He liked drinking. He always had. It made him feel good. It quelled his anxiety. It made him temporarily interested in other people’s lives, and his own. Plus it tasted good. If alcohol had no redeeming qualities, like water, it would be very easy to not drink a lot of it.
Nonetheless, he had quit altogether for two separate stretches in his life. The first time was during a period of chronic unemployment when Cindy was little, two or three years old. He couldn’t seem to find any work that summer and wound up Mr. Momming it, making her breakfast in the morning, then lolling around watching cartoons with her, or helping her finger-paint or color in her books, or taking her to the little community park down the road from their apartment, watching her stumble around, arms outstretched, in the thick grass, forever toddling after someone’s dog. Early on, he discovered that going about this in his usual state of spooked, strobe-lit hangover was exceedingly unpleasant. For one thing, everything related to childcare—constant vigilance, exposure to loud noises and fast movements, anticipating the needs of another person—was antithetical to recovering from a hangover. For another thing, experiencing the precious, fleeting moments of his daughter’s childhood as something to be grimly endured made him feel like a complete piece of shit, so he stopped drinking.
It lasted for a few months and was a pretty good time. He didn’t say anything about it to Eileen, and she didn’t say anything either, in the superstitious manner of someone afraid of dispelling good fortune by acknowledging it. But in September he finally got on another high-rise crew—a group chronically populated by heavy drinkers—and he got back on or fell back off the wagon, however the expression went.
The other noteworthy stretch of sobriety was with Carole. Their life together was anesthetic enough, it seemed at the time. He was barely writing, was trying on the mantle of sober, fiscally responsible, married suburbanite, a mantle that felt very comfortable after years of dissolute, impoverished loneliness in the service of art, or “art.” She’d nepotized him into a job as head of landscaping for the property management company she ran. In the evenings, they’d return to her condo, a newly built property in Mesa that looked out over the placid fairways and greens of Casa Blanca Country Club. Sometimes she would pour him a glass of chilled white wine; sometimes she would not. They might sit on her Ethan Allen signature sofa and watch a laserdisc of Ghost on her giant TV, and he would swoon in an ecstasy of content despair. For two years of nearly continuous sobriety, during which they got married and honeymooned in Acapulco, he tried to embrace this contentment, which amounted to a kind of meditative acceptance of what felt—deep and also not so deep down—like a reduced state. Paradoxically, in this dreamless, frictionless, numb existence, alcohol seemed not only superfluous but dangerous. It had too much to do with his real self, which he’d kicked into unconsciousness and locked in the condo’s basement two years earlier.
His real self, fortunately or unfortunately, eventually kicked down the door and escaped screaming back into the desert night. In his extended second bachelorhood, he’d established a drinking routine that had allowed him to function more or less normally, provided the definition of “normal” included living alone in a desert trailer for five years. Nothing before noon, nothing hard before five, nothing hard after ten. This had served him well enough to work and live, not to mention write the book.
Now, he drank his allotted BEER and looked at the can. It wouldn’t be a bad last beer to drink, if there had to be a last one. Anyway, it seemed to be having the desired effect—along with the little pills the nurse brought three times a day, he felt no worse than usual. No tremors, no upset stomach or sweating. Dull and blank, yes, but there was no discomfort. Maybe that was the trick—to embrace that dullness, the real blankness that existed in the heart of every moment and action and thought, the void he’d been running away from as long as he could remember. He finished his last BEER, crushed the can, threw it in the corner, sat there.
CHAPTER NINE
We’d been in-country three months without seeing any action. We went on patrol every day, a two-kilometer half-circle sweep around the base of the hill behind us, which we took to calling Mount Neverest. We cleaned our rifles and our living quarters. We ate hearty meals and worked out afterward, jogging around and around the camp (I can still recall the sequence: Quonset huts, mess, armory, heads, clinic, Quonset huts, mess, armory…), lifting dumbbells, and doing complicated and difficult variations of push-ups, girding ourselves for what was coming. We scanned the perimeter and sometimes even felt the distant rumble and rumor of mortar explosions, like an earthquake from across the sea, but still there was no action.
