Headhunter Read online

  It was that kind of place.

  The base sat on what was considered to be a “defensible” plateau, but when you put the numbers on paper it was scary: five full divisions of NVA regulars dug in and dug in deep in that maze of hills and valleys and only some 8,000 Marines there to stop them. If the shit really hit—worse than usual, that was, because the shit was always hitting at Khe Sahn—there was a reaction force of around 250,000 composed of Marines from support firebases around the DMZ, the Army’s 1st Air Cavalry Division and 101st Airborne Division, countless pilots and crews and support personnel. But when you were there and the rounds were coming in, it was hardly comforting.

  I got there just before sunset and when night fell I was down in one of the bunkers with some of the grunts I knew—Smokes and Bayonneand Street-Fighting Mansmoking weed and telling stories by the dim light of a Coleman lantern while artillery rounds hit inside the perimeter and without. After awhile you got used to it and the shelling became part of your natural rhythms. You didn’t really get scared until the shelling stopped—then it was quiet and still and eerie.

  Anyway, we were sitting there and the grunts were telling tales of patrols and ambushes and what not. Pretty soon talk turned to all things weird and morbid and tales were told and re-told. The captured American units that had been brainwashed by the Chinese and now fought alongside the VC. That unknown, monstrous version of the clap going around Saigon that turned your genitals black. Bayonne said he heard the Army Medical Corps had some kind of camp in the Philippines where they kept grunts that got it.

  “Like a leper colony,” he said. “Them grunts ain’t never going home, they’s falling apart and shit.”

  Smokes told us about the mass NVA graves outside of Hue and about some Marine Recon unit he knew about that had gotten sprayed with some weird defoliant and went around drinking blood, their eyes bright yellow and shiny in the dark.

  “They’re out there, man, somewhere,” he claimed, “hunting and hunting, they don’t care if you’re American or Viet, long as you got blood.”

  I heard stories of cannibalism and torture, secret CIA prison camps over in Cambodia where captured NVA and VC underwent gruesome experiments. About some crazy grunt with the 1/5 Marines who was building himself a body out of dead VC, stitching it up like Doc Frankenstein. Last they heard, he was looking for a set of legs to finish his work. And on it went, trophy-hunting and executions and germ warfare and secret camps and crazy Green Beret units that had gone native, hunting Charlie through the jungle in loincloths with spears and shields of human skin.

  I figured the time was right for my tale of the Headhunter.

  Maybe in the real world, people might have scoffed, but not there. Not in Vietnam and particularly not at Khe Sanh where everyone was fiercely superstitious and stories of ghost battalions and monster tigers dragging off men into the jungle fell as regular as rain.

  Bayonne said, “Shit, yes, I heard that one before. That ain’t new, Mac, that one’s old. Viets tell that one. Some giant ten-feet motherfucking tall stalks around collecting heads. Strictly bullshit, but you out in the boonies at night and you hear something out there, something big, shit, you start wondering.”

  Street-Fighting Man didn’t talk much, but when he did, the grunts listened. He said: “I don’t know about that giant-shit, but I got one for you.” He dragged slowly off the joint, smoke wafting from his nostrils. His face was shadowy and grim in the lantern light. “About six months back we were on patrol, Highlands, and we came across this Lurp team. Four of ‘em. They were hung by the feet in the jungle. Weren’t mutilated like the gooks do sometimes. Just missing their heads was all. There were tracks in the mud…big tracks. That’s all I’m saying.”

  Though it was hot and damp, the air like moist gelatin, I got a chill up my spine. We all just sat there, real quietly, listening and listening. The shells were falling intermittently and now and then you could hear the hollow popping of a pistol. Just some grunt killing a rat. At Khe Sanh the rats were real big. They’d gotten real fat off our garbage, assorted waste, and the plentiful supply of corpses. They were the size of cats, some of them. So fat they could barely walk.

  Bayonne lit a cigarette. “Yeah, there’s shit out there you don’t wanna even think about. Shit that’ll leave you cold.”

