Co Co Village?” I say when Silva tells us the assignment. It’s a special one — I can tell because he has come over to our hooch to fill it up with his smoke. That’s a first. “But lieutenant, there’s nothing to do there. The CAP guys have it all packed up tight and passive. What, did they run out of candy and flower seeds?”
“As a matter of fact I think they have run out of candy and flower seeds. But as it happens they are also running low on men.”
“Why’s that, lieutenant?” Sunshine asks.
“That is because, I’m afraid things aren’t going so well. Not in Co Co, and not with the CAP program in I Corps generally. They are getting hit more often, and more strategically. Locals are getting more distant, and the guys who aren’t local — that would be Charlie — are getting less distant.”
“We’re losing, is that what you’re saying?” Sunshine, like Silva, is not one for beating around bushes. They speak the same language.
“I am not saying that, private. But I am coming close to saying it. In a couple of weeks, in fact, we’re pulling the CAP program out of Co Co village.”
“For good?” Hunter asks.
“For good.”
Sunshine, Hunter, and myself are gathered around the lieutenant now like we’re kids at story time, in a cloud of cigarette smoke. Marquette remains on his bunk.
“You getting all this, Marquette?” Lt. Silva asks.
“Every word, lieutenant,” he answers as sleeplike as he can.
“Good. Then you, and all of us, can start packing up, because we are moving on down the road. They have lost three men, and we are providing them with seven to make up for it in these final weeks of the program. The five of us, along with Corporals Cherry and McClean, are going to be CAPs for a while. Whole new world, huh?”
Lt. Silva has finally managed to get all of Marquette’s attention. He sits up, swings his feet to the floor.
“Lieutenant, how exactly does a CAP unit lose three men?”
Silva sticks his cigarette into his teeth, that skeleton-effect thing he does so well. He holds up a thumb. “One was shot with an AK-47 by an eleven-year-old.” He keeps his thumb extended and adds the index finger. “One was blown up by a booby-trapped radio.” He adds another finger. “And one did the bamboo snake two-step.” It is called the bamboo two-step because the snake is so poisonous that you only get two steps before you fall down dead. “Although, that terminology may not be fitting in this case since the soldier was sitting down at the time of the biting and so he didn’t take any steps at all. And since the viper in question came out of a bag of freshly, locally laundered uniforms, one might be inclined to move that one also into the booby-trap column. Needless to say, the CAP unit is no longer patronizing the local laundress. Nor any of the other small local businesses that had been heretofore benefiting from Uncle Sam’s haphazard generosity. This state of affairs is consequently doing very little to sustain good relations on either side.”
“And that’s where we’re going?” Hunter asks. Fairly enough.
“Yes, it is.”
“Why?” Sunshine asks.
Lt. Silva shrugs. “I think the president referred to it as ‘an honorable end to the war.’”
“What does that mean?” Hunter asks.
“It means we ain’t leaving ’til we say we’re leaving,” I say.
Silva nods at me. “Yeah, something like that. The Marines have set their withdrawal date from the village, and we don’t look good if we get pushed out early. With a little effort and luck we might be able to leave the place a little more pacified and friendly than it is at this moment.”
You can feel the energy wafting out of the place along with Silva’s cloud as he leaves the hooch. This is a tough one, high on difficulty and low on potential for success. What would success even look like? But we are Marines. So, first thing in the morning, we will march.
“Good luck with that,” Marquette says, lying back on his bunk.
The three of us turn as one on him.
“What are you saying?” Hunter asks, befuddled.
“I’m saying shut up, Hunter, that’s what I’m saying.”
Sunshine takes one slow, sure step in the direction of Marquette’s bunk. Marquette smiles broad and slimy. “Go, on, big boy,” he says, “go right ahead. Do me the biggest favor of the whole war. Only this time put a little more effort into it so I can go home. Save me the trouble of doing it myself. ’Cause one way or another, you boys are definitely going to Co Co village without me.”
And in that moment, if I was going to build a thing in my mad-scientist laboratory that would bring out all the hatred and hostility in my soul, that thing would come out looking and sounding and acting just like Marquette.