We talked about action a lot, all the time, really. What to expect, what it was like. The majority of us were fresh, or nearly fresh, out of training. The guys who’d seen action instantly assumed a semi-mythic status with us, similar to the way seniors in high school appear to freshmen. They’d been through it. Berlinger had seen action in Binh Dinh, but he wouldn’t talk about it.
“Come on,” I said. A group of us was sitting in the mess after dinner playing dominos.
“Come on what,” said Berlinger.
“What happened?”
“When?”
“You know when. Binh Dinh.” I didn’t know if I was saying it right, rhyming the words in an uncertain singsong.
He put down snake eyes. “I told you before, it was a clusterfuck.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means a bunch of idiots in green are shooting guns at these other idiots in green shooting guns back, and there’s smoke and fire, and you’re running, then at some point you realize whatever was happening is over, and you somehow came out the other side, whoop-de-do. You won, apparently. And if you happened to catch a little shrapnel in the eye or get your dick shot off, some guy comes by while you’re zonked on morphine in sick bay, and pins a little Purple Heart pin to your chest. You can trade it in at the VFW back home for half-price Schlitz at the monthly social. Your go, Lazar.”
Another one of the combat vets, a black heavy-lidded Texan named Pauls, had fought in the Siege of Hue, during the Tet Offensive in 1968. He’d been honorably discharged following his tour, whored around Houston and Galveston and New Orleans for a year, then gotten bored and reenlisted. We treated him like some kind of warrior monk, our sensei. I remember us sitting around his feet staring up in awe, although surely we were cooler than that in reality.
What’s it like, someone might have called out, as guys got drunk sitting around the barracks, tired of the limited entertainments we had on hand to distract us from what we were really there to do, whatever that was. Without putting down whatever jungle-moist Action Comics or Playboy he was reading, Pauls would pronounce something oracular, like “It’s what it is, nothing to compare it to” or “Like going deep inside this cave and you walk out the other side different.” It sounds like pure bullshit remembering it now, but it sounded pretty badass then.
The other thing we talked about was pussy. Pussy in its cosmic infinitude of variety. Pussy as the ultimate goal of existence. Pussy as life, pussy as death. Pussy as an almost entirely conceptual entity separated from the women it belonged to. (Once, out on a run, this jug-eared kid next to me said, “Man, my dick’s so hard I gotta do handstands to pee. I get back to America, it’s all over for pussy. Pussy’s gonna rue the day I left Vietnam. Pussy’s gonna curse my name.”) Women were an entirely different subject, far too depressingly real and scary. In the same sense, we rarely discussed the stone-cold niceties of combat. Tactical considerations, for instance, or emergency triage. Our bullshit sessions about action, in both senses, were limited to the kind of metaphysical Platonism favored by scared young dudes who’ve never had the real thing.
We didn’t look to see action anytime soon, either. Our base was located on the southeastern edge of the central highlands, a relatively uncontested area, what with Cam Ranh and its tactical support within a couple of hours. A similar position on the opposite side of
the highlands, near the Ho Chi Minh Trail, would have been looking at daily firefights and the constant threat of mortar attack. Put it this way: if Vietnam was New York City, we were stationed in a toll booth on Staten Island. As far as any of us understood it, which wasn’t very far, ours was a safeguard position, making sure Charlie didn’t slink down the coast and try to curl around west toward Saigon. That’s just a guess, though. No one told us anything, least of all Lieutenant Endicott. He was a narrow-faced, tight-assed New Englander, a descendant of Boston Brahmins with a military pedigree going back to the Battle of Hastings. He had the stink of noblesse oblige about him—there was no other good reason for anyone who could have avoided service to have served. I mean, he certainly wasn’t stupid enough to have thought Vietnam was a good idea.
I will say that the area was beautiful. Sometimes, in the purple light of dusk, I would sneak behind the huts and look up at Mount Neverest. With its dark green vegetation interspersed with craggy bluff face, it reminded me of nothing so much as the few areas of California and the West that I’d seen. The surrounding forest was thick, but not overlush, and it was not hard to imagine homesteading there, getting yourself a little local mistress who knew the woods and language, and building a log cabin back in the woods. I’d imagined Vietnam as a fetid jungle, and I knew part of it was, but where we were it was soft-lit and peaceful green, if still hot as hell’s half acre.
