Matterhorn (31 page)

His stomach gave a lurch and he reacted by downing the rest of the whiskey. He refilled the glass.

Thirty-nine years old. Last chance. He knew he wasn’t smart like Blakely, or colorful like Mulvaney. But he cared. He cared
about immersion foot. He cared about security and cutting his casualty rate. But how do those things get you the notice of
the commanding general? It stank. It all stank. Goddamn Bravo Company out there on a limb. He should never have let Blakely
sweet-talk him and Mulvaney into it. Then the screwup about the rations. He hadn’t caught it. Should have caught it. Supervise,
supervise, supervise. That was the last “s” in
BAMCISS
: Begin planning, arrange for reconnaissance … or was it arrange for support? Make a reconnaissance. No, a plan. Damn. Memory
never was that good. Shit. It’s simple. You just go out there and kill the goddamned enemy. If that rations thing ever got
out, there’d be hell to pay.

Blakely was transferring the supply officer who’d fucked up back to Da Nang. Not that the S-4 minded that. Hell, no. Officer
clubs. Liquor. Women.
Round-eyed
women. There was one blond who sold cars to the troops. Cars? Hell, Mercedes Benzes. A whole year’s pay for one of them babies.
Of course there’d be nothing on the supply officer’s record. No sense making it hard on the guy. Blakely was using back channels
to let people know they were letting the supply officer off easy and not putting it on his record. But if word ever got out,
well, he could
show he took immediate action by getting rid of the officer. Not that it was so bad. Hell, no one got killed or anything.
Besides, they’d get Bravo Company out, make it up to them. He’d have steaks for everyone when they got back. In fact, with
Bravo at VCB, the whole battalion would be here at the same time. He’d have steaks for the whole battalion and a formal mess
night for the officers. Had ’em ever since the Royal Marines, goddamn it. Just like in the old days. That’s the thing for
morale. A mess night for the officers and steaks for the enlisted. Good fucking Marines, those kids. Not their fault. They’d
like him in the end. They’d understand. No leadership. That wasn’t anyone’s fault either. You get these green-assed college
kids, no experience. One day they’re screwing government office girls in Washington and a week later they’re dropped into
the bush. What can you expect? Shit. They just needed some toughening up, that’s all. Maturity. That’s why he had to get back
out in the bush again. Like those bunkers on Matterhorn. They’d have been slaughtered in an air raid or heavy shelling. You
can’t be too careful. Sure, it was hard on ’em—goddamn right it was hard. But that’s what he was here for: to save lives.
By God, all they needed was a good fucking jacking up. A little leadership.

He threw down the rest of the whiskey, grabbed his utility cap, and pushed through the blackout curtains into the night. Guided
by the whitewashed stones that lined the path, he crossed over to the COC, the combat operations center. He pushed open the
heavy door, surprising the watch officer, who was reading
Playboy
, and the three radio operators, two of whom were playing chess. The third was listening to the top-forty countdown from AFVN,
the Army radio station in Quang Tri. Everyone scrambled to his feet.

“Get me Bravo Six,” Simpson barked.

One of the radio operators began calling. Pretty soon Pallack’s voice answered, and then Fitch came up. His voice was faint
as a wraith.

“This is Big John Six. I want to know why you deliberately disobeyed an order and are sitting on your ass at checkpoint Alpha
a full day behind schedule. I want a fucking good explanation or goddamn it you can explain yourself to somebody on Okinawa,
because by God I’ll have any commander’s ass that can’t do the job. Over.”

The radio operators glanced sideways at one another. The watch officer began going over radio messages that had come in from
division.

There was a long pause. “Did you copy me, Bravo Six?” Simpson insisted. “Over.”

“Roger, sir. I copied.” There was a break in the transmission. “We were fogged in all day. I kept waiting for that bird I’d
requested. I have some bad cases of immersion foot, a body, and we’re out of food. It was my judgment we could move faster
if we had those problems taken care of. I’ll take full responsibility for the delay. Over.”

“You bet your ass you will. But that don’t help me explain it to Bushwhacker Six. Over.”

“I understand, sir. Perhaps if we knew what our mission was it would help the men move. Over.” The distance and weak batteries
made Fitch’s voice waver and break.

