The jungle was silent; even the insects sensed that a powerful, destructive force was passing their hiding places along the narrow deer path.
At over seven hundred pounds, she was very large for a Southeast Asian tiger, and would have been a perfect trophy for any big-game hunter except for the large patch of burned hide that covered her right hip. She had been hunting six months earlier and had just made a kill when the B-52 strike hit. A large, burning piece of hardwood tree hit her with the force of a truck, breaking her hipbone in eight places. The kill she had just made saved her life as she lay near it for three weeks in severe pain. For thirty meters around, the jungle was leveled from the blows of her paws and the crunching of her large teeth as she fought the pain and slowly healed. Her hip fused together with a bizarre twenty-degree bend in it that made it impossible for her to hunt deer and wild boar. She could no longer use her rear legs to leap, nor could she sprint for the necessary charge to capture wild game.
The bomb strike had lasted less than five minutes in the triple-canopied jungle that bordered the South Vietnamese valley of the A Shau and had been planned because of a reconnaissance team’s sighting of a large North Vietnamese force moving across the border toward the A Shau Valley. The F-4 pilots had executed the routine mission without reporting any ground fire or antiaircraft activity, which almost always signaled that the enemy was long gone from the area. A report of ground fire during the bombing mission would have brought at least one infantry company from the 1st Cavalry Division to sweep the area for dead enemy soldiers and a body count for headquarters. It was ironic because six of the five-hundred-pound bombs had landed dead center on a sleeping NVA Sapper Company that was assigned to harass the large American bases surrounding Da Nang to the west.
The tigress increased her pace as she drew near to the site where the explosions had occurred the night before. Her deformed hip joint and bones changed what would have been normally a beautiful, graceful gait into a pathetic hobble, but she hadn’t missed a meal in six months and knew that when the loud noises stopped, there would be something dead to eat nearby.
The five-hundred-pound bombs had torn through the crude overnight shelters the NVA soldiers had erected. Most of the Sapper Company had been sleeping in their hammocks two or three feet off the ground, and the fragments from the bombs had cut through them like a chain saw gone wild. The few survivors of the bombing were stumbling around in shell shock when the first rays of daylight filtered through the trees.
She paused in the jungle at the edge of the bomb crater and smelled the good odor of bloody flesh. A slight movement caught her eye near a pile of cut bamboo, and she hobbled through the jungle around the small clearing over to where she could have a better view. A man lay propped up against the side of the wet, earthy-smelling hole in the ground and was trying to tie a piece of cloth around his bare waist. She crouched low and growled; live meat that couldn’t run away was always better than meat that was already dead.
He looked up just in time to see the big cat hobbling across the small clearing toward him on three legs. The NVA captain reached for his pistol and almost had it out of its holster when she reached him.
The door of the TWA charter flight opened and let in the bright daylight. Private First Class David Woods remained in his seat with his seat belt still fastened as a symbolic gesture that he really didn’t want to leave the airplane. He wasn’t the only one. The jet was filled with soldiers being assigned to Vietnam, and the aircraft had just landed on the tarmac of the huge U.S. Army airfield at Saigon. A sergeant wearing a neat, short-sleeved khaki uniform and carrying a clipboard entered the civilian aircraft.
“Who’s the group leader?” The sergeant looked down the aisle at the familiar scared faces.
“Here, Sergeant!” A tall armor captain stood up and walked down the aisle. He handed the sergeant the flight manifest, with all of the soldiers’ names listed on it in alphabetical order.
“When I call out your name, leave the aircraft and board one of the buses that are parked outside. We’ll be taking all of you to Camp Alpha, where you’ll be in-processed and assigned to a unit.” To Woods, the sergeant’s voice sounded bored.
There were over two hundred men on the aircraft, and since his last name started with W, Woods knew that it would be a while before he would leave the comfort and security of the seat he had been sitting in for the past twenty-two hours. He caught quick glimpses of the men as they passed his seat, and he could see that all of them, even the officers, had large, wet sweat stains under their armpits.
“Woods…” The sergeant looked up from the manifest. “Woods, David!”
He heard the voice calling his name as if from out of a tunnel a million miles away and heard himself answering, “Here, Sergeant!” As he walked toward the exit, he saw that the opening was shining brightly, as if to give him direction to Vietnam and the war that was being fought on the other side. David took a deep breath and stepped through the archway. His senses registered three things almost simultaneously: the heat smashing against his face; a strong smell of jet exhaust; and a new smell, the smell of Vietnam.
