-----------------------------------------------------------------------
              LAST DAY IN THE FIELD WITH MIKE AND NEW GUY

                        by Robert Marcuson

     We saw them before we heard them.  They were motes on the horizon
like insects drifting down on the hot still air.  "Eagle flight," said
Mike.  Lazy from sitting under the sun, he waved them away.  But the 
helicopters kept on coming and soon we were buffeted beneath pounding
rotors." 

     "Bullshit!"

     New Guy checked his ammunition again.  This was his first time in
the field and he was very conscientious.  Mike even had to remind him
not to load his thump gun until he unloaded from the Huey. Mike didn't
want New Guy shooting down our helicopter by mistake.

     Fucking new guys -- FNGs.  This one hadn't fired a thump gun 
since that day in Louisiana they handed him three practice grenades. 
He probably hadn't hit anything, but we always gave thump guns to the
new guys.  The ammunition was heavy as hell.

     The rotors quickened.  The rice plain frothed when the leaders
passed overhead.  They came in like vengeance, bouncing on their skids. 
 
     I snuffed my cigarette in the rice.  Ducking low, I followed Mike
to the one waiting for us, the Huey that had plunked down in front a
few strides away.  I grabbed hold of the quivering machine and
scrambled aboard.
  
     New Guy carried forty pounds of thump-gun grenades.  That and all
the rest of his gear, and he waddled like a duck.  We grabbed hold of
his webbing and pulled him aboard.  He hollered over the engines.
  
     "Thanks".

     The Hueys had formed up in pairs.  1st and 2nd Platoons loaded up
in seconds.  Only half the company was going on this flight. 3rd and
Weapons Platoons would be along later.
  
     The roar increased, the skids let go and we were up.  The eight
Hueys fell forward, skimming the rice tops.  I watched my cigarette
butt pass by, then we picked up speed.  The lead pair reached the tree
line, hopped over and climbed.  The second pair followed, and the
third, then us -- like a child's pull-toy strung together nose to tail.

     We stopped climbing when the altitude gauge read one thousand. 
Reading over the pilot's shoulder, I didn't see if this was one
thousand feet, or yards, or meters.  The pilot turned to say
something, but I couldn't hear over the roar.  The pilot wasn't very
old.  He didn't look twenty like most of the rest of us.  Often you
saw a soldier was a volunteer instead of a draftee just by the look of
his face.  They were young, like New Guy.

     Near the gap where a door used to be, Mike sat cross-legged on
the stock of his M-16.  He studied the ground like a carnivorous
bird.  His acned face was ripped and pocked like the Delta below.

     New Guy sat between us.  He wrote in a blue spiral notebook, the
small kind I used to keep homework assignments in before I left my
sophmore year of college.  The Huey's vibration made his scribbles
unreadable. I watched a moment before asking what he was doing.

     "It's a journal," he said.

     I didn't ask why he was writing in the journal, so after a moment
he said, "I'm going to write a book."

     Mike looked up.  "Can I be in it?"

     "Sure, Mike," said New Guy, pleased.
     
     Mike nodded and turned back to the passing Delta.  New Guy
scribbled another couple lines, then buttoned the notebook into the
pocket of his fatigues.
  
     "I'm writing a book about the war so people back home can see
what it's all about.  What it's like, I mean."

     He seemed to want a response to that.  Mike didn't look up. The
other three grunts, the rest of our squad, sat at the other opening
trying to look like Mike, and too far away to hear.
  
     "I read a war book once," I said at last.

     "I don't want to write just another war book, something for the
reader to forget in an hour and go back to TV.  I want a book the
reader can't forget.  What's the use if it can't do that?"
     
     I was impressed.  That was the longest speech I'd heard from New
Guy in the three days he'd been with Bravo Company. Mike spat out the
door, but the wind caught and splashed it back against the jam.

     "Is there going to be a firefight today?" asked New Guy.

     Eager?  Scared?  I couldn't tell.  His eyes glowed from a face
that teenaged girls back in the world no doubt considered cute.  His
upper lip hadn't seen a razor in three days, but you could hardly tell.

     "Probably not," I said.  "We'll fly around awhile.  Then we'll
land and walk home.  That's what we usually do."

     "Not always," said Mike.

     Mike had been in-country longer than me.  He'd already been hit
twice.  The first time was before I arrived.  He caught a sniper's
round in the butt while trying to pull another grunt out of the fire. 
He should have got a real medal for that, they say, but all he got was
a Purple Heart. 