We’re all lying in our bunks, and it’s a quiet night in Chu Lai. When it’s like this, the warm dark night sitting on top of us like blankets, frogs and insects making the loudest noises on the slightly stirring air, this place could be like a home almost. Or, anyway, like a summer-vacation camp where a guy could close his eyes and just be all right, trusting that his fellow campers all around him are having the same good time, sharing the same dreams tonight for the same outcomes tomorrow.
But I tip a glance over in the direction of Marquette’s bunk and I know it just won’t ever be that here. He is going to be a rat, and he’s going to get away with it, though I don’t know how. We hear stories about guys doing all kinds of crazy stuff to injure themselves out of fighting duty, and Marquette could easily be one of those guys. He’s already snoring, so he’s obviously not sweating it like I am.
I look over to Hunter, who is staring at the ceiling and worrying himself to sleep. I stare over at Sunshine, who looks to be sleeping and readying himself for what’s to come tomorrow. Which should be plenty.
“Hey! Hey, hey!” Before I even know I am asleep, I wake up to almighty screaming coming from Marquette’s bunk.
“Shut up, will ya?” Sunshine bellows back. It is just breaking dawn, and all of us are awake, just like that. “I wasn’t done sleeping yet, Marquette, you jerk. Neither were these guys. Now, look, you got everybody up, and we all have a big day today.”
It is quite a scene. Sunshine’s bed has at sometime during the night made its way across the floor to butt up against Marquette’s. Marquette is swinging and flailing around, but not getting much accomplished, because Sunshine is shadowing his every move.
He has no choice but to shadow him, really, since they are shackled together, right ankle to left, right wrist to left.
Hunter starts falling all over the place laughing, and I join him. Sunshine deserves credit for keeping a completely straight face but Marquette deserves none because being deadly serious right now is no effort for him at all.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Marquette barks.
“Being a good Marine, and a good buddy,” Sunshine says.
“Get these things off of me, Gillespie, I mean it.”
“Sure thing,” Sunshine says. “But we gotta go find my friend, who’s an MP on patrol duty. You know, Military Police? He’s got the key. And lucky for you he understands your sleepwalking problem. I explained the whole thing to him.”
“I don’t sleepwalk,” Marquette says. The two of them are now standing in the middle of the hooch in their skivvies.
“Not with your buddy Sunshine looking out for you,” Sunshine says, smiling.
“Listen to me, Sunshine….”
All the humor falls away like a five-hundred-pound bomb off a B-52.
“Don’t call me that. You hear me?”
I think at this point if Marquette called him Sir, Your Majesty, or Handsome, Gillespie would still threaten his life.
And no matter how badly Marquette would like to get himself injured and exempt himself from our mission, it is very clear he doesn’t want it bad enough to let Gillespie do the honors now.
“Yeah. I hear ya.”
“Now, it’s a lovely morning. Too late to go back to sleep now, what with the hike we gotta take and all. Let’s you and me go find that key, huh?”
“Yeah,” Marquette says glumly. “I guess.”
Sunshine has a spring in his step as he exits the hooch. Marquette is stepping with a lot more care and caution.
“Don’t you worry,” Sunshine says to him, “I did a little freelance night patrol out here, cleaned up any little hazards that were lurking around between here and, oh, say the latrine. Shocking, how dangerous a place this can be, don’t ya think, Marquette?”
“Yeah,” he says, sounding more depressed every second.
“Good thing we’re moving out of this neighborhood, huh? I can guarantee I’ll keep you absolutely safe from harm between now and then.”
Hunter and I laugh and slap palms at the great morning floor show, then, as if we’ve heard a bell go off at the same time, we both settle right back down.
Sunshine said it. We’re moving out.
“Is that what I think it is?” I ask Cpl. McClean, even though it’s the kind of question that’s really the opposite of a question.
He has a flamethrower strapped to his back. And so does Cpl. Cherry.
“Yup,” he says.
“Why?”
“Because it’s been requested, that’s why.”
Holy moly.
