The 13th Valley

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 4

The battered jeep from Alpha, 7th of the 402d, lurched over the ruts at the Phu Bai gate, jolted past the Vietnamese concession stands and the Korean souvenir shops and shuddered up the soft shoulder onto Highway One. Chelini grabbed the bottom of his seat with his right hand, hooked his feet beneath the seat before him and, with his left arm, managed to keep the baggage from careening out of the vehicle. He glared at the oblivious driver.

The driver was a blond boy, eighteen or nineteen, whose face could have been used on recruitment posters. He appeared cheerful and very absorbed in his driving. He may have been myopic. He did not speak.

In the front passenger seat was a captain who said he was from First Brigade S-5, Civil Affairs. He was returning from his third R&R, this one to Bangkok. “Hope I didn’t keep you boys waiting,” the captain said. “One of the clerks there said there’d be a vehicle from the four-oh-second and that you’d have room for me. I appreciate that. I don’t like to wait. They’re sending over a vehicle from brigade but it won’t be here for another twenty minutes. Hope I didn’t keep you too long.”

In the rear seat beside Chelini was the man in civilian clothing who had come into the personnel office while Chelini argued with the clerk about his assignment. Below his red hair and beneath his sunburned skin the man snarled. He had not looked at Chelini when he’d thrown his suitcase on top of Chelini’s duffel bag. He hadn’t spoken while they waited for the captain. Chelini was cramped in the small back seat with luggage piled about him. The red-haired man lay sprawled across most of the seat, his left foot out the side of the vehicle and his right reaching to the shift lever between the front seats. The sun glimmered off his scowl. His eyes appeared closed.

The vehicle’s suspension clattered and the drive train whined as they drove north past the first cluster of bustling street-side shops and shanties.

The roadway was crowded with men in military uniforms or western dress or loose black trousers with loose fitting long shirts and with women in the traditional sheath dresses and silk trousers, all riding on Hondas or Vespas or Lambrettas. Old black Citroen sedans, long, low-slung, with high fenders and wide running boards, seemed filled with dozens of Vietnamese. There were colorful three-wheeled lorries and at one point a small, very ornate panel truck passed, going the opposite way. The truck was red. Its painted headlights were huge pupils in white and green eyes, the fenders yellow and black dragon legs. A dragon body rippled yellow and blue and green down the side. The roof of the truck was a pagoda roof with swirling corners and peaks surrounded by blue sky with white fluff clouds.

“Wow!” Chelini said. “You see that?”

“Hearse,” the red-haired man snapped.

“Where you boys from?” the captain turned and asked.

“Connecticut, Sir,” Chelini answered.

“And you?”

“Oh-deuce,” came the curt reply. The captain returned forward and looked at the driver who seemed oblivious to the question and said nothing.

Amongst the civilian traffic US and ARVN military machines rumbled, carrying supplies and personnel. The trucks were heavy, squarish, made of thick steel plates. Here and there were the amphibious podshaped vehicles with huge black rubber balloon tires of the military police.

The driver nodded and flashed a peace sign to every American driver who passed in the opposite direction. “Right on, Bro,” one yelled. “¿Que pasa?” shouted another. “There it is, Babe,” screamed a third. The captain shuffled about in the front seat and stared at the passing villages.

“See that village, boys?” the captain said. “That was one of my first. We resettled the people there. They’d been driven out during the ’68 TET Offensive. VC burned the place to the ground but I had them back in and resettled by the end of September last year. Now it’s one of the boomingest places south of Hue. I got the three-two-six engineers to come in with their bulldozers and build up foundation pads for the houses and then I had them help the people put in a culvert system. You know, that village flooded sixteen of the last twenty years. Amazes me these people put up with it. You’d think they’d have figured out ways to stop the flooding a long time ago but they seem to think it’s inevitable or something. Damn people won’t get up to help themselves half the time.

