“Why, why?”
“Oh, why Vet-nom.”
A sign taped to the mirror at the Playboy Club said, NO ONE UNDER 21 YEARS OF AGE WILL BE SERVED ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES.
After supper Hanson, Hanadon, and Bishop sat on sandbags drinking beer, eating popcorn they’d gotten from the small Special Forces bar, and watching the war in progress at an A-camp across the bay, whose yellow lights looked like a ship passing in the distance. They were able to pick out an occasional blink of a green or red tracer at the edge of the camp and hear the sporadic chatter of the firefight that was going on.
The A-camp finally called in Spooky, the C-130 gun-ship, and requested mortar support from the island. Hanson watched the crew fire the four-deuce mortar just down the hill from where they were sitting, the tube bursting with a hollow explosion and pale yellow flame. If he judged its trajectory right, and stared out at a point where he estimated the shell might pass, Hanson could sometimes catch a glimpse of it as it flashed toward the mainland.
The A-camp began popping flares, showing itself against the hills, a high-contrast black-and-white scene jogging in and out of focus as the flares swung and twisted beneath their little parachutes. Hanson could hear the voice of the A-camp commander directing the mortar fire on the radio, while a rock group on the jukebox in the bar sang, “American woman, stay away from me-eee…”
Spooky came in from the right of the camp, a solid slab of shadow in the black sky, the glow of its four engines flickering behind their props. Its minigun opened up, the flickering column of tracers boring down into the camp, moaning in the distance.
“American woman, just let me be-eee…”
The next morning a chaplain was leading the morning prayer on the radio as Hanson walked into the mess hall. Someone farted skillfully. The sound of knives and forks on plates did not slow down. The prayer ended with a background of violin music, then a cheerful, glib voice shouted, “Gooooooood morn-ing, Vietnam. It’s seven o’clock right here in-country,” as though Vietnam were a great place to live and work and raise a family. It was the same voice you’d hear on the car radio, on the freeway, on the way to work.
Then Archie Bell and the Drells began to sing “Tighten Up,” clapping their hands and rapping to quick little trumpet riffs.
After breakfast they formed up outside the barracks and were issued battered little M-1 carbines that wouldn’t knock a man down unless you shot him in the head or heart. They threw on forty-pound rucksacks and began the double-time march up the steep mountain road, sweating out their fatigues in the damp early morning. It was the only time, that first half-hour of dawn, that you could distinguish the delicate jungle smells. After that the sun boiled them together into green heat.
The outside edge of the road dropped off a thousand feet to the dark blue ocean. It was low tide at that time of day and the big fishing nets, bellying on stilts off the beach, were full of silver fish trapped there by the outgoing tide.
One of the primary rules of jungle warfare is never take the same trail twice, never return over the same route you took out, yet they came back down the mountain on the same road. Hanson asked Sergeant Burns why the Vietcong Sapper unit that was based on the island didn’t just set up a bank of claymore mines along the road and blow the whole column into the sea.
Sergeant Burns smiled and said, “Now Charles ain’t gonna do nothin’ like that. He do that, you understand, and he know we gonna police his ass up, and he ain’t gonna be able to blow up no more of the Navy’s boats, which is his job. We have, don’t you see, an understanding with Charles here on the island. Long as he don’t fuck with us, we ain’t gonna fuck with him. He’s the Navy’s problem, not ours.”
There was more map reading review, but no one minded. Very soon they would be calling in artillery and gunships, and medivacs. The radio was the most powerful weapon they had.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers maps were beautiful—the white valleys shading off into light green hills, blue river lines twisting through ravines and into the little double-smokestack symbols of rice paddies. But dominating the maps were the big hills and mountains, convoluted brown contour lines like thumbprints and palm prints stitched with the dotted blue lines of intermittent streams. There were the towns, clusters of black squares representing neighboring villages that once exchanged goods and services, working together in harvests, celebrating marriages between their children. But now most of them had the word “destroyed” or “abandoned” beneath them:
Kong
DangPlei Bon (1)Plei Bon (2)
(destroyed)(destroyed)(destroyed)
And there was more first aid.
