The Five Fingers Read online

  We started north. To North Vietnam. To China.

  CHAPTER 9

  I felt better than I had on the first day. I was broken into the trail, used to the twenty-four-hour pace. I was tougher and more enduring than I had ever been before. I was confident of myself, of Toliver, of the unit, and every man in it. We had proved ourselves unsurpassed in combat; after two and a half weeks in enemy territory, we were not carrying a single bullet wound. We were whole and healthy. Tan's scalp wound and Wiley's fever, the scraped elbows and knees, sore and twisted muscles were expected in this environment.

  We came down from the hills around M Ngoi to follow a stream flowing to the northeast. We marched all night and the next day, stopping only for brief rests, radio transmission, and cold food. The route wove east, then west as we followed the natural contours of the landscape, but we were making steady progress north and fast approaching the North Vietnamese border.

  At what was supposed to be an easy ford across the Nam Pa, we found a white-water river raging out of

  its banks from days of rain. We scouted for two hours before finding a spot where the river shallowed around a wide bend. Morrosco ventured out, probing in front with a long stick. The bottom was solid, and the waters never rose above his thighs for 150 yards. At the opposite bank, there was a five-yard stretch where the current, pierced by a huge boulder, cut a furious path. When Morrosco probed the chest-deep water with his stick, he was nearly swept off his feet.

  "What do you think?" Toliver asked him. "It's fast, but it's not that fast. We can make it." We lashed the gear to driftwood as we had at the Nam Suong. With Toliver leading, we walked singly through the shallow waters. We stopped near the rapids and locked hand to wrist, then inched our way into the boiling stream. Two minutes later, Toliver grabbed a root on the opposite bank. He yelled at me at the other end of the chain to come across. I handed the raft over to Tan and worked my way across the river by holding on to the men's shirts, then quickly scrambled up the bank. Tan passed the raft over. I held the raft with one hand and unloaded it with the other, then let it drift away. Tan then began working his way along the line. He was holding Toliver by the belt and reaching up toward my outstretched hand when a log shot around the boulder and hit him squarely in the back. Tan sank like a rock between Jackson and Toliver. Toliver grabbed Tan's shirt, but the force of the current tore the limp body from his hand. Jackson reached for Tan's hand but grabbed the barrel of his M-3 instead. The weapon slipped off Tan's shoulder. He started on a rolling, tumbling course down the river. He was half conscious and trying to swim, but his pack made him top-heavy. Toliver grabbed Jackson, who pulled the others across behind him. I helped Toliver up the bank, then sprinted after Tan, who was already thirty yards downstream. As I swung around an overhanging limb, I saw Tan fly backward against a boulder. His head snapped back and hit the rock with crushing force. For an instant he lay poised

  on the top, then the current swept him away. The pack was torn from his back and bobbed like a cork on the water. Tan rolled and turned in the rushing current. I ran for another ten yards until the jungle closed in on the bank. I leapt in the river and paddled frantically toward Tan. Tan's shirt caught on an uprooted tree, and I grabbed him as I swept past. Holding him with my left hand, I reached out at passing rocks and branches with my right. I was losing my grip on Tan's shirt when we washed up on an egg-shaped boulder. I pulled him up on the rock, then fell back exhausted.

  Within five minutes, the others had cut their way along the bank and stood opposite us. Morrosco stripped a long tree limb with his machete. I rolled Tan on his back.

  "He's alive!" I shouted.

  The back of Tan's head was swollen where he had banged it on the rocks. He was unconscious. His shirt was torn in several places, and he had lost half a dozen grenades.

  "Wiley," Toliver ordered, "go after the pack."

  The pack had disappeared downstream. And with it the radio. Morrosco swung the stripped limb out across the water like a fishing pole. I wrapped my right arm around the limb and tucked it under my armpit. I slipped my left hand through Tan's belt and grabbed it from the underside. Pulling him behind me, I edged my way into the current. I scrambled quickly back onto the rock.

  "We won't make it," I shouted over the roar of the water. "The current's too strong."

  "Tie him to the pole," Toliver yelled back.

