by Eric Helm
Finally, there being nothing much else to do, he’d found himself a miserable little spot of shade near the wall of the team house and sat down to sharpen his knife. But first he extracted a promise from both the Tai radioman and the LLDB communications sergeant on radio watch to notify him as soon as there was any word, either from the men in the field or from B-Detachment headquarters.
The knife didn’t really need sharpening. You could use it to shave now if you were a bit on the suicidal side. It was just something Novak did when there was nothing else to do, the way some men smoked or twiddled their thumbs.
Novak was just putting the finishing strokes on the blade when a shadow fell over his shoulder and a slightly slurred voice asked, “What in hell’s that thing?”
He glanced up to see Morrow, a can of Point in her hand, leaning against the entrance to the team house. As he watched, she drained the beer, set the can down on the edge of the sandbagged entrance and produced another beer from one of the pockets in her shorts.
“Hunting knife,” grunted Novak uninterestedly. If she’d been too huffy to talk to him when she was sober, he didn’t see any reason why he should talk to her while she was drunk. Or at least well on her way to being drunk.
“That’s not a knife, that’s a sword,” said Morrow. “What would you hunt with a knife that big?”
“Whatever,” Novak grunted again.
“Come on. Don’t be such a snit. I’m trying to make up for being rude earlier. It’s been a bad day.”
“Boy, I hear that,” said Novak, becoming more expansive. “I thought it was supposed to be cool this time of year. Cool and dry. I’m wringing wet.” He was beginning to soften. It’s hard to stay mad at a good-looking woman. Especially when you’re not exactly sure what it is you’re mad at her about.
“It is,” said Morrow. “Supposed to be cooler and dryer, that is. The rainy season isn’t due for a couple of months yet. Then it gets really miserable. I guess this must be the weatherman’s idea of a joke. Look, how about a picture of you with the knife. Might appeal to my editors. If they don’t like it, you can send a copy to your hometown newspaper.”
“Mom would like that, a picture of me. Okay, I guess.”
“Fine. Wait right there a minute. I’ll get a camera.” Morrow snarfed down the beer, set the empty next to the other one and ducked back inside. A moment later she reappeared with a black Canon 35mm SLR in one hand, outfitted with a 28-80mm zoom lens, and a can of Point in the other.
“You want a beer?” she asked.
Novak considered. “Better not. I’m on duty until the captain gets back, I guess. Sorta.”
“Suit yourself.”
Morrow took a big swig out of the can, but got a little too much. Some of it dribbled down her chin and ran along her neck to disappear in an interesting part of her olive-drab undershirt. She set the can down on a sandbag and wiped the back of her hand across her chin.
“Damned shame. Hate to waste it like that. Alcohol abuse.” She fiddled momentarily with the camera. “First shot with you sharpening it, okay? Then I’ll take a couple with you looking up. So your mother can see your face.”
“Whatever you say.”
The camera clicked. She advanced the film and took another.
“Okay, now look up as you hold the knife, but look serious. Okay?”
Novak did as requested.
“Now a big smile for Mom. Got it.” She recapped the lens and carefully set the camera down next to the empty cans, picked up the nearly full one and drained it in two gulps. Instantly she produced another one from her shorts.
“Miss Morrow, I like the way you drink,” observed Novak, “but what’s your hurry? A beer that good ought to be savored, even if it is warm. How many of those things have you got in your shorts, anyway?”
Morrow gave a little burp and smiled giddily at him.
“Thanks for the compliment, Lieutenant. Not nearly enough, I’m afraid. Pretty soon I’m going to have to go back to drinking the Carling. Not quite on a par with this stuff, but there’s more of it. With luck I think I can get the job done before I’m reduced to PBR and Schlitz.”
“Miss Morrow, why are you so hell-bent on getting drunk this early in the day? If you don’t mind my asking, ma’am. Want to talk about it?”
“No. I don’t mind your asking, but no, I don’t particularly care to talk about it.”
Novak shrugged. “You know best, I guess. Sometimes it helps to talk things over with a neutral source. I just wanted to let you know I’m available to listen, if you feel like talking.” He started to sheath the knife.
