Sympathy for the Devil

by Kent Anderson

  Hanson carried Rau out of the crater toward the medivac, the chopper fading in and out of yellow smoke, the world monochromatic, yellow and gray and black. The crew chief in the machine gestured at him to hurry, his mouth moving silently in the wind and roar, the chopper shuddering like a hallucination, its skids bumping on the ground.

  Hanson hooked one of the Special Forces medical tags on Rau, the tag that would keep him alive, routing him to an American hospital rather than a Vietnamese facility where they would let him die.

  There were scattered shots behind them as Hanson and the crew chief got Rau on the chopper that was like a crude nuts-and-bolts time machine that would take him out of the smoke and noise and killing. The crew chief, his eyes hidden by a smoky bubble face mask, nodded, spoke into his throat mike, touching his throat like a man checking his own pulse. The helicopter rose and banked away as Hanson duck-walked back to the crater, the APCs roaring as they broke from the tree line, dragging lengths of vine, their tracks chewing up brush.

  Hanson and the other Yards went on line, moving toward the APCs, searching the grass for dead and dying, firing bursts of high-velocity bullets into them, convulsing them with the withering fire, the muzzle blasts throwing up dirt and grass and blood.

  A broken-legged body flipped over on his back, one eye full of blood, bringing his arm back. He bucked and shuddered in an explosion of dust and smoke, the grenade he had been holding going off prematurely, his uniform catching fire. The explosion shook Hanson, threw things out of sync for a beat, as if the earth had heaved up and slammed back down. A splinter of shrapnel blew past his head in the wind of the explosion with a droning, sucking sound, his ears popping in the vacuum. His nose and eyes stung as if someone had slapped him.

  As his head cleared, another APC broke through the tree line, almost running him down. Quinn was riding on top, smoking a cigar.

  “Well, kiss my ass,” Hanson screamed. “Tell those people to look out where they’re going!

  “Hey,” Hanson screamed. “Hey! You want a souvenir?” His nose was bleeding.

  The APC skidded to a stop as Quinn hopped off and hit the ground running with seventy pounds of equipment. “You all right there, little buddy?” he shouted.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Hanson grunted, wiping the blood off his nose and lip. “Look at this.” He reached down and grabbed the smoldering body by the back of its belt. He heaved up, jackknifing it at the waist, off the ground, holding the dead soldier easily. But the body had been opened by the grenade and a purple and silver load of guts fell heavily to the ground, trailing ribbons of muscle and membrane.

  Hanson threw the body down. “Never mind. Never mind, goddammit. He’s all fucked up. I’ll find you another one.”

  The last thing they did was strip the bodies of negotiable war souvenirs, trading material. They usually left the packets of letters, the snapshots of parents and sweethearts. Hanson told Quinn that killing people, then stripping their bodies of personal effects was “a new, aggressive school of social anthropology.”

  Twice he’d remembered to take an ear after a firefight, but neither one had worked out. He couldn’t really get anything but the back part of the ear, not the little flap in the front, so they didn’t really look like ears. He tried drying them on the tin roof of the teamhouse, but insects went after them, particularly a species of large red wasp. One of them spoiled during the rainy season, and the one that did dry wasn’t recognizable as anything, looking like a piece of dried fruit, and Hanson threw it away.

  QUANG TRI

  Moonlight bled through chinks in the longhouse wall and threw silver bars of light across its smoky interior as a flight of Phantom jets sighed high overhead like wind through the trees. A new tapestry was still on the loom, almost finished, the most recent of the weavings that reflected everyday tribal life like illustrations in a history book. It was done in the traditional dyes, the background blue, green jungle at the bottom, showing longhouses and moon-faced buffalo looking out from the foreground. Tiny human figures bent over a green and brown plaid of rice paddy, and off in one corner a tiger stalked into the green wool, snarling over its shoulder. A black Cobra gunship with jagged fangs stitched across its nose dominated the tapestry, blotting out all but the borders of the sky, looming like a thunderhead over the scene below. The pilot and gunner, their flat features woven in white yarn, looked full-face out the side of the canopy. Streaks of red yarn, indicating tracer rounds, were stitched from the nose of the gunship to the border of the design.

