Sand in the Wind (61 page)

The exertion of marching warmed the men’s bodies and made them oblivious to the chilling rain. Dark clouds limited visibility to less than a kilometer. While this made those at the point of the columns edgy about the possibility of an ambush, it had little effect on the men of Second Platoon. They were at the tail end of the formation and it was only necessary for them to be able to see the man marching directly to their front.

The object of the patrol was, as nearly always, a careful search of a large patch of high ground. The men knew the march would be a long one, and they were grateful to be free of their packs. They quickly grew tired anyway. Before they had gone a kilometer, the rain again began to chill their bodies. As usual, their fatigue gave rise to a resentment of the constant marching and its seeming purposelessness; but as this fatigue increased, their resentment waned and was replaced by acceptance. The sight of their friends enduring the same torture as themselves forced them to endure it also. Regardless of their curses and complaints, each man was determined to continue. The root of this determination was as always, their individual pride.

At ten o’clock Trippitt ordered the first break. The columns halted in the center of a field of rice paddies. The men sat down on dikes, making no effort to draw their feet out of the water. The heavy rain would have made this purposeless. Only a few of them bothered to open cans of fruitcake or date bread. The commander of the point platoon tried to match the obscured outline of some high ground with the topography printed on his map. As soon as he was sure they were headed in the right direction, he radioed Trippitt and was told to move out. The men viewed the short duration of the break indifferently. Lack of movement had caused them to become colder. It was merely a question of being tired and relatively warm or rested and cold. They also deceived themselves into thinking of the patrol as something that could be gotten over with instead of an allday maneuver as most turned out to be.

Shortly before twelve o’clock, they reached the high ground that was the object of the patrol. A tedious sweep through it revealed a small but heavily populated ville. Though this was no surprise, the sight of it dejected them because they knew they would have to search it before starting back to camp.

Pablo and Sinclaire were standing security inside one of the hootches when Appleton took cover from the rain and joined them. He walked over to a small fire in the corner, asking Sinclaire gruffly, “No chance you had enough brains to bring that whiskey your bitch sent you?”

“She ain’t a bitch, she’s my girl; and there’s a chance I brought it, but none of you getting any.”

Appleton’s tone immediately became more friendly. “No shit, did you really bring it?”

“Won’t do
you
no good one way or the other.”

“Hey man, you sure were ready to drink with me when it was my bottle.”

Sinclaire remembered how free Appleton had been with his own liquor, but was still hesitant to share the little he had left. Sinclaire also realized that Pablo would resent his drinking on a patrol, and he was now sorry he’d admitted to bringing it. “I’ll let you have some when I drink some.”

“What’s wrong with right now?”

Sinclaire glanced at Pablo, receiving nothing more than an indifferent look. Pablo didn’t want Sinclaire drinking and he knew Sinclaire realized this, but he refused to play the part of Sinclaire’s nursemaid. “We’ll be heading back soon,” Sinclaire said to Appleton.

“Not for a while yet. C’mon, I’m freezing.”

Childs and Hamilton had just walked into the hootch, and Childs asked, “What do you want him to do, put his arms around you?”

“No, but I’d like to get my arms around
him.
The bastard’s got some whiskey and he’s holding out on us.”

“No shit?” Hamilton asked with surprise. “How ’bout it, Sinclaire? I could use some warmin’-up myself.”

If he took out his liquor now, there would be even less for himself. But Sinclaire didn’t feel right about refusing to share it. He withdrew the plastic squeeze-bottle from his pocket. As he lifted it to his mouth, Pablo said coldly, “Not here — with all these lifers around. Take it in the bunker.” Sinclaire led Appleton, Hamilton, and Childs into the bunker. They sat down quickly and started passing the liquor around. When it was Hamilton’s turn, he held the plastic bottle in front of his mouth and squeezed a long stream of liquor down his throat. The warmth of it hit him immediately, and he fell back against the wall of the bunker in satisfaction. It was too dark to see what he was doing, so those around him became startled when he scrambled away from the wall and yelled, “
Dung lai!
”
All of them backed towards the entrance as they asked him what had happened. “The wall gave when I leaned against it.”

