Army Blue Read online

  EARLY BIRD BOOKS

  FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

  LOVE TO READ?

  LOVE GREAT SALES?

  GET FANTASTIC DEALS ON BESTSELLING EBOOKS

  DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX EVERY DAY!

  Army Blue

  Lucian K. Truscott IV

  For Carolyn Stephens Truscott

  And for

  Anne Harloe Truscott

  Col. Lucian K. Truscott III, U.S.A. (Ret.)

  In memory of

  Sarah Randolph Truscott

  Gen. Lucian K. Truscott, Jr., U.S.A.

  The truth is in motion.

  The truth is emotion.

  J.L.

  The truth is sometimes found not in what was, but rather in what might have been.

  D.H.V.

  With pipe and song we'll jog along,

  Till this short time is through,

  And all among our jovial throng,

  Have donned the Army Blue.

  “Army Blue”

  ONE

  * * *

  * * *

  “Whatchew Gonna

  Dew, Eltee?”

  Firebase Zulu-Foxtrot Day One

  * * *

  * * *

  He flipped a switch in the dark and next to him a transistor radio crackled and an announcer's voice muled enthusiastically and noise shattered the dim red air of the M-113 armored personnel carrier.

  Tall trees crashed to the ground somewhere deep in the woods, crushing one another like God's dominoes.

  A thousand tank treads crunched through gravel, chewing rocks into wet dust and spitting it sideways.

  Three two-barrel carburetors blew flutter valves wide open and screamed in the night, sucking wind and gasoline in second gear. Bald tires tore into wet blacktop, burning, screeching, blowing smoke, yowling in the dark.

  It was Jimi Hendrix, but it sounded like the war.

  "There must be some way out of here,

  Said the joker to the thief,

  There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.”

  Somehow, it all had to mean something. The music had to mean something. The war had to mean something. He could feel it, the war snapping at his tired bones. He could hear it barking out there beyond the perimeter. It was their country, Vietnam was. It was their war. They all knew something he didn't know. They all believed in something he didn't believe in. They were fighting a war neither he nor his men wanted to fight. What was left to him crackled through the transistor speaker and asked him questions he couldn't answer and told him things he couldn't understand. Rock and roll spat the jerky electronic language of war. It organized the senseless noise of the killing. In red bursts of brush-made electrons and pealing protons, it told you secrets furtively in the dark. It banged on your head and it screeched in your ears: They're out there waiting for you, the cries of the living and the songs of the dead. They are waiting on your fear. They know it's coming. They are waiting for you to fuck up and they won't leave you alone. Not now.

  Never.

  Lieutenant Matthew Nelson Blue IV was stretched out on an air mattress laid on a layer of sandbags that covered the aluminum floor of his M-113 armored personnel carrier. He was studying the 113's ceiling, a bewildering maze of electrical conduits and hydraulic piping that converged on the firewall behind his head. The firewall was a half-inch sheet of welded aluminum that separated the troop-carrying compartment of the 113 from its engine and driver's compartment. Overhead, a twelve-watt red lightbulb shone dimly inside of a rattrap wire cage, bathing the dusty interior of the 113 with an eerie rosy glow.

  The Lieutenant was lying there on his back, fingers laced behind his head, staring at the ceiling of the 113 and listening to the radio and thinking about the war. He couldn't remember how or why he got where he was right this minute. One day he applied for admission to West Point, and the next day he was on his way to war. It was a logical progression, but it didn't make sense. He wasn't “for” the war, exactly, but neither was he “against” the war. His brother had fought in Vietnam and so had his father and now he was holding down his own little piece of Vietnamese real estate, and while your own flesh and blood was at risk, you had better “believe the bullshit” about the war, as they said at West Point, or you were lost.