  The Rhade word for “war” and the word for “bamboo knife” were the same, as tribal wars had been fought primarily with the long, elaborately carved knives. That seemed like a long time before, Mr. Minh thought, turning from the tapestry to the carved-ash and blood-painted pole in the center of the longhouse on which a rat had been bound with leather thongs.

  The rat squirmed and squealed and tried to bite Mr. Minh’s hand as he pierced its belly with a bamboo sliver, duplicating the wound that Rau had received at the edge of the bomb crater. Then he cut the belly open as the doctors had done to Rau.

  In the days before the Americans had come, no Rhade had ever suffered that kind of wound and lived until morning. Rau should be dead, but he was being kept alive, his soul a hostage to the doctors who had cut him open. It was Mr. Minh’s responsibility to free him.

  He looked again at the tapestry. War was all there was now, he thought, but no one understood the rules anymore.

  The moon set with the whistle and shudder of outbound gunships.

  The 3rd Mech Headquarters Base at Quang Tri spread across the bulldozed and dusty flatlands like a boomtown. Roads and bridges leading to the base from the surrounding rice paddies and farmland were guarded by Vietnamese regional force militia. They were as ineffective as security guards in an American ghetto, paid poor wages to be afraid for as long as they were on duty. They seemed always to know when any VC terrorists were in the area and would vanish until things were safe again. They were ragged troops who lay smoking Salems in string hammocks beneath the bridges they were supposed to be guarding, Asian bridge trolls in castoff pieces of uniform. They lived in tents, cardboard shacks, sheet-metal lean-tos, and in crumbling French-built concrete pillboxes. They supplemented their wages by charging farmers a duty to cross the bridge, and seemed to be always cooking and eating whenever they weren’t sleeping. When Hanson and Mr. Minh rumbled across the bridge into Quang Tri, the guards barely looked up from their pots and pans.

  Hanson was wearing his trophy-trading outfit: tiger suit, beret, mirror sunglasses, and his folding stock AK-47, a costume designed to impress the rubes at the 3rd Mech camp. He was dressed to get the best price for the war souvenirs he had brought.

  They passed an old French bunker taken over by Americans who had painted DISNEYLAND EAST in three-foot letters along the sides. An aluminum Christmas tree stood on top, and even in the sun, Hanson could see that it had blinking lights. Christmas was less than a month away, and they were already playing Christmas Muzak in the PX in Da Nang, where they had an aluminum Christmas tree that snowed on itself. The trunk of the tree was a piece of aluminum tubing that sucked up bits of plastic snow from the reservoir at the base and blew it out the top with a noise like a vacuum cleaner.

  Special Forces had produced their own Vietnam Christmas card, a painting of three soldiers on ambush with a single bright star, or flare, overhead. But Hanson and Quinn had had their Christmas cards made up in Florida, one of those mail-order places that usually prints group portraits of families with their dogs, posed in the living room near the tree. Their card incorporated a photo of Hanson and Quinn sitting on a pile of dead bodies, eating C-rations, bordered by the traditional holly design, and beneath them the word “Joy.”

  As they drove up to the main gate of the base, Hanson and Mr. Minh made an interesting contrast of energies in the battered, stolen truck. Mr. Minh, tiny, seeming to capture the light around him, wearing blue-black pajamas, a shadow independent of an o
bject. He had been quiet on the trip down to see Rau, and to take care of tribal business with the Rhade who lived near Quang Tri.

  Hanson was big by comparison, his sunglasses and the crest on his beret bright points of silver light, laughing and singing “Eve of Destruction” to himself. He felt good, good and mean. His mouth was a little dry, his skin tingled, and there was a tightness in the V of his ribs. When he felt good and mean he could see, like someone had finally turned on the bright lights, and everything he did seemed to go right, moving as easily as thought. Hanson had been trained to kill, it was the skill of his young life, and when he felt good, part of him wanted to kill something, the way another person might want to jog, or ski, or dance, or pick a fight in a bar.

  At the main gate an MP was reading Playboy in the guardhouse. He was wearing the green triangle 3rd Mech patch on his fatigues. He barely glanced up when Hanson stopped the truck at the gate, then looked back at the magazine. A large sign on the gate stated ALL WEAPONS MUST BE CLEARED PRIOR TO ENTERING BASE.

