My Detachment My Detachment

by Tracy Kidder

  Then I realized the snake wasn’t actually moving. Looking more closely, I saw that its fangs were propped open with a stick. I heard someone snickering. I looked around, and there was Pancho’s smiling face, poking around the side of the big map.

  “You like that shaky snake, Lieutenant.”

  Dear Mom and Dad,

  The other night I had to have dinner with all these awful Colonels—it was revolting.

  But we caught a beautiful green snake—a bamboo viper. It’s terrifying but dead. I shall bug you with another request. For some perverse reason I would like to have a book on snakes—Asian ones wit’ pitchers. Things sound fair to middling at the Kidder mansion (but you have never seen such a beautiful bright green snake. A one-stepper—he bites you and you take one step, which sounds very scary, but they are pretty timid—it’s the first snake I’ve seen over here—my Sgt. killed it with a machete).

  R & R

  THE INVESTIGATOR FROM NHA TRANG, A MILD-MANNERED CAPTAIN who looked too old to be a captain, spent three days with us, three days of hangovers for me at least—I took him every night to the Officers Club at the Chu Lai airfield. The day he left he told me he’d recommend “a slap on the wrist,” and I felt relieved to hear that news again.

  Our routines resumed. In the evening, there was Combat! and my map work and drinking in the lounge. Also a board game called Diplomacy, which my mother had sent at my request. Each of us played a nation fighting World War I, forming secret alliances and breaking them; quite often we ended up shouting at one another. And during the daylight hours, there were chores, such as the replacement of our rotting sandbags. The men hated filling new ones, maybe because it resembled work they’d had to do at stateside Army posts. They could work at filling sandbags for two hours and end up filling two apiece, unless I was shoveling alongside them. It had become a long-term project. I never thought to try to motivate them by pointing out that new sandbags might be vital to our survival. I only recall saying that new sandbags might be vital to our surviving inspections.

  We hadn’t suffered a lot of those, actually, but the threat of them seemed big to me, the threat of unknown consequences if an inspection went badly and also the threat to our privacy. I often mentioned the first, trying to reason with my men, and never named the second even to myself. It was only a feeling I had whenever some outsider, any outsider, visited our compound. The night, for instance, when the operations officer from our higher headquarters in Chu Lai came out, not to inspect us but for a social visit. He called me first. He told me he needed a break. He had never caused me any trouble. He’d even helped me. I should have been sympathetic. But I didn’t feel hospitable when he arrived, and I’m sure it showed.

  The men all wandered away, leaving us two officers alone in the lounge. I opened a couple of beers. We were chatting about college—he’d gone to Stanford—when Pancho sauntered in, carrying his blowtorch, which he proceeded to light. He brushed his black hair out of his eyes—it was getting too long again—and he began applying the flame to one of the interior plywood walls, scorching a patch, then lowering the torch and peering at the wood, examining the effect, all as if he hadn’t even noticed us sitting there.

  “What is that man doing?” the operations officer said to me in a loud whisper, over the hissing of the torch. He seemed alarmed. He must have thought, not unreasonably, that this man might be about to set the hootch on fire.

  Later, Pancho would tell me, “If you heat up plywood, it makes it look dark, makes it look better.” At the moment, though, I had no idea what he was up to. I looked at the operations officer, and I shrugged. There was smugness in that shrug. At the radio research compound in Chu Lai, officers didn’t drink with enlisted men. But on a recent visit there, I had made a point of mingling with EM at their club. This distinguished me from my guest, the operations officer, I felt.

  In fact, my visit to the EM club hadn’t gone very well. One guy, not one of my own men, had said to me, in a friendly voice, “You were raised on a silver spoon, weren’t you, Lieutenant?” I was in their club. I couldn’t pull rank. All I could do was say, “Not really,” while I remembered that, in fact, there was a little silver spoon at home that one of my grandparents had given to my mother when I was born. Actually, I’d felt relieved when the company commander had asked me not to intrude again on the enlisted club when I visited Chu Lai.

  The operations officer and I stared at Pancho. The hissing had stopped. Pancho was staring at the blowtorch, muttering, “Flatdick thing isn’t working right.” Then he sauntered out the door.