“Today I’m going to teach you how to keep yourself or your buddy alive until you can get a medivac. Thousands of troops die over here that don’t have to because their buddy is too stupid or too fucking squeamish to keep him alive. You’re gonna see a lot of blood over here, gentlemen, a lot of real bad-looking shit. You’re gonna have to get used to it fast. No matter how bad he might look, you can probably keep your buddy alive.
“The first thing you want to do is reassure him. Say, ‘Hey, Bill, medivac’s on the way. You’re gonna be okay. That doesn’t look so bad.’
“Now even if he knows you’re lying, that’s what he wants to hear, and he wants to believe you.
“What you don’t want to do is something like this,” he said, putting his hands over his ears and screaming, ‘Oh my God! You’re all fucked up! Your guts are all over the ground. I don’t think you’re gonna make it.’
“Gentlemen,” he went on, in a normal voice, “he’s gonna roll his eyes back and die. You’ve just killed him.
“You’ve always been told that the first lifesaving step is ‘clear the airway,’ but that is not the first step. The first step is ‘calm down.’ Pretend it’s just a movie if you want to. That works for some people. Then get down there and do what has to be done.
“Then clear the airway. Just reach in there with your first two fingers and pull out any teeth or pieces of bone that might be in the way. Turn your buddy over on his side so the blood and mucus will drain and he won’t drown in it. Give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Gentlemen, a little vomit and blood is not going to hurt you. There are hundreds of dead soldiers who would be alive today, but their buddy wouldn’t give them mouth-to-mouth because of a little blood and puke.
“If you can’t clear the airway, or if the lower face is destroyed so badly that you can’t get a seal to give him mouth-to-mouth, give him a tracheotomy. Get him breathing. A buddy of mine over at CCN was breaking contact with a WP grenade when he got shot. The grenade took most of his face off. A tracheotomy kept him alive. Last time I saw him in the hospital, he was drinking Jim Beam through a tube.”
He jammed his thumb against his throat. “Right here. Stick a hole right here in this little hollow below the larynx. Everybody find it? Okay, punch a hole through there with a knife or a ball-point pen, or a fucking can opener. Anything. Don’t worry about keeping it clean, just get it open and get him breathing. The cartilage is tough, so you’ve gotta push hard. Once you’ve got the hole made you have to keep it open. You’ll have a ball-point pen with you. Cut off a section of the plastic tube and stick it in the hole.”
He held up something that looked like a tiny silver toothpaste tube with a small needle at the end.
“One half-gram of morphine. All you have to do is stick it in an arm or leg, right through the fatigues, and squeeeeze it in. Just like Pepsodent. If your man’s lost an arm or a leg, you don’t want to put it too close to the stump because it will just drain out. You don’t use it for head wounds or chest wounds. You want to keep the brain and the lungs working, and this stuff will just slow them down and kill your man.
“If he’s hurting, well, sin loy, sorry about that, your job is to keep him alive. If you got ten casualties and only one styrette of morphine, you take the morphine and go to work. You’re gonna need it worse than them. This stuff,” he said, holding up th
e tube, “makes everything seem okay. The last time I had to take it I looked down at my fucked-up leg and thought, Wow, that leg is hurting like a sonofabitch. Interesting.
“The pain is still there, but it doesn’t seem very important.
“If you hear a loud noise out in the field and the man next to you falls down, he’s probably dead or wounded. If he’s dead, fine, no problem, but if he’s wounded, you have to find the wound. Once you find the wound, do what you can to patch it up, then start looking for the other wound. Don’t find one wound, patch it up, and say, ‘Lookin’ good now, Jim,’ and wait for the medivac. What probably put your man down is shrapnel or automatic weapons fire. That shit comes at you in batches, not one at a time. Look for multiple wounds.
“A sucking chest wound is another one of nature’s ways of telling you that you’ve just been shot. If the hole in the chest is frothing little pink bubbles, your man has got it through the lung. Get that hole sealed off so it’s airtight, or both lungs are going to collapse. You die if your lungs collapse. And, gentlemen, don’t seal the hole in the chest, then sit back and wait for the medivac, because your man is probably blowing little bubbles through a hole in his back where the bullet went out. Your man’s gonna be a corpse when the medivac gets there. ‘Oops, forgot that exit wound.’
