I Pledge Allegiance Read online

  For only the second time in about a hundred years, the US Navy has divided itself in two. My life on the USS Boston, floating off the coast and on the ocean, was part of the Blue Water Navy. What a lot of people would call the easy war.

  From now on, that won’t be the case at all. I am now part of the Brown Water Navy, where life is a whole lot more complicated.

  Because of the geography of Vietnam, it eventually became obvious to the people who decide such things that if we wanted to make progress there had to be a more clever approach than one if by land, two if by sea. There is certainly a great deal of land around here, and it sure is blessed with a good long coastline. But there’s much more of what you might refer to as other terrain for fighting.

  There is a lot of jungle in Vietnam. There is a lot of jungle. And it is cut up, north-south, east-west, and every possible combination of all that, with rivers. Thousands of miles of rivers. If you are going to move effectively around here, if you are going to find the enemy, engage the enemy, deliver troops, equip them, move them from place to place, and above all cover them with the Navy’s special brand of protection, you are simply going to have to use a good bit of boat power to do it.

  And where that jungle and those waterways come right up close and personal to each other? Well, that is about the most dangerous place on planet Earth.

  Welcome to my new home. Welcome to the Mekong Delta.

  They are called river monitors, because of their resemblance to the Monitor, one of the first two armored warships, from the Civil War. I studied that bit, the Merrimac and the Monitor, bouncing cannonballs off each other like it was nothing more than a game of dodgeball.

  One look at my new place of work, and I know things are going to get a lot more interesting than that. There will be only eleven of us on board, which means much more responsibility, and much more risk.

  Moses was right: This is a floating tank we are looking at as we stand waiting on the barge to be welcomed aboard. But what even Moses didn’t realize was this is also a beast. A growling, snarling, howling, grinning, booming, fire-breathing sea monster.

  It’s known as the battleship of the river force because it’s designed to provide heavy-duty support to our Army brothers in the thickest of battles along the banks and some ways inland. We’re so armored, and so armed, it looks like movement was just an afterthought for the craft. This creature looks to me as if it could defeat any and all comers up and down the river all by itself. The forward turret has a 40-mm cannon and an M-60 machine gun. Halfway up ship, dug in as if they were in foxholes on land, are an 81-mm mortar and two .50-caliber machine guns. The rear carries two 20-mm cannons, another two .50-caliber machine guns, and four more M-60 machine guns.

  Mounted up front and center at the nose of the operation are two smaller turrets, each with one more machine gun mounted side by side with …

  “Moses,” I ask, having not seen these bits of kit before, “what is that?”

  Moses can barely speak. “We’re on a Zippo, man. I didn’t know we were gonna be on a Zippo!”

  “A Zippo?”

  He turns to me and grabs me by the shoulders in an almost teary embrace. “Zippo. Like the lighter. Those ain’t cannons, Mo. Those are flamethrowers.”

  We both turn in silence back to the hugeness we’ve been assigned to. Like Moses, I am now entranced, looking again over every inch of this ugly, mighty thing floating here under the ungodly Vietnamese sun. It ain’t pretty, that’s for certain. It’s got tires strapped here and there as bumpers, it’s got steel caging around the turrets, sandbags packed within the caging. The turrets themselves look like they were copied straight out of some medieval book of castles and pounded out of metal — and then, while they were at it, they roped in an honest-to-goodness dragon for laughs. It’s got crazy eyes and teeth painted straight across the bow, and somebody has printed Burning Sensation across the side.

  The river monitor could easily have been the brainchild of an inspired twelve-year-old death merchant with a sense of fun. Male, naturally.

  I look to Moses, who just keeps running his eyes up and down and all over the vessel admiringly.

  “What do you make of this?” I finally ask him.

  “My boy, I am stone-cold in love.”

