Читать книгу Arizona Moon - J.M. Graham - Страница 11

4

First Platoon moved across the jungle floor, following the serpentine path cut by the point fire team. Shifts in terrain forced them to cross the stream many times. The rain seemed to grow heavier by the second, but the platoon pushed on to the northwest, working their way deeper into the Ong Thu range. Earlier, just before the rain, when their circuitous path took them to the edge of the trees, they could see smoke from village cooking fires in An Bang 3. Now they were back under the triple canopy again, fighting the rain and mud and heat. The Marines took comfort in the rain’s ability to drive flying insects to cover, but they knew that when the rain stopped, the mosquitoes would be back with a vengeance, looking for a warm meal.

The rain fell straight and hard, drenching everything from the crown of the canopy to the root systems deep below the jungle floor. It gushed down the foothills, collecting in ever-larger channels, to the stream that would carry it to the Song Thu Bon. And it soaked the Marines of 1st Platoon. Water poured from the rims of their helmets, ran down their arms, and dripped from their hands and weapons. Every plant they pushed aside dumped more water on their clothing. It soaked their jungle pants and followed the contours of their legs into their muddy boots. Everything they wore became heavier and more uncomfortable. Wet clothing clung to bodies, making movement a strain against the unforgiving fabric. The wet straps and heavy web gear rubbed wet skin raw. Flesh absorbed the water, wrinkling fingers and toes, making every minor abrasion a reason for the epidermis to peel away. Every step pushed the platoon further into the painful adventures of immersion foot. Those with experience hoped the rain would end soon so they would have time to dry out a little before nightfall, because nothing was more miserable than spending the long night soaked to the skin, wide awake with teeth chattering from the cold.

The FNGs, Haber and DeLong, were finding the going especially difficult. Each step drained their energy and every muscle protested even the slightest rise in the terrain. Although they weren’t yet aware of it, the rain was a godsend because it temporarily masked the heat. All too soon the rain would end, the heat would rise, and the jungle would become a steam bath, jacking their body temperatures up until they would feel like their helmets were the only things stopping their heads from exploding.

The lead fire team rotated the point frequently as the calluses on their hands turned spongy and peeled away against the dripping handles of their machetes, leaving pink patches of raw nerve endings. Haber followed DeLong in the column, and DeLong struggled to keep sight of the Chief’s back as he pushed through the brush. Visibility was poor, and the crashing rain smothered the sounds of the Marines’ movement, giving rise to spurts of panic when the path veered or the Chief increased his speed and DeLong thought he had lost the column. Within a few steps he would find a sign or catch sight of the Chief disappearing through the foliage ahead and a wave of relief would sweep over him. He had wanted to call out when the panic tightened his chest, but the others in 3rd Squad moved through the bush without speaking, and he didn’t want to be the one to break the silence. It was one thing to be a rookie; it was another to embarrass yourself making a rookie mistake. He wondered how the terror of thinking he was lost would compare to the humiliation of having the platoon blame him for actually losing the way. He made a silent prayer as he went, not to keep himself safe, but that he wouldn’t make a mistake that would shame him in the eyes of the other Marines.

Lieutenant Diehl radioed forward for the platoon sergeant and Blackwell stepped aside, letting the men file past him until the lieutenant reached his position. They leaned into each other as they walked so they could hear above the rain. “Meal break in fifteen, Sergeant,” the lieutenant said, tapping the crystal on his watch. “Let’s hope this rain stops by then.”

Sergeant Blackwell nodded. “We’re moving into some steep ground.”

“It’ll get a lot steeper,” the lieutenant said, resting a reassuring hand on the sergeant’s shoulder.

“I was hoping this was gonna be a cakewalk.”

The lieutenant gave the sergeant his best all-American grin. “So far, it has been.”

Five minutes after 3rd Platoon’s corpsman woke Strader from a sound sleep, he had his boots laced over his crusty socks and had pulled a wrinkled olive drab T-shirt from his pack, grabbed his soft cover, and was out the door into the pouring rain with his M14 slung over his shoulder. Leaping puddles, he moved away from the runway and toward the mess hall. The rain pounded the corrugated roofs, as though the drops were pebbles, and flew off the eaves in streaming arcs that made each building look like a fountain. The bunker sandbags had a polished sheen. A few other stragglers in ponchos were headed for a meal, and Strader wished he had taken the time to dig his rain gear out of the storage tent. But he was already drenched, and he was sure that soaking his rancid clothing in rainwater could only be a good thing.

