Sympathy for the Devil

by Kent Anderson

  Mr. Minh pulled a blade of grass from the ground, breathed on it, and the chicken’s heart hesitated, quivered, and stopped dead.

  A gray dawn rose with the sound of artillery.

  CONFIDENTIAL

  021502 BS 987602 SENSOR INDICATED MOVEMENT IN AREA. ENGAGED W/50 ROUNDS 175 ARTILLERY. MOVEMENT CEASED. A/4-21 CHECKED AREA AT FIRST LIGHT, FOUND ONE NVA UNIFORM, ONE PAIR OF US FATIGUE PANTS, AND SOME HUMAN INTERNAL ORGANS LYING ON THE GROUND. THE UNIFORM AND PANTS WERE EVACUATED TO HQ INTELLIGENCE.

  SECURITY CLASSIFICATION TO BE DOWNGRADED AT SEVEN-YEAR INTERVALS.

  CONFIDENTIAL

  FROM THE DAILY INTELLIGENCE BULLETIN OF THE 3RD INFANTRY BRIGADE (MECHANIZED)

  At 8 A.M. the thirty officers in the air-conditioned briefing room talked and laughed like students before the beginning of class. The room was long and narrow, like a small movie theater, with a raised stage at one end. A podium stood at the right side of the stage, and the wall at the back of the stage was partly covered by a large window shade with the word SECRET painted across its face.

  The walls were paneled with shellacked plywood, and plaques hung along the walls, bearing the crests of the sub-units in the brigade, cartoonlike paintings of dangerous animals—tigers, dragons, coiled snakes—and clumsy Latin phrases that declared such things as “Never Falter,” and “All the Way.”

  Two strange totems flanked the stage. The one on the left looked like a brass cigarette urn, the kind you see in hotels, filled with sand. It was a 175-millimeter artillery shell, engraved with the words “50,000th round fired by the 1st Artillery, 3rd Infantry Brigade (Mech).” The shell gleamed in the light from the stage. A thirty-two-year-old staff sergeant polished it twice a day.

  The totem on the right appeared to be a giant green carrot, two feet long, with green plastic leaves sprouting from its base. It was a sensor that could pick up vibrations in the ground. Dropped from a helicopter, it stuck into the ground like a fat dart and gave off radio signals if anything moved nearby. Quang Tri fire base would then bracket the area with artillery fire and send out a unit to sweep the area. They rarely found anything but craters and sometimes pieces of the sensor. The sensors, however, had a reputation for being effective. This was because whenever they indicated movement in an area and artillery was fired, the indications of movement ceased. No one ever mentioned that often this was because the sensor had been destroyed by the artillery fire. The fact that there were no bodies found after the fire mission would be explained by the enemy’s practice of removing any bodies to frustrate American body counts. The 3rd Mech got around that by estimating how many were probably killed. It was very scientifically done with mathematical tables and flowcharts.

  A lieutenant at the stage door gave a signal, and the talking and laughing stopped. A moment later the lieutenant announced, “Gentlemen, the commanding general.”

  General Frederic Hart entered the room. He had command presence, the kind of charisma that some movie stars and politicians have. He was a handsome man with silver-gray hair who could have been cast in a movie as a general. He looked over the officers who had snapped to attention as he entered the room, then nodded his head, smiled slightly, and said, “Good morning, gentlemen. Please take your seats.”

  As the general sat down in his leather chair in the center of the front row, the rest of the room sat, just half a beat behind him, hitting their chairs in unison.

  “Good morning, sir,” Major Long began, standing behind the podium, while his assistant, Staff Sergeant Martin, stood at attention with a pointer that was tipped by a .50-caliber bullet.

  “Good morning, Major,” the general said. “Gentlemen,” he said, turning his head slightly to indicate the room full of officers behind him, “let’s begin.”

  Sergeant Martin raised the “Secret” map cover and pulled down the first of the transparent overlays. As the daily briefing continued, he pulled down others. One overlay illustrated enemy positions, another showed friendly positions, others portrayed “incidents” and “contacts.” The symbols, flags, boxes, and arrows were drawn in fluorescent grease pencil and glowed beneath an ultraviolet light. The light gave a slight purple tint to Major Long’s short blond hair, like a matron’s blue rinse.

