The North Coast times-eagle., October 01, 2006, Page 14, Image 14

PAGE 14
HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOTHER
BY MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
(The following story took place on O ctober 27, 1966)
Monsoon winds blew down from China one afternoon
in late October and swept across the mountains of the Annamite
Cordillera, the spinal cord of Vietnam. Huge columns of rain
clouds the winds freighted from the South China Sea massed
above sharp jungled peaks and streamed through high shallow
valleys that were terraced with rice fields or were wild and
uninhabited. Rays of sunlight shot through the clouds like shifting
cannon fire into windblown trees and palms that broke the shafts
into spiked prisms and shadows. The wind was cold, and rain
from the advancing clouds hammered the jungled ridges with a
heavy roar, flooding valleys and peeling away the mottled walls
of primitive homes built of mud and thatch which were bunched
together in lonely villages. Rain relentlessly poured down upon a
haggard and straggled column of armed and helmeted men who
were sliding down the muddy ridges toward a village in one of
the smaller valleys.
I was among them, second in the ragged file, and
followed the point man into the valley. I was able to see the
village beyond a maze of rain swollen paddies, enclosed by
walls of hedgerows and palms that were whipped by the wind.
It was a skimpy place, wretchedly poor as were most villages
in the mountains. The farmers and their families lived a harsh
existence and were killed early by disease, exhaustion and
hunger. In a sense they were frontier people who had left their
culture in the overcrowded coastal plains and settled on its rough
fringes among stoneage tribes they loathed and feared in much
the manner of my own ancestors among the western Indians.
The village was an island amidst an ocean of drowned
rice fields and seemed suspended in a history of approaching
armies I looked back at the other Marines stumbling down from
the muddy ridges and saw their reflections in the brackish water
of the rectangular paddies, cast against the salt and pepper sky
like etchings of war gods.
I noticed the point man was having a hard time crossing
the valley along the spines of paddy dikes that collapsed under
the weight of his feet. He was a short fat man, hunched in his
labored walk in the sucking mud, and were it not for his clothes
and helmet I might have mistaken him for one of the small apes
that lived on the higher slopes. His back was bent, his hands
grasped his knees and pushed his legs to drive them like
sluggish pistons one slippery step after another. His rifle swung
loosely from a sling draped over his right shoulder and bruised
his hip every move of his legs. His red jowly face was haggard,
almost cadaverous, shriveled like an old orange under the green
and brown dappled steel bowl that covered his head, which
swiveled from side to side almost mechanically. His chin and
nose arched as if he was literally sniffing whatever might be
ahead or around — an ambush hidden in the trees and bushes;
a sniper in a palm tree taking aim. He abruptly dropped his head
every few moments to detect explosive landmines or booby traps
that might have been planted in the fields after the rice harvest a
month earlier. His head seemed almost as loose as his rifle and I
would not have been surprised if it turned completely around and
stared at me.
The thought hardly formed. A shot cracked from the
village. Its flat echo was the sound of a popped paper bag at the
same instant the point man splashed backward into a paddy. A
R IVER SEA
PHOTOS BY USMC COMBAT PHOTOGRAPHERS (1966)
Two Phantom jets came at sunset. The rain had stopped
with a suddenness usual in the tropics and the sky was rouge
through holes in the darkening clouds. The jets shrieked down
from the tops of the mountains and flew straight for the village
just above the mists that blanketed the fields. They barely
cleared the trees as they dropped aluminum canisters of napalm
Great jellied globes of fire erupted from all over the village,
instantly swallowed by billows of black smoke that were as
immediately consumed by a terrible heat. The village caught fire.
Houses exploded into flame; their thatched roofs burst into the
air. Palm trees flared into torches. Even the mists in the fields
were burned away, and we who cowered at the bottom of the
slope were slapped by the heat.
