“Not very dangerous unless it’s a direct hit,” Andre said. “A piece hit me in the leg once and didn’t even break the skin. No purple heart for the El-Tee. Designed for tanks, not people. Real good for initiating an ambush, though. Makes a lot of noise. Throws you off balance. Noise superiority,” he said with a laugh.
Hanson was looking at the muzzle of Andre’s weapon. It was still taped up.
The lieutenant held the weapon up and said, “Yeah, I didn’t bother to fire the thing. Too busy on the radio. Remember, that’s the most powerful weapon we’ve got out here.
“Well,” he said, “we better be moving out.”
Hanson waited until Andre had turned and was walking away. Then he looked quickly around, scooped up a few bits of tin, and slipped them into his pocket. He’d look at them later.
They followed the trail for a short while, with point and flank security, then angled off into the bush.
The brush got thicker and taller, shading, then blocking out the sun until it seemed like dusk. Tangles of vine, thornbushes, and fallen trees had to be stepped over or crawled under. It was difficult for Hanson to keep up, and it got worse. The Vietnamese and Montagnards slipped easily through the brush, but Hanson had to work his way through, his rifle and pack hanging up on branches the smaller soldiers could ignore. Soon he was out of breath, desperately trying to keep sight of the man in front of him, catching only an occasional glimpse of a boot or an elbow slipping out of sight in the gloom.
A red and silver fireball burst in his eye as a twig slapped it. He stumbled and fell, losing the man in front. He listened for someone behind him but no one came.
He wasn’t sure which way he’d been going when he fell, and could not pick up a trail. He tried to bulldoze his way through, break through the vines, but they wrapped him like a web and he had to free himself vine by vine, falling even farther behind.
Talking the panic away, he listened for the sound of the others over his heavy breathing, turning slowly, not at all sure which way they’d gone.
Please, he thought, please, when someone touched his elbow and he spun around to see Mr. Minh smiling at him. “This way,” he said, leading Hanson over a route that was easy to follow, finding a passage through growth that seemed impassable, a passage that seemed to open in front of the little man whichever way he turned, until they had slipped back into the column.
“Thank you,” Hanson whispered to him, and Mr. Minh touched his shoulder and vanished again into the bush.
The patrol stopped to eat at a small clearing, an artillery-ravaged hilltop whose edges were awash in the jungle. A small family temple, shattered and roofless from decades of war, stood at one edge of the clearing. Its walls were pocked with bullet holes and the deeper hollows gouged out by artillery shrapnel. Inside there was a rubble of concrete and C-ration cans, pieces of foil, cellophane, playing cards, newspapers, and sun-baked piles of human shit. Spent cartridges told the history of the war. The oldest, tarnished and scabbed with green, were from M-1 Garands. The short fat carbine rounds were more recent, but most of the wasp-shaped little .223-caliber M-16 casings were still shiny. Hanson wondered what some future archaeological dig would make of it.
They put security out, three-man groups just beyond the edge of the clearing, hidden in the jungle. Hanson and Lieutenant Andre found a slight depression near the edge of the tree line where they took off their ruck-sacks, propped them up for back rests, and sat facing out toward the jungle. It was a beautiful day, still not too hot, the sky a pale blue with fleecy clouds that broke up the blue so that it didn’t look like a great suffocating inverted bowl.
“Give me a little wad of C-4,” Andre said, “and I’ll heat some water for both of us in my handy-dandy marine stove here.” He pulled a blackened mackerel can from a side pocket of his rucksack. The top was cut off, and triangular can-opener holes had been punched around the sides.
Hanson handed him a wad of C-4 plastic explosive, and Andre pulled off a piece and gave the rest back. He tore his piece in half, set one piece in the middle of the can, and lit it with his lighter. It hissed and flared up as he set half a canteen cup of water on top of the can.
Yellow jets of flame escaped through the triangular holes, then shrank back into the can as the flame died down. Andre lifted one end of the canteen cup and popped in the other piece of C-4. The flame rose and the light at the vent holes jetted back out.
