Redhorn smiled. ‘One of the horsemen of the Apocalypse is taking some exercise. His name is Arc Light.’ Lopez had just witnessed the first Operation Arc Light raid – what was to become the saturation bombing of Vietnam by Strategic Air Command B-52 bombers. It was the first time the massive B-52s had been used in war. Until that afternoon the hulking bombers were for one purpose only: the game of the end, the thermonuclear destruction of the world. Their new mission, Arc Light, was to obliterate huge swathes of countryside with conventional bombs in the hope of destroying North Vietnamese troop concentrations. It was all worked out on computer: if the bombs completely demolished a thousand-meter grid square of terrain, then everything in it must be dead. There was no warning, and the aircraft flew so high that it was impossible to see or hear their approach.
When Redhorn was more bored and drunk than usual he used to tell Lopez about his plan to desert. Redhorn wanted to escape down the mountain of Nui Hoa Den and into the valley. Then he would journey west until he found the headwaters of the Son Thu Bon, then up over the Annamite watershed, past the ruins of Kham Duc and into Laos. ‘Listen, there are valleys where no person, not even a Montagnard, has ever set foot, and they’re teeming with wild animals and big game. This is where all the tiger, deer, wild boar and elephant have gone to escape this shitty war. And the waterfalls, Lopez, massive walls of water dropping from sheer cliffs to form clear deep lakes full of trout. And then we – because you’re coming with me – are going to trek on to the Bolovens Plateau where the elephant grass is eight feet high and you have to burn great swathes through it to travel. There we’ll meet the Kha people, who live in houses on stilts like Montagnards. We’ll take native wives and help the Kha hunt down and capture their enemies to trade as slaves, or to offer as sacrifices to propitiate their angry gods. And after we have cast our seed into the most nubile of wombs and throats, and thrust spears into countless breasts, and have finally satiated our need for blood and fucking – then we will head west again to the valley of the Mekong. And then the final journey north – two thousand miles – to the river’s source, where it spouts, an icy pure spring, out of a cleft in a Tibetan rock face. We’ll drink the pure water and wash the blood from our hands and feet, and listen for the temple bells. The monks will be expecting us. They’ll shave our heads and dress us in saffron robes. We will meditate and tend the temple gardens and meditate again until we have hoarded a whole incarnation’s worth of good karma. Then death, rebirth, and back again and again to the service of the blood red god Juggernaut feeding for eternity his seven serpent heads and their inexhaustible hunger for human flesh stewed in human blood and human tears.’
That was the fantasy; the reality was going up into the mountains to count the bodies that Arc Light had left behind. Lopez thought Redhorn seemed vaguely amused by their orders. ‘I guess we’re not going to see much action,’ said Redhorn. ‘Those guys are no longer a military problem, they’re a hygiene problem. If anyone crawls out of his hole after all that shit dropping on him, he’s going to be walking around with his hat on backwards talking to himself.’ Then he gave Lopez the equipment list: no extra bullets, just face masks and rubber gloves.
Just before three in the morning, Redhorn shook Lopez awake. At first, he thought there was a crisis, that the camp was about to be attacked or a team member had been assassinated. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Listen to this.’ Redhorn wanted to tell him a joke. It was from the French war. ‘During the siege of Dien Bien Phu there were these two foreign legionnaires – let’s call them Jacques and Fritz – in a foxhole outpost. “Listen, my friend,” says Jacques. “I have to take a shit or I’m going to burst.” “Not here,” says Fritz. “You want to take a shit, you use that abandoned trench line just behind us.” So Jacques jumps out and runs off, through machine-gun and mortar fire, toward the trench. Several hours pass, Jacques still hasn’t returned, and Fritz is beginning to regret that his being fussy might have caused a comrade’s death. But finally, just after dark, Jacques scrambles back into the foxhole. Fritz says, “You had me worried. What took you so long?” Jacques kisses his fingers and says, “She was marvelous, wonderful.” “What are you talking about?” says Fritz. “Just after having done my business,” says Jacques, “I ran into the most beautiful army nurse I have ever seen. Tits like you can’t imagine. So I got out my whanger and took her quickly from the front, and then I had her from behind two more times – and then once again from the front just before I came back.” Fritz spitefully points out, “But you didn’t get a blow-job, did you?” “I really, really wanted one,” says Jacques, “but it was totally impossible. I tell you, my friend, I spent over an hour searching every centimeter of that fucking trench line, but I couldn’t find her head anywhere!” ’
THEY PATROLLED FOR NEARLY TWO DAYS back and forth through the bombed valley and found nothing. The raid had cost the US taxpayer tens of millions of dollars and had killed only trees and the few jungle animals that hadn’t already fled the war. Redhorn thought it was funny. Every so often he would shout at the sky, ‘You missed! You fucking missed! Can’t you guys do anything right?’ Sometimes Lopez wondered if Redhorn had become too mentally ill to function as team commander, and whether he should do anything about it. There was one place where his howling voice echoed – weird and uncanny – as if the desolated valley itself was mocking his words in a queer eerie imitation of those soft quavering Southern vowels. In a more sane moment, Redhorn told Lopez that he was certain that the Russians had tipped off the NVA: he said they had a fleet of trawlers off Guam that monitored flight paths.
