War Year Read online

  “That way.” Benson gestured with his gun. “You gonna cut us some overhead?”

  “Long as you keep Charlie away,” Prof said.

  “Hell, I thought you engineers was tough—chop ’em up with your chain saws.”

  “Must have been some other engineers you heard about. I’m chickenshit through and through.” Prof didn’t smile when he said that.

  We walked on through the woods. “Last time I saw that guy I helped put him on a Medevac chopper with a bullet in his arm.”

  “They made him come back?”

  “Yeah. Nice thing about the infantry, they don’t let you get soft. Engineers who get wounded stay back in base camp the rest of their hitch.”

  “Glad to hear that.”

  “Mm-hmn. Best not to get wounded in the first place, though. There’s the captain.”

  “You boys took your time.” He was sitting by a radio with a map unfolded on his knees. He looked pale and his voice shook a little.

  “Had to wait for a slick, sir, got here as…”

  “OK, Prof, I know—drop your trees in the usual pattern, in a circle around the perimeter. Work fast, it’ll be gettin’ dark in a couple of hours.”

  “Yessir.” We kept walking in the same direction. “Either of you know how to use a chain saw?” Prof asked. I didn’t.

  “Yeah, I worked on a farm one summer in high school,” Willy said. “We cleared away some woods with ’em.”

  “Good. You know how to tell what direction it’ll drop?”

  “We always just made a notch on the side you wanted to fall, and then cut through from the back.”

  “Kee-rect. You take the yellow saw, the McCullough, and I’ll take the green Remington; it’s kinda cranky if you aren’t used to it. Farmer, you’ll be our security. Carry our guns and let us know if any shooting starts. We won’t be able to hear a blessed thing once we start up the saws.”

  It was almost dark by the time we had dropped enough trees and cut them up into sections two ax handles long. While we were working two Medevac choppers landed—hot LZ or no—and took away the wounded men. Doc Jones left on the second one.

  We didn’t have time to dig a hole, but the artillery lieutenant said we could hop in his if caps started poppin’. We put our bedrolls under a tree by the artillery bunker and started to blow up our air mattresses. I was bushed, and I hadn’t done much but stand around with three guns and a gas can, although they let me saw a couple of times to cut up logs.

  “Now let me show you what every seasoned trooper takes onto the battlefield,” the Prof said, reaching into his pack. He pulled out three beers.

  We drank the beer and tried to relax, but it was hard to keep calm and collected while the artillery bursts walked in a circle around our perimeter. That was supposed to keep Charlie away, and I guess it worked. I fell asleep about three o’clock in the morning, and there was no attack.

  A godawful racket woke me just as the sun was coming up; birds and monkeys (and lizards, I later found out) screeching at each other. The Professor was already up, heating a can of C-rations the way he’d showed us yesterday.

  “Morning, Farmer, drink coffee?”

  “Yeah, sure.” He tossed me three little brown paper envelopes. Instant coffee, sugar, and powdered milk.

  “Use one of those beer cans for a cup, heat it up with some C-4.” I had a steaming can of coffee in less than a minute.

  “I forgot to bring any C’s,” I said. And I was hungry.

  “They’ve got a couple of boxes down by the command bunker. But I wouldn’t advise eating anything unless you’re starving.”

  “I am, just about. Why not?”

  “We’re goin’ on a burial detail this morning. Smell anything unusual?”

  There was a faint sickly sweet smell, mixture of molasses and shit. “Dead people?”

  “Dead and half-rotten, in this heat. We’ve gotta put ’em under the ground, so don’t eat anything if you don’t have to.”

  “I thought they sent your… sent people’s bodies back to the States.”

  “Sure, American bodies. Those are Vietnamese you smell. We search ’em, then bury ’em.”

  The coffee didn’t taste so good. “Why do the engineers have to do it?”

  “Sometimes the bodies are booby-trapped. Booby traps’re our job, not the infantry’s.”

  “We gonna have to disarm booby-traps?”

  “Nothing so fancy. We just blow ’em up from a distance.”

  “Sounds messy.…”

  “Yeah.”

  I poured my coffee out on the ground. It had too much cream anyhow.