“Your mission is to find, close with, and destroy the enemy. That’s the mission of every fucking Marine.” Simpson unconsciously
pulled back his shoulders. He was aware of the staff watching him. “Now goddamn it you get to finding and destroying or I’ll
have you relieved for cause. You copy me, Bravo Six?”

“Roger. Copy.”

“It’s imperative—imperative—that you reach Checkpoint Echo by noon on Thursday. You’ll await further orders there. Imperative.
You understand? Over.”

The radio was silent. Checkpoint Echo was where two rivers joined, the one coming from the mountains over which they were
struggling and the other rushing down from another chain of mountains to their east. Fitch came up. “Sir, I’m looking on my
map here and Checkpoint Echo is across the other side of some very steep stuff. Look, in this terrain I just don’t think we
can make it that soon. Over.”

“Wait one.”

Simpson darted over to the map, putting one finger on Bravo’s position, neatly indicated by a pin with a large letter B on
it. He then put his finger on the coordinates of Checkpoint Echo. His two fingers were approximately eight inches apart. Fitch
was obviously shirking.

Simpson picked up the handset. “What are you trying to pull on me, Bravo Six? You be at Echo by noon or you’ll spend your
first month in Okinawa getting my foot out of your ass. You copy?”

“I copy.”

“Big John Six, out.”

In the damp and cold, thirty kilometers from VCB, Fitch lightly tossed the handset to the ground and stared into the dark.
Relsnik fumbled for it and picked it up.

Hawke whistled. “Maybe when he sobers up he’ll forget what he said.”

Fitch grunted.

“Hey, forget it,” Hawke continued. “What’s he gonna do, Jim, cut your hair off and send you to Vietnam?”

Fitch smiled, grateful for Hawke’s support, and wondered why he wouldn’t be happy to be relieved. Just get out of everything.
Still, he felt terrible. His fitness report would kill him. Any hope of getting a decent assignment once he left Vietnam would
be crushed. To have started out so well, a company commander, and then be shit-canned back to the rear was something he couldn’t
bear. Fitch knew the Marine Corps well enough to realize that the word would get around. And in an organization as small as
the Marines, he’d never be able to outrun it. No amount of explaining would help. It would only look like excuses. The real
story, known by Hawke and the platoon commanders, would remain locked up in the jungle until they rotated home. By then it
wouldn’t matter. Fitch would be a joke.

Down on the lines Mellas and Hamilton sat on the back edge of their fighting hole. Hamilton had borrowed Mellas’s red-lens
flashlight to fill in another square on his short-timer’s chart. It was a drawing of a delicate Vietnamese girl, her right
leg cocked up above her head, exposing her vagina. Two hundred small numbered segments twisted around the girl in a spiral,
ending with day zero on the sweet spot. “You know, Lieutenant,”
Hamilton said, “I truly think this girl here is beautiful. I mean I really do. She looks just like a girl I used to know back
home.”

“Get back, Hamilton. They all look the same from that angle,” Mellas said, remembering a joke he’d heard. Then he felt that
he’d somehow profaned the beautiful girl on Hamilton’s short-timer’s chart.

Hamilton leaned back on his elbows. “I wanted to marry her ever since the eighth grade.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“She married some guy who’s an engineer at the plant. He had a draft-exempt job.” Hamilton drifted off into his own world
for a while, then returned. “I was with this friend of mine, Sonny Martinez. We’d come down from Camp Lejeune to their wedding.
Sonny speaks pretty good English, but still a little fucked up. Anyway he gets Margaret’s husband’s attention at the reception
and asks him, ‘You been in Army before, hey?’ ‘No, I haven’t’ this guy answers. ‘Why you not go to Army?’ Hamilton’s voice
turned pompous and slow. ‘Well, you see I have a very important job and, well, it’s too important a job for me to go in the
Army.’ Well Sonny just shut up the rest of the day and I wanted to jump across the table and beat the bastard’s eyeballs out.”

Mellas laughed.

Hamilton raised his invisible toast glass. “Here’s to Margaret and her fucking husband.” He was silent for a moment. “Why
is it that assholes like that always end up marrying the outstanding chicks?”

“I guess girls want security. Guys like you and me aren’t too good a risk.”

