1968. Part 2

For a moment Spider was actually paralyzed. He couldn't move; he couldn't even feel his arms and legs.

It was as if his body had realizedone step and you could die, and decided not to take that step. Then he went forward, catching up with the man on his left, but his guts churned, audibly.

This is just great, he thought, a great time to get the s.h.i.ts. He clenched it back and was rewarded with a sharp cramp. Sweat broke out cold on his face. What do you do? Raise your hand and get a hall pa.s.s from the teacher?

"Got to take a c.r.a.p," he whispered to the man behind him.

"No you don't. You gotta hold it."

Spider glanced at his watch and realized he hadn't checked the time when he'd rotated to point. Did they shift every hour, or just odd times now and then? It was ten-fifteen. Maybe at eleven they'd rotate, and he could duck behind a bush and let fly. He could hold on for forty-five minutes. He wouldn't look at his watch.

He really wanted a cigarette. n.o.body's said anything, but Killer hadn't smoked while he was on point.

As if to give permission, the man behind him lit up. Spider juggled rifle and axe and managed to shake out a Lucky and locate his Zippo, which worked on the thirdtry.

Meanwhile he had walked several yards without looking down. The thought galvanized him even as the nicotine relaxed him. He studied the ground and trees through a cloud of smoke as he inhaled two deep drags.

Just hang in there. You can make it through forty-five minutes, more like forty now, don't look at the watch.He swallowed hard and spent an uncomfortable minute wondering whether it would be worse to vomit or to lose control of one's bowels. Either end seemed possible. But you couldn't, youcouldn't. It would be better to step on a mine and be vaporized. Or step on a punji stake. n.o.body would blame you if you lost control.Poor old Spider. G.o.d I'd s.h.i.t too, they'd say.The cramp subsided and Spider was able to relax at least one part of his body. Then he clenched up again when the man behind him whispered, "Snake!"

A huge snake, as big around as a man's thigh, was coiled up in the crotch of a fat tree between him and the right flank. It seemed to be sleeping; he couldn't see its head. "Reticulate python," he said automatically, recalling the one in the Snake House at the Washington Zoo. (It was actually an Indian python, but he was close enough.) "Big motherf.u.c.ker," the other guy said in agreement. Spider thought of the sergeant who had given the orientation lecture, the first day in Vietnam. There are a hundred different kinds of snakes in Vietnam, he said, and ninety-nine of them are poisonous. The other one eats you whole.

But Spider knew that pythons didn't eat people. Maybe babies. He stared at it, fascinated and unafraid.

He loved exotic animals; dragged Beverly to the zoo more often than she wanted to go. He'd never seen anything in the woods bigger than a garter snake.

He had to move on, catch up with the flanks. Another twinge, don't look at the watch, maybe thirty minutes, thirty-five tops.

Suddenly there was a distant rattle of machine-gun fire. Spider dropped to one knee. He looked around and saw the flanks had disappeared, flopping out of sight into the brush. The man behind him had flattened out, too, lying on his side, listening. Spider imitated him.

There was another short burst of machine-gun fire and a pop that was probably a grenade. Spider thought it had to be at least a mile away, behind them, but he didn't really know. He could hear the captain talking on the radio to someone.

After a couple of minutes a message was pa.s.sed whispering up the line. "Cap says they had movement back at the fire base, one of the OPs. We're supposed to wait." OPs were outposts, teams of two or three men hiding in four or five places near the base, listening and watching for enemy movement.

Spider knew the OPs weren't supposed to shoot. Just report by radio and then tiptoe back to the base.

"s.h.i.t," the man behind him said. "If that's for real they prob'ly make us go back and play soldier."

There was no more machine-gun fire, but less than a minute later there were five faint pops from the opposite direction, and a salvo of artillery rounds went overhead with a sound like ripping cloth. Then five overlapping, echoing explosions from the fire base. Spider was about to ask why they didn't use their own artillery, but he figured it out: the OP was too close to the fire base. To reach it with their own guns, they'd have to shoot almost straight up, and that would be wildly inaccurate. (He'd paid close attention during the artillery demonstration in Basic. A lot of it reminded him of science fiction.) An older man Spider didn't recognize moved quickly up the right flank, speaking urgently to a few people. A few of them followed him back. There was a similar shifting around on the left.

"Bet they're settin' up ambushes," the man behind him said. "Figure the gooks'll run from the artillery, come down the trail here."

Batman and Moses hurried up the trail, slightly crouched. "We gotta find a place to blow an LZ," Batman said. "You Murphy?"The rifleman nodded. "You're all X-Ray?" That was the code name for the engineers.

