The Vietnam Reader (55 page)

To her, he had never felt so wonderful, so warm, so light yet so firm. He had never moved so smoothly. He had never touched her in so many places simultaneously. To him her mouth had never been so sweet, her tongue so sensual. Her excitement rose higher, higher, faster, tauter.

“Oooooo,” she groaned. “Oooh Rufus, Rufus, Rufus. Oooh Rufus.
Make me pregnant.” Love exploded from her. “Make me pregnant. Oooh Rufus. I want all of you.”

“Oh my sweet Lila, I love you so. I love you so much. I’ve missed you so much. Lila. Lila.”

Rufus had never been so excited, Lila never so exciting. The nearness of her wonderful glowing body, the newness, renewedness of their love was overwhelming. They relaxed, kissed, lay in the bed. She teased him, tickled his side, kissed his scrotum. Nibbling at him she watched his excitement rise. He ran his fingers down her back onto her ass. He followed his fingers with his tongue. Lila lay on her back and he kissed her body, her proud body. She arched her back as he mouthed her breasts, licked and rolled the nipples with his tongue. Their passion had never known the variety. They loved again and again and then they relaxed.

“It’s going to be wonderful,” Lila said. “There’s so much to see and do. Let’s not waste any time doing nothing.”

Rufus agreed fully. It was wonderful. It was wonderful having her to make the decisions. He gave himself to her totally, trustingly. “Lila,” he confessed, “I’ve thought about you so much. All the time. You’re on my mind all the time.” It was as if he needed her to carry him now. “You’re everything to me,” he said. With the last sentence he felt he had made a mistake, had given too much, even to a wife. Lila did not return his loneliness confession with one of her own.

“It’s going to be wonderful,” she said laying her head on his chest. They did not say anything for several minutes. Rufus felt pleasantly tired. Yet he was anxious. He thought about his platoon, about each of the men in his platoon. He chose his words carefully, trying to be lighthearted, “I wonder,” he said, “where those poor bastards are sleeping tonight?” Lila rose up on her forearms on his chest and looked into his eyes. He avoided her gaze. “This is the first real bed,” he chuckled, “I’ve been in in ten months. I’ve slept in my clothes on the ground ever since July when I went to the Oh-deuce.”

“Is it bad?” Lila asked sympathetically.

“No. That part’s not bad,” Rufus said. “I was just wondering where they were. It’s raining there now and we’re in the mountains.” He
changed his tone to sound more cheerful. “It’s wonderful to be here with you.”

“Rufus,” she asked. He knew what was coming. Every one in Nam who had returned from R&R said wives always asked it on the first night. “Rufus,” Lila asked. She put her head down on his chest again. “Have you killed anyone?”

He paused and sighed. He took a deep breath. “Why don’t you ask me if I’ve saved anyone’s life?” he said.

“L-T. Bravo’s gettin hit.” It was El Paso. He had been monitoring all three CP radios while Cahalan and Brown slept. A light rain had begun falling. It was very cool and a shiver ran up Brooks’ back. Sporadic rifle shots cracked from across the valley. Bravo Company had been inserted on the north escarpment of the Khe Ta Laou on the 13th, had moved north, uphill and NDPed. On the 14th day they had engaged three NVA soldiers in a brief firefight and had pursued them south across their insertion LZ toward the valley. The Bravo troops had lost the NVA trail and had returned to the LZ for their NDP. They were now north northwest of Alpha by 2½ kilometers with only lower hills and the valley between. More rifles chattered. The NVA were probing Bravo first from one side then another. A few frags exploded.

“Put everyone on alert,” Brooks directed El Paso. “Monitor Bravo’s internal and have Egan’s cherry bring his radio up here.”

An illumination flare popped above Bravo’s position. Then another and another. Several popped over the center of the valley. The light pierced the canopy and fell eerily upon the boonierats of Company A. Brooks hated calling for illumination. The light fell indiscriminately, silhouetting enemy and friendly forces alike. Usually US forces NDPed on high ground and the illumination actually helped the NVA kill more Americans then vice versa.

El Paso, Cahalan and Brown along with Doc, Minh and FO clustered low close about Brooks. “We’re going to run into a lot of shit in this AO,” FO said quietly to the RTOs.

“I hope we don’t get hit by mortars again,” Brown said. “I hate those fucken things.”

“Anything comin at you is bad shit,” El Paso said. Artillery from Barnett began firing Bravo’s DTs.

