Matterhorn (74 page)

“That yours, Mellas?” Stevens asked in amazement.

Mellas eyed him for a long moment. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “I really don’t know.”

“Yeah. OK,” Stevens said. “You guys did a hell of a job yesterday.”

Looking at Stevens with one eye made Mellas aware that he had taken seeing for granted. Now, this way, he saw Stevens differently
from before. He couldn’t get mad at Stevens for the comment. Stevens was just Stevens, a cog in the machinery, trying to be
nice. And Mellas was just Mellas, another cog, deciding not to get angry. He didn’t much like being a cog, but there it was.
He smiled at his silent conversation. “Thanks,” Mellas said.

He returned to the new LZ and fell asleep with the sword beside him.

Someone was kicking his boot. Mellas opened his good eye. He was flooded with ugly anger at being disturbed.

It was McCarthy. Alpha Company was winding through the small landing zone. “Wake up, you silly fucker,” McCarthy said. “It
took me forever to find you with that goddamned bandage wrapped around your face.”

Mellas, smiling, reached a hand up to McCarthy. McCarthy’s radio operator was smoking impatiently. “Where the fuck you going?”
Mellas asked.

“West. Two Twenty-Four set up a blocking position right on the Z at the Laos end of the valley. We’ll be the hammer. Charlie
Company’s kicking off to our north right now. They’re pulling you guys out this afternoon.” He paused. “You guys had a rough
time, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” Mellas agreed. “Nothing unusual, though. ‘Light casualties’ I believe it’s called back in the world. All you have
to do is report it as a battalion action and the percentage lost thins to nothing. Who’s going to hold Matterhorn?”

“Why should you care? You’ll be skating on board the
Sanctuary
, dazzling round-eyed nurses. Maybe we’ll get in another mystery tour when this fucking op’s over.”

“Who’s holding fucking Matterhorn?” Mellas demanded, rising to his elbows, his good eye beginning to spasm.

McCarthy shrugged. “No one,” he said.

Mellas sank back to the ground and lay looking at the sky. No one. Finally he spoke. “Be careful, Mac.”

“Don’t worry about me,” McCarthy said.

Mellas looked at him. They both knew McCarthy was going into a fight that afternoon, the same day Mellas was leaving it all.
It was another cycle, another wearying, convulsive rhythm, and if it wasn’t Mellas it was McCarthy, and if not McCarthy someone
like McCarthy, forever and forever, like an image in facing mirrors in a barbershop, deeper and deeper, smaller and smaller,
curving with time and distance away into the unknown, but always repeating, always the same. Mellas thought that if he could
smash one of those mirrors, then this agony would stop and he’d be left alone to dream. But the mirrors were only thoughts,
illusions. Reality was McCarthy, standing above him, a friendly face, his radioman impatient to get going because they’d have
to hump extra fast to catch up with the rest of the platoon.

“Good luck,” Mellas said.

McCarthy waved and trudged after his radio operator. He turned and waved again. Mellas kept thinking, Don’t get killed, damn
you, don’t let yourself get killed.

T
he medevac helicopter flew eastward. It flashed across a white beach and then out over the South China Sea. Eventually a white
ship with large red crosses on its superstructure and hull appeared below. The chopper tilted back, its blades pounding the
air, and set down on the deck. Corpsmen ran inside and hauled the wounded out on stretchers. A nurse in fatigues was holding
a clipboard, looking at medevac tags and wounds. She was rapidly sorting the wounded into groups. The most severely wounded
were being shoved to the side as the less wounded were stripped of weapons, boots, and clothes and rushed into the interior
of the ship.

The nurse grabbed for Mellas’s tag, not really looking at him. “I’m all right,” he said. “Those guys over there are a lot
worse off than I am.”

“You let me run triage, Marine.” She looked up at his bandages. She had a coarse, red face, small eyes that seemed sleep-deprived,
and heavy eyebrows. She wore her hair in two short stiff pigtails. “Most likely to survive go first,” she said. Mellas realized
that the idea was to maximize the number of men who could return to combat.

“What’s this?” she asked, pointing at Vancouver’s sword.

“It’s a friend of mine’s.”

“All weapons, Marine,” she said, motioning for the sword.

“I’m a lieutenant.”

“Sor-
ry
,” came the sarcastic reply. “Look,
Lieutenant
. I’m busy. All weapons—even stupid souvenirs.”

“The fuck it’s a souvenir.”

