The Five Fingers Read online

  immediately. So you spread adapted ammunition across the conventional load, spacing it to be effective.

  Individual unit training was interspersed with unit i briefings from Toliver. At first we concentrated on our 1 targets and the impact zone. Later we turned to route I detail; expected opposition, topography, terrain, cli- 1 matic conditions. Slowly a general unit pattern started I to form.

  The colonel watched us closely. He was particularly I interested in my Sahka. Once the hit-zone training was going smoothly, I spent hours in the armory setting | the weapon up. If the trigger were too stiff, I might i jerk off the first round rather than squeeze; too sensi- I tive, and I could find my reflexes sending off the j second round before the completion of my arc. But at 180 meters, with a five-meter horsehair scope, I needed ! an ultralight trigger action, regardless of consequences, j By the time I was satisfied, I only had to exhale and i the bloody thing would go off. i

  I was out on the range late one afternoon. The others i had just broken off, and I was firing at photos. The J colonel arrived by chopper and came straight to me.

  "How are you, Rivers?" i

  "Fine, sir."

  "How do you like your weapon?" J

  "I've just about got it the way I want it, sir."

  "Mind if I tr

  He loaded the weapon with three rounds, rammed one in the chamber, and took aim from a standing i position. The first round rang off, followed immediate-ly by the second while the rifle was still jumping in the colonel's hands. Half a second later, the third round : went into the ground fifty meters in front of the target.

  "For Christ's sake!" the colonel said. "That's a hot trigger you've got there, Rivers."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Can you handle it?" I

  I fired three rounds into the target in three seconds.

  "Do you mind if I show this to some people, I Rivers?"

  .

  "No, sir," I said, minding very much.

  "Good. I'll have it back to you tonight."

  It was after supper the next evening before a corporal brought the Sahka to our quarters. When he had disappeared, I tested the weapon. The trigger was about as sensitive as a gate latch. I tore the trigger mechanism out of the weapon.

  "Toliver!" I shouted. My hands were trembling. He came in my room.

  "What the hell is going on? I spent two days getting this weapon the way I wanted it, and now the colonel has got it right fucked!"

  "He doesn't want you to miss."

  "I'd do better using it like a cricket bat."

  "Well, let's go fix it, Kiwi."

  He led me to the armory and stayed there until dawn while I repaired the damage.

  Mission training continued in an almost unnaturally pleasant atmosphere, without undue pressure, though we all felt a sense of urgency. We each found our motivation, our personal involvement, totally absorbing. As the days passed, we became a very close-knit unit.

  No one got badly hurt in training, though there was the occasional turned ankle or twisted knee. Jackson tried a direct eye-level shot with the rocket launcher against his shoulder, and the recoil tore his ear open.

  Tempers grew shorter as mission-depart approached. Wiley and I had words on the range when I was trying to sight in the Sahka, and he was spraying M-3 rounds around the place. It was not stupidity; it was lack of thought on both our parts.

  There were two more serious incidents during hand-to-hand combat training. Toliver and I were talking at one end of the clearing while the rest were training fifty yards from us. Suddenly, we heard Morrosco shouting, first in English, then Spanish. I turned around to see him thump Prather on the head with a big stick. Prather's knees buckled, then he fell over backward. Jackson and Wiley stood by watching. Prather was

  trying to get to his feet, and Morrosco was about to hit't I him again, when I tackled Pete from behind. Prather '-4j started for Mcprrosco and had to be brought down by w Toliver.

  Wiley told me later that Prather had been coolly J throwing Morrosco every time they moved together. s Morrosco grew excited, and it got serious. Fists and boots started flying, and Prather was taking Morrosco apart. Morrosco grabbed up his Armalite, and Prather took that away from him. Then Morrosco drew his knife, thought better of it, and crowned Prather with a stick he snatched off the ground. Jackson and Wiley had done nothing to discourage it, they were fighters themselves and could not see the far-reaching consequences.

  The very next day we were doing close-quarter combat with fixed bayonets, two on one. Toliver came at me. I parried his thrust—if he had gotten through, he D would have butted me on the ear to let me know I had done it wrong—and foot-tripped him. I spun around, and Jackson was almost on me. Instinctively i I thrust at him. I went for his uniform, but the bayonet ripped into his forearm. a

  "You son-of-a-bitch!" he shouted and came at me 1 with his bayonet. I got under his weapon and knocked it out of his hands, but my move put me off balance. Before I could recover, he came straight in and gave me a head butt in the face, turned himself around i and caught me under the chin with the back of his boot. I went down, and he came back at me. But dirt i was flying everywhere, and he got a fistful in his eyes, i That gave me time to regain my feet, and we were about to tear into each other when Toliver jumped between us.

  "Cool it," he said.

  "Jesus, I'm glad to see you, Toliver," Jackson said. "I might have broken this kid's back."

  "Better get your arm patched," I said. "Your Armalite is on the ground behind you."