“Hey, how about letting me have a look at that thing before you put it away?”
“It’s pretty sharp, ma’am. I wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself.” Novak wasn’t sure that giving his knife to a drunk was such a hot idea.
Morrow exploded. “Men! Always worried you’re going to hurt yourself. Or get hurt. Always overprotecting. Unless they need you or want to do the hurting themselves.”
Novak sensed he’d touched a nerve, but for some reason rather than backing off, he pressed the point.
“Is that what this is all about?” he asked. “Some guy hurt you?”
Morrow finished her beer, fished out another and knelt beside Novak. She took a sip, leaned forward and rubbed one eye with the heel of her hand.
“Yes. No. Oh, hell. I don’t know. It’s both, I guess. A short time back, when the team extended their tour, Lieutenant Colonel Bates made everybody take an R and R. Everybody went back to the States except Mack, uh, I mean the captain, and Master Sergeant Fetterman. They went to Hong Kong. I went with them. While we were there, we ran into this Chinese officer who had been working out near here as an advisor to the Viet Cong. I don’t know what the hell he was doing in Hong Kong. Maybe he was on R and R, too. Anyway, things got a little rough. Now the captain treats me like I’m an egg and he’s afraid I’ll break. It’s interfering with my job, and it kind of makes me mad.”
“Uh-huh,” said Novak, suddenly understanding the situation. “You kind of like the captain, don’t you?”
“Well… kind of,” admitted Morrow.
“And he kind of likes you, too?”
“I guess so. At least I thought he did. Now I’m not so sure. He knows how important my job is to me, but now he won’t let me do it right. And the tighter he closes his grip, the more I resent it. It’s almost like he was intentionally pushing me away from him.”
“Sometimes people push people away from them because they’re afraid of losing them,” observed Novak.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Morrow protested.
“Nevertheless. People frequently don’t make sense. Maybe the captain is trying to protect you because he’s afraid of losing you. Maybe he’s subconsciously setting up a situation where he’s sure to lose you because he expects to lose you. This way, the expected happens, and he can handle it. Otherwise, you get too close to him, and when he does lose you, it hurts too much.”
“That’s ridiculous. You’re saying he’s afraid of losing me because he thinks he’s going to lose me, so he’s making sure he loses me. That’s silly. It just doesn’t make any sense at all. Why is he doing it? Because of Hong Kong?”
“That and because there’s a certain amount of danger attached to your job. War correspondent. Unless,” Novak prodded, “you can think of some other reason?”
“Now you’re really getting ridiculous. I’ve never given him any reason to… Oh, my.” Morrow leaned forward suddenly and put her head in her hands, still holding the can of Point. A pained expression crossed her face. “Oh, damn you, Karen. You sure did a number on both of us.”
“How’s that?” queried Novak.
“Karen. My sister. We’re twins. She’s about fifteen minutes older than I am. She’s a flight nurse in the Air Force. She and the captain used to be a pretty hot item. Then she jilted him. Didn’t really have much choice, I guess. She has a husband back in the States. Problem is,
she didn’t tell Mack about the husband.”
“That was thoughtful of her,” Novak remarked sourly.
She shrugged. “Kari’s always been a bit flighty. One of those see-what-you-want-and-take-it-and-damn-the-consequences kind of people. Anyway, we met because we’re so much alike. Or rather, I met Captain Gerber because my sister and I look so much alike. Except for the eyes. Hers are blue, mine green. I was at the officers’ club in Tan Son Nhut having a drink with a couple of pilots I know when he spotted me at the bar and mistook me for Karen. I’m afraid I’m the one who let slip she had a husband. I thought they were just having one of those wartime flings, but Mack was serious about her.”
“Wonderful. This is better than a soap opera.”
“Look, do you want to hear this or not?”
“Take it easy,” said Novak. “I was just commenting on the convolutions of the plot. Continue. Please.”
