Matterhorn (71 page)

They started to scramble back up toward the hole. Jackson pulled out a grenade and flipped it in a hook shot, arching it over
the edge of the lip in front of the hole. It exploded.

They waited a moment. Mellas’s head finally cleared.

Again a deadly black canister came sailing over the lip in reply, and the three of them scrambled for safety. Jacobs started
parallel to the hill but slipped. He clawed at the steep slope to try to stop his downward momentum. The grenade was sliding
down the hill with him. Jacobs cried out in frustration and terror. His fingers raked the muddy clay; his boots churned against
the embankment. His eyes grew wide. “I can’t f-fucking st-stop!” he cried.

The grenade went off. Mellas and Jackson both turned their faces to the earth. When they turned around again, half of Jacobs’s
neck was laid open by the shrapnel. They ran down the hill, grabbed him by his shirt and web belt, and dragged him sideways
to a tiny depression in the ground, hoping it would give them shelter. Blood was spurting from Jacobs’s throat. He was trying
to stop it with his hands. Mellas pushed them aside and put his own hand into the long narrow hole, feeling the warm throbbing
of the blood, the tiny bubbles of air escaping from
Jacobs’s lungs. Jacobs could make no sound. Only his eyes could express the terror of that last moment.

Mellas cried out and shoved his filthy fist hard against the severed carotid artery, trying to stanch the blood. Then the
light went from Jacobs’s eyes and the terror vanished. Mellas rolled away from him. He looked at Jackson in bewilderment and
anguish. Blood dripped from his hand. “Jake? Jake?” he said, questioning, accusing, grieving.

Another chi-comm rolled down the hill. They threw themselves to the ground, and the grenade exploded. They were still alive,
for no particular reason. Jackson went yelling up the hill, the heavy radio, seemingly forgotten, on his back. He had a grenade
in his right hand and a rifle in the left. Mellas, with sudden clarity, saw the solution. One of them should not duck. He
ran to Jackson’s left. Jackson hurled the grenade with a moaned curse, then hit the dirt, waiting for it to explode. Mellas
did not hit the dirt. He kept running. The grenade went off. Mellas felt invulnerable to it. As the smoke cleared, Mellas
threw himself to the ground just at the edge of the lip. A young North Vietnamese soldier pushed his head out of the hole.
There was another kid with him, but that one was slumped, inert, against the back wall of the hole. The young NVA soldier
pulled another grenade. He cocked his arm back to throw it. Then he saw Mellas’s bloodied, blackened face and the rifle pointed
squarely at him.

Mellas watched the young man’s face change from determination to horror to resignation. Still Mellas did not pull the trigger.
“Just don’t throw the fucking thing,” he whispered, knowing the young North Vietnamese soldier could not hear or understand
him. “Just don’t throw the fucking thing and I won’t shoot. Just give up.” But Mellas saw hatred fill the young man’s face.
That hatred had kept him in his hole, fighting, beyond any possible hope of survival. And even now, Mellas thought, the kid
must have guessed that if he didn’t throw the grenade Mellas wasn’t going to shoot. But he threw the grenade anyway, his lips
curling back from his teeth.

Fuck you, then, Mellas thought bitterly as the grenade sailed toward him. He pulled the trigger and the M-16 responded on
full automatic. The
bullets ripped through the kid’s chest and face, blowing the backs of his lungs and brain out. Mellas put his head down on
top of his rifle and moaned, “I told you not to throw it, you fucking asshole.” The grenade exploded, scattering shrapnel
all along Mellas’s left side. He was still wearing two flak jackets, so only his buttocks and legs took the jagged metal.

Jackson found him there, still lying on top of his rifle, a few seconds later.

“You all right, Lieutenant?”

Mellas nodded. He painfully rose to a half crouch, using his rifle to push himself up. Marines were gathering beneath the
lip of the landing zone. All that remained to be dealt with were a few isolated holes on top, where small groups of North
Vietnamese had taken cover.

“They’re running!” he heard someone shout. “They’re fucking running!”

At last.

His eye felt as if a nail were being hammered into it. His legs were burning. He limped up to the two dead North Vietnamese
soldiers who had been throwing grenades at them. They looked about fifteen or sixteen years old. He poked one with his rifle
and there was a movement, a twitch. He pulled the trigger, forgetting that he still had his M-16 on automatic, and fired three
bullets through the kid’s head before he could stop.