  That was the weird thing. He hadn't “believed the bullshit” they fed you at West Point about the war in Vietnam. The domino theory. The war against “communist aggression.” “Making the world safe for democracy.” All of the bullshit West Point put out about the war hung around your shoulders and fell from your waist like an ill-fitting uniform. He wasn't even sure they actually expected you to believe the bullshit. It was as if the Academy—no, not just the Academy, the whole nation—was going through the motions one last time, the final throes of trying to come together before everything splintered apart, before the world, in essence, sounded like Jimi Hendrix.

  So he was lying there on his back listening to Hendrix wring the sounds of havoc from his guitar and wondering if he should change the end of the letter he'd just written to his girlfriend back home in Virginia. He hadn't been in the best of moods when he wrote the letter. Just that morning the platoon had been ordered to pack up and deploy to a new location, thirty kliks due south of Bong Mieu. It had taken all day to make the move, and the platoon had only two hours of light before it got dark to dig in a new night defensive perimeter. It was the third such move they'd made in a week, every one of them no less than twenty miles down unsecured dirt roads and jungle paths with no air cover and only token artillery support. The Lieutenant didn't want to frighten his girlfriend unnecessarily, and he was afraid the last page of his letter, railing and screeching about the three extraneous redeployments they'd made, would do exactly that.

  Lieutenant Blue was twenty-three years old. He stood five feet ten inches. He had brown hair and the features of a high school quarterback, an intense, eager look that had nothing to do with enthusiasm and everything to do with fear and loneliness. He was the platoon leader, and there was only one of them. He was always worried about something: about the letter, about the enemy, about the redeployments, about the dark. He didn't want to sound as afraid as he felt. Usually the letters he wrote her consisted of long, windy lists of what they were going to do together when his tour of duty in Vietnam was up, exactly 131 days from now. But tonight he had complained about the redeployments and complained at length about the recent arrival of the new battalion commander, a Lieutenant Colonel Henson W. Halleck, an individual with whom the Lieutenant was only too well acquainted.

  Lieutenant Blue and Halleck, who was then a major, had taken an immediate and total disliking to each other the day they met, about a year ago, when the Lieutenant was a student in Halleck's class at the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia. Halleck was teaching a class about the so-called rules of engagement in Vietnam, the code that dictated what you could and could not do in combat over there. He had finished describing the concepts of the “free-fire zone” and the “limited-fire zone,” expressing his disgust with the fact that nowhere but in a free-fire zone could you call in artillery fire on a hamlet or village, even if you were taking fire from the village, even if that fire had wounded or killed one of your men.

  Then he had chuckled and said, “Yeah, but we all know what bullshit the rules of engagement are, don't we?” and he had proceeded to instruct the class of impressionable young lieutenants on how you could get artillery fire anytime you wanted it, on any village you wanted it rained down on. All you had to do was drop off a couple of cases of beer and maybe a bottle of Scotch or three to the fire direction control sergeant in the artillery battery that was supporting you. The sergeant would then conveniently forget the map grid coordinates of any and all villages in the vicin
ity, and you could call in artillery fire on a village anytime you wanted.

  Lieutenant Blue raised his hand.

  “Sir, what you're telling us . . . are we supposed to ignore the rules of engagement? And if we do, sir, won't we be, in effect, breaking the law?”

  Major Halleck chuckled and said, “You figure it out.”

  After class that day, he stopped Lieutenant Blue and ordered him to get a burr haircut, a head-shaving not called for by Army regulations. He told him to get his head shaved or he didn't want to see the Lieutenant in his class again. Lieutenant Blue, opting not to shave his head, had taken the order quite literally and had simply stopped attending Major Halleck's classes. When Halleck realized that the Lieutenant had, in effect, disobeyed his order, he threatened him with a formal charge of insubordination. Lieutenant Blue ignored the threat and continued to cut his class. Only Halleck's unexpected reassignment to the Army's Tropical Warfare School in Panama had saved the Lieutenant from further confrontation with Major Halleck over the heart-stopping issue of the length of his hair.

