by Tracy Kidder
Then one night in the drinking hootch, someone was talking about the Americal Division patch, which depicted the stars of the Southern Cross, and I piped up and said that, speaking of stars, the light from many of them was so old that the stars themselves no longer existed, and that was because, in proportion to their distance from us, light didn’t travel all that fast.
“It’s pretty fast,” the Dostoyevsky reader said.
Well, I replied, we human beings couldn’t reach most parts of the universe even if we could travel at the speed of light, which we couldn’t.
“Oh, yeah? Why?”
“Because mass can’t travel the speed of light,” I said. I hoped he wouldn’t ask me to explain, since I was innocent of physics. “That’s Einstein’s theory of relativity,” I added.
“I don’t give a fuck whose theory it is!” He was practically yelling. “Maybe you can’t go the speed of light, but don’t fuckin’ tell me what I can’t do!”
He’d grown more and more volatile, and then rather suddenly reclusive. He seemed to avoid the other men, even his former pal Pancho. And he let the ends of his mustache grow so that they soon drooped down almost to his chin. A week or so before he left, I went on an errand to the radio research company in Chu Lai, and the first sergeant came looking for me and said he’d heard that this man of mine had grown a Fu Manchu. “Get him to trim his mustache, sir.” I didn’t like any of this, the fact that the first sergeant seemed to know what was going on in my detachment and especially the prospect of carrying out his order. (It was the equivalent of an order; a lieutenant outranked a first sergeant only in theory.) When I got back to LZ Bayonet, I took the young man aside and gave him this news. He made what sounded like a cry of anguish. Real anguish. Over being told to trim his mustache. And face twisted, he turned and strode away. He was the only soldier I knew who didn’t at least pretend to be happy about leaving. Home meant relief to me. Didn’t it mean the same to everyone? I thought he must be having trouble with a girlfriend.
He was replaced by a man from Texas, nicknamed, inevitably, Tex. At one of my training schools, I’d kept a small notebook, full of stuff about infantry tactics and the Geneva convention and, among other recorded pronouncements, this: “An officer is responsible for everything his men do or fail to do.” Mainly, I’d come to think, the rule applied to lieutenants, second lieutenants especially. Being the lowest ranking of officers, they had no officers beneath them to blame. Even though I knew I was taking the injunction more literally than it was meant, when I lay in my cot alone in my hootch those first weeks, I imagined being court-martialed for crimes my men committed. More than once I thought about Tex. Never mind what he failed to do. Imagine being responsible for everything he was capable of doing.
The way I heard the story, Tex and Spikes were old friends, and Spikes had requested he be sent to us from company headquarters in Chu Lai. I think Spikes was afraid that if his buddy Tex didn’t get away from there, he’d DEROS in handcuffs. I heard later, from Pancho, that Tex had been drunk even on the day he’d arrived at the detachment. Pancho and a couple of others had picked him up in Chu Lai. Tex was so drunk they were afraid he’d yell insults at the MPs at the base camp gate and get arrested. So they put him in the back of our three-quarter-ton truck, covered him with a tarp, and sat on him.
I can see him now, beneath the bare lightbulb that lit the drinking hootch, swaying like a sapling in a gentle breeze, face flushed, holding up a brown bottle of the beer my men sometimes bought in the ville. “Bom Nee Bah! This shit is beaucoup number one.” He had fine hair always a little too long for inspections and florid acne around his chin that made me think, Unbalanced meals. In the mornings, his hands would tremble and he’d be tremendously eager to please everyone, even me—a tendency I recognized as hangover dread. I’d seen the type he could become at stateside Army bases, the thirty-year-old private who perpetually got busted, mended his ways, earned back his former rank, then got busted again.
Tex was an E-3 at the moment. A few months before, he’d been an E-4. One of the men had told the story, Tex laughing along nervously, his eyes moving from one face to another. There had been a lieutenant at company headquarters in Chu Lai who at first had buddied up to enlisted men, even telling them to call him by his first name. Later, he’d turned into a martinet. One night, this lieutenant came into the tent where EM drank, and Tex, in a righteous fury—it went without saying that he was drunk—picked up his M-16, locked and loaded it, and aimed at the lieutenant. The first sergeant said in a weary voice, “Tex, put down the fucking rifle.” And Tex obeyed. In the end, he was merely stripped of his rank, demoted from specialist fourth class. The Spec. 4 insignia had an eagle on it; he had to take the patch off his sleeve.
