“Get the radio and get it ready, Jack,” Bates says. In a matter of minutes, he and the other men are saddled up and set to go.
Their flak jackets are on, their rifles are cleaned and loaded, their ammo belts are draped around their chest. Their steel helmets are a dark rainbow of words and mantras to keep them bold, just likeKongKillerhad adorned their fallen friend’s.Born to Kill, reads one, while another one has a peace sign with a dagger protrudingKill for Peace. Flannery has written in large black letters,From Texas with Motherfucking Love.
They don’t share what they’ve tucked secretly within their pockets, like rabbit-foot charms from their younger brothers back home. Good luck comes in a thousand forms, and they all cling to the comfort of their magical thinking to help them survive. Gomez carries a small canvas pouch containing seventeen Vietnamese coins that symbolize the seventeen days he has left on his tour. His plan was to toss a lucky coin over his shoulder every morning until he’s on his way home.
“Gomez, you shitbird short-timer,” Jack ribs him. “Can’t believe they’re taking you out again.” He shakes his head and places his fingers in his pocket. He leaves the camp weighted down by one less coin.
The column marches north.
Chief doesn’t mention the blackbird again as he takes point. He is the man they trust to cut the path, the way in and the way out of death. He carries a Lakota hatchet given to him when he was twelve, and as he slices through the thick bamboo and jungle brush, gripping its well-oiled wooden handle, he believes his ancestors live on within the polished blade.
As the first in line, he is the eyes and ears for everything that is in front of them. He tucks the hatchet back into its belt and points his rifle forward. Every one of them listens to every sound, every monkey screech, every animal that scurries over a tree branch, as each step could land them in a leg trap.
Corporal Gomez is secretly hating on Lieutenant Bates.Couldn’t he have let me stay back?he thinks to himself. He has a twenty-two-year-old wife waiting for him back home and a younger sister who writes him letters saying their mother prays every night for his safe return. Hehates this goddamn place with all his heart, and all he wants now is to return home to homemade tortillas and ice-cold beer.
But Bates can’t care that Gomez has less than three weeks left of his tour. He’s one of his best rifle men, and he needs him.
Their boots sink into the mud. The canopy of green leaves is pierced by long beams of white. Unearthly light, Chief thinks as he pushes forward, as if they are entering a place they are not meant to tread.
They continue to walk uphill. Sweat tracking their faces, adrenaline lifting off their skin.
The radio remains strapped to Jack’s back. At one point, the lieutenant stops and studies his compass and frowns.
An hour later, they take five at a clear running stream to refill their canteens and burn some of the leeches off their bodies. Some take their helmet and scoop up the water, pouring it over their heads to cool themselves off.
Chief is cleaning his knife with a piece of parachute silk, and the new kid, Danny Donovan, is singing the lyrics to the song “White Bird” under his breath, so low that almost no one but Chief can hear him.
“Not funny, man,” Chief hisses. He turns his back and walks several feet away to distance him from the man he now thinks is a fool.
Lieutenant Bates checks his watch, looks up at the sky, and realizes they have no more than four more hours of sunlight. They are behind schedule, the men having moved slower than he would have liked. He eyes Jack, his gaze looking at the radio as if he is contemplating using it to call back to command, but decides against it. “Saddle up,” he says. “Move out.… Chief, on point.” His face is now taut, his energy agitated.
They follow the streambed up the mountain, preferring the tumbled rocks to the jungle bush. After three more hours of hiking, the air changes. Long strips of mist hover in the distance, and Jack hears Gomez mumble, “Hell, we’re walking into the clouds.”
Then something besides the air shifts. Chief comes to a halt.
He senses something before the rest of them do. The jungle has become too silent. He lifts his rifle. Gomez stops behind him and does the same.
It is then that Chief sees the camouflaged face of a North Vietnamese soldier, his helmet covered in leaves, his rifle pointed straight at him. Chief opens fire.
These are the things Jack remembers from that moment:
The explosion of bullets are ripping the air and shredding the leaves over his helmet. He hits the ground hard, the radio coming off his back, Lieutenant Bates yelling into the receiver that they are being ambushed by an NVA unit.
Jack is on his belly, his head lifting from the wet earth when he sees Chief and Flannery returning fire from their rifles.
They are surrounded by incoming grenades.
“Corpsman up! Corpsman up!” It is Flannery’s voice hollering above the mayhem. “Man down! Gomez’s been hit!”
The jungle is now roaring with gunfire and men screaming at the top of their lungs with terror and rage. Doc runs through the firestorm, clutching his M-1 bag between white-knuckled fingers, until he reaches Gomez, who is on his back, his eyes looking straight up at the sky.
“I’m here, man,” Doc reassures him. His eyes are wide and full of fear. “I got you, man. Talk to me.”
Gomez is mumbling about his wife and “all those fucking coins that didn’t work.” Doc does just as he’s been trained: he tears through Gomez’s flak jacket and shirt to see if he can get down to the wound and discover the entrance and exit path of the bullet. He finds it above Gomez’s abdomen and works quickly placing a compression bandage on it. He takes out a small tube of morphine with the preexisting needle and shoots it into Gomez’s arm; then, as medical protocol dictates,he wets a finger with Gomez’s blood and draws anMon his forehead so the doctors back in the medical battalion will know he’s already received a dose.
Lieutenant Bates is face down in the dirt next to Jack, the radio’s receiver pressed to his ear. He’s called in the coordinates, screaming them into the headset, requesting artillery backup and medical evacuation while Jack prays the radio connection doesn’t break.
Hiding in the bush nearby, a young, heavily camouflaged NVA soldier holds a grenade he was issued a few days before. He has no idea it’s Willie Pete, a white phosphorous grenade that burns with such intensity that it cuts through anything in its path and won’t be extinguished with water—only through the elimination of oxygen.
