Frag Box (7 page)

South Vietnam

1965

On Charlie’s first night in country, he was put with a company on perimeter night-guard duty at an artillery firebase. They manned a string of two- and three-man foxholes fifty yards outside their own concertina wire, well into the fringe of the bush. Their orders were simple. “If you see any VC trying to sneak up with sapper charges, kill them.”

The catch was that they couldn’t see anything at all.

Nobody had any night vision goggles or even any flares, except for one of the sergeants, who had a sniper rifle with a starlight scope. A few grunts had brought flashlights, but they didn’t dare turn them on, for fear of drawing fire. And the jungle in front of them was as black as only true wilderness can be.

Their only other order was that no matter what happened, they were not to leave their foxholes.

Charlie was in a sandbagged foxhole with a goofy kid from some wide spot in the road in Georgia and a big black guy from some ghetto in Washington, D.C. The kid was named Junior Sauer, and the black guy called himself Bong. Charlie thought they were either screw-ups or nut cases. But even so, they knew the territory and the drill, and he didn’t.

“This is a bullshit detail, man,” said Sauer.

“Uh huh,” said Bong. “What you think they put us on it for? We get overrun, it don’t matter, because the firebase is all safe back behind us yet. But we get attacked and kill some gooks instead, then the lieut back in the hooch gets a nice little pat on his West Point ass for upping his body count. So he puts nothing out here but fuckups and FNGs, dig? Which one are you?” He gave Charlie a gentle poke.

“What’s an FNG?” said Charlie.

“Fucking new guy. What I tell you, Junior? Nothing out here but us disposables.”

“Well, it’s still bullshit. Hey new guy, you carrying anything?”

“Am I carrying anything? Are you serious? I think I’m carrying every damn piece of gear the Army ever bought.”

“Jesus, Bong, was we ever that new?”

The big man laughed. To Charlie he said, “He’s talking about dew, Man. Something to get high on. Some Mary Joanna or some uppers or something.”

“You can’t get high on guard, for chrissake.”

“Sure you can. Sarge don’t care. You watch; he’ll be one of the first ones firing up a joint. Acid’s no good, though. Guys on that stuff do crazy shit, like try to fly or go playing around with grenades. You try dropping any acid, I’ll kick your ass.”

Charlie decided he had just been thrown into the snake pit, with the unfortunate handicap of being sane.

Then the last sliver of red-orange sun slipped over the horizon, and faster than he could have believed, blackness slammed down on them like the lid of God’s coffin.

The entire world disappeared.

Charlie literally couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. He couldn’t even tell which way was up, which gave him a sense of falling. His face felt hot and prickly and he suddenly found that he had trouble catching his breath. He was glad he didn’t have to run anywhere, because he was sure his legs wouldn’t work any more.

“Hey new guy, where you from?”

“The Iron R…, um, Minnesota.”

“The Iron Rum-in-a-soda. Never heard of that place, did you, Junior?”

“No way, Bong. They got dark like this in Rum-in-a-soda?”

“Sure. Um, ah, no. I don’t know. Down in the mines, maybe. Is it always like this?”

“No, man, sometimes it gets real dark, you know?”

He could hear Junior giggling, and it should have pissed him off, he knew, but he just didn’t care. So much for all the bullshit about brothers-in-arms that they fed him in Basic.

Basic.

In Basic, the targets were all exactly fifty or a hundred yards away. In Basic, you could always see the targets, and they didn’t shoot back. And in Basic, the people around you were dependable, and if they didn’t know what they were doing, the sergeant did.

Basic was Fantasyland.

He didn’t know what this place was.

Then the big 155-millimeter long toms ripped open the night with their thunder. The ground trembled, and multiple shock waves and flashes of yellow-white strobe light came from behind the foxholes. Somewhere, miles away, some forward patrol had called for artillery support, and the firebase was pouring it out.

Charlie looked at the jungle in front of him in flashbulb blinks. Had it looked like that in the daylight? Were there new shapes there now, advancing between glimpses, hiding, coming to kill him? He hugged his M16, pressed the barrel against his cheek and smelled the oil. Had he used enough? Metal corroded in the jungle, he had heard, while you were still putting away the cleaning rag. And corroded M-16s jammed, were already famous for jamming. Hell, they would jam if you gave them a dirty look.

