Walking Wounded Read online

  That’s right, I’m not. I never wanted to be one. That’s not why I came.

  “I’m sorry, cap,” I say, feeling embarrassment but not much else.

  “Don’t be sorry. Just escort your friend home, and then stay there. I’ve put in the request. I’m still awaiting a response but I told them everything I just told you. Between that and your short-time status, nobody else is going to want you, either. This will go through. You’ll be rotated back to stateside duty, yet to be determined.”

  I have never been so humiliated and ecstatic in my life.

  “Thank you for everything, captain.”

  “Take care of yourself, private. And have a good life.”

  We hang up. I stand there with the clothes in my hand, looking back and forth from them to the phone and back again.

  I’m going home.

  We’re going home.

  Lieutenant?”

  I hear the voice, sounding distant and very close at the same time.

  “Lieutenant? Is there something I should know here?”

  I almost look behind me to see who he might be talking to when I remember I’m a second lieutenant. As my confirmed kills rose, so did my field promotions, to the point where my CO said I should reach major general before my tour is over.

  I roll over, from my side onto my back. There is rich soil all over the side of my face and over much of my head. I sit up. I am covered in the stuff, as if the motion of the truck has been tossing me around, or as if I have myself been thrashing and wallowing like a mad barnyard animal.

  At the open end of the truck there’s an officer looking at me strangely. “What’s this all about?” he says, pointing at a spot to my left.

  I look over and see that he is pointing at my deadly M-21 Sniper Weapon System, assembled and poised and extended through the mesh cage of the truck.

  He had been unaware that his truck was actually a mobile sniper’s nest.

  “Just trying to pay my way, sir,” I say as I scramble up and start taking the gun apart. “Riding shotgun, providing cover for the convoy along the route.”

  I have the full system broken down and back in its canvas carrier before he can even respond.

  “Uh-huh,” he says, unmoved. “Who knows what kind of bandits might have stolen all our dirt if you weren’t there sleeping on it.”

  “Ha,” I say, hopping down off the tail of the truck and walking on past him.

  “That’s a special weapon there,” he says.

  “It is,” I say, walking faster.

  “You must be a talent.”

  “I never miss. Thanks for the lift.”

  “Our pleasure.”

  At the base at Qui Nhon I hook up with another, smaller convoy hauling supplies of ammunition and building materials along Highway 19 to Pleiku. This is about half the distance we covered on Route 1, but it will be much less of a highway trip and more of a grind.

  This stretch between the port and the Central Highlands has become famous for being the rope pulled taut in a tug-of-war between us and them. The VC have used it to get men and supplies to their million little hideaways between here and Cambodia and beyond. Then we have fought to take it violently away from them. Then they have come back to destroy the road and bridges in strategic spots to make life hell for us, and we have rebuilt the road and the bridges to get back to business and make life hell for them.

  I couldn’t even tell you which side has the upper hand in the endless battle for Highway 19 as I hop aboard the convoy that’s about to travel it.

  But I do know that this convoy includes the brute-beast gun trucks that the last one did not.

  And I also know that a stretch of Highway 19 is helpfully referred to as Ambush Alley.

  The convoy contains around one hundred vehicles altogether, sent out in staggered groups of ten. I am in the second group, embarking ten minutes after the first.

  I’ve gotten myself onto one of the gun trucks. There is one assigned to each group. The gun truck is actually a converted five-ton cargo vehicle, but its similarity with the rest of the cargo haulers ends with the name. It is surrounded with steel plates on three sides and below, and the bed in back is modified beyond all recognition. There are two men stationed up top behind .50-caliber machine guns, and one grenadier manning an M-79 grenade launcher. This is serious firepower for a haulage convoy, and a direct response to all the damage Charlie has done to us along this route.

  The mood is as tense and serious as on any assignment I have been on so far. We are the third truck in the second convoy, and every man is on high alert from the moment we set out.

  The road is terrible. It’s rutted and pocked and only sporadically paved. I lean over the side of the truck to get a look at what’s out there when I feel us slide sideways for the third time. The road widens and narrows without any apparent pattern, and once we start the climb into the hills it becomes obvious that we could tumble off the road and down the side of a mountain without needing much of a shove.

  “Can I have a look?” one of the two machine gunners says, motioning toward the canvas bag that holds my weapon.

  I stare at him for a few seconds, looking at his hard face, his long arm stuck out in the direction of my gun as if I really didn’t have any say in the matter.

  Crrrack. Ping.

  It’s sniper fire. The first shot ricochets off the steel plating right between me and the presumptuous gunner guy, and everybody jumps right in. Both .50s roar to life and fill the hill above us with blanket fire. The M-79 launches a grenade into the side of the hill and the explosion brings rocks rumbling down to crash into the truck running behind us.

  I have my rifle out and ready in seconds, and I crouch in position behind the plate and watch for muzzle fire while the rest of these boys fire away wildly.

  I’m thinking about the waste. About the rounds and rounds of ammo being drilled into the ground to no effect, when we are risking our lives in this convoy to deliver more ammunition to more of our soldiers, who are going to eventually do the same thing with it.

  What are we doing here?