  The communications shelter is the spot on the boat where I do my most professional work. Shelter isn’t quite the right word, since the area where I do most of my communicating is lodged pretty plainly on deck, in between the forward turret and the midship turret, which looms over everything. I’m surrounded by the same bar armor as most of the other stations, though it’s hard to see how that really protects us from, say, bullets. For most of the time, like now, when it is life threateningly sunny, we also have this canvas sunshade rigged up over my head that makes my station kind of like a patio, sociable and all, but still not much protection from rocket-propelled projectiles.

  The water is just as advertised. The opposite of what I knew in the Blue Water Navy, this soup is a couple of shades darker than the sunset, a thin, murky, scary mystery.

  There is something honest about that.

  The captain has trained me up in the fairly simple business of communications, and has given me the even more important information about who among the vast population of Army personnel we will be communicating with. I take regular updates from the command center in Saigon, letting us know what parts of the river we need to be patrolling and what we are to look out for. And if we see anything that looks out of the ordinary in a hey-that-could-kill-us kind of way, I need to be contacting the center for the green light on doing something about it. Other times we are loading up supplies for the Army grunts, or cleaning and oiling and generally babying our implements of destruction as if our lives depended on it.

  “Our brothers in arms throughout this whole great endeavor of the Riverine Assault project are the Ninth Division.”

  “Huh,” I say. “I have an old pal in the Ninth.”

  “Second Brigade …”

  “Wow. That’s …”

  “Thirty-fourth Artillery.”

  It’s one hundred and seven degrees in the shade, and I get a chill.

  “Ivan,” I say right out loud.

  “Yeah,” the captain says, “they’re pretty much all called Ivan. Or Bruno, or Knuckles, or somethin’. Listen, I’ll just leave you to it, then.”

  He leaves me to it. This is the beauty of my job, if there is beauty to it. The it he is leaving me to is working on the task of radioing my pal Ivan. The communications job on one of these dinky tubs is nothing like it would have been on one of the monster ships. Those things have every which kind of radar, sonar, electronic gear for getting and giving information. By contrast, what I have here can look more like a glorified telephone operator’s gig. Sometimes not even much glorified. But it does mean I am the man, in charge of the box. And in my downtime I have just this little bitty bit of authority, all my own.

  It would be so great to hear his actual voice. To hear any of the guys’ voices.

  Maybe I will get better at this, but I seem to be chasing my tail in my effort to reach Ivan. I suppose it is fair to expect the infantry to be on the move and fighting as long as they are here, but still, I figure, he could take one lousy call.

  I laugh when I hear myself think that. I will talk to him eventually. We have jobs to do, and just like I was hoping, I am one step — actually several steps — closer to what I thought of as my mission when I first joined up. I am watching over my boys. Providing backup and cover while they are out there doing the truly hard and dangerous dirty work of this war. And I have the added bonus of being The Communicator, pulling us all together. Which is really as it should be.

  We’re cruising south down the Mekong, returning from dropping a load of Army troops off about halfway to the Cambodian border. Cruising back down should be the simple part, but nothing is simple in this brown water. We can go days without seeing anything hostile on the banks, but that by no means indicate
s that hostility isn’t hiding in there. Facing the Vietcong sprinkled throughout the heavy foliage of the southern riverways or in the hills beyond is a much more dicey and uncertain thing than taking on the regular army of the North.

  Ping!

  It starts with just one shot bouncing off of plate metal. Then two and three and six, like popcorn starting up.

  “Incoming! Incoming! Incoming!” somebody bellows, just a little after we have all figured that something’s incoming. Bullets are zinging past, whistling right by my ears, dinging off all the various angles of metal all over the boat. Unlike the Boston, nobody has to sound any sirens when the action kicks off down here. You know, and you move.

  And you realize that you are close to death, for crying out loud, or death is close to you, and will be from now until you get discharged.

  I scramble to my battle station, which is high up in the midship turret. I feel like a carnival clown, so exposed, so ready for plucking. Guys are shouting; the sun, finally setting, is making the horizon glow a beautiful brown. We can’t see the bullets as they sail for every one of us.