“Anyway,” the captain continued without looking to see if anyone in the jeep was listening, “I had nine thousand refugees from north of Hue in camps along this section last year. Nine thousand right in here. I can hardly remember how they all fit. There’s only four hundred left. All the others have settled back to their original villages. Except the Montagnards. They’re mostly still here but we’ve got a new village site picked out for them that their chief just okayed. Out on 546. By Lang Minh Mang. “You boys know where that is?” The driver remained oblivious. The red-haired man said nothing. Chelini waited. He was about to say, “No Sir, where is it?” but without the others replying he hesitated, then decided not to reply. The captain fell silent. The driver continued to nod to the passing military vehicles.

Paralleling the roadway were two sets of rails. As the jeep approached the turnoff for Camp Eagle, a combination freight-passenger train, the daily from Quang Tri and Hue over the Hai Van Pass to Da Nang, chugged slowly south. The engine appeared to have been made around the turn of the century. Its big black cylindrical boiler lay atop a flat platform sided by large spoked wheels. A small boxy cabin was welded to the back. The engine pushed seven empty, ancient and dilapidated cars: two flatbeds, two wooden boxcars and three gondolas. Behind the engine was a caboose and following that, twenty-eight vintage wooden passenger cars and boxcars packed with people and goods. Atop each car behind the engine sat a Vietnamese soldier armed with an M-14 rifle.

“That looks kind a stupid,” Chelini said.

“Better ta blow away the empties up front, Cherry,” the red-haired man growled.

Chelini looked at him. His eyes were closed, his jaw slack and his mouth open. He had to be asleep. How could he know there was a train there?

The jeep entered the dirt road after the train cleared the intersection. At the corner two American MPs were playing with half a dozen children in front of a ramshackle, weather-beaten bunker. Chelini waved to the children and two waved back. He smiled. He looked at the bunker. It was high above the ground, circular, made of layers of sandbags stacked atop rusting, dirt-filled fifty-five-gallon drums. The sandbags had rotted and frayed. Dirt spilled badly from one side causing the entire tower to list. It stood alone and Chelini could not determine its original function. Behind the bunker he could see a junkyard or salvage yard for the squashed carcasses of corroding military vehicles.

Further down the road were garbage dumps. Scavenging amongst the clutter, old Vietnamese women, darker-skinned than those along the highway, Montagnards, collected bottles and cans and pieces of wood. At the finding of a belt by one digger all the ladies gathered around her and shrieked and cackled. It gave Chelini a creepy feeling yet he enjoyed watching the scavengers. Beyond the dumps the jeep passed a vacant firing range where children were searching the clay for expended cartridges.

As they traveled the road became progressively drier and they rode into thicker and thicker lingering clouds of dust from passing vehicles.

“Why do you do that?” the captain demanded of the driver.

“Do what, Sir?” the driver asked.

“Nod like that. To everybody. Do you know every one of those drivers?”

“No Sir.”

“Do you think this is some country road? Are you some kind of hick or something?”

“No,” the driver answered.

“Then why do you do that?” the officer demanded again.

“I’m an enlisted man, Sir,” the driver said, “and so are they.”

Chelini chuckled inwardly. He wanted to flash the finger at the captain’s back but he didn’t dare. The red-haired man opened his eyes for a second and gave the finger to the officer. Then he nodded to Chelini and closed his eyes again.

The terrain changed subtly from the greener piedmont at Phu Bai and along Highway One to the dry red-brown of the foothills. Strings of barbed wire, stretched and looped concertina and pegged tanglefoot, extended from bunkers to a tiny guard-house with a small sign announcing, “CAMP EAGLE—GIA LAI GATE.” A lethargic MP glanced up from a paperback and nodded them through. With his left hand out the side of the jeep, below the captain’s view, Chelini saw the driver flash an inverted peace sign.

The jeep jostled down the rutted dirt road away from the perimeter line and through an area of open nothingness. Rooster tails of dust rose from the wheels. Old Marine Corps Quonset huts appeared to the right in a shallow draw. In front of one half-cylindrical building was a red and black sign shaped like a bulldozer, “Home of the 326th Engineer Battalion (Airmobile).” A little further on to the left a line of trucks were awaiting gasoline at the 426th S & S fuel point. Beside this was headquarters for Company A, 5th Transportation Battalion (Airmobile). Chelini glanced back. Behind him dust formed an opaque wall. As each new unit appeared he squirmed in the seat and squinted through the dust searching for the headquarters that would house his assignment. Next unit down the road was the 801st Maintenance Battalion looking like a giant bunker complex. All these support units were airmobile and Chelini began to understand what the SERTS instructors had meant when they said everything in the division could be picked up by helicopter and moved.