In the late afternoon of the second day, the patrol came to a sudden halt. Lopez could feel fear shudder through the column, not just in the mind, but physically, up the spine. He turned to the interpreter, Ly, and asked him what was wrong. Ly said, ‘Shhh,’ and disappeared toward the front of the file. When he returned, he was frightened and breathless.
‘What’s going on, Ly?’
Ly said that there were voices, but that the voices ‘weren’t human.’ Redhorn told him to shut up because he was ‘beaucoup full of bullshit.’
Lopez noticed that Redhorn’s hands were shaking: he’d never seen him like that before. They followed Ly back to the front of the column to see what had happened. It was necessary to crawl through a dense tangle of bomb splintered trees. When they reached the lead element they found a CIDG standing at the bottom of a bomb crater with a human skull in his hand. He was smiling. There was a stench, not so much of rotten flesh, but more like an open sewer. Then another wave hit Lopez. That one really was rotten: he had to cover his mouth and nose to stop from vomiting. Ly whispered in his ear, ‘It’s OK now, Trung Uy.’
‘What’s OK?’
Ly pointed at the skull. ‘He stopped singing as soon as they found his friends.’
Lopez looked down into the crater. A half dozen soldiers were digging and scraping away like kids uncovering treasure on a beach. There were hip sockets, femurs, complete rib cages and skulls surfacing out of the red mud. The bomb had ripped open an old grave. The CIDG were laughing and smiling, not normal smiles, but nervous, embarrassed ones. Lopez thought they probably didn’t know what else to do with their faces. The remains of some of the dead soldiers had been wrapped in plastic sheeting. These were the ones that stank most.
When the CIDG had finished exhuming and counting the corpses, Redhorn told Lopez to radio that the dead had been killed by the Arc Light bombing.
‘I can’t say that. Arc Light didn’t kill those guys. Those bodies have been there for months, years maybe.’
‘Oh yeah?’ said Redhorn. ‘Then how come that fucker was still singing?’
The Combat Reconnaissance Platoon thought that the skulls were splendid and, ignoring Mr Kim’s orders, stuck them on the ends of their rifles. Lopez’s first impulse was to stop it; it was obscene, but it was also thrilling. Lopez watched the parade of chapless skulls bouncing up and down as if impaled on spikes; it gave him a wild i
ndecent sense of liberation, as if some primal instinct had been unburied with the singing dead. They continued to thread their way through a tangle of blasted, scorched and broken trees. As the twilight faded, the only objects visible in the evening shadows were the pale skulls which appeared to have floated free of the rifle muzzles and were dancing to a macabre rhythm of their own.
They spent the night surrounded by bomb-blasted desolation. It was wasteland – literally, land wasted. It seemed so empty that Lopez wondered if the war had ended and no one had bothered to tell them and they had been left behind alone with the dead. So what, he thought. They smoked opium and drank whiskey, then slept like drugged boar pigs after a night of rutting.
