Up Country (50 page)

I looked at the water and said, “This is a clean mountain river, so we took a chance and filled our canteens here and drank directly out of the river.”

I walked along the rocky bank until I reached the natural rock ford I remembered. Susan followed, and we stepped into the river on the first rock. The water came up to our ankles, and it was as cold as I remembered it. We crossed the river and scrambled up the opposite bank.

I said, “So we crossed here, and what do we see? About ten dead enemy soldiers lying on the riverbank here, some of them half in the water. They were decomposing into the river, all green and bloated, and one guy’s jaw was just hanging by a piece of muscle and it was resting on his shoulder, with a full set of teeth . . . it was very weird.” I added, “Everyone emptied their canteens. One guy vomited.” I knelt down and scooped some water in my hands and stared at it, but didn’t drink.

Susan was quiet.

I stood and turned away from the river. I could see where the trail began through the thick vegetation, and I climbed the bank onto the trail.

Susan followed, but said, “Paul, this is the kind of place where there could still be land mines.”

“I don’t think so. This is probably a well-used ford, and this trail is also well traveled. But we’ll be careful.” I started up the trail and Susan followed. “We’ll do a leech check later.”

She didn’t reply.

“So, we’re moving up this trail, and something moves in the bush. But it’s not Chuck, it’s a deer. I’m near the front of the lead platoon, and like idiots, we all fire at the deer. We miss, and we start chasing it through this bush while the rest of the platoon is jogging up the trail to keep up with us.”

I kept moving up the trail that rose into the thick woods and up into the foothills.

“The company commander, Captain Ross, was back by the river with the other two platoons, and he thought we were in contact, but my platoon leader radioed that we were chasing a deer. This got us a chewing out from the captain, who was now leading the rest of the company to our rescue.” I laughed. “I mean, totally nuts.”

I kept moving up the rising trail. The rain forest was very thick here, and I kept thinking I felt land leeches falling on my neck.

Susan said, “Where are we going?”

“There’s something up here I want to see. I can’t believe I found this place.”

We passed by a few bomb craters that were now choked with trees and bush, but which had been fresh earth back then.

Finally, we got to a clearing that I remembered, and which was still pocked with bomb craters. Across the open clearing was a wall of rain forest, and about a hundred meters beyond the forest rose a tier of steep hills. This was the place. I walked toward the forest.

I stood at the wall of vegetation and said to Susan, “So, about twenty of us are chasing this deer and blasting away, and the deer runs right into this treeline, which then had an opening that we thought was another trail. We follow, and all of a sudden, we break into the open, but it’s not a natural jungle clearing because we see a lot of cut tree stumps, and we realize it’s an enemy base camp, hidden in the jungle, and also hidden from the air with the high triple-canopy vegetation overhead to form this huge sort of sky dome. Sunlight is filtering into these acres of open space, and it’s totally surreal. Huts, trucks, hammocks, open air kitchens, a field hospital, a damaged tank, and lots of anti-aircraft weapons, just sitting there.”

I tried to find a break in the vegetation, but couldn’t. I said to Susan,
“It’s in there.” I pushed through the thick growth and got tangled in a wait-a-minute vine, which I cut with my Swiss army knife.

“Paul,
this
is not a well-traveled path. You’re going to get yourself killed.”

“You go back.”

“No,
you
come back. That’s enough.”

“Just stay there, and I’ll call for you.” I pushed farther into the bush, knowing that this place could be littered with cluster bombs that had a habit of exploding when disturbed. But I needed to see this old base camp.

Finally, the bush thinned out, and I stood at the edge of what had once been a huge enemy base camp under the triple-canopy jungle. There was so little sunlight in here that the vegetation wasn’t very thick or tall, and I could see all the way to the rising hills about a hundred meters away.

Susan came up behind me and asked, “Is this it?”

“Yes. This was the North Vietnamese base camp. Look over there. You see those bamboo huts? This whole place was filled with huts, ammunition, trucks, weapons . . .”

I stepped farther into the old camp and looked up at the jungle canopy. “They’d actually hoisted camouflage nets up there. Very clever people.”

Susan didn’t reply.

“So, we charge in here after this deer, about twenty of us, and we stop dead in our tracks. The funny thing is that we’re chasing dinner, but the North Viets must have thought we were attacking with hundreds of troops because they’d all di di mau’ed. Gone. Someone noticed that a cooking fire was still smoking.”