  “There’s one over here. X-ray?” That was one of the infantrymen who came with us to help with the pick-and-shovel work, and provide security. They all called us X-ray, as if to remind us that we weren’t heroic grunts like them.

  “Okay,” Prof said. “You two stay here for a minute. I’ll check it out for booby-traps.” He went into the woods where the guy had yelled, and came back a couple of minutes later, wiping his right hand on his fatigues.

  “All set. Here.” Prof handed each of us a cigar and lit one up himself.

  “Thanks anyhow, Prof. I don’t smoke the things.”

  “No time like the present to start, Horowitz. Keep it in your mouth and it cuts the smell.” Willy lit up and so did I.

  The body was lying on its back with arms and legs stretched out all the way. The Prof called it rigor mortis. The skin on his face and hands was black, blacker than a Negro’s. His body was all puffed up to where it filled his uniform like a balloon. His mouth was stretched open wide, a swollen black sausage of a tongue forced between even yellow rows of teeth. His eyes were wide open and filled with ants. His body was covered with ants and flies.

  “You guys are lucky. Don’t have to start out with a bad one.” Prof took a deep drag on his cigar and kneeled beside the body.

  “This is how you check it out. First, make sure there aren’t wires or strings attached to the body. Don’t see any, do you?”

  “Uh uh.” I couldn’t keep myself from looking at the eyes.

  “Okay. Now you have to check underneath. They can pull the pin on a grenade and prop it under the body, so it won’t go off ’til you move it. Sometimes you can tell by just looking. Usually you gotta feel.” He put his hand palm down on the ground and slid it under the body’s back, sliding it back and forth. “Okay. He’s clean. Now, Farmer, you do it.”

  “Aw, Prof, I get the idea…”

  He stood up. “Still, you gotta do it.”

  I kneeled down where the Prof had and slid my hand under the corpse. Through the tight cloth of the uniform, I could feel the dead skin. Cold, spongy, slimy. I spit out the cigar and puked all over the dead man’s chest. Prof put a hand under my arm and pulled me to my feet.

  “Okay. It’s a hard job, I know. Here, wash your mouth out.” He handed me a canteen.

  Horowitz kneeled down where the Prof and I had and repeated the action. Somehow, he didn’t puke, though he looked a little green when he got up.

  The infantry was digging a hole about ten feet away. “This deep enough, X-ray?”

  Prof went over and checked it out. “It’ll do. One of you guys want to give us a hand with the stiff?”

  “Hell, no. We just dig the hole, man. That’s your job.”

  Prof stomped back. “Horowitz, take one sleeve. I’ll take the other. The grunts don’t want to get their hands dirty.”

  “I’ll help,” I said.

  “Don’t have to if you don’t feel up to it. Nothin’ to be ashamed of.”

  “It’s just a piece of meat. I don’t mind.” Like hell I didn’t. But I know, if a horse throws you, you gotta get right back up on him. Or you’ll never ride.

  He was heavy. Horowitz took one sleeve and I took the other. Dragging him to the grave, my stomach tried to heave a couple of times, but it must have been empty.

  We buried corpses all morning and through half the afternoon. After a wh
ile we saw what the Prof had meant, that we didn’t “start out with a bad one.” There were some bad ones, later on. Chunks of bodies we had to gather up onto a poncho and dump them into the hole. Man-shaped charcoal lumps, feather-light, burned crisp by napalm. And worse…

  Finally we worked our way back around to the first grave and walked back up to the perimeter.

  “Christ, Professor,” Horowitz asked, “why don’t we just move on, let them bury their own if they want to?”

  “Usually, we do move on, never stay in one place longer than overnight. Took too many casualties, though. Have to stay here a couple of days, get replacements sent out.”

  “Still, why couldn’t we just leave ’em—the smell’s not that bad, back where we’re camped out.”

  “It’s a public health problem, Horowitz. The flies. If a fly lands on your C-rations… just remember where he’s been.”

  “And open another can.”

  “Yeah.”

  SEVEN

  We spent three days at the grave-surrounded “patrol base,” with helicopters coming in almost hourly, bringing in new replacements, mail, and supplies from Alamo, and twenty-five cases of beer from God knows where. I managed to take it easy the last couple of days; once the base was dug in and the dead were buried, there wasn’t much work for the engineers.