“Well, anyway, at first I wasn’t interested. But since Karen had gone back to the States and since I’d heard so much about the guy from her, I was kind of intrigued by him. It was strictly a professional interest, at first. I came out here to do a story on him and his team, but the more I got to know him, the better I liked him. He’s really dedicated to the job he’s doing, but I don’t think he hates the enemy. He respects the Viet Cong. At times I think he even admires them. Not when they burn a village and kill civilians, of course. But when they show determination and fight. Then he sees them as soldiers like himself. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man more caring or considerate of the troops under him. A lot of the officers are just here to get their tickets punched so it’ll look good at promotion time. They don’t give a rat’s ass about their men. Mack Gerber isn’t that way at all. He actually cares about his men and what happens to them.
“I’m getting wrapped up in my isn’t-Mack-Gerber-a-swell-guy speech. Anyway, suffice it to say I felt like he was someone I’d known forever. I guess because Karen had told me so much about him. And when I finally fell, I fell pretty hard. Guess I made a bad choice, huh?”
“Not necessarily,” Novak told her. “But I’d guess your timing could have been better.”
“Okay, I get it,” Morrow went on. “What you say makes sense. Mack was in love with Karen, who dumped him, so now he’s making sure he won’t get hurt like that again by forcing me to dump him under conditions he’s in control of. It’s twisted, all right. But it does make sense in light of everything else that’s gone on. The question is, what do I do about it?”
Novak shrugged. “I listen to people’s problems, I don’t give advice. But it seems to me that running away from the problem is not the answer. For either of you. If you’ll pardon my saying so, that’s exactly what your sister did, and all it accomplished was to create more problems for everyone. If you and the captain are going to have any kind of relationship beyond friendship, you’re both going to have to be willing to take risks.”
“I am willing to take risks,” Morrow protested.
“Are you? I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re not afraid of losing the captain every time he takes out a patrol. Who did you lose, Miss Morrow, that made you afraid to take risks?”
Morrow opened her mouth in denial, cheeks flushing, then drew a deep breath and closed it. She was silent for a few minutes, then spoke.
“Is it all that obvious?”
“No. But it shows, if you know what to look for.”
“It was my father. He walked out on us when Karen and I were ten. It made some pretty hard years for Mom and us. I guess I never really understood why or forgave him for it. He was a newspaper reporter. I haven’t seen him in fifteen years. Last I heard, he was in Wyoming someplace, managing a small weekly. He used to be a pretty big name with the Chicago Times.”
“So you followed in Daddy’s footsteps and became a reporter yourself, even though you never forgave him for leaving his wife and daughters. But because you loved him and he left you, you’ve been afraid to let yourself get close to a man ever since. My guess is your sister has, too, despite her marriage. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have gone into a career that was going to keep her away from her husband for long periods of time, nor had an affair with the captain. I’ll bet it wasn’t her first affair, either. Was it?”
Morrow shook her head. “There were others. About every two or three years Karen would get restless and start seeing some guy on the sly. Always a married man, and she always broke it off after five or six months, so it never got really serious. That’s why I didn’t think her involvement with Mack was serious. Only this time she picked a man who was single and who really wanted to be in love with her, not just in her pants.”
“Well, ma’am, I’d say you sure do have a problem. It looks to me like you and the captain, with the help of your sister and your father, have gotten yourselves locked into a nice little circle. You’re so busy being in control of the situation so you won’t get hurt that you keep hurting yourselves because feeling hurt is what you know how to do best.”
“So how do we get out of it? Take a chance on being hurt?”
“That’s not a chance. That’s a certainty if you keep on going at things this way. What you’ve got to learn to do, you and the captain both, is take a chance on feeling good. About yourselves. About each other.”
“You make it all sound so simple, Lieutenant.”
“There’s nothing simple about it. But it can be done. All you have to do is decide you’re going to do it.”
Morrow laughed nervously. “I can’t believe it’s that easy.”
“There it is, ma’am. You can’t believe. That’s why you fail.”
“You know, Lieutenant Novak,” said Morrow thoughtfully, “I’m beginning to suspect that you make an awfully good psychiatrist for a first lieutenant.”
