Scout’s Honor: Chapter 20

Rosy Fingered Dawn

The Annamese mountains were blackening in the dusk, the range’s jagged peaks backlit by the fading sun. The day’s steamy, wet, enervating heat was easing at last. The monsoon rains had fallen without pause for six days and then stopped, the clouds parting to reveal a sky shimmering in humidity, trees dropping water-logged branches like dead leaves, jumper creeks roaring mustard brown, cresting their beds. 

The fifty-five men in Bravo Company’s reinforced 1st Platoon were drenched. A couple replacements remembered it was Thanksgiving, but everyone else had long since ceased caring. Lt. Thomas Cook, the 1st’s just-arrived commander, was regretting his tactical decision not to request a better meal for the platoon for fear it would be denied, wondering how he could demonstrate his leadership to a platoon he suspected ran itself.

After another day of flinching at sporadic sniper fire, 1st Platoon was digging in among the foothills east of the Annamese. The men were atop a saddle between sharp mountains above and the emerald chessboard of rice paddies far below. The jungle tree line, a green wall, rose about one hundred fifty yards north of their clearing. 

Cook had first asked Sgt. Chris Bartlett for his opinion and then decided any attack that night would likely come from the mountains to the west. A shallow, bamboo-choked ravine fifty yards away would be the enemy’s best approach. Cook ordered their two machine guns set up to face the ravine.

“City boy, if you can piss out of it, it ain’t deep enough,” Shoer said to his latest replacement. “You ain’t gonna be in my book if you can’t dig a fuckin’ hole.” His novel had begun as a joke, but now he could comically use it to banish anyone who displeased him. If the transgression were grave, he would threaten to write the miscreant in as a coward, or worse, as Army. After two tours and the better part of three years in the Corps, he had more than enough material, but he was stumped. Bestsellers started with catchy titles and he was convinced all the good ones had been taken. “City boy, I dig it when you dig, dig?” pattered Shoer as he dug his own foxhole with economical strokes, amusing himself and the others. 

One Marine shoveled while the other stood guard, studying the elephant grass, the bamboo, the tree line, and the infinite ridges, looking for Charlie. Even the city boy knew the platoon was vulnerable while digging; completing the perimeter circle of foxholes was each evening’s first order of business. 

Shoer’s squad had the northerly arc of the circle, facing the impenetrable jungle. “Dig, baby, dig. You don’t dig deep enough, we’re burying your sorry ass in it.” While his squad chuckled, Shoer tossed out more shovelfuls. “You got to be KIA to get your miserable carcass flown home. Getting shot in a gopher hole ain’t killed in action.” He spoke in rhythm as he dug. “You lean on that tool again, son, I’m going to waste you myself and tell your mama you got boomed-boomed dead by some Danang ho.” Shoer had changed, the coddled boy in him a distant memory, a battle-scarred man in his place. His laughter still rang out, but it was seldom unalloyed. And his once white-bread speech was now pure Watts, so profanity-laced that his refined parents would have been aghast. Fortunately, they would never hear about his girlfriends in Saigon—Rosy and Dawn—a pair of cheerful prostitutes who sometimes gave it away to the handsome corporal.

“You the man, O,” the city boy said. Shoer tipped his helmet back and laughed. 

Austen’s squad was on the perimeter’s west side, supporting the machine guns. Unlike Shoer, he led his own squad almost wordlessly, by example, by working harder than everyone else. His chrysalis over the preceding three years was more remarkable than his only friend’s. From the numbed, terrified teenager rolling east in rusted freight cars, to the silent recruit, to a hardened leader of men. Having buried his youthful exuberance in that Lemon Grove bomb shelter, Austen seldom spoke more than a sentence at a time, as if he were reluctantly breaking a monastic vow of silence. When he did speak, his audience listened. 

“I’ll take over, Scout,” the new replacement Palowski said at last. He should have known Austen would shovel the foxhole by himself if uninterrupted. 