     The second time, he tripped a booby trap while walking point.  I
was along for that one.  I could see the difference when he got back
from the hospital.  I'd seen it before.  A grunt already has two
Purple Hearts and needs only one more to get out of the field and into
a nice basecamp job.  The same thing when they're short and ready to
go home.  Nervous like cats, they go on sick call a lot, anything to
stay out of the field.  

     But Mike was a squad leader. He wasn't allowed to get sick.  

     We'd hadn't been in the air long when Mike pointed out two Huey
Cobra's sliding past beneath us at twice our speed.  This meant we
were approaching the landing zone.  The two gunships, sleeker than the
dumpy Hueys, had arrived to soften the LZ just in case.  Over the
pilot's shoulder, I saw red smoke rising way out front. Mike kept
watching directly below, paying no attention.  The Cobras lined up on
the smoke and began their run.  New Guy twisted around to watch.  The
rotors were not working so hard now and the ground was coming up. 
Mike tensed.

     The landing zone was just another rice paddy, a man-made clearing
in the Delta growth, this one abandoned to the war and grown wild.  A
mud berm two feet high surrounded the paddy, controlling the flow of
tidal water and separating the paddy from the encroaching, absorbent
foliage into which M-60 door gunners fired long bursts, covering the
perimeter now that the Cobras were gone.  Our Huey dropped heavily
and, even before we unloaded, screamed to be off again.

     I jumped and ran in the infantryman's crouch to get away from the
spinning blades.  The ground was too wet to lie down. I knelt down
beside Mike in the tall elephant grass and rice. 

     We kept our heads low to be invisible beneath the plant tops, and
waited for the helicopters to leave.  We were still a ways from the
nearest berm.  My ears shut down from the racket of the Hueys, the
door gunners and their machine guns.  Only when the helicopters began
lumbering away did I hear carbines in the woodline.  
     
     I splashed forward into the wet.

     Mike swore.  He was pissed-off because he hadn't expected a hot
LZ.  Crossfire arose from the nearest two berms, and then another.
We were surrounded.  New Guy crawled up, bewildered. 

     "Who's that shooting?"

     Before we could answer, the air crackled over our heads with 
bullets whipping through elephant grass and rice.  My face pressed
into plant roots.  

     The fire subsided and I pulled my face from the water.  It was
very quiet.  A tentative voice cried for a medic, than cried again
more forcefully.

     Mike's helmeted head was wrapped in his arms.  I'd never seen
Mike so flat.  

     New Guy fidgeted with his thump gun.  I could see he wanted to do
the right thing.  He was still too brand-new to be very afraid.  He
relaxed when he saw how how Mike and I were content where we lay and
not about to rush off and leave him. 

     The late morning sun was already hot, but an inch of cooling
water soaked through the crushed stems beneath me.  A helicopter
buzzed somewhere.  We lay still like rabbits.

     Waiting for Mike, my eyes followed the pattern of grasses woven
into a dense mat above the soil.  I didn't know what Mike waited for.
I let myself be transported away to other fields and woods, to a
beach, to the lawn in front of my parent's house.

     However long it seemed, it may have only been minutes since we
landed.  The voice crying for the medic had stopped. I heard
movement.  A 2nd lieutenant with three spec 4s in tow crawled into the
clearing we had crushed out for ourselves in the elephant grass and
rice.  The man he replaced had been killed a few weeks earlier.  The
2nd lieutenant was almost as new as New Guy.  

     "Mike," he said, voice strained.  "We're pinned down bad here,
but we can't stay all day.  They might not see us, but this is no
fucking cover.  Get these men in a line and assault that berm.  I'm
going back to look for a radio."

     Then he crawled away on the trail he had pressed in the elephant
grass and rice.

     One of the spec 4s was in our squad.  We'd been separated because
he'd unloaded from the other side of the helicopter. Mike turned to
him.  

     "You seen Choi and McKechnie?"

     "I don't know.  They must have got lost."

     A patter of small arms began again, carbines and a few AKs. It
was impossible to see without sticking your head up.  Most of the fire
came from the woodline behind the berm the 2nd lieutenant wanted us to
assault.  Where the lead Hueys had landed, an M-16 replied feebly.

     It didn't take long in the field to learn the distinctive rattle
of each weapon.  We knew we were in a bad way.  Our side was not doing
a good job of shooting back.  

     We all watched Mike, but he didn't say anything about assaulting
the berm.

