13th Valley (12 page)

“Nobody's going on welfare around here,” a strong matronly voice commanded. “Really, Leon. The way they all carry on. Everyone is doing just fine. Now don't you tell Leon your problems. I'm sure he's got enough of his own to worry about.”

“Leon, dear,” the second female voice came on again, “how are you?” There was much laughing in the tape. “As you know, Sheldon and I are going to London and Dublin in about a month-and-a-half even though we can't afford anything at the moment. And good things of course come in packages of three. Sheldon has been laid off; our car was stolen; and I might not have a job next year because I had another tiff with my department head but I'll write you about that. He's really being asinine and is quite a jerk. Similar to your major or colonel you wrote about having so much trouble with. The situations are parallel even though one is education and one is military. And here's mother, Leon. I wish you were here with us.”

“Mother can't say a word,” said an older male voice. “Isn't that amazing? Are you at a loss for words, Mother?”

Chelini did not look at Silvers now. This was too personal. Chelini was embarrassed for the gaunt man. Silvers simply lay back and listened, shut his eyes and laughed.

The tape continued. Leon's brother said, “Leon, you look very strange. You're only about six inches long. You've got a silver head and a black thin body. What are you doing to yourself? Has the army turned you into a piece of plastic?”

“Yes, Leon,” said one of the sisters. “We're all looking at the microphone pretending it's you.” There was a loud “Ouch!” “Sheldon just burned himself passing me a cordial over the candles.”

“Just a minute,” Mr. Silvers controlled the conversation. “I'm going to tell him one of the Playboy jokes.” Laughter. “Mother won't let me tell you a Playboy joke. You're not old enough.”

“That's not a good image for a father,” Mrs. Silvers said.

“You see,” continued Leon's father, “there's this girl who goes to Harvard to take a sex education course and she refuses to take the course because the last lesson is an oral exam.” There was more laughter.

The conversation went on and on. It made Chelini think of his own family. He laughed when the people on the tape laughed. He pretended he knew them. It made him feel close to Silvers. Finally Leon's older sister's husband, who hadn't yet spoken, said, “Leon, I hope you got the address of the guy who's putting together stories and poetry by Vietnam veterans. We expect to find some of your writings in that anthology. I'm sure any number of those things you've written would be appropriate.”

“Leon,” his father said, “you make sure you get clearance for anything you send. And let them change anything they say must be changed.”

“Pa,” the brother-in-law said, “don't tell him that. He can write what he likes. This isn't World War II.”

“Umm. Mother wants me to stop this tape. I don't know why. We've got an hour left on it.”

“Stop it until we have something to talk about.”

“Let's you and I argue. There she goes, see?”

“Just like always,” Leon's brother said. “A touch of home, Leon.”

This was followed by the sound of people talking to each other with no one speaking directly into the microphone. There was some jumbled talk of his father selling a portion of his business then Mr. Silvers said clearly, “All things being equal, this year, after you come back, I think Mother and I will pretty definitely go to Europe for about three weeks.”

“Leon,” his mother said, “you can come with us. We're going to put the machine away now and later I'll finish the tape to my son. You all had your turn. I'm going to talk to him in private.”

“Shit, Man,” Silvers said to Chelini as he clicked off the recorder, “them folks gettin down. Hey, you been over to the Phoc Roc TOC yet? That's our little club. Let's get a beer and I'll introduce you to some of the dudes.”

“Wait a minute,” Chelini reared back. “Let me think. I've seen so many people already I can't keep them all straight. There was an old man, I mean old, screaming at a dude by the basketball courts. Then three guys in with the first sergeant. There was Egan and the lieutenant. Top was getting me a radio and a rucksack. He told me to get a haircut and this Puerto Rican guy to cut his mustache. Couple of brothers slappin themselves silly …”

“That's the dap. It's kind of a way to say hi.” Silvers paused. Chelini didn't say anything. “Here, give me your right hand. I'll show you an abbreviated dap so you can greet the brothers.” Chelini held out his hand. Silvers put out his fist. Chelini balled his right hand as Silvers tapped his twice against Chelini's. Then he rapped the back of his fist twice, then the top and the bottom. Silvers opened his hand, motioned for Chelini to follow, slid the palm over Chelini's upturned palm. He snapped his fingers. “You'll get it,” Silvers said. “Let's see. The old dude had to be Zarnochuk. Old Zarno. He's battalion sergeant major. Chews everybody out. Hardass, Man, hardass! Who else?”

“There was that Puerto Rican …”

“Oh shit. El Paso. Don't ever call El Paso a P.R., Man. He's Chicano. Mexican. History major from the University of Texas. He got a year at law school finished before the draft got him.”

“Jesus! Is that right? Man, he gave the first sergeant a bad time. The other two were both black, I think their names were, ah, one was Jackson and the other was Doc.”

“Ah, El Paso always gives Top a hard time cause Top's such an ignorant shit. Jackson's from Mississippi. Doc. That's gotta be Doc Johnson cause he's the only black medic we got. Doc's from Harlem. He's company CP medic. El Paso's senior RTO. Jax is a rifleman in my squad—fire team leader if we had enough guys to have fire teams. All those dudes been here forever.” Silvers had put on a pair of shower togs and had pulled on a pair of jungle fatigue pants while he talked. He put on a fatigue shirt and picked up his hat. “Come on. Let's get a beer. I'll show you where the barber's hootch is. You in the Oh-deuce now, Cherry. You gotta get your shit together.”

C
HAPTER
6

They did not look at each other while they spoke but only squinted ahead toward the building. “Why we goin to this fuckin briefin?” Egan asked. “I mean, why this briefin? We never go to briefins.”

“We never go,” Brooks answered, “because we always … we're always in the boonies.”

“L-T, you been ta briefins before. You know they aint goina say nothin.”

