A quarter-mile beyond the airstrip they passed between a pair of guard bunkers, mounds of rotting and ruptured sandbags that looked like Iowa hayricks after a bad winter. A cheerful old man, smoking a pipe and carrying a carbine over his shoulder like a rake, pulled back a sagging concertina-wire gate, and the column entered the Vietnamese village, The Ville. As Hanson and Lieutenant Andre passed, the old man pulled himself erect and saluted. Hanson hesitated, then gave him a quick return salute, not wanting to hurt the old man’s feelings. Two of the Vietnamese behind him laughed.
The first building inside the wire had slab-sided concrete walls and a flat tin roof. A tall bamboo flagpole was flying the South Vietnamese flag, a yellow field with three horizontal red stripes. It was the village chief’s house, a sign over the door reading, VIETNAM CONG HOA. The rest of the village consisted of bamboo-frame hootches roofed and walled with thatch and a montage of American military garbage: pieces of tin sheeting, C-ration cases, their sides broken down and folded out into fat cardboard crosses with the words RATIONS COMBAT INDIVIDUAL and a mysterious crescent moon logo printed across them. Shutters were made from the thin wooden slats of ammunition crates, stamped with the lot number and the type of warhead, HE WP CN, a cryptic alphabet. Flattened beer cans were used as hinges and fasteners. Blue Ribbon—Black Label—Schlitz.
A ditch alongside the road served as a gutter and an open sewer. No one else seemed to notice the body in the ditch. Bullets had pounded its face and crotch into a dark pudding, and one leg was twisted at the knee, the foot pointing backward. The body, the uniform it was wearing, and the mud in the ditch were all the same color. The body seemed to be trying to take shape, to emerge from the mud, to evolve into a human being. Hanson had never seen a body before. The perfumed corpse at his grandfather’s funeral, rosy-cheeked and pillowed in velvet, had been different.
Villagers lined the road, watching the troops pass. Old people smiled, but their shiny black teeth and raw gums turned the expression into a grimace. Children, infants barely able to stand, wearing shirts but no pants, identical except for their tiny exposed sexual parts, gave the soldiers peace signs or “thumbs-up” with chubby fingers, chanting “Huh-low, huh-low,” like doves, a spooky, accusatory cooing.
A beautiful little girl watched sullenly, holding her naked brother propped against her outthrust hip.
There were few men or boys of military age. They were all in the Americans’ camp, in the hills with the VC, or dead.
A retarded boy with a clubfoot ran toward Hanson, grinning, then began lurching alongside, marching with them as the villagers laughed. A shiny pink burn scar on the boy’s neck pulled his head to one side so it looked as if he were listening for something. A woman ran up behind the boy, shouting and slapping him, chasing him back into the crowd.
The column slowed, stopped, then bunched up, the Vietnamese soldiers shouting and laughing, pointing up at a leafless, dead tree that had tatters of uniform and pieces of meat and intestine draped over its splintered limbs. One of the soldiers threw his arms up and out, made a sound like an explosion, then laughed madly, hopping bowlegged from foot to foot.
The hootches at the far end of the village were deserted and collapsing. The edge of a village was not a safe place to live in Vietnam.
The soldiers stopped in groups to buy noodles, rolls, and cans of Japanese mackerel, the younger soldiers strutting and cowboying for the village women.
Then they repacked their food, point men were sent out, and the cowboys took their rifles off their shoulders. The patrol wound out of the village, down the single trail snaking through terraced fields of punji sticks, sharpened bamboo stakes set in the ground, pointing out toward the jungle. The punji sticks, Hanson thought, looked like corn stubble bending beneath a monster wind.
A single gunshot cracked on the far side of the village. Chung turned to Hanson and said, “VC shoot. Say now we leave The Ville.” It was a signal to other VC somewhere outside the village.
The trail curved to the left, bordered by thick jungle on one side, dropping off with a sharp bank on the other to a system of tiered gardens. The people weeding the gardens went about their work as if the soldiers weren’t there.
They passed a temple set back in the jungle, orange poppies growing around it. It reminded Hanson of a Rousseau painting. Then it was gone, and he was staring into the jungle, recalling the phrase from training, “A few feet inside the treeline will hide you.” He could be looking at a claymore mine or an enemy soldier and not realize it.