  The major and Sergeant Martin had choreographed and rehearsed their briefing in the dark hours of early morning. Their presentations were always sharp, military performances. Each time the major indicated a location, saying, “Sir, at this location, sir…” Sergeant Martin would slap the pointer against the correct plastic overlay without appearing to look, making an audible snap with the pointer. They moved from situation to prediction, cataloging data and options with the rhythm and timing of TV weathermen.

  Meanwhile the rest of the officers listened—listened aggressively, eyes narrowed, jaws thrust forward, as though the major knew what he was talking about, as though it was the real goddamn thing, as though it mattered. All the while they mentally rehearsed difficult questions and satisfactory answers for the general, should he call on them.

  “Up there in the northeast,” the general said. “Captain Spike’s AO. What’s the situation there?”

  “Sir. The Bang Son Delta region reports very little verifiable enemy activity for the past two weeks. The 242-D Sapper Battalion appears to have relocated to the south.”

  “Paul,” the general said, looking at the map.

  “Yes sir,” Captain Spike said, standing up from one of the folding chairs behind the general.

  “Do you have anything to add to that?”

  “No sir. It’s been quiet lately. We haven’t been mortared in ten days. I think we’ve got the AO under control.”

  “It’s been my experience,” the general said, “that when the enemy stops harassing you, it means that they’re comfortable with your presence. That you’re not hurting them. If I were in command up there, I’d question whether my patrolling was aggressive enough.”

  “Yes sir.”

  A smile appeared in the general’s eyes. You have to keep these new captains on their toes, he thought. Had the camp been mortared, the general would have asked why Captain Spike’s patrols could not prevent it.

  “Major Long,” the general said, “that battalion up there by the DMZ, the Three Eighteenth…”

  “Yes sir.”

  Snap.

  “Now, Bill, is that the Three Eighteenth, or is it the People’s Red Moon Battalion, as you had it identified last week? What kind of unit is it? What’s its mission? What are its organic weapons? What is its name?”

  “Sir, we don’t know for certain at this time, sir. The only information we have comes from radio intercepts. It may be a combined unit, a different unit entirely, or the unit may simply have changed its nominal designation.”

  “Are they the unit that ambushed our people on the fourteenth?”

  “We don’t know yet, sir.”

  “Let’s find out, Major.”

  “Yes sir,” the major said. For the first time he was aware of a faint chirping in the air-conditioner. He made a mental note to have it fixed.

  General Hart sat at his desk looking out the window of his trailer. A silver cargo plane was taking off in the distance and the heat made it look as if it were warped, bent in the middle.

  One of the pictures on his desk was of his daughter at her high school graduation. She was at an expensive Eastern college now, and refused to answer his letters. It must be tough, he thought, to be the daughter of a general these days. He recalled a night, years before, when he’d tucked her into bed, then gone back downstairs to work on some sort of feasibility study. He’d almost gone back up to kiss her good night, hesitated at the bottom of the stairs, then decided against it, glad that no one would know how indecisive he had been over such a foolish thing. He wished now that he’d gone back and kissed her. Not that it would have made any difference in how she felt about him now. He just wished that he’d done it.

  He looked out the window at the rows of tanks and APCs and
slowly shook his head. This was no war for tanks. The terrain was all wrong. They bogged down in the Delta, and in the rolling hills of the highlands the unmuffled roar of the twin diesels gave the enemy a half-hour’s warning before they arrived. A heavy machine-gun bullet could pierce their light armor and ricochet through the tank like a red-hot hornet.

  So all the troops rode on top of the tanks except the driver, who knew that if they hit a mine he would, at the very least, lose his legs. He sat with his shoulders and head outside the hatch, his legs and groin tingling each time they went up a new trail. The tanks heaved on their suspension like powerboats in rough water, chasing men in sandals made out of Goodyear truck tires that left tread marks in the mud, little men carrying plastic bags of rice and grenades made out of mackerel cans. Chasing them with million-dollar Sheridan tanks that fired 150-millimeter guns aimed by electronic sights that rarely worked because of their complexity, the humidity, and the jarring recoil of the big gun. One of the shells weighed as much as a Vietcong soldier.