  Jackson and I did not like each other much, but

  there was no hard feeling. We were all primed for combat, and we respected one another's capabilities. We were a bit like lions; they may muck one another around, but they never fight to the death within the pride. This was our way of shaking hands in a violent way.

  In the evenings, we relaxed completely. We seldom talked about the mission or our training, though Jackson and Morrosco were born soldiers, and their conversation seldom strayed beyond the confines of a military existence. Prather told me about the Devon countryside, and he would often chat with Tan about Korean opera, for which he had developed a passion when stationed there years before. Tan and I were the quiet ones. I preferred reading to talking. Tan spent many hours with his books and meditation. Toliver reported every evening to the colonel, but when he returned, he joined in the chat with the rest of us.

  "You seen my family?" Jackson said one night.

  He had laid a photo beside him while he wrote home. He passed it around. It was a dinner-table snapshot. Two teen-agers—the American family seems to be a couple of kids—grinned at the camera, while Jackson's wife watched them, side-on to the camera. Jackson was not in the picture. They were obviously having a good time. They looked like good people.

  "What sort of uniform is your son wearing?" I asked.

  The son was a handsome boy, built very much like his father. He was dressed in what appeared to be a band uniform.

  "He's in military school in Tennessee. He's the cadet captain. I think he's going to get in the Air Force Academy next year. I wanted him to go to the University of Texas and study law. But hell. You could do worse than the academy."

  "What's his name?" asked Toliver politely in response to Jackson's obvious pride.

  "Eugene. Eugene Lamar. We call him Bud. That's my wife, Judy, and my daughter, Susy. She's fifteen.

  Just started high school." The daughter was a pretty girl, a fresh young teen-ager. It was difficult to see his wife because of the angle, but she seemed reasonably attractive. The impression I got was of a happy family.

  "What about you, Lew? You got any family?" Jackson knew that Prather wore a wedding ring.

  "I have four children. Only two are still at home. I have a boy at Duke of York."

  "What's Duke of York?" asked Morrosco.

  "A military school in England for sons of military families," I answered. "Your old school, Lew?"

  "Yes."

 
"How many generations?"

  "We've been regimental sergeant majors to the same unit for five generations."

  "You got any pictures of your kids?" asked Jackson.

  "No. I have a photo of my wife, though."

  He brought out a photo of himself and a woman standing under a tree. Both were dressed in hunting tweeds. She looked to me like a woman of good breeding as well as being attractive. Two retrievers sat at her feet. In the background an expanse of green fields stretched at a distant tree line.

  "Is that your farm?" I asked.

  "We're agents. Someone in my family has managed that estate for as long as we have served in the British Army. My wife is living there now, down in Devon," he replied.

  Prather held a deep affection for his wife. At times like these, he appeared such a stable character it was almost unnerving. This life in the photo, this provincial life, seemed his natural environment. Not Bien Hoa. He had a home and a family to return to when the mission was completed, which was more than the rest of us could count on. This was reflected in a calm collectedness which none of us could fail to like.

  Toliver used to question Prather about the English family environment and compare it with the American, almost as if he were jealous. He talked in generalities about his own private life; he seldom mentioned his

  family. He had a son in college, so he must have married young. That was all I ever knew. I got the impression that he was widowed or divorced. But this was a posture taken by a lot of the married men who had been living Toliver's life for a while. They insulated themselves against the past.

  In the evenings, we avoided talk about the mission ahead. Morrosco and Wiley chatted about New York and Sydney, not rockets. We drank beer. Played cards. "You got gangs in Sydney?" Morrosco asked. "My family's a gang. Six boys. Raised on the docks and all tough, believe me. Come stay with me in Sydney one day and meet a good family. They'll take care of you."

  "Is your dad a longshoreman?" "Is that a docker? . . . No, a cobbler. The best cobbler in Sydney. He learned his trade in England. He makes boots for the dockers. You could drop a lorry engine on them. They're good for putting the boot in. The steel caps will break a leg." "What were you doing before Nam?" "I worked oil rigs. Shot kangaroos for the bounty when I was skint. I was trying to get into the university at Melbourne when I was conscripted. I wanted to be an architect."

  Prather tried on a couple of occasions to draw learned discussions about the political significance of the mission and was bewildered by our lack of response. We grew more tight-lipped as the mission approached. We were like a submarine crew securing every hatch before a dive; we became one with our own thoughts.

  For us, there was no psyching up to be done; we were responding inwardly to an attitude of readiness. That had come early on, with the last two briefings. We did not pass on the power and expectation of the briefings to our training, because that was a matter of habit. We carried it out almost in an automated fashion. Prather could never understand this. Why were we not showing signs of anticipation and apprehension as he was? We were, but we kept it within us. He found

  a friend here in Wiley, who was feeling a bit the same way. It irritated me to hear them talk about it.

  "What's the matter, Barry?" I asked one night. "Vietnam beginning to scare you?"

  "Yeah, it is, Kiwi. It would scare you too, if you had any feelings."