  Hanson honked the truck’s horn and waited. He honked again, and the MP got up and walked to the gate. He strode out of the guardhouse with a cop’s swagger, his fatigues starched and creased, wearing a white helmet and a .45 at his belt. He was startled for a moment when he looked up and saw the unusual couple in the truck, then slipped back into his attitude of bored irritation.

  “He got an entry pass?” he asked, pointing at Mr. Minh, who was engrossed in studying the contents of his katha.

  “What’s that?” Hanson asked.

  “A fuckin’ entry pass, Jim. No gooks on the base without one.”

  “He’s with me.”

  “He’s gotta have an entry pass. And you better clear that weapon—in fact, you’d better leave it with me. Enemy weapons aren’t authorized on base.”

  “Tell you what,” Hanson said. “You just open the gate and go on back to your research there with the Playboy magazine. He doesn’t have an entry pass, and I’m not gonna clear this weapon, and I’m sure not going to leave it here. People have been trying to kill me, funny thing, ever since I got to this country, so I always have a weapon with me. Why don’t you just open the gate before I have to go down there and do it myself.”

  The MP moved his hand down toward the .45.

  Hanson laughed. “You point that .45 at me,” he said, “and I’ll kill you. I don’t like your looks anyway. You’re just another dipshit Third Mech excuse for a soldier. I’ll kill you and say that you went crazy and tried to shoot me. You know, they’re gonna believe me because you’ll be dead. It’ll be easy for them to believe me. It’ll be simpler to believe me because it won’t involve so much paperwork. Anyway, either pull that gun or open the gate. I don’t feel like fucking around anymore.”

  The MP stood there in the sun, thinking fast, and Hanson raised up in his seat a little, putting his hand on the stock of the submachine gun, the way he might lay his hand on a girl’s thigh, a girl the MP had thought was his.

  The MP opened the gate and stepped aside as Hanson double-clutched the old truck into first and onto the base, a little city of twenty thousand people, hundreds of Quonset huts huddling in the sun. There were barber shops, mess halls, hamburger stands, bars, theaters, and a PX shopping center full of liquor, candy, cameras, tape players, record albums, Playboy magazines, wash ’n’ wear civilian clothes, corn poppers, and battery-powered shoe brushes.

  The hospital had a small wing for Special Forces mercenaries, Yards and Nungs. The staff, American doctors and nurses, watched Hanson and Mr. Minh with curiosity as they walked the hall. They were a strange-looking pair, even in the exotic culture of the war. Hanson enjoyed the impression they made, but Mr. Minh seemed not to notice.

  Rau was strapped to the bed, a plastic tube up his nose, another sprouting from his stomach, draining yellow fluids into a jar beneath the bed, a third dripping clear liquid into his arm from a dangling IV bottle. He was in obvious pain, his eyes full of terror, as if his soul were slipping away through the tubes, the husk of his body kept alive by the indifferent machinery of Western science.

  Hanson had brought Rau a present to cheer him up, a wind-up plastic helicopter. “For you,” he said. “Baby gunship.” But Rau only stared up at the ceiling. Hanson wound the toy up and held it out to him, the stubby plastic blades clicking around. Rau looked past it and Hanson’s smile died, the toy twitching in his hand.

  Mr. Minh sat on the floor and spread out the contents of his katha. Hanson heard the faint sound of the teeth and stones clicking and sliding across the tile floor as he watched jeep and truck traffic through the grenade-screened window, raising red dust out in the sun.

  Three hours later he drove out the main gate and turned onto Highway One headed north, passing a road sign that said SPEED CHECKED BY RADAR. He was alone in the truck, having left Mr. Minh to take care of his tribal obligations.

  He had it all under a tarp in the back of the truck, the stolen truck. Special Forces had a difficult time getting equipment because of the antagonism between them and the rest of the Army, so all the trucks and jeeps at the camp were stolen. Regular Army units often left unoccupied trucks running, and it was simple to get a set of master keys for army vehicles. The 3rd Mech didn’t have time for sustained investigations of stolen trucks in the midst of the war, and the camp was far enough away, isolated in enemy-dominated territory, that no one wanted to go there to look for stolen property.

