Part IV of TWCBC. Set in the Ia Drang Valley during the Vietnam War. Bet you have no idea what I just said.

***


It was routine, they said. Nothing special. Just plugging the gap, they said. There will only be three or four snipers, they said. None very experienced, they said. Nothing would happen, they said.

Just routine.

Whoever they were, they were liars.

***

And the ironic thing was that T/3 Specialist Jack Smith used to love Vietnam.

He used to love the vibrant landscape, the colorful sights and sounds of people taking their wares to the market. He used to love the food, the people, the place. He used to love all this, but no longer did. Because now, Vietnam was nothing like the Vietnam of old.

Now, Vietnam was nothing but a wasted, barren piece of land. The villagers shut themselves indoors, not daring to come out. No one wanted to go to the market anymore, for fear of the V.C. It was like a real life version of chess’s ‘stalemate’.

It was empty. Desolate. There just wasn’t any life anymore.

The first time Jack went to Vietnam was when he was five. His father had had a business meeting there and the entire family had gone along. It had been Jack’s very first trip outside the United States of America. In Vietnam, while his dad talked about ‘adult’ things, ‘foreign’, ‘alien’ things, little Jack ran around with the Vietnam urchins, kicking a football around, getting muddy, trying to score goals. He had scored one goal and his teammates cheered him.

The second time he had gone there was on a school trip. Jack had been twelve then. The landscape had changed a bit. There were still urchins on the street, but they were subdued and quiet, and there was no football.

The third time he came over he was sixteen, on another business trip. He was going to his dad’s meeting and had to sit through the entire talk, but there was a window in the room and every chance Jack got, he looked out. There was nobody on the streets and there was no sign of life, save the big pro-government posters which flapped in the wind.

And now he was eighteen, in the U.S. Army, killing the boys he had played football with thirteen years ago. They told him that his company would just be disposing of a few snipers. The younger, newer recruits looked forward to slaughtering a few Cong. The older, grizzled veterans knew that there was something up, because the Cong never worked in numbers less than ten. Jack was somewhere in between, thinking that there would be more than three or four snipers but they would be easy enough to kill. He was not quite a veteran and not quite a rookie either, and didn’t fit in well with either camp.

They walked deeper and deeper into the jungle, the only sound their boots on the ground, crunching the leaves and broken twigs under their feet. Over the few months he had been here, Jack had learnt to tolerate the jungle – not to like it, he had never liked the jungle, but to tolerate it. The jungle could be your enemy, but it could also be your friend. It could sustain life and kill it.

This time, the life it sustained was not good news for Jack and his buddies.

With an ear shattering crack! The trees around them came alive. Private Richards, carrying the radio, gave a little whimper and keeled over dead, a small neat hole in the middle of his forehead. Captain Sheldon screamed for the men to take cover and Jack did, diving to the ground, for that was the only sort of cover he had. They couldn’t hide behind the trees, for that was the problem – the snipers were in the trees themselves, and the Americans had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

They couldn’t fire back because they couldn’t see the enemy. They were spread out over such a great distance they could barely see their own men. They couldn’t do anything but sit there and be slaughtered. Cries, unearthly cries that made Jack cringe with fear and morbid fascination filled the air, pleading for help, pleading for the medics, pleading for their mothers, pleading for anyone, anyone in the last moments of their lives. Jack looked around at the carnage the Cong was wrecking, not because he wanted to, but because something had possessed him to. A man’s belly had been cut right into half, and he was trying to keep his guts inside while he screamed his voice hoarse for a medic. Ten men lay on the ground in a circle, mutilated by the bullets that had killed them. Men were crawling through their friends’ blood, their own blood, searching for an arm of a leg that the mortar shells had cut off.

And the scary thing was that from the time Private Richards got killed to the time the mortars started coming in, only a minute or two had elapsed. They were pinned down and getting massacred right and proper. Jack’s X.O. dropped down, dead, his head gone, his neck just a mass of flesh.