I moved a few more meters into the camp and said, “We’re moving very cautiously now, tree by tree, stump by stump. We’d just scored a big hit by finding this camp, and my platoon leader, Lieutenant Merrit, radios the company commander with the good news, not mentioning the deer this time. But as it turned out, Charlie hadn’t really left, and they were hiding around the perimeter of this camp, mostly on those steep hills over there. But we’re not totally stupid either, so we get down behind the tree trunks and the stumps, and do what’s called recon by fire, which is basically shooting the place up to see if we can draw any fire in return before we get too deep into this compound. Sure enough, one of the bad guys loses his nerve or got overanxious, and fires back before the whole platoon is in the killing zone. All of a sudden, we’re in this huge firefight, and we’re firing grenades and rockets into these drums of gasoline, which are
blowing up, and ammo dumps are blowing up, and by now, the rest of the company is right behind us.”

I walked farther into this overgrown camp and looked around. It was obvious that metal scavengers had been here because there wasn’t a shard of steel left anywhere—no blown-up gas drums, no wrecked trucks, and not even a scrap of shrapnel on the ground.

Susan came up beside me and stared at these open acres beneath the jungle canopy. “This is incredible . . . I mean, there must be places like this all over Vietnam.”

“There are. They managed to hide a half million men and women at any given time in jungle camps like this, in the Cu Chi tunnels and other tunnels, in villages along the coast, in the swamps of the Mekong Delta . . . they’d come out to fight when and where they wanted, on their terms . . . but this time, we trapped them in this valley, and they had to stand and fight on our terms . . .”

I moved farther into the deserted, spooky camp. “Unfortunately, it turned out that we’d tangled with a much bigger force than ours, so we broke contact and got the hell out of there. We moved back toward the river, but they kept trying to get around us to cut us off, and we kept blasting our way out. We called in helicopter gunships and artillery, which is the only thing that saved us from being surrounded and annihilated that day. It was a real mess, but the worst was yet to come. Our battalion commander, a lieutenant colonel, had been wounded in the air assault, and his replacement, a major, really wanted to be a lieutenant colonel, so for two days, he ordered us to counterattack, supported by artillery and gunships. But we were still outnumbered, and by Day Three, we’d lost a third of the company, killed and wounded, but we retook the camp, or so we thought. All of a sudden, we hear something strange over there at the far end of the camp, and out of that jungle comes two tanks, and they weren’t ours because we had no tanks in the valley. None of us had ever run into an enemy tank, and we’re . . . frozen. The tanks had twin 57 millimeter rapid-fire cannon mounted on turrets, and they open up. One guy gets hit square in the chest with a cannon shell, and he disintegrates. Two guys get hit by flying shrapnel, and everyone is diving for cover or running, but you can’t outrun a tank. Then, one guy takes his M-72 anti-tank rocket—this little thing in a cardboard tube—stands, adjusts his aiming device very coolly as these tanks are coming at us, and he fires. The rocket hits the turret of the lead tank, and
the gunner is blown out of the turret. Another guy fires a rocket and knocks out the other tank’s tread. The enemy tankers get out and start running, and we mow them down. Now we have two tank kills, and the captain radios this to battalion headquarters, and we’re heroes. So, do we get relieved and go back to A Luoi? No, the new battalion commander is trying to get a reputation or something, and he orders us to push on. That’s not what we had in mind, but the guy is slick, and he tells us on the radio that according to intelligence reports, there may be American POWs kept in bamboo cages farther into the hills. So this motivates us, and off we go.”

I walked toward where I thought we’d hit the tanks, and Susan followed. “We climbed this steep hill over here and pursued what was left of the enemy, and kept a lookout for those POW cages.” I took a breath and continued. “By Day Six, we’d had about a dozen fights with the North Viets as they withdrew. We actually did find some bamboo cages, but they were empty. By now, we were completely exhausted, overcome with the worst kind of combat fatigue where you can’t sleep at night, you can’t eat, and you have to remind yourself to drink water. We’re barely speaking to one another because there’s nothing to say. Every day more people are getting killed or wounded, and the group becomes smaller, until platoons and squads no longer exist, and we’re just a horde of armed men without any real leadership or command structure . . . all the officers are dead or wounded, except the company commander, Captain Ross, a twenty-five-year-old who’s the old man of the company by now, and all the sergeants are dead or wounded . . . the medics are all wounded, and so are the radio operators and the machine gunners, so we’re trying to remember what we learned in basic training about radios, the M-60 machine gun, and first aid . . . and we keep pushing on . . .”

