Sympathy for the Devil

by Kent Anderson

  Quinn looked up at the little blue Buddhist shrine out in the middle of the wire. The Vietnamese still sneaked out to visit the shrine with incense and little food offerings, out in the perimeter wire with claymore mines and trip flares surrounding it, refusing to move the shrine because, they said, that was where it had always stood. Just like the mice, Quinn thought. He looked at the group of Vietnamese who were supposed to be doing the work he was doing. They were laughing, talking loud in their high, singsong language. Quinn wished he could shoot them, kill every one of the whining zipper heads.

  Fuck it, he thought, and bent to twine the wire onto an engineer stake. The heat and smell of hot grass reminded him of the cornfields around Mason City in the summer.

  That evening Hanson was sitting in the teamhouse reading a copy of Rolling Stone that had come in on the mail chopper. As he looked at the pages, he listened to Dawson tell Silver about killing someone in a bar on his last thirty-day leave. He glanced at the laughing Dawson, who had high cheekbones and an ash-colored scar streaking up beneath one eye, giving him an expression of satanic amusement.

  “Then this fool come up out of his pants with a piece,” Dawson said. “Little twenty-five auto. Just flashing it around, you understand, impressing the ladies. I’m checking this all out from where I’m sitting at the bar, and I don’t like this dude. I mean, that’s no way to act, lettin’ people see what you got. That’s just asking for it. I mean, what kind of bullshit is that? Pisses me off. So I say to myself, ‘All right. This one’s for free—this fool is bought and paid for.’

  “So I walk over to where he is…”

  Hanson looked up from his paper and saw Dawson poised on his toes, simulating a pistol with his thumb and forefinger, holding it above his head. He jabbed his finger down at the floor three times, grinning, and said, “Pop. Pop. Pop.

  “So what they gonna do,” he said. “Dude pulls a piece and I shoot him in self-defense, right? I say, ‘I thought he was gonna shoot my ass.’ Besides, I’m a motherfuckin’ war hero. One tour of ’Nam behind me, my orders already cut to go back and fight the bad ole Communists some more. Adiós, motherfucker.”

  When Quinn came banging into the teamhouse a few minutes later, he was still cursing the Vietnamese. He went behind the bar to the refrigerator and got a beer. He took a swallow and stared at Hanson. “The team hippie taking it easy?” he said to Dawson and Silver, gesturing at Hanson. “Or is he on some kind of special enlistment?”

  Hanson looked up and noticed that Quinn was wearing a .45 on his hip. Quinn glared at him while the other two waited to see what would happen. Hanson went back to his reading but twice looked up and found himself trading stares with Quinn. Hanson deliberately held the stare, as if considering it with minimal interest, then unfocused and went back to the paper, reading the same sentence over and over as he considered his situation. As he turned a page, he wondered if there wasn’t some way to avoid a showdown, but he knew there wasn’t.

  It wasn’t the sort of place, either, where people are quick to rush in and break up a fight. The threshold between anger and violence was low. He couldn’t avoid it, and he couldn’t expect any help.

  “What kind of fucking hippie college boy are you?” Quinn demanded.

  “Pardon me?” Hanson said.

  “Pardon me,” Quinn said, mocking him.

  “If I’m a hippie, I am a strange one. Up here in northern I-Corps, wearing a green beret…”

  “You got that right,” Quinn said. “A strange one.”

  “What’s your definition of a hippie?” Hanson asked him.

  “A hippie, in your case, is somebody who thinks he’s hot shit. Somebody who walks funny, and says ‘pardon me,’ ” Quinn said, walking over to where Hanson was sitting, “and who reads hippie shit like this newspaper,” he said, tapping the paper with his finger.

  “Excuse me,” Hanson said. “I gotta go piss.”

  Quinn didn’t move, standing in front of where Hanson was sitting, and Hanson bumped into him, face-to-face as he stood up.

  “That’s twice now you’ve bumped into me, little man. Number three’s gonna be a pisser. You ain’t got enough sand in your pockets for number three.”

  Hanson walked outside to the piss tubes, metal shipping tubes pounded into the sand. Out on the perimeter someone popped a hand flare, and it swung slowly from its parachute, dripping sparks squeaking and barking like a loose fan belt.