He wanted to cry.

He wanted to be very, very small.

He wanted to die.

No, that was wrong, check that thought. He wanted to live, but he wanted to quit being so very afraid. Hell, he didn’t know what he wanted, except that he wanted to be anywhere at all except where he was. And he hated the goddamned Army.

Then, as suddenly as they had opened up, the big guns fell silent, and all he could hear was the rock music. Jesus H. fucking Christ, some idiot had turned on a boom box!

“Is everybody here completely nuts?” said Charlie.

“Shit, man,” said Junior Sauer, “that’s what this war’s all about. Make the world safe for rock and roll, y’all. Ain’t no other reason to be here.”

“Yeah, but—”

“What’s it matter, anyhow?” said Bong, somewhere in the darkness. “You think Charlie don’t know where we are, after that salvo? He damn sure got us all zeroed in now.”

They heard a rifle shot from off to their left, and the radio died. Charlie figured the sergeant with the night scope had shot it. Whether that was true or not, it touched off a hailstorm of fire up and down the line. Red tracers from the company’s three heavy machine guns went streaming off into the jungle, and the chorus of rifle and pistol fire around them became deafening. Now and then, somebody tossed a grenade into the bush, just to up the ante. People were screaming as they fired, some of them standing up in their foxholes.

Charlie didn’t know what to do.

“Fire your weapon, man!”

“At what? I can’t see a damn thing.”

“It don’t matter. We put enough lead out there, won’t nothin’ get past it. Hell, we’ll kill the fuckin’ bugs.”

“But we don’t have—”

“Will you goddamnit fire your fucking weapon?”

So Charlie fired his M-16. He fired until his magazine was empty and then he locked in another one and kept firing, caught up in the blind frenzy that was sweeping through the company.

And he found that as stupid as it was, frenzy was better than fear.

After a few minutes, a sergeant came by and tapped them each on the forearm and shouted at them to cease firing. And they did so, for just about as long as it took for the sergeant to move on to the next hole. Then the shooting started again, as furiously as ever.

Eventually they ran out of ammunition.

Up and down the line, the foxholes fell silent. And as the frenzy died out, soldiers checked their luminous-faced watches and realized they still had almost six hours of watch left to stand, with no ammunition. They fixed their bayonets, stared intently into the dark, and didn’t speak.

It was the longest night of Charlie’s life.

The next day, the tension dissipated with the first morning light, replaced by a mind-numbing fatigue and a vague sense of shame. They straggled back through the wire, to where the lieutenant who commanded the company was waiting for them, hands on hips, jungle cammos flawlessly cleaned and pressed, jump boots gleaming like patent leather. His mouth was a single, stern slash, his eyes inscrutable behind dark aviator glasses. As they shuffled past him, he returned their salutes with exaggerated crispness.

Charlie couldn’t remember how close he was supposed to get before he saluted, and he probably waited too long. Thus, he committed the Army’s most unforgivable mistake: he let himself be noticed by an officer.

“Stand fast, Private!”

“Yes, sir.”

“You don’t say ‘yes sir’ to that order, shithead, you just do it. Why aren’t you holding your salute?”

“Well, you said—”

“I said stand fast. I did not say fuck off.”

Charlie added a frozen salute to his braced posture and thought about how much he hated the Army. The lieutenant did not return his salute.

“Did you learn anything last night, Private?”

What could he say to that without getting into trouble?

“Sir, yes sir.”

“All you men stand fast! Private Shithead here is going to tell us what he learned from your pathetic little mad-moment fireworks binge last night.”

Jesus, he just wasn’t going to let it go, was he?

“Let’s hear it, Private. Loud and clear.”

And before he had time to think about what he was doing, the words came tumbling out of his mouth like heretical lemmings, gleefully bound for self-destruction.

“Sir, I learned that there is a great lack of leadership and direction in the field. Sir.”

And that was how Charlie came to be designated as the company’s replacement tunnel-rat.

