by Chris Lynch
“And some of them are just little ol’ burrows under little ol’ nothin’ villages,” Marquette says flatly.
“And some of them are that,” Silva says.
McClean pulls up the lid to reveal a wood-framed hole about eighteen inches by eighteen inches. And very, very dark.
“Pretty inviting,” says Sunshine.
“Indeed,” says Silva.
Now, here’s how it is with me, how it’s been since basically the explosion, the shift in command, the fight, the whole change of scene here: I don’t talk much. I’ve decided it’s a soldier’s job to take orders, to listen about twenty times as much as he talks. And so I will exchange information, I will communicate in a helpful and professional manner, but beyond that … the idea of just talking to the other guys, without a specific reason, never appeals to me much. I’d just as soon keep to myself. I’m not rude or impolite, not mean or snarly. I would say even that in my way I might be the best mannered man in this outfit. Like a silent and gentle monk, most of the time.
My nickname for the past two weeks has been Private Monk.
Hunter, I would consider a friend. I talk to him here and there without a compelling reason to. I would bet just about anything that Hunter hasn’t killed anybody he wasn’t supposed to. As for all the rest up and down that line?
I couldn’t tell you a thing for sure. But I would imagine that whatever they have done, each one of them would tell you they believed they did the right thing, for the right reason. And they’d believe it, no doubt about it.
“This has to be investigated,” Lt. Silva says about the tunnel.
A few things are obvious right out of the chute. Sunshine, Marquette, and Silva are definitely too big for the job, and probably McClean as well. That leaves me, Cherry, and Hunter, and Cpl. Cherry wouldn’t go into a tunnel if you filled it with water and set him on fire. Possibly no corporal in the entire corps would, from what I’ve been able to gather.
Here’s another thing I’m aware of, as I look at Hunter go a bit whiter at the prospect of the tunnel: It is time for me to speak.
“Lt. Silva, as I understand it a man cannot be sent down into one of them tunnels unless he volunteers to do so.”
Silva smiles. “You understand correctly, private.”
“I’m going down that tunnel, sir. Like yourself, I’ve been hearing about these tunnels for a long time without encountering one. And like you, I am very excited at the discovery. But unlike you, lieutenant, I am built for the job.”
Now Hunter smiles, though he tries not to.
“Are you calling me fat, private?” Lt. Silva says.
For a second I panic, then I calm as I see Silva grinning like a skeleton head with a cigarette clenched between his teeth. There isn’t any fat on him. He’s just big.
“I do believe that’s more words than Private Monk has spoken all month,” Sunshine says.
“Come on, come on,” I say, and find a weird kind of franticness come over me, an itch to get down that tunnel. “Let’s get me kitted out for this job, men,” I say.
“Right,” Silva says. “We need a light, a pistol, a knife …”
I get more excited with every item he lists. I’m getting some kind of mania coming over me, rushing from the ground up. Heart’s pounding, head’s spinning, but there’s nothing bad about what’s happening to me because I’m seeing right now with a clarity I haven’t had for a long time, if ever.
I am supposed to be doing this, right now. I was meant for this. I feel as correct about going under the ground in the next few minutes as if I was some kind of giant diamond-head drill bit gonna bore all the way to the center of the earth.
And I think it shows.
“Look at this boy, wouldja?” Sunshine says. “Who is this guy? This is a whole other-dimension Rudi we are seeing here. Second-dimension Rudi. Rudi 2-D, that’s who we have here.”
I like it as soon as I hear it.
I like it more than all my other names combined.
Rudi 2-D. That’s who’s going down into this tunnel. The original Rudi never could have done this in a million years. The original test-failing, fight-losing, pants-wetting, dead-weight loser Rudi could never have done this, ever, ever. In any life. Ever.
And what’s more. What’s more? Most other people couldn’t do this, either. Not on their best, bravest day.
“Thanks, man,” Hunter says as he secures the flashlight to my chest with some white medical tape. When I am in there crawling, this will act like the headlight on an underground train.
“No problem, man,” I say. “Happy to do it.”
“I didn’t even know that thing about needing volunteers for this. That true?”
“True, but I would’ve done it anyway.”
“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t have. Even if they ordered me. I’d have let them court martial me first.”
“Ah,” I say, shoving him away, “no, you wouldn’t.”
He just grins, and I figure, yeah, he probably would have.
Sunshine has detached his bayonet and shoved it into my hand. He is grinning and shaking his head at the same time. “Go get ’em,” he says.
Lt. Silva detaches his own sidearm from his hip, checks the clip, then slaps it back into place before handing it over. “Some guys get all the fun,” he says.
I nod at him. Silva would do this, and so would Sunshine. That’s it.
I am sitting on the edge of the hole, about to be lowered down, when a thought flashes in my head, because I am still — at least for another second, until I drop down under the ground of this country on the opposite side of life from my life — I am still one little small part the sad Rudy-Judy from Boston:
Morris would never do this.
Beck would never do this.
Arthur and Teddy and every other fathead who threw my books and pencils and tuna sandwiches on the street would never do this no matter even if they weren’t fat.