  We came out of the bunker and even had my eyes been closed, I would have known I was at Khe Sanh—the smell of burning shit and wet canvas, old blood and blasted metal had its own special stench that was purely Khe Sanh.

  It was black out there and flares were going up in showers of white sparks, drifting earthward and casting a sterile ivory light across the landscape, a light that created wild, flickering shadows and sometimes froze things still as statues. Illumination rounds were being fired from 60mm mortars inside the wire. They would burst in orange-magnesium fireballs, illuminating the knife-work of the NVA trenches and limning those encroaching trees with a ghastly radiance like some fearful, haunted forest. Now and then you’d hear the clattering din of .50-caliber machine guns when motion was spotted out in the cratered, pitted no-man’s land. You’d hear small-arms fire, see snipers raise their weapons over the sandbags, hear echoing rounds and echoing screams as NVA soldiers were hit.

  Smokes and I sat with our backs to the sandbagged walls while things began to heat up out there. Flares and mortar rounds were going up and people were shouting that there was activity beyond the wire. Rolling, thudding reports of heavy artillery reached us, but this, we knew, was from Marine support bases cut into hilltops along the DMZ and directed against NVA troop movements and positions in the jungle.

  We peered over the rampart and, in the glow of the flares, we could see NVA troops running and dodging through that rutted and gouged graveyard landscape. They were trapped in little pockets out there, probably a hundred or more at most. Between the snipers and the heavy machine guns, they didn’t dare break for open ground. They fired up at us and their artillery over the Laotian border brought rounds screaming down on us. Before long, a C-47 flareship came over the trees and opened up on those poor bastards with 7.62 miniguns called “Mike-Mikes”, each of which could lay down 300 rounds per second. Some of the NVA panicked and made a run for it and were cut in half by the fifties. The C-47 made two passes and then it was silent down there, except for the screams and cries of the numerous wounded.

  The snipers had fun all night picking off the gooks that tried to retrieve their dead.

  Smokes and I were creeping around, checking things out.

  We went past the looming control tower and sordid shadows of buildings and bunkers with their threadbare, sandbagged walls and roofs pitted by artillery shells. We passed the Seabee bunker and bumped into assorted packs of Marines who kept telling me story after story until my head was spinning…and then we heard screaming from inside the wire. A bunch of us went running down there to see what the hell was going on. When we got within earshot I could see that lanterns were lit and people were shouting and swearing.

  It was coming from down in the mortar pit which was enclosed by a high wall of sandbags. Medics were down there crawling around stacked crates of ammo. One of them was giving a grunt a shot of something to calm him down.

  Colonel Layton was there, more pissed-off than usual. He was wearing a flak jacket and he had his helmet off, banging it against his leg. “GONNA BE PAYBACK FOR THIS!” he shouted so loudly that even the North Vietnamese must have heard him. “DIRTY COCKSUCKING MURDERING BASTARDS, GONNA COME A TIME OF RETRIBUTION AND GOD HELP YOUR YELLOW DINK ASSES WHEN IT COMES!”

  There were four dead Marines in there the medics had covered with tarps. Layton saw me, looked right through me, and then called me down.

  “You wanna see something, Mac?” he said and his voice had a high, insane sound to it. “Come look at this. Just goddamned well look at this.”

  When I got down there, one of the medics pulled back the tarps one by one and I saw, God help me, I saw it…and wished I hadn’t. The bodies
weren’t damaged in any way, just splattered with blood. Other than that they could have been sleeping…if it wasn’t for the fact that all four of them had been decapitated.

  “Used something real sharp,” one of the Navy corpsmen said. “Sliced their heads right off like a fucking sword.”

  People were whimpering and moaning around me and all I could do was stand there and stare. Finally, my blood found my limbs and I moved. Smokes looked at me and I looked at him and we both wondered what was silent enough and mean enough to take four Marines like that.

  “Fucking gooks, that’s what,” Layton was saying, as if reading our minds. “Well, believe me you, yes goddamn sir, gonna come a day of reckoning. Murdering fucking butchers…”

  Smokes and I stood there for some time, cigarettes hanging from our lips, until long after the bodies had been taken away and we were the only ones left. Some sergeant told us to pack it in for the night, they were dead and it didn’t mean a thing, understand? Didn’t mean a thing.