***

He survived as a tunnel rat for over nine months, which was long enough to get a betting pool started on the date of his eventual death. Short-timers always bet on tomorrow or the day after, but more and more, the smart money was saying that he might actually survive his tour of duty.

In a country full of ways to die, clearing the VC tunnels was notable for being one of the worst. If you ran into an AK-47 round or a poisoned punjii stick or one of those hard-to-see, blink-quick, deadly little green snakes that were everywhere, it was an open question whether or not anybody else in your unit would even go down after you and pull out your body.

But as he survived more and more descents, Charlie started to get deadly, too.

He learned to hear and even sense bodies in the pitch dark and he learned when to pursue and waste and when to retreat or hide. He found that if he plugged his ears up with huge wads of chewing gum, he could drop grenades into lower, intersecting tunnels without giving himself a concussion. He learned to shoot by feel, in places so dark that he couldn’t see the sights on his guns.

He acquired a pair of .45 pistols, called John Wayne rifles, a seven-shot .38 revolver, and a long machete that he filed down to make into a sort of double-edged sword. He also got a three-foot-long bamboo stick that he taped an extra flashlight to, so he could light the tunnel ahead without giving away his true location.

The gear gave him confidence, and the confidence gave him time. Time to learn how to be invisible and time to learn to kill. He learned to kill in very confined quarters, at very close range. He learned to kill without hesitation or remorse or even thought. He began to be famous. He was known as Chazbo the Tunnel King.

He was a great disappointment to Lt. Rappolt.

Then one day his company abandoned him.

***

It was a high profile, supposedly high-percentage operation, with reporters and TV cameras. Three full companies were choppered into the bush around a ville that I-Corps was sure was a VC sanctuary, if not an actual stronghold. The plan was to surround the ville on three sides, kill off the VC who stood and fought, and drive the rest of them off into a low mountain pass, where another two airborne companies waited in ambush.

It was textbook air-mobile tactics. It was guaranteed to work. Officers like Rappolt actually accompanied their own troops, though not in the first wave of choppers. It was a photo op for an officer on the way up.

And it was “fugazi” from the get-go, the Nam-era name for SNAFU.

For openers, the place was abandoned. There was nobody there but a few chickens and pigs, who seemed to mock the American troops as smugly as did the empty huts.

There were a few baskets of rice and other foodstuffs, and when the grunts kicked them over, they blew up. There were also a few weapons, which they didn’t touch. And there were a few tunnel entrances. Rappolt let himself be photographed dropping a grenade into one of them. Then he sent the photographers away and sent for Charlie.

Charlie waited a few minutes for the smoke to clear, dumped all but his essential killing gear, and dropped into the biggest and most complicated underground maze he had yet been in. After he passed three branching points, he backtracked to the beginning and started all over again, this time spreading a trail of baking soda behind him. He had learned that baking soda worked better than a string, which the enemy could move.

He found a lot of shafts leading back up to more entrances into the village. He found two large galleries where troops had probably slept and an electrically lit medical dressing station. From there, a string of bare light bulbs lit a long tunnel in a direction he thought was back into the mountains. He jerked on a wire from one of the bulbs, and far down the tunnel, something exploded and took all the lights out with it.

He turned his flashlight back on and followed the trail of white powder back the way he had come. To press farther ahead was practically asking to trip another booby trap or walk into an ambush.

Twice on the way back, he thought he heard a sound coming from a cross-gallery, and he emptied his .45s into the opening as he passed it.

When he finally came back out into the daylight, he looked at his watch and was surprised to see that he had been underground for almost two hours.

And his entire company was gone.

He ran through the ville, first in disbelief and then with a rising feeling of pure panic. It couldn’t be. Not even the dead were totally abandoned, unless the company was under such intense attack that it was impossible to take them out. But there was no sign of any battle here at all. No shell casings, no burning huts, no smell of cordite or HE in the air. His people had simply flown away and left him down in the tunnels.

But they had left a radio.

He found it not far from the first tunnel hatch, and a little red light and some static seemed to say that it was operational. He keyed the SEND button and spoke, surprised to find that his panic was now almost totally replaced by anger.