“All I do is listen to people’s problems. From the higher-ups down, and the down-belows up. That’s what first lieutenants do best. Besides, I minored in counseling at UW-Milwaukee. Figured it was sort of a prerequisite for being a lieutenant. But I’m still just a listener. People make their own problems, and people have to solve their own problems. I’m not saying running away from a problem is never the answer, but usually it’s not the best.”
“Thanks for listening, then, Lieutenant. And please, call me Robin.”
“All right, Robin. And you can call me Animal.”
“Animal!” Morrow laughed. “Why on earth Animal?”
“You still got a beer in one of those pockets, Robin?”
Morrow fished out another can of Point and passed it over. Novak took the beer, but refused the offer of a can opener.
“Ever since I played football in high school, all my friends call me Animal. After a game the team would all get together for a few beers. More like a few dozen. We partied pretty furiously in those days. If we won, we partied to celebrate. If we lost, we partied to drown our sorrows. The guys called me Animal because I’d open my beers like this.”
Novak bit down on the rim of the can with his teeth and tore the top off it. The beer fountained out in a geyser, and he lost about a fourth of it, but he spit out the lid, tilted his head back and swallowed the rest of it in a single gulp.
“I don’t believe it,” said Morrow.
“Must have cut my lip a hundred times before I perfected the technique. Sure used to impress the cheerleaders, though.”
Morrow laughed again. “You really are an animal. Let me have a look at that knife, will you?”
Novak passed it over. “Be careful. It is sharp.”
The knife had a ten-inch blade with a curved-up point and a short false edge. The rest of the back of the blade was covered with large saw teeth.
“It’s heavy. What’s this wrapped around the handle?”
“Fishing line.”
“Is that for a better grip?”
“Partly. It’s partly for survival, too. The handle is hollow. There’s a small fishing kit, some snare wire, waterproof matches and a couple of water puri
fication tablets inside. A cable saw and a few other odds and ends, too. The whole thing seals up watertight because there’s a rubber O-ring on the cap. The inside of the cap has a tiny compass set on a jeweled bearing in it.”
“I’ve never seen one like it before. What kind of knife is it?”
“It’s a Parker Custom Hunter/Survivor. I got it from Ironmonger Jim.”
“Who?”
“Ironmonger Jim and Lady Rose, Suppliers of Good Blades. They run a little shop in Anoka, Minnesota. Old Jim used to always tell me, ‘When you’re out of ammunition, nothing beats a good blade.’ When I found out I was coming over here, I went to his shop and said, ‘Jim, give me the best blade you’ve got.’ That’s it.”
Morrow handed back the knife. “Thanks. I hope you don’t get to use it.”
“I hope I don’t have to use it.”
“That’s what I meant. Thanks, Animal, you really have been a friend.”
“No sweat. Let’s go inside, and I’ll buy you a beer. Maybe we can find one in there that isn’t warm.”
“Thanks, but I’ll pass. I think I’ll unpack my bags and take a nap.”
“Sounds like a sensible notion. I believe I’ll go catch a few winks myself. It’s going to be a long night. Especially with the rest of the team out.”
Morrow went back inside the team house, and Novak picked up his knife, his sharpening stone and his steel, and went off to his quarters.
In his office Lieutenant Dung Cao Chiap signed the form he had been reading with a flourish of his fountain pen and placed it with the other forms and papers on his desk. He methodically stacked the pages and tapped their edges into alignment before placing them in the out basket. Then he checked his watch. It was nearly time.
With quiet deliberation he pushed back his chair, got up from the desk and walked over to the pegs on the wall that held his equipment. Carefully he buckled on his pistol belt and equipment harness and checked to make sure that his M1911A1 .45-caliber pistol was loaded and a round was in the chamber. Then he set the safety and holstered the weapon. From its peg he took down his M-2 selective fire carbine with the two thirty-round banana magazines taped together end to end and opened the bolt to make sure the breech and barrel were unobstructed. Then he chambered a round, set the safety and slung the carbine, muzzle downward, over his shoulder. Last, he buckled on his helmet and picked up the pouch of hand grenades, slinging them over the other shoulder. He returned to his desk and unlocked the bottom drawer, taking a second pistol from it and tucking it inside his shirt. Then he walked calmly out the door and across the runway that bisected the camp.
