Don't Cry For the Brave Page 5

  “When we’ve finished the interrogation. Come and see.”

  8

  I left my men resting and went with Blake to the second hut. The smell of the dark interior as I blinked on the threshold was the butcher-shop odour of blood, and the stink of excrement and half-digested food. An officer knelt on the floor with his back to the door. He looked round as we entered. I recognised him as an interpreter, Captain Nguyen, a South Vietnamese officer attached to C Company.

  Two prisoners were roped against the wall; they were crumpled down on their haunches. One was a woman of about thirty in a black shirt and pants with her hair hacked short. The other was a man of about the same age, hollow-chested and sick-looking. As my eyes became accustomed to the gloom I counted eight more people roped together at the far end of the hut, sitting silently, their knees drawn up and their heads downcast. Some of them seemed like children of perhaps twelve or fifteen years.

  “We flushed them out of the tunnels at the edge of the clearing,” Blake said.

  On the other side of the hut was a body, flat on its back with bare ankles and feet. I looked past the wide feet with their broken toenails toward where the head should have been. The bloody stump gleamed in the shadow.

  “What happened?” I asked concealing my retch.

  “Part of interrogation process,” Nguyen said in a high, precise voice.

  Blake and I stood mutely regarding the scene for a moment.

  “Will we find out anything useful?” I asked.

  “Let’s see what Nguyen can do,” Blake said.

  *

  I returned to the rest hut. My men took turns with Blake’s in maintaining a ring of lookouts. Even in this hut with the patch of sunlight creeping across the mud floor from the entrance, I felt the foulness of violent death around me like a cloak, and heard the murmured Vietnamese of the interpreter in my ears like tinnitus. The haze of noon hung over the jungle hills. My eyes watered; in the far distance, artillery gunfire and the occasional crackle of warplanes.

  I agreed to take a turn on watch with the men. I did so to get away from the rest hut. Here the talk alternated in a quiet hysteria. The men speculated morosely about the risks facing them on the journey back to our lines, and then hilariously about what they were going to do when victory was declared. I couldn’t face being with Blake and Nguyen in the slaughter hut either.

  I settled myself in a trench beyond the broken bamboo fence. I could see for about three hundred yards through fern and creeper into the darkness of the jungle. Ahead, I had a view across a paddy field which was dry and pocked with shell holes, into the purple brightness. In a way, I deliberately didn’t try to work out what was happening around me. I slipped a letter from Gail – which I shouldn’t have been carrying – out of my pocket. 7th Army GMC Saigon. My dearest Bob, I think of you all the time and pray for your safety. And I think of you especially when I get into bed at night naked and dream of going to sleep in your arms. And I think and dream of more than just going to sleep. I think of you inside me and your magic fingers on me, and of a big love welling up like a fountain. I can’t help writing like this, I love you so. Same as ever at GMC, except I’m doing more admin and less theatre. My rank as captain is substantive now, so attention Lieutenant! All my love, Gail.

  I dozed for a while, horny in the sun. I was hungry. The haze of early afternoon was stifling. I was tired, so tired that the gnawing in my belly could not keep me from longing for sleep between white sheets… but it was a hopeless longing; sleep was a demon that taunted me from afar. Occasionally, in the distance I could hear artillery gunfire and the drone of transport planes. My eyes throbbed trying to detect alien movement where all was quivering and scorching. I had been here for nearly one and a half hours.

  Impatient at waiting for food or relief from the duty, I left the thicket and crept towards the huts. Three soldiers were sitting near the door of the rest hut, the remains of a meal scattered round them. I pointed to my mouth and a thumbs-up came from a disembodied arm in the doorway. I’d been understood. I crept back to my post. A few minutes later Schuyler sidled out of the foliage with a tin plate covered by his dirty palm. I took the plate. It was a mess of powdered eggs and pasta, with traces of dust and small leaves in it.

  “You dropped it.”

  “Not actually dropped, sir.”

  “You know I’ve been waiting here.”

  “We thought you were coming over.”

  Schuyler gave nothing away except a trace of stupid amusement. It was a case of eat this shit or go hungry, soldier.

