He put the rifle scope to his eye and scanned the perimeter. The scope made a tiny whine, like a mosquito near his ear. The scope revealed things in two dimensions only, so the rows of wire and perimeter bunkers seemed to be painted on a curving backdrop.
He laid the rifle in his lap and took a pull of cognac, listening to the ragged rise and fall of the generators and the rumble of faraway artillery. Shadows moved around the teamhouse. He took another slug of the burning liquor and looked up at the stars.
He thought he heard a noise and turned to see Mr. Minh sitting a few yards away, watching him.
“It is a good night,” Mr. Minh said. “You can see all the stars. They are only a short look away tonight.”
It was a warm night, and the moon moved in and out of the few high clouds. Hanson remembered that he’d had the dream the night before, the one about killing the rabbits and goats. Mr. Minh had told him that dreams are as important as things that happen when you are awake. Sometimes they are the same thing. Dreams can be about the past and the future, because everything is always happening at the same time. Dreams can be a memory of the future.
“A long time ago,” Mr. Minh said, “my wife and children were killed. The Vietnamese bombed my village and killed them. They said it was a mistake. I saw the planes coming, but what could I do? A man cannot make the dead live again. They were all KIA,” he said, using the military term for “killed in action,” the term he used for all the dead, no matter how they died.
“So I began to walk,” he said. “I walked for three days and slept at night, places I had never been before. At the end of the third day the night came, but I still kept walking and the earth began to sweat in the dark. The dark began to close up. It was—what is the word for it?”
“The fog?” Hanson asked.
“Yes. Yes, the fog came and made everything seem very far away. I came to a big river I had never been to before. I could not see it with the—the fog, but I could hear it. It sounded like a giant man, a monster breathing in the dark.
“I listened to the river breathing and thought that maybe I would jump in and let the river kill me.
“What could I do? I had no power. I could not stop a plane or bring my wife and children back to life. The fog was very close. It was like being inside a cloud at night. There was nothing but me and the river breathing. We were alone.
“And then I thought, the river does not care if I jump in or if I don’t jump in. It will not even notice if I do. The river is an important man and a busy man. It is too busy being a river and it does not matter to the river how I feel. I was not important to the river.
“What should I do, I thought. The river does not care. Maybe I should live. But I was already too old to care about starting a new family. Should I use rice wine and opium every day the way the Nungs do? That is the same as being dead.
“Maybe I would go crazy, like some have. I cannot farm anymore. I cannot live by hunting. The Vietnamese and the war stopped the hunting. I cannot be a husband or a father anymore. I thought, why should I go to bed at night and wake up in the morning?
“I sat down and listened to the river and it told me. I can fight. I can kill Vietnamese. So that is what I do now. I am like a good farmer or a good hunter, but what I do is kill Vietnamese. It is all there is now,” he said. “It is my work. A man can live if he has work to do.”
Hanson realized that there were fireflies in the air around him, pulsing like lazy yellow eyes. He couldn’t remember ever having seen fireflies in Vietnam before.
MAI LOC LAUNCH SITE
The night before the ground attack, Hanson saw strange lights to the north, glowing blues and greens just above the horizon, some kind of electrical storm, he supposed. And Hose was acting stranger than usual.
Later that night the five enlisted men who had been assigned to work with Grieson on the new commo system had come to the teamhouse for the first time. One of them looked in the door and smiled. He had a chipped tooth.
“Uh, hi,” he said. “We were wondering if we could buy a few beers from you guys.”
Quinn was working over his web gear. He looked up and glared at the five soldiers with the green 3rd Mech patch. “Technicians,” he muttered, and went back to his web gear, saying, “ ‘You guys,’ ” mocking the soldier’s East Coast accent.
Hanson looked at the soldiers, looked back at Quinn, and grinned. “Oh, gosh, pardon me,” he said. “Is it all right with you, Sergeant Quinn, sir, to sell these young servicemen a beer?”
Quinn ignored him.
“Come on in,” Hanson said. “Pay no attention to that bad person over there. Have a beer. First one is on Sergeant Quinn,” he said, marking five checks next to Quinn’s name on the team roster.
