Sympathy for the Devil

by Kent Anderson

  It was warm outside, but the bar was cool and dark. Each table had a little red candle on it.

  “Real classy place,” Hanson said. “Tonga torches, Chinese lanterns, illuminated fish, you know?”

  “I think it’s pretty nice,” Gallager said.

  “Growing up in West Virginia like you did, you probably are impressed,” Bishop said. “Fuckin’ coal miner. You’re the kind of person this place was designed for. Promise you cheap drinks and a Hawaiian shirt and you’d re-enlist.”

  “At least they’d let me re-enlist,” Gallager said. “Perverts are not asked to stay in.”

  Bishop saw something over Hanson’s shoulder and quickly looked down at his beer. “Speaking of perverts,” he said, “don’t look now, but Larkin just walked in.”

  “Must have worked him up a thirst,” Gallager said, “kissing ass back at the barracks.” He took a drink of beer and set the mug down. “You know what he does whenever somebody calls ‘attention’?” he asked. Then he threw his head back, rigid, the veins in his neck standing out. He curled his lips into a wet pucker, his mustache bristling over the upper lip, and muttered through his teeth, “Yessir. Yessir. Lemme kiss it, sir.”

  The lanky soldier who had come into the bar stood next to the jukebox, his shoulders hunched, squinting against the cigarette smoke and dim light. When he saw Bishop, he straightened and sauntered over to the table. “So here you are,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Bishop muttered into his beer, “here we are.”

  “Mind if I sit down?”

  Without looking at him, Bishop said, “There’s the chair.”

  Larkin sat down and looked across the table at Hanson. “You’re the one I was looking for,” he said. “I heard a little piece of news you might be interested in.”

  “Oh yeah?” Hanson said. “What did you hear?”

  “A friend of mine,” Larkin said, “saw a set of orders assigning you to the permanent training cadre back at Bragg. As soon as we finish the training cycle.”

  Hanson looked at Larkin, looked across the bar, then looked down at the candle flickering on the table. He felt dizzy. The puddle of melted wax feeding the flame was littered with blackened match heads.

  “Fuckers must of found out you can type,” Gallager said.

  “I hear it’s good duty,” Larkin said. “The nights and weekends are all yours.”

  A woman at the bar laughed and shouted, “Honey, I told you about that,” to the bartender. Hanson squinted and watched the candle flame.

  “Hey,” Larkin said, “at least you know you’ll be alive a year from now.”

  “Fuck that,” Hanson said. “If I was worried about that I could have gone to Canada. I’m ready. I’m ready to go to Vietnam. All this shit…” He could taste the sausage he’d had for lunch.

  “Maybe after a few months you could put in for a transfer,” Gallager said.

  “I think—” Larkin began.

  “He might as well put in for a transfer to Mars or Beverly Hills, California, for all the good it’s gonna do him with that college on his record,” Bishop said. “You seen these dumb motherfuckers they’re drafting these days? The sergeant major at training group needs somebody with a brain to keep his paperwork lookin’ good.”

  “You know,” Larkin said, “I think—”

  “What,” Bishop said. “Okay, what?”

  “Well,” Larkin said, “if you’re really serious about not wanting to go to training group, I’ve got an idea.”

  “You gonna tell us what it is,” Bishop said, “or do we have to ask you or what?”

  “Mrs. Dunaway,” Larkin said.

  Hanson looked up from the candle. “You got the phone number?”

  “Just call the Pentagon and ask Information.”

  “Let’s go,” Hanson said, looking at his watch. “She might still be there.” He stood, started for the door, then said, “Quarters. Quarters.” He bought a red roll of quarters from the bartender, and the four of them went out the door.

  Mrs. Dunaway was a GS-14 who worked somewhere in the Pentagon. She handled the records of all the Special Forces troops in the Army. All the orders, transfers, and promotions were routed through her office.

  No one Hanson knew had ever seen her. Some liked to imagine her as a voluptuous dragon lady, studying their ID photos and licking her lips, manipulating their lives according to her mood.

