Matterhorn (78 page)

“That’s right. You fucking bastards want everything, don’t you?”

“Where’s your fucking pride, Conman?” Cassidy said softly.

“I left it on that fucking hill we just abandoned.”

Cassidy wheeled away. His parade-ground voice came back. “Goddamn it now, I want all ammunition and grenades piled neatly.
I want the rifles stacked in an orderly manner. I want the stacks right here.”

Some kids began to move for their weapons. Then China said, “Uhuh.” Everyone stopped. China reached for his machine gun and
threw it into the mud in front of him. He stood erect above it. Others did the same. Soon the area was littered with grenades,
rifles, ammunition belts, bandoleers, claymores, and captured weapons.

“How about our fucking can openers, Gunny? That little chickenshit fuck want our John Waynes?”

“I got a needle in my sewing kit. You want that?”

Cassidy stood alone, saying nothing. Eventually he motioned to his team from H & S to collect the weapons. The Marines from
Bravo Company, disgusted, started crawling back into their hooches or rolling up in wet ponchos on the ground.

China continued to stand over his machine gun, waiting. When one of the H & S Marines approached it, China kicked it away.
The kid stood up. “Look, man, this ain’t my idea.” He bent over for the gun again. Again China kicked it aside. The kid turned
to look at Cassidy, who hadn’t noticed the exchange, then turned back to China. “Hey, come on. Just let me get this shit over
with. I ain’t got nothing against you.”

“You touch that gun and I’ll kill you.”

“Christ, don’t get personal about it.”

China leaned over. “Ain’t nobody gettin’ my machine gun but Cassidy. You pick it up and you gonna get fucked with real bad,
whether I be here or not.”

“All right. All right.” The kid moved on.

Cassidy had noticed. He walked up to China.

“How come Schaffran didn’t pick up your gun?”

“He didn’t want to.”

“Did you threaten him, you fucking puke?”

“How can I threaten somebody?
I
ain’t got no weapons.”

Someone snickered. Cassidy was aware now that everyone remaining was watching him to see what he would do. He and China stood
there, eyes locked.

“You gonna do your
duty
, Cassidy, and pick up my gun?” China asked softly.

Cassidy looked directly into China’s eyes. His hands began to tremble. Then he bent over to get the machine gun.

China kicked it away. “Parker,” he said.

Cassidy stood up. His voice quivered with anger. “If you think I’m going to order you to do something so you can refuse it,
become a fucking martyr, and hang around in the rear waiting for trial with the rest of the vomits you call your friends,
then you got another think coming.”

He reached again for the gun. Again China toed it aside. “Broyer,” he said.

Cassidy stood. “I lost friends too, China.”

“How a fucking cog have a friend? How a fucking cog ever be a man?”

Cassidy clenched his fists and saw China steel himself for the blow. Cassidy hesitated, struggling to restrain his anger.
“Manhood’s something you’ll never understand,” he said. He stooped down and picked up China’s machine gun.

“You make me sick, cog.” China walked away toward his hooch, leaving Cassidy with the muddy weapon. The rest of Bravo Company
turned their backs on him.

Some, however, did not forget him.

“It’s time to off the motherfucker,” Henry said. “Now.”

“We seen ’nough killin’,” China said quietly.

Henry stood up and whirled around. “Man. Do I have to listen to you
we-seen-’nough killin’
shit, like I’m some kind of small boy look wonder-eyes at big daddy home from the wars? You know who you been killin’ out
there don’chew? You own brothers. Yeah. You own brothers. That’s who you been gettin’ you
’nough killin’
with. Well, I say we finish with that shit. We gonna do some killing our own. And
for
our own.”

China could see that Henry had most of the brothers with him. Still, some of them, like Mole, looked to China to say something.
China’s rhetoric failed him.

“You gonna just sit on you ass while that racist cracker throw our brother Mallory in the fucking conex box like some kind
of animal?” Henry asked. “And then
you
run you ass up that fuckin’ hill like you some kinda nigger Audie Murphy and half you fuckin’ company get killed for nothin’,
and
he
send you fuckin’ Coca-
Colas
, like you on some sort of football team? Hey, man. And then cut you balls off by takin’ you rifles. You don’t think maybe
that fuckin’ lifer hasn’t been practicin’ violence on you? Or you just turnin’ white in more ways than one? Maybe you daddy
be a white motherfucker and leave you all them white spots.”

