by Robert Roth
“Were you drafted?” Childs asked.
“No, I enlisted.”
“Well, what the fuck are you complaining about? You got what you asked for.”
Chalice kept waiting for the argument to end. Knowing that most of the squad probably sided with Sinclaire, he debated whether to get involved. Finally, more in hopes of ending some of the inane comments than anything else, he asked Sinclaire, “Do you think we should be in Vietnam?”
“Sure,” answered Sinclaire, astonished at the stupidity of Chalice’s question.
“Why?”
“To stop the Communists.”
“To stop them from what?”
“From taking over this country.”
“What the hell do you care?”
Chalice heard some mumblings of agreement, and Forsythe repeated the question. “Yeah, what the hell do you care?”
“We’ve gotta stop ’em somewhere, and I’d rather do it here than back home.”
Childs stood up and slunk toward Sinclaire while making furtive glances around the cave, then asked in a loud whisper, “Do you mean to say that if they win here they’re gonna get in their little boats and come take over the United States?”
“Hell yeah,” Sinclaire answered with conviction.
Payne yelled out, “He’s right, they’ll push us as far as we let them.” Childs turned toward Payne and said in mock horror, “You mean they’ll take over our whole country? Brooklyn? South Philly? Disneyland?” Hamilton spoke up in an excited voice. “That’s it! They’re going through all this bullshit because they want Disneyland. If we don’t stop them here, in ten years Mao will be riding the monorail.”
The laughter encouraged Childs. “Mickey Mouse’ll speak Chinese.”
“You’re making a joke out of this whole thing,” Sinclaire protested.
“You’re making a crusade out of it.”
Kovacs spoke up in a poor imitation of Sinclaire’s southern accent. “They don’t want Disneyland. What they really want is our white women.” Kovacs’s remark brought quite a few laughs. Although it went unnoticed, one of them belonged to Roads.
Sinclaire started to say something, but thought better of it and remained silent. Payne felt obligated to continue the argument. “What about the Geneva Convention?”
Chalice saw an opening. “What about it?”
“They double-crossed us. You can’t trust ’em.” Sinclaire and a few of the others voiced agreement.
“How?” Chalice asked.
“By starting the war.”
“The Geneva Accords divided Vietnam into two parts, but they also provided for a national election in 1964. We knew we’d lose, so we double-crossed them and didn’t hold it.”
“We’d a won.”
Tony 5 cut in, “C’mon Sinclaire, how many times have I heard you say all these fucking Gooks are Communists?
“We wouldn’t a lost.”
“Bullshit!” Chalice said. “We couldn’t even win an election in South Vietnam.”
“You sound like one a them protestors.”
“I was,” answered Chalice.
The men stared at him with surprise. “You shitting me, Professor?”
“You were a hippie?”
“Were you ever on the news?”
Chalice felt his admission had been a mistake. “I’ve been against this fucked-up war from the start. I had just as much right to make my opinion known as the people who favored it.”
“What are you doing here instead of Canada?” Tony chided, more to make the irony of his position apparent than to personally embarrass him.
“I don’t go for that flag-burning bullshit,” Kovacs cut in contemptuously.
Seeing the futility of the discussion, Chalice became defensive and lost all desire to continue. “I never burned any flag. Besides, a flag’s a piece of cloth. Nobody dies when you burn a flag.”
This remark brought moans of disapproval from most of the men. But they also seemed tired of the subject and willing to let the discussion die when, breaking a short pause, Childs spoke out in general disgust. “Most of the protestors are assholes, but so are most of the guys in Nam. We’re just dumber assholes.” He received a few laughs and continued. “The Prof’s right though, a flag’s made out of the same stuff your underwear is.”
“I can’t see it that way,” Kovacs commented in a tone more factual than argumentative.