Austen climbed out of the hole and tucked his palms in the small of his back. He leaned back. His weight was now below 160, sinew and muscle stretched like racket strings over his long frame. The vacant stare he had before joining the Corps was gone, replaced by a darting, calculating look of animal alertness. Also gone were the steel frame glasses, useless in the steam, sweat, and rain. After a year of bottoming despair, he’d righted himself in Vietnam. He didn’t give a damn about the war’s politics, focusing instead on leading—and caring for—his fellow grunts. He’d talked Shoer into a second tour and would have tried for a third if Shoer hadn’t been so adamant about getting on with their lives. 

After slicing the clay from his canvas boots with his knife, Austen hefted his rifle and wiped away the beads of water along the M-16’s barrel with a muddy hand, reconning their position, studying the water-carved ravine that concerned Bartlett. 

“That’s where they’ll come from tonight, guys,” Austen said in a low voice to his squad. “If they come at all.” It had been weeks since they had fought more than the monsoon’s chill, the occasional lone sniper’s fire. 

The foxholes were a foot short of what the lieutenant deemed prudent. Satisfied, however, the grunts sucked on a last cigarette before stand-to. Later, Cook chided himself for failing to have his men on fifty percent alert, but it was that gray between light and dark, before hunter and hunted exchanged positions, the time no one owned. The Americans had yet to retire for the night. The nocturnal Vietnamese, secreted away in some lair, would emerge only at night. 

“Carlson, give me a smoke.”

“Negative, ruin your health.”

“Aw, fuck me. Fuckin’ ham and lima beans,” a tall Marine bitched when he opened a can of cees. “They feed us this shit so dying won’t scare us.” 

“You dink-dicks all going to die if you don’t get your sorry asses down.” Shoer’s tone conveyed more concern than reprimand. “Bunch of fuckin’ sheep.”

At that moment, Charlie ripped open from the tree line, a hail of bullets that might have erased his squad had it been less well trained, but the opening salvo was high, and the men dove into their holes. Bullets whizzed past, indifferent death-song hornets—thup, thup, phwat—slapping into soft mud or splintering an empty canteen with a metallic clack, flattening with a dull thud against a mahogany tree, tracers lacing yellow lines between the combatants.

Charlie’s advantage, his surprise, was lost as the platoon got down. Pressed against their foxholes, the Marines listened to the same sounds, but heard different things. A few prayed. Some heard the chance to rev it up after chasing shadows for too long. Austen listened hard and heard the soft popping of three or four carbines and the chain sawing of two AK-47s. Was it a small patrol that had chanced upon the platoon or a misdirection play, a diversion from the attack that would come down the ravine? Either way, he loved it. With the electric chair his household furniture, combat was a release—a blessing—for Austen: it let him live in the moment, escape himself, shove his past into his mental attic’s farthest corner. And shepherding his squad, protecting them like school children, was, if not his penance, his mea culpa. 

New to the game, the lieutenant was certain it was a full company of NVA, and he radioed for artillery, the battery of six 105 howitzers idly waiting a couple miles away at the battalion’s fire base. Shoer inched his head up and saw the muzzle flash in the green wall. He squeezed off a burst from his M-16 and crossed his fingers for luck. After a few shots, his squad went silent for lack of targets, maintaining fire discipline, knowing the enemy’s hope was to entice a platoon into running out of ammo.

“Corpsman,” Ham and Beans yelled. “I’m hit. I’m hit. Get your ass over here.” The Marine examined his wound. “That was no carbine, man. Did you see that, Dwight, that fucker spun me around like a puppet. This is a goddamn AK hole.” He pointed with pride to his left shoulder, just under his collar bone. “Earned my goddamn heart, just like that.”

“Shut the fuck up.” 

“Ohhhhhh shit, listen,” Ham and Beans said. A whistling in the distance grew louder, overwhelming the tinny small arms fire. “Incoming,” Bartlett bellowed. The shell’s awful, air-splitting sound silenced the gunfire as both sides shimmied into the mud. 