“I hear you,” Quinn said, not looking up from his work. “You’re feeling real froggy tonight. But I ain’t gonna let you get me goin’. Yet.”
Hanson took an armload of beer cans out of the battered refrigerator and set them on the bar. “Allow me to open them for you,” he said. “A courtesy. A small gesture of interservice fraternity.”
He opened one for himself. “A toast,” he said, “to you, the men of Mister Grieson and his magic radio work.
“Yes, just ignore mean Sergeant Quinn over there. I’m more representative of the young NCO you’ll find in the elite corps of Green Berets, the well-known fighting soldiers from the sky.”
Dawson laughed.
“Easy derision, racist laughter,” Hanson said. “Pay him no mind. That’s Dawson, our Afro-American NCO. Up for a visit from Da Nang.”
“Han-sun, I don’t know who you a representative of. I ain’t seen any more like you. I believe you had yourself a little taste of that army-issue speed for dessert, you so froggy tonight.”
“No, that’s not it, Sergeant. I never touch that dangerous drug. What it is,” Hanson said, creeping around the bar, walking in a crouch toward Dawson, “is that I’m worried that Charles is sneakin’ around out there in the dark, sneakin’, sneakin’ to get you before you leave, talking in his inscrutable gook language, ‘ching-chang, yip yip, gettee buffalo soldier…’ ”
“I’m liable to shoot somebody like that,” Dawson said, picking up a Thompson submachine gun and pulling the bolt back.
Hanson laughed and backed his way to the bar. “You see,” he said to the soldiers, “Dawson’s going back home tomorrow, ‘back to the world,’ as they say, after two tours. He just came up for a visit, see if he could kill a couple more people before he goes.”
Dawson laughed. “I had to see you people before I left.”
“Anyway, Silver bet him a case of beer that the camp would get hit before he left—that mystery battalion out there we’ve been getting some intel on.
“Mystery battalion, mystery battalion,” he sang to himself.
“Hey,” he said to the 3rd Mech technician, “how’d you break that tooth?”
“Playing cricket,” he said. “Really. I lived in England for five years. Cricket. Funny game.”
“How much longer till you guys get all the right lights to blink over there in that green mobile home?” Hanson asked him.
“Couple days. Couple of weeks. Who knows? It’s the humidity here. They designed the damn thing in a lab somewhere, controlled atmospheric conditions, and they expect it to work over here. And they say it’s ‘air droppable.’ A good kick against the door blows circuits.”
The “green mobile home” was a highly classified air-conditioned, humidity-controlled radio room that had been shipped as a single unit. It was part of a complex airborne and ground electronic network to be used to locate enemy troop concentrations so that air strikes or artillery could be used against them. It was part of the “Vietnamization” effort to replace U.S. troops with machines so the war could be turned over to the Vietnamese. It was designed to replace recon units, like Hanson’s, who patrolled enemy-controlled areas in the hope of discovering enemy units, a strategy Quinn referred to as stomping through the bushes until
you step in shit.
“How do you like working for Grieson?” Hanson asked, and Quinn even looked up from his work at that.
The soldiers looked at the ceiling, then looked at each other. One smiled, shaking his head. The kid with the chipped tooth glanced toward the door and, lowering his voice, said, “If he’d just leave us alone, we could get the work done a lot quicker—”
“But the son of a bitch couldn’t do that now,” another one of the five interrupted, “could he? I’m so sick of listening to that phony fuck tell us how great he is…He doesn’t know anything about that unit out there.”
The kid with the chipped tooth laughed. “That’s Pierce,” he said, nodding at the other soldier. “He knows what he’s doing out there and he makes Grieson look bad.”
“Hey,” Quinn said, looking up from his gear. The five soldiers looked quickly over at him.
“When I was down in Da Nang, I heard that Grieson got relieved down there because too much of his information was bullshit. A couple of recon teams got shot up because of it. How about that?”
“Yeah,” the one named Pierce said. “That’s what a couple of my buddies down there told me.”
