Sympathy for the Devil

by Kent Anderson

  “Though it’s true,” Hanson said, “that a nicely structured two or three seconds like that is the sort of thing you can hang your day on over here, I’ve still got a chopper to catch.”

  He turned and started to walk away, then spun and grabbed Quinn by the sleeves of his fatigues and began to shake him the way you’d shake a child you were angry with. Quinn’s web gear rattled, grenades clacking against each other like pool balls.

  “Watch your ass,” Hanson said, “you and Silver. Don’t get yourselves blown away while I’m gone.”

  Quinn laughed. “No sweat, my man. I plan to skate till you get back. Have a nice airplane ride, sport.”

  Quinn turned and walked back toward the Special Forces compound.

  Hanson walked down to the wide white beach. It was dawn. The black hills across the bay were going to turn green soon. Gray waves began to flush pink and gold, rising endlessly and patiently, crashing back into the surf.

  Hanson heard a faint steady drumming, then spotted a black dot over the mouth of the bay. The perimeter gunship.

  The door gunner in the perimeter ship was bored. His job was like sitting in a windy open wall locker a thousand feet in the air. The fat Huey helicopter had been circling the huge military complex for four hours. For four hours he had been watching the deserted, dark beach. The door gunner wore a helmet with a tinted bubble face shield that covered everything but his mouth, and a thick ceramic flak vest over his chest and shoulders. He looked like a giant insect. The dead weight of the vest pulled and jerked on its shoulder straps each time the Huey banked around the perimeter.

  In front of the door gunner the M-60 machine gun hung barrel down, rocking slightly like an oar in an oarlock. The belted bullets draped down from the gun, folding into a box at the gunner’s foot.

  He leaned out, into his seat harness, and looked down the beach. There was a single speck moving across the white sand. The door gunner pushed down the chrome nubbin in a black plastic handle and spoke to the pilot through his helmet mike. “Hey, sir. Let’s put her down on the deck. Wake that stud on the beach up.”

  The pilot was bored too. He was a Cobra gunship pilot who had come back to Vietnam for a second tour. They had assigned him to the perimeter ship until his orders for a Cobra unit came through. The Cobra is a fast attack helicopter; flying a Cobra is like driving a Corvette. The fat Huey was like a delivery van.

  The paddlelike rotor blades that held the Huey in the air tilted alternately up and down as they spun, stabilizing the helicopter. When the pilot changes the angle of the blades, it is called pulling pitch and causes the chopper to go up or down.

  The Huey was a flying chunk of plastic and alloy steel held in the air by the balance and counterbalance of turbine and rotor blades, a bunch of moving parts all working against each other, like a chicken trying to fly. It is almost impossible for a Huey to maintain an exact altitude when it is moving forward.

  The pilot pulled pitch, hard, and the Huey dropped like dead weight. He eased back and held it four feet above the sand, bringing his speed to eighty-five knots. He smiled. He could feel it all: the flutter of the rotors, the staggered interacting gears, and the shriek of the jet turbine.

  The pilot was flying too fast and too low. He knew that. He hadn’t felt so good since his last Cobra mission.

  His right earlobe was ragged, as though it had been eaten away by some disease. It had been torn away on his last Cobra mission by a 7.62 round that had smashed through the canopy of the Cobra, meeting him as he dove directly at the RPD machine gun. The pilot had killed twelve people in less than a minute that day.

  He was holding the Huey at four feet by instinct, by feel. It was almost as though he were not involved, that he was watching himself fly. He knew that if he even began to think about making a mistake, interfering with his instincts, the Huey would twitch, dig a skid in the sand, and go into flaming cartwheels.

  Hanson watched the Huey grow, slowly at first, then faster. The larger it was, the faster it grew until it was all he could see. It hung there in front of him, the skids at shoulder height, the rotors driving empty air into wedges of sound, jet turbine screaming like pure white light.

  He looked up and met the pilot’s eyes. The pilot nodded and smiled. But the Huey was moving at almost a hundred miles an hour.

  The Huey was moving, and then a huge insect was looking at Hanson. It smiled beneath its dark bubble eye and held human fingers in a peace sign.

