13th Valley (56 page)

C
HAPTER
22

16 A
UGUST
1970

Egan and Whiteboy cussed bitterly when the ground collapsed. Brooks and El Paso shrugged their shoulders dejectedly and walked away. They had argued their best. Cherry did not fully understand. Generally, 1st Plt believed it was a mistake, felt they were victimized into committing an error. The entire day had been erroneous and demoralizing. It had been the kind of day champions lose to cellar dwellers and honor students fail easy exams. When the 1st Plt of Alpha blew the tunnel at 1300 hours and all that ground caved in the situation seemed perfectly normal—all fucked up.

No one had fallen asleep before first light. After the Numbnuts-initiated mad minute, the perimeter went on 100 percent alert. Cherry and Egan crawled outward and reinforced Whiteboy's squad. The night became colder. Ground mist rising, flooding the dark crevices between already black jungle, drained heat from boonierat bodies and dampened clothes and poncho liners. All pairs cuddled, side-to-side, back-to-back, shivering, awake, miserable, exhausted.

Throughout the night the mity-mite and distant omnipresent artillery bursts rumbled and echoed. Black mist changed to gray. The jungle remained dark. The leaf-vine canopy silhouetted menacingly against the dull sky. First light dispelled the night. Half of 1st Plt fell asleep. They slept past sunrise at 0639 and they slept through a spectacular show as the sun broke over the east ridges and peaks and splashed and refracted in the sky turning the clouds red and the sky purple. “Only in Nam,” Egan smiled at the sky. Half the platoon slept on through routine morning activities, slept until the sun burned away the mist and clouds.

The other half did not sleep. Egan rose at the earliest sign of light and silently prepared his web gear for morning patrols. There was a feeling of relief and happiness amongst the waking, relief that day had arrived. During Nam nights boonierats often feared someone somehow would devise a method of eliminating daylight and daytime would never again arrive. It was always a relief when the sky changed and a boonierat could see his brothers still there.

Doc Johnson and El Paso moved silently through the dispersed squads checking and accounting for the L-T. “How'd the night go?” Doc asked here and there. A thumbs-up sign or a nod were the only responses. Doc McCarthy delivered a daily-daily pill to every soldier, a tiny white pill designed to inhibit
falicipreum
and
volvax malaria.
Everyone accepted a pill but half the pills found their way, with a wish, over shoulders. It would be better to be medevacked out with malaria than to get wasted in the valley.

Egan gathered a small team for a first light check. They disassembled the down-trail mechanical ambush, then patrolled west, uphill. The higher MA had blown. Artillery rounds had smashed small craters into the jungle. There were no bodies, no blood trails, no signs. It was as if no one had been there last night. The patrol returned.

“Oh, Man,” Hoover chuckled to Jax and Silvers. “You shoulda seen Numbnuts last night. That fucker says he ate the C-4 from his claymore so he'd get sick. Then he says he hears somethin. I tell him he's full a shit. I think he pissed his pants. Man, you shoulda seen that dumb fuck. Scared shitless. When I skyed he was near cryin. I know there aint nothin there and I knew what that dumb fuckin shit was goina do.”

Egan returned to his and Cherry's position. He broke out his C-rat can stove, a canteen cup, water, a piece of C-4 and coffee packets. Cherry woke, shook his head, looked at Egan through bleary eyes. “Twenty-two and a wake-up,” Egan announced cheerfully.

Egan washed as best he could using the corner of a towel and a C-rat tin of water. He concocted a breakfast of virtually inedible C-rat ham and eggs, doctoring the yellowish muck with peach jam, a dash of Tabasco sauce and several splashes of coffee. Egan mixed the mush with his bayonet then ate it with a plastic spoon. The sight of it being eaten turned Cherry's stomach. Cherry ate a cold can of pork slices, a tin of crackers with cheese spread, eating first the cheese and then the crackers, and his last can of fruit cocktail. Egan cleaned and packed his ruck carefully checking the tightness of every strap. Cherry crammed his gear into the pocket of his pack, as before, then sat on it. Egan retied and tightened his bootlaces, checked his web gear, cleaned his ammo and weapon and then brushed his teeth. Cherry dusted the cover of his M-16 with his hand and sat waiting, expecting word to come to move in zero five.