The next day they descended into the low hills which sloped down to the paddy fields of the river basin. At midday they slung their hammocks for a siesta. Redhorn was halfway through what promised to be a wet dream when Ly shook him awake. All was quiet except for a voice calling out in Vietnamese – a real voice this time, not a spirit one. Lopez rolled out of his hammock and grabbed his rifle. The voice called again, ‘Chieu hoi. Khong ban – I’m surrendering. Don’t shoot.’ Lopez turned and saw Redhorn raise his rifle and start to take aim. He pushed Redhorn’s rifle into the ground and called him an asshole.
Ly shouted instructions and a youth appeared out of the undergrowth with hands raised high above his head. He was dressed in civilian clothes – a clean white shirt and brown shorts – and looked too young to be a soldier. One of the CIDG crept forward and frisked him for weapons. He was carrying nothing at all, not even a handkerchief.
The boy’s name was Hieu and he was fifteen years old. He said that he had run away from his village, Son Loi, because he was afraid that the North Vietnamese were going to shoot him. The NVA had come to his house three nights before and told him to come to Xuan Phuc the next night to help them carry rice. He didn’t go. Redhorn asked him why he didn’t go. Hieu just shrugged his shoulders like a village dolt. Redhorn asked why again. Hieu said he didn’t know, but maybe he’d been frightened. Lopez could see that there was something about Hieu that wasn’t straight. Maybe, he thought, he should have let Redhorn shoot him.
Redhorn sent for Ho Cuc to help interrogate Hieu. Cuc was also a Viet Cong defector and came from the same village. It quickly turned nasty: from time to time Ho Cuc stuck his rifle muzzle under the boy’s chin to help his memory. When they were finished Hieu was sent away. Redhorn then got out his map and asked Ho Cuc for advice on the best places to spring ambushes.
They decided to set two ambush sites. Lopez’s ambush was located in heavy brush beside a steep trail five hundred meters up the mountainside. He thought that the trail was more likely to be used by woodcutters than supply columns, in fact, he wondered if it went anywhere at all. He didn’t like the idea of blasting away some early-rising woodcutter who had set off before morning light. There was no way they would be able to identify and spare a civilian in that vine-tangled murk. On the other hand, if enemy troops did come down that trail it would be a firefight at point-blank range: there would be no control, just chaos, noise and body tissue exploding all over the place.
Lopez pressed his hand into the dank mold of the jungle floor. He fantasized about finding an entrance to a magic tunnel, like Alice’s. If he could find that tunnel, it would spin him through time and space until he tumbled out on the foredeck of Stormy Petrel as she glided on a broad reach down the St. Michael’s River with the gentle gurgle of water against hull. Someone would suggest, ‘Let’s anchor in Eastern Bay and go for a swim.’ They would say, ‘There are soft-shell crab sandwiches in the wicker hamper and cold beer in the ice chest.’ Lopez was sleepy. Sleeping on an ambush patrol was a court-martial offence, but what the hell. He was going to sleep anyway. Sleep was his only magic tunnel.
Redhorn also was sleepy. He had placed his ambush team in a position overlooking a place where a trail forded a stream. The trail sloped upwards from the ford and then formed a T-junction with another trail. The gentle sound of water flowing in the stream below the ambush site made Redhorn sleepy. Every time he began to doze he shook himself awake; he thought about taking an amphetamine, but he knew that would only make his opium induced constipation worse. Once, as he nodded off, he dreamed that he was hunting raccoons back home in Louisiana. Fully awake again, he tried to remember the dream. It was midnight and the hounds had treed a raccoon; someone was shining a powerful torch into the tree. The raccoon’s eyes, framed by its black bandit’s mask, reflected yellow-green and its mouth was open and snarling. For Redhorn, that raccoon at bay, magnificent as a medieval legend in its fatal glory, was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. But a black youth shinned up the tree to saw off the branch where the raccoon was perched. The raccoon, as it fell to the ground, suddenly looked awkward and clumsy as it twisted in the beams of a dozen torches. The baying changed to growling, snarling and barking and within seconds the raccoon was dead. Many of the hounds were bleeding. Whoever wanted the pelt skinned the animal and the entrails were given to the dogs.
