There was a pause, and then a reluctant smudge of purple smoke billowed near the crest of the ridge adjacent to the one they had been circling. Mike relaxed. At least he could die on the right hill now.
My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life. I will learn it as a brother.
The pilot gave Mike a look that said, I hope you’re happy, and spoke into the headset. “Hotel, Blue Pete. I’ve got purple smoke. Over!…Roger that. Tallyho!” He pushed the controls forward, and the chopper veered and plunged groundward in a sickening spiral. The guy could fly after all, when he put his mind to it.
Mike groped back to a spot near the door, his stomach feeling like it was half a step behind him. A series of metallic thunks, like a nail gun, stippled the floor toward the rear of the chopper. Ground fire from an AK-47.
The door gunner swiveled his M-60, blasting back, almost certainly at random. The noise was deafening. Spent shell casings clattered everywhere like a flurry of brass crickets. Clinging to a stanchion, PFC Krzykrewski looked green. The helicopter flared out of its dive with another stomach-boggling whoosh and hovered ten feet over the ridge, the elephant grass flattening below it from the rotor wash. Krzykrewski took the opportunity to throw up on the floor.
Mike moved to the brink of the open hatch, followed by the queasy Krzykrewski. He considered the daunting drop to the ground and motioned to the door gunner, Lower! The guy hollered into his headset to the pilot, then shook his head, managing to look embarrassed even through the black visor. The careful major felt that they were low enough, and even his crew knew it was chickenshit.
Fuck it, Mike thought. Anything was safer than wallowing here ten feet off the ground making a target for rockets. Besides, the chopper stank of vomit now. A little memento for the aviation wing, from the guys who got muddy and bled. Before God I swear this creed. My rifle and I are the defenders of my country. Mike gave Krzykrewski a let’s-go bang on the shoulder and jumped, holding his helmet with his left hand, field-Marine-style, and his M-16 with his right.
WHEN ALL ELSE FAILED, there was laundry. Liz hated the stuff. It fell like snow throughout the house in every season, dumped by the constant storm of children. She had left Detroit on a drama scholarship with nothing in her head but dreams of the glorious stage. She had played Antigone in high school and Joan of Arc as a college freshman, to standing ovations, and now she was the Penelope in an unattended farce, weaving and unweaving the same pile of dirty clothes while waiting to hear exactly how her man had died.
Deb-Deb swam into the kitchen, moving with the distinct sinuous movement that denoted otter locomotion in her little world. She chirped lightly.
“You just had breakfast,” Liz said.
Deb-Deb chirped again and held her paws in front of her chest in a begging motion. Liz sighed and gave her a Triscuit, and her daughter turned and undulated out of the room, holding the cracker between her lips. It wasn’t about eating, Liz knew. Deb-Deb would swim back into the living room, to the otters’ den she’d built out of couch pillows, and store the Triscuit carefully beneath the afghan in the corner, for the coming winter. Liz sometimes feared that she gave her youngest child too much magical leeway. But the fluid, playful world of otters suited Deb-Deb; she lived there more than she did on dry land.
Liz poured the last of the Saturday morning coffee into a mug that had been used only twice and sat down at the kitchen table. The precious moments between the wash cycle and the spin would be her last chance of the day to breathe quietly. She could hear the intermittent thud of a baton hitting the floor upstairs, where Kathie was practicing her trick twirling. She and Temperance were the stars of the school’s crew of majorettes, and the ceiling of the girls’ bedroom was pocked and scuffed with the scars of overenthusiastic tosses.
The boys were off somewhere burying a turtle. The casualty rate among amphibious pets in the O’Reilly household was tremendous; the latest fatality, in a sadly shriveled condition, had been found under the couch this morning after a protracted search. Liz had been ready to give up after half an hour, but Danny had insisted on finding the body. Marines didn’t leave their dead on the battlefield. Angus had cried, but Danny had bucked him up with the promise of a funeral with full military honors. They’d taken their BB guns and were going to give the turtle a twenty-one-gun salute.
