Going After Cacciato

by Tim O'Brien

  A pleasant, leisurely passage: The first night they docked at the island of Psara, then in the morning they cruised southward past Khios and Ikaria, rounded the lower tip of Naxos and steamed straight west through the soft hours of late afternoon.

  The lieutenant’s health improved. The sun gave his face color. He resumed command. On the second day of the crossing, he ordered Eddie and Stink to see about getting haircuts; that same evening he sat down with Doc Peret for a conference about possible routes north after disembarking at Piraeus. He ate well and drank moderately.

  Mostly this was Sarkin Aung Wan’s doing. Like a daughter caring for an ailing father, she encouraged him to eat and exercise, coddled him, scolded him, gently coaxed him into showing some concern for his own welfare and that of his men. The lieutenant seemed deeply attached to her. It was an unspoken thing. They would sometimes spend whole days together, walking the decks or throwing darts or simply sitting in the sun. When the lieutenant showed signs of the old withdrawal, Sarkin Aung Wan would remind him of his responsibilities. “A leader must lead,” she would say. “Without leadership, a leader is nothing.” Then she would take the old man’s hand and press it between hers and begin talking of the lovely things they would see in Paris. Her own motives were secret. What did she want? Refuge, as sought by refugees, or escape, as sought by victims? It was impossible to tell. Softly, effortlessly, she guided the old man toward recovery, and toward Paris, and through him she guided all of them.

  So as the Andros made its way past Sífnos and Sérifos and Kíthnos, Paul Berlin let himself relax in his rattan recliner at the bow. The sea was calm, the air was sweet. They’d done it. The war was over. Ahead was Paris. “Make it to Athens,” Cacciato had said, “and the rest is easy.”

  It was near midnight when they came in to Piraeus. Despite the late hour, the wharves were jammed with people milling in the light of torches and colored bulbs strung up along the piers and loading docks. Another tour ship had docked within the hour, and a swarm of customs agents and police were moving through the crowd. Clearly it was more than a routine customs check. Male passengers were being led off to one side, where they were thoroughly searched by a dozen white-helmeted policemen; baggage was dumped open on the spot; a loudspeaker blared out warnings for order in three languages. Each policeman carried a large poster of the sort that is tacked to post office bulletin boards, and the officers seemed to be trying to match faces to whatever was on the posters.

  The ship turned in slowly toward the lighted dock.

  “Us?” Stink said.

  The others were silent. Eddie slumped over the railing, gazing listlessly down at the columns of police. His face was drained. Behind him, Sarkin Aung Wan and the lieutenant sat at a small table roofed by a red and green umbrella.

  “Screwed and skewered,” Oscar said. “Cops up the ass.”

  Doc Peret shrugged. “We almost made it.”

  “I can’t—”

  “So close.” Doc sighed. “And yet so close.”

  Stink Harris was fidgeting. His tongue flicked out to lick sweat from his upper lip. He leaned over the railing, looked down, then quickly moved over to the lieutenant.

  “Well, come on,” he said, shaking the old man’s shoulder. “Let’s go. What’s the plan?”

  “Nothing I can do.”

  Stink’s teeth rapped together. Again he shook Lieutenant Corson’s shoulder, harder this time. The old man did not move. Stink hurried up to the bow, where the crew was making preparations for docking. He stood there a moment, his fingers jerking, then he turned on his heel and rushed back.

  “Criminny! Think of something … What’s the plan?”

  Nobody answered. Eddie gazed straight ahead. Doc sat down Indian-style and put his head in his hands. Looking down on the wharves, Paul Berlin counted forty policemen before he gave it up. Hopeless. The odds had been poison from the start.

  Stink was frantic. He grabbed Oscar’s arm.

  “What we gonna do? Jeez, I never … Jump!. We could jump—make a swim for it!”

  “It’s over, man.”

  “Bullshit it is! Disguises … That’s it! Dress ourselves up like women or something. Couldn’t we? Get disguised and slip by like smoke. Easy!”

  Oscar pulled his arm free.