     A Cobra appeared out of the bright blue sky and sent two tiny
rockets, one just behind the other, slamming into the ground not far
away, causing the soft Delta to roll, showering us with grit and mud.
Then the gunship stood off and hosed down the woodline with the fat
red steam from its minigun.  But the Cobra ran out of ammunition and
left.  The sniping continued.

     The lieutenant's right," said Mike.  "We can't stay here." 
     
     Having made up his mind, Mike crawled on his belly inward towards
the center of the paddy, angling away from the nearest berm. The three
spec 4s followed single file, then New Guy and me. After crawling ten
meters or so the ground was not so wet. We had been lying in a hollow.

     Rounds continued snapping over our heads.  Mike found a big ditch
half full of paddy water.  He crawled in, followed by the spec 4s and
New Guy.  I slid up to my waist into brown water, calf deep into
squishy bottom mud.

     The ditch already contained a squad from the 1st Platoon, many
wearing bandages.  I was happy to see them.  Happy also for the cover.
The ditch was deep enough for my head to stay comfortably below the
bank.  I laid out my ammo bandoliers where I could reach them quickly,
pressing them into the mud bank to keep them from sliding down into
the water.

     The far end of the ditch curved sharply to the left, to lands
unknown.  A dead man lay on his side up on the bank, both hands
clamped between his thighs.  A poncho had been thrown over his head
and shoulders, but the starched uniform said this was likely an
officer.

      On the bank opposite me, a muddy grunt lay flat on his back next
to a mud-caked shotgun.  The grunt was layered head to toe in dark
Delta mud like a chocolate.  Even his belly bandages were muddy.  I
thought he was dead too until he breathed.

     A buck sargeant from the squad from the 1st Platoon was up on his
knees and pearing over the elephant grass and rice. "I see a bunker,"
he said. "Let's get the thump gunners on it."

     There were two thump gunners in the ditch.  The one from the 1st
Platoon crawled up and sighted the woodline down the buck sergeant's
outstretched arm.  New Guy wasn't sure if that meant him, too, but I
slapped him gently on the back and he climbed bravely up the bank.

     He lifted up like a lizard.  "I can't see anything."

     "Then wait for the other guy to shoot," said Mike.  "And shoot
for the same spot."

     The weapon from the 1st Platoon fired with its hollow thump. New
Guy straightened up quickly, sighted down the barrel, and jerked on
the trigger. 

     Nothing happened.

     "Safety," said Mike.

     New Guy ducked back down.  Flushed, he pressed the safety switch
all the way forward.  The 1st platoon thump gunner fired again.  In a
single motion, New Guy popped up, fired, and was down.  The first
round exploded quickly, but we listened a long time for New Guy's
grenade.  The crunch came, but far away.

     "Too high," said Mike.  "Lower next time."

     New Guy opened the breech, shoved a fresh high-explosive round
into the chamber, and snapped the weapon shut.  He got up to fire just
as rounds crackled overhead.  1st Platoon thump gunner yelped and
splashed backwards into the water.  New Guy slid back down the bank.
Mike, disgusted, shook his head as if knowing all along we were only
giving our position away.

     Lucky for the wounded thump gunner, Doc was with the 1st
platoon.  He and a couple other grunts waded in and helped him out of
the water.  The wound wasn't so serious.  Probably wouldn't get him
sent home.

     I was feeling gloomy now and lit a cigarette.  A bank of smoke
rolled across the water to drive away the skating insects whose entire
universe was the length of this ditch.  I wondered what it was like to
be someplace else, to be doing something else. I conjured snatches of
memory, other places, other countries, other times.  They were dreams,
remote and unreal.  I had never been anyplace else. I had never done
anything else.

     Looking up, I saw Mike gripping a long sliver of casing fragment,
a piece from one of the Cobra's rockets, a tortured chunk of metal.
Mike jabbed the shrapnel repeatedly into his thigh.  When the wound
was bleeding well enough, he dropped the steel into the water.
Everybody was watching Doc and the thump gunner.  I was the only one
who saw.

     Doc finished wrapping a chest bandage around the thump gunner.
Only then did Mike call him over to look at his leg. 

     "I don't know how I got it, Doc.  I just noticed it."
     
     "You should be more careful."

     "Sorry, Doc."

     "Two Hearts already, Mike.  This is the one that gets you out of
the field."
     
     Mike said nothing, but I could feel his embarrasement.  It wasn't
much, so it didn't take Doc long to fix the leg.

     "Keep that dry if you can.  Not that it matters with the mud you
packed in there."

     "Thanks, Doc.  Don't forget my Heart."

     "Sure, Mike.  While I'm at it, I'll write you up for a Silver
Star." You had to know Doc to hear his sarcasm.
     
