I Pledge Allegiance (11 page)

“We are doing our jobs, sailor,” Cap barks. “Fire that weapon. Fire and fire until everything is gone!”

That kind of command does not need to be repeated around here.

The monitor erupts all at once as we announce our arrival at the party. Explosion after explosion bursts up from the bank. We create so much sound wall, it ceases to have any definition at all. Like if pitch-black were a sound, this would be it.

It’s obvious why Silk was questioning our direction. We’re powering straight across both lines of fire, as deep into harm’s way as it’s possible to get.

We’re headed straight for the flash that produced the SAM that brought down The Wolf.

We’re in it now.

I’m firing, firing, firing into that bank, sweating, maybe crying, fear and anger pushing up and out my eyeballs in equal measure. The gun is heating up, throwing billows of heat up over itself into my face. It bakes the sweat right off my face, but the sweat reappears instantly. It all happens again.

There’s foot soldier action apparent a quarter-mile inland. That would be our Ninth Infantry Division brotherhood.

That would be Ivan.

The air cover has largely been called out over the field troops since we have arrived and so has one of the water cannon boats. This bank is our job now.

I fire like a madman into that bank, into that invisible nest of enemy. Die, guys. Nothing personal, but die. You gotta die.

I keep looking up from my work, watching the air cover boys doing their thing. I figure wherever they are above, the Thirty-fourth Artillery is below. I have no strategic information on this. I just believe it.

Gradually, I notice the air cover is coming closer to the river. The Army is advancing our way.

I fire away like a born killer.

Silk pounds the land a hundred yards in.

Midship, the mortar boys sling shells that sound like they could bring down cities.

All the while, bullets ping off the boat’s metalwork, ringing like a ticker in the spokes of God’s own bicycle wheel.

We are so close, crazy close, to the bank, maybe seventy yards, that Charlie could reach us with a rock if it came to that. There’s fire coming every possible way, east and up and behind and south, and I’m very quickly losing my bearings, my sense of direction, my heart and my nerve and my bladder.

And that air cover, Ivan’s air cover, is probably as close to the bank as we are. We have a Charlie sandwich, but who can tell? Who can tell, because they’re still firing away, and firing away and firing bullets and I know already from the howls more than one of our crew is fighting with some new bits of metal inside him….

And then they come with the rocket-launched grenades. They explode — two, three, four — in the water right in front, beside, behind us. Next to us, the PBR rushing past to create mayhem absorbs some of its own as,
pu-boom,
first one, then a second rocket-launched grenade hits, and the boat goes dead before our eyes. It’s a bucket of smoke, engine off, floating like a dead duck right across a line of merciless fire. Charlie peppers the PBR with all he’s got.

The source of the grenades and the surface-to-air missiles finally becomes obvious. A cluster of moving
bushes, dense but nearly completely flat to the ground, is openly slinging grenades at every one of our boats.

“Nape! Nape, nape, nape!” Cap shouts, and everybody knows where he means. We have shot everything we have at that spot repeatedly and it just keeps fighting, zombielike.

Moses is practically jumping over the handle of his weapon as he and the second rear flamer pour it on into that greenery like nothing I have ever seen.

It looks as if a reptile — half gun, half Moses — is flashing a tongue of fire out of its mouth, across the water, into the trees. The first ten feet of napalm jumps and dances like a bonfire as it comes out of the gun. It’s a thing of rare, sickening beauty. Like a Bob Gibson curveball and fastball combined, it arcs, crests, slashes the air with condensed fire, then lands so accurately there on the bank of the Mekong.

Once they start, they finish. The two flamethrowers find their range, and they pour it on and pour it on, until trees and shrubs actually appear to melt before they burn. Then the human activity, you can see it clearly, like an illustration of your most horrific nightmare. Human shapes of fire, jumping, falling — standing back up and shooting! Falling again.

All the while they pour it on, and we pour it on.

Their nests open up. There’s such a fine arrangement
of tunnel bunkers worked tight into the mangrove and palm, woven right down into the roots, it almost makes you stop to marvel at the craft of it all, but there they are, doing their thing as hard as they can do it.

We were taught in boot camp that you dishonor yourselves
and
your enemy if you do not give it right back to him just as hard as you can. So I give it to these rotten incredible fighting madmen just as hard as I can.

I shoot my machine gun — my murderous, relentless .50 — until I’m well past blisters and well into bleeding. I shoot a man trying to escape his bunker. I shoot one who’s shooting back and one who’s just standing there. I shoot people who are already on fire, and I shoot people who are already dead. I cannot reload my gun fast enough to keep it going.

Passage of time now is incomprehensible to me. Everything lasts an eternity, instantly.

What does not last is this bank of life. It is flame, burning hot and fast and tall, probably twenty feet into the air. There is nothing to do but let it go.

The fight is still on all around, but this nest was the real crux of it. The air cover is just about to the bank now, the Army just about to overrun the enemy. There is nothing coming out of there anymore like antiaircraft, mortar, rocket-propelled. They’re down to bullets
now, and like the end of popping a batch of popcorn, you can hear the pop run all the way down.

Cap orders us to stop, and we all do.

Then Moses lets rip, one more violent flare of hell in the direction of a bank that was some people’s idea of paradise before we got here an hour ago.

I am looking down on Moses, my friend Moses, and thinking,
somebody’s dad.

I look at the charred bank, the bodies now burned beyond fire, the Vaseline Gasoline now their permanent mummy coating while they are posed into eternal agony figurines.