  The tanks and APCs were worse than useless in the fluid jungle war, but if the military had equipment, they used it, and by its use justified the production of more. It was good for the economy. Congressmen wanted to maintain and increase jobs in their districts so they would be reelected, and the Pentagon wanted to keep the goodwill of Congress so they’d pass military appropriations bills. And if a brigadier general like Frederic Hart wanted a second star, he’d damn well better use the equipment and use it with enthusiasm.

  And it all came down to four high school kids in a million-dollar tank chasing a couple of kids in black pajamas. In the past year the 3rd Mech had gotten more high school dropouts than ever before. Anybody with any brains was hiding out in college or the National Guard. They were getting recruits who were illiterate criminals and drug addicts who wouldn’t follow orders. The company grade officers weren’t much better. Some of the new OCS second lieutenants didn’t have the leadership to manage a 7-Eleven store, much less a combat unit.

  The general reached over and buzzed for his aide, Ed Freeman.

  Captain Freeman was an athletic officer, an “outstanding individual,” as they say in the military. He had Airborne and Ranger patches on his fatigues, and a West Point ring on his hand. He was on his second tour in Vietnam. As a lieutenant, he had been an adviser to a Vietnamese Ranger unit. After his second Purple Heart, he had been reassigned as the general’s aide.

  “Sit down, Ed,” the general said. “What did you think of the briefing?”

  The captain glanced out the window, then said, “We don’t have any idea who that unit is up there, that Red Moon Battalion. We can drop a thousand of those electronic carrots and they won’t tell us. All they have to do is change their name and we’re at square one again.”

  “You know, Ed,” the general said, “you’ve got probably two more wars ahead of you. I hope that they’re better than this one. This is the last one I’m going to have, I’m afraid.

  “I was talking to General Baker down in Saigon—we were plebes together at the Point—and he told me that we’d better get something moving up here in I-Corps if I want a second star. Something big that gets in the papers, that makes it look like we’re finally on to a winning strategy. That means the whole nine yards—sensors, artillery, tanks, APCs, something we can call an ‘armored assault force.’ That sounds good. Sounds like WWII. Like we’re winning.

  “If I don’t get that second star I can plan on spending the rest of my career somewhere in North Dakota or Oklahoma.”

  The general opened a drawer of his desk and pulled out a torn and stained khaki shirt. It had a red circular patch on the shoulder.

  The general held up the shirt and tapped the red patch with his finger. “I want this Red Moon outfit,” he said. “It’s been causing us problems and, Ed, it’s a name people remember. A nice name. Romantic. Memorable. I want people to remember that I destroyed the Red Moon Battalion,” he said, putting the fatigue shirt away.

  “Ed, I want to defoliate the shit out of their area of operations, then move some big units in. Fast. And I want it kept quiet until we are on the damn ground up there. The Vietnamese barbers in camp know about our operations before the company commanders do.

  “There’s nobody working in that area except some Special Forces recon unit farting around. I’m not going to jeopardize an operation this size by clearing it all the way through channels so some flaky Green Beret outfit gets the word. I don’t like those people anyway, Ed. That kind of so-called elite unit has no place in the Army. It’s a lot of wasted talent that ought to be spread around. But the worst thing is that they start thinking that they’re a law unto themselves. They think they can do anything they want.

  “But you’ve heard my opinion on that before, haven’t you?” he said, laughing.

  “Get to work on it, Ed. And keep it quiet.”

  After Freeman left, the general looked up at a photograph on the wall. It showed him as a second lieutenant standing in front of a large tent with three other men. Two of them were dead now, and the third was a major general. The picture was grainy, overexposed black and white, but the eyes seemed almost alive. The February light was weak, and they were all bundled up in the winter-issue gear that was never warm enough.

  The general looked at the L-shaped scar on the back of his hand, then back at the photograph. The thing about Korea was that it had been so deceptive, the terrain. You could never predict what the terrain was going to be like up ahead by what came before. And by the time they’d gotten good maps and warm clothing, it was over.

  He remembered the staff sergeant who had died next to him early one freezing morning beside a steaming river they’d crossed in inflatable boats. He’d held the sergeant’s hand with his unwounded one while he died, the two of them discussing his imminent death as though it were a poor business deal or a bad hand of poker.