Where the road turned from west to north there stood the hangars of Eagle Dust-Off, the division’s medical evacuation helicopter unit. The hangars were open. In one Chelini could see mechanics working on the jet engine of a ship. In another six men were playing basketball.

They came to the infantry areas: 1st of the 501st, 2d of the 327th and at the westernmost point of Camp Eagle, down the hill from brigade headquarters where they delivered the captain, where the jeep slowed and crept and turned, Chelini suppressed his excitement at seeing the 7th of the 402d.

During the ride back to Phu Bai and the jeep trip through Camp Eagle an anxiety plagued Egan and would not allow his muscles to either relax or tighten. In the jeep he sprawled across much of the rear seat. He felt like a plastic garbage bag filled with oil or pudding. He kept his eyes closed against the harsh sun. The jeep jolted, his head snapped on a limp neck. Don’t mean nothin, Egan moaned to himself. It don’t mean a fuckin thing. Through his shut eyes he could feel something glinting silver in the sun before him. He cracked the lids, dust and glare stung and he closed his eyes more tightly. Something glimmered. An amber glow through a draft at Louis’ Tavern in Paddington just south of Sydney or the instruments and light show at Whiskey-A-Go-Go. He opened his eyes again. The cherry beside him was awed by the antique which served as a cargo and commute train. Egan shut his eyes and said something but he did not hear his own voice. The jeep turned and his head flopped on his neck. The glitter turned. It was coming through an ice cube in a cool drink of citrus with water. The glass was moist, wet on the outside, dripping over the small fingers holding it. Wet fingers, fine and fragile. Over the glass oval lip, beyond the glint of the cube, between outstretched delicate arms the face of a dark-eyed girl glistened, looked at his face then cast down.

He opened his eyes. They were passing through the Gia Lai Gate. Back, he thought. Mick, you’re back in the motherfuckin Nam.

The dust clogged his nostrils and he began breathing through his mouth. The dust dried his throat. The captain was fussing. Egan didn’t want to hear it. He squeezed his eyes harder and shut his mouth and sucked air slowly through a slit between his chapping lips. Through his eyelids the warm sun was Mexican fire opal refracting on a ring on her finger on a warm spring day in a small town in western New York.

It was that light, that certain light, that glare that hit him across squinting eyes. That glistening would trigger in his mind the thoughts and memories and questions which would not stop. There it was in his mind, on his mind, the affair, the beautiful Stephanie. Their love had blossomed, withered, reblossomed, matured and withered again, and it was still with him, on his mind, never out of mind. A haunting relationship which periodically reran itself in his brain and tortured him. The story would be in his mind for ten days or two weeks and it would produce in him a sadness, a loneliness of a depth only an infantryman in a war zone could feel so deeply, could hurt over so much and then at times could so completely forget for weeks and weeks. Then it would spawn again and begin its run, embellished as memories often are until one cannot separate the real from the imagined.

The glint on Egan’s eyelids triggered the memories. She was as delicate as Mama-san’s daughter. She had pale skin and large lovely eyes that sparkled. Egan fidgeted. That was the feeling. The jeep, with the driver and the captain from S-5 and the cherry, rumbled down the dirt gravel road shaking the earliest moments of his relationship with Stephanie and jumbling those with more recent thoughts of Mama-san’s daughter and of his R&R ladies.

The jeep whipped. Egan opened his eyes. He sat up, licked his lips. He glared at the approaching units and at the road choked by the dust of every vehicle which had passed for an hour. Egan looked at Chelini and at the back of the captain’s head. He turned and spat dry mud from his mouth. Crazy cherry, he thought. At least he’s got the brains to keep his mouth shut most of the time. I’ll give him that.