I am the only one who would do this.
Me and Ivan.
Ivan and me.
Lt. Silva and Sunshine grab me firmly by the wrists and begin lowering me into the hole. The others stand guard, over them and over me, but still keep looking back to steal glances. They have me gripped pretty well as they lean in, lean over, lean down, and my vision sees the regular blue and green world rise, then shrink, then become an eighteen-by-eighteen window straight to sky.
The men holding me are extended all the way down. I, too, am extended all the way, hanging on to them, reaching for bottom with my toes.
I have no idea right now, in this mystery shaft, where bottom might be.
“Let me go,” I say to the men.
“You feel floor?” Silva says.
“Just drop me,” I say. “I’m sure it’s here somewhere.”
After a two-second pause, which probably involves shrugging, they drop me.
Yeoww. I feel the rush of my organs surprising themselves by surging up through my body, then grunt as I crash to the earth. I figure there was about a six-foot drop between where my feet dangled and where they land. The bump and the surprise of it mean my legs collapse under me when I hit. But I can’t even execute a proper fall, since the shaft is too narrow. It’s like crash-landing inside a barrel, and I wind up in a semi-crouch.
“Okay?” Silva whispers, and we both know even this much communication could get a guy killed.
“Yeah,” I say, and that’s the end of that. I can’t see anything, so I feel all around me, the moist ancient-scented dirt crumbling in my hands until, in the space behind my knees, I feel where this vertical road turns onto the horizontal one. I twist and torque until I get myself into position, and I’m in.
I lie still for several seconds, listening. Listening for anything at all. I have the semiautomatic pistol in my right hand, and the knife in my left. I don’t turn on the flashlight — my neck beam — until I am convinced nobody’s going to be staring right at me when I do.
But I feel this much: There is life in here.
I can feel this place breathing.
I reach in, like I am about to pinch my own Adam’s apple, and snap on the light.
There are eyes staring right back at me.
I gasp, and try like a maniac to crawl in reverse. Rats. Rats, rats, which are unpleasant and disgusting when you see them entering the subway at Park Street Station at night, but are horrors when they are four inches from your face with fifteen feet of Southeast Asia hanging over you.
I can see one, two, three of them up close, and detect movement farther down, but when I back away like a panicked cockroach it is clear that I am more bothered by the situation than they are. They sniff and stare in my direction, but it doesn’t seem like anybody is looking to make any false moves. That’s what they would say in the gangster movies, nobody make any false moves, and since I always found that funny on Sunday afternoon TV, I am going to hang on to that thought while I make my way through this.
Once I am reasonably sure that the situation is as calm as it could be, I reverse direction — and all human impulse — working my way deeper into the tunnel. Right into the teeth of the rats, you might say.
My flesh tingles as I go. No false moves, guys. They spread along the edges, up the walls, over my back. That was a false move. That was a very false move. But I push on.
I crawl on my belly for what is probably two hundred yards. The rats get routine, even when I can’t see them. It is their place. At least it means, if the rats are here, then the snakes probably aren’t. There is a famous joke here, that there are about a hundred different varieties of snake in Vietnam and ninety-nine of them are poisonous. The other one swallows you whole.
But rats make a good snake early-warning system.
Which is why I get real worried when I realize the rats are gone. All of a sudden, like their mother called them all home for supper, they aren’t anywhere to be seen or, more importantly, to be felt.
There is no air down here. I am burning up, but practically liquefying at the same time with the humidity. The only reason I can breathe at all, I imagine, is that there are vents located throughout the system, because these guys thought of pretty much everything. I have even heard that they have small chimneys cut up through the terrain for when they do their cooking. Of course, all of these ingenious airways are also making it possible for all these mosquitoes and spiders and ants and I don’t want to think about what elses to be sharing the space with me at this moment.
My skin all over is getting caked with earth. It’s starting to feel like I have a coating of soft clay plastered over me, making my pores feel all plugged, making it even harder to feel like I can get a good breath.
I stumble, tumbling into a shallow pool of stagnant water. I don’t know what this is for, but it is part of the design because a few yards up I find another, then another. Something to do with preserving the air-chemical mix, I’m guessing, so that life is possible down here. Or possibly basic toilets.
I retch, just a little, thinking I might have just been elbow-deep in VC sewage.
But I push on, and find my first side room. I turn my torso to shine my light in and all around, and see nothing but walls, so I take the turn and explore.
It’s about a six-foot side trip into a room the size of a pantry, with rough shelving going up and down the walls. The shelves are piled with cans, empty cans, which, I find when I get up close, are hundreds and hundreds of US C-rations: chili and peaches, corn and creamed beef, and the lot. Either this hotel had American clientele, or we were supplying the enemy without even knowing it.
I keep going. But with every foot of trail I blaze here, I become more convinced this network is as abandoned as the village above it. I do find interesting bits here and there. There is a level down below that was used for trash, and another side room that was used as a bike repair shop. There must be the spare parts to a hundred bikes in here — sprockets, pedals, handlebars, tires, and tubes and bells. The frames of three of them still lean there against the wall, but from the look of it the operation tanked from a critical lack of lubrication. I pick up one chain and it is fused up like a petrified bird skeleton.