“Shag your ass, Woods!” An arm waved to him from the front seat of the first bus in line.
Woods moved quickly toward the closing bus door and squeezed in between the rubber safety guards. He gave the Air Force driver a dirty look and then slipped down on the seat Barnett had saved for him. “Thanks, Spencer.”
“Fuck it! I’d have done the same for a nigger.” Barnett looked out of the window as he spoke. Cloth tape had been put around the edges of each of the bus windows and then crossed through the center. Woods guessed that the tape was put there to keep the glass from flying through the bus in case of a mortar or bomb attack on the air base. The tape was the first real sign that he was in a war zone and not another Stateside military base.
“You should ease up on the name-calling, Spencer. We’re all in the same boat over here.”
“It ain’t no different here or back in the States—a nigger is a nigger—except here you have to watch your back more often!” Spencer Barnett kept looking out of the window at the long rows of soldiers waiting under an open-air tin-roofed building for the TWA jet to refuel so that they could load up for the trip back to the States.
Woods looked around his seat and saw that most of the blacks were sitting together near the back of the bus and out of hearing distance. “Those guys must be going home.” David pointed at the group under the tin roof.
“Yeah!” Barnett grinned. “When I go back, I’m going to have so fucking many ribbons on my chest, you’re going to have to stand next to me to help hold them!”
“You’re fucking crazy, Spencer!” Woods grinned and felt good that Barnett hadn’t changed on him. Barnett had gone through basic training and advanced infantry training with him and had been the source of constant trouble and entertainment for the whole company. Spencer Barnett came from a small South Carolina town, and he hated blacks, especially Northern blacks, with a passion. He had ended up having to fight every single black soldier in his basic company, and most of the blacks when he went through advanced training. He had won about half of the fights and had fought to a draw in another third of the one-on-one battles. Barnett was so hopelessly prejudiced that the drill sergeants had given up on him and ignored most of his snide remarks. If it hadn’t been for the Vietnam War, Barnett surely would have been discharged from the service, but even the most bitter black drill sergeant saw the fighting man in Barnett and knew that he would be put to good use in Vietnam.
“Hey! You fucking fresh meat! The Cong are going to kill you!” The voice came from out of the pack of soldiers standing behind the cyclone fence waiting to board the jet.
Barnett tried pushing out the heavy screen that covered the windows on the bus, but the bolts were well-seated. The screens had been placed over each of the windows to prevent a Sapper’s hand grenade or satchel charge from coming into the troop carrier. Barnett’s face turned red, and he slammed his hand against the screen and made an obscene gesture with his middle finger. The soldier dropped his duffel bag and started climbing the fence to get at the man in the bus. Barnett pressed his face against the heavy screen and yelled, “I fucked your girl before I left the States!”
The soldier fought against his friends to climb the fence and get at Barnett.
“And she’s pregnant!”
The bus driver started pulling away from the close proximity of the departing soldiers, knowing that if he waited there for the rest of the buses to load up, a riot would start between the two groups.
Barnett dropped back in his seat fuming; he wanted a fight so he could burn off some of the tension that was boiling inside of him.
The doors opened, and the sergeant who had boarded the jet earlier hopped up the steps and nodded for the driver to depart. The ride over to Camp Alpha was short, a half-mile of the trip along the perimeter of the huge base. The sergeant looked back at the rows of young faces; all of them were looking out of the windows in the same direction, at the fighting bunkers and the rows of wooden shacks that started where the barbed wire stopped. The sergeant harbored the same thought he always had when he picked up the new arrivals: How many of them would return to the States in one piece and alive?
A gate guard stopped the bus and made a cursory check of the undercarriage, knowing that the vehicle had not left the air base but following his written directions. He nodded at the sergeant, and the bus moved slowly forward through the wood-and-barbed-wire gate.
PFC Woods stared out of his window at the plywood-and-tin barracks lining both sides of the asphalt road. He had heard about the hootches and had seen them on the evening news. The buildings seemed small now that he was close to them. The construction was very simple; a wooden frame and a plywood floor with sheets of plywood tacked around the structure four feet up, and the rest of the space covered by fine screening to keep out some of the mosquitoes.