As it turns out, we’re all loaded for bear. Everyone packs his own M-16, of course, but is also equipped with a variety of grenades and Claymore mines. In addition, each of us is weighed down with an extra weapon, either a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher or an M-60 machine gun, and all the extra ammo that goes with it. Because we’re headed to a village and not a bivouac situation out in the field, we don’t have to waste rucksack space on silly things like food or any more than one canteen of water each.
Good thing, too. As it is, this is the heaviest pack I have ever marched with.
“Are we taking over a country by ourselves?” McClean asks Silva as we start down the road.
“Just being cautious,” the lieutenant answers crisply. And with finality.
It is, as they mostly are and should be, a pretty quiet hike. The sun’s beating madly, right down through the canopy as we walk single-file along the trail we know better than any other in our whole area of operations. I’m not quite sure how much talking we would do today even if we could. I, for one, don’t feel like chatting.
Silva-McClean-Hunter-Cherry-Marquette-Sunshine-Me. That’s our formation for the march, and I have to believe Marquette is the most uncomfortable man in Vietnam at this moment. He did not want to be here, does not want to march, is just as nervous as anybody about the assignment.
And scariest of all, he’s listening to Sunshine’s thumping bootsteps right behind him.
I like my position. I once thought of rear guard as last place, but that’s not right. Rear guard is important. Rear guard suits me. March along, looking straight and left and right like everybody else, then every so often do a complete scan of the terrain behind us. I don’t get nervous about being the last line of defense with no backup. In fact, it revs me up, sharpens my senses, makes me smarter.
Thump-thump-thump-thump, the rhythm of the day gives me strength. No words. I love no words. Eyes on the prize and shut up, that’s what I like. I’m in such a groove after the first twenty minutes, I’m practically meditating.
And not thinking about something I should have been thinking about.
The spot. It comes up on us with no warning. Because why should there be any warning? It’s a sweaty green dense patch of jungle just like a zillion other sweaty green dense patches of jungle, and while I don’t sense it as we approach, I surely sense it every which way when we pass close by it.
My deathplace birthplace.
It’s where it happened. We all march on, nobody noticing but me. Because it’s mine, and means nothing at all to anybody else despite the guys here who witnessed it and the guys here who set it up.
That, right there, in that small thicket, against that tree.
March, march, march, sweat, march …
I killed a man for the first time, right there, and I swear it could have happened six seconds ago. I am heart-racing like a jackrabbit as I turn my head to look, like he’s right there, looking back at me, trying to hold his guts in, trying to pull away from the tree, from the wires cutting into his ankles and his wrists while I was cutting into his abdomen, and then his throat.
It could be happening right this second, with the way I am outsweating everybody by ten, outbreathing, outpulsating, outmarching —
“Hey, nutso,” Sunshine says to me in a whisper-growl.
I have walked right into him, stepped on the heel of his boot and found myself with my nose all but stuck in the muzzle of the M-60 he has slung over his back.
“Sorry,” I say, “sorry, sorry.”
We’re a half mile farther down the road before I stop checking over my shoulder every three seconds. He would have every right. To come after me. Every right.
But if he did, I’d kill him all over again. That’s just how it is.
Uneventful. Despite what was going on in my head part of the way, that’s how our march to Co Co village turns out.
“And let’s hope that’s how the whole two weeks go,” Lt. Silva says as he shakes hands with our host, Sgt. Culverhouse.
“Two weeks?” Culverhouse says, surprised. “Lieutenant, I like your optimism, but at this point every time we go two hours without our head count dropping that’s a cause for celebration.”
We are standing in the spot outside the sergeant’s quarters where we have stood before, dropping off candy and comic books and other goodies to the locals and winning the hearts and minds of this village. But it feels like a different place. No kids have come running out to greet us, no old men or women pass by going about the business of just being folks. The village itself, the terrain, is not what it was but instead a dried and stripped-down poor faded version of a place that’s been gradually trampled into dust. It’s dusty, is the big difference. And motionless.
“Where are your numbers going?” Silva asks.
Culverhouse motions for us to follow into his quarters. Inside there is a bed that’s pretty large by military standards, a small kitchen with a bamboo table and four chairs. There is a desk with a chair in a living area with two bamboo three-seater couches. We spread ourselves around as Culverhouse takes the seat behind the desk, like a judge ruling over his court.