  “What are you waiting for? Shoot!” the grenadier shouts.

  I ignore him and wait another several seconds and then there is another crrrack and ping and a muzzle flash high up on the hill, and I scope and I line him up, even in the bumpy back of a rumbling gun truck, and we all see the vicious little killer fall right down out of that tree sticking out of that bluff and crash down that rocky hillside and keep crashing ’til he is stopped dead by a rock as big as this truck. Somebody reaches over amid the hollering and pats my shoulder, and I smack that hand away hard enough to maybe send a few fingers spinning off into the countryside, and then there is another muzzle flash and I aim and the beautiful clean bang of my M-21 is in the air and another VC assassin is out of another tree and tumbling down when we turn a big bend in the road and ride out of that particular skirmish.

  “Holy smokes,” the grenadier says, crouching down to look at — but not touch — my rifle. “Who are you, soldier?”

  “From a moving vehicle under extreme circumstances,” says one gunner.

  “Two confirmed kills,” says the other gunner, “within, what, half a minute?”

  I am rechecking the gun, wiping it down, cleaning the scope, which is already dusty from this awful road.

  “How many?” the grenadier asks, and we all know what he is referring to.

  Everybody wants the number.

  I cannot give it to them.

  I look up, at the one guy, then the other, then the other.

  And I give them a 100-percent truthful shrug.

  This is how it goes,” Daniels says the following day, when all the other preparations have been made for both Rudi and me. We are on the strip at Chu Lai Airfield, just under and behind the wing of the C-123 transport plane. Marines are busy loading cargo into the gut of the aircraft, while Rudi lies in his box on a gurney between Daniels and me.

  Snap, snap, snap, snap.
/>   “Are you listening to me, kid? Because what I am telling you are not just suggestions. They are how it has to go. Even more than battlefield orders, these rules absolutely must be carried out no matter what it takes, and you are solely responsible for making sure that they are.”

  “Sorry, sir,” I say, aware now that I was paying attention to Rudi when I should have been paying attention to orders. I was staring down at his steel-gray box, which contains a gray steel box, which contains the remains. I’m still trying to align it all in my head, but it won’t settle.

  “We treat this duty as way beyond sacred. We treat it as if it is us in that box, and how we feel like we should be handled.”

  I wish it were me in there instead. I wouldn’t care how I was handled.

  But Rudi deserves more, and I get it.

  “He gets on the plane feetfirst. Not negotiable. Then, it’s a cargo plane, so there’s cargo. I don’t care how loaded it is, nothing goes on top of him. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “You will change aircraft, possibly multiple times. I don’t care who is on duty, you stay right there with our comrade. Right?”

  “Right.” I get a little more barky with each affirmation.

  “When he is loaded up, and when he’s placed in the hold, his head is always down. Why is his head always down?”

  I was not expecting anything like a quiz on this.

  “Because … he’s been defeated?” I say.

  Pathetic. I am embarrassed by the lameness of my answer, but for a fleeting moment I’m also amused. That was such a Rudi response that I could almost believe it was him taking over and talking through me.

  My shoulders shiver. I need to stop that kind of thinking if I am going to see this particular duty through.

  “Because,” Daniels somehow growls warmly, “he has been embalmed, and if the fluid flows away from his head and to his feet he will start decomposing before he gets all the way home. That is bad, any way you look at it, but it is particularly bad if the folks back home want to have an open casket and have a last look at this brave soldier. Do you suppose —”

  “Yes, sir, I do.”

  “Good. Then you will appreciate the importance of following these rules like a tenacious guard dog defending his master.”

  “Sir, I will follow these rules, in just that fashion.”

  Like Rudi should have been guarded all along.

  The C-123’s engines cough and bark and then roar to life. The twin propellers beat the air with a pap-pap-pap authority that instantly makes all but essential personnel flee the scene.

  Daniels gives me a salute.

  Nobody has ever had to salute me before. It makes me crack a little, makes me feel important, because I suppose it makes Rudi important. And who was ever going to predict that before this whole thing started?

  Daniels backs away and leaves it to me.

  It really is mine now, the responsibility, the care of this poor simple kid. I thought he was in my care all along. I kidded myself. I lied.

  The Marines who have loaded the plane seem to believe it now, though, because as the engines roar to life and they finish with their cargo, they march over in formation and in respect and stop in front of Rudi and me, and they wait.

  They wait for me to give them the signal, because until I do, nobody is going anywhere.

  Because we all know it could just as well be us. And because it goes just like this, because this is the right way to treat him.

  I am about to give them the signal to load my boy, my pal, my sadness and my guilt, onto the plane for the final journey, when I see somebody passing Daniels on his way to this spot. And I wait.

  We all wait, because it seems like we should. Nobody moves ’til he gets here.

  “That was my aircraft,” Beck says, shouldering right up against me, facing the scene with me.

  “Was it, now?” I say.

  “Yes, sir. Modified, of course,” he says. “It was a Provider, Ranch Hand. I sprayed so much Agent Orange out of this thing I’ll defoliate every garden in Boston just by walking past.”

  I nod, laugh a little.