"Right. You get to be our support."

"Jesus f.u.c.king Christ. Just me?"

"For now." Batman studied the terrain ahead. "Looks lighter over there." He pointed to a place a couple of hundred yards to the right and started off the trail.

Murphy c.o.c.ked his M16. "Better lock an' load." Batman and Moses did. They picked their way down a slight defile, comealong vines pulling at their pants legs, and then back up again. The land leveled off and there was a partial clearing.

In the middle of it was a rubber tree with a trunk about a foot and a half thick. Batman patted it. "Five pounds for this one. Maybe half a stick for that one and that one. That one, too. A third stick each." He pointed at other trees nearby, smaller.

"You're not gonna blow any LZ now," Murphy said.

"Huh uh. Not unless they make contact."

"They set up an ambush?"

"G.o.d, who knows. They just told me to find a place." Three more artillery rounds ripped overhead. "I don't think it's nothin'. You hear any return fire?"

"Nah. Prob'ly just some f.u.c.kin' d.i.n.ks walkin' through the woods."

"Well, let's hope so. Lay it out anyhow. Take Spider through the drill," he said to Moses. They were both the same rank, Spec-4, but Batman had been incountry twice as long, and automatically took charge.

"Wait, man," Spider said in a voice that was almost squeaky with strain. "I got to take a s.h.i.t in the worst way."

"Do it in your pants; that's the worst way." Batman handed him his shovel. "Go behind a bush and dig thyself a hole."

Spider shrugged out of his rucksack, rushed to the nearest bush and scooped up one shovelful of dirt. He dropped his pants and backed squatting over the hole and evacuated, liquid and embarra.s.singly loud, and managed to pee all over his trousers in the process. C-ration meals each had one small roll of toilet paper in a brown wrapper; he used all of one arid half of another. He pulled up his damp pants and slid the divot back over the hole.

He returned to the others and Batman handed him his M16. "Always take a weapon. Never can tell."

That would be a h.e.l.l of a way to die, caught with your pants down.

Moses laid out the proper amounts of C-4 by each tree. The five-pounder was two of the packages, which looked like vanilla salt.w.a.ter taffy. Then he tore open a package and broke the stick into thirds, saving the plastic wrapper. The broken C-4 had a sweet chemical smell. He set the chunks of explosive next to the three smaller trees and then paced around from one to the other, unrolling det cord from areel. Detonation cord was just plastic tubing filled with an explosive similar to C-4. Once properly connected, all four trees would blow up simultaneously.

Murphy watched them with growing nervousness. "This sucks, man. You want to hurry up with the f.u.c.kin' lesson?"

"He's right," Batman said. "We're pretty exposed."

Moses finished explaining about the blasting caps, where and how to put them, and all four retired out of the clearing, back into the relative safety of the bush. At Murphy's suggestion, they went far enough back so that he could see a couple of the right-flank riflemen. Batman stayed within sight of the clearing. Spider and Moses took up intermediate positions, hiding behind trees.

Spider tried to relax. The worst thing that could happen would be that the gooks come running down the trail and hit the ambush. That was hundreds of yards away. He looked around at the quietly rustling rain forest. No, the worst that could happen would be a thousand VC popping out from behind all those trees and killing everybody. Spider scrunched down a little more and waited, smoking, trying to look at everything at once.

Murphy was studying a book t.i.tledThongs, whose cover featured a naked woman tied spreadeagled to an old-fashioned bra.s.s bed. He moved his lips while he read. Spider took out his Heinlein book and tried to read it. He couldn't concentrate. He could feel a thousand eyes on him, aiming. He put it away.

"That your real name, Spider?" Murphy asked.

"No, Speidel. Not supposed to use our real names."

"Oh yeah. Buncha happy horses.h.i.t."

Names (2) Every person was given a code name for use in radio transmissions. The medic was always Doc. A person with a college degree was usually Professor. (Spider's platoon had had a Prof until a couple of weeks before Spider arrived. He'd gotten his educated kneecap ruined in a chainsaw accident.) Sometimes, as in Spider's case, they asked you what code name you wanted. Sometimes you were given one based on appearance or ethnicity: Ears, Moses, and Tonto. Sometimes circ.u.mstances prompted the platoon sergeant to change your name. Spaz had been named Frosty at first, since he came from Alaska.

Then one day he stepped out of a helicopter carrying a flat of two and a half dozen very precious fresh eggs, and dropped them.