“Man,” Egan shook his head. “You're a mess. Look at you. I never seen a dude get so filthy in so short a time. You need a shave.”

“What's this lifer crap?” Cherry barked back snidely. “Want me to spit-shine my boots too?”

“I want you to be clean, Asshole,” Egan snarled.

All about them boonierats were moving now. Moneski led 2d Sqd out on patrol. Brooks talked with the GreenMan, and FO called the FDC on Barnett with more coordinates. None of Alpha's three platoons had found a sign of the one hundred and fifty NVA soldiers seen by aircraft two days earlier. The mity-mite continued pumping and the hole continued accepting the smoke. Above the valley and as far west as the Laotian border helicopters searched for smoke rising. None was spotted. Brown called forward supply with a coded, up-dated request list. “… charlie-charlie-uniform one, delta-delta-juliet one, alpha-alpha-foxtrot eight, delta …” He spoke on and on into the handset. On the firebase a supply clerk translated the message into meaningful figures on a cage-sheet, a list to which only the quantity needed to be added. Brooks talked to the Old Fox about the hole. He radioed 2d and 3d Plts and instructed them to return to the LZ on Hill 636 for resupply. He told them the CP and 1st would rendezvous with them at 1300. Routine activity continued and most of the boonierats became bored and simply rested in the shade.

“Jax,” Egan said excitedly, “let me take yer E-T, okay?” He grabbed Jax' entrenching tool.

“Bro, yo aint gowin back down there, is yo?” Jax asked, incredulous shock beaming from his tired eyes.

“Right on, Jax,” Egan gleamed, spun and trotted toward the tunnel opening.

“Oh, Man,” Jax shook his head. “Dat fucka crazy.”

“Better en havin em tell either you or me ta go down there,” Silvers whispered.

At the opening Egan stood in a cluster of CP soldiers, Whiteboy, Thomaston and Cherry. He had tied off his pants legs at the crotch and knees and bloused them tightly about his ankles. Over his torso he wore a T-shirt, a long-sleeve jungle sweater and a fatigue blouse. As additional protection against the tear gas crystals in the hole he wore gloves and a hat. Like the day before he donned a gas mask and carried two flashlights and two .45s. Cherry secured the rope about his waist and Egan plunged in.

The trip down was identical to the earlier one except now smoke residue shortened the effective length of the flashlight beam. Egan turned it off and proceeded in the dark. Slowly down. Deeper. Deeper. It was almost routine. Whiteboy gave three sharp tugs on the line indicating Egan was 100 feet out. Egan pulled once. He forced himself left against the tunnel wall, held the flashlight in his right hand, extended it to the opposite wall. He paused a moment, aimed a .45 down the tunnel and clicked the beam on, one two, off. His eyes registered an empty tunnel. Egan proceeded repeating the lighting at fifteen-to twenty-foot intervals. At 145 feet Whiteboy jerked the line four times. Egan yanked back. He should be in the small room. He turned the light on. The tunnel continued down. Egan inched lower, flicking the light at random. No room. At 170 feet he was stopped by a 250-pound bomb. He could hear digging sounds on the other side.

3d Plt had spent a restless night also. They had backed themselves into a small gorge after retreating from the sniper. Caldwell had placed an ambush team at the top, LPs on the flanks and three fighting positions across the front. He placed his platoon CP at the center in a thin natural trench. The dog handler and the tracker spent the night with the ambush team as far from Lt. Caldwell as possible. “That mothafucka's dead,” the handler passed sentence on the platoon leader. “He gonna wish he nevah saw the light a day. What kinda man let a dog die? Just let him whimper en die en not even send a squad afta the dink who done it. Just turn around en run. What kinda man is that? I'll tell you. A daid one.” His feeling penetrated almost every boonierat in 3d. A feeling of total disbelief and disgust had grabbed them all.

“Boy Asshole done it again,” they cussed. “Where we gonna move to if we hit. That coward's fuckin us.” The hate had not been easy to sleep with.

