Into the Treeline Read online

  He woke as they were loading him onto the chopper. The troop-carrying birds of the 1st Cav were disgorging their loads as quickly as they could land. What was left of his company was marshaled off to the side of the LZ waiting to be taken out. They were pitifully few.

  The helicopter rose into the air, banked, and flew over the valley. Below him the elephant grass had been felled in great fan-shaped swaths, corresponding to the fields of fire of the enemy gunners. The Valley of the Fan. Hiding the face of death, its ribs watered by blood. If the world were right, if there were such a thing as justice, nothing would ever again grow from such a bitter flood. But it would, even more rank than before. The earth had limitless ability to soak up man’s insanity and make itself whole again. He turned away.

  Chapter II

  He made the long circuit of hospitals: Qui Nhon for stabilization, Cam Ranh Bay for initial debridement of the wounds, a very short stopover in Japan, finally back to the States. Several times the attending doctors wondered if they would be able to save him; to the wounds was added the complication of falciparum malaria running rampant through his weakened system. The days passed in pain-filled haze.

  His first clear memory was of waking up in a strange bed. There was something odd. He puzzled over it for a few moments, then realized that he wasn’t surrounded by the familiar olive-green cloud of mosquito netting.

  The sun through the window struck dust motes, sending them in lazy patterns through the air. He could hear no jets, no artillery, little more than the sound of the door opening. A pretty face, small, framed in dark hair, peered in at him and, seeing him awake, retreated before he could speak.

  Too bad. He had wanted to ask her where he was. Ah well, someone was bound to come by soon. In the meantime he would relax and enjoy these few moments that were magically free from pain. Agony had filled his existence so long it felt strange to be without it, as if he were a husk that only pain could fill.

  The door opened again and a khaki-clad man with an eagle on his collar came in, followed by the face Jim had seen before.

  “Well, Captain Carmichael, I’m glad you decided to join us at last. We thought you didn’t like our hospitality.” The colonel laughed heartily at his own joke. “I’m Doctor Cable, and this is Spec-4 Lisa Brown. She’s been keeping an eye on you.”

  Jim tried to speak, could not. His throat was parched. He mouthed “water” and the specialist was at his side in an instant. She poured liquid from a carafe on the bedside table and held his head up as he sipped it. It was wonderful, clean and clear and holding not a hint of the acrid taste of iodine tablets.

  “Feel better now, Captain?” the doctor asked.

  Jim nodded, asked “Where am I?” He was horrified to hear how weak his voice sounded.

  “Letterman Army Hospital,” the doctor replied.

  “In San Francisco? Christ, how did I get here?”

  “Nobody wanted you except us. Thought you were too complicated. Afraid of what it would look like on their records if they lost you.” The doctor snorted. “Cut-crazy bastards wanted to amputate your leg at the last stop. Lucky for you they didn’t get to it before you were shipped here. Don’t know where the army is getting its doctors these days. Sears and Roebuck, apparently. Anyway, you’re in good hands now. Notice how well you can hear? We sewed your eardrums back together. Figured we might as well while you were out of it. I know how disorienting it can be to wake up and not be able to hear anything. Happened to me once, during the Korean War. Chinese mortar shell.”

  “Am I all still here, Doc?”

  “Most of you.” Seeing the look of panic fleeting across his patient’s face the doctor hastened to add, “Nothing major gone. We had to debride the gunshot wound, and take out a lot of fragments from your lower body. Anybody ever call you magnet-ass, by the way? You attracted a hell of a lot of metal. That’s what they called me back in Korea after the mortar shell. Doctors took pieces of it out of me for six months. Some of yours we couldn’t get out. Would have done more damage than leaving it in place. As it is you look like a baseball with all the stitches.” The doctor laughed at his own humor again. “So what else do you want to know, Captain?”

  “Why do you keep calling me captain? Last I heard I was a first lieutenant.”

  “Not according to your records. You were promoted to O-3 two weeks ago. Congratulations. I guess the promotion party can wait awhile.”