The gurgling of the stream below the ambush site reminded Ho Cuc of a waterfall not far from Son Loi; he was certain that this stream fed into the fall. When he was a boy he used to play there. The water cascaded out of a sheer wall of the darkest green, and had worn a smooth chute into the rock below. Cuc used to slide down this chute which ran for forty meters before dropping into a deep pool. It wasn’t long before he had perfected the art of body slalom. He even improvised a repertoire of artistic gestures – mercurial attitudes, mournful arabesques – as the music water flung him towards the distant sea. The water chute, along with his wife, had been the great sensual pleasure of his life. He had dreamed of teaching his children how to shoot their bodies through the water slide. When he closed his eyes he could almost hear the joy-laughter of their spirits.
Redhorn had found from experience that the best time for an ambush was between just after dark and midnight. He knew that the enemy preferred to reserve the dark watches of the night for sleeping. Redhorn waited and, when nothing had happened after several hours of darkness, he allowed himself to fall asleep.
It was a tunnel dream; he often had tunnel dreams. The tunnel was full of people. At first there were refugees, carrying all their belongings on poles. There was something sinister about the way their faces were shadowed by their conical straw peasant hats. Then came the soldiers. All had lost their weapons and were barefoot. They shuffled forward with their eyes fixed on the ground, except for those who had blank black holes instead of faces. They shuffled forward – from the A Shau Valley, from the la Drang, from the hills around Dak To, from the Iron Triangle, from Lang Vei, from Nong Son, from Khe Sanh, from Con Tien, from a thousand places known only by the elevation of a hill in meters or by grid co-ordinates. They kept coming. Redhorn tried to force his way back, back through this bloodshod host, but the tunnel was so narrow and there was such a crush that the momentum of this army of the night was impossible to resist. There were so many, and they said nothing, just swayed forward. But Redhorn still continued to elbow, claw and push his way back against the retreating shuffling column. Suddenly one of the soldiers raised his face and looked at Redhorn. It was Sergeant Clements who had been killed at Plei Trap the same day that Redhorn had been wounded. Clements stared through Redhorn with dead eyes that had lost their points of reference. ‘Go back, sir,’ he said. ‘It’s no use. Go back, sir.’ Redhorn ignored him and tried to push past, but Clements had grabbed him by the arm. His grip was like cold iron and Redhorn couldn’t shake it loose. ‘No, Clements,’ he said aloud. Redhorn suddenly awoke to find Ho Cuc shaking his arm and Cuc’s fingers stopping his lips from saying more.
‘Shhh,’ hissed Cuc.
Redhorn heard the sound of someone splashing through the ford. He was fully awake at once. The party of rice carriers had learned that the CIDG were operating in the area and were being more cautious than usual. A stream crossing is an obvious place for an ambush, and for that reason
they had stopped short and sent two scouts ahead to reconnoiter the opposite side of the ford. The scouts had waded through the shallow water and had just begun to ascend the trail when they stopped. Perhaps they had heard the sort of metallic noise that can never be a natural night sound, or perhaps they had simply felt the presence of their enemies through a sixth sense. There was no time to run back or to seek cover; they were shot and killed immediately.
Redhorn knew that most of the carrying party had escaped because he heard shouting from the far side of the stream. He could actually feel the adrenaline pumping. He felt that he was on the brink of an incarnadine apotheosis, he felt he was becoming a god. He stood up and tried to get the CIDG to pursue the survivors. ‘Let’s go. Di mau di!’ Redhorn had reached his life’s pinnacle, he felt transformed into sheer power. At that moment Ho Cuc lifted his rifle and put a bullet through the base of his spine.
THE MARINES fished the body out of the river near the bridge at An Hoa three days later, and sent it on to the I Corps mortuary at Da Nang airfield. Lopez had been designated Redhorn’s ‘Survivors’ Assistance Officer’. He hated the whole business: it meant he had to identify the body, bundle up his personal belongings and answer awkward letters.
Lopez found the mortuary visit like the day he arrived in Da Nang, but in reverse, like a film spooled the wrong way round – the drive back through the desolate peninsular sand flats, the RMK yard piled even higher with scrap, and the RMK girls more than ever bloated with the semen of foreign soldiers, then the sleepy guards on the bridge, the NO INDIG notices at the entrance to the Da Nang airbase and, finally, the hum of the refrigerator condenser units at the rear of the dead meat parlor.
A River in May Page 10