Kaboom. The shell landed in no man’s land, but closer to Charlie than 1st Platoon, pelting Marines with clods and chunks of falling mud.

“75 up, 50 left. 75 up, 50 left.” Cook’s voice wobbled as he fine-tuned his coordinates, for the moment a little boy playing with outsized fireworks. He belly-crawled to Shoer’s hole for a better look, his radio man crawling after him, cursing under his breath. 

With mud still falling, Austen sat up and searched for his friend, nodding when he recognized the helmet with the cigarette packs tucked into its band. “Too goddamn bad Mancini’s gone,” Austen muttered. “He wouldn’t be wasting 105 shells against rabbits who’re halfway to Hanoi by now.” He reassumed his alert position, rifle outboard, peering over the lip of his hole into the gray. “Don’t worry, kid, they won’t get any closer. And as long as the LT wants to blow up trees, Charlie’ll stay out of sight. Shake it off. No one’s hurt bad. All that hollering means a glorified scratch.”

Another shell whistled, then screamed toward them, and again the platoon became one with the earth. Those on the southern end of their perimeter counted their blessings while Shoer’s squad cursed the perils of friendly fire.

“Man, I need to get high. I’m going to pound some of this,” Palowski said, pulling a Thai-stick from his pocket. Austen shot out his hand and flung the stick into the gathering darkness. Grabbing Palowski’s collar with one hand, he cocked a fist. “You do anything besides aspirin out here, I’ll shoot you myself. If you’re not alert, we’re dead. Nobody gets high on patrol. You got that, Palowski?” 

“Yeah, sure, Scout. Sure. Sorry, man.” He spoke with respect, obeisance. Palowski already knew that Austen had been considered the finest point man in his battalion on his first tour; that his assignment to 1st Platoon on his second was hailed as a stroke of great fortune. Had he survived, Harris would have laughed upon hearing his denigrating nickname Scout had metamorphosed into a higher rank than colonel.

“You got anything else?” demanded Austen.

“That was it, man. Just that stick.” 

“Goddamn shelling. Cheaper to buy the little bastards houses in Arizona.” The November evening would soon chill. Austen slipped on his sleep shirt and rain poncho and let himself drift as the shelling fell into its pattern of 1-2-3-4-5-6, pause, 1-2-3-4-5-6, pause. With his back against the foxhole’s forward wall and his chin on his chest, he slept.

The shelling had ceased, the lingering smoke cleared, and in the still night, Palowski’s imagination magnified every sound, turning a bird scuttling among the wet bushes into an assassin, field rats into a VC patrol. At last Austen raised his head and called out to his squad in the starry darkness, confirming fifty percent alert, each of the other five pairs checking in on his command. 

“You should rack out, Palowski. Button your collar and your sleeves, keeps the leeches out.” Smelling the boy’s fear, Austen directed him to sit still for about ten minutes to give the nearby leeches a chance to attack, explaining that their warmth-sensing ability had a radius of only a yard; with a preemptive counter-offensive, he might wake leech-free. After a few minutes, a dozen thin, inch-long leeches had arrived. 

“Watch.” The black lines shriveled on contact when he bug-juiced them. “There, your sector’s cleaned out. If one gets through, burn it off with a cigarette.”

A few minutes passed while the replacement looked at the stars and the squad leader stared at the shadows. “Can I ask you something?” He took Austen’s silence for consent. “This is your second tour, right? You did a year of this shit and volunteered to come back for another. Why, man?”

“The money’s better.”

“What? You’d risk getting wasted for a few bucks more? Bullshit, man. I wouldn’t do this for a million.” Palowski, a draftee assigned to the Corps, considered himself the intellectual superior of those who had volunteered to eat, sleep, and shit in the mud.

“Get some sleep.” 

“That’s really it? The money?”

“Go to sleep,” said Austen. On R&R in Honolulu after their first tour apart, Austen and Shoer had drunkenly decided they wanted to do their last year together, and not march up and down LeJeune’s grinder like toy soldiers. Neither man regretted the decision. 