Lt. Silva lights up and offers the sergeant a cigarette, which he declines.
“Pretty plush, as these places go,” Silva says.
“You outrank me, so it’s all yours. I can be packed and out of here in fifteen minutes.”
“Thanks anyway,” Silva says. “But I’m just a guest. So, about your numbers?”
“Aside from the casualties? We’ve had desertions. And people stopped volunteering for this program some time ago because it got a reputation as a kind of suicide mission. So we’ve had an attrition problem. We lost people who never got replaced. Until eventually the numbers got a little uncomfortably low and, like jackals, Charlie started to sniff us out. Farm country,” he gestures in a circular motion all around. “We’re surrounded by farms. Which was great when we had the locals on our side.”
“But if you don’t have them …”
“Staging areas. Hiding places and launch pads. We are under siege here, lieutenant, on three sides. That road you just came up is the exception.”
There are low groans coming from members of our party. Until Lt. Silva stands up and lays a very impressive mass scowl on the room.
“So, I have to ask,” Silva says, “what are we supposed to do?”
Sgt. Culverhouse suddenly pulls down a face like he’s pulling down a dark window shade. He looks immediately sadder and more tired than before he had heard that inevitable question. He gets up out of his desk chair and comes around to the lieutenant with his fingers scissoring for that cigarette.
“We are going to achieve peace with honor.”
Guys here really seem to hate that phrase.
“Leave with our tails between our legs,” Cpl. Cherry blurts.
“No, no,” the sergeant says, dropping down with a thump back into his chair. “That’s what you guys are for. You guys and your firepower make it possible for us to proudly leave with our tails up in the air.”
“Sheesh,” Lt. Silva says.
“Ya,” Culverhouse says. “I know, sheesh. The CAP program was a good program. The best. It was working. We were winning the hearts and minds of the people, until we just started running out of steam. It’s a shame, a real shame. So, what we are left with is this. A couple of our remaining Vietnamese partners, the Popular Force soldiers, will be here in the morning. The PF guys, by the way, are useless at this point, which is a huge part of our problem. There is absolutely no way of telling whose side they are on. Anyway, they will be here in the morning, along with the regional chieftain of the surrounding area, to discuss our departure. Our hope is that we can convince them that although we won’t be here on-site anymore, that we are right down the road. You guys will stand around like mafia types to illustrate this. Hopefully, they get the message that we could come back any time we wanted — or any time they wanted — so they don’t absolutely have to go over to the VC. We’re not completely giving up on them.”
“Wow,” Silva says, hearing the same exhaustion we can all hear in the sergeant’s voice. “I’m on your side, and even I don’t believe you.”
The sergeant nods and shrugs at the same time. “All there is to do between now and then is to maintain our presence, walk regular patrols — within the village boundaries, we don’t go out anymore — and enjoy the scenery, boys.”
Before there’s any more talk of enjoying the scenery, we get set up in our quarters. The seven of us are divided into three huts roughly the same size as the sergeant’s setup, right near his at the edge of the village. The rest of the CAP Marines are divided over a few more structures clustered nearby so that the total American presence huddles together just at the spot where you’d enter the village — or just where you’d bolt from it. It’s like the last few houses on a street that’s gradually being abandoned by the neighborhood.
Lt. Silva has a place to himself while the corporals and Marquette take one place and me, Hunter, and Sunshine take another.
Unpacking basically amounts to selecting a bunk, taking our big artillery and laying it under the bed, then lying down, each of us with an M-16 either nestled beside him or placed right across his chest. My roommates and I have our afternoon rest just this way.
“This little vacation can’t be over quick enough for my liking,” Hunter says.
Sunshine sighs deeply. “There is an air of futility settled over this whole thing, isn’t there?”
“Doesn’t feel good,” I say, “that’s for sure.”
“Right, gentlemen,” a voice snaps through the room. We all jump up, rifles ready, and see the grunt at the door. It’s Cpl. Krug, the CAP soldier I met way back when he was giving some old VC guy a going-over. “Who’s first up for patrol?”