  This night, however, Lieutenant Blue was again firmly within the grasp of Halleck, now a Lieutenant Colonel, who had materialized as the new battalion CO a week ago and who seemed to spend at least half his waking hours dreaming up stupid, meaningless daylight redeployments and night missions for the weapons platoon, Lieutenant Blue's platoon. The last page of the Lieutenant's letter had been a vituperative indictment of Lieutenant Colonel Halleck for everything from his chronic bad breath to the fact that he had a hooch girl spit-shine his boots and starch his fatigues every night, so he'd look good for combat duty the next day, presumably.

  The Lieutenant wasn't looking forward to the next 131 days under the watchful gaze of Lieutenant Colonel Halleck. Hell, he hadn't been looking forward to those 131 days before the arrival of Lieutenant Colonel Halleck. Now he positively dreaded each successive day he spent waiting for the radio to spit out another one of Halleck's brilliant maneuvers. Judging by the CO's performance after a week, it was only a matter of days before one of his extracurricular missions for the weapons platoon ended up with dead and wounded, possibly in double digits.

  That was what he had to take out of the letter. It would only drive his girlfriend crazy. He resolved to rip up the last page of the letter first thing in the morning, before he put it on the resupply chopper from Battalion. Yeah, the good old resupply chopper. The Lieutenant leaned back on the air mattress and blessed the day he got the weapons platoon. One of the advantages of having five 113s, four of which contained 4.2-inch mortars, was the fact that the weapons platoon was always base-camped apart from the rest of the Battalion, off by itself in the far boonies, where only one helicopter a day paused long enough to bother him—the morning resupply chopper. Rare was the morning that the stillness of his little clearing in the jungle would be broken by the thwap-thwap-thwap of the battalion commander's C&C—command and control—ship. Rarer still was the arrival of anyone outranking the battalion CO, say the brigade or division commander. And rarer to the point of nonexistence was the arrival of a battalion staffer like the S-3, or the S-1 or the S-2. No, those little base-camp hooch-rats with desk jobs liked to stay right there, behind their desks, as far away as possible from the fearsome boonies that surrounded the weapons platoon. It was a lonely existence out there in a tiny, platoon-sized base camp thirty kliks from civilization. It was lonely, but where others feared to tread, Lieutenant Blue was king.

  Yes.

  King of every last dust-covered, olive drab inch of it, every dirty, smelly track, every gleaming weapon, every swinging dick wearing the green.

  Yes.

  It was lonely most of the time, but it sure beat the hell out of cozying up to Halleck inside the battalion base camp, where Halleck was king.

  Lieutenant Blue unlaced his fingers and turned over on his side and closed his eyes. He felt better now that he'd decided what to do about the letter to his girlfriend. Now he could get some serious rack and prepare himself for whatever surprises the next wonderful day in Vietnam held for him.

  He was just drifting off to sleep when he felt a hand on his shoulder.

  “Eltee. Eltee. Wake yo'self up, sir.” The hand and voice belonged to Dirtball Magee, his RTO, the skinny little guy who carried the platoon radio.

  The Lieutenant rolled over and squinted into the red overhead light. Dirtball's face was only a foot from his, and he could see the hairs up Dirtball's nostrils and the brown chewing-tobacco stains on his teeth, and he could smell Dirtball, who was aptly named for his inadequate attention to personal hygiene.

  “What's up, Dirtball?” the Lieutenant asked with a yawn.

  “It's that new battalion CO, sir. He's on the horn and beatin’ the bush for yo’ ass again.”

  “What does he want now?”

  “I don't know fo’ sure, sir, but I heared somethin’ from one of the S-3-shop clerks this mornin’, when I choppered back to Battalion to get us some batteries, sir. You know him, black dude calls himself Rufus Thomas, from New Orleans.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I remember Thomas. He was in the platoon before he got wounded on that damn sweep they called . . . what did they call it?”

  “Sledgehammer Three,” said Dirtball.

  “That's right. What a name. About the only thing we pounded accurately on that operation was the ground.”

  “Anyways, sir, Rufus was sayin’ somethin’ ‘bout us goin’ out to that trail intersection agin tonight, sir, and settin’ up and checkin’ fuckin’ IDs, sir. You know. Where we was at two nights ago, at 367428 grid coordinates, ‘tween here and Son Ha.”