Palowski was snoring when Austen, standing to stretch away his stiffness, pondered his newest squad member’s question. Returning for a second tour had nothing to do with the money. Or his conclusion that he was less likely to be killed in Vietnam than caught in America. No. He had volunteered for the second tour because it was the right thing to do. His dead father had to be proud of him, to forgive him his follies, to know he had served with honor.

“It’s 0200. You’re on, Palowski. Ah, shit.” Austen grumbled at hearing Billy Andrews’s swearing twenty yards away. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. Stay sharp.” Andrews had lost his sleep shirt on the trail and was too cold to sleep. With neither tents nor sleeping bags in the field, the ratty green undergarment, worn with the poncho, provided the only warmth.

“What haven’t you lost? Goddamn good thing you’re not in the artillery. Losing a fucking howitzer would be hard to explain.” Austen pulled off his poncho and began unbuttoning his shirt, but then stopped. “Screw it, Billy. If I give you mine, you’ll lose something else. Lose your ammo and somebody dies. Tough it out.”

An explosion in their midst slapped 1st Platoon awake. 

One of the twilight snipers had crawled to within ten yards of the perimeter and hurled a handmade grenade, a Bangalore torpedo. A few of its packed stones and nails hit Palowski, doing little more than breaking his skin, but he was blinded by its smoke. He panicked and fired his M-16 at the sky to cover himself and ran. Confused, he stumbled west, toward the ravine, toward the snipers. They sawed away at his muzzle flash. Palowski crumpled fifteen yards outside the perimeter as the platoon’s two machine guns roared to life. 

“Help me, help me.” He was screaming, bleeding out from more holes than he had years. Austen weighed Charlie’s yellow tracers and the Marines’ red ones lasering at one another and, covered by the machine guns, crawled forward.

“Help me.” Only a moan now.

The sticky blood pulsed from Palowski’s wounds as Austen whispered encouragement. He reached about for the boy’s hands and gentled him onto his back like a knapsack. 

A sniper, sensing rather than seeing the rescue, waited for the lull in the platoon’s cover and then sprayed the area where Palowski fell. Austen thought the fusillade had missed them, but crawling with the grunt on his back, he felt wetness along his left thigh, and wondered how Palowski’s blood was getting inside his trousers—until his leg began to twitch. 

“Don’t die, just fuckin’ hang on. We’ll get you fuckin’ evacked in a few minutes. Don’t die, you dumb Polack. You better be listening to me.” Despite his obscenities, the corpsman’s tone was as mild as his touch, daubing at one of the boy’s ragged holes. “You have to fight, man. Keep fighting. The docs will fix you up good as new.” 

The corpsman wiped Palowski’s blood from his own brow then asked, “How you doing, Scout? Real sorry I can’t stop that bleeding. That fucker just took out your artery. Where the fuck is the Huey?” he shouted, glancing up at the night sky for a helicopter that should have arrived. “Get me that goddamn bird.”

“Get me that goddamn bird now,” the lieutenant shouted into his radio phone.

A few feet away, Austen sat with his back against the foxhole and his head bowed, both hands pressed hard against his inner thigh. Blood trickled from two small holes a couple of inches apart, the exit larger than the entry wound. The wound didn’t hurt yet. Shoer squatted in front of his best friend and tucked his cigarettes behind the strap on Austen’s muddy helmet. “Shit, Aus, you’ll be fine, seen worse mosquito bites.” 

“My third heart and you don’t have one.” Austen grinned, then frowned at the blood trickling between his fingers.

“He’ll get a purple hard-on instead for all those doses he gets,” the corpsman said. As a man of medicine, he felt entitled to comment on Shoer’s exaggerated exploits.

“Band-Aids,” Shoer said to the corpsman, “I’m giving Charlie one week—no, three days to snipe your sorry ass. If he doesn’t, you’re waking up to the pineapple surprise.” He pantomimed pulling the pin from a grenade and bowling it into a foxhole.

