The Five Fingers Read online

  In less than three seconds, I blew them both out of my path. But I was running too fast, and the steep slope took me bv surprise. I raced down out of control, my legs trying to keep up with my body. I stumbled, regained my footing, and ran smack into the middle of six men. Before I could fire, Tan ran into me from behind, knocking us both off our feet. We jumped up and everybody started firing. Bullets went everywhere. One of the NVA was cut down by a wild burst from the man standing next to him.

  I took a crushing blow on the shoulder and went to my knees. Fm back-shot, I told myself, expecting the warm blood to start washing over me. When I tried to jump up, my pack was entangled in an enormous branch that had been shot off a tree above me. I wriggled free just as the NVA closed on the two of us for hand-to-hand combat.

  "I'm coming!" Toliver shouted.

  He came bowling over the edge of the road. A man lunged at me with a knife. I parried the thrust with the shotgun and smashed his head in with the butt. Tan fired from the hip, putting another one down. I caught a glimpse of a man leveling his AK-47 at Tan. I whirled and blew his chest open with the shotgun. The man jackknifed and flew backward, his weapon firing a short burst skyward, then a longer burst into the ground. A hand reached from nowhere and grabbed the barrel of my shotgun. I hit the man a wild swing-

  ing blow with my left fist. A second man tackled me from my blind side. I fell straight over backward down the slope, still clutching my shotgun. The man leapt at me with a knife in his hand. I whipped the shotgun upward and he fell onto the end of the barrel. I pulled the trigger. Flesh and bone and gristle exploded in my face, bits and pieces cut and tore into my skin. I rolled and leapt to my feet. I slammed fresh rounds into the Greener, then turned toward the sound of the nearest fighting. I stared straight into the barrel of an AK-47. As I jumped to beat the bullet I could not outrun, I saw the top of the man's head torn off in a vapor cloud of disintegrating skull. Tan had drilled the man through the ear with his M-3. After that it was scrambling, running, yelling, fighting with bullets and knives and gun butts and fingernails. The momentum of the battle mounted to a raging snowball of death that hurtled downward out of control, faster and faster, people killing people until there would be no more to die.

  I saw a man coming at Tan's blind side with a bayonet. I could not use the shotgun without hitting Tan.

  "Behind you, Tan!" I yelled.

  Tan looked frantically around, but he was too late to protect himself. As the man lunged, Toliver shot him with his Armalite from fifty feet. When the man fell, he left Tan and me exposed to two more NVA. Tan did not see them, so I grabbed him by the shirt and pulled us both over. Bullets tore the underbrush apart where we had been standing. Toliver killed the two with one long automatic burst.

  I heard the surviving NVA break off the action from where Jackson was pinned down, yelling to one another and fading away. Then there was a lot of Armalite and M-3 fire moving toward us, with no returning fire; someone was being chased in our direction. Three NVA burst upon us out of the bush. Tan instantly killed one and Toliver the other two. We heard the rest running through the jungle.

  "Let them go!" Toliver yelled as I started after them. "We'll never get them all."

  The three of us quickly and silently inspected one another. Tan had cut the back of his head once more in a fall, but none of us was wounded. We ran back to the others. They too were unscratched. Jackson was standing beside the fallen log he had used for cover. Beside him, two small trees lay bent to the ground, their trunks ripped apart by machine-gun bullets. Every tree within twenty feet had been shaved clean of bark, and fallen limbs cluttered the landscape. Hundreds of bullets had whistled around Jackson without one touching him. We stared at the bizarre scene.

  "Knock on wood," said Morrosco.

  "There's not much of it left," Jackson replied.

  We regrouped smartly, prepared for a counterattack. There was no backslapping, no mood of jubilation. By all rights, Jackson should have been dead. Half of us would have been blown away if we had charged across the road. But one fire fight forebode nothing of the next. Every one of us had led units that had survived the most ferocious fire fights unscratched, only to see half the unit decimated in a minor skirmish.