“What did you say, Marine? You know you’re talking to a lieutenant in the United States Navy, don’t you?” That rank was the
equivalent of a Marine captain.

“Yes, ma’am.” Mellas gave her a sloppy nonregulation salute, his hand curved over limply. “How do I know I’ll get it back?”
he asked, still holding the salute, waiting for her to return it.

The nurse glared at him. Then she shouted over her shoulder, “Bell, take this man’s weapon.”

“I told you—”

“You obey orders, Lieutenant, or I’ll have your ass on report.” She moved off to the next man, reading his medevac tag, writing
on her clipboard.

Bell, a hospital corpsman, came over and took the sword. He looked at it appraisingly.

“How do I know I’ll get it back?” Mellas asked again.

“You pick it up when you get orders back ashore, sir.”

“I want a receipt.”

“Sir, you’re holding up the process. We got Twenty-Fourth Marines in the shit and—”

“I’m
in
the Twenty-Fourth Marines. I want a fucking receipt.”

“We don’t have any receipt forms for swords, Lieutenant. It’ll go with the rifles. It’ll be all right.”

“I’ve had three of my men pay for their goddamn rifles because some fucker in the Navy sold them to the gooks. I want a receipt
and I want it now.”

Bell looked around for help. He spotted the nurse and went over to her. Mellas saw her set her lips tight, then say something
to Bell. Bell returned. “You’ll have to wait, sir. The lieutenant says she’s busy.”

When the last stretcher disappeared inside the ship, the nurse walked over toward Mellas, holding herself rigid. “Now what’s
the problem, Lieutenant?”

“Ma’am, the lieutenant would like a receipt for the lieutenant’s
weapon
, ma’am.”

“A receipt. I see.” She looked down at her clipboard. “Mellas, Second Lieutenant, Bravo Company, First Battalion Twenty-Fourth
Marine Regiment. Correct?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Mellas replied.

“I’m going to issue you a direct order, Second Lieutenant Mellas, with HM-1 Bell as a witness. If the order isn’t obeyed,
I’m going to place you under arrest for disobeying a direct order. Is that perfectly clear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Mellas said tightly.

“Lieutenant Mellas, give your weapon, that sword, to HM-1 Bell and get your ass down to the officers’ ward. If you’re not
moving in ten seconds I’m placing you under arrest. As it is, I’m putting you on report for disrupting triage.”

Mellas knew when the machinery had him. He gave Bell the sword.

In the officers’ ward another corpsman collected Mellas’s reeking uniform, but Mellas wouldn’t let him take the boots. He
tied them to the end of the bed and glared at the corpsman. When he felt the boots were safe, he found a basin, filled it
with warm water, and with a deep sigh put both feet into it. Sometime later he was brought back to reality by the voice of
another corpsman. “Debriding, Lieutenant,” he said. Mellas reluctantly removed his feet from the basin.

They put him on a gurney and wheeled him deeper inside the ship. There they gave him a local anesthetic and he watched them
pick metal, dirt, and cloth from his legs, snip off dead flesh, then clean and rebandage the shrapnel wounds. “The rest will
come out on its own,” the surgeon said, already looking at the next problem on the list, wiping his hands. A corpsman wheeled
Mellas back to his bed. He had to wake Mellas up to get him into it.

He jerked awake, his heart pounding, upon hearing his name. He took a gulp of air and searched frantically for danger with
his good eye. A nurse with red hair whose name tag read “Elsked, K. E.” was standing over him. Like the triage nurse, she
wore the twin bars of a Navy lieutenant. She was curt. “You’re due in the operating room in five minutes,
Lieutenant.” She looked at his bandaged legs. “Can you walk or do you need help?”

“Whatever’s efficient,” Mellas answered. He crawled out of the bed and walked, his legs stiff. She led the way down the passage,
turning occasionally to see how far behind he was.

Mellas watched her every move, noticing her hips and the outline of her bra strap beneath the crisp white synthetic material
of her dress. He longed to catch up to her and touch her, make contact with someone soft, someone who smelled clean and fresh,
someone warm. He wanted to talk to someone who knew how he felt, who could talk to the lost, lonely part of him. He wanted
a woman.

The nurse directed two corpsmen to arrange Mellas on an operating table. She wouldn’t look him in the eye. Mellas regretted
being sent to this place, where his sudden flood of longing had no possibility of fulfillment. She thinks all I want to do
is stick it in her, he thought bitterly. Of course I do, but there’s so much more. He laughed aloud.

