The Time Keepers

Chapter 45

CHAPTER 45

I T ’ S 2:00 A.M., AND J ACK PLACES A RECORD ONTO THE TURNTABLE as music fills the air. He does the same night after night, after he has walked Hendrix through the reservoir, left his muddy boots by the door, showered, and changed out of his clothes. Yet despite all these rituals, his mind is still desperate for peace.

He looks at his bed—not as an invitation for sleep, but rather a place where his ghosts come to visit each night. Part of him doesn’t want to see the faces from his past, but he doesn’t want to forget them, either. So he lets the song on the player lift off the vinyl and ease his transition into the world of dreams. And then, as his eyes close, he is instantly there again, suffocating in the hot, humid air with his buddies hovering around him.

They are so young and impossibly immortal in the haze of sunlight. Flannery’s dog tags glimmer in the heat, his chest wet with perspiration, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Flannery is cleaning his gun, and Doc is carefully checking his medical bag. Stanley is gone but remains an angel even to the nonbelievers.

In his mind’s eye, Jack can see Chief, strong and tall as a redwood, telling him over breakfast, “The blackbird visited me last night.” Chief’s massive hands clasp a cup of watered-downed coffee, warmed by a burning heating tablet that fills the air with an acrid smoke.

Jack and the whole platoon knew that Chief was sensitive to bad omens, dreams, and visions of all kinds, but a blackbird could be a helicopter, couldn’t it?

“Maybe you’re just dreaming of Huey’s, Chief,” Flannery joked with him. He flung his cigarette to the ground. “Hey, the sky here is always full of blackbirds.…”

Chief’s face is eerily placid; his dark eyes glassy with a wisdom so ancient that it transcends words.

He returns Flannery’s gaze with silence, and Jack finds himself unnerved. He doesn’t believe in prophecies or bad luck, does he? Every day they’re in danger, so what difference does a dream about a blackbird mean to any of them? He wants to believe he doesn’t believe in good luck or bad luck, yet he’s still full of his own superstitions. All of them are.

He still keeps a letter from Becky in the lining of his helmet. His perspiration has long since caused the black ink to run, and the neatly folded paper is now so worn and delicate that when he unfolds it, it nearly falls apart in his hands. The others tease him for holding on to a letter that he can no longer read, but he carries it anyway, as a talisman, and the words are already memorized in his heart and mind.

During a briefing that morning, after Lieutenant Bates announces he’s taking a reinforced squad of sixteen men to do a recon patrol on one of the nearby mountains, he, too, tries to shrug off the dark bird in Chief’s dream.

Lieutenant Bates doesn’t tell the men that battalion intelligence suspects there might be North Vietnamese Army up on that mountain or hidden arsenals buried in the bush. Jack learned months ago, even before Stanley’s death, that he will never be told anything more than he needs to know.

“Get the radio and get it ready, Jack,” Bates says. In a matter of minutes, he and the other men are saddled up and set to go.

Their flak jackets are on, their rifles are cleaned and loaded, their ammo belts are draped around their chest. Their steel helmets are a dark rainbow of words and mantras to keep them bold, just like Kong Killer had adorned their fallen friend’s. Born to Kill , reads one, while another one has a peace sign with a dagger protruding Kill for Peace . Flannery has written in large black letters, From Texas with Motherfucking Love .

They don’t share what they’ve tucked secretly within their pockets, like rabbit-foot charms from their younger brothers back home. Good luck comes in a thousand forms, and they all cling to the comfort of their magical thinking to help them survive. Gomez carries a small canvas pouch containing seventeen Vietnamese coins that symbolize the seventeen days he has left on his tour. His plan was to toss a lucky coin over his shoulder every morning until he’s on his way home.

“Gomez, you shitbird short-timer,” Jack ribs him. “Can’t believe they’re taking you out again.” He shakes his head and places his fingers in his pocket. He leaves the camp weighted down by one less coin.

The column marches north.

Chief doesn’t mention the blackbird again as he takes point. He is the man they trust to cut the path, the way in and the way out of death. He carries a Lakota hatchet given to him when he was twelve, and as he slices through the thick bamboo and jungle brush, gripping its well-oiled wooden handle, he believes his ancestors live on within the polished blade.

As the first in line, he is the eyes and ears for everything that is in front of them. He tucks the hatchet back into its belt and points his rifle forward. Every one of them listens to every sound, every monkey screech, every animal that scurries over a tree branch, as each step could land them in a leg trap.

Corporal Gomez is secretly hating on Lieutenant Bates. Couldn’t he have let me stay back? he thinks to himself. He has a twenty-two-year-old wife waiting for him back home and a younger sister who writes him letters saying their mother prays every night for his safe return. He hates this goddamn place with all his heart, and all he wants now is to return home to homemade tortillas and ice-cold beer.

But Bates can’t care that Gomez has less than three weeks left of his tour. He’s one of his best rifle men, and he needs him.

Their boots sink into the mud. The canopy of green leaves is pierced by long beams of white. Unearthly light, Chief thinks as he pushes forward, as if they are entering a place they are not meant to tread.

They continue to walk uphill. Sweat tracking their faces, adrenaline lifting off their skin.

The radio remains strapped to Jack’s back. At one point, the lieutenant stops and studies his compass and frowns.

An hour later, they take five at a clear running stream to refill their canteens and burn some of the leeches off their bodies. Some take their helmet and scoop up the water, pouring it over their heads to cool themselves off.