We are pairing with the established guys, doing the rounds every couple of hours. Gives us a chance to get to know the place, while it gives them the opportunity to start kissing it good-bye.
Since Krug and I are old pals, I figure this is my turn.
“I thought I trusted these people, I really did,” he says as the two of us saunter down what you would call the main strip of the village. We walk very slowly, and turn left and right regularly like a pair of cuckoo-clock birds, looking into every window and alleyway.
“I guess that’s over with now?” I say.
“Ha.” He spits out a laugh. “The worst of all are those PF rats. They played us great. Fellow soldiers, yeah right. They were playing all sides for what they could get. Those are the guys, if they just let us have a shot …”
I find myself very aware, now, of all the people I do not see outside. Two women pass by, carrying empty buckets in the direction of the small stream running alongside the edge of the village. Off in the distance two older men, hunched, are heading for the farm on the hill up the road. I see nobody else. Small heads appear in windows then disappear so quickly I can’t even tell if they are adults or not. To be honest I might not be able to tell even if I got a longer look. I believe at this point I will wind up leaving this country without the ability to reliably tell the ages of the locals within a margin of error of twenty years. And I don’t even know what I think about that.
“Yeah yeah, keep staring!” Cpl. Krug shouts as one more head slips from view in a window in a half-collapsed hut on the far lip of the village. We stand there for a minute, looking out past our imaginary boundary, into the rolling countryside beyond. “There,” he says, pointing to one fenced-in field with two buffalo standing like sculptures. “And there. And that one and the one up top there.”
“What are those?”
“Those are VC hyena packs. Established, committed, just waiting for us to get weak enough or to fade away entirely so they can swoop in. These people ain’t never coming over to our side, never listening to what we have to say. We shouldn’t even be talking to them at this point. We should just mortar and rocket and strafe the life out of ’em on the way out the door. After all we did for this community, it’s an insult to the effort to leave the whole show to the VC after we’ve gone. And I can tell you, every last man here feels the same.”
Sounds pretty extreme to me.
But it doesn’t sound wrong.
Cpl. Krug executes a neat heel turn, and we’re headed back to our end of town again.
“How was that, then?” Sunshine asks over the card game he’s playing with Hunter.
“Swell would be the only word to do it justice,” I say. They have a small transistor radio going, and somebody delivered bowls of rice and some kind of cubed meat while I was out. If you didn’t know what we, maybe, know, you might think this wasn’t such a bad little holiday right here. “I might consider buying a vacation home in this community after this is done,” I say.
“Not me,” says Hunter, taking it all as seriously as possible. Fair enough.
“Who’s next?” says another corporal standing in the doorway, just as grim and unsmiling as the last.
And the next.
And the next.
By the time it is my turn to patrol again, it’s dusky, and Krug is standing in the doorway, drumming his fingers impatiently on the frame.
We walk the same walk, see even fewer people, have possibly the same conversation all over again. There are no lights coming on in the huts, no candles or flashlights or anything. The frogs and night birds and other wildlife are getting into voice, though, so it’s almost as if the place has twice the life it did in the daytime. Which wouldn’t be hard.
Crrr-racck! A single rifle shot fractures the evening air. I feel the bullet whistle right past me.
“Yaaaaahhh!” Krug screams, cupping a hand to the side of his head just below his helmet. Absolute gushings of blood are pouring out through his fingertips and down the side of his face. I grab him by the shoulder and haul him down the middle of the village, like we are in some arcade game where every last person in the village is allowed to have a shot at us.
We are motoring wildly until we see the medic, a Navy Corpsman, running out of one of the huts with a roll of gauze already in his hand. There are three other grunts around him, covering me and Krug as we run the village gauntlet. Nobody is shooting at us now, though, and I can’t even tell if anybody is bothered enough to come to the windows or doors to gawk. When we reach the men, the Corpsman slaps the whole roll of gauze onto the side of Krug’s head and they wrestle him inside.
“He shot my ear off!” Krug says as he staggers into the hut.