Hanson settled back against his pack, watching the flame, and realized that he was gritting his teeth. He had to concentrate to unlock the muscles in his jaw. Then they heard the shouting over at the temple.
Five women, who had walked into the perimeter, were squatting in a circle, facing out, their shoulders and backs touching. They had taken off their conical straw hats and set them on their knees. Three of them were in their teens, one just barely, and the other two were middle-aged.
Chung was standing over one of the older women with a two-foot length of bamboo in his hand. The woman stared at the ground. Her black hair, pulled into a bun, was streaked with gray. Her hands were in her lap, palms up, her shoulders and arms rigid, prim as a schoolgirl.
“They say they come here to get firewood, but I do not think so,” Chung said. “Too far. Beaucoup wood near village, no reason to come here.”
He turned and questioned the woman in Vietnamese, punctuating his questions with the piece of bamboo. If the woman hesitated, even slightly, in answering, he struck her in the hollow between her neck and shoulder. Whap. When she answered with what he thought was a lie, he struck her, whap, repeated the question, and before she could answer, hit her again, whap. He hit her skillfully, patiently, without anger, and with an elusive kind of rhythm. He reminded Hanson of a dentist drilling, pausing to ask without real concern, “Is there any discomfort?” then drilling again. It was the matter-of-fact application of pain. It worked. The woman began blurting out answers before Chung had finished asking the question. Whap. He hit her for answering too soon.
“Pain is a language that everyone knows.” Mr. Minh was standing next to Hanson, gravely watching the interrogation. “Vietnamese, American, Montagnard, even animals understand,” he said. “It is a way to talk when you want to be sure you are understood. No problem then. When I translate Rhade into American or French, sometimes a problem. One word, maybe, almost the same, but different. Maybe you say the wrong word. With pain, no problem. No mistake. They know what you are saying to them.”
“Bring food to VC, I think,” Chung said, almost as if he were talking to himself. “Only two have ID cards.”
He handed Andre two laminated IDs the size of playing cards. They were stained and warped and split, a blurred photo in the upper left-hand corner of each card.
“Too old,” Chung said, shaking his head.
Hanson looked at one of the cards. The photo of the woman was yellowing and had that disturbing quality of all old photos, looking like a person from another time or dimension who is trying to tell you something important. He looked over at the woman, meeting her eyes, one heartbeat, before she looked away.
Chung pointed his stick at a pile of vegetables, spoke to the woman, then kicked her in the thigh. She rocked back from the kick but continued to stare at the ground. He hit her across the shoulders, whap.
“Too much food,” Chung said, shaking his head.
Piled next to the potatoes and greens, there were plastic sacks of cooked rice, salted fish wrapped in newspaper, a plastic bag of salt, and a blackened pot with a handle made of commo wire. And there was a new pair of black pajama pants in a bag.
Lieutenant Andre, who had been pacing in front of the women, stopped as though he was listening to something. “We’re going to have another contact,” he said. “I’ve got that feeling. Just like when we picked up those trail watchers this morning. When civilians—” he began as a burst of rifle fire came from the other side of the temple, beyond the perimeter. There was more firing, then a heavier, slower pounding as an M-60 opened up.
Andre looked at Hanson with a tight smile. “When civilians show up out here, Charlie’s around. Damn, I knew it.”
They ran in a Groucho Marx duck walk back to the radio, bobbing closer to the ground after each new burst of fire. Hanson saw soldiers appear and disappear as they ducked and ran inside the tree line.
“What’s that goddamn call sign?” Andre shouted.
“Bright Packs.”
“Yeah, that’s right, Bright Packs. Dumbass fuckin’ codes.”
“Bright Packs, Bright Packs,” he said into the radio handset, “this is four six, over…”
“Four six, this is Packs,” Silver said. “Go…”
“Uh, roger, we got—”
Hanson spun around in a crouch toward the quick burst of fire just behind them. A soldier was standing on tiptoe, one of the Indians, holding his M-16 high, firing down into a little ravine. He was wearing a green tiger suit and a red bandanna. He looked like a lizard with red markings, rearing up on his hind legs. The spent brass floated out of his rifle, glittering in the sun.