  Our X-ray squad that had been with A Company all left that first day—one dead, two “lightly wounded.” In fact, most of the casualties in the ambush had come from the center file, which was very unusual… normally, an ambush comes from one or both sides, and the flanks take most of the punishment.

  So Willy and Prof and I were the engineer squad, and would be for at least a month. Prof assured us that it couldn’t be as bad for us; engineers were the safest people in the whole company. But I couldn’t help thinking that if Willy and I had come a few days earlier, it would’ve been us going out on that Medevac, wounded or dead.

  A couple of days of sitting around, drinking beer, and reading (most of the guys were playing cards, but I only had ten dollars, which wouldn’t last a minute) just about cured me of the shakes. The company set up ambushes all around the camp, but they didn’t catch anybody, day or night.

  We broke camp on the morning of the fourth day. Took about an hour to fill the holes—emptied sandbags, rolled ’em up, and tied them to our packs—and destroy all of the supplies we couldn’t take with us.

  We walked, and we walked, and we walked some more. Just like the Prof said, we walked in three lines; right flank, center file, left flank. I couldn’t see the flanks very often, though, for all the jungle. Sometimes it was so thick—big trees, little trees, vines and underbrush—that the only guy I could see was Willy, walking in front of me. I hoped somebody knew where we were going.

  After a week or so it got to be routine. We’d walk all day and dig in a couple of hours before dark. The bunkers we dug each night weren’t as fancy as the ones we had at the original patrol base—but we didn’t have chain saws to cut overhead; a good man with a dull ax (they were all dull) takes ten minutes to cut down a small tree.

  Then Thursday or Friday, I’m not sure which, the routine was over, all of a sudden.

  The captain decided we’d stop on the side of a little hill that afternoon. The top of the hill was bald except for a half-dozen trees; we could cut them down for overhead and make an LZ at the same time.

  Prof and Willy started digging the hole and I took the ax outside the perimeter, up the hill to cut down one of those little trees. I figured that one would give us just about enough overhead.

  I took one whack and the forest below exploded in gunfire. I hit the dirt and crawled over to my rifle—I had propped it under another tree—jacked a round into the chamber and looked for something to shoot at. Couldn’t see anything.

  The shooting kept up, in short spurts, but it sounded like it was all on the other side of the company. At any rate, I couldn’t see anything. I decided to crawl back down the hill.

  The perimeter was about fifty feet away—think I set a new speed record for the low-crawl. All the men had dropped where they were working. They looked a little silly, trying to hide in holes no more than two inches deep.

  Willy and Prof were in their little hole, Willy lying flat on his stomach, Prof on his back, smoking a cigarette and running a cleaning rod through his M-16.

  “What’s happening?” I flopped into the hole next to him.

  “Cap’n sent out a couple of patrols, down the hill. One of ’em ran into some trouble. Don’t know how many, yet.” Another rattle of machine-gun fire, and Willy and I scrunched down into the dirt.

  “Relax. They’re still pretty far away. Probably don’t know where we are, either.”

  The radioman came crawling over. “X-ray?”

  “That’s us,” Prof said.

  “Which of you was up on that hill?”

  Oh, shit. “That was me.”

  “Come on, the captain wants to talk to you.” We crawled to the captain, hiding behind some trees about ten feet away, talking on a radio.

  “This the guy?”

  “Yessir.”

  “X-ray, how many trees were up there?”

  “Six or seven, sir.”

  “You’ve got to get them all down, right now. We’ve got at least two wounded, one dead—going to need a dustoff as soon as they can get back.” I guessed that by “dustoff” he meant “Medevac.”

  “Find Sergeant Davis and have him detail you six men with axes. Run up there, chop ’em down, and run back. Better get a squad for security, too.”

  I went back to Prof. “Where’s Sergeant Davis?”

  “Left flank—guess he’s out that way somewhere. Why?”

  I told him what the captain said. “Well, Horowitz and I’ll go, right?” Willy nodded. “Guess we need about ten more, with the security. Let’s go.”