  The adrenaline was still racing through my veins; my heart was pounding as if it was about to explode. We all wanted to get out of there. Toliver took a bearing, and we struck north through the waning darkness, moving in a silent route march. No one wanted to talk about the events of the last hour. As we double-timed through the night, I picked off pieces of a human being that had dried on my face. My dog rag was caked in dried blood. Bone and scraps of canvas and leather clung to my fatigues and the backs of my hands. I found a stub of intestine moving around inside my shirt; I dug it out and threw it down in disgust. I desperately wanted a river to plunge into.

  As we pushed on, I thought about the fight at the bridge. It can all go wrong so quickly when the odds are initially in your favor. The NVA had been fresh and heavily armed and tracking a unit a third its size. It

  should have wiped us out to a man. But confusion and the stupid dash across the road had eliminated half their fire power before they knew they were in a fire fight. If they had observed the fundamental rules of combat, if they had found the enemy before attacking, if they had walked another hundred feet down the trail before breaking out, they would have pinned us down, an inferior force with no cover and our back to a river. Blind circumstance, impetuosity, and panic had turned the odds around, and the patrol had been blown off the face of the earth.

  But the intense ferocity of this particular action had almost frightened me. The punch, the impact had been like a train running at full speed and piling into a bus at a railroad crossing. Lives were scattered all over the jungle.

  When it started, my blood had turned to ice. In combat, my nervous system seemed to disengage from every unnecessary function. My senses responded only to an instinct for survival that was almost eerie. When I took off across the road, it was almost dejd vu. I knew when the two NVA scouts would pop up for a look. If they had moved ten seconds sooner, I was dead. But I knew. Anyone watching would have thought I was a madman. I had responded to an automatic function, a combat instinct that had to be right.

  I became strangely detached from my body during a fight. When the man had tackled me, I did not experience the physical presence of another man with his hands all over my body. The man became a thing I had bumped into in the night, and the thing was a man who had probably overextended himself, who had overrun his target and was as off balance as I was. And more frightened. So I had set about killing that thing, that man, because otherwise that man was going to kill me.

  My thoughts returned to the mission. We all knew that as we drew closer to China, the combat alternatives were shrinking. Seven men operating alone this far into

  enemy territory with a target date and site could no longer afford the luxury of a withdrawal action. We had no time to go on the run with people tracking us. Now every enemy had to be destroyed for our own survival. This was a different priority from just staying alive. The only solution was to move into the worst of it, and when the noise and the fighting stopped, to find ourselves among the living.

  We walked and ran, sweeping aside the thick jungle, for an hour until we broke out of a tree line near a river. We stopped for water and rest just as the sun rose up through a crack in the chain of mountains to the east. I studied the others. They looked like men who had journeyed through hell. One side of Tan's face was covered with another man's blood. His own blood, mixed with dirt, caked the back of his swollen head. Toliver's shirt was soaked stiff and unyielding with blood. All of us were scratched and bruised and caked in mud. Morrosco's wound had bled through the gauze, and the bandage was covered with leaves and dirt. Morrosco caught me staring at him.

  "You're looking wonderful, Kiwi," he said, smiling.

  I looked down at my clothing. Bits of flesh and fecal matter clung to my shirt. Both
my hands were brown with dried blood. My neck and face were sticky with blood and covered with little pieces of body matter like grains of sand. I gingerly probed a deep abrasion in my scalp. An elbow showed through a torn sleeve, and my knees were swollen from rolling around on the ground. We must look like madmen, a maniac band of killers, I thought. Wild animals, stopped to lick their wounds.

  "We'll wash, then move out," Toliver said.

