Headhunter Read online

  He went on and on and I only half-listened, my mind still miles away, up at Bai Loc seeing that old man without the eyes that kept watching me. I couldn’t shake it. Something about it bothered me. I asked Quinn if he heard any wild stories from the Yards up in the Central Highlands. Things about monsters and the like.

  A real funny look came over his face. “They got ghosts and devils and monsters for every day of the week, Mac. You better be more specific. To them the jungle is filled with creatures that live to eat men.” He swallowed down his whiskey and his eyes went glassy. “They believe in this wildman who lives in the jungle, they call him Nguoi Rung. Some sort of apeman or monkey that walks upright like me and you, but is like seven feet tall. Covered with hair, has real big teeth. Smells like shit.”

  “You believe in that?” I asked, perfectly serious.

  He smiled a weird, almost defensive smile, then just shook his head. “There was one time I saw something big come out of the jungle…but, shit, I’d been on a long-range patrol almost a week and I hadn’t slept more than three, fours hours.” He lit a cigarette and studied the ash real closely. “See, Mac, this country is just plain strange. Things happen here wouldn’t happen back in the States. I know a Phantom pilot—used to fly cover for us up above Dong Hai—said he was flying a fire mission over Ganh Rai Bay for the SEALs and he came in low towards the shoreline and saw something big come up out of the water and attack a Viet fishing boat. Said it looked like a crocodile, but had to be forty-feet long and had flippers, a row of bony bumps down its back. He said it came right up and plucked two fisherman off the boat and went back down. He said he almost shit his pants and nearly put his Phantom right in the trees. I know the guy, Mac. He’s all business. Not the type to make shit up.”

  Quinn was starting to get a shine on and was talking pretty freely.

  He said he knew other grunts who’d seen those wild men in the jungle. And the Yards believed in them absolutely. If you lived in their mountain villages long enough, he said, like he had, you sometimes caught glimpses of strange things up on the high peaks or in the mountain valleys. And at night, you could hear weird cries that were almost human. Almost.

  “Shit, goddamn country’s full of ghosts and spooks, Mac. You get grunts talking and soon enough they’re telling you about things that drag away dead slopes—you didn’t think Charlie hauled away all of his own dead, did you?—to feed on ‘em and things living in the treetops and in caves and what not. Birds that can carry off men and snakes that can swallow a man whole and weird things that crawl up out of the swamps at night. Viet witches and devils and gook platoons walking around even though they’ve been dead for months.”

  I nodded. It was a crazy fucking country.

  “I think it’s this goddamn jungle, Mac. It’s spooky, you know? I’ve seen things, or thought I saw ‘em, that have left me cold. I think the jungle inspires weird things in a man’s brain, it’s so, so—”

  “Primeval?”

  “You got it. Dark and swampy and unexplored, full of pockets and draws and hollows no man’s ever seen. I ain’t saying none of this business is true, just that there’s places in this country you wouldn’t want to find yourself in, things there that could turn your hair white, give you the shakes.”

  I asked him about what that old lady had said to me.

  Something misted in his eyes and his lips were pulled into a tight white line, then he just relaxed. Smiled. “Yeah, I heard that one. Yards talk about it. One of their demons, Mac. A boogeyman. A giant or ogre or some such shit that lives in the jungle, comes out at night collecting heads. Just a spook story that keeps the kids in line, you know? You be good or he’s gonna come and chop off your head.”

  I sat there a moment; I just couldn’t let it go. “Is there more to it than that?”