Somebody’s dad did that. Some brand-new tiny baby’s dad did that.

I look farther up the bank. The helicopters are already gone, the Army guys moving in.

I was just shooting there.

They start filtering down out of the remaining growth, the pathetic remaining growth we have left them, and I see the US Army uniforms. Ninth, Second, Thirty-fourth.

How do we know we don’t shoot each other?

Two infantry guys wave to us, thanks, we’ll clean up here. We wave back.

Could be Ivan. Could be. Can’t tell.

W
e’re sent back up to that same spot a couple days later. We go as an escort to a diver boat,
The Baby Giant.
It’s used to recover sunken boats. There are several here.

Funny, how different something can feel.

Funny, how often I say “funny, how” since I’ve been here, in the unfunniest place you could imagine.

Not that I’m insulting Vietnam’s sense of humor. On the contrary, I bet it’s particularly sharp.

The situation, however, the scenario, the status of life as they are currently desperately trying to live it here, is as unfunny as it could be.

Funny, how you can be in one place of absolute fire-and-brimstone horror and a few days later find the same place to be a frightening and unnatural beast of quiet.

It’s an unusually cool day as we curl around that same corner that brought us to the firefight of the gods
the other day. Clouds — thick, white, benevolent — help out by breaking up the sky, allowing a breeze, painting pictures for distraction. Will I say that one puffy cloud looks like Smokey the Bear?

Beck tells me in another letter that one of the great morbid jokes of the Operation Ranch Hand flyers is based on Smokey’s motto, “Only you can prevent forest fires.”

“Only you can prevent forests” is what they laugh about here.

They’re preventing them right now, as we approach the scene of the fighting. In the distance — but not much of a distance — C-123 Ranch Handers spray the jungle canopy up and down either side of the Mekong at such a leisurely pace, you could imagine yourself in some Indiana wheat field where the crop dusters protect the fields. If you can forget the Agent Orange part and focus on those fluffy clouds.

That could be Beck, right there, right now. It could very well be.

I could tell you one of those clouds looks like Richard Petty’s number 43 Dodge Charger and another looks like Muhammad Ali teaching Cleveland Williams a little respect.

I could tell you that long, sharp battleship gray cloud looks like a US Navy cruiser with a tiny little projectile flying off the back.

None of that would be true, but untruth should not be a barrier to saying what you want to, right? Say what you want, say what you need, say what makes you feel better, say whatever you say that gets you to the delicious part of the day where you can get your couple hours of sleep. Three if things are going particularly swell.

The clouds don’t look like any of those things. The clouds look like clouds, which is all I need from them. We don’t get enough of clouds around here. Not enough of the fluffy, harmless clouds, anyway.

I like clouds.

Ivan would beat me up if he heard that.

We stop behind the
Baby,
where the crew get to work pulling up the remains of that blasted PBR.

A whole chunk of the Ninth Division, Second Brigade, Thirty-fourth Artillery is trooping up and down this section of riverbank. Putting out smoldering fires of enemy activity, appropriately enough. The Armored Troop Carrier is parked right there, right near the charred and still-reeking results of our Zippo work, like a limo after a party.

But here’s the thing with Charlie: You can shoot him and stomp him and blow up his tunnel, shoot him and stab him and wipe out his whole bloodline. Then he seems to get right back up again.

You have to kill him again and again, and it seems to me like you have to kill the very same guy forever, because he’s not staying dead like he’s supposed to.

The Army’s right. Check under every ash, boys.

We get a wave from the bank. Then another one.

It could very well be Ivan. Right there. I could be looking at him.

While Beck flies over, right there.

It won’t often get as calm as it is right now. Weather-wise, action-wise, duty-wise. Escorting
The Baby Giant
is a sweet assignment right now. Guys are cleaning and tuning and oiling and fine-tuning their weapons at every station. Taking care of the gear that takes care of you, is what they call it. Moses, tinkering away happily, is so in love with his new sweetheart that it’s almost embarrassing to be around. And I do not, unfortunately, mean his infant child.

“You all seem to have it covered,” I say to nobody special.

I get my phone, retire to The Patio. I have to make a call.

I’m working at it, determined to bridge the small-yet-profound communications gap between the Navy and their junior partner, the Marines.

I hear a single shot ring up and down the river.

Snipers’ rifles are unlike anything used by anybody else in the military. Finely tuned, scoped, calibrated, they are nearly identical to civilian hunting rifles. They don’t have the boom factor of other weapons. It’s a modest but crisp slash in the fabric of the air.

And it can slip a round into a man’s earhole from six hundred yards.

“Moses!” somebody shouts. There’s a thump and a splash, just like a dead human hitting the sharp lip of a boat on its way to the water.

I hear running all over the boat, shouting. Eventually, off somewhere, there’s more gunfire.

I guess Charlie didn’t appreciate my friend’s zest for his duty.

The enemy does not stop, and he does not forget.

I stay on The Patio, keep my head down, concentrate harder on making my call successfully.

I have to make a call.

I have a call to make.

If friendship has an opposite, it’s war.

Chris Lynch is the author of numerous acclaimed books for middle-grade and teen readers, including the Cyberia series and the National Book Award finalist
Inexcusable.
He teaches in the Lesley University creative writing MFA program, and divides his time between Massachusetts and Scotland.

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Copyright © 2011 by Chris Lynch
Cover art © 2011 by Tim Bradstreet
Cover design by Christopher Stengel

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First edition, November 2011

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