“Pills, gentlemen. We have pills for everything. Pills for pain, for fatigue, diarrhea, infection, water purification, gonorrhea, coughing, uppers and downers.”
He held up a green and white capsule. “Special Forces popcorn, gentlemen, dexamphetamine. It makes you mean. It makes you want to go out and kill Charles with a knife, with your hands and teeth. It makes you want to go out and have fun with Charles.
“It will also get you over a hill after your troops have deserted you and Charlie is on your ass. When your body tells you to stop, but your brain reminds you that Charlie is on your ass, this will help you run faster, see clearer, and hear better.
“Lomotil. Keeps you from shitting your pants if you pick up some dysentery. And it’s good to give to your little people before you go out with them on night locations and ambushes. They have dysentery all the time, they were born with it, and all they eat is rice and fish covered with fermenting nuoc mam. If one of your people takes a shit on an ambush site and Charles is downwind, he’s gonna know where you are.
“Most of your troops also have tuberculosis…” The rain had started again. It swept through the heat a dozen times a day, violent, then gone as quickly as it had come. Water poured down in steady streams from the lip of the corrugated roof, and beyond the roof the wind-driven rain slanted down at a forty-five-degree angle, the streams of water seeming to mesh like silver-gray yarn being worked in a loom.
MONKEY MOUNTAIN
Hanson walked across the helicopter pad kicking up little red mushroom clouds of dust that blossomed and faded behind him. He stepped into the operations center and continued down the long hallway, through the stale refrigerated air and the smell of floor wax and duplicating fluid. Soldiers sat typing on both sides of him, behind glass partitions. He passed a wizened Vietnamese woman who was sifting cigarette butts out of a brass urn, then stopped at a gray steel door with the words AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY stenciled across it in black. The woman grinned up at him accusingly with black teeth, then flashed the peace sign.
He knocked, and a voice on the other side of the door said, “Enter.” He walked in, and a big warrant officer looked up from his desk at him but said nothing. He was wearing the green triangle patch of the 3rd Infantry (mechanized), the 3rd Mech.
The 3rd Mech was the conventional unit responsible for northern I-Corps, coexisting with the isolated Special Forces camps and sharing intelligence with them. Hanson, because he’d been to college, had been assigned as liaison with the 3rd Mech headquarters after leaving the island. Hanadon, Bishop, and the others had been sent to A-camps throughout the country.
Special Forces despised the 3rd Mech as a bunch of bungling amateurs, and the 3rd Mech hated Special Forces as elitists who thought they were a law unto themselves.
“I’m Hanson,” he said after waiting for the warrant officer to speak. “They sent me over here.”
The warrant officer sat looking at Hanson for a few seconds, then said, “Right. Been lookin’ for you, Hanson. Come on in,” in a Texas accent, lowering his voice to what is known in the Army as a command voice. “I’m Mr. Grieson. Be with you in a minute,” he said, turning to a chattering teletype pumping out an endless sheaf of paper that coiled and writhed on the floor. The white drone of neon lights made Hanson squint. A round TV screen displayed a flickering green bar graph to the right of the teletype.
A framed Polaroid photograph of Warrant Officer Grieson stood on one corner of his desk. It showed him sitting in a swivel chair, looking sternly at the camera, one arm slung over the back of the chair to expose the .45 he was wearing in a shoulder holster.
Grieson spun around in his chair and stood, a head taller than Hanson. He extended his hand, a star sapphire ring and a gold Rolex watch catching the light.
“Glad to have you aboard,” he said, squeezing Hanson’s hand and fixing him with a straight-from-the-shoulder look. “You’ll be working with me here in collection. Your job, basically, will be to help me interpret and disseminate intelligence on enemy units. It’s an important job, and a demanding one, but if I’m any judge of character, I think you’ll be able to handle it. Am I right?
“Sure I am,” he said. “You’re a college man, aren’t you?”