I go to follow, and one of the CAP guys stops me with a hand like a traffic cop. “We got it, private,” he says flat as the ocean. “You should get yourself back inside.”
And just like that I find myself outside, alone, in this strange, strange, strange place. I take a couple of walking steps in the direction of my quarters, and then I run full out.
Hunter and Sunshine are waiting and basically drag me into the hut.
“What’s happening, man?” Sunshine says.
“Sniper,” I say, breathless. “Jeez, you know, it’s just a guy with a gun, but is there anything really scarier than a sniper, man?”
“No,” they say together, “no, no.”
“Anyway,” I say, “one of them shot that guy Krug’s ear off. The medic is working on him now. Say, whose turn is it for patrol?”
“Wait, first, where’d the shot come from?” Sunshine snaps. “Was it inside the village or out?”
I start to give him an answer, but then realize I haven’t got one. “I don’t even know, man. Could have been inside.”
“Ahhh,” they both say, backing away with their hands up like captured prisoners.
Lt. Silva appears in the doorway. “You all right?” he asks me.
“Sure. Don’t think I’ll sleep very well here tonight, though.”
“Yeah,” he says, nodding and smoking. “I’m going to go talk to the sarge. Whatever happens, don’t anybody go outside without direct orders from me. Understood?”
“I understood it before you even said it,” Hunter says, and the three of us head back into the corner, where we sit on bunks, try and play cards while we listen to the radio.
The radio is on low, but it could be over loudspeakers the way it is cutting through everything. We would rather listen to it than anything else right now, but we know, as soldiers, we need to hear more than music. Sunshine turns the volume down lower. The music is whispering to us now, but at the same time the rest of the world outside has turned down its volume as well.
It is creepy-eerie, and the tension is flammable.
“We have to be able to retaliate, whether we get the order or not,” Sunshine says.
“If it was up to me,” I say, “I’d vote we pre-taliate.”
“Works for me,” says Sunshine. “Too bad this hut is full of good Marines who follow orders.”
I look at him hard now, thinking back to past events. “You are, aren’t you? In spite of whatever makes you mad. You are a soldier who follows orders, even stupid ones.”
“Even stupid ones.”
“Even bad leaders, you follow.”
“Unfortunately,” he sighs. “Even bad ones.”
“Well, the guy in the next hut is a fine leader,” I say, pointing my thumb in the direction of where Silva and Culverhouse are having their high-level strategy meeting.
“Agreed,” he says.
I don’t even know what card game we’re supposed to be playing. Hunter just keeps going around and around and dealing out the entire deck of cards. So that must mean, War.
Out in the distance, there are noises. Something like animal noises, like owls, wolves, hyenas, and even whale song, coming down on us out of the hills and fields.
“Jeepers,” Hunter says, shaking as he turns over a card.
“Hang tough, man,” Sunshine says. He’s sitting on his bunk, while we’re sitting on Hunter’s. We’re using an upturned five-gallon plastic drum for a card table. Sunshine flips a card over and casually reaches under his bed for his M-60 machine gun.
I flip a card and then slip over to my bunk and get mine, while Hunter reaches down for his. It’s as though we have been bunked according to weaponry, and this is the machine gunners’ dormitory. If nothing else, there won’t be any bunch that’s going to outdo the three of us in rounds per second.
This might be the world’s most high-strung low-stakes game of cards. The three of us players randomly turning over cards, each weighed down with two major weapons, bandoliers, and a backpack full of more ammo.
“Eagle,” Hunter says, bringing a whole new game into play. “I hear eagle.”
“I hear monkey screech,” Sunshine says.
“I got loon,” I add. “That’s a talented bunch out there.”
It helps a little, making light of the terror. But, also, it doesn’t. The calls are distant, but somehow all the spookier for it.
All of our cards are now down on the drum staring up stupidly at us while we stare stupidly down at them. And softly softly softly, The Lovin’ Spoonful sing up to us, “Darling Be Home Soon,” and because this makes as much sense as anything, Hunter says, “Go Fish.”
Bang! Ba-bang! B-B-B-B-B-B-B-BANNNGGGG!
