Keeping Watch (7 page)

“Don't leave me, Carmichael, don't leave me here.”

“Nobody's going to leave you, Farmboy, you're safe now. The medic's going to patch you up and it's off to the hospital with you, nice, clean sheets and plenty to eat, all those pretty nurses, don't worry.” Nonsense phrases poured out, nonsense because it did not seem possible for a man to lose that much blood and survive to the medevac's arrival. “Can't you give him some morphine?” he asked the medic.

“Any more might kill him.”

It was on the tip of Allen's tongue to ask why that wouldn't be the lesser evil here, but with Farmboy's blue eyes holding his, he could not. All he could do was wait, and listen to the gulping quieten, and watch the eyes' focus go farther and farther away. The kid was still alive when the medevac came. It was only the drugs, Allen told himself, that made him seem close to death.

The gunship's friendly fire had taken Streak and another short-timer from Alpha Squad just behind them on the bank, given T-bone a bullet in his buttock, and left Farmboy . . . wherever he was. They shoved the four men into the medevac with as much gentleness as they could, and watched the chopper take to the air.

“Not enough that Charlie's shootin' our asses, now the First Fuckin' Cav's got to take its turn.” It was Mouse, more bitter than Allen had ever heard him. “Suckers think we can't aim better'n Charlie, put a hole in they gas tank?”

“They know we're not going to do that, Mouse. They've got us by the balls—we're not going to shoot at the guys who bring us food and haul us out.”

“Maybe
you
not gonna do that, Crazy. They better damn well not count on this boy not to get 'em in my sights.”

“Frag a chopper, man?” Chris exclaimed. “Dude, that'd be bitchin'. Get their attention, know what I mean?”

“They sure as shit think twice about shootin' at our asses—eatin' this fuckin' mud while they sittin' up there, nice and dry.”

Allen didn't like this talk, not the way Mouse was saying it. Things had to become pretty grim in a company for the men to talk about fragging a hated officer, “accidentally” loosing a round or grenade in his direction during a firefight. But this company had no such hated officers, and open war breaking out between the grunts and the helicopter crews would be a catastrophe.

“Look, Mouse, fuck 'em. Let The Wolf tear the chopper boys another asshole. He'll do it righteous, you know that.”

Even Mouse had to pause at that, considering what their lieutenant's response was going to be, having his own men shot down by some jumpy-fingered gunner. Mouse's bulked-up shoulders relaxed, and the open rage faded from his face as he began to imagine The Wolf lighting into the gunship crew, The Wolf closing in on the hapless First Cav gunner, eyes gleaming and teeth bared; every man there pictured it with anticipation. “He better, man, you know what I'm sayin'? He just better. Streak was good people, fuckin' hell.”

“Who better what?” spoke the voice of authority, and Woolf was there, his eyes already angry.

“Nothing, sir.”

“How many in your squad now, Carmichael?”

Allen did a quick head count: Mouse, Chris, and he were the only members of the squad as it had been when he first shipped in; T-bone would be gone for a while, by the looks of it; and there were a pair of new guys who'd been with them eleven days.

“Five, sir.”

“Okay, I'm dropping Bravo Squad until we're reinforced, I'll be putting two of them in with you. What're your DEROS dates?”

Allen found he was fourth down, even though he'd served less than half his time, following Chris, Mouse, and a guy recently transferred into Bravo, one of the few soldiers Allen had seen here who looked older than twenty. The guy's hair was even thinning—he'd have looked like an accountant playing at Army Reserves if it hadn't been for the eyes.

“Okay, Garrison, you're squad leader,” Woolf told the man, but the accountant shook his head.

“I'd rather not, sir, if you don't mind. I've been here long enough to know that my strength is not in leadership, you might say. Besides, I'm off to R&R in a week.”

“Take it now, Garrison. We'll shuffle when we get back to the NDP.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Wolf's gaze went to the other squad members.
Funny,
Allen thought,
you always expect his eyes to be yellow
. “You men okay with that?”

“Sure, Loot.”

The lieutenant shook his head. “A person would think this Army was a democracy or something,” he said, and walked away.

