X.

On the Z Axis;

21June l967;

A Company Scale Action

Whang! Whang! Whang!

The bullets did more damage to nerves than to the Huey. The AK47 couldn’t punch through the ship’s armor.

Michael clutched his M-16. John’s fingers were white on his M-79.

Twenty-two was too young.

Then Wallace, who was at the open hatch talking back with the M-60, said, “Huh?” and stiffened. The machine gun kept firing, muzzle climbing.

John staggered over to help Sergeant Cherry drag the dead giant away from the weapon that had been his closest friend. Through the black man’s nap he saw the rotor wash whipping the up-rushing grass of the landing zone.

The chopper shuddered, shook, flipped. Its main rotor played power mower for a fractional second.

“Ahshitmyarm!” John screamed as men and equipment piled onto him.

“Not again!” Michael yelled.

“Get the fuck out before the fuel goes!” Cherry ordered. “Come on! Move it! Cash, take care of Harald.”

Oblivious to the gunfire, the men hauled one another through the hatchway. Michael got an arm around John and, crouching, firing with his left hand, dragged his friend away from the wreck. “Medic!”

Gunships ripped across the sky, sending their best to the little brown brothers behind the treeline. Air cavalrymen poured from the uninjured craft.

Wham-whoosh!

The force of the explosion threw them forward.

“Damn!” Michael snarled. “We didn’t get Wallace out.”

“He don’t care. He was dead already.”

“Lyndon Johnson, I love you, mein Führer. How’s the arm?”

“Hurts like hell. I think it’s broke.”

“That was a good coon. A bad motherfucker.”

“Yeah.”

“I hope the lieutenant does it. If he don’t, I will.”

“Write the letter?”

“Yeah.”

Wallace had said, if he got skragged, send the announcement to his next of kin, George Corley, care of the Governor’s Mansion, Montgomery, Alabama.

“What the fuck are we doing here, Michael? We had wives. We had deferments.” Incoming mortar bombs crumped like a beaten bass drum with a loose head.

“You was the one who wanted to quit school and join the army.” Cash peered into a cloudless sky so bright it hurt. “Here come the navy birdboys.”

“I wasn’t the one who said let’s volunteer for Nam. I wanted to go to Germany. Remember?”

Napalm sunflowers blossomed among the trees. They only perturbed the brown brothers more. The volume of fire doubled.

“Them bastards were laying for us again.”

Cherry came snaking through the grass. “How’s the arm, Harald?”

“Okay, except a little broken.” John groaned when the sergeant made sure the bone hadn’t broken through the skin.

“Where’s the grenade launcher? Lieutenant’s got a machine gun that company says needs skragging.”

“In the chopper.”

“Shee-it. Great. Well, Cash, it’s you and me hand-delivering it, then.”

Michael unconsciously fingered a grenade. “What about John?”

“He’ll be okay. All he’s got to do is lay here and jack off. The dinks will be hauling ass out of here in fifteen minutes. They don’t, the navy’s going to splatter them from here to the Cambodian border. And the Arvans are coming up behind them.”

The ADs began a second pass, this time firing rockets.

“So take it easy, John,” said Michael, examining his weapon. It had a tendency to jam.

“You be careful. I need somebody to bring me flowers in the hospital.”

“Hell of a way to get the Purple Heart.” Cash’s smile was a pale, nervous rictus. “What I’ll bring is that little Le girl you liked so much. The one that works out of the Silver....”

“Never mind the pussy. Let’s go.” Cherry slithered toward the treeline. Cash scrambled along in his wake. Bullets whipped the grass, harvesting clippings by the pound.

The gunships took over from the ADs.

You got to hand it to the dinks, Cash thought. They’ve got balls.

Cherry waved him forward. “They’re in some kind of bunker, else they’d have been skragged already. I want to come at them from the side, so they don’t spot us.”

All around the company’s perimeter similar little stalks were underway, driving the Cong back. That he wasn’t the only one crawling into hell did nothing to calm Michael’s nerves, though. It was becoming a very small, very personal war.

“I’ll put the grenade in. You cover.”

“Don’t be a hero....”

“Hey, man. Not me. This here’s Chicken Charlie Cherry talking. If I was in the navy, they’d call me the Chicken of the Sea. But if we don’t get that gun, a lot of guys are going to be dead when the Arvans get here.” He resumed crawling, more cautiously now that they were near the trees.

Michael crept along behind, remembering his company commander in infantry school, Master Sergeant Heinz Krebs.

Michael had invariably grandstanded the exercises. And as inevitably, Krebs’s softly spoken admonition had been, “You goddamned idiot. The idea’s supposed to be to make the other jackass die for his country.”

Krebs had always had an illustrative tale to show his pupils what they should have done. His father had managed to survive six years of the Second World War, most of them in the hell of the Eastern Front. He had been one of few enlisted men to win the Knight’s Cross, Oak Leaves, and Swords to the Iron Cross.

His son had made an impression on Michael. Cash remembered his lessons once he found himself in a place where the bullets were flying.

Three dead men lay just behind the treeline, surrounding an American-made 57 mm. recoilless rifle. They were so tiny and skinny that they resembled children. And in years, they were. The oldest might have been seventeen.

“No shells,” Cherry observed.

“Shit. Think this’s what got the Huey?” Several spent casings lay to one side.

“Could be. Let’s go.”

The snarl of the machine gun was loud now. It sounded like one of the Czech jobs, not the Russian. It was arguing with an American counterpart out in the grass. The American fire was all way high.

“Sixty meters,” said Cherry. “Let me get about fifteen ahead before you follow me. They surprise me, you surprise them.”

It went like an exercise. Everyone in the area, except the gun crew, seemed to be dead or gone. The ADs and gunships had done a good job.

Cherry made it to the flank of the low earth and log bunker, prepared a grenade, tossed it through the personnel opening in back.

Oblivious to the bursts from the American weapon, Cherry sprinted toward Michael.

A rifle cracked.

Whump!

Several hundred secondary explosions followed as machine gun ammo went.

Michael put three rounds into the guerrilla who had shot Cherry in the back, then killed the two who, miraculously, staggered from the bunker.

His weapon jammed.

As someone tried for a homer with his head and helmet for a ball.

Feebly, he rolled onto his back, stared into the hate-filled eyes of the fifteen-year-old about to bayonet him.

An officer in North Viet uniform seized the boy’s rifle.

Michael fumbled for his own bayonet.

The officer kicked it away. And allowed the boy to punt his ribs a half dozen times while he ended Cherry’s misery with a pistol round through the brain.

By the time the ARVN battalion arrived and the body counting began, Michael Cash was three miles into an odyssey that would pause only briefly in a grim little camp in North Vietnam.

From one point of view, he could be considered lucky.

He was still alive.