Attack. Defend. Strengthen defenses. Turn danger to victory. Attack and win.
A canine Vietnam War.
Pure subtraction.
You acquired a sixth sense, suited to the new world in which you lived. It can’t be named. The point is that you adapted. Not all your fellows could. Not all your enemies could. One dog turned to skin and bones. Another went mad at seven o’clock on the seventh day of the seventh week. He barked ferociously, endlessly, and was mauled by the other dogs, had both his eyes gouged out and one ear and his tail torn off, yet he managed to survive seventeen more weeks. You lapped water from a pool, listening to him howl hoarsely in a very distant sector of the map. There were springs. In the floor, in the walls. In the deepest regions of certain paths. You had been aware of the underground stream’s rumbling for a long time. Your nose caught the faintest whiff, almost an illusion, of the South China Sea. No, it wasn’t your nose, it was that unnameable sixth sense. You sensed the motion of the tide. There was water and disease. One dog came down with scabies. There was diarrhea. Colds. Avitaminosis. There were all kinds of worms and insects and parasites, and though some could cause illness—one of the parasites had caused the scabies—some of those creatures that came wriggling out of the earth were rare delicacies. They were fresher than the preserved foods. Naturally, DED, you took the initiative in trying them. TO LIVE, you told yourself. LIVE, you told your fellows. DIE, you told your enemies.
Sometimes you waited motionless for moles and mice to emerge from their holes.
A few times, your new world was visited by catastrophe brought on by the human Vietnam War raging aboveground. One day a storehouse in the second layer, crammed full of munitions the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong shared, caught fire and exploded. This changed the terrain of your world. Made it even more complex, into a labyrinth of new branches. This happened once, then again, a third time.
But you, DED, you were alive.
The subtraction continued until, a year later, it was one vs. one.
You had no way of knowing the time or the season, living underground, but it was summer. Summer 1968.
And suddenly, subtraction became addition.
There came a point when you realized that all your fellows were gone, and simultaneously that only one of your enemies was left. A moment later, you were prepared to shift gears, to make the switch to addition. Yes, you grasped what had happened, didn’t you? You did indeed. Here in this new world, which was no longer new—here in the fourth layer, underground, in the general area of the seventeenth parallel north, on the border between North and South Vietnam, only two dogs remained. One was you, and the other…? That smell…that odor?
A bitch.
In the beginning there was darkness, and then there were your enemies. Then came hunger. You killed your enemies, ate them, became the embodiment of your name. And then…you were seized by desire.
You lusted. The new world was populated by one male and one bitch. And you knew what was happening. I HAVE TO LIVE, you thought. To live. What did that mean? It was a matter of lineage, its continuation. Your…family tree. So your instinct for self-preservation kicked in, issued a command. DED, get hard.
The underground war was over. It was time to take the bitch.
Don’t kill her.
There was food. Enough for two dogs, now that there were only two, to survive at least a few months. You began sending signals. Signs in shit and piss, barks, whispers. COME TO ME, you said. COME, THE WAR IS OVER.
This is the reconciliation, you announced.
And she felt the difference. You, in turn, understood, by means of your unnameable sixth sense, that she had understood.
You came together. In your storeroom. On your—American—territory. I’M THE ONLY MALE LEFT, you barked. THERE’S ENOUGH FOOD, WE HAVE WHAT WE NEED, you barked. THE TIME HAS COME TO MATE.
WE WILL BE THE ORIGIN OF THIS WORLD.
Did she understand your words?
Three days later, the red dog was wet, in heat. For the first time, this “anti-American dog” as you had thought of her, last among her fellows, grew wet between her legs. She had eaten her fill in the storeroom on your—American—territory, running in, rooting around, sleeping, waking, and running in again, spreading food around with her nose as she gobbled it down, sleeping, waking, making a mess, and then, finally, she was ready, she assumed the position. You were ready, you were hard. You straddled her. You were on top of her, panting, shaking your butt.
