The way to Ash Shummari was a storm of noise, sunlight, heat, and dust.
From the high safety of outcroppings of white limestone an occasional lone figure—a shepherd, perhaps—could be seen looking down on the narrow, winding road, clinging to the hills like a snake to its prey, that had made its way from village to village across this ancient land since Hellenic times, since Cretan times, since before there was a Bible.
The marines in the van of the raid saw Lebanon that morning in an hours-long, jolting blur of speed and heat. They saw it with the clarity of fear at twenty-five miles an hour, more on the downhills; saw it with the hollowness in the belly that comes expecting attack at any moment. They did not talk. They did not watch the road. They watched the hills that marched with their progress, watched ceaselessly the white-shuttered windows of the villages they sped through in a clatter of treads, a howl of engines.
Will Givens saw it holding desperately tight to the welded manholds on top of an amtrac, so sun-hot he could barely close one hand on them. In the other he gripped his M-16, empty, but with a magazine ready in the unbuttoned pocket of his blouse. His boots dangled over the edge of the rolling tank, over the terrifying squeal of bogies. Beneath him, beneath the other riflemen (for that was all he and the rest of the mortar squad were now, riflemen) who clung to the top of the amphibious tank, the engine roared as if designed to deafen them, and steel treads clawed sparks from the stone. Behind them came a jeep, then another amtrac, and then a long string of them.
Three-two MAU was on its way to battle.
The squad had waited out dawn dug in at the LZ. Some time after sunrise the rumble of artillery to the south brought a renewed tension to their breakfast of cold rations. As they waited, since no one had any clear idea of what was happening, they began to invent scuttlebutt. The Syrians were good soldiers; no, they were bums; the Israelis had chewed them up a dozen times. The Russians would be waiting for them across the border; no, they would pull out and leave the terrorists to face the music; no, the Soviet Navy would sink the amphibs behind them and cut them off here in a blazing Chosin. At first they passed the rumors as a joke, but some gained the sound of truth. Will had listened to them with a hollow feeling, gripping his rifle and wishing again he had been able to zero it.
At 0730 the lead amtracs had rumbled up from seaward and the squad had clambered aboard with the rest, leaving their dug-in positions with a feeling already of regret.
Will clamped the rifle, still unaccustomed to it, in the crook of his arm. His hand came away from his face gray-white with caked dust and sweat. He could not believe how much dust there was. It came up like smoke from the ’tracks in front of the column, mixed with diesel fumes in an oily stink that overlay the warm smell of the land. He grabbed hastily at the weapon as it started to slide; they were jolting over a particularly atrocious section of road, nearing a town. People … there must have been thousands of them along here, he thought, not long before. But now the invading marines looked fleetingly down alleys where golden heaps of oranges lay in rotting piles, where laundry flapped sun-dried but forgotten. Stores gaped blank-fronted, their windows empty, those that had not been shuttered or barred. There were no cars, there were no people, there weren’t even any dogs. As he blinked past Cutford’s shadowed bulk he saw that the buildings they were passing now—taller, the city center—were hulks, shattered by shellfire.…
He stared around from the ’track, forgetting fear, seeing what war had done to Lebanon.
It might have been any of the resort towns along the coasts of the blue Mediterranean. Towns the ships had sailed by, or dropped anchor at briefly, not permitting the men ashore. It might have been downtown Palermo, the better section. It looked most like Greece, though.
Or must have once. The buildings had been new, in light colors. But now the modern fronts stared empty and the terraces were filled with smashed brick and glittering shards from the empty windows. The black stains of fires stood above them like eyebrows. The streets had been wide here, lined at ground level with shops and offices. Now piles of shattered masonry leaned outward, closing half the road, and the windows were blank and the shops were empty and the cars, those that were left, lay like the husks of long-dead insects: burnt, overturned, flattened by fallen walls. The very air was disquieting, heavy with smoke and the cave-smell of shattered plaster and the chemical stink of recent explosive.
It was the smell of ambush. He shivered and craned round, maintaining his deathgrip on the hot metal, to look for the others. Hernandez; Harner, looking sleepy, stretched out against the gunner’s cupola on the opposite side of the vehicle; Silky, seated facing aft, his helmet pulled low to screen his eyes from the sun; Cutford, sleeves rolled over heavy muscle, his face lifted toward the upper windows of a four-story apartment block as they rolled by. Washman wasn’t aboard, but Will could make out his pale face, open mouth, through the dust, on the next ’track back.
And Dippy Liebo. Where was he?
