Sympathy for the Devil

by Kent Anderson

  “. . . just gonna lay back, you know, just lay back and do my own thing for a while. Hey, I owe it to myself, right? That’s what your Eastern religions are all about, doing your own thing.

  “I’ve learned a lot watching these Vietnamese. That’s where I’m different from most of the guys here. I may be living on mortar alley, but I’m taking the time to watch and learn. A man can learn from any situation, any situation, if he tries.”

  Hendrix sang like a howling wind. Far to the west, H&I artillery grumbled, backing up the bass line.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” the E-5 said, “I’m proud of what I’ve done over here.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” Hanson said as he pushed himself up from the floor. “I’ll tell you one thing. Uh-huh. You know what? I never heard anybody say that when they didn’t have a whole lot of things to say. Did you?” he asked, looking over at Silver.

  “Do your own thing,” he said with a snort, walking over to the E-5. “Freedom bird. What did you do that you’re so proud of, man?”

  “Hey, partner,” the E-5 said, “I don’t know what your problem is, but why don’t you take it for a walk.”

  “ ‘Partner,’ ” Hanson said. “He’s a cowboy.” He grinned enormously, looked at Quinn and Silver, and said, “Do you believe this guy?

  “You don’t,” Hanson said, grabbing the E-5 by the collar and shoving him into the wall, “talk to me that way,” slamming him again against the wall, “over here.” He kicked the plywood bar into him, splintering the top loose from the sides, knocking the E-5 down, beneath the plywood top.

  One of the E-4s stood, but Quinn was suddenly on his feet. He grabbed a handful of the E-4’s shirt and slung him against the wall.

  “Sit back down, dickhead,” he told him.

  Hanson kneeled on the plywood and the E-5’s eyes bulged. “Can’t. Breathe,” he said.

  Hanson shifted his weight and said, “What do your Eastern religions tell you about that? I might have to listen to bullshit back in the States, but not here. Not here,” he shouted, grabbing the E-5’s shirt with both hands. “Not here,” he said, standing the E-5 up, the splintered wood tearing his fatigue shirt. He let go of the shirt and shoved him back against the wall. “Now stand there. You got that?”

  “Yes. Sir,” he said, trying to catch his breath.

  “Well, hell,” Hanson said, turning to look at Quinn. “You were right. How’d I ever expect to get along back there?

  “The third day I was back,” he said, brushing splinters off his shirt, “I went to a party. This woman, a psychology professor, comes up to me—she’s a little drunk—and says, ‘I heard that you were in Vietnam, is that right?’ I said, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and she starts screaming at me, ‘How could you do that?’ So I tell her I don’t really want to talk about it, and she yells, ‘Well, I do. I want to talk about it.’ She’s screaming in my face.

  “So I walked away, and she followed me, yelling, ‘Did you enjoy it?’

  “She wouldn’t leave me alone. I went into the bathroom and locked the door, and sat on the edge of the tub for a couple of minutes. Real nice bathroom. Ceramic tile and mirrors and soap shaped like sea shells.” He laughed. “I thought about you guys while I was sitting there. Hiding in the bathroom.

  “I got up and opened the door, and she was waiting for me. She started yelling again, so I said, ‘Yeah, I enjoyed it,’ and pushed her out of the way and went home. She fell over a hall stand or a table or something chasing me out the door. Somebody started the story that I beat her up. Things just went downhill from there.

  “Back in ‘the world,’ huh?” Hanson said, turning to the E-5, who was still breathing hard, his shirt torn. “Back in the land of the big goddamn PX, huh? Well, good luck, pal. It’s all yours.”

  And then they were lying on the beach. Quinn was passed out and Silver was talking. The moon was low in the sky, red and lopsided.

  “They’ll never be the same. Those guys,” Silver said, “who walked on the moon. What else could they ever do after that?

  “I watched ’em on TV that night in July,” he said, gesturing with his head as if July were just back there somewhere. Back in July, as if time and space and distance were all the same.