  “Tell Sergeant Lucas to report to me now. That’s an order.”

  “Yes, sir. Mr Blake’s making progress with the prisoners.”

  “What progress?”

  “Cutting their throats.”

  Schuyler sidled away and I swallowed the glutinous mess in four or five lumps.

  I had agreed with Blake that we would move at 1300 hours regardless of the success of the interrogation; it was shortly after 1200. I swung my pack on my shoulder and looked at the earth at my feet for signs of my presence. I ground a lump of pasta into the dust, and scanned the jungle and paddy slowly one more time.

  Lucas crept to my elbow. “What’s going on?” I asked.

  He looked hard at me, wrinkled his lips and didn’t reply. He cocked his rifle.

  “You carry on here,” I said.

  I approached the big hut along the fence line; there was no shadow. I crept in a shimmering haze. At twenty feet I could see in the doorway the luminous shape of a bare body, the lower back and buttocks of a GI. By the time I was at the door frame, the GI was coming out, tucking his shirt and tightening his belt. Nguyen sat on his haunches outside, under the eaves. Blake was standing beside him, scanning the jungle, his long pale eyelashes nearly resting on his cheeks. The thumb of one of his hands was hooked in his belt; his forearm had fine fair hairs which sparkled.

  I stepped past both men into the hut. The woman lay flat on her back on the earth. She stared. Her trousers had been removed and dropped over her thighs. I reached down and pulled the garment away. She whispered some words. I saw the bruises, the blood and wetness between her legs. Nguyen came in.

  “What’s she saying?”

  “Americans would say ‘unjust war’.”

  Her legs were strewn brokenly apart. Her shirt had been pushed up to the rise of her breasts. The contours of her waist and hips shone faintly, smooth and shiny. Below her navel were whitish lines, the stretch marks of an earlier pregnancy. She was probably a mother. I dropped the pants back on top of her body.

  “Men need a woman,” Nguyen laughed, puffing a cigarette held in a delicate hand. He nodded as though his head was on a rocking pin.

  “If she’d had a chance, she’d have cut your balls out,” Blake said, entering the doorway as though he could hear my unvoiced objection.

  “Did they talk?”

  “Sure,” Blake said. “It’s no time for squeamishness. We may save lives with what we know from this vermin.”

  “Will we be taking them back?”

  Nguyen smiled tolerantly. “Too far.”

  “This isn’t ROTC manoeuvres Bob, hoisting your prisoner’s underpants up the flagpole. That stuff.”

  Blake moved back to the doorway, his expression hard, set against the sun and the jungle. His leg jutted into the rectangle of searing light which fell in the doorway. Privation had hardened the boyish lines of his cheek and jaw.

  “Did you get much information?” I asked Nguyen.

  The Vietnamese gave a small smile. “The size and armament of VC units in the area and their direction of march.”

  “The information could be wrong. The prisoners had to say something,” I said.

  “Nearly all said the same thing.”

  “Is it of real value?”

  Nguyen was pleased with the question. He licked his chiselled lips gently. He had the face of an Egyptian god beaten out of pure gold. “The value of the information and the fate o
f the prisoners cannot be correlated if that is what you are trying to do. It has always been that a man can have his life taken for a few coins in his pocket, or for a reckless word.” He raised the palms of his hands and nodded at this certainty.

  *

  It was nearly 1300 hours and my men were ready to move. They stood silently for once, uncomfortable in their harness, spavined horses, grunts, heads down, edgy, waiting. Then they formed a long single file at the edge of jungle, with Blake’s patrol in the lead.

  I slipped out of line and went back to the prisoner’s hut. The charnel-house smell enclosed me like poisonous gas. Dust settled in the motes of light. The space was empty. I went to the mouth of the big tunnel and was hit by the same stench of corrupting flesh as I stepped into the neatly timbered entrance.

  I moved through the passage, flicking on my cigarette lighter. In the half-darkness I was denied the full detail of the scene. The soft corpses of dead prisoners had been dumped in a pile of blood saturated flesh and torn clothing. Half a dozen live prisoners crouched in the dark, roped together, the light flashing on their teeth and eyeballs. I heard a footfall behind me.