  He licked his lips a few times and his hands on that scarred table were balled into fists, a white moon rising at each knuckle. “Was…was a Yard, Mac, friend of mine…a blood-brother…saved my ass more times than I’d like to remember. Name was Wogao and he was some hard-charger. He told me when he was a kid the Headhunter came into their village, said he saw it from his hiding spot under a hootch. Said the thing was seven, eight feet tall and black and green and rotting and stunk like death. Had claws. Long claws. Ripped the head off the tribal elder and went on its merry way.” Quinn shrugged, but looked uncomfortable, uneasy. His eyes were staring holes straight into the wall. “One time…me and Wogao…we were up in the high country and we set us a sweet ambush alongside this stream that we thought was a VC infiltration route. Wogao saw something then that turned him pale as a white man. He showed it to me. It was a footprint in the mud, Mac, but…Jesus, twice as wide as my boot and maybe twice as long…no man left it unless he was a giant. Wogao wouldn’t stay there, said we had to get the hell out of there by nightfall. I’d seen this guy charge machine gun nests and dive right into the middle of an NVA squad with nothing but a machete…he was brave, Mac, Christ, he was brave. But that footprint, it scared the shit right outta of him. He was frantic, half out of his mind.”

  “What did you do?” I was feeling pretty tense by then myself.

  Quinn let out a sigh, shook the tension off him like a dog shaking rain. He laughed low in his throat. “We got the hell out of there. Maybe I’m drunk and maybe I’m crazy and maybe I been in the bush too long, but I swear to God those people have a sixth sense about things like this. You been around ‘em long enough like me, you get it, too. Up there, Mac, I could feel it, something…awful.”

  After that, Quinn wouldn’t say much to me. He half-heartedly discussed ops and the war and the hippies back in the states, said he thought he might never go home after the war, didn’t sound like anywhere he wanted to live.

  But as for me, I kept getting these mental images of the Devil That Hunts Heads. Images that haunted me like ghosts, like some smear on my soul I just couldn’t rub off no matter how hard I tried.

  Not until much later did I realize why.

  3

  But the war was full of horror stories and you had to keep it all in context or you would lose your mind. Another Beret told me that when they’d take NVA or VC prisoners, the officers and NCOs would be turned over to intelligence for interrogation, but the lowly enlisted gooks were used for target practice. “The Nung mercenaries that fight with us are some real vicious characters, Mac, real good with spears. They’ve got us making them and practicing with them, too. What happens is, we line slopes up against the wall and throw spears at ‘em. After I killed ten, twelve of those pricks that way, I got pretty good at it. But not as good as them. There was this one Nung, he could sink his spear through two VC and still stick it in the wall behind them…”

  4

  Three days after Bai Loc I got myself caught in a real shitstorm.

  I was up in the Plei Trap Valley with a platoon of the 4th Infantry Division humping it through the jungle hell of the Central Highlands, climbing mountains and battling swarms of gnats and mosquitoes, looking for a story, always looking for a story—and sometimes thinking that maybe the best story going was about some dumbfuck correspondent always jumping into battle looking for a story he could never find.

  We were strung all over a hillside like toy soldiers tossed into the grass, only this grass came up to your chest and if you dared stick your fool head above it, some gook sniper was bound to put a hole in it, free of charge. The air was heavy and hot, pungent with the stink of rotting undergrowth and sweet decay. It was an hour before dark and in the trees rising above and behind us like some great rampart, birds were chirping and singing, monkeys chattering and swinging wildly through the branches like gymnasts on amphetamines.

  I got invited along by Bravo Company commander, Captain Donny Sweet. Sweet was not like Morales or some of the other kill-happy, widow-making ground-eaters you ran into over there. He was very intelligent, soft-spoken, subtle in every way that counted. To his troops, he was a combination of Jesus Christ, John Wayne, and a favorite
uncle. He never let them step into the shit without wading in it himself and I saw him, on numerous occasions, right on the perimeter giving the enemy a taste of the M-60 machine gun in person. He never took his boys out on a gook-hunt the same way twice. He was smart enough to know that old Victor Charlie was always watching, making notes on tactical patterns and insertions. He never failed to confuse the shit out of them.

  Sweet invited me along because he knew I was always hot for a story and he was sure we were going to be making boocoo contact with the dinks. The operation was to monitor any NVA activity and particularly supply lines coming over the border from Cambodia. And once either of those objectives were satisfied, to bang the shit out of the enemy. Three companies of the 4th were dug-in out there, waiting for the shit to fly.

  Problem was, it was already flying.