  “But I did it for him. And for Ivan. Cleared those banks of that foliage so the VC couldn’t hide and kill our boys. That’s why I did that awful thing.”

  “I know,” I say. “The same reason I did all of what I did, off the coast and up all those scary Mekong riverways. For them, pal. We did everything for them.”

  “Because them was us.”

  “And us was them.”

  “And look where it got everybody. Look how they thank us.”

  Bless their souls, the Marines know nothing about what we are talking about yet they remain rigid monuments all the while.

  “We won’t look at it today, though,” I say.

  “No, sir,” Beck says, and he takes it upon himself to salute Rudi and begin the good-bye for good.

  Now he’s done it.

  “Oh, man … ,” I say, joining in the salute and triggering the orderly action of the Marines carefully shouldering one of their own. “I’m supposed to be in charge here,” I say softly as Beck and I hold our salutes and I completely wash my own face with the crying.

  “You’re doing fine,” he says.

  “Feetfirst,” I croak, with no hope of them hearing me.

  “It’s good, don’t worry. They know what they’re doing.”

  “And they have to load him so his head is in the right position, because —”

  “They’ll give him a pillow, I’m sure.”

  As Rudi slides into the belly of the C-123, Beck and I release our salutes. As we do, I hear — and I realize that for Beck this really is the final one —

  “Bye, Rudi, pal,” he says.

  I can only guess what I look like because when he turns to face me he gets all urgent. “Come on now, Morris,” he says, grabbing my shoulders firmly. “Come on now.”

  “I don’t know how I’m going to get through all this, Beck, man.”

  “You’re going to get through it the same way you have always gotten through everything. By being a good man, Morris, man. And by focusing on home. You’re going home.”

  “Yeah, well, right now, home feels a lot scarier even than this place does. And this place is a certified nightmare.”

  “It won’t be bad at all, once you’re in Boston, with all your people around.”

  “You think?”

  “I do.”

  “Wanna trade, then?”

  He releases his grip on my shoulders and tugs me by the arm toward the plane.

  “Not on your life, old friend,” he says with only a little pop of a laugh.

  The loading crew have all jumped down and the cargo door is secured with a slam. I look through the small window as Beck stands there all alone, watching us taxi. Watching with his studious Beck brand of solitary mourning while Rudi and I take off for home and whatever that is now.

  And I cannot help thinking about Ivan, where he is and what he is at this, this moment of ours.

  I belong in the highlands.

  I have known that from the moment I arrived in Pleiku. Check that. I knew it before I arrived, when that first chopper rose out of the swampy, untrustworthy lowlands and the terrain kept on rising with us, as if to meet us. This is the geography of the hunter, the wild and irregular mountains with caves and nooks, notches and valleys and forests. It’s a world that repays seriousness, attention to detail, patience, controlled anger, focus. Self-reliance.

  In spite of the chaotic circumstances, this feels like coming home now. My heart rate slows. There are worse places to die.

  We have been fired upon with increasing frequency as we’ve climbed Highway 19, and we expect more as we approach our base at An Khe. The first group has taken the brunt, and already we have passed two of their trucks — abandoned, upended, and burning off the side of the road. As the altitude has increased, so has the caliber of ordnance being thrown at us. Rocket-propelled grenades took out those trucks,
and one almost got us, sailing right past and into the hillside between us and the next vehicle in line. It’s become clear from the heads-down dash of the operation that nobody expects the full convoy to reach Pleiku. Everybody involved seems to understand it’s just a big brutal game of red rover, red rover, except if you fail to ram through you don’t get to just join hands with the other team.

  We run into another barrage about a mile from An Khe. Mortar rounds come surging up out of the dense greenery that runs all down along the slopes of Hon Cong Mountain, and for about two minutes it is furious.

  “There’s nothing even to shoot at!” one gunner screams out from a crouching position. Mortar shells are landing all around us. The road just ahead suddenly erupts in a great boom, and a plume of smoke and rock and earth sweeps over us as we barrel and bang over the crater at full speed. Us guys up here on the gun truck’s top deck are thrown all over but scramble right back into place.

  “Well, shoot at it anyway!” the other gunner screams.

  They do indeed blast away, down the slope, while trying to remain largely behind the truck’s steel plating. The grenadier lobs away in the general direction of the mortar nests and doesn’t even pretend to strain for visual contact.

  Such a waste.

  “You don’t just shoot for the noise of it!” I shout through the commotion.

  “You don’t even shoot for that,” one gunner snaps back.

  “That’s right, I don’t,” I say. I’m sitting with my back to the armored wall, my knees up to stabilize me. I take the cloth I’ve been using to keep all this dirt and debris from compromising my rifle, and I mop the sweat that’s started running heavily down my face. It’s blood, though, I see now. Sweat, too, lots of that. But a fair amount of blood is staining the cloth. I probably smacked my forehead on the steel plating during that last eruption, which underscores how our means of protection can cut both ways when the battle gets hot.

  “Friendly fire,” I say, laughing to myself when I see the blood taking over the rag on the second and third dabbing.

  Except it’s not a laugh. It just sounds similar to one. It doesn’t have a name of its own.