Not once.
Twice.
A third time.
The bitch was obedient.
Your sperm dribbled from between her legs. Your seed.
You were calm again.
And then, five days after you and the bitch met up, late at night—late at night aboveground, that is, and in Vietnam—you were murdered in your sleep. You had your testicles bitten off and your throat ripped open.
You died.
Just like that.
Yes, DED, you were dead.
From here on out, it was the bitch’s story. She wouldn’t let the body of a fellow dog go to waste. She tore into it with her fangs. It was warm. She gobbled down the liver, the spleen. She took mouthfuls of the meat. She lapped the still uncoagulated blood. Because she required it. She needed the nutrition. Lots of it—vitamins, minerals, proteins, everything. Because she had a litter of puppies growing inside her.
The bitch knew by some unnameable sixth sense. That she was pregnant.
She had to prepare. She readied herself to give birth.
Nine weeks passed. Thumps came from overhead, from the layer above, even though it was supposedly closed off. She ignored them. The North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong had begun redeveloping the network of tunnels. The bitch kept silent, however, so that her former masters wouldn’t find her. She wasn’t a red dog anymore, she was a mother. A mother dog preparing to give birth for the first time. Her instincts told her everything to do. Find a quiet place and hide. Ignore the humans, all you need is food. Forget the humans. Turn your back on humanity.
The mother dog obeyed these commands.
She kept a low profile, there underground.
Labor pains began. Then, at last, the delivery. A slimy, half-transparent bag slithered out as she pushed. Then a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth. One after another, slowly. Three of the pups were dead. The bitch ate the afterbirth, as all mother dogs do, and she ate her dead children too.
Three puppies had been born alive.
She began raising them. But she had problems suckling them. She didn’t have much milk. Two of the puppies grew weak. Again the mother’s instincts kicked in. She didn’t hesitate at all. She bit into the weaker puppies, killing them.
And ate their bodies.
One puppy.
He sucked powerfully at her teats.
He lived. He was healthy, strong. He, DED, was your child. A male with no name. He did not inherit your name, and he would not eat the flesh of his flesh. Even when his mother died. This was in February 1969. The puppy was no longer suckling. He didn’t eat the body. Instead he imitated his mother’s actions when she had been alive. He ate the food she had brought to the cave where he had been born, their nest.
His mother’s body rotted, stank.
AWFUL, the nameless puppy thought. The stench grew worse with every passing day until at last it drove him away. He would go. You see, DED, how clever your son is? He wandered quietly, secretly, through the fourth layer. There was a need for secrecy—he knew this from his mother’s actions, he had figured it out. It wouldn’t come as a surprise to you, DED, even on the other side, to learn that the labyrinth of tunnels and branches had been completely transformed. There were new passageways, and others that had been closed off. All the path
s too narrow for humans to pass through had been abandoned. But if you were a puppy? Could they be used? Yes, they could. And so the fourth layer was now connected to the third, and so to the second, and to the first.
You would have been impressed by your son’s intimate knowledge of the map’s coordinates. He had grasped it all. He appeared and vanished without warning in this “new new world,” faster even than the humans.
Yes, he was fine.
Relax, no need to worry.
You need not linger.
Spring came and the nameless puppy was growing healthily. He was an orphan, but he had never suffered from hunger. He knew well where in the network of tunnels he could find food, and what it was safe to take. He knew everything. Everything relating to this world, that is. But he wasn’t satisfied with this…this routine, with no aim beyond survival. At this early stage in life, he placed no stock in omniscience. He wanted the unknown. It was this, the things he had never experienced, that called to him. And so, even as he surpassed the humans, he spied on their doings. Explored the new munitions storeroom they had dug. The cave next to the underground kitchen, where they kept live chickens that began laying eggs day after day. When an operating room was added to the underground hospital after a medical unit was sent down from Hanoi, he tried to get as close as possible to the astonishing thing they had in there: a light bulb powered by a bicycle-powered generator that the surgeons used when they operated. He was doing all kinds of things, seeing all kinds of things.