Childs decided to take one more stab at getting in the last word. “C’mon Sarge, if one of those times you had the runs and were out of shit-paper and looking around for something to use, if you just happened to see Old Glory lying around doing nothing, tell me you wouldn’t use it.” Interested more in the argument as a contest than as a discussion, the men felt Childs had made a good point and most of them started laughing. Milton, who had been standing watch outside, walked back to find out what was happening. He arrived in time to see a few cans and rocks flying in Childs’s direction. Kramer quickly quieted the men. As he did so, Harmon sat up. “What’s going on?” he asked in a dazed voice.
“Nothing, everything’s okay,” Kramer answered. “How you feeling?”
“I’m all right, but it’s awful hot in here.” Kramer placed the back of his hand against Harmon’s forehead. “I’m okay,” he protested drawing his head away. He still had a fever, but it didn’t seem any higher.
“Here, I’ve got some food for you.” Kramer handed him his own and Harmon’s portion. At first he refused, but then slowly ate it while Kramer searched through Fields’s gear for some medicine to give him.
The men spent the rest of the day quietly withdrawn into themselves, waiting for the rest of the company to arrive. As dusk approached with no sign of them, they became more aware of their isolation and speculated about what might happen the next day. Darkness came more suddenly than it would have if they had been outside the cave. The only things that could be seen were the luminous dials on some of the wristwatches. Hunger made the men restless, and they could hear each other moving about. Every sound became more audible and what little talking occurred was done in eerie whispers.
Kramer had felt a headache coming on for a few minutes. It was a familiar, helpless feeling, and for some reason he hadn’t undergone it since joining the Marine Corps. Now one side of his forehead throbbed unbearably while he lay with his forearm pressed tightly against it. His mind beset by numerous, unrelated thoughts, he tried to clear it in order to fall asleep. ‘Would have to get one of these now. If I could only sleep, for just a minute, it’d go away.’ The pain increased. He pressed harder against the side of his forehead. ‘One bullet, one fucking bullet would cure this thing. Right above my eye. It’d feel so good, burn right through.’
Chalice sat watching the jerky movements of Childs’s watch dial. Suddenly it disappeared. His eyes were wide open, searching for it in the darkness, while Tony 5’s question repeatedly came to mind. ‘What am I doing here?’ He began to doubt whether he had ever really believed in his own or anybody else’s activism, telling himself that at first he had, thus admitting to stupidity rather than hypocrisy, but no, he couldn’t accept this either. It wasn’t stupidity, at least not the idea. ‘You have to look at it rationally,’ he told himself. ‘Special case — can’t generalize.’ He tried to slow his thoughts in order to gain control over them. ‘They just wouldn’t listen,’ he argued to himself, knowing that “they” couldn’t have helped but listen. ‘What more could we have done?’
Suddenly remembering something he had read, a seemingly irrelevant magazine article, Chalice tried to discover a connection between it and his thoughts. The article had been about a wolf, raised from a cub by a family in their home. Everytime the wolf was brought into the house and something had been rearranged, it would immediately freeze to a point, staring at the object that was out of place — a candlestick, a small ashtray. Now seeing the relevance, Chalice refused to accept it, very logically telling himself, ‘You can’t generalize. . . . We just tried to do too much.’
But again he found himself left with Tony’s question. ‘What am I doing here?’ He wondered if he, alone and separated from those who believed as he did, would do more than “them,” would someday write the book, reach the fools who seemed unreachable. Now he began to question this also, whether it had ever been more than an excuse, if fear of jail and gang rapes, or exile hadn’t been more important, or maybe it was the desire to create something indestructible, something that wouldn’t die with him. ‘Sure, write a book . . . but kill in the meantime.’
Kramer had the second-to-last watch that night. Milton gently shook his shoulder. He sat up. No words passed between them. Unable to remember exactly how high the cave was, Kramer got to his feet slowly. Surrounded by darkness, he also wasn’t sure where the entrance was. Remembering he had gone to sleep with his feet towards it, he moved in that direction taking short, wary steps to keep from tripping over anyone. Now he could barely make out the opening a few feet away. On his second step towards it, he fell hard across two of the men. They didn’t move. For a few seconds he couldn’t figure out why. He lay motionless on top of the corpses listening to his men squirm around, awakened by the sound of his fall. Drawing his legs up under him and over the corpses, he slowly rose to his feet and ducked out the entrance.
