13th Valley (3 page)

The river carries soil and rock from upland watersheds to the base of the knoll. Where the knoll forces the waters to bow, the river has deposited much of its cargo to form a beach. Sticks, branches, bamboo, whole trees have been brought down the waterway, and, catching, have formed a massive snag at the beach's north end. Riverwaters roil in the snag, back up then boil over, rushing first then sliding into the deep channel around the knoll, then lazily flowing into the broad plain beyond. Each monsoon season the river has overflowed and flooded the plain; each dry season the waters have dropped below the mud bluffs of the deepest channel.

From the muck plain of the valley floor and from the rolling hummocks of mountain erosion, elephant grass grows to twelve feet and dense bamboo thickets choke the earth to the river's edge.

The headwaters of the river are in the very rugged terrain to the east where the valley is narrow. There the mountains rise to summits of nine hundred, one thousand, and eleven hundred meters. As the river flows west down the mountains, the valley widens. Four kilometers from its origin is the knoll which causes the river to bend. At that point the valley floor is almost six hundred meters wide. The north ridge is steep, dropping quickly to the valley floor. The south ridge is lower and gentler of slope. From the numerous peaks along the ridges, small ribs extend toward the valley center and form canyons which guide sporadic rivulets to the river.

The Khe Ta Laou river valley is difficult to enter, hard to traverse. For a very long time it had remained isolated. Life in the valley is highly organized and each plant and animal form aids and is dependent upon the entire system. The equilibrium is sharply structured—a state, perhaps, which invited disruption.

C
HAPTER
1

C
HELINI

From that day on they called him Cherry and from the night of that day and on he thought of himself as Cherry. It confused him yet it felt right. He was in a new world, a strange world. Cherry, he thought. It fits. It made little difference to him that they called every new man Cherry and that with the continual rotation of personnel there would soon be a soldier newer than he and he would call the new man Cherry. Cherry. He would repeat it to himself a hundred times before the day ended.

For James Vincent Chelini the transition began early on the morning of 12 August 1970. He was at the 101st Airborne Replacement Station at Phu Bai for the second time; there now to receive his final unit assignment for his year in Vietnam. The air in the building was already stifling. Chelini sweated as he waited anxiously for the clerk to dig through a stack of personnel files.

“No way, Man,” Chelini shook his head as he read the order.

“I don't cut em, Breeze,” the clerk said. “I just pass em out.”

“Listen, Man,” Chelini protested. “I'm not an infantry type. I'm a wireman. That's my MOS
*
. Somebody screwed up.”

“Breeze,” the clerk shrugged, “when you get this far up-country aint nobody here ee-ven kin figure what them numbers mean. We's all Eleven Bravos. You know, you get that from Basic.”

Chelini cringed. It was one more snafu in a series of snafus that were propelling him faster and deeper into the war than he had ever anticipated. “Man,” he said, restrained, “I can't be sent to an infantry company.”

“Next,” the clerk said lethargically.

“Hey. Dude.” A harsh voice erupted behind Chelini. “Just say fuck it, Dude. Don't mean nothin.” A red-haired man in civilian clothes had entered the office without being noticed. He addressed the clerk. “Hey REMF,” he said in a voice of complete authority, “you seen Murphy?”

“Murphy's gettin ice cream,” the clerk answered.

“You REMF fuckin candyasses sure got it dicked,” the red-haired man laughed harshly. The man gestured at Chelini, who flinched, then ordered the clerk, “Square that cherry away, Man. Ya don't gotta fuck with everybody all the fuckin time.” The man glided out the door and was gone.

“Who's that?” Chelini asked the clerk.

“Him? He's a crazy fuckin grunt from the Oh-deuce. Fuckin asshole. He en Murphy use ta be in the same company till Murphy extended ta get out a the field en they put him here.”

“Oh-deuce?”

“Yeah, Man. Oh-deuce. Four-oh-deuce. That's where you goin, cherry. That's where you goin.”