  We stripped and waded into the river. We washed our shirts, flailing them against the rocks, and scrubbed our torsos with sand. I ducked beneath the water and shook my matted hair with both hands. The water calmed me, washing away the ugly stains of fear and rage. We rested on the bank while the morning sun

  dried us. Prather shared his tobacco with Morrosco. Wiley and Morrosco bantered lightly; it was their way of recomposing themselves. I stayed aloof from the chatter. I was not impressed with being alive. Yet the sight of the others in the morning light had startled me. It had been a very ugly business. Very close. I stared at the sun's reflection on the river as it rose in the morning sky.

  Tan had not spoken since we left the battle scene. He had marched in silence and now sat staring blankly at Wiley's attempts to be humorous. Suddenly he stood up from a rock and walked toward me. He extended his right hand. When I offered mine, he closed both hands over it and held it tightly.

  "Good morning, Gayle," he said. "I am glad to see you. It is a beautiful morning."

  Still clinging to my hand, Tan stared beyond me at the sunrise, then turned to look at the distant mountains as they woke up to the morning light. The others stopped talking. Abruptly Tan dropped my hand and walked to Prather, who lay with his back against a rock, his pipe between his teeth.

  "Good morning, Lew," Tan said, once again offering his hand.

  Prather stood, took Tan's extended hand, and touched him lightly on the shoulder. Tan went to each man in turn, spoke his name and shook his hand in a formal manner, then held each of their hands in his own for several seconds. We remained silent until Tan had made a circle of the unit. When he had finished, he squatted on his haunches and waited. No one moved for several seconds. Wiley leaned across and hit Jackson lightly on the shoulder with the knuckles of a half-closed fist.

  "You son-of-a-gun, you really stuck us in it," he said softly.

  "Vic," I said to Toliver, "it was close."

  He was bent over the mapping case, studying the route ahead. He looked up sharply. He stared at me

  without replying. He folded the maps and replaced them in the case, then rose stiffly to his feet. He looked around at the group. All eyes were on him. "Let's move out," he said.

  CHAPTER 10

  Toliver wanted to move us before the adrenaline stopped pumping and fatigue set in. By going out now, he could refocus our attention on the mission ahead. Draw the mission purpose close again. Leave the rest behind as past history. We were still on edge. Every time a leaf rippled, we were ready to blow the jungle apart. We needed to cover miles, restore our motivation for being there. Then we could take a rest.

  We helped one another into our gear, exchanging fleeting touches on the arm or shoulder. Then we moved off sharply.

  We followed the river until it joined the Nam Pa, then along the Nam Pa toward its junction with the Nam Meuk. We stopped on a hill overlooking the Nam Pa Valley south of the village of Pong Nang.

  We pitched camp at a calculated, steady pace; we were all at the outer edge of nervous exhaustion. I felt that if I did not ease into relaxing, I would collapse. Jackson built a small fire and reheated some of the

  cold vegetables. Prather and Wiley lashed boughs together and tossed their groundsheets over them to make a rough lean-to where we could sleep out of the sun. Morrosco fussed about like a grandmother, treating our minor wounds. Tan tested the radio and managed to raise a signal; the water had not reached the batteries. I joined Toliver to study the route ahead.

  "How long are we going to stay here?" I asked him.

  "I know we're behind schedule," he answered. "But we all need the rest. That last business was careless. Sloppy. We've got to get back on an even keel. We'll stay here the rest of the day. Get a good sleep."

  We ate, then spread our gear about and helped one another clean it. The monotony of the task and the peaceful campsite helped us unwind. I walked to the edge of the camp and gazed down at the panorama spread beneath us. The river ran through a wide mountain valley, the floor of which was covered in waves of small green hills. To the east, the hills rose in an unending chain of lush mountains that climbed into North Vietnam. Between the hills a series of small streams twisted their fingers into the Meuk like the roots of a mangrove tree reaching for the ground.

  I closed my eyes. Instantly, I was back in the bush, choking the life out of a man, waiting for the bullet that never came. I opened my eyes. I could see the hills and rivers again.