In some places I can crouch and shuffle forward instead of crawling on hands and knees, but that’s no help and in fact just makes it more frustrating. It makes you want to stand up all the more. Twice, I let the urge get to me and find myself crashing into the rounded dirt ceiling above me. And every time I come to another new dead end of an opening, the entryway is just that much smaller and so I am right back on my knees again.
I smell something different just as I am about to call it quits. Something munitions related. Phosphorus, gunpowder, something.
The opening to this space is slightly larger, and up a bit of a rise. I crawl up a ramp, like to a mini underground parking garage. I flash my light in through the opening and catch a glimpse of a substantial-size storeroom, chock full of the same crates of United States standard ammunition I’ve been seeing and using since I got here. Our stuff. They got their hands somehow on our bullets. They are pumping US personnel full of our ammo. Everything from M-60 machine guns to Howitzers to full-metal jacket rounds for this very handgun I am at this very minute —
I get a thump at the base of my neck that feels like a tree falling on me.
I cry out in pain and surprise. I have been clubbed by something like a baseball bat, though it could well be a choice chunk of rock, and my face is being ground into the turf hard enough to make my nose cartilage sound like a bowl of just-wet Rice Krispies amplified inside my head.
There is only one guy, it seems, but one is enough in here. He is on my back and already my light is gone, driven into the dirt. He is grabbing for the knife, smashing my hand against the rocky base of the doorway until the weapon falls out of my grip.
I scramble onto my side, feeling around for the blade while he claws and punches at me, and suddenly, I can tell he’s got the bayonet, and we are just smashing and thrashing at each other in pitch blackness, until he grabs me by the neck and we go tumbling down that ramp and away from the underground ammo depot.
We roll backward and crash into what feels like a fork in the tunnel road. I try to wheel on him with the pistol, but it is frankly all guesswork and I’m just flailing around and catching nothing. I stop for a second, listening for his breathing, which is made all but pointless by my own frantic hyperventilating, and I am feeling really in trouble.
Because he knows the terrain.
Whack!
The whole side of my skull feels cracked as he pits the base and blade of my weapon right across my eye socket.
I crash backward again, rolling down to another level, where I bump to a halt against a tunnel wall.
We are both filling the space with breath, and sweat, and fear. He is up above me, I can hear, but I would have to go blindly to go after him at all.
What would the other option be? Waiting?
I crawl up toward his breathing.
He knows every curve down here, for sure. He is up and I am down.
“I’m gonna kill you,” I say, dropping my voice as low as I can get it. It’s not very low, but I’m just thankful it doesn’t crack. “I’m gonna blow your head off, man.” Why should I expect him to understand English? Is there any chance in a million scenarios I would be likely to get one word of Vietnamese? I hope my tough John Wayne voice will be enough to defeat him based on tone alone. “Drop that blade, Chucky, or I’m going to shoot you right in the face. I mean it.”
“Don’t shoot face,” he says, from about five feet away and a tick to the left.
“Good,” I say, walking forward on my knees. “Good. English. Good. I want to hear the blade hit the ground. I want you to flash that light on the blade where I can see it.”
“No light,” he says. “You light. No me light.”
“You have my light, pal. Don’t mess around.”
I’ve stopped. I’m standing, on my knees, with the pistol leveled straight from my shoulder like some kind of dwarf cop
busting an invisible drug dealer on the street.
There are three directions he could take, if he wanted to dodge. I haven’t the slightest clue.
“I will shoot you,” I say.
“Shoot!” he says, and I think I know the spot, so I oblige.
Boom! The sound is deafening in this small space, and as the muzzle flash goes I see the space where I was sure the guy had been. But there is nothing there but ghost.
“I will find you.”
He is here, yes, just like a ghost, but I feel his presence like I could feel the rats. I sense him just before he makes his move. He comes through some other side entrance, lunging at me, slicing through my shirt, nicking my shoulder and making me scream at the very same moment I turn on him and pull the trigger.
The gun muzzle bumps right into his head as I shoot him. The flash illuminates his face at the very instant the blast tears it right off his skull.
I sit. In the darkest darkness there is.
That face. It was with me, for a fragment of a fragment of a second that face was here in the world with my face and now they are in very different places.
How old was he? Who can tell with these guys? As far as I can tell they are ageless, and probably won’t ever die if you don’t blow them away at some point.
Might have been a kid. Might have been younger than me. Why was he here by himself? Was he abandoned, or punished, or rewarded for his bravery and independence? Was he here by accident? I used to think I was here by accident. Now I know I was all the way wrong about that.
Who was he?
Why should I care?
Point-blank. I can only imagine what this scene looks like right here. A bloody mess.
Or no mess at all. Beck used to drive me demented with that thing about if a tree falls in the forest does anybody hear it. Teased me like when you feed a crazy dog his own tail so he’ll chase it ’til he drills himself into the ground.