The familiar taunt made China clamp down his teeth so hard that he was afraid he’d break a molar. He knew what Henry was doing,
and he knew that too much was at stake to give in to his rage.

Henry strutted over to the Makassar ebony trunk and opened the heavy lid. “You think about it, brother, while I fix us up
some good brother Roogie and try and understand why you so fucked up.” He carefully removed the clothing and other items in
the trunk to reveal a beautifully crafted box with a sliding drawer. He opened the drawer and took out a silver bong with
a crystal water bowl and an ornate cigarette roller and some paper.

China took the plunge. “You the one that’s fucked up. Wha’chew think you gonna accomplish killin’ one more fucked-up God-and-country
pork chop? He just a fuckin’ cog in the machinery. He
crawled
in front of me, man.”

Leaving the lid to the trunk open, Henry simply smiled at China. He coolly walked over to the matching dresser, removed the
false bottom in the drawer, and pulled out a small plastic bag of marijuana. Then he took a diamond-inlaid silver cigarette
lighter from the top drawer. Still smiling, he turned to face China. “You the one give him you gun. He cut off you fuckin’
balls, the way I see it.”

China rose to the bait, but not in the way Henry wanted. “You think I’m not ready to roll on them suckers? You think I don’t
see they a bunch of sick motherfuckers?” China turned to the other brothers, not even addressing Henry. “What you people think
this is, some sort of gang bullshit? We not about just goin’ out and doin’ violence to cut up some people for the hell of
it. We about stoppin’ things at the source of the evil. The
source
. We got to overturn a racist society. If it come to a fight, it gonna be a
real
motherfucker. We can’t let them get us one at a time.”

He turned to Henry, who’d sat on his cot and was carefully building a joint with the ornate roller. “You think I’m not souped
up for a motherfucker over this? You think that I don’t know payback gonna be a motherfucker for that racist cracker? But
payback gotta come right. All that happen wit’chew is they throw you black ass in another conex box just like Mallory. They
do worse for you. They throw you upside down in one of those fuckin’ punishment holes like they do the gooks, and you be in
so deep they have to pump sunshine to you all the way from Texas.” That got a laugh from the other brothers, and China started
to feel better. “They send you so far out in the bush they gonna use rock
apes to carry you mail.” Then China pounded his fist on his palm. “We got to get power. One dead Georgia cracker a drop in
the bucket over here. I left dead Georgia crackers all over that fuckin’ hill. And dead brothers too. Dead people ain’t worth
shit. They just big nothins.”

“Power,” Henry sneered. “Sheeit.” He licked the glue on the joint and smoothed the paper into place. “You and you jive fuckin’
talk, China. Mao say power come from the barrel of a gun. That dude know where it’s at. Wha’chew gonna do? Go back to the
world and sing ‘We Shall Overcome’?” Now Henry got the laughter.

“Spare me,” China said.

“Well, wha’chew gonna do?” Henry coolly licked the cigarette paper along the seam, sealing it shut, watching China through
narrowed eyes. “I can just see China singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ as he walks in for his cyanide shower.”

Henry’s friends now chimed in.

“Hey, Henry. You tell him.”

“Yeah, China. How come you not runnin’ with us no more?”

“Hey, come on, brother. What’s into you? Huh, man?”

“Nothin’ into me,” China fired back at them. “I been out in the fuckin’ bush tryin’ straighten shit out while you jive-assed
mothers in here talkin’ about revolution. I
workin’
revolution.”

“
You
spare
me
, brother,” Henry said. “Just ’cause you ain’t figured a way get you ass out of the jungle.” He laughed. “If you really workin’
revolution, then you better start right here. You frag the motherfucker. That way we teach those fuckin’ bigots that payback
start right away. They gonna fuck with us, we gonna fuck with them worse.” He put the joint in his mouth and started striking
at the flint of the lighter.

China, his senses heightened from months in the bush, smelled the lighter fluid. It annoyed and slightly nauseated him. “I
told you there’s no point. He just a little cog in the works. Besides, we get our own point across without killin’. We need
to arm the black man for
de
fense. We ain’t about murderin’ people. We maybe pop a smoke under his ass some night or maybe put a note on it like we did
for the colonel.”

“You gonna write another note?” Henry asked. He blew out a long exhalation of smoke. The others laughed. “Later for that,
huh.
Way
later.”
He handed off the joint and then turned his back on China and reached under his cot. He pulled out a fragmentation grenade.
“This ain’t no smoke,” he said, tossing it lightly up and down in his palm. He tossed it over to China. “I think you chickenshit
to use it.”