Hearing the story again upset Tex, evidently. In the dim light, he seemed to be weeping. “First Sergeant took away my bird,” he blubbered. “Top took away my bird.”
“War’s hell, Tex,” said Sergeant Spikes.
“My little brother,” Tex said, still blubbering, but now in an angry voice. “Fuckin’ VC killed my little brother. Fuckin’ slant-eye fuckin’ dinks killed my little brother!”
“Hey, bud?” said Spikes. “You shut up now, hear? You never had a little brother.”
“Fuckin’ dinks killed my little brother! Gonna kill those fuckin’ gook vC.”
I remembered times of being maudlin drunk myself. Looking at Tex at such moments was too embarrassing. I turned to Spikes. He made a face and shrugged.
Usually, Tex would wail through a collection of mucus and tears, making noises in his throat, waiting for Spikes to grab his arm and tell him to go to bed, so he could tear his arm away. This time Tex went to the screen door at the back of the hootch and yelled out, “zips! You fuckin’ zips! Gonna fuckin’ kill you fuckin’ zips!” The next thing I knew he had grabbed the grenade launcher and stumbled out the screen door at the back of the building.
My detachment was armed as well as an infantry squad, weapons lying around all over the place. Most men had an M-16. We had a communal M-60 machine gun and an ammo box or two of fragmentation grenades. And I had let Tex take responsibility for what seemed like the most lethal weapon of all, the grenade launcher and its various rounds, which included shells filled with white phosphorus (“Willy peter kills VC, like to ruin their whole day”). I would have had a hard time explaining my reasons to a military court. The honest answer would have been “Because he liked the weapon. I thought he’d take good care of it.” Had he loaded it before he’d gone out the back screen door? Not far away in that direction was the prisoner-of-war cage, a small outdoor jail, like an enclosure at a zoo, lit up now in the night. In daylight sometimes, I’d stopped and gazed at it. Usually, an old man or woman in rags would be squatting inside behind the wire.
I froze, mouth open, looking at Spikes.
“Goddammit!” Spikes said. He ran out into the night. By the time I reached the doorway, I could see him returning, hauling Tex back like a bag of feed.
SPIKES AND PANCHO WERE FAR FROM SHORT, BUT SOON THE REST OF THE MEN who remembered Lieutenant Pease had departed. It was as if, one day, I looked around and they were gone. Others had replaced them. And I was no longer the new guy at the detachment.
I felt comfortable now in the drinking hootch. The weather was still hot, though with increasing rain showers. Almost every evening Spikes and I would sit together, in undershirts or bare-chested, watching Combat! on our old TV and drinking. Usually it was beer, which we bought on runs in the three-quarter-ton truck to the Chu Lai PX. That place was a shopping center in a combat zone, a hyperbolic extension of Napoleon’s dictum that an army travels on its stomach. It was stocked with food and toiletries and cigarettes and even magazines and the latest in cameras and kitchen and stereo equipment at cut-rate prices. Often, though, the only beer available came in rusty cans without pull tabs. Invariably, we’d point this out to each other, with knowing smiles. We weren’t cherry. We knew the big breweries sent us soldiers stuff
that no one else would buy.
I had started calling Spikes by his first name—Stoney. He hadn’t asked to do the same with me, and I hadn’t made the invitation. Somewhere on the route to my detachment I’d been warned against allowing this, and now I’d also heard the story of the lieutenant whom Tex had made as if to shoot. So Spikes still called me “sir,” but I liked to think that we were friends.