In short, the kids were happily occupied. No one was crying, no one was fighting, and no one was in obvious immediate danger. The grocery list was formulated, and the children’s dentist appointments were set. Mike’s most recent paycheck wouldn’t clear the bank until this afternoon, so she couldn’t dig into the stack of unpaid bills until tonight. Her gynecologist seemed happy enough with the progress of her pregnancy, and he was much more pleased with the five pounds she’d already gained than Liz was herself. The toilets were clean, within reason, and she had vacuumed less than a week ago. The laundry was in motion and the sink was empty.
Liz sipped her coffee and dunked a cold tater tot in the pool of ketchup on her plate. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad day after all. Hell, it was almost ten o’clock, and no one had showed up yet to tell her that her husband had been killed.
[ PART TWO ]
Sir, the United States Marines: since 1775, the most invincible fighting force in the history of man. Gung ho! Gung ho! Gung ho! Pray for war!
RECITED BEFORE MEALS AT OFFICERS’ CANDIDATE SCHOOL, QUANTICO, VIRGINIA
The truth is that the more ourselves we are, the less self is in us.
MEISTER ECKHART
CHAPTER 5
SEPTEMBER 1967
AT LARRY PETROSKI’S funeral mass, on Labor Day, Liz threw up. At first she thought her nausea was metaphorical, a response to the God-and-country homily by the complacent priest; and then she thought it was guilt, that she was so appallingly glad it was Maria’s husband in that casket and not hers; but as the literal bile surged in her throat, the fine points ceased to matter and she clapped her hand over her mouth and bolted, smacking through a gauntlet of black-clad knees in a blind rush from the pew.
She made it only three steps down the center aisle before she doubled over and the first wave spewed. Liz tried to catch it in her cupped hands, but it was too much, and in any case her stomach heaved again and again. She’d had three cups of coffee, a bowl of Cheerios and a piece of toast, and several of Maria’s Bloody Marys at the Petroski house beforehand, and it all came up in wave after splattering, convulsive wave. She was beyond embarrassment; it was more like dying, a truth so absolute that there was nothing to do but surrender to it.
When she came back to herself, she was on her hands and knees on the bespattered tile, smelling sour vodka and tomato juice. Danny was beside her, looking alarmed. The other children, thank God, had stayed in the pew. Liz smiled ruefully at her son, trying to indicate that she was all right, which was ridiculous, of course. This wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted your kids to see.
Why did you throw up, Mommy? Well, sweetie, I guess I just can’t stomach this shit.
The glib priest had mercifully fallen silent, and everyone was staring at her in degrees of sympathy and dismay. She’d gotten turned around somehow and was facing the front of the church, looking right at the flag-draped casket set before the altar. It seemed like such a formal and tidy package, so un-Larrylike. They’d finally squared the edges off that joyful, incorrigible man and made a standard-issue hero of him in spite of everything.
And what is a hero, Mommy? Nothing but hair, teeth, and eyeballs, dear.
Her stomach convulsed again. Danny put his arm around her tenderly, trying to keep her hair out of the way, as you would try to make a dying man comfortable on the battlefield, not flinching at the splatter. He was his father’s son, all right, Liz thought; and he was having to grow up way too fast. She began to cry, she was so ashamed of herself. It really wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted your kid to see.
AT THE QUANTICO National Cemetery an hour later, Liz stood across the grave from Maria with two childr
en on either side, the girls closest, squinting in sunlight so bright it seemed perverse. The front of her dress was streaked with the vomit she hadn’t been able to sponge off, as were Danny’s pants. She felt empty as a ghost, an incidental casualty of the ceremony. Maria, armored in a black wool dress, black pillbox hat and gloves, and black sunglasses, had her own three boys arrayed in a somber row of diminishing height. She looked implacably composed. She’d told Liz over the Bloody Marys that morning that she wasn’t going to cry, she wasn’t going to wail, and she wasn’t going to accept the flag from the casket, that they could take their goddamned Stars and Stripes and stick it where the sun didn’t shine.
Sure enough, when the white-gloved sergeant in his dress blues brought her the flag, folded crisply into a triangle, Maria sat unmoving, looking at the thing as if it were roadkill dragged home by the dog. But Chevy, proud and stiff beside her, wearing his new black suit like a uniform, reached out, and the sergeant handed him the flag with some relief. Maria glanced across the grave and tilted her sunglasses back on her head, her eyes finding Liz’s. A dry, frank look, spent, and eloquent with resignation: there was no way to beat the system. First they took your husband; and then they took your son.