Captain Sheldon had gotten hold of the radio Richards had been carrying. Doing his best to wipe the blood off, he yelled that they were pinned down and they needed support. The operator very kindly replied, “You are not authorized to be on this frequency!” and cut off.

Sheldon called back. “Don’t tell me what I can do and what I can’t do, you nut. We’re being massacred! If I ever get out of this I’ll see to it you won’t even get to sweep the floors of the barracks, you nobhob nitpicking nimcompoop Nazi!”

Jack allowed himself a hint of a smile. Even under fire, Sheldon still used the most unconventional swear words.

Finally the operator came to his senses and said something about a helicopter.

Firing at two hundred feet over the ground in the dark is rarely accurate. You shoot anything that moves and you don’t stop to see what you hit, or if you hit at all. That was what happened in the Ia Drang Valley that day. The heli wounded a lot of American boys, almost as many as the Viet Cong had. How futile, Jack thought bitterly, to die of an American bullet when you’d survived this far! They were falling all around him, American boys and Cong boys alike.

And then suddenly, almost inexplicably, they were gone, and the cries of Medic were the only ones that could be heard.

Jack was surrounded by dead and dying men. One of them was Sergeant Moore. He was still alive, but in a terrible state – his lower body had been virtually ripped apart, and he was bleeding heavily. Jack told him he would make it, told him that he would see his family again, but he knew he was lying, he knew that Sgt. Moore wouldn’t survive the night. Jack had seen his family – a young wife and a two year old daughter – and he knew Moor e had gone through World War Two, the Korean War, all those big conflicts, and now he had been killed by this little war, a war that wasn’t even supposed to be America’s.

Jack still wasn’t injured. He marveled at the fact that all the blood on him wasn’t his. The C.O., propped up besides Sgt. Moore, was going now. His wife’s name was Cathy, he told Jack. His own name wasn’t really Radar, it was Ben. He had kids three and five years old. Their names were Jonathan and James. He had wanted another son, he had wanted to call him Jack, after that quiet, helpful T/3 Smith whom he thought was one of the best men in the unit. He wondered where Jack Smith was now. Was he dead? He wished he could talk to Smith now. To tell him that he had been chosen by top brass to…

The C.O.’s head rolled forward and he was gone. Jack wondered what he had been about to say. Poor Jonathan, poor James. Poor Cathy.

The air was heavy with the smell of blood. And then the mortars started again.

They screamed over Jack’s head, whether American or Vietnamese Jack wasn’t sure. He was beyond the point of caring anyway. One thing he was sure of, though, was that mortars hurt. One such mortar landed in front of Jack, and Jack would have died if Sgt. Moore hadn’t taken the shrapnel. As it was, he felt shrapnel enter the side of his face and his legs, and the fiery, burning, white hot sensation shooting through his body was almost unbearable. All his coherent thoughts stopped coming and it was just screaming, screaming, he didn’t know what he was screaming but he was just doing it. It could have been “My legs, my legs” or “Dear God, Dear God” or “Mom, Mom” over and over again, just lying there and screaming his heart out. Then he stopped screaming because he knew there wasn’t any use screaming, he wasn’t sure how he knew that but he just did, and he also knew somehow that the worst thing he could do was to lose his head. So he crawled, trying to find the mortar squad, trying to find someone, anyone who could help, because he didn’t want to see dead and dying bodies all around him anymore, he didn’t want to see his friends with their heads bloodied or gone anymore, he just wanted someone to talk to, he didn’t want to be alone anymore, he didn’t care if it was American or Cong, he just needed someone, needed…

Someone stuck a gun into his face and he threw himself on the gun. “Thank you, thank you,” he said over and over again, and somewhere along it became “talk to me, talk to me” and he was so glad to be able to hear Sgt. Baker’s rough voice “It’s going to be okay, Smitty, it’s going to be okay” as he cradled Jack’s head in his arms and tried to wrap a bandage around.