  “What date?”

  “Date? Ah, you mean today’s date. October 18, 1967. You’ve been here for six days. Most of that time we’ve kept you pretty hopped up. Figured it was about time for you to come out and join the world, so we started weaning you a couple of days ago.”

  “What now?”

  “Now we’ve got to get rid of the malaria. The leg is still infected. But the malaria worries me the most. Falciparum has a nasty habit of turning into blackwater fever and shutting the kidneys down. Then you die. And we don’t want that to happen. The Army Medical Corps has spent entirely too much money on you to let you croak now.” The doctor laughed again.

  Jim decided he liked this doctor despite his irritating laugh. At least he hadn’t tried to bullshit him.

  “I think it’s time for you to get a little more rest,” the doctor said. “A little consciousness at a time is enough for anyone.” He injected a hypodermic needle into the tube dripping a clear solution into Jim’s arm.

  “Lisa here will take good care of you, won’t you, Lisa?” The young corpsman nodded and smiled.

  Jim was enchanted. Lisa was the first Caucasian female he had seen in almost a year. The lack of Asian features was soothing. Through the haze of the rapidly taking effect painkiller he thought her quite beautiful.

  “I think the captain likes you, Lisa,” said the doctor. “Better be careful and stay out of his reach when he gets his strength back. These Green Berets are notorious. Probably carry you off to his lair and feed you rats and snakes. Make you jump out of perfectly good airplanes and other such silly pastimes.”

  Was that a speculative look Jim thought he caught in her eyes? Surely not. Probably just the effect of the drugs flooding so pleasantly through his body. Wishful thinking. Still, when he got better…he drifted off to sleep.

  The next weeks were filled with pain. To avoid addicting him to the painkillers they were slowly withdrawn, ones of lesser strength being substituted. Unfortunately they were also of lesser effectiveness.

  The hole in his leg constantly suppurated. Another debridement was performed. This involved the scraping away of dead muscle tissue in hopes of removing the focus of infection. It was a procedure he remembered from his days as a medic; he had performed it on lab animals during training, and later on wounded Cambodian soldiers. The theory was that this, combined with heavy doses of antibiotics, would speed the healing process. But the Southeast Asian bacterium proved stubborn.

  Occasionally a piece of metal would work its way to the surface. He could always tell when one was ready to come out. The spot would turn red and tender, then swell, then a boillike pustule would form. If he caught it early enough, Doc Cable lanced it. More often it broke on its own as he tossed in the bed, the tiny piece of metal that had caused the problem hard to find in the pus and blood.

  By far the worst were the malaria attacks. They came in predictable patterns. For a day he felt fine. Then the chills came and the shaking racked his body. It was so violent Lisa had trouble keeping him in the bed. He felt cold, so cold, wondered if he would ever be warm again. He was covered from head to toe with heavy wool blankets but they had no effect on this internal frost.

  The chills lasted from eight to twelve hours, then his temperature began its inexorable rise. Soon the covers were thrown off and even the feel of Lisa’s cool hand on his brow was unbearable. Within a couple of hours he was delirious. He had horrible dreams of burning—inside a crashed helicopter, in a blazing building, being roasted slowly on a spit over hot coals.

  As the process completed itself the fever br
oke. This was signaled by the sweats, his body pouring out fluid in an unending flow, soaking the sheets three or four times a day. Then the cycle began again.

  The combination of chloroquine, primaquine, and pyrimethamine seemed to be having little effect on the disease. A tropical medicine specialist was called in for consultation. To the other drugs he added quinine dapsone. The dapsone caused diarrhea. In his lucid moments he was ashamed to smell the stench as his bowels evacuated themselves onto the bed. The two times he had attempted to get up and go to the bathroom he had ended up flat on his face on the floor, earning a furious scolding from Lisa. Thereafter he endured it as she patiently cleaned up after him, never showing the least expression of disgust or embarrassment. No need for her to; he was disgusted enough for them both. But the dapsone finally killed the bug.