  The monkeys in the trees were throwing rotting fruit down at us and handfuls of their excrement. I already had five or six globs of that foul, runny brown stuff painting up the back of my flak jacket.

  A private next to me—kid named Toones from Iowa, who, of course, picked up the moniker “Loony Toones”—elbowed me as we stared down into the misty jungle, waiting for the recon team that was out scouting Charles to come back.

  “Hey, Mac,” he said. “Those fucking monkeys, they want us to play with them.”

  “I don’t like the game,” I said, flicking a centipede off my arm. “I’m about ready to pick up my toys and go home.”

  Toones laughed at that. He was a tall, wiry string bean of a kid with freckles dusted across his nose like liver spots. Fresh-faced, innocent looking, like maybe he should’ve been playing center on the high school basketball team and dipping his nozzle into a cheerleader’s tank, not out here in Southeast Asia killing people. But he’d been in-country almost ten months and was getting short.

  As I watched, he pulled a tennis ball out of his pack. A worn, discolored thing that looked like it had been used to clean out a drain. Rolling onto his side, he tossed it up into the trees. It was perfect throw; the kid had quite an arm.

  The monkeys up there started jabbering and jumping and the tennis ball arced back down at us. Pretty soon, half a dozen grunts were throwing tennis balls up there and, sure enough, the monkeys threw them back.

  “It’s psychology,” Toones explained to me. “Like with a kid, dig? He’s acting up, so you give him something constructive to do.”

  I heard someone coming up behind us and pretty soon Herpes, the top sergeant, was giving the boys a ration of shit, but almost whispering it so no unfriendlies could hear. “You peckerwood cherries pack those balls away right goddamn now! Gonna have the goddamn slopes over here wanting to play, too, you fucking idiots! Only they like to throw Chinese stick grenades…”

  “Okay, Top,” Toones said, winking at me.

  Everyone settled down and pretty soon the monkeys were bombarding us and I figured we’d be covered in shit by the time that recon patrol got their asses back. So we waited and waited.

  “Hate this waiting,” Toones said. “Me? I’d just as soon engage, wrap it up, E and E the fuck out of here. Goddamn eternity like this.”

  On my other side, Garletto, a corporal from Rochester, New York, said, “Hey, you guys know what the definition of eternity is? The time between when you come and she leaves.”

  We laughed over that one. Garletto didn’t; he just laid there stroking the barrel of his M-79 grenade launcher like it was his dick, hungry to shoot his load. He was like that; real grim and sober, always telling dirty jokes, but never so much as smiling, ball-bearing eyes always scanning the perimeter.

  He said, “You know how you get four queers on a bar stool? You turn it upside down.”

  He started on another one, but suddenly there was gunfire in the jungle below and the recon team came busting out of the brush and scrambling up the hillside, screaming out for covering fire. They were almost to the top when half of North Vietnam charged out nipping at their pink asses.

  “Contact!” they were shouting. “Contact!”

  Everyone opened up and the lead was flying and people were crying out. A dozen NVA got cut down and the others dashed back into the jungle, the foliage coming apart around them in a green spray as the gunners of the 4th gave them a taste.

  The squad leader of the recon patrol was panting and pouring water on his black face. Sweet wanted the Situation Report in the worst way and when the guy finally caught his breath, he gave the quickest Sit-Rep I’d ever heard: “Gotta be a thousand of the motherfuckers in that valley…bearing right down on us!”

  Sweet passed the word to the platoon leaders—take cover, spread out, and watch those flanks. He found an M-16 for me and thrust it in my hands, saying, “Keep your head down, Mac…but if they bust our perimeter, you’ve got my permission to zap as many as you can tag.”

  I’d been in it before, too many goddamn times, and only once or twice had I had to do any shooting. It wasn’t something I was against (I’m a real demon when it comes to saving my own white ass), but right then, laying in that heavy cover and waiting for hell to come charging at us, I had an ugly feeling. As if maybe my stomach and assorted internals had oozed down into my boots and that hollow was filled with a storm of butterflies. I felt so light I thought I might just drift up into the air, so I pressed myself down into that dank, insect-crawling loam.

