13th Valley (64 page)

Only now did the reality of Silvers' death begin to hit Cherry. He had gone into shock, functioning perfectly yet not recognizing the meaning of the events about him. It was a perfect soldier's reaction and though it made Cherry sorrowful, it also made him happy. Now, in the dark quiet, he could ponder. What'd I do with that address he gave me? Cherry asked himself. I told him I'd send his stuff to somebody. What stuff. They took it all away with his body. Cherry pondered the death itself. But it was difficult for Cherry to think about death. He did not have words and concepts to build his thoughts. There had been his Christian upbringing and his biological science courses and each had provided him with a set of theoretical constructs to frame his thoughts but he had rejected the first and tonight the second seemed inadequate. Cherry put his hand to his right calf. The new bayonet was there. It felt good. Like Egan's, Cherry thought. He smiled. All around him the others chatted softly.

“Hey, Doc,” Brown whispered.

“Yeah,” Doc answered.

“Oooo, Doc! Lieutenant Caldwell's got the funniest red mark on his ass.”

“What that?”

“I aint sure,” Brown chuckled. “I think maybe it's lipstick.”

“Bullshit,” Caldwell said seriously offended. “Cut that chatter.”

Disgust with Caldwell had passed among all the EM of Alpha. “When the dinks opened up,” Brown laughed more quietly, “I saw him kiss his ass good-bye.”

Brooks stifled a snicker. “Hey,” he stopped the peripheral talk, “listen up. There are times,” he said very solemnly altering the mood, “when a man or men follow another man simply because the other man is in a position of authority. If you all followed me unquestioningly and you didn't give me advice, we'd all be dead. I want to hear what you're thinking. Tomorrow, we're sending a platoon to rendezvous with Delta and the rest of us are going to probe all over this valley. Maybe we'll cross back over to the other side.”

“We aint goin back on that road?” Garbageman asked.

“I think we ought to stay off it, Ruf,” De Barti agreed with Garbageman. “At least as much as possible.”

“GreenMan wants us to find a way up the cliff and mark it,” Brooks said. “We might need it later. Besides, we have to find it to meet with Delta.”

“This is fucked down here, Mista,” Doc said disgustedly. “We stay in this valley, we gonna rot.”

“I don't like it either,” FO said. “That dink this afternoon. He must have counted every man in our column. I just know he did. He counted every 60, every radio. You can forget trying to keep up any illusion about two companies. They know everything about us. You can bet yer ass that dink gets a gold star for today.”

“Those fuckers,” Garbageman cursed. “Them shithead bastards. It seems like they always know where we're at. They're goina snipe the shit outa us.”

“They gowin suck us in,” Jax said. “They gowin leave us signs like an in-vi-tation. Then they gowin shut the door. This pig shit. This white man's war.”

“Come on, Man,” Egan said quietly. “Haven't we had enough of that crap.”

Before the meeting Egan had had to quiet Jax and Marko. Silvers had been Jackson's field partner and Brunak as AG had been Marko's. Jax and Marko buddied up as soon as the medevac bird departed. Then Egan and Thomaston had come and appointed Jackson squad leader. Marko thought the promotion should have been his.

When they moved into the new NDP the two had huddled and pointed their weapons outward. In the cold wetness Marko had asked, “Jax, you got a chick?”

“Shee-it Man,” Jax answered jiving quietly, “I got all kinda chicks. Black en white. They loves my ass.”

“Man, what I wouldn't give to see a round-eye right now,” Marko said.

“Roun-eye!?” Jax exclaimed. This man need some educatin, he thought. “Doan give me none that roun-eye shit. Eyes aint roun. Rouneye? Ma-aann. Yo white fuckas always screamin roun-eye when yo mean white.”

“I don't give a rat's ass what color she is long's she pink inside,” Marko countered. “I'd ball a black bitch ta be outta here right now.”

“Yo honkey mothafucka,” Jax seethed. “Yo mean yo'd ee-ven stick yo golden dick in black pussy. Yo'd even lower yoself that far ta get out a heah. We here cause a white fucken pigs.”