  Hanson had made a deal with the master sergeant in charge of unloading air-delivered supplies, wholesaling the entire truckload of war trophies to him for the supplies now under the tarp. There were fresh eggs, sirloin steaks, gallon cans of freeze-dried shrimp, steak sauce, milk, canned fruit and vegetables, canned bacon, Louisiana rice, fruit juice, packs of Kool-Aid the size of saddlebags, the perishables all packed in steaming dry ice. He’d gone to the PX for cognac, Chivas Regal, a Jimi Hendrix tape, and another tape Silver had asked for, Bubble Gum Music Is the Ultimate Truth.

  It was noon in northern I-Corps, and Highway One was deserted. Gradually, miles back, the green rice paddies had thinned, dried up, and given way to silver salt flats. The nature of the heat had changed, becoming shrill, almost audible, pitched just above the whine of the truck’s transmission. There were no shadows or shade, the sun burning down past anything in its way, then boiling back up from the salt. Behind the silver sunglass lenses, Hanson’s eyes were pinpricks of black.

  The truck had no roof or windshield, and the road grit collected in ridges below his sunglasses and in the sunburned creases around his neck. The can of 3.2 beer he’d drunk before leaving the base had settled into a flat coppery throb behind his eyes. But he was enjoying the trip, the momentum, feeling out the limits of the rattling truck, pushing her, building time like a shallow curve on a flowchart.

  He rounded a banked curve and saw a small deer, compound fractures gleaming in both delicate hind legs, trying to pull itself upright, its legs collapsing at each attempt, yelping like a dog. The image of the deer appeared and vanished so suddenly around the curve that Hanson could almost believe that he had imagined it.

  At the edge of a small village, the last one before the salt flats took over completely, he saw a child bathing in the shade of a doorway, smooth-skinned and wet, glistening in shadow.

  A moment later he heard the bullet go past, just behind his head. He felt the little snap it made, its own tiny sonic boom, an instant of atmospheric disturbance behind his ear, and he drove on, out of range of the village sniper. He maintained his speed, thinking how he and the bullet had almost collided, shared the same square inch of space twelve thousand miles from the place he had been born, in a burning salt flat where he had come to be that morning through a lifetime of choice and coincidence. He shivered with sunburn, and for a moment the salt flats looked like arctic plains, white sand blowing across the blacktop like snow.

  Up ahead, beside the road, a strange shadow took on depth as he rolled closer, into the smell of dust and motor oi
l and some other thing heavy and sweet for an instant, a pocket of odor. He saw the bodies clearly then, three of them, though it was difficult to sort them out, their arms and legs twined where they lay in a pile: three fat men—the bodies had swollen in the sun—with puffed-out cheeks, their faces covered with black and green bruises, looking as if they were in some hellish wrestling match, their teeth in snarls like dead dogs on the highway.

  The bodies were stiffened and twisted into attitudes of revulsion, at each other and at themselves, arms and hands drawn back and clenched, heads cocked at an angle as if looking away in disgust. They were so swollen, they looked like enormous fat men bursting out of comically tight pajamas. Everybody loves a fat man, Hanson thought.

  And the next instant they were gone, the salt flats ahead pristine again. Hanson looked in the rearview mirror, but all he could see was sand and salt. It puzzled him. There were no villages out that far, no military installations. What had they been doing? Who had killed them? Why? What side were they on? Had it happened at night or in the sunlight? He thought about it for what seemed like a long time. While he was thinking, the rat in the longhouse shuddered and died, and Rau’s breathing stopped while Mr. Minh, walking a dusty road outside Quang Tri, touched his katha.

  A jeep appeared alongside the truck, lurching dangerously, red lights flashing, the Vietnamese driver stiff-arming the horn, a 3rd Mech MP pounding the side of the jeep with one hand and jabbing his finger at the shoulder of the road, his shouts lost in the wind.

  Hanson slowed and pulled the truck bumping to a stop off the road, and the jeep whipped around to a quick stop in front of him. The MP walked back toward the truck, stiff-legged, bent slightly at the waist as though walking against a wind, just a kid trying to look tough. He and Hanson locked stares as he got closer, and the MP’s steps seemed less certain.