  I began to talk to the operations officer about my feeling for enlisted men.

  After a while he said, “You’re very malleable.”

  Forget it, I told myself after he left. Who cares what that asshole thinks?

  THE WINTER MONSOON BEGAN IN OCTOBER. IF THE SCUDDING CLOUDS TORE open and a hazy sun appeared for a moment, one of us would shout and we’d all run outside, then hurry back in when it began to pour again. We wore our heavy field jackets indoors and walked to meals in olive-drab ponchos, slogging through mud, Spikes saying to me, “Y’all hear that great suckin’ sound, Lieutenant?” He was saying the sound of our boots expressed his feelings toward the Army. It wasn’t something an enlisted man, especially a sergeant, would say to every lieutenant. I’d smile as he said it, turning to his shrouded figure beside me.

  Can the mud really have come halfway up my calves as I watched the men work on our malfunctioning generators? Looking back at meteorological records, I realize that the rainy season around Chu Lai that year was a great deal shorter than I have remembered, but it left a strong impression. Ivory Fields occurs in a hot, dry time, but in the prologue the narrator says, “When the ground that machines have eaten turns to mud and roads become swift streams and the rivers swell and the wind and rain drive helicopters right out of the sky, rain will own the land again. Then men will not move much except as other legged creatures move. It has always been that way and always will be in the few days left to come. So consider the rain. Without it the pride of foreign soldiers would be unbounded and the land might be left no pride at all.”

  There were in fact some days when the war from our vantage point came nearly to a halt, days when I had no fixes to report and, as Hemingway might have put it, I had too much time to think.

  Letters from Mary Anne had dwindled. The ones that did arrive had grown increasingly cheerful and chatty, and they gave me an ominous feeling. She had suggested gently once—I didn’t remember the occasion—that I should be a man, not a boy. For months I’d been trying to convince myself, by convincing everyone back home, that in the crucible of war I’d made that great transition. The actual facts of the case had a way of ganging up on me in the doorway of my hootch, when I walked down there alone after my morning briefing and breakfast at the H-Troop mess hall. The screen door would slam behind me, and I’d hear myself say aloud, “Shot in the head.” I didn’t know when I’d first uttered the phrase. I didn’t wonder about that, but was always startled hearing it in my voice. I wasn’t imagining suicide. I wasn’t imagining myself dying in a glorious firefight. Originally, perhaps, I had imagined mourners at my funeral, but by now they were just magic words. “Shot in the head.” usually, this cleared the air for a while.

  I spent hours alone in my hootch, the canvas flaps lowered, the rain ringing down on the metal roof, sometimes matching the rhythm I made on the manual typewriter. I finished a story about a soldier in an unnamed country who gets enraged when a fellow soldier tells him that human beings can’t travel at the speed of light. His buddies don’t know that he has just received in the mail a clipping of a wedding announcement from his hometown paper. He reads it again and he thinks: “She would be lying on her back, her legs spread, making little noises. And in his mind’s eye his cute little girl, with her neat hair and little nose and pretty little round-collared blouse, tossing feverishly, naked below the waist.”

  Christmas was coming. I walked up to the
Military Affiliate Radio Station, where a soldier could sometimes place an international call, a laborious process but free of charge. I had it in mind to call Mary Anne in the States. I tried, but no one answered.

  “Sorry, Lieutenant,” said the man who placed the call.

  I walked back to our compound, feeling blue until the camera started following me again: reopening the letter I’d received back in October from David Riggs at Harvard.