The jets rolled back and came again. They dived down
the same ridges and across the fields and dropped their last
canisters into the flaming village. I stared at the fires. I felt the
stinging heat against my nose and eyes and smelled the acrid
smoke blown off the fires by the wind. Helicopter gunships flew
in a few minutes after the jets left, and though they were tossed
wildly by the wind they careened over the paddies like large
dragonflies. I heard the heavy clatter of their machineguns as
they shot up the fields on the other side of the village. Two
helicopters shot rockets into the burning village then raked it with
machinegun fire. A single helicopter broke off and flew towards
us and landed next to green smoke erupting from a grenade
tossed by an officer into the paddy in front of us. The point man's
body was heaved into its open side door like a piece of rubbish.
The helicopter lifted unsteadily into the air and with a great burst
of power swung onto its side and arched around the mountain
silence as sudden as the shot lasted only a second. Most of the
other Marines dropped to the ground and started firing rifles and
machineguns into the village ! discovered myself half submerged
in water and mud choking on slime and vomit. I tried to focus my
eyes on something to shoot at but saw only a small hill I had not
noticed before. After a few seconds I realized it was the point
man's rounded stomach sticking out of the water like a dumpling
in stew.
A voice bellowed over the gunfire and it raggedly
ceased. The voice shouted again and the Marines behind me
began to withdraw back to the ridge. Three of us ran to the point
man and started carrying him. He was dead — a hole in his right
cheek blew out the back of his head which dripped blood and
brains after we lifted him from the paddy — and had not taken
an ounce of weight with him when he died. Our initial attempt to
run slowed quickly to a lurching walk. I had his legs and pushed
at him as if he was a wheelbarrow, desperate to get out of range
of a second shot. We finally dropped his body next to a tree and
covered him with a poncho. We spread out along the ridge
bottom, which was heavily brushed, and pointed our weapons
at the village. An officer crouched against an embankment and
shouted into a radio for an air strike. He shouted again at
another officer who was trying to locate the village on a rain-
soaked map, and shouted back into the radio.
We waited for the jets like executioners. The village was
almost completely obscured by the rain and by fogs rising from
the fields. It appeared and disappeared as if straining to vanish
before it was found by bombs, to become as much a phantom as
the man or woman who had killed the point man.
OLD MAN
GALLERY
He was just an old man. Bent and scabby-legged, sores
all over his dark calloused feet; three long chin whiskers curling
from his ancient crumbling jaw like nonsensical banners. He was
waving one. A flag. Yellow with three red stripes. He was stand­
ing beside his hut. Kids were running everywhere yelling at the
Marines walking through the village. A tiny village alongside a
river. Chickens, ugly pigs, skinny dogs, scrawny old women with
black teeth and frightened smiles because they thought the
Americans might kill their men or burn down their homes.
So everybody pretended to be friendly and the old man
hid his Viet Cong flag and brought out the Saigon absurdity,
waving and smiling to beat hell. But Fat Jack saw him and Fat
Jack had never shot down anybody in cold blood. Jack had this
thing. He wanted to kill somebody. And here was this ridiculous
old man. Who would miss him? Just an old man; he couldn't
work in the fields anymore Another hungry stomach for a family
loaded down with kids to feed. So Jack walked up to him and the
old man started bobbing his head up and down faster and
smiling wider, but it didn't matter. Jack had the rifle in his face
and the trigger pulled before the old man's body knew it was
dead. He didn't fall. He just stood there without much of a face.
A squashed, dripping berry. The back of his head looked like
a busted balloon. Then he fell, old knees buckling on withered
legs His ass hit first, then the rest of him, sitting hunched over
for a second, collapsing on his side. "I don't feel nothin'," Jack
shouted The guys just smiled. The kids stopped running, quiet.
The old women scooted back into their huts A low wailing began
to throb through the village, but Jack was walking away shaking
his head, telling his friends he just didn't feel nothin'. The old
man, he had a lot of blood for such a small, skinny, used-up old
man, he was left to lay there. Nobody touched him, not the kids,
not the women, just the flies, coming from all over the village, the
fields
C O N T E M P O R A R Y W O R K S OF A R T
NICK KNAPTON
& KLAUS LANGE
1160 COMMERCIAL ST., ASTORIA ♦ 325-1270
V A N DUSEN BEVERAGES
ASTORIA, OREGON
-MICHAEL McCUSKER
1
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325-2362