Farther ahead, the trail narrowed even more before it disappeared, skirting around behind a large rice paddy that looked like a lake, flat and silver in the sun.
Hanson felt excited, nervous, but not really afraid, the way he used to feel waiting for the starting pistol at a cross-country meet. He had real trouble believing that he was actually on patrol in Vietnam. He watched his feet moving, looked at his hands around the black rifle. He drummed the fingers of one hand against the rifle butt to be certain that he was still in control of them.
The column stopped, and a moment later Lieutenant Andre motioned for Hanson to follow him and Chung on up ahead. The Vietnamese platoon leader was questioning two boys, both of them twelve or fourteen years old. The taller of the two was thin, almost gaunt for his height, a blue nylon shirt hanging straight as a sack from his shoulders. The side of his face was flushed and already swollen, the eye literally bloodshot, all of the white a dark red. He stood stiffly, his arms and opened hands pressed tight against his thighs, fighting the impulse to shield himself from another blow, an act that would only invite a more severe beating. His head was bowed and he was crying silently.
Chung spoke to the platoon leader, who stepped aside. Chung’s face pulled tight, lacquered with light sweat. He spoke to the boy, not loudly, but low and sharp, then hit him in the face. The boy stumbled half a step backward and regained his balance without looking up or raising his arms. Chung walked up close to the boy and spoke softly to the side of his head, then hit him again, almost knocking him down.
A soft cry escaped the boy the next time Chung hit him, which earned him another blow.
Hanson tried to look impassive. He didn’t know whether to watch or look away. Lieutenant Andre walked back to him. “Watch this,” he said, and walked over to the smaller boy.
He pointed the muzzle of his CAR-15 at the boy’s face, less than an inch from his right eye, and insisted, with sudden fury, “VC. You VC!” He leaned into the submachine gun, almost touching the boy’s eye with it. “VC!” he shouted. “Now I kill you.”
Terrified, the boy said, “No. No VC. No VC.”
Lieutenant Andre turned and walked back to Hanson, shaking his head, a wry smile on his face. “Power,” he said. “That was a power demonstration. Did you see the look in his eyes? He thought he was going to die. That’s what power comes down to when you get serious about it. No wonder people want it.
“I’ll have to tell you about law school sometime. This,” he said, holding up the mean-looking little gun, “and that,” gesturing at the boy, “is what the law is based on. But they don’t tell you that. They neglect to mention that part,” he said with a laugh.
“See that tree over there?” he said, pointing off to the side of the trail. “They were up there and the point man saw them. They’re trail watchers. One of their buddies back there in the village fired that shot when we left The Ville to let them know we were on our way. When we passed the tree, they were going to signal to their partners who were waiting to ambush us somewhere up there. They want to kill us.
“We’re gonna use them to break trail for us in case there are any mines up there, and as a kind of ambush shield. All in violation of the Geneva Convention, I might add.”
Chung and the platoon leader tied the boys’ arms behind them, cinching their wrists and elbows tightly together so their bony chests were thrust out, and put them at the head of the column.
The trail cut sharply around a hedgerow, a dens
e peninsula of bamboo and thornbushes, and Hanson lost sight of the boys as they rounded the hedgerow while he was still parallel to it. The space between the trail and the hedgerow was thick with grass, the wide, saw-edged blades a grayish green about three feet tall, the height of grass in a vacant lot unmowed all summer.
It was getting hot, and for the first time that morning Hanson was conscious of the weight of his rucksack. The straps were like a tightness in his chest, making breathing difficult, and his right arm was going numb as the strap cut off circulation. He bucked the pack up on his shoulders and tried to adjust the straps, realizing that he had left too much slack in them. He took a second to look at the grenades hanging at his chest, still feeling as if he were in a movie, then began fumbling with his pack straps, trying to tighten them and watch the trail at the same time.
The two explosions overlapped, the second following like a quick echo, though much louder than the first. BooBOOM! The wooden pop of a few rifles surged to a furious lashing fire, gusting and rattling like hail in the wind. The air around Hanson was alive, boiling with tiny sonic booms and brass-jacketed slugs, little cones of lead rabid with energy that, if they only touched him, would tear away gouts of muscle and splinter his bones.