“We got a contact here,” Andre continued on the radio. “Don’t know how big it is yet. They seem to be on two sides of us. I’ll advise you of our situation as soon as I know more, over…”
“Roger that, four six,” Silver’s voice came from the radio, tinny and faint. “We’ll be here.”
Another of the Indians broke from the jungle into the clearing. He was brandishing an AK-47, shaking the heavy weapon with one hand above his head, whooping, leaping like a dancer, the muscles in his neck and forearms cording under his brown skin.
Chung ran over. “Two VC,” he said, breathing hard. “KIA. Two weapon. AKs. Platoon leader say more VC run. Maybe WIA. We go check it out now.”
“Wait,” Andre said, and called the camp. “Bright Packs, things seem to be under control here, but there’s still some movement out there. How about cranking up the four deuce and putting some stuff out there before we make a sweep. Anybody in there wounded is gonna be pissed off.”
“Uh, roger, wait one…” Silver said. “Affirm. We can do that for you. Where do you want us to put it…”
Andre gave them a six-digit coordinate for the 4.2-inch mortar, Silver repeated it, and the radio began to hiss.
The five women were huddled together, looking toward the sound of the last rifle fire.
One of the Montagnards fired a grenade launcher in that direction, a clear metallic tonk, like the sound of a cork pulled out of a big aluminum jug. There was silence for two, three, four seconds, then the round detonated with a muffled concussion, distorting a patch of jungle like a furious wind, throwing up dirt and pieces of vine that slowly cartwheeled up and back down.
Silver’s voice broke the radio static. “Four six, this is Packs. You want smoke first round? We’re ready to lay it in.”
“Negative, gimme HE first round. I don’t want to give them any more time to boogie out of there. Put the high explosive on ’em.”
“Roger, copy HE first round…”
The radio hissed, then the single word “shot” came from the speaker, and it began hissing again.
A faint whistling, more a presence, a pressure in the air, grew to a low muttering overhead, whuwhuwhu, and a flash of orange burst from the jungle, for an instant looking like the flame jetting out of the marine stove, then erupting with shredded leaves, bits of brown vine, and fat divots of earth and grass, all blotted out an instant later by a cloud of smoke and dust.
“Outstanding,” Andre said into the handset. “Drop five zero and fire for effect.”
Another murmuring whistle went over and exploded, then another and another, the concussions overlapping, the jungle and smoke violently frozen for an instant with each explosion, then boiling in on themselves again.
“Good, good,” Andre said. “How about walking a few to the right, say a hundred meters, over…”
“Roger that.”
They came more slowly, each one impacting a little farther ahead of the one before it, like the huge slow steps of an invisible giant.
Each woman watched silently, tight-lipped, the way a woman might watch from behind a police line as her house burned down, not knowing if everyone else got out in time.
“All right,” Andre said to the radio. “Real fine. Cease fire, and we’ll go take a look.”
“Uh, roger,” Silver said. “We try to do our best for the man in the field. We’ll stand by the tube in case you need any more. Nice break from routine here.”
“Uh, roger that,” Andre said. “And can I get a chopper for ammo resupply and to pick up five detainees, over.”
A different voice, the captain’s, spoke from the radio. “Affirmative. I’ve already got a bird en route to your location. They gave me a twenty-minute ETA. Anything else you need out there besides ammo? Over…”
“Affirm. How about a couple of cases of cold soda for the troops and a six-pack of beer for me and my man here? Put it on my tab, over…”
“Roger that, we’ll send it out.”
Two of the Indians were pulling a body out of the jungle. They’d tied a vine to one of his wrists and were dragging him on his back to the middle of the clearing. His arm seemed to reach, straining toward the end of the vine to hold on, the other arm flopping behind him. His head and heels bounced and jerked over the uneven ground like a puppet doing a jerky tap dance.