He decided not to think about that right now. It was too freaking hot; he felt sick from the motion and the jolting, and he had to stay alert. With that thought he realized suddenly what Cutford was looking for, and the knowledge, coupled with the slow thunder early that morning, made him sit up straighter and try to blink the dust and sun from his eyes. Maybe you’ll see some action today, Will, he thought. Somehow the prospect was less appealing than it had seemed in boot camp. Or even that morning, on the ship.
Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord God; and not that he should return from his ways, and live?
Above them, between the building-fronts that walled off the road, a plume of smoke blinked from the hillside. He tightened his grip on the rifle, staring upward; it was dust, not smoke, streaming behind a single vehicle that paralleled their progress along the lower road. A flank guard, most likely. He craned left to look past Cutford’s shoulder down into the valley and saw, yes, a left flank of two jeeps and a ’track below on the dry bed of a river. They stopped as he watched, and men leaped out to clear something from the path; then they rolled on again, the ’track taking the lead, tiny as a green bug from his height.
The lights on the tank ahead glowed red as it slowed for a curve so sharp the vehicle ahead of it had disappeared. He opened his mouth, but the pause of thought made speech too late, even if the driver could have heard him. He got his legs up just in time. Inertia jerked him forward, almost tearing his arm off, and the hull of the ’track bonged as its snout collided with the rear of the one in front. Glass shattered above the diesels, and when they moved again he saw that their headlights had been crushed flat. Too much noise for communication, even in a shout, but when he glanced back his eyes met Hernandez’; that was enough, to share it with someone else.
He faced forward again and stared up at the corner building as they edged around it, backing and filling to get past. He inspected each window, watching for movement, for shadows; and beside him the corporal did the same. Though no one stirred behind the dust-filled glass he still felt the coldness.
But if ye will not obey the voice of the Lord, but rebel against the commandment of the Lord, then shall the hand of the Lord be against you.
By noon they were deep into the hills, and still had seen nothing and no one. The only sign of human life had been a crack-windowed Mercedes full of local militia, who hastily pulled onto the berm when the lead amtrac came barreling down the middle of the road toward them. The terrain became steeper after that. The ancient folding of the land grew more violent, less welcoming, if any of it was welcoming, until the left flank dropped back out of sight. The villages they clattered through became smaller, the buildings older, and then they were in the mountains and there were no more villages at all.
The road stayed good, though. It was a new-looking two-laner, and they could see at curves where the rock had been blasted away in white gouges and left to fall toward the river. From atop the ’track the view was dizzying. The elevation was no greater than he was used to back in Western Carolina, but here the hills were unrounded, unclothed with green; they fell precipitously, eroded faces of bare white rock, gullies with thin brown grass over what soil had not been leached away. To him it looked ancient, blasted, barren. The open sky blazed blue light down over them, shimmering the asphalt with heat, the breeze of their motion offering no coolness but only drying their eyes and parching their open mouths. The roar of their engines echoed back from the faces of the hills until it seemed that an army, not half a battalion, was winding its way upward into the highest passes of Lebanon.
It was a little after midday, and the feeling of danger, of threat, had worn thin. They were toiling in column up a long grade, the overheating engines whining. He was clutching his M-16 between his legs and sipping at his canteen between jolts, letting it swing with his arm so that not a drop of the hot fluid would be lost, when the first detonation sounded far off and faint beyond the top of the hill.
The mortarmen knew it instantly. Silkworth twisted round in the frozen instantaneity of surprise. Givens dropped his canteen, the water slopping warm over his thighs and crotch, leaving a dark streak down the dusty green hull of the track. It bounced once heavy off the roadway and then splintered, crushed, flattened by the rolling steel of the treads. Cutford slammed his riflebutt on the hull, swinging himself down to the roadway as the ’track began to slow.
“Incoming!”
The first round exploded below them, down along the drop of the ravine, blasting rock and dust outward through the clear air. The column slowed, ’tracks slewing sideways trying to stop in time, slamming into one another, crushing in the fenders of jeeps as officers scrambled out. Horns beeped and echoed from the hill. The distant thunking of several more rounds on their way precipitated a general dismount and a scramble for a shallow ditch against the upward slope.
“Mortars,” he said stupidly to Hernandez, whom he found beside him, leaning against the bare hot stone. “They sound just like our eighty-ones.”
“Man, we shoot back?”
“Can’t see anybody to shoot at.”
“Well, let’s get some fire out, man. Get their heads down maybe.”
He watched Hernandez pull a loaded magazine from his trou, and it was suddenly the obvious thing to do. They were shooting at you; you fired back. The click of the thirty-round magazine engaging, the slam of the bolt feeding the first cartridge sent stiffness into his spine. With a loaded weapon in his hand he felt like a marine and not like what he had been all that morning—half-tourist, half-target. Behind him one of the ’tracks loosed a burst from its turret machine gun. Craning his head back, he could see it tear puffs of stone from the upper curve of the hillside.