Chelini had allowed himself to be drafted and he had allowed himself to be sent to Vietnam. He had had the means to resist but not the conviction or the will. Indeed, inside, he heard opposing voices. His father was a veteran of World War II. All the Chelini men—and the Chelinis were a large Italian-American family—had served in the armed forces. James observed that having served somehow set them apart from those who had not gone. On the other side were the people of his own generation, the protestors and students, who included his older brother Victor.

In 1968, in order to avoid the draft, Victor had skipped to Canada via the New Haven underground. James told himself that that had sealed his destiny. Victor was a disgrace to the family. Outwardly, Mr. Chelini defended his older son's right to make his own decision, but inwardly, James felt sure, it tore at his father's heart. James saw his draft order as an opportunity to reestablish the family's honor.

Before basic training began Chelini signed up for a third year and a guarantee of communications school, in order, he justified it later, to avoid combat. In Basic Chelini was an enthusiastic trainee and he tried hard to learn good soldiering. In advanced training he became a telephone systems installer. This, he was certain, would guarantee his safety. No matter where he was stationed, he thought, he would work at a rear-base. He would support the war effort if needed, yet he would not really be a part. After AIT, when Chelini's orders came through for Vietnam, he told himself he would experience the war zone, exactly as he had always planned, without exposing himself to combat. He told himself that he was totally naive, that he had everything to experience and to learn.

Chelini arrived at the giant army replacement station at Cam Ranh Bay near midnight 31 July. It was dark and raining as the plane descended steeply toward the airstrip. GIs on board were fidgeting. They had been en route from McCord Air Force Base via Anchorage and Yokota, Japan, for seventeen hours. Because of the jet-lag, the confusion of crossing the international dateline, his excitement and exhaustion, Chelini didn't know if it was the thirtieth or thirty-first of July or the first of August. He had been up for twenty-five hours.

An MP welcomed the planeload of arrivals to the Republic, then said, “Go directly to the buses. In case of rocket attack on the base or ambush during convoy, remain in the buses and get on the floor.” Chelini could not tell if the MP was serious. Here? he thought. He tried to look at the MP's face but was propelled with the mob toward the waiting vehicle.

What he thought was the third and last leg of his journey turned out to be a middle step. “Move your body, Troop,” he was ordered, prodded, pushed. They boarded the buses by rank and service, army lower enlisted last.

“Okay, everybody,” the shout of a cadre cracked as they disembarked. “Form up on the hardstand.” Chelini trudged on with the others. He did not remember the bus ride. Strange, he thought. Strange to fall asleep after spending all that time getting here. Chelini stared at the installation about him, but nothing stood out. It appeared to be just another base.

Crackling static from an olive-drab loudspeaker stationed at the peak of a white clapboard building interrupted his thoughts. “ATTENTION! Attention in the company area. Those manifest for An Khe report to the orderly building. You are shipping.”

Cadre continued shouting. “Okay. Listen up. We've had a sapper attack an we didn't get em all. We don't know where they are. Sooo, stay away from the perimeter. Got that? I know you've heard Cam Ranh Bay is secure. In the past two months we've had more activity than in the past two years. Two nights ago we had a rocket attack.”

Chelini was too tired to talk. He looked at his feet. “Sand,” he mumbled to himself. “That's what this place is.” The sand lifted with the slightest kick. It was so fine that little clouds formed around feet and rose to his ankles and then to his knees. It stuck to the sweat on his arms and face and neck. Soon itching tormented his entire body.

Processing began immediately. Chelini filled in form after form without paying attention to what they were. His money was changed for Military Payment Certificates (MPC), and he was assigned a bunk in the transient barracks. By 0300 Chelini, without having slept, was back on the hardstand with his duffel bag and a manila envelope of his records. Wearily he, and about five hundred others, waited for orders.