It has kicked off, and it has kicked off full throttle and right here in little Co Co Village. The sound, a nonstop wall of shooting, sounds like the rifle range in basic when the whole camp was going at it at once.
Bu-hooom!
And the RPGs are out. It’s all happening on our doorstep, a true-life, door-to-door, hand-to-hand battle for this sad little village.
“What do we do?” I ask Sunshine.
The three of us are up and ready and bouncing up and down on the balls of our feet by the door. But we hold on, waiting.
“Let’s go!” the lieutenant and the sergeant holler as they fly past the door toward the action.
So, we go.
We make our way hut by hut upward through the village the same way Krug and I went on our patrol. There is a monstrous amount of gunfire happening at the village’s far end where Krug was shot, but I’m surprised to find we don’t seem to be taking any incoming from the hot spots around the village.
“What’s happening?” I ask as we duck behind the last of the “American” huts. What is certain is that all our guys, CAP and regular grunts, are already going at it heavily with the enemy somewhere up ahead. Every last man is gone out of these huts, even Krug.
Maybe especially Krug.
“Somebody kicked something off,” Lt. Silva says.
“I told my men to hold fire,” Sgt. Culverhouse says. “Krug was being taken care of. It was probably a rogue shooter. I ordered my men to suspend patrols, to let it cool down and let us get to this meeting in the morning.”
“So what happened?” Sunshine says.
“What do you think, soldier?” Culverhouse says.
“Your men waited for you to get around the corner, then they went out hunting.”
Culverhouse puts his index finger on the tip of his nose and presses it flat.
Bingo.
The sergeant heads up-village, still ducking in a hut at a time, but it is obvious where the action is.
We can tell by the trail.
Bodies are appearing in the road. They are hanging out through windows. At least a half dozen uniformed Americans are visible between the spot where we stand and where the remaining soldiers are making a stand seventy yards farther up. Two huts up, there is a hut completely bombed out with at least ten bodies smoldering about the place. Small bodies, but man, I will never be able to read these people, so I don’t know. A hut down the road is a bonfire.
As we near the first American bodies, Hunter points down at Marquette, spread in the road.
“I’m surprised he even bothered to come this far,” I say.
Sunshine points his M-60 at the body, but doesn’t shoot. He does better.
“You think this is bad,” he says to the dead man, “wait ’til Lieutenant Jupp gets his ghostly hands on ya.”
But the joke evaporates just that quickly as we take in all the dead Marines.
We don’t need orders now. We all run.
Hunter, Sunshine, and I are pouring M-60 rounds into everybody and anybody on the opposite side of the line from our guys, who are squatting, kneeling, lying down on one side of the road, set up in the windows of three huts they have commandeered. They are stepping over dead Vietnamese, pushing them aside. Somebody hurls a body into the street and it’s so light it sails almost into the hut opposite.
Just as we arrive, Cpl. Cherry screams like crazy and opens up his flamethrower and instantly sends two huts shooting red into the sky. Three Vietnamese men with guns come running out completely in flames, and all the firepower of the USMC steps in to do the humane thing and put them so far out of their misery that the pieces divide into thirty or forty small little fires right there in the road in front of us. I see movement, and I shoot it. I see another movement, and I shoot it.
VC? Who can say for sure?
Free-fire zone.
The CAP world was once the very opposite of the free-fire world.
Free-fire.
It is very close to silent in my head now, though everybody everywhere is firing as if any unused ammunition will be turned on us as punishment. The sounds — of explosions and screams, and of that peculiar hot flapping sheet of fire — are all adding up to a kind of silence, as I watch my fingers, my hands, my arms, doing the hard muscular work of killing that person there, and that one and that one until every bit of this job is done and I can stop.
That silence, the one made up of all the sounds, continues and continues and continues long after there ceases to be any movement on the other side of the line. The heat of it all is what finally blows me backward, away from the fight that isn’t any fight anymore.
As I walk back to my quarters, to get my good night’s sleep before the big meeting in the morning, I finally hear a sound. It’s the helicopters, coming to evacuate us all from this place tonight.
Confirmed kills.
Co Co Village. Confirmed.