It was as if he had taken hold of a high-voltage cable and become part of the circuit. His old life burned out of him, replaced by this new power. His eyes dilated and he could taste the adrenaline as it stung up into his nose and pushed through his skin as sweat.
He dropped into the grass, the wind clubbed out of him as his chest hit the ground. Flicking the safety switch on his rifle to AUTO, he fired eighteen rounds, the electrical tape on the muzzle shredding away in a colorless strobe of heat, the black gun shuddering in his hands, pistoning shells in and out, spent brass arcing gracefully away, glowing tracers blinking out in the dark green hedgerow. Twigs and bits of bark exploded from a tree above him, landing on his back, and a bullet tugged at his rucksack.
His new bush hat, a self-conscious piece of war fashion, unreal as a stage prop, fell over his eyes, and he pushed it back on his head. He reached back and fumbled at one of the stiff new ammo pouches, feeling the canvas against his thumb and fingertips as if the sensation went directly from his hand to his brain. While pulling a fresh magazine loose, he studied the breathing blades of grass in front of his face, smelled the sunlight in the dirt.
He snapped a new magazine into the rifle, fired it off, and reached back for another. It took a conscious effort to pay attention to the basic things that he was supposed to do, but the months of training he’d had, the habits he’d learned, took over and his body did the simple tasks that were required of it to stay alive—eject the magazine, remove a fresh one, insert it into the rifle, point the rifle in the direction of the enemy, pull the trigger—doing it all as mechanically as scratching an itch in the midst of a complex emotional debate. The tracers seemed to be the only dependable measure of passing time, every fifth round, blinking out of the muzzle of the weapon, vanishing in the same instant into the hedgerow, as regular as long seconds being counted off.
He heard Lieutenant Andre calling his name. “Yeah,” he shouted, smiling. At least he thought he was smiling, but he wasn’t really sure what his face was doing, trying to smile to show that he hadn’t been shaken by the ambush. He felt self-conscious and foolish to be doing something as silly as responding to his name, something as superficial and ordinary as that.
He raised himself off the ground so that he could see Lieutenant Andre, who was lying on his side, looking at a map and holding the radio handset to his ear.
“What?” Hanson yelled.
“Get back down! I just wanted to see if you were okay.”
The firing died down to a few nervous bursts like scattered showers at the end of a storm, and Lieutenant Andre hobbled over in a crouch. “You stay here,” he said, “and help the medic. I’m going up ahead to see what’s happening.”
“Right,” Hanson said. “Okay.” It was an immense relief to be told what to do. He had no idea what was going on or what he was expected to do, as if all the rules he had learned all his life were no longer valid. He felt as if he weighed five hundred pounds. His knees and mouth were twitching, and it took him several seconds to gain control over them.
Right, he thought, the lieutenant knows what to do. Stay here and help the medic. That’s it.
He stooped to pick up the three empty magazines he’d fired, and then stood there stupidly trying to think of what to do with them. Pinning his weapon against his side with one arm, he fumbled with the buttons at his chest, thinking to stuff the magazines inside his shirt and deal with them later. He reached over for them with his free hand, and the barrel of his weapon burned a pink welt on the inside of his forearm. He thought he could smell the cooked skin, a sweet, delicate odor almost lost in the burning plastic and pepper smell of gunpowder.
His leg began to tremble at the knee, and it felt good. He stood there and let it quiver. It was as if all the terror and confusion built up inside him were pouring out of his body at the knee. He let it drain out, almost urinating as his muscles suddenly relaxed.
He looked at the three empty black magazines in his hand and flung them away into the grass.
Just off the trail a chunky Vietnamese sat in the grass holding his side, his long face a picture of comic surprise, like the little fat man in a slapstick comedy whose chair has just been pulled out from beneath him. He was holding a pressure bandage against his ribs, a square wad of cotton and green gauze, like a small fat book, olive drab cover with the title OTHER SIDE AGAINST WOUND across it in big red letters. Frayed gauze tails dangled from each of its corners.