  And all around us the night crawled and slithered and danced in hostile, phantasmal forms, brushing us and flowing over us and reaching out for us with clutching, black fingers. All night we could hear the sounds of the NVA crying out for help or death and we wondered if it was because they were hurt or because some nameless thing had sniffed them out and was coming for them.

  At first light, we found something interesting.

  Not us in particular, Smokes and I, but a squad patrolling the perimeter.

  They took us out there and showed us, though it was a very dangerous place to be. But even the NVA were real quiet that day and it made me wonder why exactly. Leading from the mortar pit were a set of tracks pressed into the soft, red clay. Immense footprints like the ones Quinn had said he’d seen in the mountains above the Montagnard villages. They were so large I could put my boot in ‘em—size 11—and Smokes had room to put his boot next to mine. From heel to toe they were seventeen inches long and pushed down very deep. There were black clods of earth squirming with maggots in them.

  No man that ever walked left a print like that.

  But whatever did, I saw only the prints leading from the mortar pit and out to the perimeter. Beyond that, there was nothing, as if whatever it was had leaped over sandbags and barbed wire, booby traps and landmines all the way to the NVA trenches.

  “Whatever left those was real heavy,” one of the Marines said in a dry, guarded voice. “And whatever it was, it was full of worms.”

  I looked out across those tangled hills and vales, that thick, enshrouding jungle and wondered, just wondered what malfunction of evolution could have birthed something like this.

  10

  For a week after that one, I stayed in Saigon.

  I stayed mostly in my hotel room and tried to write and mostly did a lot of drinking, but not much else. My mind was filled with childhood images of ogres and forest-demons, monsters and trolls that lurked in the dark woods, always hungry for human flesh and the meat of children.

  Things were starting to add up—at least in my feverish brain—and I didn’t care for the sum total. The idea of firefights and terrorist attacks, artillery barrages and body bags, had all become very prosaic now. Whatever harsh glamour they’d once held was gone. I was thinking about far worse things and hating myself, maybe, for thinking them. But what choice did I really have? I was the supreme agnostic, a collector of stories and lives and tragedies. I always kept an open mind to even the most bizarre occurrences, but I never actually believed in them; I merely jotted them down without much thought.

  Now, I was starting to wonder.

  First, I looked at what I knew. Not much. Some crazy bitch in some shit-nothing little ville (Bai Loc) had uttered some nonsense about “the Headhunter”, she had also said, Ac quy ddi san ddau, meaning the “Devil That Hunts Heads.” Just some bullshit, jiveass story tossed around by the peasants. Okay. Then I had Quinn telling me pretty much how he believed in it, had seen its tracks, maybe even seen it once. I trusted Quinn. He was a real ballbuster, a real warrior, but he was no storyteller. No liar. Then I was with the 4th—a real party, that one—and, as we awaited dust-off, some grunt lost it, started shooting, said he saw some giant stalking the perimeter. Then there was that hardass lifetaker NCO from the 173rd, Bridges, and his story of the heads on the poles. Bridges had no sense of humor. He ate VC for a living and shit down Uncle Ho’s throat for kicks. If he said he saw something, I tended to believe him and only because I knew his kind very well and they did not go in much for fairy tales. Then came Khe Sanh. Khe Sanh with stories of Lurp teams found headless in the jungle. Khe Sanh where I saw those beheaded Marines up close and personal. And, yes, Khe Sanh where I saw those tracks myself leading away from the mortar pit and out to the perimeter, where they oddly vanished.

  And that’s what I had.

  Was it enough? Really enough? No, I told myself. In fact, more than once I went up to the mirror and looked at the haggard, unshaven, boozy-eyed wreck in there, saw the cynicism in his face and started laughing. It was only when I was away from those eyes, my eyes, that I swallowed it all down and began to believe again.

  Because I believed in a lot of crazy things.