“They’re on the far side.”
“Yeah. They got us in defilade. Nice setup.”
“For them.”
“That’s what I meant. Wish we had the tube here.”
“Yeah, toss a few back…”
“But we don’t,” shouted Silkworth, just behind them, startling them so that Will almost dropped his rifle. “You two fuckups leave your brains on the ship? Spread out under fire! Christ! Hernandez, clamp that chinstrap, you’re losing your helmet. Givens—”
He ducked suddenly, the two privates half a second behind him to the ground, and the whoosh came down on them and exploded ahead of the lead ’track. Rocks rattled off the hull and skittered along the asphalt toward the stalled column. The shock patted his face and he raised his hand to it, coming a little out of the numbness and unreality that had begun the moment that first faint chug had come from the other side of the mountain.
“Eighty-one all right,” said Silkworth loudly into the aftersilence, pulling himself to his feet.
“Sarge—is it Syrians, or Lebanese?”
Silkworth stared at him as if he were crazy. “I don’t know, and I don’t give a shit. Do you?”
He had to admit it, the sergeant had a point. He pulled back his head and looked up toward the crest. Nothing showed on the ridgeline. He looked back along the road. Two of the ’tracks had maneuvered almost to the cliff-edge, cupola MGs at maximum elevation, and were firing tentative bursts into the blue. The foot marines, all disembarked except the men actually inside the ’tracks, leaned in the ditch next to the hill-slope, looking upward.
Another shell exploded into dusty life, still below them, but closer than any before it. Fragments whicked past. “Jesus Christ,” said Silkworth angrily, looking back along the column. “They’re bracketing us. We just going to sit here? Sooner or later one of them motherfuckers is going to hurt somebody.”
A jeep edged around the firing amtracs, between them and the hillside. A man in back pointed a flexible 7.62 upward, his eyes white in a dust-smudged face. As it neared them, Will recognized the man beside the driver: the Colonel. He had seen him only a couple of times, but he had a face you didn’t forget. At this moment he looked interested, but not excited. The jeep squeezed past their ’track, scraping metal to metal, and went fifty yards farther up the road; then stopped. Haynes stood up in the front seat, looking down into the ravine, and one of the officers ran up from the ditch, not saluting, and began pointing out where each shell had fallen.
The colonel pointed too, back up the hill, and then a flurry of faint thuds floated down to them and with no lag at all, as if the noses of the shells had distanced the sound of their firing; two flame-hearted tulips of smoke and dust leapt simultaneously out of the hillside fifty feet above their heads. The blue light of sky turned brown, dark, and dirt came down and rocks, flying free down among the crouching men, banging off the hulls of the tanks, which fired now steadily up into the dust. Will found himself firing too, blindly, and along the hill the other men lifted their weapons uncertainly.
“Knock it off,” shouted Silkworth. “Save ammo, fuck-heads. You can’t see a thing. Hernandez! Put your safety back on.”
“What’s wrong with shooting back, Sergeant?”
“I didn’t say to, that’s what.” Silkworth glanced toward the colonel, saw that he was still standing, still looking up at where the dust was settling toward the column. Anxiety came suddenly into the corners of his eyes. “Helos … he ought to call for gunships. Where are they? I haven’t seen one all day. Air support…”
“Unless he know something you don’t,” said Cutford, who had crawled up behind them while Silkworth was talking.
“What’s that mean, Cutford?”
“I mean, they ain’t gonna be no helos. No support. Why else they took away the mortars? No, man—this another of those fucked-up political actions. We just here to die, man, just here to die.”
“Shut up,” said Silkworth. “Just shut that up now, Corporal.” He looked away.
The colonel sat down; the jeep’s engine revved; the lieutenant ran back toward the lead ’track, his holster slapping, helmet bobbing. The mortarmen watched him run past them, watched as the colonel reached back to take a microphone that the gunner handed him.
“Into the ’tracks,” the junior officer shouted to Silkworth, not stopping. “Get ’em in.”
“We movin’ on, Lieutenant?”
But he was gone, past, shouting and waving at the next knot of men huddled into the hillside. Silkworth looked back toward Haynes, then upward, squinting into the eye-clenching brilliance of the Mediterranean noon; hesitating, reaching out to hold Givens and Hernandez back as they started to stand up, so that they froze too, looking upward.
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.
“Jesus,” breathed Will Givens, deep in his chest. He recognized the sound, not of one mortar, but of a battery of them.
