prologue

The bodies lie by the trail, still warm as if the men were asleep. Villagers will soon strip the bodies naked, pausing only to offer thanks for the unexpected bounty. Then the animals will come, down from the rocks and out of the jungle to reduce the naked bodies to bones. And when the animals have finished, the jungle will fold the bones into itself.

For the living, the narrow trail down from the ambush site is wearying, with switchback after switchback descending from the plateau. Then a final switchback, and the trail spits the leader and his men into a small clearing on the valley floor.

The leader raises a hand, and the men take a knee near the entrance to a path leading into the clearing. The butts of their M-16’s rest lightly on the ground. They listen, and listen some more, then the leader signals with one hand. Scouts move out on point into the tall grass, both to the left and the right of the path. He stands. It is his job to survey the path as far as he can see, looking for freshly turned earth, and for thin wires woven into the grass and sparkling in the sun – for the things that could kill them. Seeing none, he steps off. His men fall in at five yard intervals, rifles hanging on thin hips and wary eyes scanning the grass.

The path makes a sweeping curve, and after a hundred yards the men emerge onto the beginning of a dirt trail. The leader calls another halt and the men kneel. This trail he knows will lead to another that will take him to the village. It will be a mile of walking under a green canopy wet with decay and smelling of misery. He listens, listens some more. Then the hand signals, and they move out again.

Master Sergeant William Coté Moreau and Staff Sergeant Tommie Hutchinson, US Special Forces, and their complement of four Rangers, all experienced and one of them a medic, plus a handful of Montagnards from the Jarai tribe, emerge from the trees into a small village of simple huts, an uncountable number of chickens and a dozen or so small children running for mothers. 

Two of the Montagnards carry a wounded man cradled in a green military poncho slung between two saplings. The man is in civilian clothes that bear no labels. His head rests on an old leather and canvas backpack, and he is bleeding through a very new bullet wound in his stomach. 

Sergeant Moreau is tired and filthy, and until now he was also frustrated and empty-handed. But the backpack contains paper, paper means intel and intel means he will return with something to show for a seven-day patrol in the mountains above the Ia Drang Valley.

Not that he cares much about intel, but he has come to believe that the only reason he is still alive after almost four full tours is because he does his job well every second of every day. His job is to get intel. He has some, and that means he will probably stay alive a while longer.

Moreau checks his watch. Helo extraction is in two hours, and they are about an hour out from the rendezvous point, and that’s with hard walking. They will stop here to rest, and to give Doc some time to do his job with the wounded.

He’s been in this village several times, and it’s not pro-government, not anti- and not likely to survive with that ‘leave-me-alone’ attitude. Even so, his men know to be careful. Some are going hut to hut, herding the villagers onto the broad dirt path that splits the village. Two Montagnards are carrying the prisoner into one of the larger huts. Hutch and the rest of the men are setting perimeter security. At this time of day, many of the villagers are working the paddies, and the perimeter team will also keep an eye on them.

Moreau studies the western and northern sky. After four years in-country he can read weather, and he reads heavy weather coming. If they are lucky, it should hold off until they reach the extraction site at an old French strong point. If they miss the extraction, or if the weather grounds the choppers, hoofing the twenty klicks back to base west of Pleiku means finding a defensive position for the night and being lucky for one more day.

Moreau follows his men into the hut and finds the prisoner on his back with the poncho between him and the dirt floor. The man’s head is almost directly below the ancestors’ shelf, and the smell of this morning’s incense lingers. Moreau gives the shrine holding the ancestor tablets a second look. It is finer than most he has seen. The headman’s family must have had some wealth at one time, for the rest of the hut says the family has none now.

With Doc tied up working on a couple of the Montagnards and one of his Rangers, Moreau kneels beside his prisoner and administers a full syrette of morphine, field dresses the man’s stomach and, since the bullet passed through, packs the exit wound at the back. A show of mercy might give the man hope that, if he cooperates, he can survive.

The Montagnards hoist the man from under his shoulders and settle him on a low, wooden stool. Then they brace him from either side with their hips. Moreau watches the prisoner take several deep breaths. Impressive that the only sounds the prisoner has made were a moan when he turned him to pack the exit wound and these few gasps.

Moreau drops to both knees in front of the stool and glances up to be sure the man’s eyes are in focus, and focused on him. They are, and he pulls one item after another from the blood-stained pack, laying them out in a semicircle on the dirt. Each item brings a question.

“Do you speak English?” he asks in English. There is no answer. The man is young, perhaps no more than 20.  His clothes are well-made. “Do you speak Vietnamese?” asks Moreau in Vietnamese. There is no answer. The man’s eyes are heavy-lidded, his breathing slow and regular, but he is looking at Moreau. He doubts he could do the same with that wound. He took a bullet in the shoulder at An Lão in ’64. Another creased his cheek in the firefight at Khe Sanh in early ’66, leaving a thin, white smile on the left side of his face. He knows pain, and he suspects that being gutshot is pain distilled. Purified.

“Do you speak French?” asks Moreau in French.