  He had been in the hospital just over two months when one evening Doc Cable showed up in his room after rounds. Jim looked at him in surprise; after-hours visits were not usual.

  The doctor closed the door behind him, came over to the bed, and opened his medical bag. Christ, Jim thought, what now? It was bound to be painful, and he was heartily tired of pain.

  From the bag came a full bottle of bourbon.

  “Thought you might be in need of this by now,” said the doctor. He poured a healthy shot into each of two glasses, handed Jim one, and raised his own in silent toast.

  The liquor flowed hot and smooth down his throat, sending smoky tendrils of pure pleasure flooding throughout his body.

  “Not bad, is it? Still think the medical profession screwed up when they got away from the therapeutic value of medicinal alcohol. Of course, most of the medical profession thinks I’m a dinosaur, but fuck ’em.”

  “Fuck ’em indeed,” Jim agreed, holding his glass out for a refill. “So, Doc, what’s next?”

  “You’re doing pretty good. Lots better than anyone would have ever expected when you came in here. Including me. Looks like we beat the malaria, even though you may have recurrences. The infection in your leg is largely licked and the wound is starting to close. You’ve still got some metal in you, but nothing that’s going to cause any real problems. What I’m leading up to is, after some physical therapy to strengthen that leg, you’re going to be pronounced fit for duty. I plan to profile you, give you a piece of paper that will keep you to limited duty for a while, but that’s not going to last forever. You see what I’m saying?”

  Jim shook his head. “I don’t want a profile,” he said.

  Doc Cable looked at him with exasperation written all over his face. “Goddamn it, what I’m trying to tell you is that they’re likely to send you right back to Vietnam! And you may not be so lucky next time. If you can call what you’ve gone through being lucky. We damned near lost you. Hadn’t been for the grace of God and a strong constitution we would have.”

  Jim was silent. He took another sip of the bourbon.

  Cable looked at him speculatively. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  Jim nodded.

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “Hell if I know,” he said. “I could tell you that I thought what I was doing was important, but that would be a lie. Or I could spout some patriotic bullshit, but you know it would be just that. I’ve given a lot of thought to it. Best I can come up with is that I’ve left too many friends back there. If they’re there, I should be.”

  Cable took a measured sip of bourbon. “Guess I understand,” he said. “Felt pretty close to the same way myself after I got hit in Korea. But I was luckier than you. That war ended before I got the chance to go back. This one doesn’t look like it will ever end no matter what our wonderful politicians tell us about light at the end of the tunnel. Really, you don’t think you’ve done enough? I read your 201 file. This was your second trip over there. You went as an enlisted man the first time?”

  Jim smiled. “Yeah, ’63 as an SF medic. Hell of a lot different war then.”

  “How so?”

  “No big-unit actions. Just a lot of little skirmishes with local-force VC units. No conventional U.S. troops, so you didn’t get nearly as much support. But I liked it a lot better. At least then you felt like you were doing something and weren’t just a tiny cog in some vast military machine.”

  “Take a lot of casualties?”

  “Not at first. For some reason the VC let us build our camp without a lot of interference. Guess they figured we were going to be like the French, build this fortified complex and stay inside it, let them have a free hand outside. They were pretty surprised when, after getting our strike force trained, we started patrolling all over the area. Caught ’em with their pants down more than once.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Then it got serious. They started seeing us as a threat, pulled in a Main Force VC battalion, attacked the camp. Hell of a battle.” Jim was silent for a moment, eyes distant. In his mind he was replaying that night of terror and confusion. “They came in from the south side, through the rubber trees. For some reason, the people in Saigon had picked a spot for the camp right in the middle of a rubber plantation. We were down in a valley, hills on two sides. And the trees came almost right up to the wire. We’d asked permission to cut them back. Saigon came back and said no. Said the French plantation owners, who they didn’t want to anger, had refused permission. So we had no fields of fire, no observation.