  As they jogged across the parade field, Hanson pictured her as a kind, blue-haired little old lady. Like his grandmother. She had a tiny office somewhere deep in the concrete heart of the Pentagon, where she did needlepoint. There were photos of her grandchildren on the filing cabinets.

  The phone booth was in front of the whitewashed little post library. A soldier wearing low-cut Army shoes, jeans, and a Ban-Lon shirt was using the phone. He was leaning against the glass, looking up at the ceiling and smoking a cigarette.

  Hanson pulled open the folding glass door and said, “Tell her you’ll call her back in a minute. I’ve got an emergency.”

  The soldier looked down at Hanson. “Hang on a minute, hon,” he said into the phone, then to Hanson, “What the fuck’s your problem, man…”

  Gallager stepped from behind Hanson, grabbed the soldier’s arm, and jerked him stumbling out of the phone booth. The phone bounced and spun at the end of its cord, banging against the glass walls of the booth as if it were trying to escape. Hanson caught it, pulled the door closed, and pumped the chrome receiver until he got a dial tone. The soldier in the Ban-Lon shirt was saying, “Okay, man. Okay,” his voice muffled by the glass. He grunted and said, “All right…”

  A voice on the phone said, “Operator.” Hanson asked for the Pentagon and she said, “One fifteen for three minutes.” As he dropped them in, the quarters rang—bong-bong-bong—tolling ominously—bong-bong—like an iron clock. Hanson listened to the phone ringing on the other end. Cigarette smoke was still thick in the booth and it burned his eyes. He jerked the door tight and the little fan in the ceiling began to hum, sucking the smoke up. It washed over his arms and face like fog. A woman’s voice said, “Please hold.”

  Hanson held the receiver to his ear, listening to the static, the clicks, the musical phrases whistling and tooting in quick, random patterns. He imagined the armored phone cable snaking north under freeway traffic, and bedrooms, and arguments in neighborhood bars, turning along the bottoms of rivers and bays, covered with mud, humming beneath the dark water.

  “Hello? Yes? Hello?” he said, and saw his voice, a blue spark jumping across microwave relays, beamed over swamps and herds of cattle, hissing through windowless switching stations.

  No one answered, and he waited. The sun was going down. High overhead a B-52 caught light from the curve of the earth.

  “Thank you for waiting,” the woman said, breaking the static. Hanson explained who he wanted to speak to and she said, “Please hold.”

  “That will be another one fifteen,” the operator said, coming on the line.

  Bong-bong-bong—the phone began to ring again beneath the sound of the quarters—bong-bong.

  A woman’s voice said, “Hello.” A husky voice. It was more like a greeting than a question, the way a blind date might say hello when she opened the door to her apartment, then smile, look over her shoulder, and say to her roommate, “Don’t wait up.”

  Hanson smelled hot wiring. The fan rattled in the ceiling. He could see sparks behind the grillwork.

  “Hellooo there,” the voice said, throaty and seductive. “Are you out there?”

  Hanson kicked the door ajar. “Yes. Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Is this Mrs. Dunaway?”

  “Here I am,” she said, sounding like she was smiling. “At your service.”

  “The Mrs. Dunaway in charge of Special Forces?”

  “The very one, darlin’. What’s your name?”

  Hanson gave her his name and ID number. “I’m sorry to bother you so late in the day,” he said, “but I’ve got a real problem and you’re
the only person who can help me. I hope.”

  “No bother,” she said. “That’s why I’m here. I hope I can handle your problem, Hanson. Let me pull out your file here.”

  The fan had stopped, but the smell of burning wires was strong. It was mixed with a faint smell of perfume and sweat.

  “Here you are, darlin’,” she said. “Why, you’re almost finished out there, aren’t you? You’ve done real well.”

  Hanson felt himself getting an erection.

  She laughed and said, “You’re a good-looking young man. But you don’t look very happy in this photograph.” It sounded like she was smoking, the way she exhaled her words. “Big shoulders,” she said, and Hanson pictured her lips forming the words. “But now,” she said, “what can I do for you?”