“Somehow I can’t help thinking we’re better guys, though.”

“Unfortunately, women don’t,” Mellas said. He remembered the night Anne told him that she couldn’t go along with this weird
concept of morality he’d come up with about keeping his promise to the president. It had started as a wonderful meal in the
New York apartment that Anne shared with two of her friends from Bryn Mawr, both of whom had made themselves descreetly absent.
Anne had gone all-out, not only with the bacon-wrapped chicken livers and water chestnuts, but with real French-press coffee
from a real French-press coffeepot that she’d brought home from her junior summer in Paris. Mellas had never seen
one before. He thought that the best time to tell her about sending in his letter to the Marine Corps would be over coffee.

There was no best time. Mellas found himself standing with an empty coffeepot in one hand and two empty mugs in the other,
looking at her beautiful backside. She was wearing the salmon-colored miniskirt that emphasized her small waist and hugged
her bottom—the one that she knew drove him wild.

“You don’t even
like
the president,” she said. Exasperated, she whirled back to face the sink of dirty dishes. “You told me yourself that he’s
just a manufactured image. It’s not like making a promise to a
person
.”

“Yeah, but he’s the
president
. American presidents don’t lie to Americans.” He felt foolish talking to her back. “He’s like the representation of the—I
don’t know, of the Constitution, for Christ’s sake. I swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States. I raised my hand
and swore, so help me God.”

She twisted around, her hands still on the edge of the sink. “You were a high school kid. You were
seventeen.
”

“I was still me.”

She turned back. “Oh, God,” she said to the wall.

He looked dumbly at the pot and cups in his hand. Why was she mad at
him
? It was a sacred oath—and two of the guys he’d gone through training with at Quantico were already dead.

“Waino,” she said, still looking at the wall, “Johnny Hartman got his doctor to say that knee he hurt in football would go
out all the time. Jane’s brother got
his
doctor to say that he was gay.”

He said nothing.

She let out a long sigh. Her shoulders moved just that little bit back down to where they normally sat. He realized that she’d
been holding her breath. She went into her quiet voice, the one that he knew there was no arguing against. “You got into Yale
Law School. You were
deferred
. In three years the war could be over, and if it isn’t, you’ll do your time as a lawyer. People would kill to get to where
you are.”

“People are
getting
killed. Better people that Johnny Hartman and Jane’s brother.”

She turned, this time slowly. She was trembling. The tears welling from her green eyes struck him dumb and made him feel guilty.
“Yes!” she hissed. “Yes, yes, yes, yes! And you sent in the letter without even talking to me about it. You didn’t even
think
to talk to me about it.”

A month after that he was at the Basic School in Quantico, Virginia. He found it difficult to write to her, knowing that Marine
training was totally foreign to her. She responded infrequently, saying that her new career kept her busy. Once, after he’d
been in Quantico nearly three months, he called her to say that he could get up to New York on a three-day pass. She said
that she had already planned something in Vermont. Two months after that he had his orders to Vietnam. He called her and said
he had to see her before he shipped out. She said OK, but warned him not to plan on spending the night.

Beefed up from the training, hair cut to the skull, and in the uniform of a Marine second lieutenant, he made the long train
ride from Virginia to New York. When he got to her apartment, her roommates told him that she was out on a date. He waited
awkwardly, knowing that her roommates were trying to entertain him. Finally they went to bed. When she got home, she made
tea. After an awkward half hour she told him he could sleep on the couch and she went to bed.

He’d been so frightened and desperately in need of comfort that he crawled into bed with her anyway. After two uncomfortable
hours with her back to him, he gave up on sleep. He got up in the dark and struggled into his uniform in the over-heated apartment,
the wool sticking to the sweat on his body. She watched him silently. He called a cab and packed his Val-Pak. When he was
folding it together on the floor, he looked up to see her sitting on the side of the bed. She was wearing a long man’s shirt.
It didn’t hide her panties. Apparently she didn’t care.

“When’s your plane?”

“Oh-five-thirty.” He wished that he hadn’t slipped into military time.

“You hungry?”

He stood up, pulled the Val-Pak upright, and lifted it. “No.”

“Well …”

“Yeah.” He couldn’t take his eyes off her. He never could. “Bye.”