“Hey, Dawson,” Quinn said. “What time is it?”
“Gettin’ on toward ten,” he said. “That’s close enough to midnight, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, let’s break out that case of beer.”
More beer was passed out, and Hanson asked the kid with the chipped tooth, “How’d you end up here?”
“Like I said, I was over in England. In school at first—I’m a rich kid. Then I started bumming around, and my draft notice caught up to me.”
“But what are you doing here? In ’Nam. How bad did you have to fuck up to get sent over here?”
He laughed. “I volunteered. See, you’ve never been an electronics repairman at Fort Bliss, so you can’t know. You sit in a little room all day. There was a neon light over my desk that made a high little hum like a bug. I was going nuts trying to look busy under that light. The damn thing flickered, like it had an electrical tic. I tried to kill time debating things with myself like the, uh, relative merits of two different kinds of radarscope image configurations.
“So I decided to come to Vietnam. You know, does it really look like the six-thirty news? My generation’s war. If I ever have any grandchildren I can tell them I was here.”
They drank in silence for a few minutes. Then Hanson looked up at the ceiling and said in a monotone, “Uh, this is Defcon, Body Count.”
Quinn was polishing the bolt of his Swedish “K.”
“Body Count, this is Defcon, do you copy, over.”
Still polishing the bolt, Quinn said, “Uh, roger-roger Defcon, I copy five-by-five, over.”
“What is our situation here, Body Count? Do we have max H&I concentrations this location? Are we operational? Please confirm.”
“That is most affirmed. Max H and I. Fire Base Bruise and Peggy Lee on call with selected ordnance to include Willy Pete, HE, uh, photo-flash, flare, BLU-10 Brave Firecracker, and nonpersistent CN nausea, and smoke. One-oh-fives, one-five-fives, and eight inch.”
“Uh, roger, Body Count. Have you made contact with Colonel Fang’s phantom battalion—the mystery battalion—and, if so, have you deployed as planned, Op-plan Blue Tango?”
“That is most affirmed, Defcon.”
“Real fine, Body Count. We have the Grieson mobile home here, calibrated with blinking lights. You may anticipate max saturation, your location.”
“Roger that, Defcon,” Quinn said.
Then Silver, who was standing just inside the door, said, “Uh, roger-roger. We have the ordnance, the technology, and, Body Count and Defcon, we have the motivation. Good fortune surrounds us.” Then he hissed through his teeth, sounding like radio static.
“Ah, good fortune,” he said, walking toward the refrigerator, where he got a beer. He took a sip, then said, “Hey, Commander Hanson, lemme borrow your tin whistle.”
Hanson walked to his footlocker, took the tin whistle out of his pack, and gave it to Silver.
Silver sat down on a rope-handled ammo crate on which black words were stenciled across the raw wood: PROJECTILES/HE/105—LOT 177321. He bent his head, paused, then began to play, a slow, frail piping that seemed to confirm the possibility of joy while rejecting it, sad, and so eerie that Quinn stopped polishing the machine-gun bolt and looked up.
When Silver had finished the piece, the kid with the chipped tooth said, “ ‘Banish Misfortune.’ I haven’t heard that in a long time. Stay where you are,” he said. “I’ll be right back,” rushing out the door.
“Couldn’t sleep,” Silver said. “Figured I ought to come up and have one of the beers I’m gonna win from Dawson. Shit, I got radio watch in an hour or so.”
The kid came banging back through the screen door. “Now,” he said, “sure the beer is fine, but I happen to have this bottle of Irish”—setting a green Bushmill’s bottle on the bar—“and,” he said, a little out of breath, “I happen to have this,” and he pulled a dulcimer from beneath his arm.
“First,” he said, holding up one finger, “a taste of the Irish.”
They passed the bottle around and drank from it.
“And now, sir,” the kid said to Silver, “would you happen to know a little air, a favorite of mine, ‘Sir John Fenwick was the flower of them all’?”
