Sand in the Wind (3 page)

“I guess so.” Kramer waited for Hyatt to speak, but he just sat there with his head in his hands massaging his face. Kramer started to ask, “How was it?” but checked himself and asked instead, “Was it bad?”

“Some of it, some of it was real bad. The rest was all right.
  
.
 
.
 
. Seems most of the time I remember the bad parts.” Hyatt dropped his hands from his face and slowly raised his head. The room was too dark for them to make out each other’s features, but their eyes stood out against their silhouettes, each pair focusing on the other. “I made a mistake once, about two months ago. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.”

Hyatt got up and walked to the door. He placed one hand against the jamb and leaned his weight upon it. Kramer studied his dark outline — a blot against the deep pink evening clouds. Hyatt turned his head halfway back towards Kramer, seemingly looking in both directions at the same time. “It was in those mountains.” He paused, as if wondering whether to continue.

Kramer sensed that he would, and asked himself uneasily, ‘What’s he want from me?’

“My platoon was up there alone. Just before sunset we got a few rounds of sniper fire from above us. Probably from about four hundred yards — too far away to be accurate, just harassment. I should have ignored it. But I wanted to take some sort of action instead of just sitting there. I called in mortars. The rounds fell two hundred yards above us. I adjusted the fire two hundred yards higher up, or at least I thought I did, so did my radioman. Mortars thought I said ‘Come down two hundred,’ all three of them said that’s what it sounded like. A round fell near one of my squads — I should have made sure they were more spread out.
  
.
 
.
 
. Two men were killed instantly, we couldn’t even tell what parts belonged to who. Three more were wounded seriously, and two others slightly. The medivac chopper couldn’t get in because it got dark too fast. Another man died just before dawn. Maybe he was luckier than the two amputees that lived
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
one of them had his balls blown off.”

Kramer said to himself, ‘At least it was short.’ But suddenly Hyatt began speaking again. Kramer wanted to leave or say something to stop him, knowing that he couldn’t do either, asking himself, ‘Why the hell did he pick
me?
’

“I’ll never forget that night,” Hyatt continued, and it was his change of tone that most unnerved Kramer. He was no longer talking, or even speaking. It was as if he were reading lines, lines he had read a thousand times before, each word imperatively following from the one that preceded it. His emotions seemed to stem as much from the words themselves as from their meaning — as if their meaning were lost to him, and could only be found by repeating them again and again. “There wasn’t any moon; you couldn’t see a thing. You wanted to reach out and touch someone. Even if there was somebody right next to you, you were all alone. Two choppers circled right over us for an hour trying to find a place to land. The noise was scaring us shitless.
  
.
 
.
 
. I guess everybody felt better when they gave up and left. I can’t ever remember a time as silent as when those choppers left. We knew those men had to be medivacked, but I know damn well we were all relieved.

“The silence didn’t last long though, maybe not more than a few seconds. One of the wounded moaned real loud — no words, just a moan. That fucking sound cut through me like a razor. Then I heard some garbled words from the same direction. All three of them started mumbling, crying, moaning — one or two of them begging to die. I said to myself — maybe out loud — ‘God, please, please let them die. Don’t torture them.’ They were filled with morphine, but it didn’t do any good. They went on all night.

“The Gooks must have heard them. I guess it gave ’em pleasure — God knows they’ve suffered enough — because they started yelling and laughing at us. I don’t think there was more than four of ’em, but they came in close, maybe twenty-five yards and from different sides. They were yelling and laughing like a bunch of jackals — never fired a shot. We could hear the brush move as they changed positions. It was the
only
time I’ve actually hated them. I’d lost men to them before, good men, but I never hated them.

“A few of my men lost their cool.
What cool?
Nobody had their cool that night. The idea that it was our own mortars that did the damage, that’s what made it worse. You don’t expect to lose men to your own mortars. Some of my men fired at the sounds, giving away their positions by the muzzle flashes, knowing they didn’t have a chance to hit anything. If there had been more than a few Gooks out there, we would have been in real trouble.
  
.
 
.
 