“What’s so funny?” one of the corpsmen asked, moving a huge machine that hung from a track overhead. He positioned it carefully
over Mellas’s face.

“Between the emotion and the response, the desire and the spasm, falls the shadow,” Mellas said. He attempted a smile.

The red-haired nurse turned to look at him intently.

They held him down by the shoulders and an older doctor came in. He peered into Mellas’s eye and injected a local anesthetic
next to it. The nurse washed the eye, cleaning out the dirt and powder that had mixed with the ointment that Fredrickson had
shoved into it. A piece of shrapnel had laid open Mellas’s eyelid. Another piece had gone into the skin just above the bridge
of his nose, stopping against the skull. Mellas was tense with fear of what was coming. He looked up at a large black machine
on tracks above him. It had large thick glass lenses and a stainless steel needle about six inches long that narrowed to a
very fine point. The machine started to glow through the lenses, which magnified the doctor’s eyes, peering back at him. Then
the lenses covered the brilliant light, and the light seemed to penetrate Mellas’s brain. The steel
needle came out of the haze of light, and the doctor moved dials that moved the needle. The redheaded nurse’s hands pressed
down on Mellas’s forehead and chest. The needle went into Mellas’s eye. He held on to the gurney and tried not to scream.

Bit by bit, the chips and flakes of the defective hand grenade were picked from Mellas’s eye. Then the surgeon put two stitches
in the eyelid.

“You’re incredibly lucky, Lieutenant,” the doctor said. He was already pulling off his mask. “Two of those slivers were just
microns from severing the optic nerve. You’d have lost your eye.” He pushed the machine back. “You won’t see normally for
a week or so. Keep a patch on it for a while, but you’ll be able to return to your unit in about a week.” He turned and began
washing his hands. Mellas felt as if he’d just been notified of his own hanging.

He was wheeled back and he slept.

When Mellas awoke he climbed out of the stiff sheets and hobbled to the passageway. The cold steel beneath his feet vibrated
from the ship’s engines. He hailed a passing corpsman and asked where the enlisted men were. He was pointed in the right direction
and limped off. He found Jackson in a ward with about a dozen other wounded Marines, all hooked up to IV bottles. Jackson
was awake, staring at the wall, propped up against the headboard with a blanket over his legs. There were no bumps at the
end of the blanket.

Mellas suddenly didn’t want Jackson to see him. He wanted to walk away and blot Jackson from his mind.

A corpsman came up to Mellas. “Can I help you, uh …”

“Lieutenant,” Mellas finished for him. “I’d like to see one of my men.”

“Sir, we’re not supposed to have visitors except between fourteen and sixteen hundred hours. These guys are still pretty critical.”

Mellas looked at the corpsman. “Doc, he was my radioman.”

“If one of the fucking nurses comes in, I ain’t covering for you,” the man said and stepped aside.

Mellas approached the bed. Jackson turned his head slightly, then looked away.

“Hi, Jackson. How you doing?”

“How the fuck you think?”

Mellas took a breath and nodded his head. He didn’t know what to say. It was clear that Jackson didn’t want to see him.

“Look, Lieutenant, just get the fuck out of here.”

Other Marines, who’d been half-listening from nearby beds, went back to reading or fiddling with the tie strings on their
light blue pajamas.

Mellas, also in pajamas, standing alone, felt suddenly naked. He seemed to be a petitioner at Jackson’s stumps. “Jackson?”

Jackson turned his head again, looking coolly at Mellas.

“Jackson, I …” Mellas tried to keep some dignity, not wanting to break down in front of everyone. “Jackson, I’m sorry it happened
to you.”

Jackson turned back to the bulkhead. Then his lips started to quiver. “I lost my legs,” he said, his voice shaking. He started
to moan. “I lost my legs.” He turned to Mellas. “Who’s going to fuck someone with no legs?” His voice rose and he broke down
completely. “Who’s going to fuck a goddamned watermelon?”

Mellas backed away a couple of steps, shaking his head, feeling he’d done something wrong for still being whole, for having
collapsed, for letting Jackson do the hole-checks. He wanted forgiveness, but there was none. Jackson was now thrashing back
and forth, shouting. Corpsmen rushed to hold him down, and one shot a needle into his thigh. “You better get out of here,
Lieutenant,” the corpsman said.