Liz met her friend’s gaze helplessly; and after a moment Maria let her sunglasses fall back into place and put her arm around Chevy’s shoulder as he clutched the flag to his chest.
The seven riflemen of the honor guard snapped their M-1s up and fired, chambered rounds and fired again, and again; and as the echoes of the shots faded a lone bugler played Taps from a green knoll above the grave site. Kathie, and then Deb-Deb, began to sob. Liz wept too. It was poignant almost beyond endurance; but in her heart she fought the poignancy, for Maria’s sake and, finally, for her own. Let the sweet sad song play on and make its little moment’s magic. Tomorrow that same bugle would play Reveille, and everyone would wake up heedless and duly inspired to do it all again. Except, of course, for those with nothing left to lose among the living, and those who rested with the honored dead beneath the clean white stones.
“IS LIEUTENANT PETROSKI in heaven?” Angus asked on the way home.
“Captain,” Danny said. “He made captain before he died.”
“Of course Uncle Larry is in heaven,” Liz said.
“If Daddy gets shot, will he go to heaven too?”
“Shut up, birdbrain,” Danny said.
“Hush, Danny,” Liz said and, to Angus, “Of course he will, honey. But Daddy’s not going to get shot.”
MIKE COULD SMELL the Marines before he saw them. It was a distinctly male, American smell, part locker room and part wet dog, the reassuring stink of troops in the field. The elephant grass was shorter near the hilltop, maybe three feet high, and trampled down, and a hint of Hotel Company’s desultory perimeter was discernible in a series of shallow foxholes, where unshaven men in filthy dungarees lounged with their rifles cradled close, their ponchos jury-rigged to create some shade. They all looked hot, tired, and sullen. Almost everyone had their flak jackets unfastened in the heat. The troops in sight seemed remarkably casual, even bored, but it was a deceptive tedium. Somewhere within hollering range, a hundred and eighty armed and edgy U.S. Marines were dug in, ready to fire at anything that moved. Yet he and Krzykrewski had penetrated well inside the company’s position before they were challenged.
The good news, Mike thought, was that no one had taken them for bad guys and shot them. The bad news was that nobody seemed particularly well positioned to shoot anyone. Boredom and slack tactics were a particularly lethal combination. The old military rule of thumb, that war was 99 percent dull routine and 1 percent pure terror, applied in Vietnam as well. The uniqueness of Vietnam was that you could get killed here as easily when you were bored as when you were terrified.
Mike, with Krzykrewski still tagging along, headed for a gaggle of antennas toward the center of the position. The Hotel Company command group of nearly a dozen grimy men, none showing any indication of rank, was crouched in a natural hollow in the trampled-down elephant grass. No one had bothered to dig in, and one well-placed mortar round could have taken them all out, but that was life at the top. Most of the men were heartbreakingly young. They eyed Mike and Krzykrewski noncommittally as they approached.
“Where’s your Six?” Mike asked the one who seemed to have the most lights on, a gangly radioman with clear blue eyes. The kid jerked a thumb toward two men near the center of the group, an older black man in a sleeveless green skivvy shirt and a self-important young fellow in sweat-soaked fatigues. The older guy had the resigned look of a senior noncommissioned officer containing disgust. The younger guy was a little too bright-eyed. Here we go, Mike thought.
“I’m Captain O’Reilly, the new CO,” he said.
The older man spat, barely short of insubordinate, confirming Mike’s sense that he was a sergeant. The younger man jumped up and almost saluted, then caught himself. To salute anyone in the field was to make him a target. “Lieutenant Claridge, sir. Welcome aboard.”
Mike squatted and gestured for Claridge to get down again too. The sergeant hadn’t moved. “Thanks. What’s our situation?”
Claridge hesitated.
“Pure cluster fuck,” the noncom supplied. He had a Mississippi accent and a tattoo on the meat of his shoulder, a red dragon breathing a stream of flame that said, SIC SEMPER FIDELLIS.