  Sergeant Davis was on the line closest to the shooting. “Can’t give you no squad, man, I don’t care what the captain said. If Charlie’s comin’ through, he’s comin’ through right here—I need every man I can get.”

  “Look, Sarge,” Prof said. “They’ve already called for a Medevac”—which was a lie—“and those wounded men might die if we don’t get ’em right away.”

  “Bullshit. I’ve seen guys shot in the stomach hang around all day—’sides, if Charlie breaks through a weak line here, he’ll wipe us all out.”

  “Okay, okay—give me two men with axes, I’ll see how many I can get from the right flank.”

  “Simpson! Rodri-gez! Get axes and follow these X-rays.” Simpson and Rodriguez scrambled over, looking relieved. Don’t guess I’d care to stay on that line, either.

  A buck-sergeant named Moselle was in charge of the right flank. “Ten fuckin’ guys? Yer outa yer gourd, Professor. They’s a war goin’ on—can’tcha hear?”

  “God damn it, Moselle. Nobody’s firing on your flank. Anyhow, captain’s orders.”

  “Awright, awright. B team! Up that hill—on the double!”

  “Thanks, Moselle. Have ’em back in a couple of minutes.”

  “I’m comin’ with ya to make sure.”

  “Bring an ax.”

  “Roger.” He picked one up and the six of us ran up the hill in a low crouch. B team was already there, in a circle around a grove of trees. There were seven trees. We saved the smallest for last.

  All but one of us dropped our trees, and Prof was working on the smallest one, when a grenade burst halfway down the hill, on the “enemy” side. We hit the dirt and rifle fire roared all around us, most of it from B team—maybe all of it.

  “Get back!” Moselle shouted. “Back to the line!”

  “Us, too,” Prof said. “Go!” We ran like hell.

  Prof went straight to his demo bag, started reeling out det cord.

  “Can the dustoff land with those two trees there?” Willy asked him.

  “Hell, no. Foul the blades. We gotta go blow ’em down.” He cut off about eight feet of det cord and
crimped blasting caps on each end. Then he snipped off about a foot of orange fuse and capped one end of it.

  “Now, either of you ever blown a tree?”

  “Not me,” I said. Neither had Willy.

  “Nothin’ to it. One of ’em’s cut halfway through, the other’s little. A pound of C-4 each would knock ’em to Kingdom Come.”

  He got two bricks of C-4 out of his pack. “We’ll use a pound-and-a-half each, just to be sure.

  “You use the pointy end of the crimpers here, poke a hole in the C-4 to make a place to put the cap.” He put a hole in one of the bricks, two holes in the other. His hands were shaking.

  “Now get this. Don’t have time to repeat it. Put one block at the base of the little tree, and one in the notch where Moselle was cutting the other. Connect the two with det cord, that’ll make ’em go off at the same time. Then put the fuse in the other end of the block that has two holes. Light the fuse and crawl down the hill. Ninety-second fuse, plenty of time to crawl. If you get up and run, you might get shot.”

  “Which of us is gonna do it, Prof?”

  “I am, of course—but if I don’t make it, Horowitz tries, if you don’t make it, Farmer tries. Farmer, if you don’t make it, some poor yoyo’s gotta go up there with an ax.”

  I was a little disappointed that he put Willy ahead of me. Also a little relieved. We went back to the right flank.

  “Moselle, I’m going up to blow those trees. Give me some cover, okay?”

  “Sure. Jus’ a second—Hey, Pig! Got that 60 set up?”

  “Yeah, Moser—want I should shoot somebody?”

  “Professor’s goin’ up the hill. Lay down a field of fire on his right.”

  The belt-fed machine gun chattered twice.

  “Whenever you’re ready, Prof. I’ll get a couple of 16’s to cover your left.”

  “Use my new men, Horowitz and Farmer.”

  “Okay.”

  Moselle put us in a “foxhole” (about a foot deep) on the edge of the perimeter, facing the hill. “One of you guys start poppin’ as soon as Pig starts the M-60. Bursts of three, about five seconds apart; aim anywhere to the Prof’s left.”

  “That’s this side?”

  “Yeah, yer military left. Don’t hit the Prof if you can help it. One reloads while the other fires—got it?”