  Even though it’s a tiny fraction of the size of the giant cruiser of my first tour, the monitor feels as if it has every bit as much firepower. Every time the gunner beside me fires his cannons, it sounds and feels as if a plane has crashed into something right beside me.

  I must be doing my staring and cringing routine, which I perfected out at sea and which will not be tolerated here, because the gunner, Everett, hollers at me, “Use that thing, right now!”

  I have a field telephone slung like a knapsack over my shoulder, but he doesn’t mean that. With a crew of eleven, everyone has multiple jobs, and everyone knows if you fail to do yours.

  I settle in at my second duty.

  I am a man of war now, for real. Settled in alongside Everett, I take my place behind my .50-caliber machine gun. I pepper every bit of coast I see, where tracer bullets lace through the evening air like murderous mosquitoes trying to put us away.

  I won’t lie. It feels good. I have my helmet on, and as I blast away, the shaking of the gun, the boat, my bones, keeps jiggering the helmet down over my eyes. I push it back every time without missing a beat, and I fire-fire-fire like it’s my sworn nemesis out there who has insulted my mother and killed all my pals and sworn to knife every man, woman, and child I’ve ever known.

  The thing, finally, that makes shooting at a person feel right? It’s shooting at them. Shooting a gun is the thing that convinces you of the rightness of shooting.

  Because it works. It solves problems, after all, right? I can feel it right this second, as the repeating action of the machine gun shakes my hands to a state of absolute numbness that works its way from my fingers up my hands and all into me everywhere. I am not, for the moment, afraid. I am not useless or out of place or just getting by. I am shooting something, stopping something — I am meeting aggression with aggression, saving my friends in the process, saving everybody’s friends in the process.

  As my bullets penetrate the jungle, I swear I can actually feel my fears and worries and problems go down. I am forcing them down with my .50-caliber machine gun.

  The mortar fire booms from below us, pushing the massive bulk of the monitor down farther into the water. We hear as the shots connect with their target in the distance. The explosion is unbelievable, as if it’s an explosion of explosions, two rockets hitting each other nose-to-nose in midair.

  BOOM goes Everett’s cannon again, and a whole section of jungle seems to buckle under the blast fifty yards beyond the bank. My instruction is to hammer away at whatever tracers I see coming out of the bush, and I have to say I’m adapting to it. Part of me would rather be on the line to our big buddies, calling in coordinates for the helicopter gunships, the killer Seawolves, to come in and finish them off.

  But sometimes it’s your own fight.

  I don’t know how we’re doing it, but we’re firing on all cylinders, with machine guns, howitzers, mortar fire, and rockets obliterating whatever threat has just been unleashed on us. Gradually, over maybe twenty minutes of heat and holler, we put the attack out entirely.

  There’s one last, loud salvo from shore, then Everett throws an arm around my neck as the captain powers up the monitor to head upstream. The air is filled with sulfur, smoke, and sunset. Everything around us is burning.

  The brown water is like gravy, bubbling in our wake. To make us more nimble on shallow water, we have light, crisp armor plating and jets instead of propellers pushing us on.

  My heart has never pounded like this. I take a moment to watch all thirty-two inches of my sweaty chest puff crazy like a hummingbird. Then I look back out at the water, the banks, the low sky ceiling. There is something beautiful there, in the smoking murky scene we’re fleeing.

  “Wow,” I say to Everett. “Who did we shoot?”

  “Who knows?” He laughs weakly. “We got ’em all, though, whoever they were.”

  There’s something wrong. I look down at where Everett’s arm is draped over and down my chest. There’s blood. His blood.

  “You’re hurt,” I say.

  He tries to wave it off, but he can’t. He’s leaning hard on me now.

  “It’s just my arm,” he says. Then he collapses and pulls me to the deck with him.

