He had to stop at the entrance to the mortuary compound and wait for a guard to let him through. It struck him that it must be one of the most heavily defended compounds in I Corps: the mortuary had the best barbed wire he’d ever seen – concertina, razor wire, tangle-foot. But it wasn’t the Viet Cong they were worried about; it was their fellow Americans. Everyone hated the Graves Reg personnel – all those embalmer types and mortuary attendants. And every time another pal got killed they hated them even more. People were always chucking grenades into the compound and the one in II Corps – at LZ English – even had a rocket attack. No one would talk to anyone who had anything to do with Graves Registration: they had their own barracks, their own mess hall, even their own chaplain. And they need barbed wire and bunkers – for their own protection.
Lopez parked the jeep next to a Graves Registration Platoon truck. Some ghoul had written: URGENT PRIORITY – DON’T DELAY – I CORPS MORTUARY on the front bumper of the truck. The lettering was done in fancy Gothic script like an advertisement for a horror movie. He wanted to turn around and go back, and later he wished he had: Lopez was sure he was going to have nightmares about it for the rest of his days.
He explained his business to the inner perimeter guard, who had long fingernails painted purple, and was led into a long prefab building with no windows. An embalmer in a stained lab coat consulted a clipboard and asked Lopez to follow him. There was a sharp acid stink of disinfectant and chemicals. There must have been thirty tables on either side with nude carcasses who wore a waxy glassy look. Some of the bodies had tubes stuck into their necks and crotches that were sucking the blood out of their veins. Other corpses, already drained and bloodless, were festooned with similar tubes that pumped embalming fluid into the arteries. Many of the dead had ugly purple black blotches on the backs of their hands: evidence of some ham-fisted medic in a blind panic trying to find a vein to start a drip. It all made Lopez feel sick and greasy. On one table were charred pieces of pilot.
He was finally led to a loading bay where six dark green body bags were lying next to each other on the cold concrete floor. A stockpile of aluminum coffins, stacked in rows six high, towered over them. The embalmer checked the tags until he found the right bag and then asked Lopez to give him a hand.
They lifted the body bag on to a white porcelain-clad table with blood gutters. Lopez watched the embalmer undo the clamp that sealed the bag and peel back the plastic. The face was bloated and decomposed, the eye sockets empty except for the brown cracked husk of a withered eyeball, but he knew it was Redhorn. A thick swollen finger had burst like a cooked sausage around his wedding ring.
Afterward, Lopez felt no pity or sorrow, only a sense of having been defiled by the corpse and the ghoulish mechanisms of the mortuary. His only desire was to be cleaned, to be purified. He wanted to be stretched out naked on a sunny beach in winter, being scrubbed clean, like a piece of bleached driftwood, by the icy wind.
There was a custom at Nui Hoa Den that whenever anyone did anything for the first time they had to buy a case of beer for the rest of the team. On Lopez’s first evening back after identifying the body, Dusty Storm stomped into the team house and chalked up a case of beer next to Redhorn’s name. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ asked Carson.
‘He sure as fuck never got himself killed before.’
Lopez asked the team what they thought: they agreed that the beer cash be appropriated from his personal belongings before they were packed up and returned to the next of kin. It was usual to make macabre jokes in the face of death, but the mood was still miserable and depressed. Everyone hated it when a team member got killed: it wasn’t just mourning and grief for the person killed; it was mourning for one’s self too, the reawakening of the queasy fear of becoming ‘dead meat’.
Before leaving Da Nang, Lopez had been told that he would be acting camp commander until Redhorn’s replacement arrived. It could be a long wait. There was a shortage of captains because they were grinding up infantry lieutenants faster than they could turn them out. The lieutenants, who didn’t get ground up, didn’t want to become captains either; they just wanted to say ‘Fuck you, Uncle Sam’ and get out as soon as possible. The army was so desperate they started giving direct commissions to sergeants. Even Dusty Storm had been put forward for one.