  He listened to the country grumble with artillery fire. He’d been there only a couple of days, and it was his one chance to avoid the S-2 shop. If he fought Quinn, who had already established himself here, he’d likely be labeled as someone who couldn’t get along and get his ass shipped back to Da Nang. But if he didn’t fight Quinn, he’d never last either. He’d run into guys like Quinn before, who didn’t like the way he talked or walked or what he said.

  He decided to go back into the teamhouse.

  Jefferson Airplane was flying out of Silver’s big stereo. The three of them had been into a bottle of Jim Beam, drinking boilermakers. They were over at the radio table, laughing, hardly noticing when he came in. He got a beer out of the refrigerator, picked up the Rolling Stone, and sat down at the far end of the bar on one of the high bar stools. He was reading an article about a war protest in Brooklyn, where demonstrators rubbed pig’s blood on their nude bodies, rolled in the street, and then “made love,” when he felt something jammed into the small of his back and heard Quinn’s voice saying, “What do you think of this, my man?”

  Jefferson Airplane was singing “White Rabbit.” Quinn had stuck the muzzle of his .45 against the base of Hanson’s spine. Hanson felt the tiny shudder and click of the gun being cocked, felt it quiver through his spine and the tight muscles in the small of his back.

  Once cocked, a .45 goes off with just a touch of the trigger, just an accidental twitch of the finger. Hanson could smell the liquor on Quinn’s breath. The refrigerator shuddered and began to hum. Then the pressure was gone. He heard the click of the hammer dropping to half-cock. Quinn said, “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

  Hanson turned on the stool, stepped down, and walked out the door, listening to them laugh behind him. He sat down on the waist-high sandbag wall that ran from the teamhouse to the piss tubes. A flare popped, then another, the two of them barking as if they were calling to each other in the dark, swinging two sets of shadows across the camp. He touched something leathery next to him and jerked his hand back.

  It was one of the wire-laying gloves Quinn had been wearing. He put it on, made a fist, and jabbed the heavy glove in the air, then tried it against the sandbags. He put the other one on and moved back to the side of the teamhouse door and waited.

  He heard Quinn laughing on his way to the door, and he set himself just outside the door, legs shoulder-width apart in a slight crouch. When Quinn stepped out, drunk and laughing, Hanson drove his left fist into Quinn’s solar plexus, bending him over, then snapped a right into his kidneys, sending him down. Quinn raised himself up on his elbows, vomited, then slumped back down.

  Bending over him, Hanson said, “Quinn, I want to get along in this camp. Let’s not underestimate each other and maybe it will work out. But I’ll kill you before I’ll leave.”

  He hid the gloves under a pile of sandbags and smiled in the dark. It had felt good. He repeated the two punches he’d used on Quinn and walked grinning out of the faint light coming from the teamhouse, to his bunker, where he slept.

  Quinn woke up with a couple of cracked ribs, pissing blood. He found Hanson filling sandbags and walked carefully over to him, hung over, trying not to wince. If he were to hit anybody, it would hurt him more than the person he hit.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Hanson said, gripping the entrenching tool he’d been using.

  “Come on over to the shade here. I want to talk to you.”

  As they walked to the shade of the gun tower, Quinn said, “Those were pretty good shots for a dude your size, bu
t I was drunk. Sober, I’d pound your ass into the sand.”

  “You better kill me if you do,” Hanson said, “ ’cause next time you’re drunk or asleep or looking the other way, I’ll be there.

  “But we don’t need that shit. Let me buy you a beer.”

  Quinn looked down at him, smiled, and said, “I believe you. We’ll see. Let’s go get that beer.”

  Quinn never did figure out what had caused the little parallel rows of dashlike lines that patterned the bruises on his side and chest. He never realized that they were the same size and shape as the staples in wire-laying gloves.

  THE ORCHARD

  It was past seven, still cool, but Hanson could feel the heat beginning to seep in like an undertow. Shreds of milky fog clung to the green folds of the mountains to the west like spiderwebs in wet shrubbery. The sun was just beginning to warm the red clay, concrete and sandbags, the wood and wire of the camp, teasing out the odors of mo-gas, urine, smoke, and waxy canvas. He could smell the sizing in his new tiger suit. It was dyed in swirls and rivulets of green, black, and brown and was as stiff as a Halloween costume.