Far above them, high up in the brilliance, tiny blacknesses, like steel tears wept by the sky hung turning, deciding; and then winked out.
“Disappear,” shouted Silkworth, and Will hit the ground at his feet, scrabbling down into the deepest part of the ditch. More bodies slammed in on top of him. There was time only to hope desperately that the rest of the column had someone like Silkworth to warn them, and then the rounds went off, the sound not outside but within his head, like a train passing a foot away. The ground jolted and concussion cuffed at his chest. Things pattered and pinged above him, and in the middle of four explosions so close they were one explosion, someone began to scream. “Barrage,” someone yelled above him, and he thought Barrages yes they’re firing in salvos now, not like we do but then this way you get to spot your fire as a group, you don’t get confused between tubes the way we would; and he knew, too, they must have someone spotting for them, someone on the far side of the road, on some bare crest, with binoculars and a radio—the radio probably just like theirs.
Shit, he thought. Shit. Shit. Jesus!
It all took about half a second, two seconds at the most, and then the roaring stopped and he was up and running for the ’tracks, stumbling over a fresh hole in the roadway, the stink of explosive cutting his lungs like one of Harner’s Marlboros. The other men were running too, the ramps of the ’tracks were coming down. Two marines carried another between them, his feet dragging uselessly. He looked awake but dazed, and his boots left blood on the asphalt. At the head of the column, through the dust and smoke, he saw the colonel staring still upward, holding the handset absently away from him.
Will Givens hesitated on the ramp, looking back. He was looking at his first field of battle. He looked closely, seeing it all whole and clear; the men, the helpless vehicles, unable to turn on the narrow road, the striating clouds of blue smoke and white dust that tamped down the hot heavy air above the roadway.
The colonel stiffened and swung the handset toward his mouth, looking upward. Givens saw now, looking down at him from the ramp, that he held a map in the other hand. He leaned back, peering through the smoke. The amtracs had stopped firing. Whoever had been screaming stopped. In the sudden silence along the road all they could hear was the faint serial concussions of another volley beyond the hilltop, and a tinny voice quacking from the radio in the jeep.
“No, I can’t spot,” the colonel was shouting back. “Area fire. Area. It’s rock up there, so HE’s just as good as VT. As long as it goes in right now.”
The tinny voice crackled back, and the marines waited, looking first at the man in the jeep, at his erect back, turned to the hillside, and then upward at the sky. Then the explosions came again, louder this time, and the ground shook and pieces of rock came loose from the cliff above them and slid downward.
“Get the fuck in here, Oreo, you idiot,” said Cutford, appearing beside him.
“Let go of me.”
“You want to catch a frag? Get your ass in here.”
“What’s happening, Cutford? Does he want artillery?”
“You listen with those ears, numbnuts? We got no arty ashore.”
He understood then, and a shiver took him. He raised his eyes to the smoke that blew off the other side of the hill, from the hidden mouths of mortars, and felt suddenly how immense it all was, how vast was the machine that had put him here, deep in a ravine in Asia. Vast and unpredictable, vast and unknowable. Some distant decision-maker had placed a black private first-class here, like a checker nudged forward by an old man in the pine-smelling dimness of a lumberyard. But that anonymous counter was Will Givens, sometime guitar player, someday engineer. The machine used him. Would it stand behind him? Or did it even know, recognize, that the man inside this uniform felt and knew just like the ones who sent him, suffered fear and yearning and desire?
The last men came running from the ditch, bent low, aiming themselves for the amtracs. Will recognized Wash-man’s tubby figure, his lowered head. He was heading for the next ’track back. He craned out. “Washout!” he yelled.
The private looked up, pimply face dirt-smudged, and saw him and changed his direction.
Will was craning around the hatch of the ’track, watching him, when the volley hit the column. Five, six shells, dead on in range and spaced along the road. The hull of the LVT behind them vanished and in disbelief he saw bodies in the air, smoke, flame; it must have been a dead hit. Another went off at the same instant directly in front of him. The shock was so close and hard he was unable to move, only watch, frozen, as twenty feet away Wash-man straightened, arched forward, like a clumsy diver from the side of a pool, and then rolled to a bloody stop on the roadway. One side of his head had been blown free, left behind on the asphalt like a discarded rag.
“Washout!” he screamed, starting forward.
“Get in here, shithead!” Cutford shouted in his ear, jerking him back. He stared, unable to look away, as the ramp ground upward, cutting off the light. Something shoved him, something he dimly recognized as a heavy hand, and he stumbled back into the shelter of the amtrac.
The eyes of the others met his in the dimness, and huddling together they waited for the shells to fall.