Lopez couldn’t sleep that first night back: he just lay on his bunk and stared into the blackness and sweated into the sheets. The mortuary visit kept flashing back. And besides that there were rumors – convincing ones – that the camp was going to be attacked. He tried to listen through the usual night sounds – the crackle of the radios, the dull whump of distant artillery – straining to hear something different. He hated responsibility.
After a while he got up, poured himself a slug of bourbon and lay down again. He tried to blot Vietnam out of his mind by recalling all the women that he’d ever been with and fantasizing he was doing all sorts of crazy sex things. That even made him more miserable because – cruelly and incongruously – the image of Redhorn’s corpse kept floating up in the middle of his sex romps. The body-bag scene kept reminding him that he was likely to die without ever having sex again.
Lopez fell asleep. There was an insane dream: somehow his bedroom at Rideout’s Landing had been transported to a house in Da Nang. He looked out the window and there were rickshaws in the wet night and a hearse parked at the curb. Ianthe came into the room: she was dressed in mourning. She told him that everything was all right. Lopez found her black dress, her black stockings and black shoes, incredibly erotic. Something was different. She was no longer a step-sibling that had shared his bathtub until the age of six. Ianthe, in death, had turned into an object of intense erotic desire. She put a finger on his lips and told him that they must be quiet. Then they lay down together and began to make love – silent but hard, breathless and passionate. Just as Lopez was about to enter her he woke up. He hugged the pillow tight and whispered soundlessly, ‘I loved you so much, I adored you. Please forgive me.’
Someone was sitting on the side of his bunk. Lopez could smell cigarette smoke. When he opened his eyes he saw a dot of red ash glowing in the pitch black of the bunker cubicle. He felt a hand resting on his thigh. ‘Who’s there?’
‘It’s me, Trung Uy.’
It was Tho, Lopez’s Vietnamese counterpart. ‘What’s wrong, Trung Uy?’ Lopez liked the formality of the relationship with his counterpart. They always called each other Trung Uy, first lieutenant, regardless of the situation.
Tho sat smoking and moved his hand further up Lopez’s thigh. ‘I think, Trung Uy, VC come tonight.’ Tho’s voice sounded so calm and soft that Lopez wasn’t certain that he had heard correctly. ‘How do you know this, Trung Uy?’
‘There are many intelligence reports from our agents in the valley. But that’s normal: agents always saying VC about to attack. But this time, I think, the reports are correct.’
‘Why?’
‘Trung Uy, our outposts and perimeter bunkers are mostly abandoned.’ It sounded like Tho was sobbing, but Lopez soon realized his counterpart had the giggles. Tho found the situation so unbelievably awful that it had turned into a comedy of the absurd. ‘When,’ said Tho, ‘CIDG soldiers heard VC supposed to be coming, they bugged out. No bullshit, Trung Uy, they checked out PDQ. They goddam legged it.’ Tho spoke English with an exaggerated New York accent that he had picked up while chained to a POW from the Bronx during two years in a jungle prison camp.
Lopez asked Tho if he was teasing. It was too dark to see his face, but he could almost sense his counterpart’s half-hooded eyes and the ironic knowing way he tilted his head.
‘Of course not, Trung Uy. Go take a look around the bunkers yourself.’ Tho laughed his hangman’s laugh. ‘I think the CIDG said, “I wasn’t born yesterday, Uncle Sam, I get the hell out of here PDQ.’ ” Tho wiped his eyes. ‘PDQ, that means pretty damn quick, Trung Uy, just in case you didn’t know.’
Lopez got out of bed and dressed. He knew th
at many Vietnamese were secretly contemptuous of the Americans, but Tho was one of the few who were completely open about it. Tho had been held in a POW camp with four Americans and twenty South Vietnamese captives. Every one, POW and captor, was given the same frugal rations and lived in the same conditions. The Americans alone were unable to cope. Eventually, there were three Americans left, then two, and then only one. A short time before Tho escaped, or was released – the facts surrounding his return were pretty murky – the remaining American expired from pneumonia. Tho giggled when he told that story too.