  His web gear and harness were almost new. They had belonged to the dead man he was replacing, but he didn’t know that yet. It had been the dead man’s first operation. He’d stood and charged the tree line where a small ambush had been sprung, and was shot dead. Afterward, the team had sent him back to Da Nang in a body bag, still a stranger to them, and the heavy-weapons man, who’d been with him at the ambush, had said, “Now why do you suppose he did that?”

  It had been a small, routine ambush, and no one else had been hurt. The three local Vietcong villagers who had initiated it with AK-47 fire had run away while the rest of the patrol stayed under cover and called in artillery. They were surprised and delighted that they had actually killed an American.

  The young soldier they’d killed hadn’t known what was expected of him, and he didn’t want to look like a coward. When the shooting started, he had looked around—no one gave him any orders—and attacked the tree line, bewildered as he ran, the 7.62 rounds stinging, then deadening his leg and shoulder and chest and hand, lifting him up and letting him drop. The last thing he’d seen was the top of a gray-green tree and the bright blue sky, worried that he’d done the wrong thing and looked foolish.

  “Damn it, Chung,” Lieutenant Andre said to his Vietnamese counterpart, “I told him last night that we needed three machine guns. Three.”

  “Company commander say no more M-60.”

  “Look. It’s past dawn. Charlie should be able to see which way we’re going and stay out of our way. The company commander can probably find one now. Okay?”

  “Okay. I go see.”

  Lieutenant Andre turned to Hanson, smiled, and said, “You might as well take your rucksack off. It’ll be a while yet. On an operation this size, the Vietnamese usually manage to stall until they’re sure Charlie has all his ambushes in and knows which way we’re going so they can stay out of our way. There’s no Vietcong units out there big enough to mess with us, but our Vietnamese want to be sure we don’t surprise anybody who might shoot at us.

  “Nothing usually happens on an operation this big, but you never know. Sometimes the stalling backfires and Charlie’s waiting. I’ll be glad when we get this launch site hardened so we can get rid of our Vietnamese.” He laughed. “But, like they say, it’s the only war we’ve got right now.”

  He reached into his fatigue pocket and pulled out a roll of black electrical tape. “Let me see that weapon a second,” he said, taking Hanson’s M-16. “It’s a good idea,” he said, tearing a piece of the tape loose, running it up the last two inches of the barrel, over the muzzle and down the other side, “to tape the muzzle up.” He ran another piece over the barrel, making an X of tape that covered the muzzle. Then he ran a third piece of tape around the end of the barrel to secure the first two pieces.

  He handed it back to Hanson. “Keeps water and dirt out of the barrel, but blows right off if you fire a round.”

  The Vietnamese were all bunched around their teamhouse, smoking Salems, playing grab-ass, strutting and preening. The Montagnards stayed apart in groups of four or five, smoking their acrid tobacco in tiny curved pipes fashioned of wood and water buffalo horn and pieces of brass from M-16 and AK-47 rounds. In those groups only one person spoke at a time, the smooth cooing and flow of the Rhade dialect so much more pleasant to American ears than the nasal whine of the Vietnamese.

  “First operation for you, yes?” a voice at Hanson’s elbow said.

  Hanson turned to see the man who had told him about the cobra. “Yes,” he said.

  The man smiled at him, his gold and jade teeth catching the sun. “Good,” he said. “It is the first operation for my nephew’s son. I am going along to…how do you say it, Andre?”

  “Watch out for him?”

  “Yes, thank you. To watch for him. How are you today, Andre?”

  “Very good, Mr. Minh, and you?”

  “Very good, thank you, sir. But we must watch out very good. I killed a chicken today, and something was wrong. I don’t know what it means,” he said, gesturing with his hands.

  Hanson noticed that dark dried blood rimmed his fingernails and outlined the creases on the backs of his hands.