His rage was gone, and in its place was an inert, sick weariness. Mellas now knew, with utter certainty, that the North Vietnamese
would never quit. They would continue the war until they were annihilated, and he did not have the will to do what that would
require. He stood there, looking at the waste.

Below the west ridge, Hamilton’s work was just beginning. “They’re coming off the hill,” he shouted. “Goddamn it, hurry. Let’s
go!” He and Mole emerged from the jungle onto the defoliated ridge. They threw themselves down, and the rest of the squad
scrambled to join them. Hamilton was pointing excitedly at a small group of figures who were trotting in an orderly fashion
off Matterhorn. Mole set the bipod of the gun down on the earth. His A gunner crawled next to him holding the
long belt of bright copper bullets away from the feeder assembly. Mole began to fire. Two of the figures went down. The others
scattered.

“We’re getting some, Lieutenant,” Hamilton said happily over the radio. He saw a small hillock just in front of them. He tapped
Mole on the shoulder. It would be a perfect place to command the entire finger. He stood up and ran, the radio on his back.
Mole started after him.

A rocket-propelled grenade slashed violently out of the jungle where the NVA had taken cover. It exploded in front of Hamilton,
killing him instantly.

Mole shouted Hamilton’s name. He tossed his gun to his A gunner, grabbed Hamilton’s body, and dragged it back to their original
safe position. The rest of the squad followed him. Mole wasn’t about to get his ass killed because some fucker went bloodthirsty
on them.

The fight for the LZ moved into its final phase. The south and east slopes were covered with Marines methodically killing
anything that moved. Fitch and the CP group were walking up the south slope. Hawke and Connolly, who had captured the NVA
machine gun, were covering the exposed northern slope, firing at the retreating enemy with careful short bursts. Three groups
of NVA, unable to escape, had set up positions in the old Golf Battery artillery pits. One of the groups had a machine gun
that was keeping the Marines at bay, covering the top of the hill with its fire.

Mellas radioed Hawke. “I’m sending a baseball team around to the north to get behind that fucking gun. You’ll see character
Charlie with a bandage on his head instead of a helmet. Don’t shoot his ass. Over.” Mellas looked up at Cortell, who was nodding,
his filthy bandage unraveling slightly.

“You tell him to pop some smoke when he gets there so we don’t shoot him. Over,” Hawke returned.

Mellas relayed the message, and Cortell nodded again. Mellas pulled his last smoke grenade from his belt suspender and gave
it to Cortell.

There was a sudden explosion nearby. The three of them flinched. There was yelling in Spanish. Amarillo had thrown two grenades
into a bunker just below them and was now crawling rapidly inside. There was
a brief spatter of shots from his .45. Everyone waited anxiously, watching the entrance of the bunker.

The familiar camouflage of the Marine jungle utility emerged, back first. Amarillo was pulling a shrapnel-mutilated body out
of the bunker behind him. The shots had all been fired into the man’s skull.

Then a ricochet from the NVA machine gun spun crazily over their heads. “OK, Cortell. Get going,” Mellas said.

Cortell crawled off to join his squad. Mellas poked his head above the hole he and Jackson shared with the two dead North
Vietnamese boys. He pulled one of the bodies down, stuffed it into the bottom of the hole, and stood on it to get a slightly
better view. The LZ was deserted save for Robertson’s body, which lay sprawled by the side of the blasted machine-gun bunker.

No trees remained on Matterhorn. The thick bushes that he and Scar had first tumbled into when they arrived were burned away.
The entire beautiful hill was shorn, shamed, and empty.

Mellas saw Goodwin poke his head briefly above the lip of the LZ. Goodwin ducked down again when machine-gun and rifle fire
from some nearby positions opened up on him. Goodwin radioed Mellas.

“How we gonna get that fucker, Jack?”

Mellas explained that Cortell was working his way behind the position. It would be a matter of time. The remaining enemy were
trapped.

Occasionally a Marine would pop up, apparently desultorily, unload half a magazine in the direction of the enemy machine gun,
and get back down.

Mellas saw Cortell’s red smoke. He stood up, shouting, “Don’t shoot. Cease firing. Cease firing.” Goodwin did the same.