In some outfits, like Spider's, you were encouraged to forget your comrades' actual names, and only use code names even in everyday conversation. Then you couldn't slip up and use a person's real name in radio communication, which was usually monitored by the enemy. Once the enemy knew where you were at a given time and day, they could send a bogus telegram from Washington, through the Polish emba.s.sy, supposedly from the Army, regretting to inform your parents or wife that you had been killed in action there and then. Thus undermining morale on the home front.

Spider went along with it, but he did notice that Sergeants Miller (code name Papa) and Wilkes (code name Sarge) used their actual names. He a.s.sumed it was just another one of those things the army did to take control of your life.A walk in the park (1) No more rounds came over and there was no more gunfire from the fire base. After about an hour, somebody whistled and waved them back. Spider and Moses retrieved the demolition stuff, repacking the three broken chunks of C-4 into their plastic wrapper and rolling the det cord back onto its spool.

Murphy was moving into point. He reminded Spider to "safe" his weapon before going back to the end of the line: take the round out of the chamber and replace it in the magazine. Spider pulled back the arming lever and the round didn't eject.

"Murphy. Look at this." Spider showed him the ejection port. The cartridge was stuck in the chamber at an odd angle.

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h." Murphy wiggled the cartridge out and c.o.c.ked the weapon, then slid the arming lever back again. Same thing. He handed it back. "This piece of s.h.i.t don't work. Better get it replaced when we get back. Tell the RTO to call the armorer."

Spider went back down the column and found the radioman squatting on his haunches, smoking intently.

He explained the problem and the man nodded wordlessly over and over, then spun the generator on the p.r.i.c.k-25 and told Ivy Four-niner Bravo that an X-Ray Echo Mike name Spider wanted to DX a Mike One Six and trade up. He listened for a moment and then nodded at Spider.

"What they say?"

"They said 'That's a Rodge, out.' "

"Do I get a new gun?"

He shrugged. "I guess if they got enough." Spider started to walk away. "Hold it; let me see that thing."

He c.o.c.ked it and pried open the ejection port with his fingernail. The round was at the same useless angle. "Be d.a.m.ned." He jiggled it out and reseated it, straight, then removed the magazine and c.o.c.ked it again. This time it worked. "That's what you gotta do. Seat the round manually. Give you at least one shot."

"But then won't the second round jam it up again?"

"Prob'ly. One round's better than none."

"Yeah. Thanks." Spider walked on back to the rear and took up his position. After a few minutes the column started moving.

He felt just as exposed here as he had walking point. He'd heard that in a box ambush, they hold their fire until the last man comes through. And he knew there were enemies behind him, unless the OP had been shooting, at ghosts.

Of course they were always behind you in this country. And in front of you and on both sides, and up in the trees and even underground. And he had a weapon that fired one round at a time and had to be reloaded manually.

The Black Death (2)The M16 that Spider carried in 1968 was the r.e.t.a.r.ded child of an elegant parent, the Armalite AR-15, designed by weapons genius Eugene Stoner. The AR-15 was an ideal weapon for jungle warfare-lightweight, reliable, deadly. Its tiny 5.56-millimeter bullet was more lethal than the 7.62-millimeter one it was designed to replace, because it tumbled end over end inside the victim's body, tearing a wide swath of destruction rather than punching a neat hole straight through. If it hit a bone, it could glance off at any angle; there were stories of bullets that would hit a man in the leg and rip all the way up through the body to exit through the top of his head.

But the U.S. Army did not accept the AR-15 without modifications. The bullet tended to wobble at minus 65 degrees Fahrenheit, which could be a real disadvantage if we declared war on Antarctica, so they increased the "degree of twist" in the rifling, which stabilized the round in frigid weather, but also reduced the amount of tumbling inside the victim, and thus the weapon's lethality.

Another problem was lubrication: The technical manuals that accompanied the M16 recommended the same lubrication procedures as for its predecessor, the M14, but the two weapons are as dissimilar as a sportscar and a pickup truck. The conventional lubricant, W-L-800, decomposed in Vietnam's humidity.

What really destroyed the M16's efficiency, though, was a change in its propellant powder, from IMR ("improved military rifle") to slower-burning conventional "ball" powder. This increased the cyclic rate of fire from 700 to 1,000 rounds per minute, which caused the weapon to jam. It left a residue that gummed up the barrel and the action. When Colt tested M16s in 1965, it found that none of its samples failed if they used IMR, but half of them did on ball powder.

At first the military denied that this was thereal problem. The real problem was that soldiers were being lazy, not cleaning their weapons properly. The U.S. Congress didn't think much of this att.i.tude when one of their number read them a letter a wounded marine wrote home to his mother: We've been on an operation since the 21st of last month. We left with close to 1,400 men in our battalion and came back with half. We left with 250 men in our company and came back with 107. We left with 73 men in our platoon and came back with 19.

