Silver sat with the fat earphones on, glaring up at the TV across the room and at Grieson, who laughed at all the jokes. Silver watched the leggy hillbilly girls and the fat men in overalls popping up and down in the crepe paper cornfield. He watched Buck Owens strum his red-white-and-blue guitar. Finally, he took off his earphones and said, “I hate that phony hillbilly shit.”
“Tough,” Grieson said, never taking his eyes off the screen.
On the TV a hillbilly in a straw hat said, “Marriage? Sure I believe in marriage.”
“How much did you pay for the TV?” Silver asked Grieson.
“Without marriage,” the hillbilly said, “husbands and wives would have to fight with perfect strangers.”
When he’d stopped laughing, Grieson looked at Silver and said, “I paid two-fifty. A good deal.
“And it’s American-made,” he added.
Silver walked out of the teamhouse followed by a burst of tinny laughter from the TV.
He came back a few minutes later with a wad of MPC, military pay certificates, in his hand. It was often called funny money, miniature bills of different colors bearing pictures of tanks, submarines, and jet fighters on their faces, like currency for some violent board game.
Silver began counting the bills out on the bar, mumbling to himself as he stacked them. When he was through, he aligned the edges of the bills by tapping them on the edge of the bar.
Grieson was pointedly not paying attention to Silver’s performance.
Buck Owens was sitting in a barber chair on the TV, and the barber asked him, “Have you changed much since you graduated from high school?”
Silver thumbed the edges of the bills and looked at the TV.
“No, I haven’t changed a bit,” Buck Owens said.
“Not a bit? Are you sure?” the barber asked him.
“Heck no, I just graduated last month.”
“You’re right,” Silver said, walking over and dropping the stack of bills in Grieson’s lap. “Two-fifty is a good deal.”
Buck Owens and the barber vanished. The TV twitched, rocked, and began swinging on its shelf, spewing gray smoke and silver dust. A tracery of blue fire played about the set as the screen imploded, turning white, then black again. The explosion that ended the “Hee-Haw” show and sent everyone in the teamhouse to the floor, reaching for their M-16s, left Hanson with an angry chirping in his ears, the sound of an overflight of vicious birds.
As they all looked up from the floor, Silver slowly lowered the big .45 in his hand, his voice sounding synthesized through the whine in Hanson’s ears.
“At ease, everyone. At ease,” he said as he holstered the pistol and walked out the door.
Hanson went through the agent reports and the top-secret radio-intercept logs, the daily intelligence logs, and the results of airborne radio monitors, then finally decided, on a hunch, to go south, to where the hills dropped off into the river valley.
In the absence of Mr. Minh, Hanson planned to take Sergeant Major’s four Nung bodyguards along. Sergeant Major had sent them up from Da Nang for a little time out in the field to keep them sharp and mean.
As far as Hanson could tell, the Nungs were as close to being evil as a human being could be. They were Chinese mercenaries, loyal to Sergeant Major. They enjoyed hurting people. Or any living thing. They thought it was funny to shoot water buffalo to pieces in free-fire zones. But they were effective.
The Korean Marines were brutal too. The United States hired the Koreans to do the jobs Americans couldn’t get away with, paid them four times what they would have made in their own country, plus all they could buy from the PX and sell on the black market, doubling and tripling their income.
The Koreans would sweep through a village and kill everything in it—men, women, children, pigs, dogs, buffalo, chickens, everything—then burn what was left to the ground. The smoke from the village would carry the smell of burning straw, rice, meat, and kerosene on the wind. And the American Military Command could say that the Koreans, our allies, had done it, not Americans, because Americans deplore such actions. Of course, the Koreans had been sent to the village by the American command because the Americans wanted the village wiped out.
But the Koreans were mere hired thugs, fraternity boys following orders, compared to the Nungs. The Nungs were as brutal as the weather, as a heart attack shooting up your arm. Once when Hanson had not been long in-country, he had stopped them from cutting the throat of a dying Vietcong who had shot at them from the edge of a village. The Vietcong was a middle-aged Vietnamese with a fist-sized goiter on the side of his neck. His old Springfield rifle was held to its stock with wraps of wire, and he had only two bullets for it. Hanson had felt like a boy trying to stop farmers from bleeding a pig. The Nungs just looked at him, puzzled, and the VC died of his wounds there on the dirt in front of them.