“Augh you fucken son of a nigger cunt,” Marko spun and grabbed Jackson's shirt. “When you goina see this aint white America's war fought by his nigger slaves. What the fuck do you think I am? White dudes like me get blown away more often than niggers like you. You fucken black bastards sold your souls. Your people sold their yellow Bros down the fucken drain, Boy, just so they could be like us whites. This aint whitey's war, nigger. It's
our
war.”

Jax was ready to kill Marko. No one called Jackson a nigger. Jax began a suffocated scream. Egan had come down and grabbed them both and had drained the fury. He had talked to them quietly and had asked them both to come to the CP meeting to bring up their debate. Jax had come alone.

“Yo ask me up here yoself,” Jax reminded Egan.

“Hey,” Brooks said. “First let's settle the local problems. Then we can work on the world situation.” They returned to the discussion of their plans with Brooks saying, “Our ultimate objective is the high feature by the river. That knoll with the big tree. Our ultimate mission is to clear the NVA from the center of the valley. Those goals establish the parameters of our actions.”

“Our ultimate goal,” Doc said, “is ta remain alive.” Doc had been unusually quiet ever since the medevac. Silvers had not been the first dead man he had evacuated and he would not be the last. And Brunak would not be the last of the wounded. Somehow, their shootings affected Doc more deeply than any before. Perhaps it was because 1st Sqd, 1st Plt was, except for that Numbnuts character, among the best squads Doc had ever seen. They were always alert, vigilant. If they were so easily sniped wasn't he all the more vulnerable?

Doc's usual speech was a mixture of city-black street dialect and army/ boonierat jargon. Now he spoke with an almost professional eloquence. “Leon Silvers died instantly,” Doc said. “He died from the traumatic amputation of his head. That's quick. Brunak is gonna be different. That man has a long struggle ahead of him, if he makes it. When they hoisted him this afternoon he was in deep hypovolemic shock. He was losing a lot of blood and it wasn't coming out. That means edema, the effusion of serous fluids into intracellular space. McCarthy hadn't inserted the IV properly and Brunak's vascular system was draining. Dig? There won't enough blood left in him for his heart to pump. He gone into tachycardia.”

“What's that mean, Doc?” De Barti asked.

“His heart beating at an excessive rate,” Doc said. “It was tryin ta pump up the pressure in a system that was full a holes.”

“He's goina make it, aint he, Doc?”

“I talked to the TOC bout an hour ago,” Doc answered. “They doan have no word yet.” No one spoke so Doc Johnson continued. “I got one question, Mista,” he said sliding to his less formal speech. “One question. How many mo mothafuckas we gonna git blown away fo we reach that ultimate objective? We got men here sufferin from immersion foot, from jungle rot. Half the company's got colds and half gonna catch pneumonia. What the fuck fo, Mista?”

“We bein Judas Goats fo a whiteman's operation,” Jax said. “They sendin us down here ta git slaughtered so they know right where ta drop the bombs. That way they doan have ta spend so much money on bombs cause they ken drop less.”

“No company of mine is going to be slaughtered,” Brooks said firmly. He had heard enough of their complaints. “It pisses me off to hear you guys talk like that, like …”

El Paso interrupted him. “Yes,” he said, “but we can talk about it, can't we?”

Brooks looked through the darkness toward El Paso's voice. He paused attempting to think of a response. No one else spoke. Brooks could not think of an alternative. He was trapped. Later he would think to himself, I should have said, ‘Yes, you can talk, but let's talk tactics first.' Now he could not think. He wanted their opinions but he wanted them to agree with his own.

“Maybe,” Lt. Caldwell said, “you men should think more about killing dinks than about turning chicken and running.”

“Fuck that shit,” Egan snapped angrily at Caldwell.

“Wait a minute,” Brooks said tenuously. “This meeting is open. El Paso's right. We can talk.”

They spoke quickly now, all except Caldwell without anger. Each man was firmly entrenched in his own convictions yet each was willing to sway, to lean, just a little because the other men were boonierats. From that base they spoke and listened to each other respectively.

“I'd like to know something,” Cherry asserted himself. “I'd like to know what the hell we're doin here.”