It was a little lighter outside, but not much. Kramer moved through the wet brush until he was about ten yards from the cave. There was no breeze, but the damp, chilly air still pierced through his clothing. ‘Should of brought my poncho liner.’ He then remembered the time Gunny Martin had caught Appleton standing watch wrapped in a poncho liner, and had bashed a rifle butt over his head. Kramer began to shiver, but decided it was too much trouble to go back for it now. He longed for a cigarette to warm his insides, knowing that if he ever caught any of his men smoking on watch he’d want to kill them. ‘Can’t believe the company didn’t show,’ he thought before deciding that they’d probably heard the ambush and had headed towards it. ‘You’d think they would have sent at least one platoon here.’ His thoughts turned to Trippitt — ‘Sonofabitch can’t read a map for shit,’ but he knew that somebody in the company should have been able to lead them there. Kramer became conscious of the tightness in his stomach. The idea of a two day march to the lowlands without food worried him. Only the fear that another day of waiting would make it three days caused him to decide to start back in the morning. ‘Maybe they’ll spot us on the way down. Possible.’
Suddenly, the cold, quiet air was shattered by the roar of bombs and the screech of jets. Kramer spun around in the direction of the explosions. He watched with surprise as the soft glow of napalm filtered through the trees. More blasts and the sounds of more jets followed. ‘Two, maybe three klicks away . . . Wonder what they’re after.’ The bombing continued for ten minutes. He checked the time. ‘Kovacs has last watch. Should have woke him five minutes ago.’ Kramer made his way back towards the cave. As he bent down to enter, he could barely make out the outline of a face staring up at him.
“Really going at it,” Kovacs whispered. Muffled voices agreed from inside the cave.
Kramer stepped back as Kovacs made his way out. “The jets woke everybody up. Weren’t getting much sleep anyway, not on those empty stomachs.”
“What do you make of it?” Kramer asked.
“The bombing? Could mean anything. They don’t have to see much to unload.”
“I hope they didn’t see much.”
“I wouldn’t sweat it. I was drinking with a few of them on my R and R and they were bragging about killing elephants, tigers, water buffaloes — they just like to drop bombs.”
Kramer nodded from habit, Kovacs being unable to see him. “That’s real nice to know. Listen, we’ll get out of here as soon as we can tomorrow. Unless there was a foul-up, they wouldn’t be dropping bombs if they knew we were anywhere near here. Make sure everybody’s up at dawn. No use letting them sit around thinking about their stomachs.” As Kramer stooped to enter the cave, his nostrils caught the smell of decaying flesh. Nauseous tremors ran through his body. He quickly stepped over the corpses and made his way to the back of the cave. Instead of lying down, he propped his back against the wall and thought over his plans for the next day.
When Kovacs returned to the cave, most of the men were sitting up. “Lieutenant?”
“Over here.”
“Daybreak.’“’
“Okay,” Kramer called out. “Let’s get everybody and everything out of the cave.” The men filed out dragging their equipment.
“Pablo, how many cigarettes we got left?” Kovacs asked.
“Two.”
“Sunrise, special occasion. Let’s run one,” Forsythe suggested. Pablo lit a cigarette and the rest of the men stood around him shivering as they waited their turn.
When the last puff was squeezed out of it, Kramer, who had been giving some medicine to Harmon, turned towards the rest of the men. “We should be able to make it back in two days. I know you’re hungry now and you’ll be hungrier tomorrow, but we’ll be moving fast enough to take your minds off your stomachs. Let’s get rid of any extra weight. Empty your packs of everything except ponchos and poncho liners. Get your bayonets out and shred anything you leave behind. Dump your flak jackets too.” Kramer looked toward Kovacs and received a nod of agreement. “That’s fifteen pounds you won’t have to worry about. We should be able to make it without hitting any booby traps. Childs, you’ll be walking the point at first. You can keep yours if you want it.”