  Strange the way Vietnam has all of a sudden ceased to be hard news. Every night at ten to seven Walter Cronkite switches over to some correspondent in khakis, standing in a sort of vacant lot, who proceeds to explain (usually with appropriate boom-boom sound effects) how Charlie has some new gear from Peking, or how we are building brand new villages out of corrugated aluminum … And for some reason (frustration, boredom? the Fall of that pompous, good man Senator Eugene McCarthy?) everybody has decided that the war is just part of the system, like taxes, etc. Even radicals prefer to foment against abstractions—Our Warmongering Society—rather than to bother their heads about the miserable country in which you are stationed. I am afraid this means that you are being cheated—sent to a situation that, morally, is so desperate that no one wants any part of it.…

  It might have felt good enough to imagine myself a young man risking his life for a noble cause, but to be a young man in a morally desperate situation that everyone back home wants to forget—this had a sweet sadness that reminded me of the most important of my literary experiences of war. Mainly Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and his stories “In Another Country” and “A Way You’ll Never Be,” love and illusion destroyed by war. So much war fiction managed to deplore and romanticize at the same time.

  It didn’t really matter that I wasn’t in much danger. Most of my correspondents back home didn’t seem to know about the distinction between combat duty and duty like mine, between the lives of REMFS and those of grunts. To them, it seemed, any job in Vietnam must resemble the assault on Iwo Jima. I’d reassured my correspondents in letters to the World, but then, often enough, I’d left room for doubt: “I have a sore ear and some boils, but otherwise I am very healthy. Go’s brother died of something I can’t mention in a letter, and I just told him. But I have all my shots, don’t worry.”

  I wrote to Mary Anne. Soon I would be eligible for a week of rest and recuperation, R & R. I thought she might meet me in Hawaii. I wrote the letter carefully. In the first draft I wrote, “Perhaps I already asked once—I think I did. No harm done. I will understand if you choose not to, and am quite through with turning pleasant ideas into nasty ones. I feel myself a very jolly person now—my company is highly coveted, by man and beast, general and private, easterner and westerner. Well, to enjoy yourself you have to be a little bit of a fool.” She wrote back saying she couldn’t come. I sensed that she was sad, and I knew she wasn’t telling me all she felt. She closed with her signature, without writing the word Love.

  I knew that she loved me, but in a way that had grown more sisterly than romantic. The fact was unacceptable. It made me furious. A few days later, I woke up with a fever. I sent a message back to the company saying I was sick. I drank like Tex that night, and staggered down to my hootch afterward and wrote this:

  Dear Mary Anne,

  Many days have passed, and several nights which I cannot recall with any certainty. One time I stood on the top of the hill when mortar rounds were falling with their little muffled thumps throughout the base camp. Other people were dying who did not want to. I wanted to see. Now I do not want to die, but I like to live this way, I really do, and I think I am best suited for the kind of certainty of war. You know who are enemies and you do not have friends. You expect nothing from people and give nothing, but you watch and see and soon you know all about stern dictums, such as, “Be a man, not a boy.” Still I believe in things—loyalty, honesty, honor, courage—but having never seen them, except once in myself, I prefer their opposites. I prefer them, that is, to the in-betweens, the rationalizers—“it’s better this way”—and their lack of all courage. Because it takes some courage to be disloyal and deny it to yourself. The good person owes people something—hatred, love, honesty—what he would extend, or like extended, to himself, or herself.

  I do not care for you or about you any longer, nor will I ever again. But I would like you to know that I do thoroughly hate you, and that, at least, is something. You have a maudlin, deceitful mind, and you are cruel no matter how kind to children. In the end those things do not distinguish you.

  This is your receipt. What you may have done to me, or I to you, in the past, is nothing alongside this little agony you built by neglect. And you will not understand why, or what that means. It’s gone now, and as a matter of fact it came and went swiftly. But I believed in you, and in being good and fine, in punishments and rewards, not as absolutes but fine contingencies, and I could have spent my life on them if you had paid me only the respect which I have richly deserved from you, and you had taken leave of me honorably.

  Do not come near me and do not write me a reply, or I will make you and whatever you love this month very sorry; and I mean that as you only can when you know your capabilities.

  I have nothing to lose. I really lost my virginity over here. I shot a man through the head and little pieces of his brain and a great quantity of blood colored my gun and my clothes and my face. I never cried so hard over you. But, not unlike you, I am becoming a whore of a different sort. I like it. I LIKE it. You filthy, rotten bitch. One letter from you at any one time would have done so much for me. You fucking bitch.

