It’s working. This time it will work, and what comes next will not come. The tape continues to play, and it is working. Chapel will win his war, and everyone goes home. Everyone goes home alive.
The tape stops, and there is silence. An awful, familiar silence.
The chain has not been broken, because nothing can break the chain. What has occurred will occur, and will never stop.
“What the fuck is happening?” a voice screams. It’s McNulty. “What the fuck is happening?”
No answer. No sound.
It’s so dark I can’t see my own hands. I remove my other earplug.
Then there’s sound again. The sound of shells leaving long cylinders from high ground opposite our position.
“Tubes!” Render shouts from the dark.
The air fills with the whistle of plotted metal falling from the sky, then the thudding explosions as they make contact with the earth.
The darkness is gone, replaced by fire. Orange, red, yellow, white, and blue. Flares in the sky and explosions on the ground all around us. Burning phosphorus, RDX, and TNT blossom along our ridgeline like deadly tulips, cradled on cushions of smoke, showering everything with hot shrapnel and shards of earth.
The valley below is now crawling with movement as thousands leave their mountain hideaways and rush the valley floor, heading for the high ground on the other side of the bowl. Tripwires sing and claymores thud in mad syncopation. More flares cut the black sky, pink, green, and white, pushing back the stars and falling slowly like bleeding fireworks.
I find Chapel yelling something unintelligible at Morganfield in a language that may or may not be English, or even human, as Morganfield’s hands dance over the audio player, making adjustments to a dead machine. I grab Chapel by the shoulders and turn him to face me.
“You need to call this in!”
“I can’t,” he says, the end of his words cut off by explosions. Someone screams, a sound coming from a human throat, not from a speaker.
“Why not?”
“We kill them, the mission fails.”
“That doesn’t make any fucking sense!”
Chapel looks out into the valley and the wave of humanity heading our way.
“Call in the strike!” I say. “You knew this would happen. You know like I do!”
Chapel’s face stills, and he is about to say something, when the Hmong emerge from the trees behind us. Chapel looks at me, smiles, and pushes my rifle across my chest.
He winks. “Good luck this time.”
A mortar strikes nearby, and the concussion separates us, knocking me to the ground. Shrapnel grazes my leg, my hip. I stand up and when the smoke clears, Chapel is gone.
The tape starts again, louder this time and skipping, adding an extra layer of confusion and horror to the sounds of mortars and men, rifles and bullets and screams of the dead and dying that braid together with the recorded nightmare. Now we can all hear it, but its meaning is wasted, as it’s been exposed as a sham.
The first of the VC crest the ridgeline. The Hmong open up with their weapons.
I run.
36. Shedding Scales
“‘Good luck this time,’ you said. ‘This time.’ Why did you say that?” I look at Chapel in the dim light of the hut, searching his face for any clue that his mouth isn’t giving me. The shine in his eyes has gone flat.
“I don’t remember,” he says.
“That’s bullshit. I remember all of it. Every second.”
“Well, you would, wouldn’t you?”
“What’s that mean?”
“According to you, you’ve been there before. Experienced that night, a number of times.”
“I have. You have, too. I know you have. What you said, how you said it, that look… You have, too.”
“I don’t think so. I don’t remember…a lot of it. Most of it. I’m getting old.” He looks out the small window of the hut. “The jungle takes my memories from me. A few more every day. It’s why I’m here, I think. Why I stay here. I want the jungle to take all of them, and just leave me…empty.”
“No, it’s not that. You do remember. Your brain remembers, but won’t let you see it. It’s in there. It’s all in there.”
“Maybe,” he says.
“Then let me fill you in.”
37. Butcherbird
I run to higher ground, away from the jungle and the ridgeline and the killing that’s happening there. I need to get my feet out of the mud and post up high, wait it out and then disappear. The moon is out now, and everything is lit up blue. I can see where I’m going, and others can, too, I reckon. So I climb higher, as the eruptions of death become more faint below me.
Further up the incline, I climb the strewn boulders and granite blocks, jumping from surface to surface, surprised by my agility. Frankenstein’s monster. Chapel’s coward. I come to a stop on a flattop, crevices surrounding it on three sides where the stone split away when this massive stone hit the earth from wherever it was flung. Finding my feet, I turn back and look down to the fighting in the flashes of grenades and mortars. The moon is full now, the clouds have all bugged out with me, leaving the killing field illuminated and in sharp detail. I see McNulty being hacked to death with a machete. Then two, three more blades, taking off one of his arms, then his leg. Bayonets bury themselves in his torso. A barrel presses against his screaming head and takes off the top of it. He falls to the ground, dead before he lands.
Yards away Render is standing his ground in front of the wave of hateful humanity and shooting his rifle dry, then his pistol, then picks up a rock from the ground and is dropped before he can wind up.
Behind them Darby is on the move, in and out of the darkness, appearing long enough to take shots and drop weapons and pick up new ones and continue. A heavy machine gun assembled on the ridge tracks him, and begins firing as he disappears into the shadows. He doesn’t emerge.
I can’t find Morganfield, or Medrano. I think one of the mortar rounds got Jorge early on. It’s a blur, the memory, but it’s there, seen by one of my new eyes. The son of California, the father and husband and uncle and son and grandson would never mix his ingredients back into the soil of the San Joaquin.
It’s Chapel I’m waiting for, because I know he’s alive this time, as I’m sitting right in front of him at the other end of the River. I didn’t see him before, but this time I do. He’s fighting with the Hmong, his true tribe. We were hired guns, window dressing, or maybe just a part of the game I don’t understand.
Dozens of VC are rushing the Hmong position, which is arrayed like a rotating shield formation, rifles firing rounds until spent, and then those behind moving to the front, while the replaced move to the back to reload and check and cool their weapons. Chapel fires his M-1 like a patient hunter taking down a herd of buffalo too far away to hear the shots.
Bodies stack up on both sides, creating a picket wall between them. The Hmong stand their ground. Chapel continues to fire. A new platoon of VC rush from the jungle to their flank, and they’re caught in a half-pincer. Charlie swarms the Hmong position like ants, offering up their lives to crush the tribesmen. The last I see of Chapel he’s buried by bodies, both living and dead.
My head buzzes and I swoon backward, almost losing my balance, then run into something big. I turn and find a Vietnamese man—a boy, probably, by the pudginess of his face—looking down at me, as he stands almost a foot taller. He seems surprised, not noticing me as he watched the carnage below us. His face is open, curious, full of wonder. Just like a child’s. He’s strapped with boxes of ammunition and bags of provisions, hundreds of pounds of it. He’s a mule, not a soldier. A giant mule.