He had authority with the other men. He had that strong, pugnacious jaw, and he could make his displeasure felt without raising his voice, and he always seemed to know exactly what he thought. He believed in dogs. I supposed this came with having been a country boy from Alabama. (We had a yellow dog, named Easy because she’d gotten pregnant. At some point, I recall that orders came to rid the base camp of all dogs. And Spikes said, “Anyone comes to shoot my dog, I’m gonna shoot him first.” This worried me, but no one came to take her and the order seemed to fade away.)
He believed in beer, but not in drugs. (One sensed that soldiers were using drugs all around us. In a nearby village that my men called Nuc Mao, you could buy six-inch-long, machine-rolled marijuana cigarettes in cellophane-wrapped packages of twenty. “Nuc Mao one hundreds.” But I don’t think any of my men used drugs, not even pot. Not that they imagined Spikes would turn them in. They seemed to view him with a mixture of fear and fellow feeling that was miraculous to me. I believe they kept away from drugs simply because they knew Spikes disapproved.)
He was useful. No, essential. If something had to be done, he could get the men to do it. We had an unspoken agreement: We’d make the detachment and the men presentable when visitors were coming from higher headquarters. I didn’t have to remind him to hide his pair of scuffed brown boots. He fouled up once, when a trio of sergeant majors visited from Saigon and reported back to our commanders in Chu Lai that they’d smelled beer on Spikes’s breath. Both the first sergeant and my company commander confronted me with this charge. “My sergeant works hard. He’s entitled to have a beer with his lunch,” I said. The first sergeant repeated the charge. I repeated my defense. I was learning.
I’d even figured out a way, sometimes, to coax Pancho to the base camp’s barbershop: “Look, I hate to tell you this, Pancho, but the first sergeant saw you back in Chu Lai and says you need a haircut.”
“He’s a flatdick. Your brother the first sergeant.”
“Look, I don’t care if you get a haircut. The thing is, if we don’t play the game, the lifers’ll be out here all the time inspecting us.”
He went off muttering. “Your mother the first sergeant.”
But more often than not, his hair was trimmed by the next day. It wasn’t all that difficult managing Pancho, usually. There are people, of course, for whom intimidation is just a prelude, whom the smell of fear incites to further violence, but he didn’t seem to be one of those. Maybe that was because he didn’t find it very difficult managing me.
When I first arrived at LZ Bayonet, I’d sometimes drive with the men on their trips on the sandy side roads off Highway One. I went with them once or twice to “the ville,” one of the little ramshackle settlements spawned by the war, about a ten-minute drive from LZ Bayonet, a town built largely of stuff scavenged from the huge division dump in Chu Lai. My men had discovered a couple of prostitutes in the ville. Several times we’d also driven to an unsecured stretch of beach south of the Chu Lai airfield. I remembered an abandoned church set in a field of sand so white it looked like snow, and one time when we were swimming a fighter-bomber with a wing on fire coming over us, parachutes popping, as the jet plunged into the sea. (“We better get out of here,” I’d said.) But now, near the end of the second month of my command, I mostly went “outside the wire” only in the letters I wrote home.
The base camp had a Vietnamese barber who didn’t speak much English, and a young Vietnamese had worked for us as a house girl until orders had come prohibiting the use of casual local workers in base camps, for the sake of improved security. Those were the only Vietnamese I knew, and I wasn’t likely to meet others, now that I’d stopped going on the men’s excursions. But I often wrote to my parents about two Vietnamese boys, named Go and Hanh, and described various kindnesses I performed for them. Among the moldy papers I saved, I find this passage in an unmailed letter to Mary Anne: “I am getting to be a great comfort to myself. Soon integrity will have me in her clutches. And speaking of integrity, I rescued a pathetic little whore from the ocean today. God knows what she was doing there besides drowning.… ”
More elaborate than that, I find among my old papers a draft of a children’s story, called “The Pig and the Bodhisattva.” I sent the final draft to Mary Anne. I wrote the story for her, and I’m sure I led her to think that I wrote it for Go and Hanh—a thirty-page-long story to read to Vietnamese children who didn’t exist and, even if they had, wouldn’t have understood it.