The squad stared openmouthed at the retreating back.

“Did The Wolf just make a joke?” Allen asked.

“Hard to imagine,” the accountant said. “You're Carmichael? I'm Gregory George Garrison—they call me ThreeG.” They shook hands, and went off to amalgamate their two squads.

But the Army didn't seem to be in much of a hurry to bring the platoon in. Over the next two days, pressing forward into the green, no one seemed to know what they were doing out there, and they would have suspected that the company command had forgotten about them had they not responded to radio requests for artillery and supplies. Allen found himself walking next to Flores the morning of the second day, and heard how The Wolf had used Lucy's radio to call in the report of the gunship's friendly fire.

“Sweet Jesus, I'm glad it wasn't me on the other end.” Lucy said it with admiration. “Just listening made me want to crawl off and shit my guts out under a tree. Thought my radio's tubes'd be melted down. That gunner better arrange himself a quick bullet in the foot and get lifted out right quick, else he's gonna find himself in lots of little pieces.”

That cheered Allen, and left Mouse with a bounce in his step when he relayed the conversation to him. The rain even let up for a while, enough to tuck their ponchos up over their shoulders and steam in the sun.

They came to a small ville around two in the afternoon, five hooches, six ducks, and a bunch of kids wearing shorts or nothing at all, most of them with sores on their legs and scalps. The closest thing they found to a bunker was a suitcase-sized hole under the family sleeping area, covered with a board: a rat-resistant store for rice, but nothing being hidden from human attention. The ville's papers were in order and the people were friendly, so the GIs distributed a few chocolate bars and cigarettes, the medic smeared the worst of the kids' sores with ointment, and they moved on. One kid tagged along for a while, a handsome boy of about eight, formally dressed in both shorts and an adult-sized T-shirt that had once been printed with a picture of the Eiffel Tower. It was more hole than fabric and the ragged hem came to his knees, but it was clearly a thing of pride. Allen figured the kid was hoping that if he hung around the GIs long enough, one of them might give him another T-shirt. The boy skipped up and down the line, chattering merrily in his pidgin English, and because he was cheerful, because his scalp was relatively clean from scabs and his face was animated, the weary, dispirited grunts put up with his presence. Eventually, though, he decided that these GIs had given all they could be talked out of, and between one tree and the next, he was gone.

That night, the enemy fell upon them.

The platoon was dug in on a piece of ground marked on the maps as Hill 117, nicely softened but with enough drainage in the soil that their holes did not turn instantly into bathtubs. Allen was not the only one to fashion a cup from one C-ration tin and cut a stove from another, heating a cup of cocoa over a chunk of burning C4—the air was cooler here on higher ground, and the hot drink was welcome. Chris lit a joint and handed it back and forth with Mouse, offering it to Allen but not taking his refusal personally.

Allen took first watch for their stretch of the perimeter. It was an odd night, the jungle quieter than usual, without the usual shift and rustle of the wildlife. The clouds cleared for a while, revealing a quarter moon lying peacefully in the blackness. Something about its distance made him think of home—not the dry California valley where he'd lived the last few years, but his real home, the string of islands lying in the straits between Canada and the state of Washington. Jerry and he used to sneak out on moonlit nights, creep down to the dock and climb silently into the family rowboat. They'd go out into the strait, draw the boat up onto one beach or another, maybe make a little fire and cook some hot dogs. That must be why he was thinking of those nights: The moon had been like this the night he and Jerry shared a can of watery cocoa heated over a fire on the cove beach at Sanctuary, one of the uninhabited islands everyone said was haunted by ghosts. Cocoa, silence, and ghosts; yes, that was Vietnam all right.

Shortly before the end of his watch, he heard the
thump
of a flare, followed by the pop overhead and then the wavering light. He brought his rifle up, hearing the line of M16s similarly responding to the alarm. Two guns fired, but there was no answering fusillade from the night, and after a minute Allen thumbed his safety back on; somebody probably heard a wild pig, or a rat.