By the time he reached the mess hall the line had moved inside, and he grabbed a partitioned metal tray with a wire hook on one corner and ducked through the door. Inside, wet ponchos hung through rifle straps or rolled into tight bundles dripped a wet pattern on the floor that followed the steam tables down the right side of the building. Big stainless steel coffee urns stood along the back wall. Strader followed the queue, collecting a strip steak, corn, mashed potatoes with a ladle of gravy, and a section of fruit cocktail. At the end, he dipped his canteen cup into a bin of ice and then filled it with water.

The personnel gathered for mess sat in groups segregated by assignment, MOS, or rank. The tanks and amtracs sat together. The 155 battery crews kept to themselves, their ears attuned to voices calling for a fire mission. The corpsmen from the battalion aid station made a small group at one table, sometimes joined by other docs assigned to the companies. Marines from line duty came and went in rotation, and the office personnel sat at the end of the sergeants’ table by the urns where staff sergeants and gunnery sergeants voiced their gripes to first sergeants over coffee and cigarettes. The lower ranks secretly called it the lifers’ table because they knew that these were the Marines who ran everything. The officers might give the orders, but the sergeants made the orders happen. They knew how things worked and how to get things done. When something was wrong with the green machine, the sergeants were the wrenches the officers used to fix it. The sergeants themselves identified more with the hammer than the wrench. You could tighten up a problem, or you could hit the problem so damned hard that it would fix itself.

First Sergeant Gantz looked up when Strader passed. He pinched his nose with one hand and covered his coffee cup with the other. “Damn, Marine,” he said, “do you have to stink like that?”

Strader stopped and let the miasma that surrounded him spread. “I blame it all on Charley,” he said.

A gunnery sergeant on the other side of the table wrinkled his nose and waved Strader on. “Victor Charley doesn’t have to smell you,” he said.

Strader lingered longer than any of them appreciated. “I guess I could use a hot shower.”

The first sergeant jerked his head toward the other end of the mess hall as though Strader’s odor was giving him spasms. “Keep moving, and make sure that shower happens real soon.”

Strader finally started to move again. At the end of the sergeants’ table, Corporal Pusic looked up from his tray with a disdainful glance at Strader’s condition, as though he hadn’t seen it earlier. There was plenty of empty space on either side of him, but Strader just nodded and moved on.

Halfway through the mess hall, a squad from Golf’s 3rd Platoon was in from the lines and wolfing down their meals like starving dogs. Strader slipped in next to a lance corporal with the ace of spades drawn on the back of his flak jacket and a mouth bulging with half-chewed strip steak.

“Reach,” he mumbled, spraying little bits of meat across the table.

Strader already had his face buried in his upturned canteen cup of ice water, and rivulets of cool heaven were running down his neck to join the rainwater in his T-shirt. He gulped and gulped until the cold made it too painful to swallow. His cup hit the table with a clunk that sent a splash of ice over the rim. “How’s it goin’ Ace?” he said. “The Crotch treatin’ you right?”

“The Corps couldn’t love me more if I was Chesty Puller.”

Strader sliced off a piece of meat and forked it into his mouth. Ace finished chewing his wad of steak and started to shovel in another load. “Doc tells me you’re too short to talk to.”

“No, but you’ll have to talk fast,” Strader said, gulping more water. “Things cool here?”

Ace had to chew awhile before the chunk of steak in his mouth was small enough to talk around. “Chuck’s been probing the line on and off, especially on the north end of the runway. Nothing serious, though. They just fire off a few rounds every once in a while to make sure we aren’t getting any sleep. They did light up the CAP unit in the vill a couple of nights ago. They had a mad minute going until 2nd Platoon went to the rescue. Other than that it’s been samey same.”

Ace watched with amusement as Strader drained the rest of his water then crunched a shard of ice between his teeth. “You must be really short to be worried about being on this side of the wire. How much time you got?”

Strader added a spoonful of corn to the fragments of ice he was chewing. “Three and a wake-up.”

Ace washed down his steak with a gulp of coffee and showed Strader his best grin, studded with bits of strip steak. “I guess you’ll be sleeping in your flak gear tonight.”

“I ain’t gonna get twitchy, Ace. I got nothing to worry about with you on line, right?”

