orders. The platoon was now so light, they would have been justified in returning to base to put themselves together again. However, Brenda had his ideas about what a lieutenant asked of his men, and no one was surprised when the order came to move out.

“Fuckin' hell,” Mouse said. “We just gonna march to Hanoi, you figure?”

“Why not? Go direct to the source,” Allen told him.

“What?” Mouse asked, and Allen just shook his head to say it was not important.

When the Claymore wires were up and their packs on, Allen looked at the rest of the squad. “Hey, Penroy,” he said. “Where's deRosa?”

The others shrugged. Allen dug out a scrap of paper and wrote the question, shoving it under Mouse's nose.

“The hell should I know?” Mouse grumbled. “Ain't seen him since last night.”

“He's probably gone to check on his buddy Gonsalves,” Tom said, or maybe it was Tim.

“He's prob'ly off gassin' with that cousin of his, Gonzo I think his name is,” Mouse said, not having heard the first suggestion.

But deRosa was not with Gonsalves, and in fact, deRosa did not seem to be inside the perimeter. They found his pack, and they found a rifle that could have been his, but they did not find him. He'd either dropped his things and fled in a panic, or he'd been taken. Penroy took the news to Brennan, who came over with Sergeant Keys to examine the abandoned gear.

“He was getting pretty flaky out there in the elephant grass the other day,” Allen said to the sergeant. The lieutenant heard, and turned the reflective glasses on Allen.

“You sure seem to have a lot of problems with that elephant grass.”