The Nungs were as normal as the war around them, and Hanson came to admire the way they got the job done. Some of them shot up a mixture of opium dissolved in rice wine when they were in camp and things were slow, but it didn’t seem to blunt their effectiveness out on operation.
It was hot that first day out. The dry elephant grass hissed and left a fine brown dust as they moved through it, its sharp edges cutting their forearms and faces, sweat making the cuts sting and washing the blood off their skin.
Sweat stung Hanson’s eyes, and dust from the elephant grass tickled his nose. His face was a tight mask of sunburn and grit.
The Nungs in their black pajamas moved through the heat like shadows or hallucinations in Hanson’s peripheral vision.
Hanson could feel the small compass he wore on a chain around his neck. As he moved, it tapped his chest lightly just above his heart. He didn’t wear dog tags, not caring if his dead body was ever identified or not, didn’t like the clicking pieces of metal at his throat like stamped zinc tags of ownership.
They crossed an open pasturelike area two at a time, the only way to do it. There was no safe way. As Hanson watched, squinting against the sun, looking for movement in the tree line beyond the clearing, the first two Nungs, one on each flank, moved across the clearing like black thoughts. Hanson, then Silver, crossed, each paired with a Nung. The two Americans didn’t go across together because if one of them got hit, the other would have to coordinate gunships and medivacs on the radio.
Earlier that morning they’d had to hide from a group of women and buffalo boys who were collecting herbs. Hanson had felt at first foolish, then annoyed, and finally grimly amused at the possibility of a water buffalo stepping on him where he hid. The bandy-legged women had chattered happily and smoked their acrid pipes. It was a situation that had never been covered in the classes on patrolling back at Fort Bragg. Had they been seen, they would have had to abort the operation. Hanson was worried that the Nungs might decide to kill the women and boys, and the operation wasn’t important enough for that.
They had all crossed the pasture and were edging through a stand of dead reeds, taller than a man, growing out of baked and broken mud, when they heard a voice. Part of a word. They froze and waited, listening, the smell of reeds around them like a cornfield. Hanson shifted his weight, and the shards of dried mud broke underfoot like rotten tile.
He saw the two khaki-uniformed men for an instant before they faded into the reeds. Hanson, Silver, and the Nungs crashed through the weeds after them, firing twenty-round clips of ammunition. The muzzle blasts from the weapons rippled the hot air with superheated gas roiling with dust, brown flakes of reed and red dust pulsing with concussions that Hanson could feel on his face and chest.
The two men vanished. They were able to track them for a short distance through the dust and dry grass, but the trail disappeared. Silver found a Ho Chi Minh sandal, the sole cut out of a U.S. Army truck tire, the straps from pieces of inner tube made in Akron, Ohio.
One of the Nungs spotted a khaki shadow slipping through the tan grass at the base of a hill but lost sight of it. At the base of the hill th
ey got on-line and walked slowly, parting the grass with the barrels of their rifles. They found something that looked like an animal burrow, then discovered that the size of the opening was concealed by grass. After checking for trip wires, Hanson knelt at the edge of the tunnel. The faint stink of humans hung at its mouth. Silver called the camp and plotted some 105 artillery in case they ran into more than they could handle alone.
Hanson told Quan, a Nung whose forearms were mottled with sores from shooting opium and rice wine, to call for anyone in the tunnel to surrender.
“They will not come out, sir,” he said to Hanson.
“Try it anyway. Maybe they will. We’ll get a week’s R and R in China Beach for a prisoner.”
“They will not come out,” he said again. “We have to kill them, I think.”
“Just try it, okay? Tell them that we will not hurt them if they come out.”
“I’ve seen this movie,” Silver said. “Come out with your hands empty, Scarface,” he said, imitating Humphrey Bogart. “Yeah, the party’s over. Give it up. Your mother’s here. We flew her out from the nursing home in Cleveland. Your mom doesn’t want you to take the big sleep.”
“Tell ’em to come out, Quan,” Hanson said again.