Though I don’t know why, I really wasn’t afraid of getting ambushed or shot at by a sniper on trips to the ville and the beach. But I could imagine my commanders’ fury if they knew I was poking around in unsecured countryside, and soon the excursions didn’t seem worth the anxiety. And yet as long as they did their chores and jobs, I didn’t forbid my men their day trips, even though I knew that if they got in trouble, I would get the blame. They were bored. I could sympathize. Maybe in my mind, letting them go on their adventures amounted to adventurousness. And frankly, I’m not sure what would have happened if I’d tried to stop them, since Pancho was behind most of the trips. He usually had one of the others go with him. Sometimes he went alone.
“Hey, Lieutenant, I’m taking the truck. I’m gonna go pheebe around the ville.”
He didn’t speak vietnamese, but he liked to say he could pass for someone other than an American, even for a vietnamese, because his skin and hair were roughly the same colors as theirs. I didn’t ask just how he might pull that off. Did he shed his uniform and put on black pajamas once he turned off Highway One? He didn’t always say where he was going, and I never could predict, when the truck returned in a cloud of dust and I looked out through the screens at the front of the operations hootch, what new loot Pancho would be bringing back to my detachment.
One time it was an acetylene blowtorch. Another time a puppy, black and tan and cute, of course, whom he had already named Tramp. He said he’d found him tied up outside some farmer’s hootch. “The zips were going to make him into soup, I think.”
He didn’t usually say where his prizes came from. One afternoon he climbed out of the truck with a foreign-made automatic submachine gun, bright green. It looked to me like a giant praying mantis. “What the hell is that?”
“It’s a Swedish K, Lieutenant.”
I couldn’t resist. “Where’d you get it?” I asked.
He lowered his head and looked at me sidelong. “Heh, heh, heh.”
A few days later, I was lying on my cot for a nap in front of the fan my mother had sent me, and I thought I heard a rustling in the grass outside my hootch, and looking out, I saw Pancho moving through the underbrush, stealthily, like a hunter, the green gun at the ready. Wherever it came from, it was contraband. Definitely unauthorized. But since it belonged to Pancho, I knew there wasn’t much chance that anyone who came to inspect my detachment would find it. I had come to trust Pancho in this way. Whatever he happened to be up to, he wasn’t likely to get caught. As I think of it now, this was the main reason I wasn’t very nervous about his excursions. Sometimes events followed, though, and they could be worrisome.
Walking up the slope from my hootch one day after my morning nap, I saw a furtive-looking transaction in the parking area outside operations, a gray panel truck with an insignia I didn’t recognize painted on the door, and an Asian man in civilian clothes handing something through the driver’s window to one of my men—two flat, round, metal canisters, the kind that hold reels of movie film. I was inclined to ignore this, whatever it was, but I got the whole story that evening, when the men presented me with their plan. On one
of his journeys, down by the docks in Chu Lai, Pancho had made friends with some Seabees who had introduced him to some of our South Korean allies, and Pancho started bartering with them, and it turned out they had some skin flicks they were willing to rent. Talking it over among themselves, my men figured they could set up a little movie theater in one of our empty hootches and invite the soldiers from the cavalry troop across the base camp street for double features, at three dollars a head. Actually, my men had already cleared out the hootch and hung a sheet at one end of it for a screen, and someone, probably Pancho, had borrowed a projector from somewhere. I didn’t ask from where or how. It seemed better not to know.
“All right,” I said. “Just be careful no one wanders into operations.”
I went to the first showing and stood near the door among a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd of hooting soldiers, and, trying to seem uninterested, watched an Asian woman copulate with a dog, a purebred boxer from the look of it. At movie time the next night, I walked some distance in the moonlight down the oiled base camp street away from my detachment. The commotion at our theater still seemed very loud. We enjoyed a certain privacy inside LZ Bayonet. Our operations compound was covered with KEEP OUT signs, and as a rule the various local authorities stayed away. The next day, I reasoned with the men. We didn’t want to attract the attention of someone like the local provost marshal. The men were excited, though. The theater had already grossed several hundred dollars. One more showing and we’d have enough to re-equip the drinking hootch, indeed to turn it into something that deserved to be called a club, a lounge just for us.