This backdrop of placid, rugged beauty was the unlikely theater on which we staged our fantasies of action. We imagined scarring the hillsides with zappers, M-32 rounds, calling in air strikes to shear off the rock face. Vast firefights, an Independence Day of tracers and mortar shells, taking it to an invisible enemy that had massed somewhere out there. We imagined leading a charge, using our bayonets. We imagined acts of valor and acts of cowardice in equal measure. Though we were young, most of us were not dumb or naïve enough to pretend we knew how we’d respond in a real battle. That was why we imagined it and talked about it at such great length—we were trying on the clothes of a soldier the way a child tries on his father’s suit. We hoped we were up for it and feared we weren’t.
I remember in mess, once, Hawkins started talking about what he was going to do when he bagged his first zip, as he put it. “Gonna aim for the stomach, so he goes down but don’t die,” he said, mouth glistening with fruit syrup.
“Shut up, Lester,” someone said.
“No, wait,” he said. “Then I’m going to walk up and fucking execute him.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“I’ve got a little speech worked out and everything.” He grinned, pulling out a piece of paper from his ID wallet.
Berlinger said, “You know they don’t speak Dumbfuck, right?”
I don’t know where he got his hands on a translation book, but Hawkins looked down and started reading in a halting, cornpone Vietnamese: “Toi muon ban nhin thay khuon mat cua nguoi dan ong da giet chet ban. Doi voi tat ca coi doi doi, linh hon cua ban se thuoc ve toi.” He folded the paper back into his wallet with an air of finality, something settled.
“Well,” someone said at last, “what’s it mean?”
He said, “It means ‘I want you to see the face of the man who killed you. For all eternity, your soul will belong to me.’ ”
“Jesus Christ, Hawkins.”
Hawkins may have been a fucking nutcase, but I gave him credit for at least being up for some action. The longer we were there, talking about action and seeing none, the more I was convinced I wasn’t. I just couldn’t fathom the notion that there were men somewhere out in the jungle, a whole nation of men, who hated America and wanted to use their guns and knives and mines to do away with me. Me! Let alone the idea that I should do the same to them. I got through my doubts by lying. I teetered around on my bravado like a pair of stilts. I lied all day, to myself and others, but at night, in my cot, surrounded by the innocent snoring of my fellow soldiers, the truth squatted on me like a school-yard bully, pinned me to the bed and forced me to look it in its bright eyes. The truth, it said, is you can’t do it. Oh, you can fire a rifle and do fifty push-ups and ten pull-ups. You ran your survival course in respectable time, finished Basic. You can put on your greens and helmet and field pack, and look exactly like a soldier. But you are not one.
It wasn’t from any conscientious objection. I was nineteen—I wasn’t conscientious about anything besides jerking off twice a day. And I had no conscience to speak of. It was simple fear, yet I knew most of the men sleeping around me were scared, as well. I knew I was likely surrounded by a jungle dreamworld full of bloody ambushes, green malarial death, incompetence, and paralytic impotence in the face of the enemy. And I also knew none of them felt what I felt, which was a leaden certainty that I was not going to do this thing everyone, including me, said I was going to do. What quality separated my fear from theirs? Was there simply more of it? Maybe so. It flowed like liquid metal through my veins, made my arms and legs dull and useless. I only reached sleep each night through the thin comfort of knowing that in the morning I could keep lying and defer the truth one more day.
When I did dream, I sometimes dreamed about the little strip of woods behind our quarters, figures weaving their way silently between the trees. In one memorable nightmare, I was enormous, towering over the base, looking at myself as I slept. I grabbed the trees by the tops of their branches, and yanked, and the whole piece of land came up like a ripped-off Band-Aid. Underneath, thousands of tiny Viet Cong writhed in the light, like maggots under a rotten log suddenly exposed to air. I pounded them over and over with my fist, and woke up flailing at the mosquito netting over my cot.