Lopez asked Tho if they had any soldiers left at all.
‘Yeah sure,’ he replied more Bronx than ever. ‘You can bet your bottom dollar, Trung Uy, there will always be people too stupid even to come in out of the rain.’
Tho’s open sarcasm was getting on Lopez’s nerves. ‘Stop patronizing me, Trung Uy.’ Lopez wasn’t sure that Tho knew what the word meant – he didn’t imagine they used it too much in the Bronx. But Tho surprised him.
‘How can I possibly patronize you?’ he said, ‘You’re only a … only a boy.’ Tho had a talent for retorts to which reply was impossible.
‘How many CIDG are still in the camp?’
Tho said there were about forty.
Lopez woke up the American team, put the camp on full alert and made sure there were Americans in charge at all the key points. He almost told them to shoot anyone who attempted to leave, but was afraid he’d sound like a B-movie villain and that they’d laugh at him.
Lopez got a chair and radio so he could sit on top of the .50 caliber machine-gun bunker. The position gave the best view of the camp, but made him a sitting duck. He didn’t care: if it was going to happen you might as well get it sooner than later. And he didn’t like the idea of being handcuffed to Tho in a POW camp either.
But he knew that when it did happen, it would be an inside job. The CIDG who didn’t run away wouldn’t be staying because they were ‘stupid’ – they’d be there to do a job. The loyal ones would take off; the double agents would stay behind to kill the Americans and their counterparts.
The villages and hamlets of the river valley were still populated, but at night there were never any lights – only the moon reflecting on the river. But that night there was no moon, which made endgame even more likely.
Lopez tried to cheer things up by firing illumination flares from the 4.2-inch mortar. He had already dropped the first one down the mortar tube before he remembered that he should have checked to see if the mortar had been booby-trapped to explode. It hadn’t.
It was fun sending up illumination rounds, like fireworks on the Fourth of July. After three or four seconds the river valley was washed in a spectral pale green light as the flare, suspended from a tiny parachute, swung back and forth drifting, back and forth descending, casting stalking shadows which ran like ghosts across the trenches and bunkers.
After a time the air turned damp and chill, the stars were extinguished, a bank of mist rolled down the river, licked the base of the mountain, liked it, and ascended the slopes. The mist veiled the camp in a shroud so dense that visibility was a question of feet, not yards. Lopez continued to fire illumination, but the light of the flares only turned the black impenetrable murk into a milky green impenetrable murk. This was, he thought, the place where the boundaries of death’s kingdoms came together, so close together.
Lopez heard someone moving in the trench line behind the bunker. He flicked the selector switch of his rifle from safety to semi-automatic. Him first, he thought. Someone was singing:
Two little children lying in bed,
One of em sick and t’other one dead.
‘Hello, anybody home?’ Sergeant Jackson sounded drunk. ‘Ain’t nobody back at my place; even the chickens done gone to roost in an old crab apple tree.’
‘It’s me, I’m up here.’
‘Well, that’s somethin’. It was gettin’ mighty lonesome over there. I was startin’ to think I was the only person left in the whole goddam camp.’
‘Are there any CIDG left?’
‘Soon as the mist rolled in, they rolled out. Well, I better get my ass back and mind the store. Good night to you, sir.’ Jackson had no body, no substance: he was only a voice, a spectral sound in the dark mist. Lopez listened to him go. It had been so long since he’d heard that song.
Call up doctor, doctor he said,
Feed dem children on shortnin’ bread.
Mama’s little baby love shortnin’, shortnin’,
Mama’s little baby love shortnin’ bread.
A few minutes later there was a sound of an explosion on the western perimeter of the camp. The explosion was followed by the sound of small arms fire; it lasted about two minutes, then came the sound of a grenade going off, a few more sporadic shots, then complete silence once again. Lopez braced himself and waited for more, but nothing – only silence. After half an hour, the mist lifted just as suddenly as it had appeared. From time to time he illuminated the camp and valley with flares, but all appeared at peace. Whatever it was, had passed.