The Nung crouched to one side of the hole and began to shout, but Hanson knew he wasn’t telling them to come out. Quan didn’t want to fuck around with prisoners. He knew he wouldn’t get the trip to China Beach anyway, only Hanson and Silver would.
Quan looked up at Hanson. “I tell you, sir. They will not come out.”
“Try again.”
Quan shrugged and yelled some more.
Hanson took a concussion grenade from his harness and looked at Silver. “You know we’re gonna have to smoke ’em,” he said. “Quan’s probably told them we’re gonna cut off their balls and tear their hearts out.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know about you,” Silver said, “but I don’t want to go down in there until we’ve Osterized the fuckers. I’m gonna want ’em pureed before Mrs. Silver’s boy goes down there in a hole in the ground.”
Hanson pulled the pin on the grenade and spun it into the hole. Four seconds later the ground shuddered beneath their feet and dust drifted from the hole, its edges collapsing inward, enlarging. Hanson and Silver stood looking down into the darkness. They threw in fragmentation grenades.
Hanson dropped his pack and rummaged through it, pulling out a stick of plastic explosive. He pulled it in half like a piece of bread dough, lit the end of one piece with a match, and threw it into the tunnel. The flame flickered, grew, then enveloped the fist-sized piece of explosive. The yellow flame turned blue, and beneath the nimbus of flame, the explosive blistered and glowed black and red, revealing a narrow smoky tunnel. Fresh shrapnel glittered like silver where it was embedded in the walls. Silver looked at Hanson. Hanson shrugged and said, “Might as well take a look.”
Two of the Nungs stayed on the surface to watch for anyone who might try to escape from other tunnel exits. Hanson eased himself into the tunnel, the short-barreled submachine gun in one hand, a red-lens flashlight in the other. Quan and another Nung followed, and Silver went in last. Moving through the tunnel was like reaching into a hole and feeling for a snake. Exposed roots pulled at Hanson’s shirt as the walls of the tunnel turned, turned back, then opened out into a room.
The air was alive with gossamer creatures. Hanson felt them settle on his cheeks, then. jump off. They walked across the backs of his hands. He felt one in his lips and spit it out. Breathing through his nose, he wiped them away from his nostrils. One as big as a hand landed on his neck and he snatched it away, slapping his hand savagely against his thigh to kill it. They weren’t stinging, so he tried to concentrate on the darkness in front of him.
He thought he saw movement and fired a twenty-round clip. He turned off the light and hugged the floor, worried as much about getting hit by fire from the Nungs behind him as anything ahead.
He was right to be worried. Fire from behind snapped over him like deafening bursts of static in the smoky, dusty, dirt-floored chamber. It illuminated the room like strobe lights, making it difficult to tell what was movement and what was only flickering shadow. As he reached out, low-crawling, his hand sank into something warm and wet. He jerked his hand out and began beating at whatever it was he’d touched, smashing it with the metal stock of his submachine gun. In the yellow and blue flash of automatic fire it absorbed the blows like a tar baby. Then the green tracers flickered out and stopped. The red ones stopped, and all he could hear was the ringing in his ears.
With the flashlight he found a kerosene lamp and lit it. As they adjusted the flame, bodies took shape in the dark. Hanson spun around at the sound of a burst of fire and saw Quan standing over a corpse. There were bodies, parts of bodies, and bloody puddles of mud on the dirt floor of what Hanson realized must have been a small field hospital. His ears rang and buzzed from the gunfire and his eyes stung. He licked his lips, tasting dust and explosive.
Shards of parachute nylon purled and sideslipped in the dusty, reeking air. The earthen walls and roof of the room had been covered with parachute panels, and the grenades had shredded them. Greenish-red tendrils of the cloth hung from the ceiling, undulating like kelp, stroking and tickling Hanson’s ears and neck.
He backed into a bunk wedged in one corner of the room and turned to find himself looking at an emaciated corpse. But the corpse was still alive. He was so frail that he must have been in the hospital for TB or malaria, but he was riddled with fresh shrapnel wounds from the grenades. One of his legs was almost severed, white shards of bone catching the light. He was dying, glaring up at Hanson from beneath one propped-up arm. He worked his mouth, to speak or to spit at Hanson, but he could do neither.