“We’ve assumed a defensive posture,” Lieutenant Claridge said hastily, to which the noncom, with an air of supplying a translation, added, “Our asses are flapping in the wind.”
Mike eyed the older man. “And you would be—?”
“Master Sergeant Isaiah Tibbetts.” They stared at each other. “Sir.”
“Well, Top, why don’t you humor me for a minute here and shut the fuck up.”
Tibbetts’s eyes sparked angrily, but he set his mouth in a firm line and said nothing. Mike turned to Claridge.
“Call the platoon leaders in here, I’m going to want to see them right away,” he said. “And after that you and I will make some rounds. Our perimeter is a mess. We’re going to need to move some of those positions in and tighten up. We’ll send out a squad to mine the path we came in on. We’ll need to arrange some reconnaissance. And let’s get everybody digging in. Some of these guys haven’t even gotten their shovels dirty yet.”
Claridge looked pained. “Sir, the men are tired. And, begging the captain’s pardon, pissed off. We’ve been humping these hills for almost a week.”
“Better tired and pissed off than dead. Call the platoon sixes in, Lieutenant.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Claridge said. His hand twitched, he wanted so much to salute, but he restrained himself and scuttled reluctantly to the radio.
Left alone, Mike and Sergeant Tibbetts squatted for a moment in silence.
“Jesus, Top,” Mike said at last.
“Yes, sir,” Tibbetts agreed. “Jesus Fucking Christ. Welcome to Heartbreak Hotel.”
“So, what’s the story, with this company?”
The sergeant hesitated. “The straight shit, sir?”
“Hell, yes, the straight shit.”
“The straight shit is we been patrolling this fucking cesspool for the last six weeks with the stupidest fucking rules of engagement you ever heard, and taking casualties almost every fucking patrol without ever getting any back. Yeah, the men are tired and pissed. But they’re mostly just sick of getting their asses kicked. They’d like to at least get some back.”
“We’ll get some back,” Mike said. “What about Daniels?”
Tibbetts hesitated. “I’d hate to speak ill of the dead, sir.”
“God forbid,” Mike agreed, deadpan.
They looked at each other, making their mutual assessments; then Tibbetts shrugged. “Captain Daniels was a nice man. A very nice man. He hated to ask too much of the men, and he wanted everyone to like him. And golly gee, sir, they liked him a lot.”
“But—?” Mike prompted.
“But he was a
fuckup,” Tibbetts said. “And he left you with a fuckup company. And if we keep fucking up, a lot more of us will be dead. Because Lieutenant Claridge is a fucking nice guy too. Sir.”
Mike was silent for a moment, then he said, “Well, Top, I have four kids at home, and a wife I love, and I am the meanest motherfucker you will ever meet, because I intend to get home to them alive.”
The sergeant met his gaze. He had surprisingly gentle eyes, brown as new coffee. “Aye, aye, sir. I got a little boy myself.”
“Let’s get to work, then,” Mike said.
THE OCEANA NAVAL Air Station PX on the last Saturday afternoon before school started was jammed with harried mothers, their children in tow. Liz pushed a shopping cart up the boys’ clothing aisle, tossing six-packs of white athletic socks and BVDs on top of the basketball hoop and the girls’ new sweaters and dresses. Everyone had outgrown last year’s clothes, lost last year’s book bags, and scorned last year’s lunch boxes. Danny wanted a “Combat” lunch box this year, which meant that Angus did too, so that would be easy. Kathie had set her heart on a Barbie lunch box. But not just any Barbie, a Negro Barbie. It had something to do with her friend Temperance. Liz had found nothing but blond-Barbie lunch boxes, and one brunette, at half a dozen stores so far. She’d tried to make a case to her daughter for patience, for breaking down the lunch box color barrier with all deliberate speed, but Kathie would settle for nothing less than immediate action.
Deb-Deb wanted an otter lunch box, which was probably impossible. She would have to settle for Baloo from The Jungle Book. A mammal, at least.
Fifteen feet ahead of Liz, Danny and Angus skulked along the edge of the aisle with plastic M-16s in their hands, taking cover where they could find it among the racks of children’s clothing. They were treating the shopping cart as a convoy vehicle to be escorted through the hazards of the PX.
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