Childs was far from unfrightened, but he couldn’t resist saying, “Hey man, people like you shouldn’t drink.”

Hamilton ignored him and again yelled, “
Dung lai!
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
I tell you it gave and then pushed out again.”

The others were now convinced that Hamilton was neither mistaken nor kidding. Appleton could make out two silhouettes in the dim light of the entrance. “Some of you guys get out of here.” Childs and Sinclaire crawled out of the bunker while Appleton and Hamilton moved cautiously towards the wall. Appleton reached it first, and he shouted, “
Dung lai!
”
while pressing against it. “You’re right, it’s phony. Stay back and cover me.” Appleton began to shake the wall while cautioning, “
Dung lai.
” It continued to give without falling, and he became more and more nervous as he tried to bring it down. Knowing the darkness would hide whoever was there even after the wall was removed, he was anxious to get whatever was going to happen over with.

Hamilton was also nervous, and he said, “Let’s get out and throw a frag in first.” Part of the wall collapsed upon Appleton before Hamilton had finished speaking.

“
Dung lai,
” he cautioned while crawling behind it. He heard the nervous breathing of someone too frightened to muffle it. A quick grab forward filled his hand with flesh, and he dragged the unresisting body from behind the wall. “I got him,” he yelled, pulling his prisoner towards the entrance. “See if there’s any more of them.”

When Appleton emerged from the bunker, he was shocked to find he was holding a frightened and beautiful young girl. Immediately, men gathered around to find out what had happened. Hemrick walked over, and Pablo said to him, “I thought you checked out that bunker?”

“I did. You saw me. I was down there ten minutes.”

“You must have been beating-off,” Childs commented.

Their attention was drawn away from Hemrick by Hamilton’s excited voice from within the bunker. “Sonofabitch, look what I got!” He crawled out with a grin on his face and an SKS in his hand. The girl was forgotten as the men gathered around the rifle. “Been wantin’ one of these babies since I got here.”

Without malice, Appleton said, “Hey man, I was the one that did the dirty work.”

Realizing that this was true, Hamilton said, “I’ll flip you for it — two out of three and I’ll give you the first.” Appleton agreed, whereupon Hamilton produced a coin and won two straight flips and the rifle.

Appleton was still cursing and kicking his helmet at anybody in sight when Trippitt came over to look at the prisoner. He ordered the men standing around her to get on with the search. A few minutes later, someone in Third Platoon discovered a cache of rice. It had been buried in a huge urn. The men probed the ground around it with sticks, uncovering two more urns. Another half hour yielded nothing, but Trippitt ordered his men to continue searching. They did so grudgingly, knowing there would be barely enough time to get back to camp before dusk. Trippitt was too excited by the find to be worried about this now. Regretting that the hootches were too wet to be burned, he decided to send all the villagers to the detention camp at Due Due. The weather made it impossible to call in a helicopter. They would have to be marched back to camp with the company. He ordered his men to round them up. When this was done, Kramer reported to Trippitt, thinking that the company would now start back to camp. Instead, Trippitt told Kramer to make sure that his men were conducting a thorough search. “Don’t you think we ought to head back?”

Kramer had hesitated asking this, but to his surprise Trippitt merely glanced at his watch and said without irritation, “In a few minutes.”

Forest then walked up to him with a Chinese Communist grenade. “We found about a dozen of them in the roof of a hootch.” Trippitt immediately ordered a search of every roof. The men did so grudgingly, while worrying about getting caught out in the open at night. Most of them were soon gathered under the protection of the hootches, halfheartedly poking their rifle barrels into the roofs.

A half hour passed without the men uncovering any more weapons or rice. Feeling he had waited until the last possible moment, Trippitt reluctantly ordered the company to form up. The presence of over thirty villagers prevented him from arranging his men in two columns as on the march from camp. Instead, he formed them into a single column with the villagers placed in the middle of it and Second Platoon on the tail end. Aside from a few young mothers with babies in their arms, all the peasants were small children or old people. Many of them had been able to gather a few possessions together, and they clutched them nervously as they were herded around. While their stares had been passive and sometimes hostile within the ville, their eyes now darted around apprehensively.