Somebody screamed. The Cong were moving around, and each time they found a wounded G.I. they would shout for their mates, and they would cluster around the man who was screaming for help, a scream of “Medic” which would turn to one of “No, no, please, no, please, no, no – ” and then the man would fall silent, and Jack knew what had happened and shivered uncontrollably. He didn’t want them, the Cong, to come here because he knew what would happen if they found him. “Make them go away,” he whimpered, whispered to Baker. “Make ‘em, please, tell ‘em to go away an’ leave me alone, an’ don’ come back.”

At first they thought the worst was over. Jack could hear a bit of a firefight a few miles off, and he thought that his friends, his comrades were here at last, that they were here to save him, to save everybody, to get them out of this place.

But then the sounds of gunfire died off and the foreboding jungle was silent again.

It was thanks to the silence that Jack began to think properly once more. He was ashamed at having acted like a little boy and said so to Baker, who waved a hand and said gruffly, “Don’t let it bother you, Smitty. War can do strange things to a man.” This comforted Jack, and he tried to go to sleep, trying not to remember the faces of the boys he had played soccer with. For those boys would have grown up by now, would have gotten into the Cong, and he might have killed some of them.

All through the night it was a repeating sequence of a scream, desperate and pleading, before a rat-a-tat-tat and more silence. Jack couldn’t sleep, so he crawled over to where the wounded lay. What was left of his company. Nobody spoke. Neither did Jack. He just lay there, eyes wide open, not able to tell who was beside him or in front of him.

It was as if the soldiers knew when they were about to die. One fellow had been hit in the stomach, rather like the guy who Jack saw with his guts spilling out, and that fellow suddenly pulled himself over Jack, splattering him proper with blood, and crawled far, far away. A few minutes later Jack heard a gurgle, and the poor boy struggled for a while before there was no more noise.

Somewhere in the night there was another firefight, and mortar shells began to land around them, some falling short and killing the Americans, sometimes getting a Cong. None of the Americans could care anymore, except for Captain Sheldon, who was yelling into the radio, and when the radio line got cut he continued shouting until a mortar fragment caught him and he slumped over what was left of the radio, unconscious.

Sergeant Baker pulled up next to Jack – at least Jack thought it was Sergeant Baker – and they sat together, watching as a few bullets lit up the night every now and then.

In the wee hours of the morning Sergeant Gale was hit and started screaming for his mother, like Jack had been doing a while ago. He would do this every now and then, screaming. Jack thought he must have lain there for six hours before he died. Perhaps he could have been saved, but nobody could call a heli, nobody could move anyway, nobody could care anyway. Everyone was dying.

In the morning Jack could hear the American boys’ voices, perhaps not 100 feet away from them. Captain Sheldon had recovered from his mortar fragment and was telling them exactly what they could do to themselves and where they could put their rifles, but you could tell that he was pleased to see them all the same. They could only take the walking wounded and the four most terribly wounded men with them, because they only had four stretches. Jack wanted to get out of there so desperately, he didn’t want to stay amongst the naked and the dead, so he said he could walk, but when Sgt. Baker helped him up he could barely stand, let alone move. Still, he was determined to get out, to run away from this hell that he refused point blank to stay, and after a shouting match between him and Sergeant Baker they had no choice but to take him along.

They passed the nearest village and there was a wooden football net with a football just in front of it. It was the village where Jack had had that business meeting a long time ago. A firefight was going on just a few feet away, and a stray bullet, Cong or American he didn’t know, struck Jack.

Like a dream, oblivious to Baker’s shouting, oblivious to everything, Jack wondered over to the ball. All the pain in his legs was gone. He kicked the ball, but he didn’t see if he scored a goal, for he collapsed at that very moment, dead.

Seconds later, the ball rolled gently into the back of the net.

Finis