The prisoner’s eyes open a bit wider, as if surprised this American has managed two foreign languages. Moreau can see the awareness behind them. They aren’t the eyes of a man with opiates flowing through his veins, not yet. Moreau wonders if he can even feel the drug.

The prisoner answers in French, his voice soft and tinged with pain. “My name is Tan. I am a volunteer medic.”

Moreau raises his voice slightly, but keeps it pleasant despite his choice of words. He finds it more effective when seeking answers to play the friend and confidant: “C’est des conneries, Tan. Ne me mens pas. Tu es un soldat – don’t bullshit me, Tan. You’re a soldier.” He gestures at the contents of the man’s pack, spread on the dirt floor between them. “I don’t see any medical supplies, which means you aren’t a medic, and you don’t have time to play that game.” 

The man says nothing. His eyes are dark, still bright, and still locked on Moreau’s. “Think about it Tan, or whatever your name is. I can call in a chopper and get us both out of here, get you some help. But you have to help me first. What is all this? What are you doing here?”

A spasm of pain shuts the man’s eyes and he inhales deeply. The air between them is rich with the smell of incense, coconut oil and lemongrass. Tan shudders again as he absorbs the pain, then draws himself together. “That is an appealing lie, sergeant. But it is still a lie. I am already dead.”

After a few minutes more of this Moreau knows that the man will give him nothing. He sweeps everything from the prisoner’s pack into his own and slings the pack over his left shoulder. He orders the two Montagnards to go outside and tell the men to saddle up.

When his two living props leave his side, Tan fights to hold himself upright. Winning that small victory, he raises his eyes to the barrel of Moreau’s forty-five. The sight of the instrument that will end his pain is neither unexpected nor unwelcome.

You look relieved, Moreau thinks. He steadies Tan with his left hand. Been waiting for this since we sat you down on that stool, haven’t you? Waiting for the bullet. Waiting for me to give it to you. When his lips twitch, he feels the scar tighten along his cheek. What a wonderful world. “Quel monde merveilleux, Tan,” he says. Then he pulls the trigger, twice.

The noise rocks Tan on his stool, but he doesn’t fall. Beside him, a cloud of aerosolized straw drifts back down to a pallet perforated with two small black holes. Blinking back pain, and surprise at feeling anything, he watches Moreau toss two morphine syrettes and a silver coin at his feet.

Moreau began carrying a silver peace dollar on each mission about a year ago, and he never brings it back to camp. Sometimes he leaves it on a roadside temple, or tosses it into a village well, or places it in the crook of a tree. On his last patrol, he left it with a Vietnamese girl. She was sitting upright in the shallow ditch beside the AK she’d sprayed at his patrol. She had been 14, maybe. He’d stood by her as his men swept the small village, sometimes leaning down to brush the flies away from her eyes. When it was time to move out, he left the coin in her hand.

Moreau nods at the dollar lying lady-side-up at the man’s feet, holsters his forty-five, grabs his M-16 from where he leaned it against a wall of the hut and walks backward toward the door. “I consider these coins to be good luck, Tan. Maybe this one has enough in it to get you out of here.” 

Then Moreau is out the door, and he cannot hear the whisper from the stool behind him. If he had, he would have thought that “au revoir” was a wildly optimistic comment.

A day later, after a smooth evac, Moreau finishes typing his mission report and attaches it with rubber bands to the letters or code books or whatever the writing was that Tan was carrying. The characters look like Chinese, but Moreau doesn’t care. The intel guys can have a field day.

He turns the bundle in, walks back to his tent and drops down on his cot. He is alone, free for a few hours, and he pulls his pack from beneath the cot. He takes out six small bars of gold, a wad of nearly 5,000 American dollars and a teak box. Inside the teak box, nestled in felt-lined compartments built to measure, are two blue stones. One is a perfect oval, the other is pear-shaped, and each is a bit larger than a robin’s egg. Moreau lifts each stone in turn. They are smooth and cool, almost calming. Wherever it was Tan was going with all this, the path now leads to the U.S.

Moreau replaces the stones in the box and wraps it, the gold and the cash in a Doors’ Waiting for the Sun t-shirt. The irony is all too obvious, and he hums the chorus of The Unknown Soldier, thinking back to the man who’d been waiting for the end, and to the wonder in Tan’s eyes when he shot wide.

Maybe a mercy shot to the head would have been kinder, but fuck it, there are already too many men lying dead and far from home. If Tan somehow avoids that, then that’s one for the little guys on both sides of this fuck-up of a war.

Unlacing his boots, Moreau draws another line through a number on his mental calendar. August 13, 1968. 66 wake-ups to go. He lies back, his head heavy on the thin pillow. He’s given the intel guys enough. He’s given the Army and his country enough. He’s given Tommie Hutchinson half the gold and half the cash they took from Tan, and Moreau knows to his soul Hutchison would die before saying how he got it.

Moreau closes his eyes and lets his mind drift, sixty-six days away from being out after four years, three one-month furloughs, two Purple Hearts, some medals he cares nothing about and a Dear John letter from the bitch who didn’t want to be a mother to his little girls – and now, out with a lot more than that. Sixty-six more days, and then home to his girls.

--© 2017, Terry Jones & Kevin Jones