  “I’m going to get Sergeant Mills to roll a few grenades in here and bring the roof down,” Blake said.

  “Bloody hell!”

  “It’s war, Bob. Don’t you realise?”

  I lowered the lighter over the heads of the live prisoners. One looked like a child, hollow-cheeked, resigned.

  “It’s war, you pussy,” Blake repeated.

  *

  In fifteen minutes the two patrols left the huts, moving in a single file along the edge of the jungle. I heard the muffled crump of the grenades. My tongue was like a tainted bladder swelling in my mouth and nausea uncoiled in my guts.

  9

  At three in the afternoon I estimated that we were not more than perhaps three hours from our own lines at this rate of progress. The thought glowed brilliantly and then died like a worn-out light bulb. What I had seen at the huts had receded to a flicker. The forefront was aching anticipation of death. We were spread out along a track in a shallow valley. We had been moving quickly through the thinnest growth and along watercourses. Then a crack of sniper fire brought us to the ground. We slithered deeper into the undergrowth like snakes.

  Blake crawled back along the column reassuring the men. When he got to me, he said: “Charlie doesn’t shoot for fun. What does he want us to think?”

  The vision of the camp was receding; a few hours away by direct march; but overnight if we had to detour.

  “You could call in a chopper,” I said.

  Blake screwed up his lips in rejection. “It’s a cop out. And a big risk for the bird.”

  “We’ve got two patrols here.”

  “That’s our strength. Different if we had casualties. What would we say? We wet our pants so we called up?”

  Blake and I and the two sergeants leaned our grimy faces together over the map, while our men stared nervously at the menacing thicket of foliage. Blake radiated calm and settled our route.

  We inched our way, exhausted, up a low rise through sodden leaves and vines. At the top nothing was clear from the viewpoint. Blake suggested a detour to the south, coolly assured us of the way, and silently directed our movements in the next two hours over the path he determined. For the men the precise way was irrelevant. For them it was mud pools, streams, patches of swamp, banks of slippery creeper and sharp spears of grass which cut like a razor, and spiked plants that buried their barbs in the trousers and pricked through into the flesh leaving inflamed lumps. Every track and bank was fraught with the possibility of landmines and booby traps, and every clearing possibly covered by a hostile machine-gun nest.

  We stopped to rest. I conferred with Blake about the route, but it was only formal. Blake said briefly what we were going to do and I had to repeat it to my men. Before we parted I had to speak to him.

  “The prisoners you had back there… ”

  “Yes, Bob?” Blake said gently.

  “Christ, Jim, they were slaughtered.”

  “I did my duty.”

  Blake used the phrase my duty exclusively. He was a professional while I was a volunteer, a graduate of a brief officer training course at a New Mexico barracks. He was an expert in hand-to-hand fighting and infantry tactics, and additionally to stiffen him he carried in his head a knowledge of military history and the philosophy of war. You couldn’t devote your life to soldiering unless you believed it was a useful occupation, even a noble one. Duty had to be done.

  I wanted to see it as Blake saw it. I was a would-be school teacher, there to help out.

  “We couldn’t leave the prisoners or they would talk and take arms against us later. That’s the reality of it,” he said.

  “What could the prisoners talk about that would harm us?”

  “Every piece of information about us in enemy hands is potentially of help to them.”

  “Weighed against a human life?”

  Blake jutted his chin and moved away. He had undoubtedly allowed me more leeway than he would have given any other junior officer.

  We started tramping again and after half an hour we halted near a defined trail. All the men were now convinced that the enemy were close. Since the sniper’s shot had been fired we had actually heard nothing suspicious. We had paused a hundred times, frozen by the rustle of a snake or a rat. The rasping of jets and the cough of heavy guns was ominous background music. My flesh crept and my hands shook. We couldn’t turn our heads fast enough to fix Charlie’s implacable brown eyes.

  At the next rest, we withdrew into the bush, drinking from our canteens and chewing chocolate bars. I squatted near my men.

  “Do you agree with what happened, sir?” Trask asked. “At Kam Sung.”

  “Killing those VC?” Moore said. “The motherfuckers got what they deserve.”

  “They weren’t Viet Cong. They were villagers,” Trask said.