  I tied Tan to the limb with his belt, then eased him into the current. Tan went straight under the water, but Toliver and Morrosco hauled him ashore within seconds. They pulled me across in the same way. While Prather and Jackson stripped Tan, Morrosco was dressing his head. Wiley came running back.

  "It was washed up onshore," he said, waving Tan's pack.

  Toliver jumped up and grabbed the pack from Wiley's hand. He ripped it open and fished about until he brought up the radio. Water cascaded from the set when he snapped open the back of the small aluminum casing. Toliver tore his dog rag from his neck and mopped furiously.

  "How bad?" I asked.

  "I imagine it's ruined," he replied.

  "We're not likely to get an abort signal on a bloody broken radio," I said.

  Toliver was grinning.

  "Not bloody likely, old chap," he said, "so we'll bloody well get on with the bloody job." Toliver shook out a few more drops, then leaned the radio against a rock so that the innards could catch the sun. We turned to Tan.

  "How is he?" Toliver asked Morrosco.

  "He doesn't seem to be broke up anywhere."

  "What about his head?"

  "There's no way for me to know how bad it is," said Morrosco.

  "So we wait," said Toliver.

  Within minutes, Tan had regained consciousness. He needed rest before he could walk. Toliver looked at his watch.

  "Radio transmission in less than an hour. We'll sit it out here."

  As we stripped and dried our gear and weapons, I thought about the one incalculable factor in combat. Luck. Fate. The odds. Whatever it was called, I hated it. Because I had no control over it. One more time now it had run in our favor. If the log had hit the driftwood raft instead of Tan, we would have lost the explosives and half our supplies. As it was, both Tan and I could have drowned. The crossing was a tough situation that had gotten away from us, yet we survived it with a bumped head and a few lost grenades. Luck. Where do you enter it on the accounts ledger?

  The radio was another matter. At 1515 hours Toliver tried and failed to raise a carrier wave. I felt

  divided. Every time my exhausted legs crested a hill, every time I fired my weapon or hacked a path through the jungle, my determination to carry out the mission had redoubled. At "Bien Hoa the odds had seemed so enormous as to be preposterous: a seven-man team pitted against half the armies in southern Asia. But in the confines of the air base, that remained hypothesis. Here in the field, it had become reality. And the team was so good, it was not only surviving, it was advancing. We were on schedule and only a week from the mission site. A day's march from North Vietnam. Tomorrow was the last chance to call us back. Part of me wanted to see Toliver grab up the useless radio and throw it into the bush. Another part of me did not want to turn loose from that last fragile contact with a friendly world.

  At 1545 hours, Toliver switched off the radio and handed it back to Tan, who was sitting up and cleaning his weapons.

  "Can you walk?" Toliver asked.

  Tin all right," he said.

  Tan tried to stand but fell back into a sitting position. Morrosco gave him a glucose bar. Within minutes he was on his feet, and we were back on the trail. Tan was unsteady, hardly fit for combat, so Toliver slowed the pace for the rest of the day.

  We moved very cautiously now. This area was heavy with NVA patrols which protected Highway 19 to the north and a bulge in the North Vietnamese border, which at one point was only ten miles east of us. We traveled up the Nam Luang Valley, crossing it first to skirt the village of Pak Luong, then again to follow a branch when the mainstream turned
east into North Vietnam. We were in a stand of trees just below the village of Kung Sala when Jackson, at point, dropped to the ground. We broke for cover and waited. After five minutes, Jackson crawled back to Toliver. I crawled forward to join them.

  "NVA patrol," Jackson asid.

  "How many?" Toliver asked.

  "F:v- ." he answered. "In the tall grass beyond the trees. Headed right at us. But they ain't looking fcr us. They're moving too carele s

  "How are they spread?" Toliver asked.

  "Hundred yards front to back. In a file "

  "How much time we

  "Six. seven minutes."

  "Fie scouts. That means a minimum party of twenty. We have to take them. Otherwise we could get caught out between two parties, if either one sees us."

  Discretion was vital. One burst from an automatic weapon could call down twenty men on us. We would have to take five men silently. That meant taking them simultaneous

  I pulled my machete and showed it to the men behind, then held up five fingers. Prather inched his way forward to join the three of us.

