The patrol left the crater and pushed uphill through thick undergrowth. After about fifty meters the column halted again. The lead element had stumbled on a North Vietnamese supply cache. Dusty and Lopez went forward to have a look. They found four raised bamboo platforms covered with rusty pieces of corrugated metal. The cache contained a number of large cone-shaped explosive charges intended for cratering roads. There were also boxes of blasting caps, hand grenades and spare parts for rifles. The cone-shaped explosives were too heavy and awkward to carry, so they decided to booby trap them instead. While Dusty was concealing hand grenades and rigging the supply cache with trip wires and other tricks, Lopez organized a perimeter defense in case the supply cache people came back too soon.
Lopez placed himself on a small trail leading up from the cache. The CIDG were posted at intervals in the undergrowth on either side. He had never experienced such absolute, such utter quiet. It was as if the world had stopped spinning. He went down on one knee, like genuflecting in church, and stared down the path which seemed to both disappear and not disappear. It was like looking into a black hole, a bottomless pit, down to a meaningless black vacuum of nothingness forever and ever. He felt a deep nausea, complete estrangement; he couldn’t even recognize the backs of his own hands. It wasn’t the natural fear of pain or danger or being maimed, but the vertigo of confronting utter nothingness. Death is for eternity. Lopez looked at the CIDG on his left, who had his hand down the back of his shirt, trying to crush an insect that was biting him. Suddenly, for Lopez, even the fear of dying no longer made sense – there was only a black emptiness that seemed to spiral out forever beyond the furthest stars.
Lopez saw something move on the trail. A man, dressed in stained khaki appeared. He looked about forty, perhaps older; his face was like wrinkled yellow parchment. He seemed completely unaware of the presence of an enemy, his rifle slung over his shoulder. He was smoking a cheroot. Despite the close range, Lopez’s first shot missed. A look, not so much of fear, but of sheer astonishment, crossed the man’s face. Lopez aimed again, breathed, and squeezed the trigger. His second shot hit the man in the stomach and he crumpled, making a sharp coughing sound as the bullet hit him as if trying to expel his spirit out of the hole. Then the CIDG on either side of the trail opened fire and for a while the body jigged up and down on the trail.
The shooting stopped. Lopez looked at the crumpled body. Is that all? Is that all there is to it? He looked at the CIDG on his left, surrounded by spent cartridge cases. The Vietnamese smiled at Lopez and reloaded his rifle. Before the soldier got up, he finally succeeded in fishing the troublesome insect out of his shirt, and crushed it between his fingernails.
Then it was time to move out.
Redhorn was drunk every night, and most days. As he became more drunk, his accent became more southern and more redneck. Lopez knew it was all an act. Redhorn came from a well off and educated background – his father was a doctor and his mother smoked little cigars and taught Latin and Greek at Sweetbriar Women’s College. At first, Lopez wondered if Redhorn’s being crazy was all an act too. He soon realized it wasn’t.
The Group Medical Officer used to brag to his doctor friends that one in seven Special Forces personnel were clinically psychotic. ‘Back home,’ he said, ‘this would mean a court order to the closed ward at Spring Grove and, if they behave, visitors from two to four on a Sunday afternoon. Here, they’re valuable members of society. Psychopaths are extremely useful in a war. None of your Hamlet crap: they just do it.’
Not all the crazies were psychos; some were just war junkies looking for the ultimate mainline adrenaline rush. Unlike them, the psychopaths never got over-excited or turned on by it. They just went about their business coldly and unemotionally, calling in napalm, putting the wounded out of their misery, getting information out of prisoners, getting rid of prisoners, putting their colleagues in body bags – never traumatized, never depressed. They were in their element.
The psychopaths never wore necklaces of tanned human ears for they had no need to strike poses or show off. They were utterly self-contained. Their faces never betrayed emotion, except for impish half-smiles of satisfaction that never left their lips. Nor did they ever throw tantrums under stress and shout abuse at incompetent or cowardly comrades – they simply pulled the trigger. And best of all, though they had no physical fear, their names seldom appeared on casualty lists. Their antennae were always on the highest level of alert; their instinct for survival was almost psychic. Of course, they couldn’t be trusted – the compulsive low cunning was always there, quietly evident in every act and word.