The squad from 3rd Platoon had to get back to the perimeter so other Marines could get a shot at a hot meal. They gathered their gear and pulled away from the table. Ace had to finish his beans and coffee on the fly. “You know I’ll kick ass, Reach. But if they get past me, you’re on your own.” He caught up to the squad dunking their trays in the rinse barrels outside, and they disappeared in a splash of puddles.

Strader went back to his food, taking his time cutting his steak into bite-sized pieces and chewing slowly. He was in no hurry. He could take all the time he wanted. He could go through the line again and sit until the mess sergeant threw him out. And he would have done that, but he wanted to use the showers while it was still daylight. He just hated being caught in the dark in nothing but a towel and flip-flops.

First Sergeant Gantz leaned down the table toward Corporal Pusic and cocked his head in Strader’s direction. “You know that Marine, Pusic?” he said.

Corporal Pusic turned in his seat to look at Strader as though he had no idea who the sergeant was referring to. “Oh, yeah, that’s Corporal Strader.”

“Is he one of yours?”

Corporal Pusic hesitated before answering, his mind racing to search every possible scenario his answer could create that would cause Sergeant Gantz to bring a world of hurt into his life. He was stymied. “Yeah. He’s Golf, 1st Platoon.” He couldn’t imagine that anything Strader did would reflect badly on him. But he also knew the vagaries and unpredictability of sergeants. He waited for the other shoe to drop, but the sergeant just rapped on the table with his knuckles and went back to his coffee, leaving Pusic to feign an inordinate level of interest in his meal. He didn’t want to do anything to provoke the wrath of the sergeants. He had cultivated a very beneficial relationship with them. They were especially useful when the officers of Golf Company came to him with a problem or an assignment. And when problems were solved and assignments were successfully completed, the officers saw Pusic as an indispensable cog in the company wheel. Although the credo of the Corps was that every Marine was a rifleman first, Pusic wanted to be needed right where he was, and he didn’t want anything to tip the delicate balance away from that. If he had anything to do with it, no one would ever even consider that he might be useful elsewhere.

The drumming of the rain on the roof slowed to a few scattered taps, and the runoff trickled to a stop. Marines who had been in no hurry to finish while it poured took the opportunity to clear their tables and head back to their areas. Pusic watched them through the screens as they went, picking their way around the larger puddles, leisurely skirting the surrounding buildings. He could walk back to the company office now without getting soaked, so he rose to go. He turned to look for Strader, but the table was empty. Things were looking up.

As the storm rolled away across the An Hoa Valley, the NVA troops bundled their waterproof covers and lashed them to the bamboo poles and the barrel of the recoilless—anyplace where they could provide a cushion for weary shoulders. The jungle canopy continued to leak the dregs of the storm, but not enough to convince Nguyen to delay departure. The Americans were somewhere in the valley, and he was anxious to move out of their reach. His orders demanded that he stay away from them.

Nguyen spread a map across his knees as the others crouched around him. “We are here,” he said. His finger followed the contours of the mountains north and stopped west of Huu Chanh 1. “We will rest here tonight, and tomorrow we will push all the way to Minh Tan and boat across the Song Vu Gia.” His finger stopped on the village near the river. It looked like a great distance. “Tomorrow will be a difficult day. I suggest we cover as much ground as we can before nightfall to ease our pains tomorrow.”

Truong pointed to the large circle drawn on the map that encompassed the entire Ong Thu mountain range and covered most of the valley from the Que Son Mountains to well beyond the confluence of the Song Vu Gia and the Song Thu Bon. “Is that circle the place the Americans call the Arizona?” he asked.

“This circled area is the home of our R-20th Doc Lap Battalion,” Nguyen corrected him. “Thanks to them, we will have a safer passage here.” Nguyen folded the map and waved it in front of him like an emperor indicating the expanse of his domain. “This is Doc Lap’s hunting ground. Here intruders pay a bloody penalty for trespassing.”

Truong and Pham exchanged glances. “I hope they know we aren’t the intruders,” Pham said.

Nguyen rose and began strapping on his heavy gear. “This place has no secrets from the 20th,” he said. “Every footprint here is at their pleasure. The Americans would do well to remember that.”

As Nguyen adjusted his load, Pham and Truong helped the others lift the heavy machine gun and situate the poles on their shoulders. “And yet the Americans are here,” Truong whispered.

The weapon bearers shifted their loads until they settled into a reasonably comfortable position and the NVA column moved north.