  “That's what Thomas said?”

  “Sho’ ‘nuff,” said Dirtball. He stuck his head out the cupola atop the 113 and spat tobacco juice through his front teeth and dipped quickly back inside.

  “Not that bullshit act again,” said the Lieutenant. “What does this guy figure? Some VC is going to come down the trail tonight and we're going to check his papers, and he's going to be carrying a little card says ‘Me VC'? He's got to be out of his mind. Checking IDs in the boonies thirty kliks from nowhere. Jesus.”

  “Whatchew gonna dew, Eltee?”

  “Where's the radio?”

  “Right here, sir.”

  “Give it to me, Dirtball.”

  Dirtball reached outside the ramp of the 113 and grabbed the platoon PRC-25 radio, commonly referred to as the “prick-25.” He pushed the whip antenna out the cupola and picked up the mike.

  “Rattlesnake Six, this here's Rattlesnake Two, over,” said Dirtball in his distinctive Arkansas drawl.

  The radio crackled with static for an instant, then stopped.

  “This is Six, over.” It was Halleck. The Lieutenant recognized his voice, not to mention his call sign. The guy had been battalion CO for over a week now, and he'd been radioing missions to the weapons platoon two or three times a day, but the Lieutenant had yet to lay eyes on him in person. Halleck did everything over the radio, from inside the air-conditioned comfort of his hooch or up in a goddamned command-and-control chopper. No sense in messing up your spit-shine or getting your starched fatigues all sweaty and dirty. No sir. Just pick up the radio and fight the war from a seated position. The modern electronic battlefield suited Halleck just fine.

  “I gotchew, Six. Wait one, over,” said Dirtball. He handed the mike to the Lieutenant.

  The Lieutenant hesitated for an instant before he pushed the button on the mike. He knew Halleck was going to send him and his platoon out on another bogus mission, and this time somebody might get killed. For what? For nothing, that's what.

  What would Dad do? he wondered.

  Shit, what was he doing wondering what his father would do? He could hear the old man's voice, calm and reasonable and level and utterly certain of the rightness of it all:

  Do exactly what you're told, son. Don't talk back. Don't ask questions. Don't speak unless spoken to. There are elements to the mission that you're not privy to. Buckle down and gri
t your teeth and just do it and ask questions later. That's the way the Army works, son. And that's the way young men learn the lessons of command.

  What utter bullshit. All his life he'd listened to his old man intone the lessons of command, the way of true manhood. You never talked back. You did what you were told now. You asked questions fucking later. Always fucking later. Never now, when you actually needed the answers.

  He shook the old man's voice from his ears and tried hard to find the voice of his grandfather. Down deep in his gut he didn't really like blowing off twenty-three years of his father's teaching, but he reasoned that it was okay, as long as he kept it in the family.

  What would Grandpa do?

  Would he grit his teeth and take the call from this bloody nincompoop again and run his troops all over hell's half-acre . . . for no reason at all? Would he risk twenty-four lives just because some guy's got a hard-on for him from back at the goddamned Basic Course? Would he?

  What would Grandpa do?

  He'd figure out a way to fix Halleck's wagon without fucking up any of his guys or himself, that's what he'd do. He'd use his noggin. He'd slip one past that fucking colonel so fast he wouldn't even feel the breeze. He could hear his grandfather's growl:

  This is one of those times when you rear back and treat a son of a bitch like he's a son of a bitch, boy. You out-son-of-a-bitch him, that's what you do. You finesse him with a fast shuffle and sit back and wait for the son of a bitch to try and out-son-of-a-bitch you. There's always a way around a dumb son of a bitch: the way of the smart son of a bitch. Use your noggin, boy. That's what God gave it to you for.

  The Lieutenant took the mike.

  “Rattlesnake Six, this is Two, over.”

  “This is Six, Two. Ops order follows, over.”