     "Whatever you say, Doc."

     Doc was a real doctor, not just someone the army had turned out
for the war.  He was a hell of a lot older than anybody else in the
unit, maybe forty.  

     Finished with Mike, Doc checked on the muddy grunt across from
me, who never showed signs of life except sometimes to breathe.  Doc
rested his hand on the muddy grunt's shoulder and lied to him about
how things would lighten up soon and how the med-evac was coming.

     New Guy fished the spiral notebook from his pocket and laid it
out on the bank to dry. He searched pockets for his lost pencil. He
asked me if I had one. I told him, "No."

     I lit another cigarette and gave one to New Guy because his were
wet.  We sat for a long time and smoked.  The tepid ditch water seemed
cool against the hot sun.  I gave up trying to be clean and lay back
into the soft mud.  War sounds kept me informed.  Gunfire was sporadic,
routine, nobody seemed to be working very hard.  An occasional M-16
showed that somebody from our side was on the job.  Cobras made their
periodic runs at the surrounding woods and berm.  They didn't appear
to do much good, but how could I tell? It kept the other guys cautious
and we knew we weren't forgotten.  Insects droned when gunshots
lapsed.  A breeze scuffled with the rice and grass and blew away our
cigarette smoke.  I noticed the water had risen. Tide coming in.

     Mike and half the grunts from the 1st Platoon were sound asleep.
So it appeared. New Guy seemed to want to write it all down.  He
looked up and down the ditch, hoping, I supposed, to find his lost
pencil floating.  
     
     The last thing I remembered before falling asleep myself was Doc,
still sitting with the muddy grunt. He seemed tired with the kind of
tired that has little to do with sleep. Doc was too old to be humping
the boonies with a bunch of kids.
                               
     I woke up sticky with heat and hoping the dead officer with the
poncho over his head was a dream.  A firefight flared a couple hundred 
meters away; probably 3rd and Weapons Platoon finally come to give us 
a hand.  My watch told me the day was more than half gone somehow. The 
sun and tide said as much. Dark opaque water had risen a foot.  Not
concerned for our convenience, the Delta kept to its task, soaking up
the backed-up waters of the Mekong twice each day.

     The muddy grunt's layers of mud had dried and cracked into little
squares and triangles.  Doc's movement through the water sent waves
lapping at his bandages.  Doc checked him over and called me over. Doc
on one side, me on the other, we slid hands beneath his shoulders and
buttocks and inched him higher up the bank. He whimpered some, but
stopped as soon as we stopped pushing on him. He'd lost his helmet and
was more exposed to stray bullets, so I removed my own helmet and
snuggled it on his head.
                                 
     I went back to my place in the mud and the 2nd lieutenant came
crawling in. He still hadn't found a radio. He glanced around in
appraisal then looked at me. "You stay here with Doc and the wounded.
All the rest of you soldiers grab your gear and get ready to move.
Grab extra grenades from those staying behind."

     He let Mike stay, too, what with his bad leg.  

     New Guy's eyes skittered between Mike and me as if our good word
might keep us together. I felt bad. It wasn't right to run into a
firefight first day in the field. Myself, I'd had a few weeks to get
used to things.

     I helped New Guy into his heavy ammo vest. The vest was sewn from
scrap pieces of grenade bandolier and a fatigue jacket with the arms
cut off.  I'd made the vest a long ago when I'd been a thump gunner.
The vest never did not carry enough, so I tied extra bandoliers around
New Guy's torso, tightly so they wouldn't flap around.  I clipped the
four hand grenades I'd been carrying to his webbing. Other grunts
stripped grenades from the dead officer and other stay behinds. Then
the 2nd lieutenant said New Guy should not carry hand grenades because
he already had his thump gun. So I undid all New Guy's hand grenades
and passed them around.

     I told him to be careful. He asked me to look after the notebook
still drying on the bank. It would just be wet all over again if he
took it.

     Then the 2nd lieutenant low crawled into the rice and the squad   
from the 1st Platoon and New Guy vanished along with him.  Mike and me
and the Doc, the muddy grunt, the wounded thump gunner, the dead
officer and a few others, we stayed behind.

     Later we heard the crunch of grenades and New Guy's thump gun as
they worked to force themselves over the berm. The intense firefight
lasted almost a minute, then faded into sniping before quieting
altogether. We waited for the fight to resume, but it never did. There
was no way to know of their success.

