by Peter Straub
“Lieutenant—” Poole said.
“Waste her,” Beevers said.
Spitalny was already aiming, and Poole saw him smile against the stock of his rifle. Behind them, just coming out of the trees, a few men watched it happen: the woman racing downhill, Spitalny with his weapon to his shoulder.
“Don’t lead her much, Spit,” someone said. It was a joke. Spitalny was a joke.
He fired, and the girl lifted up and skimmed along for a yard or two before collapsing and rolling down the hill.
When Poole walked past the girl’s body he remembered the card called “Nine Rule,” which he had been given along with another called “The Enemy in Your Hands” when he had been processed into his unit. “Nine Rule” said of the VC: You can defeat them at every turn by the strength, understanding, and generosity you display with the people.
The third of the nine rules was: Treat women with politeness and respect.
And the fourth was: Make personal friends among the soldiers and the common people.
Oh, it got funnier and funnier. Rule five was: Always give the Vietnamese the right of way.
Down in that village, he thought, they were going to make some personal friends. Dengler stumbled along, making a visible effort to look as if he were not exhausted and in pain. Peters had given him a shot, “a cool one,” he said, enough to keep him moving since he refused to be left behind. The sniper was still back in the jungle behind them, and the platoon was strung out, checking both directions, ready to blast at anything they saw move back in the jungle.
“Peters, are you sure that Dengler is gonna make this?” Poole asked.
“M.O. Dengler could walk from here to Hanoi,” Peters said.
“But could he walk back?” Poole asked.
“I’m okay,” Dengler said. “Let’s check out this village. Let’s grab those maps. Let’s raid that rice. Let’s orient those armaments. Let’s put the whole damn place in an evidential killing box.”
Beevers’ platoon had successfully taken part in a killing box the week before, when one of the Tin Man’s reports of North Vietnamese troop movements had turned out to be accurate. A company-sized detachment was reported to be moving down a trail called Striker Tiger, and the captain sent out platoons Alpha and Bravo to position themselves on Striker Tiger in advance of the detachment to eliminate it. They had arranged themselves above Striker Tiger, which was a trail about a yard wide through thick wooded jungle, so that all in all they had a mostly unobstructed view of maybe thirty feet of the trail. They held their weapons sighted down on the open stretch of Striker Tiger and waited.
For once, a prearranged concept worked the way it was supposed to. One lone NVR soldier, a lean, worn-looking man who appeared to be in his early thirties, strolled into the killing box. Poole nearly fell out of the tree. The NVR simply kept mooching along. Behind him, loosely bunched, followed what looked to Poole like fifty or sixty men. They too were not boy soldiers—they were real ones. They made about as much noise as a pack of grazing deer. Poole wanted very much to kill them all. For an instant, every soldier on the road was visible to Poole. A bird yammered above them in a harsh feminine voice, and the lead man looked upward with an expression for a moment almost wistful. Then everybody in the trees and up above the trail on the slope began firing at once, and the air was obliterated, rent to shreds, destroyed, and the men on Striker Tiger flopped and jittered and spun and shuddered. Then there was a total silence. The trail glistened with a bright, brilliant red.
When they had counted the bodies, they learned that they had killed thirty-two men. By counting separate arms, legs, heads, and weapons, they were able to report a total body count of one hundred and five.
Lieutenant Harry Beevers loved the killing box.
“What that boy say?” asked Spanky Burrage.
Beevers looked at Dengler as if he expected mockery. Evidential, he would have thought, was more his vocabulary than any grunt’s. Beevers was tensed up, and Poole saw how close to the edge he was already. Poole saw only trouble in the new Beevers. Triumph had made him lose his grip—a few days ago he had said something about his days at Harvard, a college Poole was certain Beevers had never seen, much less attended.
For a second Poole looked out across the plain on the other side of the village. Two oxen that had bolted when Spitalny shot the water bearer were cropping at the grass, their noses buried deep in wet, electrified green. Nothing moved. In the village before them everything was as still as a photograph. Poole hoped that the people who lived in the scatter of hootches had heard that the round-eyes were coming and fled, leaving behind trophies of bags of rice and maybe an underground hole full of grenades and ammunition clips.