  “Grainy black-and-white picture, couldn’t tell what we were looking at, at first. They were taking pictures of their feet. On the moon. It was like sugar they were stepping in. And the shadows, man, they were sharp as fucking knives.

  “We were all fucked up and tripping. Laughing at it. ‘Oh wow,’ you know, taking pictures of their feet on the moon.

  “What would they ever be able to do, after that. Work in an office? Make commercials for shaving cream? Get old. We put them up there and then…

  “We brought them back. Just brought ’em back, man. Congratulations, and thanks a lot, and see you around sometime.

  “They must look up there—like this—and try to see where it was that they stood. Maybe they wonder if they’re still up there, looking back at themselves. Like it’s all still going on and there’s two of them, one up there and the other down here. They must get scared, right? Worried that they’re going crazy. Real straight-arrow dudes, too. Always had some kind of goddamn machine, where they push a button and it does what it’s supposed to do.

  “I wonder if they call each other up, like they’re the only guys in the world who have this rare disease—the only ones who know what it feels like. Call up and ask, you know. ‘Hey, are you all right? You okay, man? I’m feeling kind of weird tonight.’

  “Probably not, huh? Too macho to admit something like that. Too hard-ass. Good goddamn troops.

  “There must be nights when it’s like the moon looks in at them through the window, calling them—‘Come on back, brother.’ ” Silver’s voice was crystalline as he sang. “ ‘Come on back now,’ and they have to close the shades and hide under their blankets, or turn on all the lights until morning while the moon hangs in the air outside and waits.

  “All their lives, you know, that’s all they wanted to do. Go to the moon. It was what they dreamed about. And all the time it was dreaming about them. And they get back and…Whose dream was it, anyway?”

  The surf rolled in, black and silver under the moonlight. Hanson thought that Silver had passed out. But then his voice came again, as if he’d never paused.

  “I’ve seen things here. You know. I never even suspected. Those guys on the moon. They get there and it’s like it’s all been waiting for them all their lives. They never should have gone, but they didn’t have any choice. Like when you step into an ambush, into the killing zone, before they start to fire you up, and for an instant, you know what’s gonna happen, like your life started there, and it’s gonna happen over and over. Like that time in Laos. Sometimes I feel like it’s still happening, it’s always happening, and if I fall asleep, I’m gonna be back there.”

  Silver rolled over onto his elbow and looked through the dark at Hanson, the South China Sea hissing in behind him on the sand—silver-blue winks of phosphorescence in the blackness farther out. Yellow smears of light from the fishing boat lanterns bobbing, and farther out still, the rows of porthole lights from the destroyers and carriers, like lights of a frontier settlement on the prairie. An image they’d grown up with at the Saturday matinee.

  The stars were perfect points of light. Hanson could feel the cough of artillery coming up from deep in the ground. He settled his head into the sand and went to sleep.

  PART TWO

  THE BEGINNING — FORT BRAGG

  The induction center had the dirty glitter of a bus station. It smelled of sweat and stale cigarette smoke. Rows of chrome and plastic chairs shared the floor with overflowing aluminum ashtrays. It was hot. There were vending machines for candy, cigarettes, and bitter coffee. But it was the mood of the place, the pervasive resignation, the defensive impersonality that gave the concrete-walled building the atmosphere of a Greyhound station.

  When he looked around, Hanson realiz
ed that most of the people in the room would be the ones who couldn’t afford an airplane ticket, who would wait with their shopping bags, cardboard boxes, and taped-up suitcases while a recorded announcement of the next departure reeled off the list of dying farm towns and industrial suburb slums, ending with a hearty, “All aboard, please.”

  Hanson was hung over. His mouth tasted tinny. He was sick to his stomach and had a headache. He’d reported to the center at 8 A.M., and he was still there at three in the afternoon.

  Very little had happened during the day. A cadre assigned to the center had made a joke about Hanson’s long hair, but no one had laughed. They weren’t in a mood for easy jokes. The other thing that had happened was that a Marine sergeant had walked into the room, pointed at seven people, saying as he pointed, “You, you, you…” then said, “Stand up.”

  They did. Then he said, “Follow me. You are now United States Marines.”