A Vietnamese medic, kneeling beside the surprised man, looked up at Hanson. “Dau,” he said. “Dau.” Hanson was sure that it was a word he was supposed to know, Dau? Dow? Tau? But it made no more sense than anything else seemed to. His knee was still shaking, and it felt very good. The plastic wrapper from the bandage lay next to his foot. Cartoon soldiers printed on the wrapper demonstrated how to apply the bandage.
“Dau,” the medic said. “Dau.” He opened his mouth wide, jabbed his finger in it, then pointed at the wounded man. “Dau.”
“I don’t know,” Hanson said, holding his palms up and out. “No Biet.”
The medic spoke to the wounded man and gently pulled the bandage away. The man watched mournfully as the wound appeared, dark jellied blood, ribbons of muscle, a white splinter of bone. He looked up expectantly at Hanson.
“Dau,” the medic said. He pointed at the wound, pointed at Hanson’s pill kit, opened his mouth and jabbed his finger inside.
“Oh. Right!” Hanson said. “Biet Roy. Dau. Beaucoup dau. Pain. Pain.”
He took the pill kit off his web belt, removed it from the green plastic bag, and worked the top off. He considered the morphine for a moment, then took out two small foil-wrapped codeine tablets. He’d keep the morphine. Next time he’d bring an extra. He looked up the trail and saw a man’s legs sticking out from beneath a poncho. Red and greenish-black fluids puddled to one side of them.
Lieutenant Andre came back grinning and excited. “How about that,” he said. “An hour out on your first operation, and you lose your cherry. How’s it feel?”
“Not exactly what I expected.”
Lieutenant Andre laughed. “It never is,” he said, then jerked his thumb toward the body in the trail. “One of the trail watchers. Took a dose of gas from his own people. What goes around comes around. Yes. Yes it does, I’m here to tell you that. We only took the one slightly wounded. Good beginning, Hanson, excellent beginning…”
And then the medivac chopper was coming in, getting bigger and bigger, coming down like it was riding a cable, its rotor blast bending the grass and hedgerow, blowing dirt and debris, the jet turbine shrieking, a machine the size of a bus falling out of the sky.
The wounded man hobbled to the chopper and got on board while Lieutenant Andre talked to the pilot on the radio. Chun
g and one of his squad leaders walked the shorter boy, the one Andre had threatened, blind-folded and bound, up to the chopper and threw him in.
Two Vietnamese carried the poncho-wrapped body to the door, the edges of the poncho flapping demonically in the prop blast, but the crew chief jabbed his finger at the body, shaking his head no. Chung walked over to the two men, spoke to them, and they let the body drop. Then they argued, their stiff black hair blowing back from their heads. They looked like two drivers arguing after a fatal accident on a freeway, yelling at each other over the traffic noise. Finally one of them, rigid with anger, pulled a poncho out of his pack, and they used it to double-wrap the body. They slid the body over the lip of the door, and Lieutenant Andre waved the chopper away.
It dipped its nose and rose to tree level, then banked away. The grass around where it had landed was littered as if there had been some kind of bloody picnic there: used field dressings, puddles of blood, mackerel cans, plastic rice bags, and a couple of Coca-Cola cans. Some of the troops had taken advantage of the break to have an early lunch.
Hanson watched the chopper go, the sound of its rotors fading, and wished he were on it. The first hour of the first day in the field and he was ready to quit. He hadn’t expected this. And he had a year to go.
“Crew chief was pissed about the body,” Lieutenant Andre said with a smile. “Said he didn’t want a bunch of ‘body fluids’ on the floor of his airplane.
“Hey,” he said, “come and take a look at this.”
Hanson followed him, thinking that somewhere close by there were people, people he didn’t even know, who had tried to kill him.
Lieutenant Andre showed him where the B-40 round had hit, the bazooka-type weapon that had made the double explosion—the first bang when it was fired, the boom when the rocket exploded. Just a shallow crater the size of a dinner plate scorched into the baked mud of the trail. Scattered around it were jagged pieces of tin, shredded bits of gray sheet metal smaller than dimes, like bits of a letter ripped up small enough so that no one could piece it together and read it.
Sympathy for the Devil Page 23