Helicopters had been in the air all night. Now they opened fire with miniguns, showering the bay in a red waterfall of tracers. The firing seemed to be concentrated about six hundred meters from the processing center. Some cadre spoke of AK-47 fire, but Chelini couldn't distinguish the sounds. Most of the cadre paid no attention to the helicopters. Somehow it seemed far off. Chelini watched the firing and listened to the buzz of the mini-guns but he was very fatigued and apathetic. “They didn't even have coffee for us,” he griped to a man near him. “Fuck the army, Man,” the soldier grumbled back.

0400. 0500. 0600. Finally, “… Ivor Carton to Bien Hoa. Timmy S. Cervantes to Quang Tri. James V. Chelini to Phu Bai …” Chelini smiled as the sound of his name came over the address system.

0615—the first light of his Vietnam tour. The area surrounding the post was exquisite, a bay of deep blue-green waters surrounded by mountains. The temperature was already rising and it was muggy. Chelini did not notice the beauty. He looked about him and was aware of only one thing—sand. It got into Chelini's mouth and ground between his teeth.

New people continued to arrive. Some looked concerned about the sapper attack and the helicopters firing. Chelini assured them it was nothing.

Phu Bai, Chelini thought. He looked up the location on a large, crude map drawn on the side of a processing building. He traced the route with his finger. That's about three hundred and fifty miles north of Saigon. Near Hue. The XXIV Corps is the division in that area. That's good, he told himself. It's just what I want. It's farthest north, so it's got to be cooler than here.

He was shuffled about like baggage. Line-ups, formations, order checks. The temperature kept climbing. He yawned. There was so much activity and noise, and he was so tired.

Chelini was the last passenger to board the C-130 transport going to Phu Bai via Da Nang. The noise of the uninsulated aircraft made it impossible to talk or to sleep. He felt like a zombie. The ride was rough, and he was becoming nauseous. The men sat on four rows of webbed benches that were suspended from the plane's raw metal skeleton. “If Ah was a side of hangin beef,” someone shouted into his ear, “they'd a treat me bettah.” Chelini did not respond.

The C-130 approached Da Nang from the sea, descended and landed. Twenty soldiers deplaned. Though he was not scheduled to disembark, Chelini, who was at the very back of the ship, got off and pulled his gear down to the pavement to make it easier for the others to exit from the narrow bowels of the plane. The rear door closed with Chelini watching from outside. The plane taxied to the runway, paused, sped forth, lifted off and flew toward the sea.

Chelini was paralyzed with exhaustion. He shuffled off with the others who had left the aircraft and then found himself left behind by the side of a taxi way. He sat on his duffel bag. The envelope with his orders and records remained on the webbed seat in the plane. He sat by the runway for a long time. The Da Nang airfield was flat and clean and everywhere white concrete glistened in the noon sun. “Snafued,” he mumbled to himself.

Chelini had felt that something was not right the moment he left the aircraft, yet he was too self-conscious to yell, to make himself seen. He simply sat and thought of ways to justify what had happened. He was sure someone would take care of him.

After a while someone did come up to him. “Where you going, Soldier?” the man asked. Chelini told him Phu Bai. The man directed him to a helicopter pad that had stacks of bundles of “Stars and Stripes” newspapers at one side. A large helicopter landed. Chelini helped someone load the papers, then climbed aboard and sat amidst the bundles. His body seemed to be on auto-pilot.

The thought of having to explain where he had been without having a good explanation made Chelini tremble. Oh, God, I'm AWOL. They'll court-martial me. What if something happens to me? Nobody'll know. His body twitched. His eyes opened wide. He kicked some of the bundles as the helicopter banked to one side. He fixed his eyes on a man standing, peering out the left rear porthole. The man wore a dark olive-drab flight suit and an olive-drab fiberglass helmet with wires and a mouthpiece. The upper front of his helmet was covered with a dark, opaque sun visor and the sun glinted off the shield as the man looked out the porthole. In front of him was a machine gun.