. They didn’t leave till an hour before dawn. All night they kept it up, all fucking night.”

Hyatt paused, and when he began speaking again, it was in a calm, deliberate tone. “It seemed like the sun was never gonna come up. Even when it did, it came real slow. All we could see were shadows, then bushes,
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
trees, rocks,
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
each other’s silhouettes. Nobody even felt like chasing them. We were beaten. We didn’t want revenge, we just wanted to get out of there. When it got barely light enough, we started to clear an LZ for the chopper. Nobody gave any orders — not me, not my squad leaders. Everybody knew what to do. They all moved slowly, with their heads down. We couldn’t look at each other’s faces. Each one of us was alone, trying to figure things out
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
because if what happened that night was real,
God,
what the fuck could be unreal?

“Nobody looked up when we first heard the choppers. Then, very slowly as we directed it in, everyone’s eyes locked on the medivac chopper. The gun ships that came with it didn’t prep-fire the area. I think we were all glad of that. As the medivac landed, we stared at it as if it was some sort of useless miracle. The men carrying the wounded and dead didn’t run towards it. I never saw that before. Always, when a chopper landed, they ran to it. One of the crewmen motioned for them to hurry up, but they ignored him, walking real slow with the stretchers.

“After the medivac took off, I gave the order to move-out — back down to the lowlands and the rest of our company. It took us four hours to get there and my orders were the last words I heard. We marched slowly, and with our heads down — even the point man, and I didn’t tell him to do otherwise. When we got back, nobody from the other platoons came up to us, they knew better. Usually my men would break up into groups. Not this time. Everyone just went his own way.”

Hyatt took his arm from the door jamb, lowered one foot to the top step, hesitated, and then walked out the door without looking back.

Kramer’s eyes followed him. He was still staring out the door when Forest came through it shaking his head. Upon seeing Kramer, he mumbled, “That Hyatt’s a weird one. Can’t get as much as a nod out of him.” Kramer made no reply, still wondering why Hyatt had chosen to tell the story to him. “You wanna go to chow?”

Kramer looked up, for the first time seeming to notice Forest. “In a few minutes.” He slowly pulled out a cigarette and leaned back on the cot, feet still touching the floor.

2.
Hill 65

The convoy left An Hoa for Da Nang at eight in the morning. An hour and a half later a jeep, a six-by carrying troops, and two more six-bys carrying supplies, separated from the main body of the convoy as it passed Hill 65. The four vehicles proceeded up a steep dirt road that ran the length of one side of the hill. Just before it reached the top, the road hair-pinned to the left and was bordered by a row of six 105-millimeter guns set under large sheets of camouflage netting. A cliff of sand rose fifteen feet above the opposite side of the road. The backs of five wood-and-screen barracks were visible atop it. The vehicles followed the curve to the left and passed in front of the barracks. Twenty yards farther down the road, a long line of Marines passed sandbags to the edge of a barbwire fence where other Marines were building bunkers and gun emplacements. At the crest of a sharp rise, two six-inch guns sat upon their tanklike vehicles. The crews of both guns lethargically uncrated huge shells and piled them in pyramids against a dirt embankment. The newly arrived vehicles proceeded another fifty yards before stopping at the center of the hill where wooden buildings clustered along both sides of the road.

As soon as the six-by stopped, the Marines in it jumped down and plodded off in various directions. A jeep sped by honking its horn at a lanky Marine with a bushy mustache. He waved to the driver and called out, “Delaney,” then turned around to the two men walking behind him. “That’s Delaney. He used to be in Third Platoon, but after his second Purple Heart he got pulled out of the bush and they made him a jeep driver. It’s a skating job.
  
.
 
.
 
. We’ve got to go back to the hootches we passed on the way up here. I’ll show you the gunny’s hootch when we get there.”

The taller of the two men in back of him nodded, and the other said, “Corporal Harmon, I better get my knee checked. It’s killing me.”

Harmon turned around thinking, ‘Hope I don’t get this worthless motherfucker in my squad.’ “Listen Graham, the first thing you and Chalice got to do is check in with the company gunnery sergeant,
then
you can start worrying about your knee.”