As a reflex, Hanson held eye contact with him, trying to stare him down, feeling foolish and ashamed of himself but unable to look away. The soldier seemed to grow more powerful, taking Hanson over, taking control. He was dying and had nothing to lose anymore. Then, somehow, Hanson began to accept whatever it was in the soldier’s eyes. It was not anger or hate that poured into him from those black eyes, but a kind of neutral strength that filled Hanson with energy, like deep breaths of pure oxygen.
And then the soldier died, and it was as if Hanson had to have taken whatever it was boring into him from those eyes before the soldier was able to die. A tiny sigh escaped the soldier as he passed on to death, and he and Hanson were, for a moment, alone somewhere—in space, in the desert, drifting on the ocean. Hanson could see himself watching the last light leave the soldier’s eyes, deaf to any sound in the room because of the wail and chatter in his ears. His nose and throat burned with dust and gunsmoke, rubbing alcohol, high explosive and urine, blood and sweat. Everything but the soldier’s eyes seemed out of focus until they went dark and flat, and then Hanson turned away, his heart pounding with murder and joy. In the yellow light he saw Quan watching him, smiling.
They smashed the shelves of medicine and stripped the bodies of valuables. Silver found a Chinese copy of a Walther PPK on one of the bodies, a pistol that would be worth a thousand dollars in Da Nang.
“I can see it in the hometown paper now,” Silver said as he went through the pockets of a dead nurse. “Green Berets attack hospital. No mercy. Turn hospital into morgue…no, into charnel house. That’s it. That’s the word they’d use.
“Jesus,” he said, “this looks like a cave-in at the hillside butcher shop.”
It was late in the day when they got back to the launch site. “Okay,” Hanson said into the radio handset, looking down at the camp from just inside the tree line, “we’re coming into camp from the banana patch out here. Gonna pop a little smoke so you know it’s us.”
“Pop it,” Grieson’s voice said over the radio.
Hanson pulled the pin from an olive drab canister, the size and shape of a beer can, labeled in stark black letters, M-1 A-1 SMOKE/PURPLE. He side-armed it out into the clear killing zone that ringed the
camp like a moat. The spring-loaded fuse snapped shut with a soft pop. Hanson held the ring and cotter pin he had pulled, spinning it on his finger as thick purple smoke began to billow, blowing back into the green jungle. He liked the purple and green together, like a landscape from another world.
“I identify purple smoke,” Grieson said.
“Grape smoke, you got it. Goofy grape,” Hanson said. “We’re comin’ on in then.”
“Come on in.”
“I’m gonna kill that fucking Grieson,” Silver said.
They had a John Wayne movie that night, a Western. John Wayne was a hit with the Montagnards because he wore a Montagnard tribal bracelet that he had been given while filming The Green Berets a few years before. Whenever the Apache Indians rode across the screen, the Yards shouted, “VC! VC!”
Grieson was the projectionist. He’d hung a sheet across a line on the teamhouse patio for a screen. The Cinemascope lens was held onto the projector with a piece of string, and at times it would slip, turning the people on the screen fat and skinny, like a funhouse mirror.
The lights came on at the end of the movie, and the image of a cabin shaded by a live oak faded from the bedsheet screen. Hanson left the patio, where Quan staggered past him, muttering to himself, and walked to the ammo shed where his gear was stored.
Rope-handled ammo crates lined the walls of the shed, some of them broken open to the dull sheen of grenades, mortar rounds, and linked fifty-caliber ammunition. It was cooler sleeping in the ammo shed than it was down in a bunker. Sometimes there was a breeze. And he liked to sleep surrounded by the explosives. He felt safe there.
He took the heavy-barreled M-14 with the starlight scope off the wall, picked up a green bottle of cognac, and started out the door. He stopped, went back for his web gear, and slung it over his shoulder, then walked across the dark camp and sat down on the sandbags around one of the heavy mortars. The big mortar tube was down in a concrete pit, set in the center of concentric circles, painted aiming arcs. Clusters of aiming stakes were driven into the ground at the edge of the pit. It looked like the site of an exotic religion or a ritual sacrifice.
Sympathy for the Devil Page 32