Chief is cleaning his knife with a piece of parachute silk, and the new kid, Danny Donovan, is singing the lyrics to the song “White Bird” under his breath, so low that almost no one but Chief can hear him.

“Not funny, man,” Chief hisses. He turns his back and walks several feet away to distance him from the man he now thinks is a fool.

Lieutenant Bates checks his watch, looks up at the sky, and realizes they have no more than four more hours of sunlight. They are behind schedule, the men having moved slower than he would have liked. He eyes Jack, his gaze looking at the radio as if he is contemplating using it to call back to command, but decides against it. “Saddle up,” he says. “Move out.… Chief, on point.” His face is now taut, his energy agitated.

They follow the streambed up the mountain, preferring the tumbled rocks to the jungle bush. After three more hours of hiking, the air changes. Long strips of mist hover in the distance, and Jack hears Gomez mumble, “Hell, we’re walking into the clouds.”

Then something besides the air shifts. Chief comes to a halt.

He senses something before the rest of them do. The jungle has become too silent. He lifts his rifle. Gomez stops behind him and does the same.

It is then that Chief sees the camouflaged face of a North Vietnamese soldier, his helmet covered in leaves, his rifle pointed straight at him. Chief opens fire.

These are the things Jack remembers from that moment:

The explosion of bullets are ripping the air and shredding the leaves over his helmet. He hits the ground hard, the radio coming off his back, Lieutenant Bates yelling into the receiver that they are being ambushed by an NVA unit.

Jack is on his belly, his head lifting from the wet earth when he sees Chief and Flannery returning fire from their rifles.

They are surrounded by incoming grenades.

“Corpsman up! Corpsman up!” It is Flannery’s voice hollering above the mayhem. “Man down! Gomez’s been hit!”

The jungle is now roaring with gunfire and men screaming at the top of their lungs with terror and rage. Doc runs through the firestorm, clutching his M-1 bag between white-knuckled fingers, until he reaches Gomez, who is on his back, his eyes looking straight up at the sky.

“I’m here, man,” Doc reassures him. His eyes are wide and full of fear. “I got you, man. Talk to me.”

Gomez is mumbling about his wife and “all those fucking coins that didn’t work.” Doc does just as he’s been trained: he tears through Gomez’s flak jacket and shirt to see if he can get down to the wound and discover the entrance and exit path of the bullet. He finds it above Gomez’s abdomen and works quickly placing a compression bandage on it. He takes out a small tube of morphine with the preexisting needle and shoots it into Gomez’s arm; then, as medical protocol dictates, he wets a finger with Gomez’s blood and draws an M on his forehead so the doctors back in the medical battalion will know he’s already received a dose.

Lieutenant Bates is face down in the dirt next to Jack, the radio’s receiver pressed to his ear. He’s called in the coordinates, screaming them into the headset, requesting artillery backup and medical evacuation while Jack prays the radio connection doesn’t break.

Hiding in the bush nearby, a young, heavily camouflaged NVA soldier holds a grenade he was issued a few days before. He has no idea it’s Willie Pete, a white phosphorous grenade that burns with such intensity that it cuts through anything in its path and won’t be extinguished with water—only through the elimination of oxygen.

He pulls the pin and hurls it at Bates, who is still on the radio. It explodes in a ball of flames and sets him ablaze. Jack, who, as always, is less than two feet away from his lieutenant, is also partially engulfed in the searing white flames.

The grenade brings with it five thousand degrees Fahrenheit of heat, and its force is so extreme that it incinerates Bates and burns part of Jack’s face off, blinding him in his left eye and taking with it a portion of his scalp and hair. His skin melts through every muscle, down to the bone.

Jack does not remember Doc hurtling toward him, his friend’s hands rushing to unbutton his own flak jacket and then pulling it off his body to smother the fire burning Jack’s scalp and face. He will never recall the steps Doc takes to administer morphine and to seal off his wounds with Vaseline strips, or how his friend realized there was no place left on his head to write the letter M.

The helicopters are already circling above, laying down heavy fire to wipe out the enemy. One of them is lowering to retrieve the wounded and dead. Nobody knows what to do with Lieutenant Bates, who is no longer recognizable, like a ball of melted wax.

Chief and Doc are making stretchers out of the dead men’s ponchos to carry them toward the chopper. Chief slings Flannery over his back and hurries to get him on board.

“There’s one more man down,” a voice calls out, and Doc hurries to find who it is.

“It’s Danny,” someone yells.

Exhausted and following the code of the corpsmen, Doc searches through the dead to find him.

Little Danny Donovan is only eighteen years old, a fresh recruit who came only a few weeks before to replace Stanley. He’s crying that he thinks he’s going to die, but Doc can see it’s just a painful, but not fatal, shoulder wound.

“You’re going to be okay, Danny. You’re going to be okay.”

He is wrapping Danny’s shoulder as Chief and the other men help carry the remaining wounded and dead to the chopper. They won’t leave a single body behind.

“Doc, am I dying?” Danny’s eyes are wet with fear.

“You’ve got a long life ahead of you, you’re going home,” Doc assures him as he sees the crew chief on the chopper gesturing that they have to hurry and get the hell out of there.

He reaches to help pull Private Donovan up, hoping to rush him to the chopper, when out of nowhere, an NVA soldier who has been lying on the ground and thought by the others to be dead pulls himself up and shoots Doc in the head.