Silver nodded his head, smiled, and they began to play together, the dulcimer, the tin whistle, and the song about a knight who was brave and thoughtful and honest, gentle and kind enough to be remembered as the Flower of Them All. The teamhouse was silent for the music. Quinn looked up from his gear, his cold little eyes almost thoughtful.
When they’d finished the song they passed the bottle around until it was empty.
The kid with the chipped tooth said, “Thanks for the hospitality,” as he and the other four got up to leave.
“Not at all,” Hanson said.
“Our pleasure,” Silver said. “See you tomorrow.”
Dawson smiled and said, “Later,” and even Quinn nodded and said, “Yeah.”
After they left, Quinn said, “Fuckin’ Third Mech radio plumbers. Shit!” He was walking to the refrigerator to get another beer when they heard a whining and snuffling at the door.
“Hose,” Quinn said, “come on in and have a beer.” While he looked for Hose’s beer bowl, Silver walked over and opened the screen door.
Hose swaggered in, his head held high, carrying an arm in his teeth.
“Jesus!” Silver said, shocked in spite of himself. The other three froze for a second, then Quinn said, “Come and get it, Bud,” setting the bowl of beer down on the floor.
The dog dropped the arm, walked over to the bowl, and began lapping up the Carling’s Red Label.
“It’s a gook,” Silver said, crouching next to the arm. It had been blown off at the shoulder, but the force of the explosion had driven the fabric of the fatigue shirt into the flesh, so the arm was clothed in a khaki sleeve. The fingers were dirty and clenched, but untouched. Only the ragged shoulder was bloody.
“What’s that insignia?” Hanson asked. “I’ve never seen that.”
There was a red circle patch on the shoulder of the shirt sleeve.
Quinn knelt to look. “A sun?” he said. “A red sun?”
“Fuck,” Silver said, “let’s get that mother out of here, over the first row of wire, anyway. We can send it down to Da Nang in the morning. I mean,” he said, beginning to laugh, “I don’t want that fucking thing in here while I’m on radio watch.”
Hanson picked up the arm by the sleeve and carried it out the door. It was heavy and it flexed at the elbow as he walked to the inner perimeter wire.
He slung it over the first row of concertina wire, and as he watched it arc heavily away, the clenched fist opened into a reaching hand, the tendons in the arm having been loosened by the force of the throw.
It was almost 2 A.M. when it started to ra
in. The sappers, wearing only loincloths in order to slip through the wire more easily, pushed long bamboo tubes ahead of them. The bamboo was filled with explosive and would blow paths through the wire for the assault troops.
The sappers had covered themselves with ash so they would not reflect light, and it gave them a ghostly appearance. In their loincloths they carried foot-long sections of engineer stakes and short lengths of wire with loops twisted in both ends. As they slithered through the wire, they used the sections of engineer stakes to prop up the tanglefoot wire so they could crawl under it. When they came to the coils of concertina, they hooked one looped end of the wire they carried to a section of concertina, then pulled it back and hooked the other end to another section, parting the concertina wide enough to crawl through. Freckles of blood began to appear through the ash as they nicked and cut themselves on the wire.
They moved very slowly, feeling ahead of them for trip flares and claymore mines. They turned the mines around so that they faced the camp even though they themselves would be in the camp if the mines were fired. When they came to pebble-filled beer cans that were hung on the wire as noisemakers, they simply dropped in a handful of dirt to muffle them. The North Vietnamese sappers were brave soldiers who were very good at a dangerous job. An elbow or ankle could trip a flare, ruin the attack, and ensure their deaths in the bubbling smoking silver light of the magnesium flares.
Once the sappers had the bamboo charges in place, they entered the camp and began throwing satchel charges into bunkers. Others detonated the lengths of bamboo, and the assault troops poured through the wire, some of them dragging small trees, like Christmas trees, behind them. There was a satchel charge tied to the peak of each tree, and the troops jammed the trees, peak first, down the entrances of perimeter bunkers. The Montagnard troops in the perimeter bunkers could not push the trees out before the charge went off, the tree branches jamming the narrow bunker entrance like a plug.
Sympathy for the Devil Page 33