Elvis didn’t have a village, Poole thought: Elvis lived in the jungle like a monkey, and he ate rats and bugs. Elvis wasn’t really human anymore. He could see in the dark and he levitated in his sleep.
Underhill faded off to the right side of the village with half the men, while Poole took the other half off to the left.
The only noise was that made by their feet moving through the vibrant grass. A strap creaked, something rattled in a pot; that was all. Manly was breathing hard: Poole thought he could just about hear Manly sweat. The men began spacing themselves out. Spitalny began shadowing after Dengler and Conor as they faded toward the quiet hootches.
A chicken went buk-buk-buk, and a sow grunted in a pen.
A wooden stick popped in the fire, and Poole heard sparks and ash hissing down. Make them be gone, he thought. Make them all be in An Lat, two or three klicks through the forest.
Off to his right, someone’s hand slapped the plastic stock of an M-16, and the sow, not yet alarmed, grunted a question.
Poole came up alongside a hootch and had a clear sightline across the center of the hamlet to Tim Underhill, who was moving silently alongside another hootch. Off to Poole’s left, twenty or thirty yards beyond the perimeter of the village, the sparsely wooded forest, a hanger from the wooded slope, took over again, and for a second Poole had the ghastly fantasy that a hundred North Vietnamese soldiers crouched among the trees, aiming their weapons at them. He shot a panicky look into the woods and saw no soldiers, only a tall half-concealed mound. It caught his eye for a moment, looking almost manmade, of painted concrete and plaster, like a hill at Disneyland.
But it was too ugly for Disneyland, not picturesquely ugly like a haunted castle or a romantic crag, but naturally ugly, like a wart or a skin eruption.
Across the clearing Tim Underhill held his back against the hootch and looked at him; between them a big black pot sat on a communal fire. A column of smoke wisped up into the air. Two hootches down from Underhill, Lieutenant Beevers silently worked his mouth in a question or command. Poole nodded at Underhill, who immediately shouted “Come out!” in Vietnamese.
“Out!”
No one moved, but Poole heard whispers in the hootch beside him, and the other whispers of bare feet on the hootch’s wooden floor.
Underhill fired a round into the air.
“Now!”
Poole trotted around to the front of the hootch, and nearly knocked down an old woman with sparse white hair and a toothless smile who was just emerging from the opening. An old man with a sunken sun-dried face hobbled after her. Poole jabbed his rifle toward the low fire in the center of the village. From the other hootches came people with their hands in the air, most of them women in their fifties and sixties. “Hello, GI,” said an old man scuttling beside his old woman, and bowed with his hands still in the air.
Spitalny yelled at the man, and clouted him in the hip with the butt of his rifle.
“Stop!” Underhill yelled. Then, in Vietnamese, “Drop to your knees!” and all the old people went down on their knees in the trampled grass around the cooking fire.
Beevers went up to the pot, peered inside, and with his boot gave it a push that sent it rolling off the fire.
The sow began to squeal, and Beevers whirled around and shot
it in its pen. An old woman yelled at him. “Poole, get your men to check out these hootches! I want everybody out of here!”
“They say there are children, Lieutenant,” Underhill said.
Beevers spotted something in the ashes where the big pot had been, and he darted forward and thrust his hand almost into the fire, jabbing at whatever he had seen, and finally pulled out a charred piece of paper that looked as if it had been torn from a notebook. “Ask them what this is!” Instead of waiting for a response, he danced up to one of the old men who had been watching him and said, “What’s this? What’s this writing here?”
“No bik,” said the old man.
“Is this a list?” Beevers shouted. “This looks like a list!”
“No bik.”
Poole also thought it looked like a list. He signaled Dengler, Blevins, Burrage, and Pumo into the hootches nearest them.
A wave of noisy protest came up from the old people kneeling near the guttering fire and the toppled pot.