  I believed in ghosts. Vietnam was full of ghosts. Like Quinn and his Yards and their crazy telepathy and precognitive bullshit, I had my own sixth sense. You spend enough time with the dead and particularly those who have died violently, you get sensitive to them. People who die in battle don’t give up easy, they tend to linger. For days after a firefight I’d see dead men and when I didn’t see them, I’d feel them, drifting around me like cold mists. When I first got in-country, I was in the A Shau Valley with the 101st Airborne. After a real nasty battle where I first got sprayed with gore and learned firsthand how very messy death was, I took a chopper out that was filled with bodies wrapped in ponchos. Just me, the pilot, and the door gunner. As we lifted free of the valley, stray NVA rounds thudding into the belly of the Huey, a wind whipped through the chopper, making those ponchos snap and flap, revealing the faces of the dead. The door gunner yelled at me, told me to cover them motherfucking faces on account he didn’t like them looking at him and he didn’t want to hear what they had to say.

  Crazy. But true.

  Like the ghosts, I couldn’t make much sense of this Headhunter business. But then, nothing in war makes much sense. You can’t apply peacetime, real world logic to things in a war. It just doesn’t work. So I went over it all in my head hour after hour and found that the longer you look at something, the more it looks like something else.

  My second day back, Ky showed up.

  Ky was a fourteen-year old Viet kid who looked after my rooms and things when I was gone. Ky was a real operator. A tough street kid who swam with the sharks of the black market and could get you anything you wanted at a moment’s notice. He ran card games and sold grass to GIs and was like my right-hand man. He wanted nothing better than to come to America and be a disc jockey. He had an impressive record collection and knew the words to everything from Joplin and Hendrix, the Doors and Country Joe and the Fish.

  He came to see me, bearing bottles of Japanese beer and cartons of cigarettes, several rubber-banded back issues of Playboy stuck inside his shirt. In Saigon where the street kids would steal not only your wallet, but your pens and even the buttons off your shirt, Ky moved amongst them unmolested.

  A happy, slick kid with a million angles, he was usually bursting with stories and jokes he learned from Marines and paratroopers. But that day he was looking decidedly pale. He gave me the things he had collected for me and I paid him and it didn’t escape me that he looked hunted, that he trembled and started at the slightest noise.

  I asked him what was wrong and he told me some weird things had happened while I was in Khe Sanh. He’d come up to check my place and found what looked like mud smeared on the door, great clods of it, he said, and in it, worms, still alive. He washed it off and as he was doing so, he got the feeling he wasn’t alone…yet
the corridor was empty. He said he stood there, dirty rag in hand, listening. He heard something coming down the bend in the corridor—a shuffling, dragging sound, something like a ragged, hoarse breathing. Said he smelled something awful, like an animal that had been dead a long time, something closed-up in a box. Then, whatever it was, just vanished.

  It scared me. I didn’t like what it alluded to. Ky was a tough kid. It took a lot to scare him or even shake him. He’d grown up with war and atrocity. But he was frightened. And even more frightened when he told me that every night since, he’d heard it coming. Felt it, smelled it, heard it dragging itself towards him.

  But always when he was alone.

  Each night it seemed to get closer.

  The night before he’d been in an alley following a poker game he’d rigged. Right away, it had come for him, closer and closer until that smell was so bad he’d wanted to vomit, but was too scared to do anything but stand there. It—whatever it was—had gotten within ten feet of him…he could feel it there, he said, some gigantic thing that stunk like death and he could hear the sound it made, the deep, ragged breathing like gigantic bellows sucking at a fire or “a wind through a tunnel” as he put it.

  “This not good, Mac,” he said. “They are names for this…names I don’t remember or want to…old names…this bad thing…”

  What could I do except tell him there had to be a logical explanation for it? He wasn’t buying that and neither was I, so I told him to move in with me, that whoever or whatever it was would be in big trouble if they tried to tangle with us. But he said, no, no, he’d handle it in his own way. But I knew the real reason is that he didn’t want to endanger me. God help me, but I just couldn’t bring myself to tell him that it was I who had endangered him.