“Down south,” FO said getting everyone’s attention, “we used to use a doughnut. We’d use a full brigade to encircle the enemy just before dark. All night long they’d pour in artillery and air strikes. The dinks’d try to move out. In the morning we’d go in and mop up.”

Egan and Cherry joined the CP circle. Egan had led Cherry to the CP during a break from the illumination. Cherry slapped at a mosquito. Egan grabbed his hand. “Keep the fuckin noise down,” he snarled. Doc handed Cherry a small plastic bottle of insect repellent. Cherry squirted some into his hands and wiped it on his face and neck and passed it back. It passed around the circle. The mosquitos had come out with the rain.

Nine men with four radios sat quietly listening to the valley noises and to the faint rushing air sound of the radios. The probe of Bravo had slackened. It had lasted less than ten minutes. The artillery crews on Barnett ceased shooting illumination and DTs for Bravo and returned to the random H & I fire, the blasts rumbling and echoing in the dark. It seemed peaceful. Cherry had not slept when the column stopped. He had not rested before the night move. With the security of being at the center of the company and surrounded by eight others he tried to close his eyes. It was peaceful.

A new sound entered the night. It was that most horrible of sounds, the light concussion of air non-sound, a mortar being fired. And everyone of them knew it was not friendly mortars. They had no sister units that close, in that direction, below them east in the valley. FO, Egan and Brooks instinctively pulled out lensmatic compasses and fixed on the sound. Everyone else froze. There was no place to move. No holes had been dug. Along the column men, already on the ground, lay flatter, condensed their bodies. Sweat sprouted in beads on foreheads, phaffft. Hearts slowing, eyes widening, balls clinging, climbing, rectums constricting and sphincters clamping down in anticipation, phaffft. phaffft. Ten times. Twelve times. Ears like radar searching the sky. Then lightning bursts in the mist and karrumph … karrumph … Flashes across the valley, karrumph. karrumph.

Radios crackled lowly. Panicked voices could be heard. “Bravo’s
FO is hit,” Cahalan reported. Rounds continued to explode at Bravo’s location. Twelve, sixteen, twenty times. “They got three dudes hit.” Then rifles chattered. AKs, RPD machine guns clattered and were answered by M-16s and M-60s. The fire intensified. Hand grenades and RPGs and thumpers exchanged percussion. The howitzers on Barnett reacted firing Bravo’s DTs. “Drop one hundred, left fifty.” The caller was working the howitzer rounds around his perimeter.

Amid the explosions and the continuous small arms cacophony came the popping sounds of the NVA mortar tube below Company A. The enemy mortar team was firing furiously. Brooks grabbed Cahalan’s handset, threw it back and scrambled for Brown’s. He keyed the handset bar furiously, interrupting Bravo’s artillery adjustments. “Armageddon Two, Armageddon Two, this is Quiet Rover Four, over.” He unkeyed. “Come on you bastard, I got a fix on the tube.” Brooks keyed again. “Armageddon …” He paused. Everyone else had frozen. The twelve howitzers on Barnett were all firing. The booming from Barnett and the explosions across the valley increased. Brooks violently shoved the handset into FO’s hand. “Get Arty. Tell ’em you hear the tube. Tell ’em you’ll adjust by sound.” El Paso covered Brooks with a poncho and Egan produced a flashlight and topo map. They could still hear the NVA mortar rounds being launched. “We are receiving in-coming mortars at our sierra,” an RTO in the TOC bunker on Barnett reported. “Firebase gettin hit,” FO reported to the group. FO reached the FDC at Barnett. He calmly explained the situation. “Armageddon Two, Rover Four. Fire mission. Over.” FO gave the direction and approximate location of the target as Egan and Brooks deciphered the coordinates from the map. FO casually suggested the type of projectile and fuse action and adjustment. Then he added, “Now fo Gawd sakes fire the Gawddamned thing.”

“Stand by for shot,” the radio rasped.

“Standin by,” FO said coolly.

The popping sound had stopped. It now began popping again, popping over and over. Again the boonierats of Alpha clung to the earth. Had the NVA mortar team adjusted to their, Alpha’s, position? The small arms fire from Bravo never ceased.

“Shot out,” the radio rasped.

“Shot out,” FO repeated.

FLASH! KARRUMP! The first NVA mortar rounds exploded, the noise following the flash by half a breath. Flash! KARRUMP! Flash! KARRUMP! Flash! KARRUMP!

“Shee-it,” Doc smiled.

The howitzer round from Barnett exploded near to where the sound of the popping tube had come. “Right fifty,” FO called. “Yo on the money. Fire for effect.”