  After two other guys take Everett off me and lay him down, I radio ahead and make sure medical coverage is waiting. Part of the special nature of the Riverine Force is that all its parts seem to be in motion at once. There are medical teams stationed on various boats. Some craft are dedicated medical units, like great big amphibious ambulances. And there are units positioned all up and down the river from the Delta to the DMZ, harboring small but expansive med teams that can do everything from lancing a boil to relieving you of a gangrene-filled hand before it’s too late. We are directed to a spot about six klicks from where we are, where one of the stationary pontoons has just the stuff to make Everett right again.

  “I don’t need any help,” Everett insists, despite not being able to get himself off that very bit of deck he landed on. “It’d take more than this to get me to go to no stupid doctor. I’m made of tougher stuff than that. What do I look like, Blue Water Navy or something?”

  “Hah,” Moses says, standing over us. “He got ya there, Mo.”

  “Everett,” the captain says, “everybody appreciates your toughness, but this cannot stay on this boat.”

  Cap takes Everett’s hand and raises his arm to show Everett the extent of his own wound.

  The arm hangs there like something in a butcher’s window. Everett’s been hit by who-knows, but whatever it was took a chunk the size of my fist out of the underside of his biceps. It is seeping blood and fibrous tissue, like a wolf bite has torn the arm nearly in half.

  Everett’s remaining toughness spills onto the deck, his eyes rolling back in his head. Moses cradles him to the deck while I tie a fast and tight tourniquet around the highest part of his arm I can get a purchase on. The bandage is already soaked through by the time I get it tied, but it’s at least making a temporary barrier to prevent his heart pumping all his blood out into the war.

  Another crewman comes running with the med bag. Cap grabs it from him, tears it open, and shoots a vial of morphine straight into Everett’s arm, then another shot, of antibiotics, the needle driving right into the pulp of the open shoulder muscle.

  “He’s gonna lose that arm, Cap,” Moses says, perching exactly between question and statement.

  “He loses any more blood, the arm won’t be an issue,” Cap says, looking off to where we need to take the patient.

  He’s not dead when we leave him, so that’s good. By the time we’ve removed him to the floating med station, though, it looks like we’ve all been shot. Moses, myself, and Cap all get a quick appraisal from the field doctors trying to satisfy themselves that the whole crew hasn’t been shot up. We are eventually allowed to leave Everett and take ourselves back out.

  I am l
ooking myself up and down as we move along the river again. Looking at the blood on my arms, my thighs, all over the front of my shirt. When I was a kid, I had to turn away whenever I got cut, to keep myself from getting woozy. Now it’s lots of blood, and I cannot stop staring at it, fascinated. I sniff at it, trying to get a scent. Some completely demented urge, but powerful just the same, comes over me to taste it.

  “Wash that business off yourself,” snaps Cap, already cleaned up and re-shirted. I guess I’ve been fascinated by Everett’s blood for longer than I realized.

  I guess somebody else’s blood is an altogether different thing.

  There is a rotation when somebody leaves ship like Everett does. A full compliment has eleven enlisted men and the captain. Guys choose jobs according to length of time on board this particular boat, and Everett’s job was one of the lower ones, with him being perched in the highest spot of all the battle stations. He liked it, though, for the view, for being able to survey all before him, as he put it, and I could certainly appreciate his logic.

  I wouldn’t appreciate having his job, though.

  He’s going to live, but there’s no guarantee he’s going to be back with this crew anytime soon. He isn’t being replaced by anyone right off, so I find Moses up in the tall turret beside me as we go on another evening up and down through the syrupy Mekong River. Central Command says a few of the slower troop carriers have been pestered by pods of nasties dug into the banks making night raids, and we have been politely asked to flush them out and start a proper fight.

  “It’s far too quiet along this river at night,” Moses says as we lean over the bar armor, scanning for anything indigenous and deadly along the banks. He is right beside me now, but when it kicks off, his battle Station, the cannon, sits more or less just up over the shoulder of machine gunner me. He’s at the big gun up high above everything, watching over it all. It occurs to me that this is just the situation I envisioned would be best, right after he beat me senseless on the Boston. Comforting.