  The Huey was half a mile down the beach and getting smaller.

  The ocean was a deep blue now. Hanson watched an aircraft carrier and two destroyers out on the horizon slowly altering their positions. It was as though they were trying to spell something out to him in sign language.

  FREEDOM BIRD

  The padded seat tipped back and pulled him down into it. A shudder ran through the 707, Hanson’s arms lifted slightly from the armrests, and all the GIs cheered as it rose from the runway at Tan Son Nhut. Hanson looked up at the ventilation nozzle hissing air like a tiny ball-turret gun. In a seat near the rear of the plane, one GI was wearing handcuffs and crying softly.

  Later, Hanson got out his Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. It was warped to the shape of his leg. It was mildewed, sweat-stained, and bloodstained, even though he had kept it in a plastic bag. He turned to “Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea,” and skipped to the ending where the warrior-king Cuchulain kills his own son, having been at the wars so long that he does not know him. Afterward the Druids chanted while he slept, making him believe that the sea was his enemy:

  Cuchulain stirred,

  Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard

  The cars of battle and his own name cried;

  And fought with the invulnerable tide.

  Hanson always pictured him cursing and slashing with his sword tirelessly at wave after wave as they rolled in at him. He looked out the dark porthole window at the huge wing of the plane, outlined by the blue-yellow glow of the jet pods.

  So, he thought. Well.

  The Tokarev was in the carry-on bag between his feet, a heavy Russian automatic the size of an Army .45. A red star was set in the center of the black plastic grip. Much of the bluing had been worn down to bare metal by the stiff military holster, and there was some rust-pitting on the side, but it had been well cared for over the years.

  The pistol had a yellow tag attached to the trigger guard with a metal seal, authorizing him to take it on the plane. Like everyone, Hanson’s luggage had been searched, and he had been frisked before boarding the plane. The search was for narcotics and weapons, explosives and ammunition. An MP had glanced at the Tokarev, then stared Hanson in the eyes and barked, “You got any rounds for this weapon, troop?”

  Hanson blinked. He leaned slightly forward and said, “Pardon me?” It had been a long time since anyone had spoken to him that way.

  “That’s right. If you’re carryin’ any rounds for that weapon, you’re in big trouble. You got it now?”

  Hanson watched the delicate machinery of tendons and cartilage, like tiny ribs, working the MP’s throat as he talked, the vocal cords throbbing like a heartbeat. It would crush in his grip like a sparrow. He smiled and said, “I’m going home. I don’t want any trouble.”

  The MP gave him one last hard look, then said, “Okay, troop,” and jerked his thumb toward the door.

  Outside, Hanson said to himself, “Big trouble.” He smiled and said it again, changing the inflection. “Big trouble. Big trouble.” Halfway across the tarmac he was laughing. “Got some big trouble here at the boarding gate,” he said as he walked to the end of the line to board the plane, still laughing.

  The PFC in front of him turned around and said, “Yeah, Sarge. I feel the same way. Gettin’ on that freedom bird.”

  “Yeah,” Hanson said. “Let’s go home.”

  Hanson reached up and turned off the reading light. He put the book away, careful not to disturb the corporal asleep in the seat next to him. He leaned back and clos
ed his eyes.

  The NVA captain had been propped in a sitting position against a bamboo grove, badly wounded in the legs. His men were gone. The hatchet team Hanson was with had been after them all morning. But the captain had led his men well; the hatchet team had taken casualties.

  It had been a nice morning, not so hot. A slight breeze made the bamboo grove clatter softly. The brown stalks were the size of a man’s leg; the smaller stalks were green.

  The captain got off one shot with the Tokarev. It blew Hanson’s canteen up, snatching him to one side as if someone had pulled at his pistol belt. For a moment Hanson thought that he’d been hit, that the canteen water was blood.

  He met the captain’s eyes and saw no fear in them.

  He put two six-round bursts into the captain’s chest.

  Then he stripped the body of its pistol belt and picked up the Tokarev. The body had a letter in its shirt pocket, and a picture of a woman and child, wrapped in a plastic bag. Hanson put the letter and photograph back in the shirt, wrapping it well because the shirt was soaking through with blood.