Early summer.
The nameless puppy began encountering difficulties. He was growing healthily…in fact, he was now fully grown. He was no longer a puppy, and he was no longer the size of a puppy. His body had filled out remarkably. But this bewildered him: how could the world have shrunk so? The narrow paths that led in and out of the fourth layer were now impassable.
WHAT’S HAPPENED? the nameless dog asked himself in his frustration.
He shouted, IT’S TOO TIGHT! EVERYTHING IS TOO CLOSE!
This circumscribed world didn’t satisfy him. It wasn’t enough. He didn’t feel fulfilled. And he started losing track of his coordinates, which made it difficult to keep hidden. Everything had changed, his measurements were all wrong! He was no longer omniscient, he realized that. So what was he to do? What?
He was approaching an answer.
First there was the fourth layer. Then there was the third. Then he found the second and finally the first. He kept probing the network of tunnels for things he didn’t know. And at last…at last…
Summer. He was crawling through the first tunnel. It stank. It stank. He crawled. He kept crawling and crawling. He forgot all the coordinates he had carried in his head. WHO CARES, he thought. WHO CARES ANYWAY! His body tingled with a heightened sensitivity. An unnameable sense growled within him. He was biting through to something new. Which way had he come, which branches had he chosen? Which forks in which paths had he entered? It didn’t matter, he was being led on. By a voice. You, nameless dog. A nameless sense dispensed its commands to you, a nameless dog. The voice spoke to you. And you heard it, didn’t you?
To live. Live. Live at the edge of starvation. Hunger to live.
YES, you replied. YES, YES, YES.
Woof!
At last, nameless dog, you, too, barked.
Unsatisfied, you set out, beyond the confines of the world you knew by smell. You sniffed, inhaled the odors, searching for the unfamiliar. Finally, you crawled out aboveground. Your fixation on the unknown had made it happen. The smell of grass, undergrowth, moss on a stone, a dangling vine. It was hot. That’s what it was like up there. On the Indochina peninsula, in the tropics, just above the seventeenth parallel north. You had emerged into North Vietnamese territory, outside the DMZ. The exit from the network of tunnels, incidentally, was a camouflaged wooden trap door of the same sort used at crucial junctures underground, so you knew how it worked. You scratched at it, broke through. There was no sentry on guard. You pressed forward over a terrain devoid of humans, devoid of any trace of humanity, and you were out. You stood there, dazed.
WHAT IS ALL THIS? EVEN THE SOIL SMELLS DIFFERENT?
IT’S ALL SO DIFFERENT!
You were moved. The scent in your nostrils was the earth baked by the sun. But it wasn’t daytime now. When you emerged from that cramped world, it was the dead of night.
July 1969.
The moon was out. You turned to look at it. It was dazzling. This was nothing else, only moonlight, but for you, born and raised underground, it might as well have been as bright as the sun. You had seen the Vietnamese doctor’s light in the tunnels, so your eyes were familiar with illumination. They had been educated by the bulb in the operating room, and they had felt awed by its vivid round glow. But the moon hovering up there in the sky…this was different. The shock of it was altogether different. You were moonstruck. Any number of stars twinkled in the sky along with the moon, but it was the moon that got you. An American reconnaissance plane carrying an infrared camera flew by, but you were enchanted by the moon.
That summer, humans, too, found their gazes drawn to the same celestial body. The whole world was focused on the moon that season, because the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration had launched Apollo 11 and, for the first time in human history, landed a man on the moon. That was the human world, though, not the dog world. Dogs had been the ones to open the door to space travel, but now the man-made satellite Sputnik 2 was all but forgotten. Twelve years had passed since then.
The human twentieth century continued, that summer, as though Anno Canis didn’t exist.
You cried.