  One of the seven said, “But you can’t…”

  The Marine sergeant, who looked like he’d already put in a long day, smiled at him, the way you’d smile at a willful, irritating child.

  “Son,” he said, “I just did. So why don’t you just shut up and try not to step on your dick again. ’Cause if you piss me off, you’re gonna be a whole lot unhappier than you already are.”

  They marched off, and Hanson didn’t see them again.

  Just before five the rest of them were sworn in in a small carpeted and paneled room. An aging captain greeted them from behind a plywood podium. On the wall behind him there was a gilt device the size of a wagon wheel. In the center of the wheel was what seemed to be the limbless torso of a stocky woman, clad in armor, with cannon, spears, and flags blooming from her breasts like growths. The words, THIS WE SHALL DEFEND ringed the rim of the device, symbol of the Army Training Command.

  The captain’s uniform hung on him like a baggy business suit, and he looked like an unsuccessful salesman. A miniature of the wheel behind him was tacked to his lapel like a lodge button. Hanson imagined him being patronized at an Elks Club luncheon by more successful members. If he’d worked for an automobile agency, he’d have been the guy who sits in the little building at the back of the used car lot, a half-pint of liquor in his desk drawer.

  He swore them in, telling them that they did not have to include the words “under God” if they did not want to. Hanson and the others raised their right hands and recited the oath after the captain like a grim responsive reading. Hanson did not say the words “under God,” and felt immediately foolish.

  “Congratulations. You men are fortunate enough to serve your country in the uniform of the United States Army, the best-trained, best-equipped, and most-motivated fighting force in the world today.”

  They boarded the olive drab buses, more like school-buses than Greyhounds, for the 120-mile trip to Fort Bragg. Graffiti, bloated women with spread legs, penises like rocket ships, were scratched into the metal backs of the seats.

  Hanson watched cars passing, farmers and cows in the fields. The sun was setting, and the taller trees turned orange. Cars began to turn on their headlights, and the temperature dropped. Dim lights came on in the bus, throwing the passengers’ faces into shadow. None of them spoke, rocking together with the movement of the bus. It grew dark outside, and the seams in the concrete road thumped through the bus like flak around a bomber.

  Out across the dark fields he could see winks of blue static. Boxes containing electrical grids were mounted out there like little phone booths. Insects were attracted to the boxes, and when they flew into the grid they were electrocuted. Hanson imagined that if he were close enough, he could have heard the dry snap of the current and the burned husks and wings falling into the pile of dead below.

  Something touched his shoulder and a voice behind him asked, “Well, what do you think about it?”

  It was a pudgy kid in the seat behind him, his face moonlike in the dim light.

  “I don’t know,” Hanson said, smiling, “but I’m not too happy about the way things look so far.”

  “Have you had any college?”

  “Yeah. I came home from my Shakespeare class and there was the letter.”

  “I thought so. You don’t look like the rest of these guys. I could tell,” he said happily. “Me too.” His voice hardened. “But I had to drop out my sophomore year. Mono. I told them that, but they still drafted me. No one even listened to me.

  “But hey,” he said, suddenly smiling, “it’s great to run into another college man. Billy Riley,” he said, extending his hand across the back of the bus seat.

  Hanson twisted in his seat and awkwardly shook hands, introducing himself.

  The bus dimmed its headlights, and all the reading lights went out with a tiny click.

  The first DI stalked silently to the back of the bus, then turned to face the front, staring straight ahead as if the bus were empty. He was a wiry man, not much older than Hanson, but his pale face already showed a tracery of broken veins across his nose and beneath his eyes. He had a tattoo on his forearm, but just as Hanson was about to look back to see what it said, the DI snapped at another recruit, “Don’t look at me, shit-bird,” and Hanson cut his eyes toward the front of the bus, grateful that it hadn’t been him caught looking.