Then, too, there were good dreams—disembarking a Boeing 707, expecting to step out into the choking Indochinese air—only to feel a cool breeze on my face, look at the smiling stewardess at my elbow, and somehow know that I was back in America. But then again, these were also the worst dreams, as terrible as they made waking up, dripping with sweat, under the same mosquito netting, bivouacked in a tin hut somewhere in Vietnam.
———
The one thing that did happen during this stretch didn’t happen to me. Berlinger and Tony Carbone had been sent out on morning patrol, probably as punishment by our staff sergeant, Davis Martin, for having to listen to them go back and forth all the time. Berlinger baited Carbone like it was his job. Anything cornily Italian—Dean Martin, Marciano, spaghetti and meatballs, et cetera—was fair game, and Carbone somehow always took the bait.
I was in the yard after exercises, writing a letter back home I knew I wouldn’t send, when I heard yelling. Me and two other guys ran to the entrance—Berlinger had Carbone under the arms and was hauling him like one of the giant flour sacks that got dropped off by supply trucks twice a month. He was shouting for help and we ran down the path to where he was, rifles out. Carbone’s foot was gone and the meat of the leg was sheared away to the shin, like a chicken leg gnawed to the bone. It trailed in the bloody dirt, left a little divot. The guy to my left, whose name is lost to me, got on his knees and retched. Me and the other guy grabbed his legs, what was left of them, and carried him into base, to sick bay. I remember looking down at the bone sticking out and thinking how odd it was, that it looked in real life the way you would imagine it. That there was no special magic holding our bodies together and no sacred energy unleashed when they were torn apart. Just blood and bone.
That night, sitting sedated, but still ashen and sweating, with his back against the hut’s tin wall, Berlinger told me what had happened. Predictably, they’d been going back and forth, and he’d started in about how Sinatra was a fairy and “My Way” was about taking it up the wazoo. Carbone came at him and of course Berlinger, with a foot and eighty pounds advantage, easily fended him off. Too easily—he accidentally pushed Carbone back into a nearby bush, and when Carbone got up, he was covered in shit; apparently some monkey or lemur had eaten a bad oyster and squatted there. Carbone stalked off, furious, momentarily leaving the trail, which, over t
he last year, had been swept and patrolled into a safe, smooth ring. He disappeared into the woods, and a second later Berlinger’s ears compressed and there was smoke and then screaming. Berlinger found him on the outside of a black ring of underbrush, singed and flattened by the mine he’d stepped on.
Carbone was sewed up and shipped home. We saw him off in the back of the green supply truck, got him situated against a couple of those big bags of flour. The morphine he was on dropped his eyes before we could wish him well, and then the truck was pulling out and gone. In the days that followed, recon found no further mines in the area and the consensus was that it was random, possibly a remnant of the French occupation. Just bad luck, shrugged Davis Martin at chow a few days later.
“Bad luck,” said Berlinger, looking up from his turkey Alfredo, his tin of stewed apples.
“What else?”
“Stupidity?”
“Yeah, that too.”
Other than that, though, we waited. No action, besides the action in our heads. And my growing certainty I wouldn’t be able to do it, whatever it was. At a certain point, I even began fantasizing that we would never see action, that my military life would wind up being the same as my civilian life, just a bunch of jerking off and bullshitting, albeit in hundred-degree heat. Then on May 22, 1971, the order finally came down to move out.
———
Vance put the book down and, for the hundredth time in the last thirty minutes, scanned his surroundings for the girl. He sat on a bench beside a small playground at the apex of San Ysidro Park—in the daylight it was not a magic garden, just a city park where people walked their dogs, took their children to play, or, like him, sat reading in patches of sunlight. Below him was a sloping expanse of green, bordered on each side by rows of trees and to the south by a row of interlocking Spanish colonial apartments in pastel colors that reminded him of Easter candy. In the distance, the buildings of downtown pressed up against the horizon; an expanse of gray rainclouds issued from over the skyline. They had a quilted, overstuffed look and provided a sense of three-dimensional depth that prevented the vista from looking like a mediocre landscape painting.
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