“No thanks.” Childs pulled off his flak jacket and started to cut it up.
“Sir, what about the mortar rounds?” Hamilton asked.
“Mortar rounds, you should have pawned those off on somebody that went with the company. They’re worthless to us without tubes. How many of you have rounds?” Five hands went up. “Okay, we’ll get rid of them and some C-4 to boot. Tony, when we get all this shit inside the cave, put those rounds in and set a charge under them. Use two blasting caps to make sure.”
A few minutes later, Kramer told Childs to move out and Tony 5 to light the fuses. At first Childs’s pace was as fast as the ones Bolton used to set. By the time they heard the charge go off he had slowed down a little, but not much. There were no complaints from the rest of the squad — hunger and the desire to get back to camp drove them on as fear never could. Childs’s skill, or luck, enabled the squad to move over fairly easy terrain and kept them constantly traveling downhill. In an hour they reached the spot where the napalm had been dropped the night before. Nothing remained of the canopy except a huge oblong blotch of charred and smoldering tree trunks. Childs cut through it, keeping as close to the edge as possible. They were practically to the other side when Kramer held up the column. “Pass the word to take ten.” Turning to Kovacs, he said, “We can shoot a pop-up over the canopy from here. It’s a long chance, but maybe somebody’ll see it.”
“Good idea,” Kovacs agreed.
“Think Charlie’s around?”
“Doubt it. Haven’t seen any bodies.”
“Send up a red one. We’ll head for the trees, wait five minutes, pop a smoke, wait another five, and beat it.” By this time Kovacs had the pop-up ready. He banged the bottom, and a large red flare burst over the burned-out canopy.
As the men moved towards the edge of the brush, a gray: object caught Hamilton’s eye. “Hey, look at this.”
Kovacs walked towards him with Kramer and Milton following. At Hamilton’s feet lay an oddly shaped object that took each of them a few seconds to recognize. “Looks like they did get something,” Kramer said slowly as he stared down at the charred remains of an upper torso. One arm was missing and the head was barely connected. “Where’s the rest of him?” Kramer wondered out loud.
Kovacs pointed his rifle where the waist should have been. “Must have been wearing a belt of chicoms. Exploded when the napalm hit them. Probably around here somewhere — in more than one place.” The tip of his rifle nudged the remains of the body and the ashe
s crumbled around it.
By this time the rest of the squad had all taken a look. Some of them were still standing around it and others were checking the brush when Childs’s voice called out, “Here’s the rest of him.” The entire squad walked over and found Childs standing beside two barely connected legs. “This part’s only medium rare.”
“Smells like hamburger meat, don’t it?” Sinclaire asked.
Childs raised his head slightly, his tongue protruding from his mouth for a second and his eyes shifting from side to side. Chalice, who was standing directly across from him, immediately realized what Childs was thinking. The others saw Chalice’s blank expression and followed it to its object — Childs. No one said a word, but most of the others also realized what was going on in Childs’s mind. They began thinking about it to themselves, some of them biting their lips and slowly rubbing their stomachs. “Why not?” Childs asked sneeringly.
Kovacs nodded agreement. Then Tony 5, who had just realized what was going on, stepped back. “Are you crazy? No!”
Pablo shook his head. “Uh, uh.”
“I’m starved,” Forsythe said demurely.
There was a pause, then Hamilton spoke. “I’m so hungry I’d eat anything.”
Tony took a step backwards. “Not that hungry! . . . Just two lousy days — we can make it.”
“Count me out,” Payne said, his voice tinged with guilt for even thinking about it.
All faces slowly turned towards Kramer. He remained silent for a few seconds, then, as if to wash his hands of the matter, said, “It’s up to you. Help yourselves if you want.”
Childs dropped to his knees, pulling his knife out as he did so. Pablo, and then Tony 5 turned away. The rest of the men stood watching in silent awe as the blade of Childs’s knife scraped the burnt crust away just above the front of one of the knees. He made two slashes a few inches long and an inch apart, then joined them and removed the piece.