Nobody laughed.

China knew in a flash of insight that once again Henry had him coming or going. If he did what Henry wanted, Henry was the
leader. If he didn’t do it, he was disgraced, and Henry was still the leader.

“We see who’s chickenshit,” China said. He pulled the pin of the grenade and everything seemed to go in slow motion for him.
He was so weary of slaughter that his own didn’t matter any more. It was the same tired suicidal feeling he had walking off
the hill in the mortar fire. He was only dimly aware of people shouting, running, scrambling for the door of the tent. “He’s
fuckin’ crazy, man! A fuckin’ frag goin’ off! Jesus Christ!” China, his tongue on his lips, concentrating on the count, tossed
the grenade back to Henry and watched the spoon fly off toward the side of the tent.

Henry, his eyes wide, tossed the grenade back to China and dived out of the door for the wet ground.

China threw the grenade into Henry’s open trunk, slammed down the heavy lid, and threw a flak jacket on top of it. He dived
for the far side of the tent behind a pile of seabags, flinging himself down, rolling off the runway matting of the floor,
facedown onto the dirt just beneath it at the edge of the tent, covering his head with his hands and arms.

The explosion pounded his ears and body.

He lay on the damp dirt. The silence and darkness were gradually filled by painful ringing in his ears, then by the smell
of TNT. His head ached. But he was unharmed. He heard the excited babble of voices outside the tent. He stood up. Someone
opened the now ragged flap of the ruined tent.

Henry walked in. He struck the lighter and coolly looked at the splinters of his once solid ebony trunk, at his shrapnel-pitted
dresser, the ripped seabags. “You gonna pay for this, China.”

China knew Henry wasn’t talking about the furniture. He also knew that although Henry’s image had taken a hit, power always
trumped image—and, he was beginning to learn, ideology. Power was the ability to reward and punish. Henry could reward with
money and drugs. He could punish by withholding money and drugs. A nice combination. Ultimately, however, Henry wielded the
power of punishment held only by a self-selected few. He was willing to murder. China knew that if a man could kill
some
one, everyone knew that he could kill
any
one. The only way to stand up to that kind of power was to be willing to die.

China walked back to the company area, uneasy and apprehensive.

A
helicopter carried Mellas the thirty miles from the hospital ship back to reality, dropping him to the ground at the Dong
Ha airfield. From there, he hitched a ride on an Army truck thirteen kilometers south, across a dreary wasteland of abandoned
rice farms, to Quang Tri, the location of the division’s administrative rear. Mellas could tell that the Army driver was curious
about him. After all, Mellas had a patch over one eye, several boxes of cigars under his arm, and a sword hanging from a complicated
strap over his shoulder.

Finally the driver could contain himself no longer. “Where’d you get the sword?” he asked.

Mellas was amused. “Out in the bush,” he said.

“Ah.”

There were some things he couldn’t tell the uninitiated. For them, the bush should, and would, remain a mystery.

In Bravo Company’s unpainted plywood office a clerk was pecking at a typewriter. He had his shirt off and sweat glistened
on his broad back, which also bore the scar of a bullet exit wound. Cigarette smoke curled limply upward in the humid coastal
air. Above the clerk, covering the entire back wall, was a blown-up picture of a beautiful model in a girdle and brassiere
advertisement. A note had been handwritten by the model on the large poster in neat round script. “To the men of Bravo Company,
First Battalion, Twenty-Fourth Marines. You’re doing a great job.
Love, Cindy.” It was dated February 1967—just two years earlier but in some ways a bygone era.

The clerk told Mellas that Fitch was leaving for Okinawa in the afternoon and filled him in on the staged fragging, the note
wrapped around the grenade, and Simpson’s disarming the company. He also said that Cassidy had come to the rear, ostensibly
to say good-bye to Fitch but more to drink himself into oblivion after having to be the one who actually took the weapons.
Then the clerk said that the company would be skying out tomorrow for Eiger, and that Hawke had been given command. According
to scuttlebutt, Mulvaney himself had given Hawke the job. Mellas said he was glad. Then he walked over to supply to get new
gear for the bush. There he was told he’d have to sign for a deduction from his paycheck in order to pay for his old rifle
before they would issue him a new one.