Cortell’s bandaged head appeared momentarily above the crest. The seven kids left in the squad jumped above the lip of the
LZ, threw seven grenades at the machine-gun position, and jumped down, out of sight. The gunner started to turn the barrel
to meet the new threat. The grenades went off in and around the shallow pit, causing a series of shock waves that hammered
Mellas’s eardrums.

Immediately Goodwin was rushing across the LZ toward the smoke from the explosions. A stunned NVA soldier struggled to turn
the machine gun on Goodwin but couldn’t move fast enough. Goodwin, like a panther making a kill, was on top of him, firing
his M-16. The remaining NVA in nearby gun pits stood up, weaponless, eyes filled with terror, and raised their hands. They
were cut down in seconds as every available weapon on the hill turned on them.

Mellas, still standing on the dead boy’s body, slumped his head forward and rested his bloody, stinging face on the cool clay.
Jackson leaned back, resting his radio against the side of the hole. “We won,” Jackson said.

Mellas simply nodded inside his helmet liner. His helmet was motionless against the clay. He reveled in the feel of the cool
earth against his chin and mouth. Soon, however, the wind made his damp utility shirt too cool for comfort. He dragged himself
from the hole and started shouting at various fire team leaders to organize the defense in case of a counterattack. Then he
remembered Hamilton, waiting in ambush down below.

“Bravo One Three, Bravo One. Sorry I rushed you in so much. Why don’t you get up here and set in from eight to ten. Twelve
is due north. Over.”

There was a long silence.

“One Three, this is One Actual. Did you copy? Over.”

Mole’s voice came over the radio, trembling. “Character Hotel is Coors. Over.”

Mellas’s hands started shaking. “Any others? Over.”

“We got two minor Oleys. Over.”

“Can you get everyone in without help? Over.”

“Yeah. Over.”

“One out.” Mellas handed Jackson the handset.

The hill was theirs.

Jackson leaned over and put his head in his hands.

Mellas limped to the edge of the LZ and watched Mole struggle up the hill with Hamilton slung over his back.

Mole dumped Hamilton at Mellas’s feet. “Sorry, sir. I know you was tight.” He walked away, leaving Mellas standing over Hamilton’s
body.

Mellas silently emptied Hamilton’s pockets. He found a letter from Hamilton’s mother. In it she’d written, “Don’t you worry,
Buster, you’ll be home soon and it will be all over.” Mellas hadn’t known Hamilton’s
nickname was Buster. He felt he had never known Hamilton at all—and never would know him.

Mellas’s left leg throbbed with the shrapnel, and his right leg burned. Blood caused his trousers to stick. He felt a sharp,
pulsing pain in his blinded eye. If only he could sit down, just sit down and do nothing. But the defenses had to be set in.

He struggled to his feet. An explosion slammed against him. He hit the dirt, rolling next to Jackson. They both looked up
to see greasy smoke drifting across the LZ. Someone was shouting for a corpsman. “Mine! A mine,” someone shouted from Goodwin’s
sector. “The place is fucking mined!”

“Jesus shit,” Mellas muttered.

He stood up again. The land around him had become toxic. He didn’t know where to step.

Still, the company had to be set in. Mellas went to his knees, crawling so he could see the signs of a buried mine or trip
wire as he went from hole to hole. The kids, too, just wanted to sit. Mellas joked with them, cajoled them, threatened them.
Eventually they started to dig into the hill, throwing dead bodies from holes, re-digging half-buried trenches. Others were
struggling up the hill with dead Marines or helping to move the wounded so they could be evacuated. Fitch called for volunteers
to clear a small section of the hilltop for a medevac bird. Soon a line of Marines formed and slowly crawled across the area
with their K-bars in front of them, probing for mines, watching for trip wires. One kid was blown open from the abdomen when
his knee set off a pressure device his knife had missed. They threw what remained of him onto the pile.

Fitch called an actuals meeting. Mellas made his way around the rim of the LZ. Smoke choked and nauseated him. It drifted
sluggishly from the hill to join the heavy gray clouds rolling endlessly away toward Laos.

“Nice work, Mel,” Fitch said. He was haggard and drawn. Hawke and Goodwin were both sitting with their elbows resting on the
inside of their knees. They were staring into space.

“Hamilton got killed,” Mellas answered. “He used to carry my radio.” He had no idea why he was talking. He just had to tell
someone. “Is Conman OK?” he asked Hawke.

Hawke nodded.

Fitch looked at Mellas more closely. “You need to be medevaced,” he said.