The sergeant ordered the men to fall into two ranks and let them smoke until the trucks carrying their baggage arrived from the airport. Woods and Barnett found their gear and carried their duffel bags into the nearest empty hootch.
Barnett looked around the open squad bay and saw that there was a door leading out of the back. He set his bags down, walked over to the screen door, and pushed it open to look outside. A latrine and a shower were right outside their building. “Fuck this shit, Woods!” Barnett turned to face his friend. “I don’t want to have to spend the night smelling shit!” Barnett picked up his gear and exited through the back door. “Come on! We’ll find a place near the perimeter.”
Woods hesitated and then lifted his heavy duffel bag off the floor. Right now, he would rather have Barnett as a friend than an enemy. “Don’t you think the sergeant will get pissed if we leave?”
“What the fuck is he going to do to us? Send us to Vietnam?” Barnett chuckled at his own joke. He stopped walking when he reached the last barracks in the long line of buildings and entered this time through the back door. The building was empty. “Pick a bed!” Barnett dropped his gear on the cot nearest to the rear door, and Woods selected the bed across from him. Both soldiers could hear the sergeant calling for the men to fall out for chow. Three more soldiers rushed into the hootch and dropped their bags on the beds near the front door before rushing back outside.
Night was beginning to fall as the new replacements stood in the long line outside of the mess-hall building. Woods watched the Camp Alpha cadre enter and exit the building through the cadre exit. He noticed that all of them were relaxed and none of them carried any weapons. The line moved slowly. Barnett lit up a Kool cigarette and inhaled the smoke deep into his lungs. Woods noticed that his basic training buddy was very nervous; Barnett always hot-boxed his cigarettes when he was nervous. When they were waiting for it to get dark in basic so that they could crawl the night infiltration course, Barnett had hot-boxed his smokes.
“War getting to you?” David said, trying to start a conversation with Barnett.
A look of pure hate flashed in Barnett’s eyes. “Nothing gets to me! Nothing!”
“Just asking, Spencer… just asking!”
“Fuck this shit!” Barnett left the chow line. “I’m not going to wait all night for some shit food!”
Woods nodded and watched his hyper bunkmate stride off toward the perimeter.
The food was bland but edible, for replacement-center food. David made a thick sandwich before he left the building and stepped out into the night. He didn’t realize that it could get dark so fast. Lights were blinking on and off behind draped doors and window flaps, giving off enough light to see by on his way back to his hootch. He was stopped by another one of the replacements, whom he recognized from the airplane, and was asked directions back to their hootches. The man had failed to orient himself before entering the mess hall.
Woods found his hootch and walked down the dark aisle between the bunks until he found his duffel bag. He saw that Barnett wasn’t on his cot and went to the back door and peered out.
“You back already?” The voice came from a sandbag bunker twenty feet behind the hootch.
“Yeah, I brought you a sandwich.”
“What kind?”
“Pork chop.” David handed Barnett the sandwich.
“Smells good. Maybe I should have eaten.” Barnett unwrapped the thick sandwich and took a bite. “Fuck!”
“What’s wrong?”
“The bones are still in there!”
“Oh, yeah… forgot about that.”
Barnett started laughing, and Woods joined him. It was funny how sometimes a small thing could cut right through the tension.
“Hop up and have a seat… it’s the best view in town!” Barnett patted the sandbags with his free hand.
“Might as well. There’s nothing else going on tonight in this shithole place.” Woods took a seat on the sandbag personnel bunker that was used only as overhead protection in case of a rocket or mortar attack. A series of mortar pops echoed back to the two men from the perimeter, followed shortly by four flares lighting up the night sky. An M-60 light machine gun broke through the quasi-silence of the base. Woods watched the red tracers arch over the flat terrain and bounce off the ground before losing their light. It was a pretty sight in a macabre sort of way.
“I don’t think I remember where you said you were from.” Barnett adjusted the sandbag he was sitting on. “Michigan?”
“Naw, I’m from Lincoln, Nebraska… the state capital.”
“No shit!” Barnett exaggerated the words, trying to be sarcastic.
Woods stacked up a small pile of the sandbags from the roof of the bunker and made a backrest out of them. He leaned back and crossed his legs. It was a coupl. . .
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