  Sweet was on the horn to the other companies, telling them to stand ready.

  I’d seen human wave attacks before.

  Up at Special Forces A camps they’d happen pretty regular as the communists would try to overrun them. I saw one I’d never forget up at Quang Tri when no less than three VC sapper battalions decided to take the camp. They charged across the clearing, dozens blown to hamburger in the minefields, Claymores wasting an easy hundred more. But still they came, throwing ladders over the barbwire and razor wire, supported by mortars that were landing inside the compound. I watched—literally in shock—as the Green Berets and their Yard and Cambodian mercenaries pounded the hell out of the VC with heavy machine guns, small arms fire, and recoiless rifles. Within ten minutes of the siege, there were hundreds of corpses on the wire and still they came pouring in like soldier ants. We evacuated, those that were still alive, and the VC overran the camp.

  But until this day I’d never seen a NVA human wave attack.

  They came out of the jungle, hardcore mothers, firing AKs and drum-fed RPDs. Bullets were whizzing all around us, ripping up clods of earth and bringing a shower of branches and leaves down on our sector. The men of the 4th put out heavy suppressive fire and the gooks took boocoo casualties as they tried to mount the hill. The bodies piled up and still they kept coming. A shrieking, shouting, roaring wall of bodies coming at us in a flood, like some grim human river that had burst it banks.

  The men started firing their Claymores that were pointed down the hill and the explosions were loud and resounding, one right after the other. Each Claymore was filled with some seven-hundred steel ball bearings that tore gaping holes in the NVA’s numbers. Dozens of them simply vaporized, torn into tiny fragments. Those that made it past went down in a hail of bullets.

  Then the next wave made its charge.

  I could hear small-arms fire coming from our flanks and I figured we were right in the middle of a nest of the enemy. I heard Sweet on the radio saying he thought we were sandwiched between battalion-strength units. Men were shouting and shooting and slugs were going right over our heads and I saw several NVA soldiers that made it up the hill. Some of them went down and some of them didn’t. One threw a grenade that wiped out three of the 4th’s gunners. Rockets—communist B-40s—were landing all around us, fired from below. They erupted with great, dull thuds, spraying earth and debris everywhere. Tree limbs came down and leaves were falling like rain. More NVA made it up the hillside, firing and killing and being killed. Toones jumped to his feet and charged their numbers, taking down four or five until a rocket exploded and he was no more.

  Shel
ls were landing all around me and I kept rolling this way and that to avoid them. Exploding rounds threw twigs and stones in my face. The world became a seething storm of dust and dirt and black smoke. I crawled over the bodies of dead Americans and dead North Viets. Two NVA soldiers came through the brush off to my left, low and peppered with filth and blood. I rolled onto my belly and sprayed them down with my 16.

  Another charged forward and my rifle jammed.

  He had me. I was a dead man and I knew it.

  It all happened very fast. My life did not play out before my eyes or any of that clichéd bullshit, I just remember thinking how goddamned unfair life was. I tried to act dead, but that sonofabitch saw me, grinning as if he was enjoying himself. And then Garletto came up behind him and put a three-round burst into his spine. When he was down and flopping and crying out in pain, Garletto gave him another one.

  Again, we repulsed them with machine gun and automatic rifle fire, thrown grenades and bloody hand-to-hand combat. But we had taken causalities and there was no way we could keep going on like this; there were simply too many of them.

  And below, in the jungle, we could hear them readying themselves.

  The rocket barrage had ended and the air was cloudy with smoke and shivering mists of blood. Bodies were everywhere. Ours. Theirs. Men were screaming out for medics, but most were dead.

  It was carnage.

  I’d witnessed plenty of battles firsthand by then, but I’d never seen anything like this. Literally, hundreds of bodies in every possible state of mutilation and dismemberment reaching from the top of the hill and down into the hollow below. Heaped and stacked and scattered, seven or eight deep in some areas…blood, limbs, heads, and viscera.