  Then I lay on my cot with my .45 locked and loaded and resting on my chest. I yelled now and then. I heard the rats. The next morning, I made it to the colonel’s briefing, then fell back into my cot in my hootch. My men let me sleep. But by noon the air inside was like an oven. I woke up bathed in sweat. I read over the letter. It seemed better not to mail it. I just had a short-term virus, as it turned out. But I didn’t always take the malaria pills. So, I told myself, it could have been something much worse.

  The rains ended. Life returned to normal, hot afternoons, dust that stiffened your hair. One of the commo ops played a Simon and Garfunkel tape again and again, inside the operations hootch, while manning the Teletype. I still wasn’t tired of the songs. “Scarborough Fair.” “Homeward Bound.” “Feelin’ Groovy.” Elsewhere, life was full of possibility. I fell for the songs every time, wistful for things I imagined people my age were doing back home.

  Back when I’d gone to the ville with my men, I had waited outside while they visited the prostitutes. Two would approach the truck. “Boom-boom, GI? You want fucky-fucky?” Recently, a command decision had made it illegal to perform “Hollywood stops” (not fully stopping at intersections; the generals were upset about the frequency of accidents), and getting caught with a prostitute was now an arrestable offense. I certainly didn’t want to get arrested myself, but I didn’t forbid my men to go to the ville. One of them had already contracted gonorrhea twice from the same woman. Many others got crab lice. Spikes would tell them, “Here’s what you do, bud. Shave your crotch on one side, pour lighter fluid on the hairy side, set it on fire, and when they come out of the brush, stab ’em with an ice pick.” One morning I found a crab in my groin, without having done anything to deserve it. GIS from other outfits were using my private shitter, which was situated rather near the main base camp road. I found several of them, tough-looking grunts, standing outside it in a line one day and very politely asked them not to use it anymore. “It’s okay this time,” I said.

  For me, r & r seemed to promise the best and safest opportunity for meeting compliant young women. At the detachment, new guys listened to old guys tell stories about their trips. Tex, for instance, used to talk about his r & r in Taipei. “The Peito Baths are beaucoup number one. All you do is ask a taxi driver.” He would describe a delicate Asian woman giving him a massage, during one part of which she walked on his back, up and down his spine. “
Yeah, Tex, and what else?” He wouldn’t reveal more. “Didn’t get any, huh, Tex?” He would smile. He’d get a faraway look. “Go to Taipei, the Peito Baths, bud. All you do is ask the taxi driver.”

  But hearing Tex talk about those baths in Taipei, I kept getting a picture of a large, unsanitary public steam bath, with tiled walls like those in decaying New York City subway stations. We could choose from among any number of places. Sydney, Australia, for instance. Someone had heard someone else say that Sydney was the place to go. “Round-eyes meet you at the plane. No shit. They practically fuck you right there.” But I thought I knew enough about round-eyed women to be skeptical of that. I had been reading more of Joseph Conrad. “Singapore.” The name on our list made me think of sampans, courageous sea captains, women in sarongs. One of my men was also eligible for r & r at this time. That was Schulzie. We decided to go to Singapore together.

  No trace of Schulzie appears in Ivory Fields. Perhaps because he became a real friend to me, he became in retrospect less colorful than others. He was a lean, angular guy who often spoke a streetwise lingo from the side of his mouth that I assumed he’d come by honestly, growing up around New York. “Didn’t your mother ever teach you nothin’?” “Money talks, Jack.” “That don’t mean jackshit.” “Fool me once, mothah, shame on you …” But it wasn’t entirely convincing. I have a photo of him and me that describes him better. We stand bare-chested by our truck. My right hand is raised. I had sent a copy of the picture to Mary Anne, in part because I thought I looked handsome in it, and in part to prove I wasn’t paranoid, that I was having a real good time in spite of everything. I wrote on the back: “Speaking Cherokee with Schulzie. I have been informed of my nomination as a third rate Cherokee deity, by Schulzie, who was informed via letter by his blood brother, Catcher Bear. It is a great honor and a heavy responsibility.” I never felt worried about my standing with Schulzie. I found genuine relief in his silliness. He was still open to the world.