Poole heard a child begin to scream in one of the other hootches, and jumped into the one the old couple had left. The interior was murky, and he gritted his teeth with tension.
“He says it’s a list of names,” he heard Underhill explain to the lieutenant.
Poole stepped into the center of the hootch. He tested the floor for a trap door, jabbed the mats with the barrel of his rifle, and stepped outside to go on to the next hootch.
“Ask them about the sniper!” Beevers was shouting. “Let’s get it out of them.” He saw Poole. “Get everything!” he shouted.
“Yes, sir,” Poole said.
Pumo was hauling a screaming child of five or six toward the center of the village, and an old woman leaped up and took the little boy from him. Dengler stood slumped in the sun, listlessly watching.
A feeling of utter waste and emptiness went through Michael Poole, and he turned to enter the hootch on his left. He heard crying from the meadow side of the village and saw Beevers send Spitalny and Spanky Burrage in that direction with an impatient gesture. He stepped into the hootch, and something moved in the gloom at its far end. A furtive shape came toward him.
There was a burst of machine-gun fire from outside the village, and Poole instinctively fired on the figure advancing toward him, knowing that it was too late. He was already dead.
2
Loud terrible moans came from just outside the hootch’s entrance. Miraculously not dead but knowing that the hootch was seconds from blowing up along with the grenade in the enemy’s hand, Poole threw himself outside and saw Thomas Rowley on the ground, most of his stomach blown away and his purple and silver guts looped all over the grass. Rowley’s face was very white and his mouth was opening and closing. No sounds came out. Poole crawled over the ground. People were firing everywhere. At first Poole thought that all the old people had been killed, but as he crawled away from the hootch he saw that they were huddling together, trying to stay under the fire.
The hootch behind him did not blow up.
Beevers ordered Dengler to check out the woods to the left of the village. Dengler began to trot toward the narrow trees. Another burst of fire came from the woods, and Dengler flopped into the grass and signaled that he was unhurt. He began firing into the woods.
“Elvis!” Beevers yelled, but Poole knew this was nonsense because Elvis did not use a machine gun. Then Beevers saw Poole and yelled, “Air support! Heavy contact!” He turned to the other soldiers and yelled, “Get them all out of the hootches! This is it! This is it!”
After a time there was no more firing. Rowley lay dead before the hootch where Poole had killed the VC. Poole wondered what Beevers had meant by “This is it,” and stood up to see what was going on. He caught Pumo’s eye as Pumo came out of another hootch. Pumo looked like a man who simply did not know what to do, and Poole could not tell him because he did not know either.
The Vietnamese were crying, screaming, shouting.
“Heavy contact!” Beevers was still yelling, and Poole called it in.
“Burn the village!” Beevers yelled at Underhill, and Underhill shrugged.
Spitalny shot a blast of flame into a ditch and burst out laughing when the ditch began to shriek.
Beevers yelled something and ran over to see what was in the ditch. All around Poole men were running between the hootches, setting them on fire. It was hell now, Poole thought. Beevers was reaching down into the ditch. He pulled out a naked pink girl. They hid the children, Poole thought, that’s why it was so quiet, they heard us coming and sent the children into hiding. All around Poole, rising up like the screeches and yells of protest from the old people, were the fireplace smells of burning wood and the choking smells of burning grass and the flat dead odor of burned earth. Poole could hear fire snapping at the dry hootches. Beevers held up the pink squirming girl like a fisherman holding up a particularly good catch. He was screaming something, but Poole could not hear the words. Beevers began to move toward the village, now holding the girl out in front of him with both hands. Her skin was beginning to shrivel. When Beevers came to a tree with a vast fleshy head and a winding mazy trunk made of many trunks combined, he swung the girl by her heels and struck her head against the tree.
“This is it!” he screamed. “This is it, okay?”
Spitalny fired a flamethrower blast into a pen and incinerated two hens and a rooster.
Beevers swung the little girl around once more and this time split open her head against the mazy tree. He threw down her body and came raging toward the center of the village. “Now ask these people about Elvis,” he yelled. “Let’s get the truth out of these motherfuckers for once.”