  “What’s wrong with you guys?” Stink shook his head violently, stepping back from them. His fingers kept jerking. “A joke, right? Right? Trying to fool me?”

  Nobody spoke. The ship’s foghorn made a loud rumbling sound as they slipped in toward the docks.

  Stink smiled to show it was a fine joke. He touched Eddie’s sleeve, then began tugging it, short jerking tugs.

  “Quit?” Stink said. “Just quit?”

  “Look, little man, you can’t buck—”

  “Bullshit!”

  Stink’s face collapsed. His fists clenched and he stepped back from them. His lips tightened. And for a moment, for the first and only time, Paul Berlin felt a measure of respect for Stink Harris. Not respect, exactly. Understanding, maybe—knowledge. The kid was a scrapper. Tough and unquitting.

  Stink glared at them for a moment, then turned away.

  Quickly, he stripped down to his underwear. He stuffed his shirt and trousers into his boots, tied the boots around his neck, and climbed over the railing. His skin was white. He held his wallet in one hand, his pocketknife in the other.

  “Come on,” Doc said. “It’s not—”

  Stink did not look back. “Fuck you fuckers,” he said. That was all he said.

  He jumped.

  He pinched his nose, closed his eyes, and jumped. There was no splash. No noise at all, nothing.

  As the ship slipped cleanly into its moorings, and as the first ropes were cast off, Paul Berlin could make out the dim silver wake of a swimmer in the waters behind him. Silver, dark, silver, dark. Then the wake was gone. So was Stink Harris.

  Thirty-nine

  The Things They Didn’t Know

  Lui lai, lui lai!” Stink would scream, pushing them back. “Lui lai, you dummies … Back up, move!” Teasing ribs with his rifle muzzle, he would force them back against a hootch wall or fence. “Coi chung!” he’d holler. Blinking, face white and teeth clicking, he would kick the stragglers, pivot, shove, thumb flicking the rifle’s safety catch. “Move! Lui lai … Move it, go, go!” Herding them together, he would watch to be sure their hands were kept in the open, empty. Then he would open his dictionary. He would read slowly, retracing the words several times, then finally look up. “Nam xuong dat,” he’d say. Separating each word, trying for good diction, he would say it in a loud, level voice. “Everybody … nam xuong dat.” The kids would just stare. The women might rock and moan, or begin chattering among themselves like squirrels, glancing up at Stink with frazzled eyes. “Now!” he’d shout. “Nam xuong dat … Do it!” Sometimes he would fire off a single shot, but this only made the villagers fidget and squirm. Puzzled, some of them would start to giggle. Others would cover their ears and yap with the stiff, short barking sounds of small dogs. It drove Stink wild. “Nam xuong the fuck down!” he’d snarl, his thin lips curling in the manner he practiced while shaving. “Lie down! Man len, mama-san! Now, goddamn it!” His eyes would bounce from his rifle to the dictionary to the cringing villagers. Behind him, Doc Peret and Oscar Johnson and Buff would be grinning at the show. They’d given the English-Vietnamese dictionary to Stink as a birthday present, and they loved watching him use it, the way he mixed languages in a kind of stew, ignoring pronunciation and grammar, turning angry when words failed to produce results. “Nam thi xuong dat!” he’d bellow, sweating now, his tongue sputtering over the impossible middle syllables. “Man len, pronto, you sons of bitches! Haul ass!” But the villagers would only shake their heads and mill uncertainly. This was too much for Stink Harris. Enraged, he’d throw away the dictionary and rattle off a whole magazine of ammunition. The women would moan. “Dong fuckin lat thit!” Stink would be screaming, his eyes dusty like a snake’s. “Nam xuon
g dat! Do it, you ignorant bastards!” Reloading, he would keep firing and screaming, and the villagers would sprawl in the dust, arms wrapped helplessly around their heads. And when they were all down, Stink would stop firing. He would smile. He would glance at Doc Peret and nod. “See there? They understand me fine. Nam xuong dat, it means to lie down. You just got to punctuate your sentences.”