  He smiled again and walked over to a group of Rhade in which there was a boy of ten or twelve, hardly taller than the carbine he carried. His black canvas Bata boots were so big that they flapped at the toes like clown shoes. His baggy green pants were gathered below the knee and gartered with shoelaces. He had all the best features of his race—broad forehead and high cheekbones, long black hair and dark eyes, and skin the color of his rifle stock. The older men were helping him adjust his rucksack and gently teasing him. They could have been getting him ready for a Little League game or his first date.

  “That was Mr. Minh,” Lieutenant Andre said. “And the guy over there with the long hair is his nephew, Rau. Rau’s the one who saw you down at Monkey Mountain.”

  “What was that about killing a chicken?”

  Lieutenant Andre smiled. “Well, like I told you, the Rhade call him Chicken Man. He can read the entrails of chickens and, they say, find things out that way—find things that are lost, tell if somebody is lying, predict the future. I don’t know, but I’m willing to believe a lot more now than when I was in law school. He’s a hell of a good soldier.”

  “His English is pretty good,” Hanson said.

  “His French is better. He used to work for them. He knows what he’s doing.”

  Lieutenant Andre looked over at the Vietnamese teamhouse. “Where the fuck is Chung?” he said. “I’m ready to get this circus on the road.”

  There was no one uniform worn by the company of troops but random combinations of green American fatigues, cut down or rolled up to fit, brown leopard-spot fatigues, green and black striped tiger suits, black pajamas, and even an occasional pair of faded blue jeans that cost the Vietnamese a month’s pay on the black market and that they tailored skintight.

  Headgear was even more varied and personal—flop-brim hats patterned with greens and browns, narrow-brim hats that a golfer might wear, some of the brims raveled into fringe or cut in a sawtooth pattern, some with the brim torn off and worn like skullcaps; olive-brown NVA bush hats, green baseball caps, conical straw hats and Fiberglas helmet liners. Some of the young Montagnards had thick, shoulder-length hair that they tied back with strips of tiger suit material, and they wore red bandanas around their necks. They were the best soldiers, cocky and reckless, and the Americans called them Indians.

  “Remember what I told you,” Andre said. “If we make contact, find a hole and keep an eye on me. If anything happens to me, you’re the only person who can use the radio to call in air support. Don’t get killed. Your first operation, you’re just there to see how things work.”

  Chung had worked his way back through the troops. “Okay, Trung Si,” he told Andre. “Lieutenant Van get M-60 from one-o-
one company. No sweat. We can go now.”

  “Well, thank you very much, Mister Chung,” Andre said.

  “No sweat,” Chung said. “Dee,” he yelled into the crowd, swinging his arm in a circle above his head. “Dee.”

  If anyone had been watching from the hills to the north, they’d have seen the camouflaged brown and green troops begin to swarm, the red dust rising to their knees, then up to their shoulders like smoke as they formed into a ragged line feeding out the inner perimeter gate. The thud of boots and rucksacks might not have reached the hills, but the clink and dull ringing of buckles and belts of ammo would have carried like the sound of wind chimes.

  Hanson bucked his rucksack higher on his back and slipped in near the middle of the column, keeping Chung and two riflemen between himself and Lieutenant Andre, the way he’d been drilled to do, through more than a year of twelve- and sixteen-hour days, so that only one of them would be likely to be hit by shrapnel from a single grenade or the first burst of automatic fire initiating an ambush. He did it without thinking, as a sailor might close and seal a watertight door behind himself as he walked through a minesweeper in enemy waters. Hanson glanced back at the teamhouse and saw Quinn and Silver watching. They gave him a “thumbs-up” and he returned it, feeling like an imposter.

  Outside the main gate, a worn and rutted section of airstrip pointed north–south, ending abruptly like a misplaced section of two-lane country blacktop. Red clay showed through the asphalt like raw meat in a third-degree burn. Once across the airstrip they were officially in hostile territory, and a metallic rattling rose from the column, tentative at first, sporadic, growing to a sustained static, the sound of a platoon of soldiers chambering rounds with heavy, spring-loaded rifle bolts.

  A unit of American troops from the 3rd Mech stopped to watch them from atop APCs and an open-sided truck mounting a Quad-50 machine gun, the truck’s name professionally lettered along its sides: CHUCK WAGON.