Underhill spoke to the old man, who was now trembling with mingled terror and rage, and got back a rapid tirade that made him shake his head.
“You want to see how to do this? Watch.” Beevers stormed into the circle of cowering Vietnamese and pulled to his feet the little boy Pumo had taken from a hootch. The little boy was too frightened to speak, but the old woman who had been clutching him began to wail. Beevers clipped her in the forehead with the butt of his .45, and she toppled. Beevers clutched the child’s throat, pointed the .45 at his head, and said, “Elvis? Elvis?”
The little boy gargled something.
“You know him. Where is he?”
Layers and curls of smoke drifted around them, carrying odors of burning straw and singed meat. Spitalny was training his flamethrower on whatever was left in the ditch. The hootches crackled around the lieutenant, the little boy, and the old people. Underhill knelt beside the child and spoke to him in soft Vietnamese. The child did not look as though he understood anything Underhill was saying. Poole saw Trotman approach the hootch where he had killed the VC, and waved him off. Trotman went on to the next hootch in the circle. A second later yellow flame grew along the roofline.
“I want his head!” Beevers yelled.
Poole began to trudge through the smoke toward the hootch where he had killed the VC. He wanted to drag him outside before the hootch was fired. Everything was all fucked up anyway. None of the hootches had been properly searched—Beevers had gone crazy when he had been fired on. Where was that list, anyhow? Poole thought that after the hootches burned down, they could still check beneath them for secret compartments—maybe it would not be a total loss. He saw Dengler, dazed and covered in dust, walking back toward the ditch to see what Spitalny was doing.
The problem was going to be to keep Beevers from killing all the old people. If he found Elvis back in that hootch, which Michael had begun to think might be very likely, Beevers would want to execute the whole village as VC. Then they’d double or triple the body count, and the Tin Man would be another little step along the way to his brigade.
For the first and only time in his military career, Michael Poole asked himself what it was that the army wanted him to do—what America wanted him to do. His radio popped and sizzled, and he ignored it. He stepped over Rowley’s body and went into the hootch.
The hootch was full of smoke and the smell of gunpowder.
Poole took another step through the smoke and saw the body kneeling before the far wall of the hootch. A small black head, a brown shirt now wet with blood. The body seemed to be all trunk—“main housing unit,” Beevers would have said. Poole saw no grenade. Then he finally took in the size of the body curled up before the wall and knew that he had not killed Elvis—he had killed a dwarf. He took another look around for the dud grenade, breathing hard now without knowing why. He looked at the dwarf’s hands, which were small and dirty. They were not a dwarf’s hands: they were not any adult’s hands, being very delicate as well as crusted with dirt. Poole shook his head, sweating, and lifted the shoulder of the VC’s body to get a look at his face.
The shoulder gave him almost no resistance at all, and the small body rolled over to expose the face of a small boy of nine or ten. Poole allowed the boy’s body to relax back down onto the floor. “Where’s that grenade?” he asked himself in a voice that sounded normal. He kicked over a little table, scattering pins and combs and a pair of round sunglasses. He tossed everything that was in the hootch upside-down—the pallets, the tin cups, straw baskets, a few old photographs. He realized that he was doing this to keep himself from fully understanding what he had done. There was no grenade. He stood very still for a moment. The radio sizzled again, and Beevers yelled his name.
Poole bent down and picked up the child’s corpse. It was about as heavy as the body of a dog. He turned around and walked through the smoke to the hootch’s entrance. The shrieking went up a notch when he came out.
Underhill blinked when Poole came toward him carrying the dead child, but said nothing. A woman jumped up with her arms outstretched and her face broken into craziness by grief. Poole moved up to her and gave her the dead child. She sank down into the circle of old people, crooning to the child.
Then at last the Phantom jets came wailing in over the village, their noise drowning out the sounds of fire and human voices. The old people huddled close to the earth, and the big jets screamed over the village and turned in the air. Off to the left the forest around the cave became a single huge fireball. The forest made a noise like a thousand wind machines all going at once.