The first night that the generator conked out, Redhorn called Lopez into his cubicle for a drink. They started another bottle of bourbon just after midnight. Because there was no electricity they had to light candles. The atmosphere was more like Verdun in 1916 than Vietnam in 1967. Lopez thought that Redhorn, lying on his bunk, looked like an effigy of a knight recumbent on a medieval tomb, his profile grotesque as a gargoyle in the sputtering candlelight. Outside there was a terrific thunderstorm, louder even than the 175mm artillery from the marine base at An Hoa that was impacting on a nearby ridge. The senseless shelling of empty jungle loosened soil from the ceiling of the bunker and sprinkled them with earth, like next of kin at the edge of a grave.
The nonsense of the artillery got Redhorn going about the marines. ‘Useless cunts,’ he said. ‘Look how they’re fucking up at Khe Sanh. They deserve to be overrun.’
Lopez just nodded.
‘Marines fuck everything up. When I was with the 8th in Guatemala we had a liaison officer from the embassy – he was supposed to keep an eye on us. He was a Marine Corps major, good-looking guy who spoke fluent Spanish. He didn’t turn up for a briefing one morning so they sent me to wake him. He was lying on the floor next to his bunk, dead meat, with a plastic bag over his head and a piece of washing line knotted around his neck. I rolled him over. At least he came before he died; there was spunk splattered all over a horny photo in his porn mag. I guess it was his favorite jerk-off picture: there was this Hispanic-looking girl simultaneously sucking off a soul brother and a white dude. The white guy still had his socks on – funny how you remember details like that – and the girl had a face full of semen, not just from the guys in the photo, but from the major too. It all had a certain symmetry, like a work of art.’
‘Strange way to commit suicide.’
‘Don’t you know anything, Lopez? It wasn’t suicide. It’s called auto-erotic asphyxiation; it happens quite often to these who want to intensify their manual relief sessions.’ Redhorn poured Lopez more bourbon. ‘He should have used a slip knot. Marines are stupid. How can you send these guys to a place like Khe Sanh? They can’t even organize a hand job without ending up in a body bag.’
Lopez was sitting in an old threadbare armchair with gilt legs, the kind of chair you’d expect to find in some nineteenth-century French sea captain’s parlor in somewhere like Nantes. He wondered how it had found its way to a bunker at Nui Hoa Den. But Vietnam was one of those places where all sorts of junk washed up from all over the world, like lost keys and watches find their way to the dark side of the moon.
Lopez noticed that Redhorn was looking at him in a funny way. ‘What is it?’
‘Sergeant Storm, allegedly regarded in some circles as a toothsome morsel, tells me that you confiscated an item of personal adornment.’
‘Human ears aren’t jewelry.’
‘Don’t be a sanctimonious asshole. If there is a moral issue, it’s about killing people in the first place. After they’re dead, it doesn’t fucking matter whether you eat them, fuck them, or turn them into lampshades.’
Lopez tried to contain his anger. ‘Don’t call me an asshole.’ His voice was quiet and firm. He waited for Redhorn to answer, but for a while the only thing he got back was a blank stare.
‘You know, Lopez, I once had a commanding officer who used to think he was a goddam Sunday school teacher. He used to
talk about things like duty and honor.’ Redhorn suddenly jumped up, grabbed a grenade launcher and slammed a round into the breech. ‘Come on, Lopez, where’s your fucking honor?’ He pointed the grenade launcher in Lopez’s face. ‘Come on, man, pull honor’s trigger and blow me away.’
Lopez finished his bourbon. When he looked at Redhorn again, he could almost see the aura of a Freudian death wish looping around his temples like an evil halo.
Redhorn sat down and disarmed the grenade launcher. ‘If you want to play this moral shit, this Waffen-SS-man-with-a-conscience shit, you can get off this fucking hill. This isn’t Hollywood, man. This is Viet-fucking-nam.’ Redhorn replaced the weapon on its hook and lay back down on his bunk. ‘Your problem, Lopez, is that you just don’t understand. You just don’t fucking understand.’
‘What don’t I understand?’
‘The thing itself. The thing that is in the act itself. The act worships itself. Don’t you understand?’
Lopez poured himself more bourbon. ‘You’re really impressive, Redhorn. You should get a job teaching philosophy at the Sorbonne.’
‘You know something?’ Redhorn suddenly sounded tired. ‘Behind your mild mannered exterior, you’re really quite an arrogant little shit, aren’t you?’