Hanson walked over and looked down at the body. It was badly torn up by M-16 rounds, but there wasn’t much blood. He looked over at the women. They had been tied and blindfolded.
“Go ahead,” Andre said.
“What?”
“Go ahead and put a burst into him. See what it feels like. Looks like half the platoon already did.”
“I just wanted to have a look,” Hanson said, his voice sounding strange to him.
“Go ahead. They had to be the people in the ambush this morning. Just picture him,” Andre said. “Picture that guy there waiting for us. For you. He was laying there watching you this morning, waiting to turn you into something that looks like he does now. Same guy, right there.
“Hey,” he said, in a different tone of voice, “look at that. The woman with the pants.”
The dead man was wearing black pajamas. The top had been in good shape before the bullets went through it, but the pants were old and frayed.
“How about that,” Andre said, smiling at the irony. “She was bringing her old man his lunch and a pair of pants.
“Picnic ends in tragedy for Vietcong couple,” he said in a TV announcer’s voice. “Film at eleven.”
Later that afternoon they took a break on a hilltop at the northern edge of their area of operations, where the operational boundary for the 3rd Mech began. The terrain was rolling foothills covered with elephant grass, the uniformity broken only by a few backyard-size stands of trees and brush.
They could hear tanks. They couldn’t see them yet, but they could hear them, engines whining and gearing down like buses or garbage trucks climbing a steep hill. Then, one by one, they topped the crest of the hill two klicks away like drunken bugs, stopping, skidding around, then lurching off in a new direction.
They stopped at each clump of trees to engage in a “recon by fire,” riddling the brush with heavy machine guns, then firing point-blank into the trees. From the hilltop Hanson could see the muzzle flash from the main gun, a burst of orange flame in the trees, then the greasy blossom of smoke. The sound reached him an instant later, a faint, paired concussion. They fired again and trees leapt from the ground and toppled slowly into the brush.
The tanks lumbered on from grove to grove and on out of sight as Hanson and Andre worked on their warm beers, but they could still hear the engines and the wooden, goofy-sounding tat-tat-tat of the .50-caliber machine guns.
“Looney Tunes,” Andre said. “The American war machine. Blowing up trees. Goddamn Third Mech. It’s embarrassing. Charlie must think we’re all fools.
“Big day, eh,” he said to Ha
nson. “Pretty bizarre stuff, huh?”
“Pretty bizarre. Shit, I’m prepared to run into the Three Stooges out here. Larry, Moe, and Curly. The Three Stooges of Vietnam, barking and hitting each other in the head with sandbags.”
“You’re gonna learn to love it, I can see that already. You appreciate the insanity.
“I was in law school when I enlisted. You know, law school, you think you’re gonna find out what the rules are, and things will make sense then. Because you know the law. So you’ve got statute law, which is slippery enough with all those clauses and exceptions and definitions, but at least it’s there, written down. But then they throw case law at you, and it all goes out the window. So you take your exams, and it’s mostly luck how you do, and you think, if they’d tested me on that other stuff, I’d have done better.
“I got tired of it and joined up. Special Forces, the whole ball of wax, and I like it over here. If you’re wrong, you’re dead. Simple. No mistrials, no court of appeals. Things are final.”
He finished his beer, flattened the can, and used it to dig out a hole beneath a rock he was sitting on. He slid the can under the rock, covered it with dirt, and brushed the area around it to hide any evidence of dig-ging. He did it while he talked, as naturally as another person would throw the can in a dumpster.
“I was meaning to tell you,” he said. “Don’t trust Chung too much.”
“You think he works for the other side?”
“No, not that. He hates the Communists. They killed his family. He’s a little crazy that way. But he likes to run things out on a patrol like this, and he’ll take over if you let him. He’s probably a better field commander than I’ll ever be—he’s been at it for ten years—but we can’t let him start running things. And you can’t always trust his translations. If you’re trying to tell a platoon leader something, or he’s trying to tell you something, Chung is liable to translate it as what he wants to do.
Sympathy for the Devil Page 24