  He looked at the body and said, “Well…” but there really wasn’t anything to say. It was the best ones who died, he thought.

  Hanson reached down into the carry-on bag between his feet and popped the clip out of the pistol. He slipped past the corporal and walked down the narrow aisle past the rows of sleeping GIs, some of them softly spotlighted by reading lights, their cheeks and eyes hollow. The plane hit a pocket of turbulence, and all the green-clad GIs leaned to one side, rose slightly, then sank back down into their seats as one.

  When he reached the tail of the plane, a pretty blond stewardess wearing a blue cap looked up. He smiled at her, and she looked back down at the paperback book she was reading.

  Inside the lurching little bathroom—glaring light and stainless steel—he loosened his web belt and unbuttoned his trousers. There was a wide strip of white adhesive tape across the inside of his thigh. He slowly pulled the tape away and the bright bottlenecked bullets dropped, one by one, into his other hand. He threw the tape away, buttoned his pants, and pulled the Tokarev clip from his pocket. Each round made a solid click as he thumbed it into the clip. He loaded the rounds the way a man might deposit dimes in a pay phone.

  Back in his seat, he slid the loaded clip into the butt of the pistol and stuck the pistol between the armrest and the side of the plane. For eighteen months not a minute had passed when he did not have a weapon in his hand or within easy reach.

  Outside the porthole the silver and black wing shuddered slightly. The muffled jets sounded like a waterfall.

  Well, Hanson thought. He smiled slightly, then had to squint to keep his eyes from watering. He leaned his head against the roaring skin of the plane and was asleep in seconds. He dreamed about the skull.

  It had been a year and a half since Hanson had reported for duty at CCN. The gate into the compound was a narrow path cutting through the wire: triple-strand and engineer stakes, coils of concertina piled shoulder-high and head-high, two-layered webs of tanglefoot with trip flares hanging in it like beer cans littering the ground cover along a highway. Triple-strand, concertina, tanglefoot all the way in like jagged steel hedges.

  Claymore antipersonnel mines perched on little folding legs, facing the gate—almost jolly-looking, like fat little Keep Off the Grass signs. But the words stamped across their faces were FRONT TOWARD ENEMY.

  There was no grass in the wire. It had been burned away with mo-gas so often that the fired red clay smelled like overheated machinery.

  Two sandbagged towers inside the compound could rake away the gate and sweep the entire perimeter with interlocking heavy machine-gun fire.

  But it would not be the wire, or the claymores, or the gun towers that Hanson would remember about that day; they became familiar and comforting, as welcome as the outskirts of the old neighborhood after an exhausting trip to a vicious city.

  Hanson would remember the skull.

  There was nothing crude or clumsy about the skull; it had been skillfully cut out of plywood and painted: a huge grinning death’s-head wearing a green beret. Taller than a man, it looked down from a heavy cross-timber above the entrance to the compound. It was the black-socket eyes that had stopped Hanson; the way they pulled wryly down toward the jagged nose hole. The skull seemed amused at itself. Below the skull, painted in large block letters, were the words, WE KILL FOR PEACE. Sometimes at dusk, when the light was right, the skull seemed to be screaming.

  The plane landed at Fort Ord and they were all processed through the replacement center in a matter of hours. The planeload of GIs stripped out of their jungle fatigues and exchanged them for baggy dress uniforms in a windowless concrete building. On the other side of a low wall, another planeload of soldiers was reversing the process, leaving their dress uniforms in a pile and putting on stiff new fatigues for their flight to Vietnam. Hanson imagined the two groups lining up on the runway according to size and simply trading uniforms.

  The wall was high enough that neither group could see or talk to the other. A skinny kid on Hanson’s side jumped up, grabbed the top of the wall, and began shouting to the soldiers dressing for Vietnam, “You’ll be sor-ree. You’ll be sor-reee.

  “You’ll be sorreeeee…”

  Hanson left his fatigues and jungle boots in a pile, took a cab to the airport, and caught the first plane headed east.