  The second DI stepped up to the front of the bus and stood with his back to the windshield, hands on hips, glaring at the recruits from beneath the brim of his Smokey-the-Bear hat. He was big and black, his starched fatigues tailored for his weight-lifter’s build. He had a wide nose and small, deep-set eyes, and he looked down at the recruits as if he were genuinely, personally angry with them. Hanson could see a vein in his neck throbbing, and the bead of sweat that appeared at his temple and slid down his cheek.

  “People,” he said, “I am Staff Sergeant Jones. I don’t want to be here tonight, but my captain said I had to be here. You already fucked up my night.

  “You all are some sorry-looking individuals, but they scrapin’ the bottom of the barrel for bodies to fight this raggedy little war, so I got to take you.

  “You gonna be sorry you ever got on the bus. You gonna hate this place. I’m gonna make you people pay for the trouble you caused me. You got one minute to get your shit and be standing at attention out there on the blacktop. Now move!”

  Two more drill instructors leapt into the bus, and then all of them began screaming, “Move. Move. Move,” tendons cording their necks, faces red.

  “Goddamnit get your ass out there,” one yelled, grabbing a kid by his high school T-shirt—“Wilson Wildcats”—jerking him out of the seat, and slamming him against the opposite side of the bus.

  “Move your ass. Gonna knock your dick stiff…”

  “Don’t you raise your hands at me, boy,” one of them screamed at a kid who tried to shield himself from a blow. “I’ll kill ya. I’ll tear your fuckin’ heart out. You hear me? You hear me,” he screamed, slapping the back of the kid’s head with his open hand.

  “Yessir, yes sir!”

  Another body hit the side of the bus, shaking it on its suspension.

  “Damn you…”

  “Yes sir!”

  “Out. Get outta my bus, this is my motherfuckin’ bus…”

  “They’re crazy, they’re really crazy,” Riley said as Hanson clawed his way to the door, worried that he might get trampled. A DI kicked a skinny black kid out the door, where he landed on all fours. Then Hanson was out, and they were all trying to line up in the parking lot. There were yellow patches of streetlight across the asphalt, ragged with shadow from swarming bugs.

  Hanson looked up at the bus and saw Riley coming off, one DI lifting him to his toes by the seat of his pants, another walking alongside, screaming in his ear and slapping him on the back of his head. “. . . my fat boy. You my fat boy. I get one every busload. They always mine ’cause I like fat boys. I’m gonna fuck you to death.”

  He hit Riley in the stomach, dropping him to his knees.

  “Get up, you tu
baguts, getonyerfeet,” he shrieked at Riley, silver spittle flying from his lips. “Youan’you,” he yelled at two other recruits. “Take charge of this fucker, get him outta my sight. I can’t kill him now, I wanna save him for a couple of days. Take him, take him…”

  They took Riley under his arms and half-walked, half-dragged him to the end of the formation. One of them called him fat boy and slapped him on the side of the head. “You’re causing trouble for all of us,” he shouted.

  As they marched the terrified column off the parking lot, two of the DIs looked at each other and grinned. It was good training.

  The room was bleak and harshly lit, like an interrogation setting. Illustrated posters of “The Soldier’s Creed” lined the walls, one of them declaring, “I will never surrender of my own free will.” The “Last Chance Table,” a scarred plywood platform, stood at the front of the room. A black and white sign, posted above it like a lunch menu, listed prohibited items.

  One of the DIs addressed the recruits from the front of the room. “Gentlemen, when you leave the induction center you will have nothing on your person that is not U.S. Army issue. You will not have any of these items,” he said, pointing at the sign, and then began reading off the list: “Firearms, narcotics, controlled substances, or medication of any kind—”

  Billy Riley raised his hand and said, “But sir, I had my prescription filled just before—”

  One of the DIs shouted from the back of the room, “If you passed the Army physical that means you don’t need any pills.”

  Riley looked like he was going to say something more, but the recruits sitting near him hissed and cursed him, and he lowered his hand.

  “. . . alcoholic beverages, candy, knives, condoms—rubbers, gentlemen, you won’t be needing them—pornography—No Playboys or fuck books or dirty pictures—we don’t want you getting all hot and bothered ’cause your buddy might start looking good to you—any reading matter except the Bible, playing cards…”