Now Egan could not close his eyes. The driver brought the jeep up to the First Brigade Officer’s quarters where the vibration of a generator could be felt beneath the rock music on the stereo set it powered. “Motherfucker,” the driver said as he turned away from brigade. He had a low mild voice. “Motherfucker didn’t even say thank you.”

The jeep slowed and entered the battalion area. An old white soldier was chewing out a lethargic black soldier by the basketball courts. Charlie Company was in informal formation with its gear spread out. Platoon leaders and platoon sergeants and company commanders were meandering and checking and asking questions. A supply truck was unloading cases of C-rations by Recon’s hootch and the clerks from S-l were preparing the stage at the theater for a floor show. It was already difficult to remember what the World had been like. Egan could not even be sure if the eyes of the gypsy in Sydney had been blue or green or brown.

“f**k,” he growled. “Just f**k. Twenty-six en a wake-up.” Oh man, he said to himself. Twenty-six en a wake-up. If we can just keep from hittin the s**t. Twenty-six en that Seven-Oh-Quick Freedom Bird’s goina drop me off in Stephanie’s AO. Echo. Tango. Sierra.

When the jeep stopped before Company A’s headquarters the dust which had tailed it along the road and into the battalion area caught it, swirled and engulfed the vehicle, passengers and all those who were within a five-meter radius.

Brooks stood up coughing. First Sergeant Eduardo Laguana came out of the hootch, ineffectively swatting the dust away from his face. “Turn that thing off,” Laguana shouted. “You try to drown the company commander?”

“Hey, L-T,” Egan called as he hopped from the jeep. “What’s happenin? ¿Que pasa, Top?”

“Say hey, Babe,” the lieutenant greeted Egan. “You know, Danny, I knew you were coming in right now.”

“Yeah, L-T. That’s my aura. You tuned into it. I’ve got one hell of a strong aura.”

“No. That wasn’t it. I could hear Top up there in the office. He just got a call from brigade. Somebody complaining about my troop’s military courtesy. I knew it had to be you.”

“That fucker complained? f**k im. Hey, what’s happening anyway? This place looks like a giant cluster fuck.”

“How was your R&R?”

“Short, L-T. Too f*****g short.”

“You,” Brooks pointed to the back of the vehicle, “you must be Choolee-nee.”

“Yes Sir,” Chelini said and he awkwardly saluted the lieutenant from his cramped seat beneath the baggage.

“Yeah? Hum.” The lieutenant sized up the neophyte with sweeping glances. “I’m Rufus Brooks. This is First Sergeant Laguana and you’ve already met Platoon Sergeant Egan. Top,” Brooks thumbed at Laguana, “will get you squared away with a bunk for tonight and a ruck for tomorrow and all the paperwork Personnel requires. S-l says you’re a wireman.”

“Yes Sir,” Chelini said. “I work on telephone systems.”

“Hum,” Brooks stroked his chin. “A telephone man. Yeah. Good. You’re going to be Daniel’s RTO.”

“What?” Egan said, startled. “L-T? This cherry goina be my RTO?”

“Yeah, Daniel. Tompkins extended for a clerk job with supply. Now,” he added laughing, “you got zero five to get out of those civvie threads and make a strack troop of yourself. You and I are going to catch a bird to Evans. They’re briefing us about tomorrow’s CA. I want you to come up with me.”

“You come here, Scholdier,” Sgt. Laguana said to Chelini; “we get you squared way. Bring jor equipment and we lock it away.”

“Pop, De Barti, Thomaston and Whiteboy are up there already,” Brooks told Egan. “And Caldwell can’t make it. Hey, tell me, really, how was your R&R?”

Egan looked at the lieutenant and chuckled. “God fuckin damn, L-T. Shee-it. That cherry’s goina be my R-fuckin-TO! I thought they’d drop him off with the Delta Darlins. I just get back en you loadin my ass with briefins en CAs en cherries. Now you wanta hear a c**k story. And, Man,” Egan paused, “do I got some good s**t to lay on you. Let me tell you bout the tattooed lady.”

“Come on, Danny,” Brooks said stepping forward and putting his arm around Egan’s shoulders. “Tell me about it.”