Still, there was a sensation as of the jungle holding its breath, and it made him edgy. On the stroke of midnight, Mouse, who had an extraordinary sense of time even if he never wore a watch, stirred in his sleeping trench, paused to take a piss, and shambled over to the fighting hole the squad had dug for itself. Hearing every sound the big man made, from the rustle of the poncho liner to the last spatter of drops hitting the ground, Allen nearly laughed aloud. When Mouse climbed down beside him, Allen put his head close to his squad-mate's and whispered, “I was getting all freaked out at the bad vibes, nearly talked myself into sending up flares to check for VC in the wires before I realized it's only because the damn rain has stopped.”

“Know what you mean. I kept wakin' myself up with my breathin'.”

“Well, everything seems okay. Alpha Squad sent up a flare a while ago, but nothing there.”

“Maybe Charlie's spooked with the rain stoppin', gone home to wash his socks. Sleep good, man.”

Allen went back to his hole behind the sandbags. Before he lay down, however, he studied the darkness again: There were people out there, he could feel them. Still, there was nothing he could do sitting here. Might as well sleep.

It began an hour later with a scream, a sound of distilled mortal terror that jerked every man upright, hair on end and gun in hand, a sound that seemed to last a lot longer in the memory than the two or three seconds before the grenade exploded. A man in Alpha Squad had been peaceably in his hole, either dozing or staring out into the night, when a grenade dropped out of nowhere and he had felt Death rolling around between his boots. That explosion was followed rapidly by three more, then
Move move MOVE!
and a mounting wall of noise, bursts and firing and yelps of pain. Allen caught a snatch of Flores shouting into his radio and braced himself for the resulting artillery, but for what came, there could be no bracing. Two of the shells came to earth twenty feet from the perimeter, the concussion slamming into any person still above ground. There were four men in the fighting hole Allen's squad had dug for two, a press of elbows and gun butts, and the sides of the hole half collapsed into them with the incoming shell. All four crouched over each other's knees and shoulders, hands gripping their helmets. Allen, squeezed in against Mouse, had a crazy image of what a passing bird would see: four round rocks jammed together in a hole. Then the third shell landed, nearly on top of the first; for several long seconds, he couldn't think, couldn't even breathe.

Did he imagine a high, panicky voice screaming instructions to correct the distant guns? He must have imagined it, he couldn't have heard anything in the cacophony of explosions, screaming men, and gunfire that followed. Flares and smoke filled the air, flashes of launched grenades shot more or less blindly into the dark, the flares throwing dancing shadows from the trees, shadows that hid the enemy. Both sides flung death at each other across the cleared ground; inside the perimeter, men died.

Years later, when Allen happened to step into a discotheque with its pounding music and pulsing strobes, he was instantly snatched back to that night in the jungle. The flash of shells and sweep of tracers, the weird harsh light of the flares, the heat and confusion and the noise of all-out battle overwhelmed the senses, leaving a man with no choices but to curl up in a fetal position, or rise to his feet and hurl mad defiance out at the terrifying dark with all the breath in his lungs and all the ammunition in his possession.

One of their radios was still working, or perhaps the distant artillery had found its error. The next rounds hit lower ground; one thin scream, indistinct words over and over again, proved that the response had been to some degree effective. The attack slowed. After a few minutes, Allen eased over the top of the sandbags so the others could shovel out the dirt that had collapsed in. He heard ThreeG calling for a damage report, and he answered that his guys were okay. The hole closer to the misfires had not fared so well.

“They're dead, Carmichael,” came a choked voice. “We're all fucking dead, oh fuck, oh God, we're dead.”

Allen squirmed over the ground, dragging his gun after him. He couldn't see a thing, not until another flare went up, and even then all he could make out was a black hole until a hand shot up and seized his, scaring him half to death. Its owner pulled himself up until the gleam of wire rims was inches from Allen's face.

Allen turned to hiss over his shoulder, “Mouse! I need a hand here, man.”

Mouse was there in an instant, the whites of his eyes the only thing visible, but his strength hauled Chris up from the hole. The surfer's hands came up automatically to straighten his glasses, his skin pouring out the musky aura of old marijuana.