  “Mrs. Dunaway, I was drafted, but I volunteered for Special Forces. I didn’t mind the extra year. I worked hard, and I like it. I just found out that they’ve cut orders at Bragg assigning me to training group…”

  “I see here that you have three years of college,” she said. “That’s wonderful. Hanson,” she said, “we need more young men like you.

  “Hanson, are you there, darlin’?”

  “Yes. Yes, ma’am. What, uh, I mean, I volunteered to go to Vietnam. All my friends, the people I trained with, are going. Is there anything you can do to help me?”

  “To see that you go to Vietnam?” she said. “Of course. I can just put your name on the next manifest before those other orders get here. Is that what you’d like, Hanson?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Could you do that?”

  “I’m doing it. I’m doing it right…now,” she said. “I’ve entered your name.”

  “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

  “Oh,” she said, exhaling into the phone, “it was my pleasure. What else can I do for you?”

  “That’s all I need.”

  “Well, good. I’m so glad you called me. Have a good trip…Hanson.”

  Her voice vanished and all Hanson could hear was the static and drone of the dial tone. He held the warm receiver to his ear. His mouth was dry and he could feel his heart beating.

  CAM RANH BAY

  The chartered World Airways 707 bucked and shuddered like a boxcar on the way to the Western front. The FASTEN SEATBELTS/NO SMOKING sign came on. Hanson could feel the plane slowing, his body lifting, floating away from the seat back, as the engines changed pitch. They dropped into heavy cloud cover, and Hanson watched the mist flow over the rivet-studded wing. He studied the forward edge of the wing, then looked back at the flaps, big and small, as they moved slowly, tentatively, like the heel and fingers of a hand feeling for something in the fog. A silver-white strobe light on the tip of the wing flashed through the mist. Everyone on the plane strained to see through the fog, finally to see Vietnam.

  Vietnam. A myth. It was the place they’d seen on the six o’clock news all through high school. The sound of teletypes, Walter Cronkite’s fatherly voice as he said, “Good evening” and gave the weekly body count as stick figures, each representing a hundred dead men, appeared on the TV screen. It had become as much a part of their lives as homework and drive-in movies. Jungles, hootches, rice paddies, punji stakes, booby traps. Ambushes. The jumpy film footage of men running and falling in fear of an invisible enemy, the camera swooping, out of focus, from the treeline to the ground, shouts and puny popping noises in the background. Then the pictures of bodies, of writhing, bandaged men, and the sound of medivacs.

  Charlie. Charlie was down there, Victor Charlie, Mister Charles.

  “Gentlemen,” they had been told, again and again, “Charlie is the best jungle fighter in the world today. He has been fighting for twenty-five years. Think about it, gentlemen. Twenty-five years. He knows every trick there is, and, gentlemen, if you do not have your shit together, he is going to kill you. Look at the two men sitting on either side of you.” And they would act as if they were not looking, but they would look. “One of them is going to come home dead or seriously fucked up. Graves registration will tie off his dick, shove a rubber plug up his asshole, and ship him back in a reusable aluminum coffin.”

  And yet it was hard to believe that Vietnam really existed. It would be like going through the looking-glass into a familiar movie, to become actors, directors, prop men, in a long-running TV series in which you became the characters you had grown familiar with, comfortable with, over the years. Roles that had been waiting for you with lines you already knew.

  “The first thing you’ll see is the shit fires,” one private said to the man next to him. “That’s what they do over here. They burn the shit. A buddy of mine told me.”

  Hanson imagined a country ablaze, shadows and sweet black smoke.

  A grinding noise and two thuds shook the airliner, and the passengers stiffened, but it was only the landing gear dropping down.

  A dim image of ocean and rocky cliffs floated beneath the last layer of cloud, and then the plane broke through. The ocean was overcast, a dark blue breaking gray and white against the rocks. A few shacks flashed past below, faces looked up, and the plane touched down on a gray, skid-streaked runway.

  As the plane taxied toward the terminal, two stewardesses walked the length of the cabin spraying small aerosol cans at the ceiling. The cans emptied with a faint hiss, and the sweet stink of insecticide settled on the soldiers. It was necessary to fumigate the aircraft to kill any American insects that might upset the ecological balance of Vietnam.