The sun was high and hot when 3d Plt finally moved out. Rafe Ridge-field walked point. Nahele with his M-60 was at slack. They moved out of the small gorge and onto a little used trail, perhaps an animal trail, Rafe thought. He led them southwest around behind Hill 636. Still they found no indication of the one hundred and fifty NVA. They began climbing toward the peak. Ridgefield moved slowly, cautiously, pausing for a break every ten to fifteen minutes. Various thoughts were accumulating in his head, assembling themselves into a … Da-da! DA-DA! NEW AND UPROARIOUS RADIO PROGRAM FOR ALL MY MARVELOUS LISTENERS OUT THERE IN RADIOLAND.

Ridgefield paused in very heavy vegetation to assess how to proceed. Behind him Nahele sat down and lit a cigarette. Ridgefield studied his map and checked his compass. He climbed forward three paces and mounted the prone carcass of a thick dead teak tree. He stood on the trunk and stared into the erratic green leaf wall of the jungle with the thousand irregular black shadows under palm fronds and behind branches. The trail had completely disappeared. Rafe stared into the dark holes in the vine masses, into the pockets where all light was excluded, blocked by moist living vegetation high above and layer upon layer of dead rotting support entanglement below. Older life supporting new life, he thought. The dead supporting the living in ever increasing heights of jungle, old trees dying, smothered and strangled beneath ever newer covers of green, spreading, reaching for the sun, climbing over the decaying structure, weighing heavily upon disintegrating branches, dying and decomposing as each new layer smothered the one below until the substructure weakened and the weight increased to the point of collapse. Ridgefield stared at the vegetation. A supporting limb snapped. A slow-motion avalanche of green crashed as a section of canopy imploded. He jumped down, squatted. Behind him others sought cover. He stared into the vegetation. It shook as if the earth below had opened its jaws and eaten a huge chunk of life. Ridgefield looked into the new wall, into the new life growing from the old, and he understood it all. He laughed delighted with the revelation and he jumped back onto the tree trunk and searched the black voids and the greenness for a trail to make the climb to the peak easier. As he stared directly into one black nothingness its center flashed bluewhite, a perfect circle, a blinding muzzle flash from within the depths of the void. He never saw anything again.

“How the fuck did a bomb get down there?” El Paso questioned.

“How the fuck do I know?” Egan shrugged.

“Danny, are you sure it's a bomb?” Brooks asked breaking from his radio report to the GreenMan.

“You fuckin guys think I'm makin it up? Fuck it. Go down and look for yourselves.”

“What happened to the room?” Whiteboy asked.

“I don't fuckin know,” Egan growled.

“Well Gawd A'mighty, a room caint just dis-ay-pear.”

“Well the fuckin thing just dis-ay-peared.”

“GreenMan wants us moving,” Brooks stopped the questioning. “He wants us to blow it.”

“No way,” Egan shouted.

“Ya caint blow mah hole,” Whiteboy protested.

“We gotta dig it out,” Egan said. “Send three of us down to dig a room before the bomb. Then we can dig the bomb out.”

“Ah couldint fit in thaht hole,” Whiteboy lamented. “If Ah could Ah'd go down there with ya, Eg.”

El Paso took the hook back from Brooks. He radioed GreenMan's RTO and explained the situation and said they had three volunteers to go back down. He explained what they wanted to do and what they believed, speculated, the tunnel would lead to. Brooks took the hook and talked to GreenMan again. He asked for a day. Denied. Six hours. Denied. Two hours. Denied.

“Aw, they stickin it to us ah-gain,” Whiteboy grumbled walking off and kicking a burnt-out smudge pot.

“We're gettin fucked, L-T,” Egan complained.

“Blow the fucker,” Brooks ordered.

Towing a reel of wire and two cases of C-4, Egan re-entered the shaft. He was in about fifty feet when word of Ridgefield's death reached the CP. On the ground above, 1st Plt packed up and prepared to move out. Egan and the hole were the only things keeping them from going.

“Can't they signal him to hurry up?” Numbnuts whined to Cherry. “We'll be the last ones to resupply.”

“So what?” Cherry said. He was very tense. Numbnuts' whine irritated him.