But William didn’t really know me in 1979 when we worked together, not in any detail, and over this past year, as I read his journal, I wondered if that was why William had told me about Vietnam, why he shared his journal with me. I was not his spouse or his friend. I was not even his peer. The journal would not color my perception of him because, like Beau and his freshman roommate—by chance paired together for nine months—William and I had been paired together by chance and we would never see one another again.
I went back to the journal.
We were on patrol December 12, 1968. We were told to take this hill, secure it, and turn it over to the ARVN. Hill 1338. I will forever remember the number.
We’d humped all day. Usually we cut our own path to avoid the land mines. Alpha Company took point. Charlie Company, my company, was in the rear. It was just me and Victor now. Bean had rotated back home. Forecheck was dead, and Whippet had been injured and sent home.
Cruz wasn’t supposed to be with me. He was a short-timer—under a month before his DEROS. He was supposed to be on a Huey headed to Da Nang to file papers and avoid paper cuts before he shipped home. He wasn’t supposed to be on a lurp. He was there because of me. He was there because I turned down the clerk’s job at Da Nang that he had set up for me, because I had come back for him, so we could leave the bush together. He was out in the bush because of me.
As we humped, I kept my gaze down, searching for booby traps. I was worried, but more so for Cruz. Every step he took, I expected it to be his last. I expected to hear a boom and then nothing.
Cruz would just be gone.
As we humped, Cruz kept talking about going home to Spanish Harlem, about me coming to meet his huge family. He kept saying we were going to eat Puerto Rican food until we threw up, then go to the clubs and dance with the senoritas until morning, then do it all over again. I couldn’t understand why he was breaking his first rule—don’t talk about home in the bush—and I kept telling Cruz to shut up, to not talk about home. But he wouldn’t let up. He kept describing the party until I could see it in my head and taste and smell the food. I could also see the senoritas. I could see their tanned skin, dark eyes, the sexiness of their hips and their calves, the curve of their breasts beneath their sweaters. I could smell their perfume and feel their bodies up against mine, their fingers playing with my hair. It was one of the most vivid visions I’d had of home since I arrived in Vietnam, and though I tried, I couldn’t push the vision from my mind.
The terrain steepened. The trail became thick with vegetation. It had rained hard the prior night and early that morning. Seemed like it always rained now. We all had trouble getting our footing. The red mud-clay was, at times, up to our ankles. Alpha Company went up the hill at roughly four p.m. I figured we’d make it to the top and set our perimeter. We’d dig in. In the morning we’d turn the hill over to the ARVN and leave.
What I didn’t know, what none of us knew, was that an entire NVA battalion, an estimated five hundred men, were dug in atop the hill and along the southern side—a reverse L. It is a classic ambush tactic, and we were in the kill zone.
AK-47s opened up on Alpha Company along with rocket-propelled grenades. The NVA knew we had superior firepower and superior air support, so it waited until we got to terrain where the APCs and the tanks couldn’t help us, couldn’t come up the hill. It waited until we got so close we could see one another. Too close to call in air support.
It was a brawl. A street fight.
Machine guns tore up the jungle, cut down men and plants. RPGs exploded. Alpha Company never even had time to drop their packs. We could hear the wounded wailing, but every time men were sent up the hill, the NVA cut them down. We couldn’t overwhelm them with superior firepower, not this time. We were trained to fight our way through the ambush, but without the firepower, without footing, that was a futile act.
At dusk the NVA didn’t evaporate into the bush. They continued to fight.
They fought all night. Charlie Company tried, but we couldn’t get up the mountain, couldn’t reach the dead and the wounded. I hunkered down halfway up the hill and expected Cruz to hunker down beside me. He was going home, to the party, to the food, to the senoritas. But Cruz wouldn’t hunker down.
“I’m going up, Shutter,” he said to me.
“What?” I shouted. “No. No you’ll die.”
“We all have to die.”
“No,” I said. Then I broke the first lesson. “We’re going home to New York. We’re going to eat your mother’s cooking and dance with the senoritas in the clubs.”