“Thanks for the smokes,” said Austen. 

“Best to ruin your health while they’re fixing it, yin and yang thing.”

“Shit, shit, shit, shit,” the corpsman intoned, prayer-like. He stopped working on Palowski, his chin drooping to his chest. “The patient has expired.” He was accustomed to ugly wounds from land mines and booby traps, but only one other boy had died in his arms. “Poor sonofabitch. Ah, shit. What do I have to do? Yeah, got to tell the LT. You OK, Scout?”

“Yeah.” The two young men glanced at the body a yard away. Neither said anything. Fire forbidden, Shoer shook loose a cigarette and broke it in two, tossed both pieces in his mouth and chewed. 

“Put him in your book, Parse,” said Austen, his voice struggling slightly. He loved his moments alone with Shoer, moments when he could relax, when he could speak without fear, freely—except about his past—sometimes even joke. “Say something nice about Palowski.”

“Fuck my book. I can’t think of a title and you know what? I can’t think of anything except this shit, and who wants to read about that?” Shoer watched Austen’s blood pooling between his legs, black in the moonlight. “That’s looking like the Red Sea. Cut that bleeding shit out.” 

“I’ll be back in a week, tops,” Austen said. “If the LT tries to make anyone other than Spiese squad leader, talk to Bartlett.”

“Spiese. Got it.” Shoer spat out the foul taste the cigarette had left behind.

“You ought to write the book.” Austen gazed at the dead boy, neither envious of his peace nor terrified by it. “Write that he’d be alive if Andrews hadn’t lost his goddamn sleep shirt.” Austen hung his head, exhaustion closing on him. “Nah, it’s not Billy’s fault, it’s mine. I should have known that—”

“Maybe I will,” Shoer broke in. “Yeah, I’ll write it when I’m supposed to be studying at that college where the chicks major in fellatio. Not playing football—unless they let me use Baby M.” He patted his rifle. “So I’ll have plenty of time. Hey, you can be the hero. Need some facts for your bio, and from the looks of you, I best get them fast. Where you say you’re from, Corporal Austen?”

“Nowhere.”

“Not good. Mysterious heroes went out with the Brontë sisters. Maybe we can make up for it with a happy family?” 

“None surviving.” Austen’s smile flattened as a small arc of blood spurted from his thigh. Shoer pursed his lips at the sight. 

“Shit, this is sounding like that white mother—what’s his name? —Dickens. Yeah, right, and nobody reads his shit anymore. And I do have great expectations for my book.” He had long since given up on his friend’s past, but still swatted at the mystery like a ball of yarn. “My readers need something they can sink their teeth into, not some mystery— they need porn. How’s it hanging down there?”

“Two inches shorter than it used to be.”

Shoer laughed, flashing moonlit teeth. “Wait a second. I’ve got it. The book opens in Saigon, our hero in bed with a couple hookers, my hookers.”

“Just two? I thought you wanted a best seller.” 

He laughed again, then grimaced, contemplating Austen’s pooling blood. “I’ll make sure the LT puts you up for a Cross. They hand them out like candy to dopes like you. If I said, here’s ten thousand bucks if you’ll get yourself shot rescuing some kid you never saw before, you’d laugh at me. But for a five-cent ribbon and a piece of worthless metal?” 

“You’re the one with the Bronze Star. Besides, the only cross I’ll ever get is the one they bury me under,” Austen said, repeating a line they’d heard a hundred times. He raised his head, studying Shoer, wanting to beg him to stay safe, wishing he could hold him in his arms. He made a loose, trembling fist and bumped Shoer’s hand. 

“I’ve got to go.” Shoer gently brushed Austen’s cheek, rose, his rifle a part of his body, and disappeared in the darkness.

“Stay well, Parse.” 

“We’re going to put you under, Corporal. Count down backward from ten,” the field hospital’s doctor said. Outside, the first wisps of pale pink dawn reached across the eastern horizon, soft edging the gathering storm clouds with a rosy hue.

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