  The air base was not much different from McCord AFB, where they’d taken off eighteen hours and twelve time zones away, leaving there in mid-morning, having waited with their gear since 5 A.M., landing in Vietnam in the early afternoon of the same day, having flown with the sun but having lost a day and a night, according to the calendar, somewhere over the ocean. Cam Ranh had the same busy little trucks on the runways, the same camouflaged C-130s, the same olive drab buses which they boarded on the tarmac.

  But the buses in Vietnam looked like prison buses. They had heavy wire screens over the windows to deflect grenades. The C-130s were housed behind wedge-shaped steel walls that were five feet thick at the base. And out on the far runway, F-4 Phantom jets were landing. Hanson watched them coming in as the bus crossed the runways and he listened to their faraway furious shrieking until the sound was lost in the drone of the buses.

  The buses bounced along in a sullen little convoy, cutting through a sea of sand dunes veined and crosshatched with rusting concertina wire that seemed to have no pattern.

  The replacement center was neatly laid out on the sand, falling-down two-story barracks whose walls flaked cream-colored pieces of paint the size of maple leaves. There was a bunker between each row of barracks made of corrugated four-foot-wide drainage pipe. The pipe was heavily sandbagged on the sides, the sandbags thinning out toward the top where there was little danger of shrapnel penetration. The sandbags were rotten; many of them had burst and washed away in the rain.

  The buses stopped at a large open-sided building much like a covered loading dock. A young buck sergeant shouted, “Everybody out and line up over there at the hard stand,” pointing to a large open area bordered by a low wooden fence. Inside the fence, the sand was covered by hundred-pound sections of PSP, perforated steel plating, the stamped-out three-by-five sections that are linked together to form temporary roads and runways.

  The busloads of men walked over to the hard stand, and Hanson recognized two Special Forces soldiers, Bishop and Hanadon. They were standing across the street, their arms folded across their chests, watching the group of new men. Hanson had gotten drunk with them two days before at Fort Ord, and they had left on an earlier flight.

  Hanson had his beret stuffed into his fatigues pocket. He’d found out long before that it didn’t pay to stand out in a formation, especially in a temporary duty station. If there are four ranks, slip into the third one and look like everyone else. That’s how you avoid work details.

  Hanadon spotted Hanson and grin
ned. He nudged Bishop and walked over. Hanadon was half-Filipino, but he was bigger than Hanson. The two of them had gone through infantry school, jump school, and a year of Special Forces school together. Hanson had once stopped Hanadon from killing another soldier.

  “Say, brothuh,” Hanadon said, grinning. “Welcome to The Country, my man,” and the two of them slapped hands.

  A pair of dented loudspeakers that were aimed down at the hard stand began to shriek and chatter from atop a miniature guard tower. They quieted to a low hum, and a bony staff sergeant in the tower began to speak, his voice metallic, with a slight mechanical echo. “All right, gentlemen, everybody down here on the hard stand. You can talk to your buddies later.”

  He waited while the new troops grumbled. “Man, an’ I thought it was gonna be different here, but it’s the same old Mickey Mouse bullshit.”

  “What that fool think he gonna do? Send me to Vietnam? I ain’t hurry in’ for no motherfucker.”

  “ ’Less it’s Charles, holdin’ some shit.”

  “Shitman, you tellin’ the truth now.”

  “But for that Mickey’s Monkey bony motherfucker—my momma’s gonna catch a flight over here and play soldier for him before I do.”

  “There it is.”

  “Gentlemen,” the staff sergeant went on, “if you cooperate with me, we can get this over in a short time. If you do not cooperate with me, that’s all right too. You’ll be here all night. It doesn’t matter to me. I get off at six o’clock.”

  “I’ll catch you later,” Hanadon said. “Barracks C-Charlie. Me and Bishop got a bottle. You the only SF guy on this manifest?”

  “Just me.”

  “Okay. We’ll fill you in on this dump after you process in. Look out for work details. This place is falling apart ’cause there isn’t enough cadre to maintain it. They’re snatching everybody up for details. Catch you later.”

  Bishop grinned at Hanson and gave him the finger.