I stared at the hills in the distance.

Susan said in a soft voice, “Paul, we can go back now.”

“Yeah . . . well, we should have asked to be relieved or reinforced, and maybe the company commander did, though I don’t remember . . . but this running battle had taken on a life of its own, and I think it had a lot to do with killing more of the people who’d killed and wounded so many of us . . . it was like a fight to the finish, and as frightened and fatigued as we were, all we wanted to do was kill more of them. In fact, something very strange had happened to us.”

I stood. “It went on for a total of seven days, and by the seventh day,
you couldn’t guess that we were nice American kids from a nice, clean country. I mean, we literally had blood on our hands, on our ripped fatigues, we had seven-day beards, and hollow bloodshot eyes, and filth on our bodies, and we weren’t thinking about shaves and showers, or food or bandages . . . we were thinking about killing another gook.”

We both stood there and finally Susan said, “I understand why you wouldn’t want to talk about this.”

I looked at her and said, “I’ve told this story a few times. This is not the story I don’t like to talk about.”

I walked fifty meters farther into the camp, and Susan followed. “We moved deeper into these hills, and on the seventh day, we were patrolling down a ridgeline, looking for another fight. The company commander put out flank security—two guys in the ravines on either side of this ridge. I was one of the guys. Me and this other guy scramble down into this ravine, and we’re walking parallel to the company, who we could still see on the ridgeline above us. But then the ravine got deeper, the ridgeline turned, and the other guy was way out in front of me, and now I’ve lost visual contact with him and the rest of the company. So, I’m walking by myself, which is not a good thing to do, and I’m trying to catch up to the guy in front of me, but as it turned out, he’d scrambled back up the side of the ridge to try to find the company.”

I moved to the base of the steep hill where there were still some huts, collapsed and overgrown with vines. I looked up at the hill. “It was over there, on the other side of this hill . . . I’m walking by myself, and I decided it was time to climb back up the ridge and find everyone. Just as I was about to do that, I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye, and standing on the other side of the ravine, not twenty meters away, is a North Vietnamese soldier with an AK-47 rifle, and he’s looking at me.”

I took a deep breath and continued, “So . . . we’re staring at each other, and this guy is dressed in tiger fatigue pants, but he’s bare-chested, and he has bloody bandages wrapped around his chest. My rifle is not at the ready, and neither is his. So, now it’s a matter of who gets off the first shot, but to be honest, I was frozen with fear, and I thought he was, too. But then . . . the guy throws his rifle down, and I started to breathe again. He was surrendering, I thought. But no. He starts walking toward me and I raise my rifle and yell, ‘Dung lai!’ Stop. Halt. But he keeps coming at me, and I yell again, ‘Dung lai!’ He then pulls a long machete out of his belt. He’s saying
something, but I can’t figure out what the hell he’s trying to tell me. By this time, I’d had enough of this, and I was going to blow him away. But then I see he’s pointing to the entrenching tool—the shovel hanging from my web belt, and all of a sudden, I realize that he wants to go hand-to-hand.”

I felt a cold sweat forming on my face, and I listened to the birds and the insects in the trees, and I was back in that ravine again.

I said to Susan, or to myself, “He wants to go hand-to-hand, and he’s spitting out these words. I didn’t understand a thing he was saying, but I knew exactly what he was saying. He was saying, ‘Let’s see how brave you are without your artillery, your gunships, your jet fighters.’ He was saying, ‘You fucking coward. Let’s see if you have any real balls, you overfed, overindulged, fucking American pig.’ That’s what he was saying. Meanwhile, he’s coming closer, and he’s not even ten feet from me now, and I looked into his eyes, and I’ve never seen hate like that before or since. I mean, this guy is totally around the bend, he’s been wounded, and he’s alone like maybe he’s the last survivor of his unit . . . and he’s motioning for me to come closer, you know, like in a schoolyard fight. Come on, punk. Let’s see if you have any balls. Take the first swing . . . then . . . I have no idea why . . . but I threw my rifle down . . . and he stops and smiles. He points again to my shovel, and I nod to him.”