  I never unwound after combat until I had relived it in my mind's eye: every option, every mistake I or someone else had made; analyzed it, and filed it in that corner of my memory labeled "survival." My thoughts turned to the team. Tan's strange behavior at the river had emphasized the bond, almost of love, that was growing among us.

  Rarely in my life had I experienced what I considered love, and each time it had been equated with pain. Shallow love was a false emotion; I was too pragmatic to succumb to that again. And real love had always been the forerunner of sorrow. But I could

  not help myself. I felt some of what Tan had shown that morning. Every time we went into combat and emerged alive, a unique experience was binding me closer to the others. I feared this as a dangerous weakness yet felt powerless to halt it.

  I thought of what I had once told a young Marine whose best friend had just been blown apart by a mortar shell. If you see enough death and cause enough death, you never take it for granted. You just do your damndest to stay alive. I recalled my father in New Zealand, pushing a plow all year around to get the finest crop he had ever had, and at the last minute the wind would blow the whole damn lot away. This team worked at staying alive. It was the best I had ever seen. And we could all be blown away in a sudden storm.

  It was the preoccupation with staying alive that kept us sharp. Yet ultimately the choice was not ours. I never forgot that a bullet through my own head was any different than my bullet through another man. We simply had to keep trying.

  "I don't know how you kept from being hit back at the bridge," Morrosco said to Jackson.

  "Bitin* dirt, son. I dug me a trench with my teeth."

  "What happened?"

  "I'm not sure. I jumped off that road, right into the middle of those motherfuckers. They was yelling and blazing away, and I couldn't even see them. So I went to ground and returned fire to the flashes. Bullets were flying everywhere. I got down to about snake height. I'll be spitting out rock for two weeks."

  "Next time, be sure you know where you're going before you go," Toliver told Jackson.

  Jackson did not resent Toliver's remark. We all knew what Jackson had done was unavoidable; Toliver was reminding us all to maintain maximum vigilance. A word of reprimand from the commanding officer gets things back on an even keel.

  "Well, boss," Jackson said, "you go first next time

  and I'll be right behind you. I heard your pop gun, Kiwi. How'd you do?"

  "Four rounds. A body count of four," said Prather with some awe. „

  My shotgun was drawing considerable attention. In a fire fight with automatic weapons, you could not tell how effective you had been until after the event. But my shotgun made a distinctive noise. There was always a stark realization of what it was doing. I allowed myself absolutely no human reaction, because it was total devastation. When I hit a body in bone such as the rib cage, there was little to hold it together. If I thought about that for half a second, there was a bullet on its way to me.

  Gradually, the conversation turned away from the battlefield. We talked about the countryside and admired the landscape around
us. The rest of us grew quiet when Wiley and Morrosco talked about girls they had known a long time ago. In a unit like ours, people did not dwell on the future. We never got the expanded dream talk regular soldiers indulged in, because we recognized the reality of our environment. Once we had crossed the Mekong, I never thought about the outcome. I knew the mission purpose, and I knew it would be carried out. After that, what happened .. . happened.

  Their conversation stirred my loins. All the marching and fighting and trying to save lives could not overcome the sex drive completely. On the early days of a mission, it would dig at me until finally I would get fed up and fit it into the back of my mind. When we were well fed and rested, it could come rushing back. When the conversation stopped, I knew everyone's thoughts were drifting in the same direction.

  We each had our own interpretation of what we wanted, and we kept these to ourselves. Prather would be thinking about his wife and children and the farm in Devon. I could never tell about Toliver or Tan. The others were more obvious. I never thought about Sai Pei or the women I had known in Saigon. I thought

  about someone many years in the past. For one moment, I was overcome by sadness that it was finished, and I was here in the jungle. The sadness turned to bitterness, then to anger that I was allowing my sex drive to dominate me. The memory faded into the past.

  Barry did not have the same control. He took out the picture of the girl he had found in the dead man's wallet, stared at it for a moment, then got up and walked into the bush. He needed release, in the only way he would get it.