almost. His beam flashed nervously. In the tunnels in her homeland, one never used light. Light was an American invention; it was the invention of men who feared the dark. But Phuong and the men and women who fought with her over the long years never used light; they learned, instead, to feel their way with their hands. They learned to sense, from variations in the atmosphere and gradations in odor, the approach of strangers.
Mother, can you smell him, her daughter asked from her heart. He’s terrified. His body stinks with fear.
I smell him, too, she replied.
Ahead, the tunnel narrowed even further.
“Sister Phuong, one moment please,” the American said in Vietnamese. “I have to report.”
He knelt, turned his beam off. The darkness was complete. She heard him fumbling.
“Rat Six, this is Team Alpha, we’re about seven hundred yards in, no sign of this tunnel Alice yet. Do you copy, Six?”
“Alpha, that’s an affirmative, good and clear.”
“Uh, Six, we’ll keep on picking our way along.”
“Go to it, Alpha. We’re counting on you. How’s your partner?”
“She’s real stable, Six, wish I could say the same for myself. Out, now, Six.”
“Roger that and out, Alpha.”
He flicked his beam back on.
“Are you ready, Sis?” he said in Vietnamese.
“Yes.”
“Then let’s go on.”
“Brother Dee-gard-ahn, why do you come? Why not just stay here? I’ll go on. You’re very scared, Brother, I can tell. I know my way. I won’t get lost.”
“I have to work the radio, Sis.”
“Brother, tunnels are no place for terror. Fear, yes. Fear, always. Fear, importantly. But terror, no, because terror leads to panic. Not many people can fight in a tunnel. Not being one of them is no disgrace. We learned it because it was the only way we had against your flying demons and terror bombers.”
“I’m not one of them, you’re saying.”
“I can tell, Brother. I can sense it.”
“No, it’s all right. It’s just walking, I can handle it. There’s no fighting, it’s just walking.” He smiled with a great deal of effort.
“Then let’s go, Brother American,” she said.
Alex, in the lull after the failed attack, scampered over his position checking on his men, telling them how well they had done.
“Is that all they’ll send, do you think?” he was asked.
“No, they’ll come again. And again. And again. I think the troops they send against us next will be better. Finally, they’ll send the very best. It’ll be a night fight, great fun.”
Morale was high. The boys seemed to be holding together very well. Down in the missile silo, the general reported good progress on the cutting. It would be sooner than everybody thought. He’d lost only ten dead and had eleven wounded, this from the terrifying air assault and the infantry assault. He had ample supplies of ammunition left. He was in an excellent situation, all things considered. Only two things really bothered him. First, the loss of one of his two light machine guns in the infantry assault, and second, that he had used so many of the Stinger missiles in defending against the air attack. He had only seven left.
“Sir, great shooting on that last bird,” someone called. “You can still see her burning down on the plain.” And you could: the smoke rose still from the wreck, drifted up through the bright sky, where it shredded and dissipated in the wind.
“No, nothing,” said Alex. “It was just luck.” Of course it hadn’t been. When the last plane came in by itself, it had been Alex with the M-60 who alone had refused to dive, even when the cannon shells were cutting away at him. He’d tracked the pilot all the way, and when the plane had ruddered hard to the left, he’d jumped up from the gun position like a duck hunter and held the weapon in his arms, pumping his rounds into the craft. He’d seen the tracers flick into the bubble cockpit, seen the bright glass haze as they tore through and the plane began to wobble, then never gathered enough altitude to make it out of the dive, and sank to the ground.
Alex had never shot down an airplane before. He felt queerly pleased.
“Now, back to the digging,” he said. “Enough congratulations. Time to get back to work. Whose turn is it? Whose shift? Red Platoon?”
“Blue Platoon,” the call came. “Red Platoon’s already dug down to hell.”
There was some laughter.
“All right,” Alex said, loving them, “Blue Platoon, in the trenches under the canvas. Red Platoon’s turn to sunbathe on the perimeter.”
“But Blue Platoon shot down the helicopter. Don’t we get a reward?”
“Lucky shot,” yelled one of the boys of Red Platoon. “Now you’ll dig till you’ve blisters the size of coins, just like—”
But Alex interrupted the horseplay.
“You said the helicopter went down? I didn’t see it crash.”
There was a moment of silence.
“Sir, we shot down a helicopter. It went over the hill and crashed.”
Alex listened carefully. He remembered the medevac chopper taking off at the beginning of the assault, but it should have hovered downslope. It clearly wasn’t a gunship, because it hadn’t brought any fire to bear on his position. But why would a medevac chopper have ventured over the firefight, particularly when it was so easy to avoid it? The more he thought about it, the more it bothered him. Then he said, “Everybody who fired on the helicopter, fall in on me, please.”
In the end about twenty men from Blue Platoon came over and gathered around Alex.
“Tell me about this helicopter,” Alex said. “One of you. Slowly. Not all at once. The man who spoke first.”
“Sir,” the boy eventually said in slow country rhythms. “Sir, during the last run of the aerial attack, a helicopter flew low over the trees. We saw it only very late in its approach, because everyone was undercover from the airplanes. Naturally—” he clapped his rifle, a Fabrique Nationale FAL, “I fired on it.”
“What kind of helicopter?”
“UH-1B. The Huey, so famous from Vietnam.”
“You hit it?”
“I–I
“How many rounds?”
“Sir?”
“How many rounds did you put into it? What kind of sight picture did you have? Were you leading it? Were you in the full or semiautomatic mode? Where were you firing?”
The boy was silent, baffled.
“Please be honest with me,” said Alex. “I mean you no disrespect. You are a brave and dedicated man. But I have to know the answers to these questions as completely as you can tell me.”
“Sir, then the truth is, I fired hurriedly. I had no time to really aim competently. I was firing semiautomatic and perhaps I got off seven or eight rounds.”
“Did you see any damage? I mean, ruptures in the steel, smoke, flames, blown rotors, that sort of thing?”
“Not really, sir. It was so fast.”
“How about any of you others. Who else thinks they scored hits?”
A few hands rose.
“Full-auto or semi?”
The answers were all semi; the stories were all the same: jerked shots fired desperately at a flashing target, no real sight pictures, less than a magazine apiece fired at the machine.
“Yet