  "Tan's in no condition for combat," he said. Take him to the rear. Lew." Toliver said, "and cover us. Rivers, you stay here with WHey. I'll go forward two hundred yards with Jackson and Morrosco. We'll let them walk through, then pick up the last three. Well wait for you and to make the first

  move."

  I lay in wait in knee-high grass behind a large tree, I did not strip off my pack or unsling c If things went right, I would never feel their weight; a man taken by surprise can be curiously slow to react-I should have time to come up off the ground and slash the man's throat open before he could fire with a ?on already in his hand. When a man has the edge, a thirty-five-pound pack is as much an integral part of his body as arms and legs. When he loses that edge, thirty-five pounds is a bastard. But if we had to run. my gear was going with me.

  The NVA scouts advanced into the trees with the carelessness of a patrol that was a week's march from the nearest battlefield. I caught occasional glimpse Morrosco, Jackson, and Tofivei moving in behind

  them. When the lead man was ten yards in front of me, I heard a crash. I glanced up and saw Morrosco sunk to his waist in a pile of rotten foliage. The man Morrosco was stalking whirled around, shouted, fired his weapon, and started to run. Suddenly there was confusion everywhere.

  While the NVA were yelling back and forth, trying to sort us out, I jumped up. My target spotted me immediately and tore off through the bush. I ran after him. My gear weighed a hundred pounds now. If I did not catch him in thirty yards, he was gone. I heard two short bursts from an AK-47. We've sprung it, I told myself. I kept running, expecting the bushes to part and reveal half the North Vietnamese Army.

  The man was pulling away from me when he caught his foot on a vine and went sprawling. I tackled him as he scrambled to his feet. He twisted and fell on his back. Before he could recover, I straddled him. I raised my machete and brought it down on his head. He caught the blow with the stock of his rifle. I jerked the machete up to chop again, but it was embedded in the wood. I let it go and grabbed the rifle by both ends and forced it down. The weapon hovered, then slowly descended across the man's neck. I threw my full body weight against the weapon.

  When the rifle reached his throat, the man let go one hand and grabbed at my face. He tore frantically at the flesh, groping for my eyes. I grabbed his index finger in my teeth and hung on. His face swelled ; purple, and froth spilled from the corners of his mouth. His fingers fluttered briefly against my face. , His body gave one convulsive heave, then stopped.

  I was appalled. This was not calculated combat; it was a free-for-all in the jungle. Amateur stuff. Heroics. I did not want any part of heroics, because I was not ready to die. Special forces were not trained for this nonsense. I had survived a dangerous, untidy fight only because I was the better man. While I had been killing ; one man in the ugliest way possible, I was totally exposed. I could have been blown away at any moment.

  I slit the man's throat, then jumped up. I heard yelling and fighting at every quarter, but I could see no one. I sprinted toward the sound of a scuffle nearby. At that moment, a man broke out of the bush ten feet in front of me, running at full stride. Before I could change course, the man slammed his rifle into the side of my head. My legs turned to rubber, and I dropped in my tracks without losing consciousness. I tried to jump up, but my body had stopped functioning. I lay on my back and watched the man dive on top of me. My brain struggled, but my muscles would not respond. The man raised his rifle overhead to smash my skull in. At that instant, Toliver appeared from nowhere; he chopped the man's arm off with a savage swing of his machete. The blade carried on, bouncing off the man's head and severing one ear. The weapon and the arm holding it fell across my chest. Toliver chopped again, splitting the man's throat like a slaughtered pig. A fountain of blood burst in my face. The man fell on top of me. Toliver shoved the dead man aside, then looked me over quickly to confirm that the blood that drenched me was not my own,

  "Get up," he shouted.

  I tried to answer, but no words came out. Toliver grabbed me by the shirt and dragged me through the forest. My left eye was completely closed; through a film of blood that covered the right eye, I watched the jungle floor creep by. Toliver was not hurrying. The sounds of fighting had ceased. I realized that all the patrol must have been killed. But how badly were we hit? That was one fuck of a way to ambush somebody, I told myself. Suddenly the numbness gave way to exploding pain in my head. I must have convulsed, because Toliver stopped and leaned over me.