Lopez fell into an alcohol haze while Redhorn gave him a lecture about how they were witnessing ‘the end of the Western Empire’, and how ‘in a rotten society, that reeks putrefaction like a six-day-old body count, only the warrior is pure.’
After Redhorn had fallen asleep, Lopez left the bunker for some fresh air. He couldn’t help thinking about the marine major in Guatemala. The dry season was ending with a vengeance, and the rain came in solid sheets. When the lightning flashed, Lopez could see that the downpour had turned the camp into a mudbath, disintegrating sandbag emplacements, collapsing trenches and letting loose a river of mud that carried barbed wire, mines and trip flares down the sides of the mountain.
It was three o’clock in the morning, but the camp wasn’t asleep. There was always a low murmur of Vietnamese voices even during the darkest watches. The CIDG bunkers were faintly lit by oil lamps that cast soft yellow circles of light. The oily smoke that curled from the flames stained the bare earth walls and ceilings yellow brown. There was always gambling in one bunker or other, and the sound of cards and dominoes slapping on the hard earth floors until dawn. Sometimes the patterns of lamplight and shadow made the faces of the Vietnamese look fiendish as they squatted barefoot in tight circles staking what was left of their pay.
Phong was emptying out tea dregs prior to making another brew when he saw the new Trung Uy – the new lieutenant – standing in the rain. He called over to Lopez and gestured for him to come in. Lopez jumped down into the connecting trench and made his way to the bunker. Phong held open the door curtain and found Lopez a seat on an ammunition box while he made the tea.
Lopez liked the semi-domesticated fug of life in the CIDG bunkers, the cooling pots of tea, uneaten bowls of rice, even the dank curtains of washing hanging from a crisscross of clothes lines which made it impossible to walk upright. The air was scented with incense sticks and candles burning in front of pictures of the Buddha, the Blessed Virgin or a strange female deity who looked almost Hindu. Stains of tea dregs and spit discolored the yellow earth floors, and bandoleers of ammunition and weapons lay around everywhere.
Many of the soldiers had created little family shrines on shelves above their beds. These were ‘the widower soldiers of Kham Duc’ – there were about sixty of them. The shrines usually consisted of a few photographs, a poem written on a commemorative card, a toy, an item of cheap jewelry or an odd trinket inexplicable to all except the widower soldier. The grandest shrines had perforated brass ornaments for holding joss sticks.
Kim was staring at a photograph of his wife with the air of someone locked in a trance or in prayer. Lopez felt embarrassed, as if he were intruding on something. Ho Cuc stopped cleaning his rifle and said, ‘No sweat, Trung Uy, don’t worry. He does that every night: sometimes fifteen, twenty minutes, sometimes an hour. You wait, he won’t be long now.’
The photograph had been taken when Kim’s wife was seventeen. It was a formal studio portrait, contrived to be flattering and sentimental: the silk texture of the skin, the eyes like a sad young doe. But it was unnecessary, for the woman had been a natural beauty. There was a second photograph: his wife – a few years older – was holding their daughter, a girl of two, and the eldest son. There was no photograph of the youngest; the baby had only been seven weeks old.
After he had finished his meditation Kim noticed Lopez looking at his family photographs. It was polite for the Vietnamese to talk about their dead: they were still part of the family, just like the babies still to be conceived and born. Kim told Lopez the story in a voice that was calm and distant.
The accident happened when Kham Duc was being ‘closed down’. It proved an impossible position to hold. Soon after the final siege began, it was decided to abandon the camp. A large C-130 cargo plane had been sent to bring the soldiers’ wives and children out first. Lopez knew all about the evacuation of Kham Due: it was part of the 5th Group’s oral history. The operation was completely fucked up.
At the last moment there was a big argument on the airstrip between the camp commander, who wanted to get rid of the civilians because they were getting in the way, and the pilot, who thought his plane was already overloaded. The camp commander won the argument by sticking his .45 in the pilot’s face. A lot of SF people sympathized: the aircraft in Vietnam always flew overloaded anyway – so why did the pilot go all regulation-strict at a time like that?