     In the afternoon, the stinky water nearly covered my shoulders
but at least had stopped rising. In that place where earlier I had
thought 3rd and Weapons Platoon might be fighting, it was quiet.
Cobras came and went as if keeping to a schedule, bombarding berm
dikes with rockets and pouring thousands of rounds of 7.62mm ammo into
the woodline. Out of ammunition, they flew off.

     During long silences when the Cobras were gone and nobody was
shooting, it was easy to think the enemy had been chased away. But
there always seemed to be somebody somewhere impatient enough to
expose himself and prove it wasn't so.

     I did finally hear some shooting outside the paddy but did not
know what it meant. Maybe that was the 2nd lieutenant and New Guy.

     I remembered I had not eaten since sunrise. Retrieving a tin of
Ham and Lima Beans from my deep fatigue pocket, I ate it cold.

     A time came when the silence had been too long.  No cries, no
gunshots. Even the breeze and insects were still.

     "It's over," said Mike. He crawled up out of the ditch to looked
around. "It is over. I see grunts walking in the treeline."

     I scooted up to see a squad of GI's advancing single file in the
treeline, the upper left corner of the paddy as I memorized it during
the flight in. The pointman did not like being up front. He waved his
M-16 as if clearing spider webs. 

     I turned to see another file marching up through the middle of
the paddy, uniforms clean. They stepped right up to us. 
     
     The Captain identified himself as Echo Company. He looked around
at us and scowled and asked who was in charge.  Mike admitted he was
in charge and no he did not know where to find the CO. The Captain
said medevacs were on the way, and for the first time since I'd seen
him Muddy Grunt opened his eyes. 

     The Captain saw that Mike's wound wasn't anything, so he told
Mike and me to go over to the berm, the same berm we'd landed near that
morning, take positions and wait.

     I collected my ammo bandoliers and my M-16. The Captain picked up
a helmet he found lying in the elephant grass and rice. He tossed it
to me. "Wear this, Soldier."

     We trudged back through the same broken down paddy grasses we'd
flattened that morning. Mike limped, his wound probably already
infected. Or maybe he was just stiff.  

     Half a dozen others already waited at the designated area, mostly
in bandages, but all were sitting up. We sat down with little to say.
Silence seemed the right thing. I didn't see New Guy or any of the
others. We sat and watched Echo Company walk a grid through the paddy
looking for lost equipment or personel.

     I heard a pop and saw green smoke. The first medevac dropped into
the center of the paddy. Beneath the pilot windows and across the nose
stretched the red-on-white-over-olive-drab cross. Green smoke swirled
in the propwash. Litter bearers filled the Huey and the helicopter
lifted heavily and was quickly replaced by another.

     The badly wounded would go first, then the rest of us.

     Echo Company tossed the helmets, webbing, weapons, whatever they
found in the paddy, into piles building like leaves atop rain ponchos.
These and body bags would fly out later.

     On the berm our small group grew with stragglers.
     
     Mike was not a smoker and I'd run out of cigarettes. He handed me
the two packets from his C-rations that he always saved for me. The
menthols I tucked under my helmet band for trading later. The other
4-pack was my own brand and I opened it. 

     Mike sat rubbing his bandage. "At least you got your third
Heart," I said.  
     
     A lieutenant from Echo Company came up to check our names against
his list. Mike asked to look at it. The lieutenant turned back a page
and handed the book to Mike. He looked over the list for a long
time. "That 2nd lieutenant got it," said Mike. "And New Guy is here,
too."

     The lieutenant retrieved his notebook and said our Hueys were
coming. As he walked away, he looked at me and said, "You're lucky. We
have to stay here tonight."

     The other side of the berm was just another paddy and another
treeline, a vaque hint of sun color remaining in that far hedgerow. I
slapped a mosquito and listened for more rotors.  

     "It isn't going to be the same company now," I said. I was going
to miss Mike. "They'll fill it up with fucking new guys."

    "They'll need replacements and new squad leaders. They'll probably
send you to NCO school."
     
     NCO school would be nice. It meant at least six weeks out of the
field.

     "Too bad about New Guy," I said.  

     Already the only light was the white light of a flare, too far
away to see its parachute.

     Suddenly, I remembered the blue spiral notebook left back at the
ditch. I should have gone back for it. It should be with his personal
effects. Mis mother might want it. But I was awfully tired. And I
heard the Hueys coming for us.
     
     "He was crazy," said Mike, face whitening as a new flare
ignited. "Talking about his book like that."
     
     The Hueys came in for us then, though there were not so many of
them. Mike and I got up and scrambled for the nearest one.
                                     
                                 END