  The FASTEN SEATBELT sign blinked on above Hanson’s head as his plane lost altitude over Illinois, but he didn’t notice. He was thinking about Barker, the time he’d bought a bicycle in Da Nang and brought it back on the mail chopper, remembering the way he rode it around the outer perimeter road, doing tricks that got the Montagnards to line the road and laugh at him.

  “Sir.”

  Hanson looked up to see the stewardess standing over him, her face tight with anger. The plane was empty.

  “Sorry,” he said, smiling, picked up his bag and walked toward the front of the plane.

  They’d found Barker at dawn after a sapper squad had probed the camp. He was draped over the big four-deuce mortar tube, never having gotten his first round off. The NVA sappers were good. They’d had all the mortar pits bracketed before they came through the wire.

  An RPG rocket had hit Barker in the back of the head. There wasn’t much blood. The explosion had cauterized most of the veins and arteries. There was nothing left of his head except the lower jaw hanging from his neck like a huge, ragged lip. When they carried him to the teamhouse to zip him up into the talcum-and-rubber-smelling body bag, the jaw flopped as if he were trying to say something.

  He hadn’t thought about Barker since the morning they found him. It was better not to remember dead friends. He was glad he wouldn’t have to worry about seeing Silver and Quinn die.

  The sheet-metal exit tunnel, curving from the plane to the boarding gate, rocked and shivered beneath Hanson’s jump boots. It was painted a stark white, with fleshy plastic accordion pleats where its sections were joined. He was alone in the tunnel, and the wind moaned down its length. He smelled hot machinery. The tunnel had begun to close in on itself. He could feel the shudder through the soles of his boots, and he fought the urge to run.

  The boarding gate was still under construction and he had to go outside and walk to the main terminal. It was foggy, and the air smelled of mo-gas and hot metal. Beyond the far runway, refinery burnoff tubes flared dirty yellow in the dark sky. Hanson thought he could hear a faint roar each time the flame pulsed. White smoke boiled under hundreds of floodlights.

  A red fan of light swept through the fog like a rotor blade. Hanson could hear it hiss each time it passed over him, and he couldn’t keep from ducking his head.

  He hurried toward the terminal. Over the entrance a banner announced, WELCOME HOME, GIS—CHICAGO IS PROUD OF YOU!

  The first thing he saw after pushing through the glass doors was a car. A gleaming metallic-blue Ford LTD. It turned slowly around with a mechanical groan. The
headlights and bumpers winked, windows flashed as they turned through blue spotlight beams. Glossy color posters showed elegant men and women gazing at each other across the hoods of automobiles. Muzak droned from hidden speakers.

  He turned and began to walk down the concourse, following the arrows. It smelled of sweat, perfume, and cigarette urns. He passed men in suits carrying briefcases, angry-looking women in tailored dresses, bracelets, and bright lipstick, exhaling smoke, security guards with pistols on their hips and black men pushing brooms and shining shoes. He felt that they were staring at him, but they glanced quickly away if he looked back at them.

  Gift shops, snack shops, Hertz, bars, all cut into the side of the corridor like bunkers. Arrow-shaped signs saying R-11 or GIFTSBOOKS, posters of beautiful women smoking cigarettes or running along white beaches. A loudspeaker boomed, asking someone to “report to the Eastern ticket counter please.” He passed a door that had a bull’s-eye painted on it with the silhouette of a man spread-eagled in its center like a target.

  Hanson felt like an immigrant or a refugee in his baggy uniform. Everyone he saw looked healthy and rich, but no one smiled. The last time he’d seen anyone laugh had been back at Fort Ord.

  He saw a young soldier and could tell by the insignia on his uniform that he was on his way to Vietnam. He stepped into one of the little bars to avoid him. The bartender was Hanson’s age. He was wearing a loose-fitting silk shirt and a gold link necklace. When Hanson ordered a Scotch and water, the bartender frowned at him and said, “Eye dee.”

  “What?”

  “ID. I’ve gotta see some ID.”

  “Oh. Right. ID. You have to know who I am.”

  The bartender didn’t change expression.

  Hanson handed him his Army ID card. The bartender looked at it, laid it on the bar like it was something that smelled bad, and walked away.