  “Sappers came first, blew holes in the wire, got inside the camp and raised hell. Then the assault troops came. Breached the perimeter in two places. We poured the fire into them from the flanks, broke the assault, started trying to mop up the ones who were still in camp. I was in the dispensary by this time, trying to take care of the wounded. We’d made the mistake of only sandbagging the buildings halfway up, so the bullets were flying through the tin from waist level up. Had to work squatted over. Hell of a mess. Floor was covered with broken glass, blood, shit, everything. Kept slipping as I tried to move around. Stood up just once, that’s when I got the scar on my shoulder. Carbine bullet went through one of the posts, hit me, embedded itself. Lucky it was almost spent, would have broken the bone otherwise.” He fell silent. How could he describe how he had felt that night? How could you tell someone about the beautiful terror?

  “Anyway, we fought ’em off, killed a lot of them. And that’s when it really got serious. They started terrorizing the villages, going in and killing anyone suspected of collaborating with us. We’d been doing village sick call all the way along, taking a patrol out and treating all kinds of weird diseases. First time any of these people had ever seen anything like modern medicine, even though what we were doing was pretty primitive by U.S. standards. Treated everything from goiter to tuberculosis. Did a lot of dental work. Ever try to pull a tooth from someone who’s been chewing betel nut all their lives, Doc? Not too much fun. The stuff is abrasive, wears their teeth off right down to the gum line. Then the roots get infected, they get these horrible abscesses. Can’t use extractors, can’t get enough of a hold. So you use elevators, slowly pry the thing out. We gave ’em novocaine, but the abscesses blocked a lot of the effect. So they just had to suffer through it. But you should have seen how grateful they were, to finally get rid of the pain of the tooth!

  “Anyway, once we’d get these people treated we’d get ’em to come to the camp for follow-ups. The intelligence sergeant would talk to them, find out who’d been visiting their villages, names of the local VC, who was cooperating with them, who they’d seen moving through the area when they were out in the fields. Pretty damned effective. They were grateful for the treatment so they’d tell us just about anything. We had three to four hundred people showing up every day.

  “The VC couldn’t let that go on. First they started spreading the story that the Americans were poisoning the people who came in. Any patients we couldn’t cure were used as examples. See what the Americans are doing to you? That didn’t work too well because for every patient we lost there were fifty who showed obvious improvement. Th
e VC lost face.

  “So they let it be known that anybody who showed up for treatment at the camp would be regarded as a ‘counter-revolutionary enemy of the people.’ Started selectively killing people, especially those they suspected of giving us information. They’d go into a village, pick up a few people to use as examples, make the rest of the village watch as they cut off their heads. They’d carry the heads around to other villages to show what happened to people who cooperated with the My Lo, long-noses, they called us.”

  “I’d heard they were particularly murderous bastards,” Cable said.

  “Yeah. And it didn’t really matter to them who they killed. Men, women, even little kids on a couple of occasions. But you look at it their way, it was something they had to do to stop us. Right and wrong have a way of getting mixed up over there.

  “Anyway, although it cut down on the number of people who cooperated with us, there were still plenty who did. Enough for us to get some pretty detailed info on the agitation and propaganda, agit-prop, squads who were doing all this. We figured out the pattern, came up with a pretty good idea of where they might be next, started sending out ambush patrols. Caught enough of them to make it costly. Killed some, captured a few.

  “Now, we’d captured VC before. Usually turned out to be some young kid who’d been forced into joining, or occasionally somebody who’d joined up of his own free will. Once you showed them you weren’t monsters, weren’t going to rip their hearts out and eat them as they’d been told, they saw they’d been lied to by the VC and would often cooperate.

  “But the agit-prop guys, they were a different breed. They were absolutely convinced of the rightness of what they were doing. True Believers, as Hoffer would say. Anything to further the cause, all acts were justified. They scared the hell out of me, I can tell you that. It was as if their humanity had been squeezed out of them by their convictions. No room for both. They had absolutely no doubts. Certainly willing, even eager, to die for their cause. More important, they didn’t care who they had to kill.”