It is funny. He smiles widely at the sudden bloodstream. It is a deeper cut than he meant to make but of less than no significance. A prank. Nothing more than a jailhouse tattoo, a heart stabbed into the arm from boredom, filled with a poison of inks to darken and dye the skin. LOVE and HATE inscribed upon the knuckles. A pachuco cruciform at the webbing of the thumb. A slash over the heart for luck.
He is hunkered down beside his huge rucksack in a small woods at the edge of an area of marshes on the Long Tau, where the spike team was to effect an ambush of Viet Cong guerrillas who had terrorized a small, nearby hamlet, torturing and brutally killing a province chief and his family. Intelligence believed that the VC were using the ruins of a pagoda in the woods in back of him for a supply cache near the hamlet, but Chaingang knew it was a setup and he had gone on a different course, alone, waiting and watching. The team had been wiped out by mortars and sniper fire. Set up by hoi chanh dinks who had been double agents or quadruple agents or ... who knows? And the boat was gone. There was no radio. And Chaingang was alone.
He knows he will wait until dark and then make his way to the New Cairo Ditch, which is the Long Tau River in the IV Corps Tactical Zone, 331/STAR RACER, Spike Team M-1350, Republic of South Vietnam.
THE RUNG SAT SPECIAL ZONE (1965)
The LZ, which is named with some ridiculous woman's name, is perhaps fifteen clicks out and the birds change pitch and it signals his on-line terminal that this is the time he hates about to materialize and manifest itself in the sudden drop to the decks, and suddenly your lunch is in your throat and before you can drop your socks and grab your rocks the 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile) has set them down through the small opening in the green, and a commo “adviser,” a marine sergeant, is yelling at them to double-time it to the blue feature.
They are soon jammed onto a PACV from some riverine unit and roaring up the snaky waterway into the Long Tao's ranged mouth. The Hovercraft is called a patrol air-cushion vehicle and Chaingang thinks of the blue feature as a water snake, winding the way a serpent will, flowing and twisting into the Rung Sat.
These are spooky Charlie-held streams that weave a web of blue and brown lines through the jungle delta and sprawling Vietnamese marshlands. There will be no medevac back in here. No arty. Nor resupply. This is a lonely game to be played by the chosen few. What did they say on the commercials? The few—the proud. If you get your ass kicked back in here you are permanently fucked up.
Chaingang sees the tributaries as a thousand water snakes, their names sounding like notes played on a busted musical instrument by a deaf man without hands, music that reverberates and twangs and echoes shrilly with Asian monkey vibes of bad luck and slow death and omens of evil.
Water snakes feeding into the arms of Satan. Warping the drug-ripped minds of these children. Injecting them with massive shots of instant paranoia and fear tremors that rumble deep in the gut like the New Madrid Fault Line, and the boys hope they can get their fatigues off before the fear erupts, because as everyone knows Ho Chi Minh's revenge takes no prisoners.
The PACV comes coasting into the Long Tao at dusk in a ratfuck of off-loading mania and hand signals and everyone sweating bullets, wishing they were aboard her when the chief petty officer makes her a memory. And the team is moving out to dig in the night positions before the blackness of Victor Charlie country comes to blind and befuddle.
They are moving into the darker green of the Jungle. Wet. Soggy. Putrid. Foul vegetation and rotting plant life and dead fish clog the humid air, making it impossible to breathe from the stink and the asphyxiating humidity. And this is the GOOD time. When that tide goes out the Rung Sat becomes a barf city mudhole of the most evil and poisonous stench the devil ever shit on earth. Stinking slime pops like the sound of enemy coming, and you can only hope that the worst thing in your nightmares will be the red ants and leeches and venomous snakes and big, growling man-eaters and alligators as big as Chryslers and vampire bats that come to suck human blood.
Charlie lives here. It is his base camp. Ammo dump. His triage. His resupply. Charles’ R & R. Charlie owns this bitch. Welcome to the Rung Sat Special Zone. Four hundred square miles of the most frighteningly dangerous, stinking, deadly mangrove swamps and river delta in the Nam. The name translates as the Assassin's Forest. A slimy, smelly, murderous mass of vampire feces that lies along the Long Tao, connecting Saigon to the South China Sea.
331/STAR RACER is an operation being run up the VC's nostrils by the U.S. Naval Advisory Group, the Crotch, and assorted spooks, grunts, and snake-eaters from various units. Because the mission is aimed through, if not around, certain elements of the ARVN, it becomes the property of one covert spike team, carried on the books as M-1350, written in invisible ink and guaranteed to NOT go down in history.
The Hoi Chanh dinks have butt-fucked intelligence once again, and the unit is wasted. Its ass is well and truly waxed, and Chaingang, who is a self-contained hunter-killer unit moving slower than the pack, never following fee path of least resistance, working solo, is now operating alone. No radio. No spike team. No chopper. No boat. Surrounded by VC and worse—he is in the heart of an NVA base camp—and the monsoon rains will come soon.
Somewhere, GHOST TOWN, the exfiltration team, awaits the radio signal. A coded crackle of words sounding like routine grid coordinates: India—Whiskey—November—Yankee—Zulu—Foxtrot—Golf—Papa—Lima—Golf—Papa—India. Twelve simple words. IWN. YZF. GPL. GPI. What could be simpler to remember? But there is no mike to key. Not static-filled radio to speak the exfiltration sign into. No way to tell them. So he will WALK out of the Rung Sat. He will KILL his way out.
He makes his way again to the edge of the shadowy tree line and comes out at the edge of a rice field, moving quickly across the muddy paddy dike. Sweating profusely in the scorching heat and energy-sapping humidity of the dreaded RSSZ. Fifteen quintuple-E bootprints mashing down in the muddy earth, leaving a trail that is dangerously clear. He wishes he had extra grenades or even a pie or two, which is what he calls the claymores, that he could use to leave a little surprise in his pathway. To “close the back door” behind him.
But he is out of ‘nades, mines, even ammo. Worse—although he prefers the personal killing modes—he has lost his long-range destroyer. It is his tool for dispatching the little people as the current situation and terrain dictated and he missed the comfort of the weight on his left shoulder.
It had been R & D'd by the Bridge Tool and Die Manufacturing Company, of Philadelphia, Pa., and made by Inland Steel—the Inland Manufacturing Division of General Motors—and it was Chaingang's pig, the M-60 LMG. Twenty-four pounds of slope killer. A gas-operated, 550-round-per-minute, 43 1/2-inch death machine fed by a disintegrating link belt system, which the government had phased in to replace the venerable .30 Browning.
Under ordinary field conditions the M-60 would easily lift a hundred-round bandolier vertically, and the auto-fire recoil was sufficient to actually hold the weapon in place when fired from the hip, making it the most reliable heavy-duty piece that was sufficiently mobile for a single man to carry into combat.
He liked the weight of it on the special shoulder pad. He enjoyed the way it felt cradled in his arms as he thought about how easily he could cut a man in half with the projectiles from this tool. How easy it would be to stitch a line of bullets through the middle of a human, blasting him apart with the mere touch of a trigger.
But his M-60 and ammo were gone. No pies. No ‘nades. Not even his Hi-Standard with the suppressor. Only a pitiful Colt Woodsman and half a dozen .22 rounds, his chain, and his blade.