  Not knowing the language, they did not know the people. They did not know what the people loved or respected or feared or hated. They did not recognize hostility unless it was patent, unless it came in a form other than language; the complexities of tone and tongue were beyond them. Dinkese, Stink Harris called it: monkey chatter, bird talk. Not knowing the language, the men did not know whom to trust. Trust was lethal. They did know false smiles from true smiles, or if in Quang Ngai a smile had the same meaning it had in the States. “Maybe the dinks got things mixed up,” Eddie once said, after the time a friendly looking farmer bowed and smiled and pointed them into a minefield. “Know what I mean? Maybe … well, maybe the gooks cry when they’re happy and smile when they’re sad. Who the hell knows? Maybe when you smile over here it means you’re ready to cut the other guy’s throat. I mean, hey, this here’s a different culture.” Not knowing the people, they did not know friends from enemies. They did not know if it was a popular war, or, if popular, in what sense. They did not know if the people of Quang Ngai viewed the war stoically, as it sometimes seemed, or with grief, as it seemed other times, or with bewilderment or greed or partisan fury. It was impossible to know. They did not know religions or philosophies or theories of justice. More than that, they did not know how emotions worked in Quang Ngai. Twenty years of war had rotted away the ordinary reactions to death and disfigurement. Astonishment, the first response, was never there in the faces of Quang Ngai. Disguised, maybe. But who knew? Who ever knew? Emotions and beliefs and attitudes, motives and aims, hopes—these were unknown to the men in Alpha Company, and Quang Ngai told nothing. “Fuckin beasties,” Stink would croak, mimicking the frenzied village speech. “No shit, I seen hamsters with more feelings.”

  But for Paul Berlin it was always a nagging question: Who were these skinny, blank-eyed people? What did they want? The kids especially—watching them, learning their names and faces, Paul Berlin couldn’t help wondering. It was a ridiculous, impossible puzzle, but even so, he wondered. Did the kids like him? A little girl with gold hoops in her ears and ugly scabs on her brow—did she feel, as he did, goodness and warmth and poignancy when he helped Doc dab iodine on her sores? Beyond that, though, did the girl like him? Lord knows, he had no villainy in his heart, no motive but kindness. He wanted health for her, and happiness. Did she know this? Did she sense his compassion? When she smiled, was it more than a token? And … and what did she want? Any of them, what did they long for? Did they have secret hopes? His hopes? Could this little girl—her eyes squinting as Doc brushed the scabs with iodine, her lips sucked in, her nose puckering at the smell—could she somehow separate him from the war? Even for an instant? Could she see him as just a scared-silly boy from Iowa? Could she feel sympathy? In it together, trapped, you and me, all of us: Did she feel that? Could she understand his fear, matching it with her own? Wondering, he put mercy in his eyes like lighted candles; he gazed at the girl, full-hearted, draining out suspicion, opening himself to whatever she might answer with. Did the girl see the love? Could she understand it, return it? But he didn’t know. He did not know if love or its analogue even existed in the vocabulary of Quang Ngai, or if friendship could be translated. He simply did not know. He wanted to be liked. He wanted them to understand, all of them, that he felt no hate. It was all a sad accident, he would have told them—chance, high-level politics, confusion. He had no stake in the war beyond simple survival; he was there, in Quang Ngai, for the same reasons they were: the luck of the draw, bad fortune, forces beyond reckoning. His intentions were benign. He was no tyrant, no pig, no Yankee killer. He was innocent. Yes, he was. He was innocent. He would have told them that, the villagers, if he’d known the language, if there had been time to talk. He would have told them he wanted to harm no one. Not even the enemy. He had no enemies. He had wronged no one. If he’d known the language, he would have told them how he hated to see the villages burned. Hated to see the paddies trampled. How it made him angry and sad when … a million things, when women were frisked with free hands, when old men were made to drop their pants to be searched, when, in a ville called Thin Mau, Oscar and Rudy Chassler shot down ten dogs for the sport of it. Sad and stupid. Crazy. Mean-spirited and self-defeating and wrong. Wrong! He would have told them this, the kids especially. But not me, he would have told them. The others, maybe, but not me. Guilty perhaps of hanging on, of letting myself be dragged along, of falling victim to gravity and obligation and events, but not—not!—guilty of wrong intentions.