  "Hang on, Kiwi," he said, leaning close to my face. "You'll be all right in five minutes."

  He laid me on my back with a pack under my head. Then he sounded off, and the others drifted in one by one.

  "Anybody hurt?" Toliver said.

  "Morrosco," Tan said, as he began to dress an ugly flesh wound in Morrosco's forearm.

  "I'm all right," Morrosco said, though he appeared to be in considerable pain. "When I stepped in that hole, that guy hit me immediately. I don't know why he ran. He could have finished me."

  "You'll be all right," Toliver said.

  "I know that," Morrosco replied. "What about him?"

  "He got hit in the head. He'll be okay."

  My head was clear, but it was pounding with pain. I listened as they described what had happened. Morrosco's fall had blown the ambush. The man he was stalking hit him with the first machine-gun burst, then missed Toliver with the second. Then all five scouts took to the bush. After that, it was happening everywhere, like a running fight on a crowded tube platform, where the crowd parts and one gang does the other gang, and when the noise dies down, the crowd closes in again, and it is all over.

  But ten minutes had destroyed the myth of our invincibility. The greenest soldiers in the field could have done as well. The shouting and automatic weapons would have been heard over a great distance. We had no idea where or how big the main NVA party was. And Morrosco was wounded.

  I tried to stand. My knees gave way beneath me. Five minutes later, I was on my feet. We moved out as quickly as I could walk. We badly needed time ] and distance between us and this messy business.

  Toliver kept the pace slow; Tan had recovered from his ducking and was carrying Morrosco's weapon, but my stride was unsteady for several hours.

  It was well into the night when we joined a branch of the Nam Pa at a point where a main trail to Highway 19 followed its northern bank. We had swung sharply east to circumvent the area where the patrol had come from, then turned northwest to get back on our original course.

  A dirt and timber bridge spanned a shallow stretch' of water, joining a smaller jungle trail on our side to

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  the larger one on the far shore. We waded the river below the bridge, then grouped on the north shore. Silently we mounted the mud embankment that led to the trail ten feet above.

  We spread out along the edge of the trail, which was little more t
han a dirt track fifty feet wide at this point. On the far side, the bank dropped sharply where the jungle grew up almost to its edge. Toliver waved Jackson across. He jumped to his feet and dashed over the road and down the slope on the opposite side, disappearing into the underbush.

  Toliver waved me over. As I rose to a crouch and started to run, we heard a shout in Vietnamese, then a blast from Jackson's M-16, answered immediately by half a dozen AK-47s. Then a lot of shouting from our left. In all, we must have heard ten or fifteen voices. A party of twenty men, assuming they were not all yelling.

  A lot of lead was being thrown at Jackson. He returned it sparingly with his weapon on semiautomatic fire. I signaled to Toliver that Tan and I would go across to relieve Jackson, but he waved us down and motioned for us all to remain silent.

  We were most likely facing the NVA unit whose scouts we ambushed. They had found the bodies and tracked us through the night. But they had moved faster than we, and we had passed in the night without bumping into each other. They assumed we had crossed the Nam Pa and were searching both sides of the trail for us. Jackson must have run right into the middle of one party. When Toliver refused to let us relieve him, I immediately guessed why.

  Within a minute, half a dozen NVA came out of the trees on our side of the trail, fifty yards to our left. They thought everything was happening on the other side. They bunched at the edge of the track and dashed across together. They were perfect targets, sky-lined in silhouette above the road. Toliver held our fire until the NVA were in the middle of the road, then all six of us fired together. Bodies flew everywhere. We

  killed four outright. Two more were knocked down by their comrades, but they jumped up and scampered over the edge of the road. The two NVA parties were now separated and thought they were surrounded. I decided to move before they could recover from their panic. I sprinted for the spot where the two survivors had ducked out of sight. Tan was right at my heels. The two NVA did exactly what I expected. When the firing stopped, they climbed back up the road to see if they could spot us. When they stood up together to look over the edge of the road, I was fifteen feet from them, running full out with my shotgun at the ready.