  I grew more silent as departure approached. Sometimes a conversation would be going on around me, and I would slip into a state of deep concentration about what we were going to do. Now and again I got the rush that this would be my last mission.

  CHAPTER 6

  As our departure date grew near, we had two personal briefings with the colonel regarding our individual targets. The first was a review of intelligence data and a pr6cis of our plan for the hit. Present at the second was a captain in the medic corps, an army psychiatrist, though he never said so. They were monitoring the guys in the War Room in the Pentagon so it was no surprise to see him. He launched a battery of questions without introduction.

  "How do you feel about this mission, Rivers?"

  "It's a job."

  "It's a lot more than a job. How do you feel about the odds against?"

  "They don't bother me. I've been up against the odds before."

  "Have you been experiencing any depression or suffering doubts since training began?"

  "No." Psychiatrists got very little mileage from me.

  "What do you consider the hardest part of the mission?"

  "The mission-in."

  "Not the hit?"

  "That's the easiest."

  "What about the mission-return?"

  "Why should I worry about that? It would be pure hypothesis. We'll take it as it comes."

  "How do you feel about the team?"

  'The best I've ever worked with."

  "What about your fight with Jackson?"

  "What about it?"

  "Are there hard feelings?"

  "None."

  "How do you feel about him?"

  "I consider Jackson a junior. He got a little over-primed, a bit self-indulgent. There are no problems between us."

  "How do you look at your prime target?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "As a man or as an animal?"

  "A man."

  "What kind of man?"

  "A vain one. Basically insecure."

  "How do you arrive at that conclusion?"

  "From the film. He obviously adores the crowd worship. Vanity. And he seems to need it to boost his ego. Insecurity." The captain leaned forward. I was coming up with perfectly natural conclusions he had gone to school for years to learn. "A small-man complex coupled with great power. That adds up to instability. And decision-making from a personal, rather than strategic, viewpoint."

  "How do you feel about eliminating him?"

  "It will be a good thing for everyone concerned."

  "Including yourself?"

  "My motivation is the target. The moment he is eliminated, it will become my survival."

  The last week was spent preparing gear: checking and binding weapons, distributing the load across the team, packing our individual packs.

  Apart from the Sahka, which would not be a combat weapon, I carried an Armalite, a .38 automatic, and my twelve-bore Creener Remington pump-action shotgun with the barrel cut back to the end of the hand grip. For hand-to-hand combat and jungle survival, I wore both a machete and a double-edged sheath knife with a six-inch blade. Slung across each shoulder were two dobie bags. One contained a hundred prepared rounds for the shotgun, two hundred plastic casings, a thousand primed caps, loose number six shot, and a small tool for recapping rounds. The second bag held a thousand steel balls, plus my powder, which was not bulky as each shell took only a small amount. I expected to pick up shell casings in the field and repack cartridges when we broke to rest.

  We wore U.S. fatigues of heavy canvas that would breathe in the daytime, provide warmth at night, and serve as armor against insect bites and skinned elbows and knees. Six of us wore U.S. jungle boots. Prather kept his SAS desert boots, which were of similar design but leather where ours were canvas; they offered good ankle support, and the leather breathed sufficiently for jungle use. We each kept our own beret, with the service flash removed.

  Across my waist and shoulders, I wore magazine belts loaded with M-3 clips for Wiley and Prather and ammunition for my Armalite. The .38 was on my hip, with two clips attached to the holster. The Sahka went on my back. It was broken down in three pieces in a hard leather case which was mounted on a parachute support. The butt of the Sahka was hollowed to hold seven crossed rounds. The rifle case was protected in my waterproof body wrap, which would double as sleeping bag or rain shelter. On my back, below the Sahka, I wore a medical wrap that circled my chest and snapped in front. In the medical wrap was a kit containing morphine, elastic bandages, wadding for plugging wounds, two short pieces of dowling for making a temporary splint
, Benzedrine, quinine, vitamins. One trouser pocket was stuffed with

  .38 clips, another with three three-day K-ration packs. In a shirt pocket I had extra dry rations—barley sugar cubes, more quinine and vitamins, salt tablets, penicillin tablets. I carried dried figs and apricots in wax paper; these I would chew for moisture. I had two corks to burn and rub the charcoal into wounds to prevent infection. I had the usual body-care supplies—tar soap, toothbrush, toothpaste, chewing gum. On my belt, in addition to my mess kit and two canteens, I hooked ten grenades. On one wrist I wore a watch, on the other a wrist band with aspirin, swabs, yet more quinine, antinausea pills. Stitched into one arm of my fatigue shirt was a sewing kit of thread, needles, and plastic scissors. I had a gun-cleaning kit small enough to roll up in my hand; a rag, a string, a metal weight, a telescopic wire brush, tiny cans of oil, grease. A wee flint for sharpening the knives. Extra net underwear and socks were wrapped around my calves beneath my trousers. The others were dressed much as I was and carrying the same personal items.