We
set up ambush near a canal. The canal wasn’t an arrow-straight, concrete-lined
waterway, but a glorified ditch, a winding, twisting narrow stream deep enough
to carry small boats from village to village. Most canals were several hundred
years old, dug when the Vietnamese came from the north and took land from the
native population or pushed Khmers back east or Thais back south.
The
moon that night was big and fat and rose an hour after I set the squad on a
wide treeless point that jutted from the bush and into the paddies. I hated big
fat moons, except when on ambush in the rubber plantations and I could see the
dinks when they came down trails or across clearings, carrying mortar tubes and
bipods and base plates and shells they would drop down the tubes and send
toward base camp where my bunk was. Or if I was at base camp, staggering from
somebody’s tent and toward my own hooch and maybe had too much to drink, but
not enough, because I could still walk. A big fat moon helped then, because
maybe I would see tent stakes and piss tubes and not trip over them and fall
down and make a fool of myself.
But
there, stuck out on that point, with two hundred meters of flat open ground
between the paddies and safety in the woods, and if shit got really bad, we
would have to run across it ... I hated big fat moons.
I
put Allen and his M-60 machine gun on the center of the point, and Frenchy, who
wasn’t a squad leader yet, but would be in a month when Ben Thomas got stupid
and dead at the same time. I put Allen and Frenchy and myself on the point,
because from there I could see up and down the canal and anything that came by.
The point was fifty meters from the canal and stuck into the paddies like a
middle finger jabbing a message against fate and all that shit. I put Bo, Reese
and Jim to watch the rear and the flats that stood between the point and safety
in the woods.
The
moon rose higher and got smaller, but no less bright. Paddy rice wasn’t tall
enough to hide the canal, but dikes near the canal would make anything that
came down seem to float through the paddies. Dinks used the canal to bring down
weapons and ammunition and whatever else they needed to run their war, which
wasn’t much. Intelligence people said the dinks ran small boats up and down the
canal at night, probably during the daytime too, but we didn’t have enough
people to check every boat that came along. Anything that moved at night was
fair game, and it was easier to kill dinks than search them. The dinks knew
that anything moving at night was fair game. They shot us, we shot them. That
was the rule.
About
midnight Frenchy nudged Allen and Allen poked me with an elbow. I looked left
and saw a mast coming down the canal and the bulwarks of a boat. A mast? I had
figured on a small canoe, one of those hollowed-out
logs the dinks used to take pigs and produce to market, but there came this big
canoe with a mast. Allen shifted his gun left.
I
had a parachute flare, the kind with a rocket in the end and a cap with a
firing pin you fit over the end of the flare, and you fire the flare by
slamming the end onto the ground I
didn’t do it that way, but rose to my knees and fired the flare with my hand.
The flare whooshed into the sky, and a woman at the prow of the boat cut loose
with one of those Chinese light machine guns. She could tell where the flare
came from, and she just cut loose with the machine gun, and green tracers
whizzed past my head. Then the flare popped and danced beneath its parachute,
and I saw the woman. God, she was beautiful, standing at the prow of the boat,
one foot braced against the bulwark, the butt of the machine gun at her right
hip, and she ripped off a full pannier, right at me.
Frenchy
yelled at me, and the woman reached down into the boat and grabbed another pan
of ammunition and slapped it onto the gun and held the trigger down. Her face
grimaced from recoil of her machine gun or fear, or maybe she grinned at the
joy of it all. She ripped off about half that pan and then Allen opened up and
stitched her with a ten-round burst. The woman didn’t fall, not right away, and
Allen stood up and held his gun hip high and walked his shots down the boat,
catching a man at the tiller and another man coming over the side. Allen
stopped firing then, and there was a silence and I heard the woman’s body
splash into the water. I called Jim from the rear position, and Jim put three
rounds from his grenade launcher into the boat, and the boat blazed in the
moonlight. The flare danced downward, parachute swinging on a small breeze.
I
got everybody out then, running across the moonlit flat ground and into the
trees, falling onto the ground and panting like hounds when the fox is finally
dead.
Allen
placed another belt of ammunition in his gun. He looked at me and grinned. His
teeth flashed yellow-white in the moonlight. “Man,” he said, “that bitch had
balls.”
· Judges 9:32 -- “Get ye
up, therefore, you and the people who are with you, and set up an ambush in the
fields.” -- King James version