Kim and his family waited, while the propellers of the C-130 created a cloud of whipped sand that penetrated everything. Kim was concerned about the baby’s eyes and held him tight against his chest with one hand gently covering his precious head. The baby had taken a fold of Kim’s cotton field blouse into his mouth and was sucking it. The mistake made him laugh. ‘I think he wants you,’ he said, handing the baby to his wife. The crew chief finally gave in and signaled that there was enough room after all. Kim’s wife and three children were among the last pushed into the packed aircraft. The hydraulics wheezed, the boarding ramp began to rise and the two-year-old clinging to his mother’s leg disappeared from view. The last picture Mr Kim had of his family was that of his wife undoing her blouse and curling their hungry infant to her breast. Then the loading ramp shut.
The aircraft had just left the ground when it shuddered, turned its nose downwards and crashed just beyond the end of the runway. Kim and the others watched, stunned and uncomprehending, as everything that was precious to them was consumed in a fireball.
THE RAIN MOVED SOUTH and the dry season made a last-ditch attempt to reassert itself. The midday heat seared the soul; the sun burned away all coherence and purpose. Lopez watched some of the team fall into alcoholic lethargy as others turned to frenzied activity. Mendy took out his anger on a punching bag. Jackson sweated out his frustration repairing trenches and filling sandbags. The outpost smelled of sexual frustration, anger and boredom. The Americans became aggressive and bad tempered, the Vietnamese sardonic and increasingly furtive. Relations between the two were not good. Clark, the team sergeant, had to be sent back to Da Nang for accusing Dai Uy Ky of being ‘a corrupt liar and cheat’. It was acceptable to shout these things behind their backs, so long as the Vietnamese could save face by maintaining the polite fiction that they didn’t hear or understand. But Clark had crossed the line of no return by accusing the Dai Uy directly and in surprisingly fluent Vietnamese. Ky’s letter followed the usual terse formula: ‘Dear Captain Redhorn, I can no longer guarantee Sergeant Clark’s safety at this location. Yours, etc.’
Carson, the team’s next senior NCO, took over as team sergeant. He was in his mid-forties, but looked much older. At first, Lopez had found Carson difficult. The sergeant’s behavior was surly, sarcastic and verged on disrespect. When Lopez complained about his att
itude, Redhorn turned on the lieutenant. ‘Listen up, Lopez, I know you didn’t meet many Carsons at Harvard. But when the sewer backs up, the power lines are down or you’re too ill to wipe your own ass – it’s the Carsons of the world you call out. And, since they’re dumb enough to do that for people who despise them, they’re also dumb enough to obey orders – no matter how crazy. The Carsons moan and complain and don’t like doing it, but at the end of the day they’ll die for you. And, Lopez, that guy has a story to tell. You should listen; you might learn something.’
And eventually, during a long night in an airless bunker, Lopez heard Carson’s story.
The sergeant came from an America that Lopez, before he joined the army, had only glimpsed through car or train windows. Carson enlisted in the army in 1943 as a seventeen-year-old from one of those places in Georgia where the dry hard clay nurtures only slash pine, scrub oak and dry hard people. The military was the only adult life that Carson had ever known. When he went home he always told his friends that the army was ‘a shit job,’ but paid better than the sawmill or sharecropping, and ‘you didn’t have to work so hard.’ The problem was, according to Carson, that ‘every time they send you to a foreign war it always ends up a fucking disaster.’ He’d been captured twice: first by the Germans in Italy, and seven years later in Korea when the Chinese Army overran his unit.
Carson’s first war ended in the olive groves of Italy. He was captured at Anzio in 1944 after his unit had been cut off and decimated. A week later, he was herded into a cattle truck and sent to a POW camp on the outskirts of Dresden. The following February, after the fire bombing, there wasn’t sufficient manpower to bury and burn the dead; foreign workers and POWs were brought into the city to help. Carson remembered how the Wehrmacht had executed their fellow Germans for looting and tied signs to their bodies labeling them Plünderer – looter. He remembered the humiliation of marching past these corpses while the survivors of the fire bombing shouted abuse and spat at the Americans. They assumed that it must have been the Americans – not the civilized European British – who had carried out the bombing raids. But what Carson remembered most of all was the smell. The Germans had given the POWs large quantities of schnapps to blunt what was left of their human sensibilities, but it didn’t work. In some cellars there was only a slimy green-yellow substance. Carson wrapped a cloth permeated with eucalyptus oil around his nose and mouth before he descended into a cellar with a rope and hook. As soon as the wave of stench hit him, he ran back to the surface and vomited up the schnapps and the morning’s cabbage soup. In the end, the army was called in, with flame-throwers.
A River in May Page 7