  “They screwed the ass off the woman, too,” Schuyler said.

  “Yeah. A whole lot of them got into that,” somebody said.

  “We weren’t invited to party,” another added.

  “What do you think, Lootenant?” Trask asked.

  “Get ready to move out,” I said.

  Maroni turned on Trask angrily. “What’s the matter with you, cuntface? Any one of those gooks would have opened your bones!”

  “Keep quiet,” I said as Blake sidled through the branches like a cat and crouched beside me.

  “An hour down the trail,” he said with a tight little smile.

  “Can we go?” Lucas asked.

  “Cleared last week. The nearest thing we have to a main highway,” Blake said.

  The lure of home was on us strongly now, the temptation to move quickly. Blake rooted out a weed at his feet and drew a plan with his finger in the earth. He pointed to the map and then his plan on the ground.

  “We should come out between these two OPs. We’re identified. And we’re as good as ordering a drink at the bar.”

  Blake insisted that he speak to all the men. They moved sluggishly into a huddle, pale faces, damp clothes steaming.

  “We’ll be moving in single file at fifteen feet. Remember your IAs. Watch your nominated flank. Let your buddy behind protect your ass.” Blake engaged each man with his eyes and his exhilarating but cold smile. “And remember, men, kill the enemy without mercy. Kill, kill, kill, and God Bless America!”

  The words, hissed out very quietly, sent a stiffening charge through all of them.

  *

  Soon a chain of men was spread far along the track, moving more quickly than we had all day, tiptoeing, silent as mountain cats. After half a mile we came to a stream and at Blake’s signal, slipped into the water waist deep. The stream was festooned with hanging plants and the water clotted with weed. I found a footing on the uneven stone bed and stumbled upstream a quarter of a mile to a point where the channel skirted a clearing.

  When I was opposite t
he clearing sunlight was beginning to strike the water. Hope was expanding with the brightness. Then without warning, gunfire raked along the right flank of the column. It seemed to come from the clearing. Blake’s sergeant, Mills, in front of me, groaned and slid under the water.

  By the time the next burst of fire started most of the men had found cover under the bank. At first I held Mills’ head out of the water. Blood and pieces of bone and slime ran through my fingers. The body leaned on me with such a spiritless deadweight that after a few moments I knew it was lifeless and let it go.

  We were pinned down in the water, our ambushers behind a camouflaged earthen rise at the edge of the jungle fifty yards away. Between us was a clearing of coarse grass and fern. I fingered my wet 45 and began to estimate the chance of retreat along the stream bed.

  From the machine-gun post came a loudspeaker voice: “Yanks! Surrender or die! Move and we kill you all! Throw your arms on the bank of the river.”

  The VC voice was American accented, the kind you get by being schooled in the US rather than learned on the street. I could see no enemy on either side.

  Blake had made a mistake trying to pass the clearing using the stream, instead of detouring around it in the jungle. Our anxiety to get home had betrayed us.

  The loudspeaker voice rang out again: “I prove that we can kill you like dogs where you stand.”

  Another hail of gunfire cut a thin rope of froth down the centre line of the stream a couple of yards from the men who crouched under the bank. I thought we were safe for the moment in the lee of the bank.

  “Throw your guns on the bank and get out of the water. Keep your arms raised.”

  Silence. The sound of trickling water. The hush of a draught in the trees. Blake inched downstream to me. We spoke with the water at lip level. Blake’s eyes were radiant.

  “No surrender. We ease downstream. Get into the jungle, encircle them and go for the mothers!”

  The order was passed from man to man and a paralysis of fear prevented any questioning. We retreated slowly. After twenty minutes we had jungle on both flanks. The men cautiously eased themselves out of the water through the thick roots at the water’s edge. We were under a canopy of trees with a rich undergrowth of swamp roots and creepers. I tried to find a way to mount the greasy bank. Sergeant Mills’ body had accompanied my retreat. I grasped the shoulder of the corpse and saw a red-holed cheek and an open eye like a child’s marble appear from the amber water. Without emotion I put my boot on the dead shoulder and forced myself upwards through the spear grass and mud to a ledge.