Nameless, gazing straight up at the moon, you were pained. Your eyes hurt. You had been born underground, where vision was useless, and the moonlight was too strong for you. Tears welled in your eyes. Tears fell. But you didn’t look away.
You kept staring up at the moon, overwhelmed.
You sensed something behind you.
You turned around. Your eyesight still blurred by tears.
It was a human. He held a night vision device in one hand and a military map in the other. He was different from all the other humans you had seen…spied on…so far. There was a difference in race—in build, in odor—but of course that meant nothing to a dog like you. You were on the edge of a firebase to the north of the DMZ, an area that was on the front lines but which had been cleared of North Vietnamese soldiers.
You were unsure how to react.
Because instinct told you there was no need to run.
WHAT IS…WHAT…?
You, nameless dog, were at a loss. How could a human do what he was doing, stand there opposite you as he was, in the darkness?
The human spoke: “Are you crying?”
His voice sounded like a dog’s whine. It radiated through your body with the same warmth as the commands the unnameable sense issued. You had no way of knowing, of course, but the language the man spoke was not Vietnamese. Neither was it Chinese. Or English.
WHAT IS IT, HUMAN?
“I saw you,” the human said. Then, holding up the night vision device, “I saw you with this. Crawling up out of the ground. Like the earth was giving birth to you. You were looking up at the moon.”
ARE YOU A GUIDE? you thought, your vision clouded with tears. A GUIDE TO THIS OTHER WORLD?
“You’re the opposite of those dogs who returned from outer space. But not unrelated. And look at that physique of yours…you’re purebred, huh? Purebred German shepherd? You don’t look that old either. Young, in fact. You’ve just graduated from puppyhood.”
HEY, HUMAN, you say. THIS IS A GREAT, MYSTERIOUS WORLD.
“Strange…are you an American dog?”
I CAME ABOVEGROUND.
“They set you loose in the tunnels to explore th
em in secret, and you got lost—is that it? No, it can’t be. You don’t have that kind of attitude at all. Are you Chinese, then? One of the dogs in that platoon they talk about, the one they say the PLA sent in four years ago? No…that’s not right either.”
YOU WERE HERE.
“Anyway, I was here, and then you turned up,” the human said. He spoke the same words, dog, nameless dog, that you yourself had just said. Not in Vietnamese, or in Chinese, or even in English. In Russian.
“Come. I’ll take you with me. Can your children be the next Belka, the next Strelka?”
The KGB officer held out his hands, and you barked. Woof!
In March 1969, the Sino-Soviet split finally escalated into armed conflict. The two armies exchanged serious gunfire in the area around Zhenbao, aka Damansky Island, in the Ussuri River, on the border between the nations. In June a similar border dispute broke out along the edge of Xinjiang Province, and in July the same thing happened around Bacha Island, aka Gol’dinskii, in the Heilong River. The participants in the conflicts were always border guard troops. The tension had been building for some time. In 1967, as China was pressing ahead with the Great Cultural Revolution, the Red Guard attacked the Russian Embassy in Beijing. They set fire to effigies of Soviet leaders. A more offensive demonstration would not have been possible. And did this shift in Sino-Soviet relations have an effect on the Vietnam War? Of course. As if the Vietnam War weren’t already chaotic enough. In June 1965, the USSR and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam signed two agreements concerning “free Soviet aid in the development of the national economy of the DRV” and “strengthening the DRV’s defensive capabilities.” Just one month after the PLA marched through Friendship Pass to provide secret aid to Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam, the Soviet Union and Vietnam were building a new relationship. Ho’s health went into a decline that year, and the party secretary took control. The USSR exploited this shift to try, in a variety of ways, to chip away at the Sino-Vietnamese friendship. During the first half of the Vietnam war—America’s quagmire—the world’s two great communist powers were in fact engaged in a tug-of-war, each trying to attract that small communist country, North Vietnam, to their side. In the end, Vietnam chose the USSR.
Belka, Why Don't You Bark? Page 21