  RED MOON BATTALION

  The day before there had been a fierce rain, a two-hour cloudburst, the kind of storm that would stop interstate traffic back in Kansas and set off the tornado sirens. It was impossible to see or hear anything out in it, difficult even to breathe. It was a freak rain for I-Corps. The monsoon season was weeks away, and the Asian sun came back out hotter than ever, making the grass and red clay steam.

  “The earth is sweating,” Mr. Minh said. “The storm was hard work for him.”

  And then the termites appeared, flying termites with bodies like baroque pearls and wings like flower petals. Millions of them swarmed out of their burrows in the baked red clay that the rain had frosted with a layer of mud. They rode the steaming air like pollen or blowing snow, the silver-blue wings sticking to Hanson’s face and forearms and chest. And then they died. The mud glittered with their twitching bodies.

  Somehow they had gotten through the screened windows of the teamhouse, and at supper Hanson and Quinn swept them off the table, brushed them away like an unexpected dusting of snow at a picnic. The powder from their wings made a white paste on the back of Hanson’s hand.

  Mr. Minh had never seen such a thing happen before, and he was worried. Clearly, it was a powerful omen.

  Hanson stepped from the shade of the teamhouse and walked to the command bunker, the TOC, a concrete slab with only a hooded doorway showing above the ground. He stopped on the stairs and waited for his eyes to adjust to the shade. He smelled creosote, mildew, wet canvas, and the delicate scent of electricity. Three pairs of claymore mines were mounted along the sides of the timbered stairwell, facing him like sets of stereo speakers.

  Down in the bunker the banks of radios hummed and warbled as he rolled an office swivel chair out from the long plywood desk and up to the wall covered with the intel map. The single sideband receiver was on, making the strange hollow barking sounds that Hanson called space dogs, imagining them adrift in some fourth dimension of radio waves. A sawed-off shotgun stood propped in the corner. A Thompson submachine gun, bandoliers of ammunition, and satchels bulging with gren
ades hung from nails on the rough-hewn teak walls.

  He heard Sergeant Major on the stairs behind him, favoring one leg slightly. Sergeant Major had come up to the camp after it was overrun to try to get it back into operational shape.

  “What do you see there, young sergeant?” he asked from the stairs.

  “I think the Three Eighteenth up there, the Red Moon Battalion or whatever they’re calling themselves this month—the Jane Fonda Liberation Unit—it’s cranking up for something.” He flipped an overlay down on the map, then another, and rolled the chair back for perspective. The overlays showed a pattern of secret radio intercepts that radiated from a central area near the DMZ, a good indication of enemy buildup. “Look at that,” he said. “Maybe we could put in there, a couple klicks west of them, inside the border there, move toward them from their side of the border…”

  “You and Quinn and Mr. Minh and a couple of Mr. Minh’s boys, right?”

  “Good idea,” Hanson said, grinning. “You and me think a lot alike. I’d like to take Troc and one other guy. Troc’s been feeling bad about Rau’s son getting killed.”

  “Are you going to win this war all by yourself, then?” Sergeant Major asked.

  Hanson swung around in the chair, laughing. “Don’t tell anybody, but I don’t think we’re gonna win. It’s just that I’ve grown to love the work.”

  Sergeant Major smiled. “Sketch out an operations plan. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Why,” Hanson asked him, “do we bother to sanitize these operations? They know we’re crossing the border, and we know that they know, so why bother with all this sterile equipment? Everybody knows what’s going on. It’s in the newspapers.”

  “It’s sort of like fooling around with another guy’s wife,” Sergeant Major said in mock seriousness. “Now, neither of you wants to fight over her. She’s been whoring around on both of you just like these little pissant countries over here. But he knows that everybody else has been hearing the rumors, so he’s got to confront you to save face. So he asks you if you’ve been fucking his wife and you tell him no. You both know that it’s a lie, but it takes care of the situation. He’s just got to say something, like, ‘I’d better not hear that you are,’ then both of you can go back to doing more important things. Besides,” he said with a smile, “we love those black helicopters and all that spook stuff.”