You know what killed most of us? Our own rifle. the M16. Practically every one of our dead was found with his rifle torn down next to him where he had been trying to fix it.

After some years, too late to help Spider and his contemporaries, the M16 was retrofitted with a chrome-lined chamber and a buffer modification to slow down the cyclic rate of fire, which made it a little more reliable-though still not as good as the original, using IMR. Why did they continue to use ball powder? It was a complicated skein of interservice rivalry, bureaucratic inertia, and porkbarrel politics that has never been unraveled, and never will be. A pity, since it would be nice to be able to point a finger: This man's inefficiency, or ego, or avarice, killed more American GIs than any division of Vietnamese.

Foreign influences After an hour or so word came back to Spider to take ten, scarf some chow. He dropped the rucksack with relief and flopped to the ground. His neck and shoulders and back and thighs ached. He was in prime shape-he'd worked out every day from the time he got his draft notice until he left for Basic Training, and Basic had been a constant aerobic h.e.l.l of running and calisthenics-but this would take some getting used to. It wasn't just the weight of the burden, but also the stop-and-go shuffling. And his muscles couldn't relax, shift the burden around, any more than his brain could relax.He rubbed his neck and looked around uneasily. He couldn't see either of the flanks. The only person visible was Killer, about ten feet up the trail, looking through his rucksack.

He was hungry but didn't feel like challenging his nervous stomach with a can of cold greasy food. He rummaged through two boxes of Cs and took out their jungle chocolate and cookies. The jungle chocolate didn't melt in the heat, but it didn't taste like chocolate, either. It wasn't too bad with a cookie and warm c.o.ke. His mother used to give him warm c.o.ke to settle his stomach; the a.s.sociation was comforting.

Murphy came quietly down the trail to take up the rear position.

He sat down next to Spider and slipped out of his rucksack. "Havin' fun?"

"Tired."

"You get used to it." He frowned into the pack and pulled out a C-ration box. "Can't eat the eggs unless I'm f.u.c.kin' starvin'."

"You short?"

"Hundred and two days. Guess in three days I'll call myself short. You got a while?"

"I'm not even countin' yet. November twenty-ninth."

"Jesus." He opened a can of beans and franks and popped a beer. "This your first hump?"

"Yeah. I was a clerk for a couple weeks."

"Quartermaster?"

"Naw, Graves. Over in Kontum."

"s.h.i.t, I'd get out of that, too. Gotta be a f.u.c.kin' b.u.mmer." He spooned a piece of fat out of the beans and threw it away. "But you got a X-Ray MOS?"

A man's Military Occupational Specialty was determined by stateside training. "Oh yeah," Spider said.

"Did Basic and AIT at Fort Leonard Wood, that's all engineers. But I got incountry and they asked if anyone could type. I was the only one who raised my hand, wound up in Graves."

"Go to college?"

"One year. Learned to type in junior high."

"Flunk out? College, I mean."

"Yeah, yes and no. Got shafted. Filed an appeal but then I got my draft notice. I think the f.u.c.kin' college got in touch with the draft board." Spider did have a legitimate grievance. He flunked out of college because of an F in a five-hour chemistry course. He'd been getting Bs all along and studied hard for the final, and in fact breezed through it with no effort. He was the first person to hand in his blue book, which turned out to be a fatal error: the graduate a.s.sistant left it lying on the table when he collected all theothers, and, not knowing one student from the other, a.s.sumed Spider had not been there and recorded his grade as a zero. When Spider got his F, it was his word against the graduate a.s.sistant's. By the time his appeal was processed, the graduate a.s.sistant had gone home to Iran. Ten years later he would die, defending the Shah. Spider would have cheerfully killed him now. "You go to college?"

"s.h.i.t, no. Got a wife and kid, kept me outa the draft for a while. They're gettin' hard up. Be draftin'

college guys before long, don't evenhave to flunk out."

Spider was tempted to tell him the whole stoiy, the f.u.c.kin' towel-head grad a.s.sistant who lied, but he'd told it too often and sometimes people didn't believe him, especially if they hadn't gone to school.

"How're they gettin' along? She got a job?"

"No, she went back with her folks. She could get her old job back, waitin' tables, but you know. f.u.c.kin'

Jody." "Jody" was the archetypal civilian, probably a draft-dodger, who had an insatiable appet.i.te for soldiers' wives and girlfriends.

"Get to see her at R&R?"