“Come on, Danny. You really can't tell. We might get something. Besides, the colonel wanted a good showing for the Third Brigade CO.”

“Shee-it. REMFs givin the briefin only do it so they can kiss the colonel's ass. And the colonel, he only goes cause he likes to have his ass kissed.”

“Maybe so.”

“They already worked everythin out in the TOC before. Or in the colonel's office or in the general's hootch while the old man's ballin some gook whore.”

“Shhh. Looks like they're already underway.”

In the 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile) it was not atypical for a battalion from one brigade to be placed under the operational control of another brigade for short duration assaults. Airmobility produced a functional efficiency in the deployment of forces which previous warfare had never matched. The helicopter made it possible for entire battalions to be under the operational control of one commander in one area one day and under the control of another commander in an area a hundred kilometers away the next day. If the men didn't have to disembark and slowly trudge by foot about the jungle mountains it would almost be possible to have only one set of boonierats. The army could have twice the commanders with their command posts and maps and charts and electronic surveillance devices and half the ground troops and simply airmobile the troops, op-con the boonierats, in a continuous hopscotching. Troops would no longer belong to a commander but to several commands and the casualties of one real unit could be spread over the various on-paper units. The quicker infantrymen could be moved, the fewer infantrymen would be needed. Theoretically there would have to be more support and transportation troops and the endless deployment, redeployment, redeployment from fight to fight might be hell on the soldiers. That was reality for the one-in-ten American soldiers in Vietnam who were the infantry. One-in-ten was the lowest ratio of line soldiers to support troops in American military history.

The 7th of the 402d was the division reaction force, the cooling unit to be extracted from its AO at any moment and inserted about a hot spot until cooled then extracted and inserted again. Brooks and Egan felt uneasy in the Third Brigade rear. They entered the briefing hall as unobtrusively as possible.

“Gen-tle-men,” a young second lieutenant was saying, “the governing mission of this operation is to conduct airmobile operations in support of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Vietnam, to locate and destroy enemy units and base camps and to interdict enemy movement into the lowlands. Our operations provide the secure environment which is enabling the GVN to pursue the national objectives of political stability and socio-economic development. In support of this mission we will be operating from two headquarters; the main headquarters here at Camp Evans and an advance light TOC on Firebase Barnett. The topographic briefing will be delivered by Sergeant Marquadt. Sergeant.”

Egan and Brooks mingled silently with the company grade officers and enlisted men standing behind the seven rows of seated personnel. The room was bright, lighted by three rows of fluorescent lights and the glow through the translucent shades drawn across the window openings. The room was stuffy. Several senior NCOs sitting in the third and fourth rows were smoking pipes. EM in the back smoked cigarettes. The air about the lights and by the shades was tinted blue. People were shuffling in the chairs and shifting from foot to foot behind. Voices murmured.

The Third Brigade commander—self-named Old Fox—sat sideways in his chair in the front row. The remaining seats in that row were vacant. The second row was occupied by the battalion commander from the 7/402, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver M. Henderson—The GreenMan—and by various commanders from artillery and supply units. In the third row sat the Air Force and Vietnamese liaison officers, intelligence and operations officers and NCOs. Behind these were more staff personnel, officers, NCOs and clerks and in the last rows the company and battery commanders and platoon leaders who had arrived early enough to get a seat. Standing, leaning against the windows and the back wall and against each other were the majority of lower ranking enlisted personnel and late arriving junior officers. Among these were several men from Company A including Jonnie ‘Pop' Randalph, platoon sergeant of the 2d platoon, Lieutenants Frank De Barti and William Thomaston, platoon leaders of the 2d and 1st platoons, respectively, and Clayton ‘Whiteboy' Janoff, a squad leader from the 1st platoon who'd only come to accompany Lt. Thomaston.

Egan and Brooks found an open space at the center of the crowded rear section, stood side by side in an informal parade rest and faced forward. “Hey,” Egan nudged Brooks, “can you believe this REMF mentality?” Brooks did not respond.

“Thank you, Sir,” Sergeant Marquadt said insolently. The sergeant approached the podium with an extended chrome swagger. Behind the podium and indeed covering most of that wall of the building was a topographic map of northern I Corps. The map was fourteen feet wide, eight feet high. It was a composite of twenty-eight smaller topographic maps, each covering a grid of 27.5 x 27.5 kilometers. At the top the DMZ was depicted by two roughly parallel lines seven kilometers apart. The Laotian border was marked in red to the left. Jungles were in dark green, clear forests in light green, lowlands and swamps in white with light blue symbols for rice or marsh grass. The entire map had a brown under-hue from the thin topographic lines circling up to the mountain peaks and opening down the valleys, becoming denser as the terrain steepened. To the right was the Gulf of Tonkin in pale blue. Various areas were dotted with red triangles indicating hilltop firebases.

The maps were of a scale of 1:50,000. Infantry units carried those sections in which they operated. Artillery units used the maps in their FDC (Fire Direction Control) to plot missions. At the base of each map, in the key printed in English and Vietnamese, were the disclaimers: DELINEATION OF INTERNAL ADMINISTRATIVE BOUNDARIES IS APPROXIMATE, and DELINEATION OF INTERNATIONAL BOUNDARIES MUST NOT BE CONSIDERED AUTHORITATIVE.

“Gentlemen,” Sergeant First Class Emil Marquadt boomed, “the operational environment is a long occupied, extensively developed and heavily defended supply and logistic base, staging area and communications and transportation center. Resident forces include administrative, logistic, quartermaster and transportation units with organic security as well as some tactical units …” Aw, come on, Man, Egan thought, raising his eyes to the ceiling. “… Central to the landform of this operational area and determinant to the direction of attack is the Khe Ta Laou river valley which runs generally east-west.”