After only a few minutes of marching, it became clear that the villagers were incapable of keeping pace with the Marines. Trippitt reluctantly ordered the point to slow down. The rain increased, and some of the children started to cry. The men became even more worried about making it back to camp before dark. Many of them thought to themselves that they wouldn’t have been stupid enough to wait as long as Trippitt had.

The sky grew darker as much from the angle of the sun as from the clouds that hid it. The point man could see no farther than twenty or thirty yards to his front. After they had marched for over an hour, the cries of the children became less frequent. Then suddenly, there was a burst of rifle fire at the head of the column. The rain muffled the sounds of the shots, making it impossible for those men in the rear to tell whether they were AK-47’s or M-16’s. Each man searched the grayness around him in fear, knowing that if it had been an ambush, it couldn’t have come at a more dangerous time. A medivac chopper would find it almost impossible to make it to them; and if one did, it was doubtful it could pick up the wounded without being shot down.

No medivac was needed. The point man and two of the men behind him were beyond help. The haze before them had suddenly exploded with the muzzle flashes of numerous AK-47’s. The shots had been fired not at the soldiers themselves, but at the sound of their movement through the rice paddies. The point platoon had returned the fire in the direction of the previous muzzle flashes, then swept towards them. Thirty yards away, they found a wounded NVA soldier. He had been shot in the buttocks as he fled.

It was only a few minutes before the column started moving again. The platoon formerly at the point took up the tail end. There had been no time or material to make stretchers, so four of the stronger men carried the three bodies and the prisoner. Third Platoon moved ahead of the villagers while Second Platoon placed itself behind them. Unable to see the peasants through the haze, most of the men in the column could hear their frightened words and the cries of their children. Many of them had at first felt pity for the villagers. Now all they felt was resentment. The sky had grown menacingly darker, leaving no chance of a return to camp before nightfall. The noise that the peasants were making increased the probability of a second ambush. It also added to the confusion. Every man knew that this confusion would multiply if the company were attacked again.

Each minute made them more vulnerable, and the knowledge of this increased their edginess and shortened their tempers. Trippitt, the primary reason for the danger they were undergoing, was all but forgotten as they listened to the noise that the villagers were making. It was these peasants who now endangered their lives. Every few minutes a frustrated Marine would make matters worse by shouting at them to shut up, doing so in a language the villagers didn’t understand. Even if they had understood, they would have been too confused and nervous to obey.

Kramer marched on disgustedly. Each labored breath left him unsatisfied. He felt as if he were choking on the darkness that surrounded him. Despite the rain, he was sweating profusely and could feel the thick salt slime that coated his entire body. Everytime he stepped over a dike he wanted to say, “
Fuck this shit!
” and sit down upon it until he could no longer hear the villagers, the men around him, and his own heavy breathing. Tony 5 was only a few yards away, but the darkness made it necessary for Kramer to follow solely by the sound of Tony’s footsteps. He felt the rotting skin being rubbed away from his insteps, and knew that his socks were already soaked with blood. Kramer began to dread each step and the painful necessity of pulling his feet from the mud. Yet he realized that many of his men had far worse cases of immersion foot. The eerie luminescence of his watch dial caught his eye. It was almost eight o’clock. At least it wouldn’t be long before they were back at the perimeter.

Chalice scanned the blackness around him, expecting it to explode at any moment with bursts of rifle fire. He cringed each time the peasants made a sound and silently cursed them. Stumbling forward, he felt as if he were dragging all of them behind him on a rope while they cried out and pulled in different directions. It was as if he would never be free of them, and would soon collapse and in turn be dragged by them. He heard Hamilton shout at one of the villagers, and was actually surprised by the fact that they were in front of him. It wasn’t until Chalice bumped into him that he realized Hamilton was bent over, trying to lift an old woman off the ground. He did so roughly, and Chalice saw the old woman’s hand reach back to grab a battered pot at his feet. The absurdity of that pathetic act made Chalice want to cry out in laughter. There was a smile on his face as he mumbled, “A pot, a lousy fucking pot.” Barely able to see Hamilton reach for it, Chalice heard the pot splash into the water a few yards away. Hamilton continued to urge the old woman on, now almost compassionately.