  After the war, perhaps, he might return to Quang Ngai. Years and years afterward. Return to track down the girl with gold hoops through her ears. Bring along an interpreter. And then, with the war ended, history decided, he would explain to her why he had let himself go to war. Not because of strong convictions, but because he didn’t know. He didn’t know who was right, or what was right; he didn’t know if it was a war of self-determination or self-destruction, outright aggression or national liberation; he didn’t know which speeches to believe, which books, which politicians; he didn’t know if nations would topple like dominoes or stand separate like trees; he didn’t know who really started the war, or why, or when, or with what motives; he didn’t know if it mattered; he saw sense in both sides of the debate, but he did not know where truth lay; he didn’t know if communist tyranny would prove worse in the long run than the tyrannies of Ky or Thieu or Khanh—he simply didn’t know. And who did? Who really did? Oh, he had read the newspapers and magazines. He wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t uninformed. He just didn’t know if the war was right or wrong or somewhere in the murky middle. And who did? Who really knew? So he went to the war for reasons beyond knowledge. Because he believed in law, and law told him to go. Because it was a democracy, after all, and because LBJ and the others had rightful claim to their offices. He went to the war because it was expected. Because not to go was to risk censure, and to bring embarrassment on his father and his town. Because, not knowing, he saw no reason to distrust those with more experience. Because he loved his country and, more than that, because he trusted it. Yes, he did. Oh, he would rather have fought with his father in France, knowing certain things certainly, but he couldn’t choose his war, nobody could. Was this so banal? Was this so unprofound and stupid? He would look the little girl with gold earrings straight in the eye. He would tell her these things. He would ask her to see the matter his way. What would she have done? What would anyone have done, not knowing? And then he would ask the girl questions. What did she want? How did she see the war? What were her aims—peace, any peace, peace with dignity? Did she refuse to run for the same reasons he refused—obligation, family, the land, friends, home? And now? Now, war ended, what did she want? Peace and quiet? Peace and pride? Peace with mashed potatoes and Swiss steak and vegetables, a full-tabled peace, indoor plumbing, a peace with Oldsmobiles and Hondas and skyscrapers climbing from the fields, a peace of order and harmony and murals on public buildings? Were her dreams the dreams of ordinary men and women? Quality-of-life dreams? Material dreams? Did she want a long life? Did she want medicine when she was sick, food on the table, and reserves in the pantry? Religious dreams? What? What did she aim for? If a wish were to be granted by the war’s winning army—any wish—what would she choose? Yes! If LBJ and Ho were to rub their magic lanterns at war’s end, saying, “Here is what it was good for, here is the fruit,” what would Quang Ngai demand? Justice? What sort? Reparations? What kind? Answers? What were the questions: What did Quang Ngai want to know?

  In September, Paul Berlin was called before the battalion promotion board.

  “You’ll be asked some questions,” the first sergeant
said. “Answer them honestly. Don’t for Chrissake make it complicated—just good, honest answers. And get a fuckin haircut.”

  It was a three-officer panel. They sat like squires behind a tin-topped table, two in sunglasses, the third in skintight tiger fatigues.

  Saluting, reporting with his name and rank, Paul Berlin stood at attention until he was told to be seated.

  “Berlin,” said one of the officers in sunglasses. “That’s a pretty fucked-up name, isn’t it?”

  Paul Berlin smiled and waited.

  The officer licked his teeth. He was a plump, puffy-faced major with spotted skin. “No bull, that’s got to be the weirdest name I ever run across. Don’t sound American. You an American, soldier?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Yeah? Then where’d you get such a screwy name?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Sheeet.” The major looked at the captain in tiger fatigues. “You hear that? This trooper don’t know where he got his own name. You ever promoted somebody who don’t know how he got his own fuckin name?”

  “Maybe he forgot,” said the captain in tiger fatigues.

  “Amnesia?”