El Paso took him by as much surprise as Doc had earlier even though he had heard El Paso's scholarly speech before. “The problem,” El Paso began, “problems, encountered in trying to resolve which historical antecedents caused our intervention and what the historical morality of that intervention is, are complicated by our inability to withdraw to a greater perspective and also by the ongoing occurrence of events.” That, Cherry thought, has got to be a prepared speech. “It is as if historical perspective were depth,” El Paso said. “And that depth is a cone. The greater the depth the greater also the diameter. Every year we descend into history we find not simply greater lineal understanding of today's events but we also find these events inseparably tied to other events. Looking at today is like looking at the point of the cone. Looking at historical antecedents is looking into the cone. To get an accurate understanding of today we must work toward the base understanding, seeing everything in each expanding strata below. At a certain point the known details and connections begin to diminish and the cone reverses and becomes smaller until it points out and there we are in pre-history.”

“Wow!” De Bard exclaimed. “That's beautiful.”

“Well, what's that all mean?” Garbageman asked.

“What do you call that?” De Barti asked.

“I understand what you're saying,” Cherry said, “but that doesn't answer why we're here.”

“That,” El Paso chuckled to De Barti, “is El Paso's biconoid theory of history.”

“Biconoid? Biconoid?” Egan repeated to himself. “Two cones,” he said.

“Joined at the base,” El Paso added. He was pleased.

“So what?” Caldwell said.

“So.” El Paso said moving on, “it depends on how far back and how wide you want to go to justify or explain or understand what the fuck's happenin here now.”

“We've been over a lot of that before,” Brooks said.

“You ever hear of the Oxford Oath?” Egan asked El Paso.

“About 1935?” El Paso replied.

“Yep,” Egan said. He had thought he would catch El Paso with that one. He had tried many times and only rarely succeeded.

“Well, what is it?” Cherry asked.

“It was a sworn statement,” Egan said. “And a slogan. It was somewhat the equivalent of chanting ‘Stop the War in Vietnam.'”

“Huh?”

“It was a movement in England,” El Paso explained. “About '35 or '36. It was an oath where students resolved never to bear arms for king or country. The oath was agreed to by a majority of Oxford Union members. The Oxford Union was a nationwide student organization. They say Hitler used to quote it to his general staff to lessen their anxiety when he'd want to make another move toward world conquest. Hitler said it was evidence the British were rotten to the core and that his staff was exaggerating the risk of his moves.”

“It allowed Hitler to advance unchallenged,” Egan said. “That's just what the NVA are thriving on too. Vo Nguyen Giap uses student dissent in the World to dupe his dinks into thinking we're weak. And that's only where it begins. China and Russia use it too. Ya know, maybe we're here simply as a show of strength and will. And that show is a deterrent. It keeps the Commies in check so they don't blunder us into a thermo-nuclear holocaust. That won't happen if Tricky Dick keeps a shit load of us here. We become a safety valve for world tension.”

“That's a bunch a shit,” FO countered quietly. “We're more apt to blunder us into World War Three by being here than by withdrawing.”

“What about the Middle East?” Egan said. “Egypt's got Russkie advisors, Russkie technicians, Russkie troops manning SAM missiles. We back down here what's goina keep the Kremlin from pushin inta Israel? That would blow up the earth. We can't just say we aint goina defend our allies. Be just like the '30s. Mao'd take Taiwan. Russia'd take Berlin. The communists'd move in everywhere.”

“You Americans,” Minh said softly. He did not want to speak with so many GIs clustered for he felt very much alienated when they had these discussions, but he could no longer allow them to prattle without injecting his thoughts. “You Americans,” he repeated, “you are most blind. You do not see my country or my people. All you see are your words. We were reduced to ignorant child-slaves under the yoke of colonialism. It is not communism you most protect us from. Communism is not a threat to us. We need your support to keep out a foreign enemy. Soon we will not need that. But you should not fear us if we become communist. It will be communism for us, not against you. We must be the ones to have power over ourselves.”

“Amen, Brother,” Jax whispered enthusiastically. “Vietnamese Power to Vietnamese People. Black Power to Black People.”

“And White Power to White People,” Brown added.

“Amen,” Doc said.

“If you view the world,” El Paso began, “as Western and Eastern power centers and vast power voids, the expansion of communism since, well, 1917, is a simple swinging back of the slow moving power pendulum pushed to one extreme by colonialism. The Europeans expanded outward from the 1400s to like 1945. Communism is a backlash movement for a lot of countries that were once colonies. If it's strong today that's because colonialism was strong earlier.”