When the three of them reached the hootches at the far end of the hill, Harmon pointed to the second one and told Chalice and Graham they would find the gunny inside. He then walked over to a powerfully built soldier sitting on the steps of the next hootch cleaning his rifle. “Sarge, did you miss me?”

The sergeant glanced up, and answered gruffly, “It’s about fucking time you got back.” As he stared at Harmon he began to smile and his eyes took on a slightly Asiatic cast.

Harmon reached down and started playing with the sergeant’s light brown hair. “Did you really miss me that much, Hunky?”

The sergeant looked up sneering, “If I can’t fuck it, I don’t miss it. But I’ll tell you right now, if you don’t get your goddamn paw off my head, you’ll be beating-off left-handed for the rest of your life.”

Harmon snickered as he sat down. “What’s been going on since I left?”

“Nothing much. We’ve still got the same fucked-up captain, the same fucked-up gunny, and the word is we’re gonna get a new lieutenant; and chances are he’ll be just as fucked-up as the rest of them.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. How was Japan?”

“Great. If I hadn’t run outa coins, I woulda went AWOL and stayed another week.”

“Yeah, I was gonna go there on my second R and R — went to Australia on my first — but I’m getting so short now I don’t wanna waste the money. Anything I don’t spend on whores, I’ll spend on a car when I get back to the world.”

“I know what you mean. The first day I was there I went ape-shit trying to fuck everything in sight — blew about two hundred dollars. But I finally found one I dug, so I stayed with her the rest of the time. Did a lot of sightseeing.”

“Catch the siff?”

“Don’t know yet. We’ll see in a couple of days.” Harmon rose to his feet. “I’m gonna ditch this pack and crash for a while. Don’t let anybody wake me up.”

“Yeah.
  
.
 
.
 
. Hey listen, if you don’t have lines tonight, I know where we can hear some records and drink a few beers.”

“Sounds good. I’ll see you later.”

The sergeant started to put his rifle back together when he saw two pairs of new boots walking towards the steps. Not looking up, he thought, ‘Here comes some more boot motherfuckers wantin’ a chance to get their heads blown off.’

The two new men stopped in front of him and Graham asked, “Do you know where we can find Sergeant Hunky?”

“Sergeant Hunky, my ass, you
dumb
cocksueker.” Graham took a step backward and started to speak. Before he could get a word out, the sergeant asked through a set of tightly clenched teeth, “Who told you to say that, that sonofabitch Martin?”

“The company gunnery sergeant, sir,” Graham stammered.

“That’s Martin, stupid. Let me tell you something right off the bat, pal. Anytime you do something that bastard tells you, you got a damn good chance of getting your ass blown away; and around here your chances of going home in a box are pretty good regardless.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Since when do you say
‘sir’
to a sergeant? You’re not in boot camp any more. My name is Kovacs, Sergeant Kovacs.
  
.
 
.
 
. You both grunts, riflemen?”

Chalice nodded his head and Graham answered, “Yes, sir.”

“You aren’t too bright, are you? What’s your name?”

“Private Graham.”

“And yours?”

“Lance Corporal Chalice.”

“Chalice, you’ll be in Alpha Squad. Find Corporal Harmon, but don’t wake him up if he’s asleep. Graham, you’ll be in Bravo. Sugar Bear’s your squad leader. He’s around somewhere. You can drop your gear in the hootch. It belongs to our platoon. I guess that wino told you you’re in Second Platoon.”

Chalice and Graham walked up the steps and into the hootch. A narrow aisle ran down its center. The rest of the room was taken up by two rows of cots covered with packs, rifles, and other equipment. As Graham stopped to take his pack off, he said, “That guy’s a real bastard. I’m staying away from him.”

Chalice kept walking towards the far end of the hootch where Harmon was sitting. “I’m in your squad.”

“Glad to have you. Make room on one of the racks to drop your shit.” Chalice hesitated, saying, “I don’t want anybody to get pissed off because I’ve got my gear on their rack. Where can I get my own?”