KARRUMP! The NVA mortar rounds were exploding on Alpha’s old NDP, on their locations of three hours earlier. “Shee-it,” Doc laughed. He turned to Minh and punched him on the shoulder. Up and down the column troops were breathing easier.

KARABABOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM! Six US 105mm howitzer rounds exploded in the valley very close below Company A. The entire peak rocked. KARABABOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM! Another volley exploded. “Get ’em, Arty.” Another volley. The earth shook. Rifle fire was still clattering from Bravo’s position. KARABABOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM! Silent cheers arose, imaginary banners waved. Silent bands played. The cavalry rode across ninety unseeable TV screens. The pioneers were saved.

The frequency of artillery explosions in the valley increased. The 105s from Barnett were joined by huge 175mm and eight-inch howitzers from distant firebases. The small arms clatter at Bravo ceased, then erupted, then ceased again. It settled down to sporadic crackings in the wet drizzle night sky.

“Bravo’s requesting an emergency Dust-Off,” Cahalan reported to the group.

“No fucken way, Man,” Brown said.

“How in fuck they gonna get them dudes out?” Doc whispered angrily. “How they gonna get a bird inta the middle a dis mothafuck?”

“Their FO’s dead,” Cahalan said. “They got three urgent, one priority, one tactical urgent. And their FO.”

“Oh this fucken valley,” El Paso said. “It’s socked in tighter en shit in yer ass when hell’s rainin down.”

Cherry’s hands and legs were quivering. He had his radio on company internal freq and monitored the routine sit-reps from his squads
and the other platoon CPs. His whole body shook. Oh God. Don’t let any of us get blown away. Please God.

The sounds of the valley diminished. The small arms fire at Bravo’s location ceased. The NVA mortar tube was silent. US artillery slowed but continued to erupt in the valley. Waiting dragged heavily.

“How will they get the wounded out?” Cherry whispered to Egan.

“They’ll get ’em,” Egan said. “Medevac pilots got big brass balls.”

Doc Johnson was sick, nauseous. The inability to help, to affect the situation at all, always made him ill with frustration and anger. You trah, trah, trah, Doc thought, an what it get you? You trah bein good, doin right, an it doan change a fucken thing, Mista. Not a fucken thing. It was the same in the rear and the lowlands as it was in the boonies. It was even the same back in the World.

Doc was a large dark brown man, large and heavy for an infantryman. He had a large head and fuzzy black coarse hair and a scant fuzzy moustache that came to the corners of his mouth and curled back into itself. His chin was covered with coarse stubble. Over his left eye there was a deep scar, pink against his deep brown skin, that ran to the bridge of his nose and obliterated the eyebrow. In all, Doc had a heavy thick look which many people automatically associated with slowness, dullness and dumbness.

Doc, Sergeant Alexander Vernon Johnson, was a city black. He was born and rasied in New York, Manhattan, up at 143d Street with a turf extending from the Hudson River east across all of Harlem, mixed neighborhoods, mixed ghetto of Puerto Ricans and blacks, some whites, old Irish and Jewish remnants. Doc’s family had been lured from the South in the 1920s by the prospect of high-paying employment in the factories of the northeast, lured with tens of thousands of southern blacks migrating for a better life. Long before he was born, in 1949, his people had settled into a pattern of male nomadic job searching and broken matriarchal families. Alexander was raised by a woman who was not his mother in a family where the siblings were not blood brothers and sisters in a street culture which was more tribal than cognatic. Alexander had no father but many fathers, no mother
but many mothers and no siblings but brothers and sisters everywhere on the turf.

For a boy growing up in the city, the street was a good place, the best place. Inside it was dull, dingy gray close and dirty with age, the kind of dirt cleaning does not affect. Inside was where the winos laid in the hallways, where the roaches spawned in the moisture beneath sinks and behind tipping commodes. Inside the paint had all yellowed and cracked and chipped, and the plaster walls and ceilings had cracks running like veins in science book pictures of the human body. In the street there was handball and stickball and stoopball, and over at the school there was basketball. On the street the buildings had color and the walls carried ads for skin bleach and hair straightener. On the street there was music and dance. The street never, never was completely dark.

Street life connotates a harsh nastiness to the uninitiated but to a boy who knew the street it was communal, pleasant. Alexander knew from very early on that someone or thing would watch out for his welfare by forcing him to school or by rapping with him when he needed a man to talk to or by protecting him when a rival gang invaded his turf. He was an inner-city poor black child who did not know he was poor and who scoffed at the social worker’s condescension. For a time he was a city cowboy, a small time street hustler, good friend, bad enemy.