“Some. Before I got drafted.”
“I never had time for college myself,” Grieson said. “Wish I had. But I’ve done all right without it, I think. Well,” he said, “I think you’re going to like it here. You’ll be helping me cross-reference enemy unit designations, their strength and movements, weapons and personnel. Over here,” he said, walking across the room, “is something I’m kind of proud of.”
He flipped up a large window shade, the word SECRET across it in red block letters, exposing a large map of northern South Vietnam on the wall. Dozens of little boxes with tiny flags were drawn in crayon on the map. They looked like the stubby ships in a kid’s game of Battleship. Grieson pulled the chain on a light fixture, and the Day-Glo crayon lit up, throbbing with electric reds, greens, and blues. Grieson stepped to one side, folded his arms, and grinned.
Hanson thought about Linda, back in school, and almost smiled. She had the same kind of black light in her bedroom, the light that made her body glow blue in the dark, her lips and nipples black, that lit up the peacock feathers and the Jimi Hendrix poster.
Grieson pulled down a clear overlay with more boxes drawn on it, and another, until the symbols began to overlap and obscure the map.
“Here, for instance,” he said, tapping three of the glowing boxes with a bullet-tipped pointer, “we think that these three units are really only a single unit that uses different names and radio call signs and has two extra commo units that make radio transmissions from decoy locations. But we aren’t sure. Sometimes a unit will just vanish when we think we have it pinpointed, then turn up fifty miles away under another name. It’s our job to find and fix these units…”
Hanson leaned his head against the wall. He could feel the hum of the radio components against the back of his skull as Grieson talked. He looked down at Grieson’s desk, at the carefully printed sign beneath the Plexiglas top that said, THE DIFFICULT WE CAN DO RIGHT AWAY—THE IMPOSSIBLE TAKES A LITTLE LONGER. It shared the space beneath the Plexiglas with some yellowed newspaper clippings, a photo of a small dog sitting on a sofa, and a faded color print of a woman standing in front of a Chevrolet.
“. . . using POW reports, visual sightings, radio intercepts, sensors, and other…classified techniques you’ll soon be familiar with.
“I know,” he said, “that some people laugh about us being ‘armchair commandos,’ but I’ve got over a thousand confirmed kills since I’ve been here. B-fifty-two strikes. Arclights. That’s confirmed.
A thousand kills confirmed by BDA.
“The troops out in the field do a good job, but it’s this,” he said, sweeping his arms wide, taking in the teletype, maps, banks of radios and filing cabinets, “that kills the gooks out there. Believe it.
“You know, Hanson, war is like a business at this level. Expense versus profit. But I’ve got more power than any corporation president.” He laughed. “Welcome to the corporation.”
After the briefing, Hanson was dismissed for the day. He thanked Grieson, walked back down the shotgun hall, and when he stepped outside the air-conditioned operations center, the noonday heat struck him like a sudden illness. The only sound was the tweet-tweet-tweet of a chopper that had landed while he was inside. It was empty, its rotors drooping as they turned slowly around to a standstill. The whole compound was deserted, everyone holed up in air-conditioned buildings. The presence of the empty helicopter was the only indication that time had passed while he was inside. He left the compound through the main gate and began walking down the road toward the granite hill known as Monkey Mountain.
Dust from the red clay road collected on his face and the backs of his hands, turning to mud with his sweat, the color of the road. A squad of Navy SEALs ran past in formation, wearing ragged cutoff fatigue pants and combat boots, barking at him and laughing as they passed. Though there was a rivalry between the Navy SEALs and Special Forces, Hanson felt a kinship with them. They had volunteered for hard training and dangerous duty, and they stuck together.
Off to the right, a military junkyard was piled with olive drab and soot-black wreckage scabbed with rust. Behind the barbed-wire perimeter, there were jeeps, trucks, APCs, tanks, and a John Deere tractor with one rear wheel blown off, like a civilian casualty mixed in with the military hardware. A giant cargo helicopter hovered over the junkyard like a praying mantis, sucking up a column of dust.
Sympathy for the Devil Page 19