At first light, they found that some barbed wire had been cut and a few trip flares dismantled. There was also a human leg dangling from the concertina wire near where one of the camp’s mines had exploded. Nothing else was amiss. The CIDG began to trickle back. By mid-morning everything was normal. Soon all the CIDG were back, everyone pretending, like civilized adulterers, that nothing had happened.
‘You KNOW SOMETHING, Lieutenant Lopez…’ Lopez and Captain Boca were standing on top of the .50 caliber machine-gun bunker and looking out over the valley of the Son Thu Bon. Redhorn’s replacement had finally arrived.
It was hate at first sight. Lopez hated everything about Boca: his opinions, his voice, his face, his body, his tastes, his mannerisms. A lot of the officers in Special Forces were like Redhorn – crazies, deviants, psychos, crypto-fascists, closet Klansmen, sociopaths – but Boca was worse; just dumb faceless humorless dull brutality. It wasn’t the Redhorns of the world who stoked the ovens of the Holocaust. Murder as a routine industrial process would have bored them to death; they would have begged a transfer to Stalingrad. The great killers are dull, they are without imagination. They are not psychopaths: they are the gray technocrats of death, pasty faced from lack of sun, ready and waiting in missile silos and nuclear submarines.
After several weeks in command, Lopez was surprised how resentful he felt at handing over to Boca, and it wasn’t just because he loathed the man. He had begun to feel that Nui Hoa Den was his, that he owned it. The morning was exceptionally clear and fresh. Despite everything, the view continued to thrill Lopez with its beauty. The valley was a place where, despite the crater scars of war, the paddy fields were still green mirrors which rose in terraces on the lower slopes of the almost perfect pyramid of Black Widow Mountain. And beyond that mountain lay the broad valley of Que Son and then more mountains, wildly cragged and blue-gray in the morning.
‘You know something,’ repeated Boca, ‘all these goddam countries look alike.’
This was Boca’s first time in Vietnam, but he’d already had tours in Taiwan, Korea and the Philippines. So, presumably, all those other ‘goddam countries’ had patterns of paddy fields etched into the contours of the land by generations and generations to reflect the sky like inlaid glass set in lacquer frames.
A week after Boca’s arrival, Sergeant Carson was shot during a sweep through the village of Phu Gia. The village had been Communist since the beginning of the war, but was tactically worthless. Redhorn had ignored Phu Gia – there was nothing there except for a handful of ragged local force guerrillas. Most of population had left the village when it became a free-fire zone. Nothing was left of their homes except for the bamboo frames. The remaining population lived in forlorn hovels roofed with rotten thatch, prone to infestation by obnoxious larvae. The people of Phu Gia learned to ignore the black worms falling from their roofs into their rice bowls. It was more important to dig deep and solid
underground bunkers than to repair the roofs. The remaining population comprised a hundred or so women, children and old men, and about twenty-five guerillas who disappeared into the hills or tunnels as soon as a patrol approached the village. The people were gaunt and ragged. Many of the old suffered from trachoma – the eye disorder which causes the eyelashes to turn inward, causing excruciating pain and blindness – and all the children had running leg ulcers.
As soon as they were outside Nui Hoa Den’s barbed wire, Carson turned to Lopez. ‘This isn’t just a waste of fucking time, sir, it’s a dangerous waste of fucking time.’
Lopez pretended he wasn’t listening. He found that the best way to deal with Carson was just to let him talk, let him get it out.
‘This, sir, is one useless operation. Ain’t nothin’ in Phu Gia worth shooting or blowing up, but some of our guys always get shot or a couple of legs blown off. Attacking Phu Gia is like picking on the saddest ragamuffin in the schoolyard. You start callin’ him names, pushin’ him around, you think he’s real chicken – then all of a sudden he hammers you in the testicles, then he goes and knocks your eye out when you bend over in pain.’
Carson was wounded just before nine in the morning the next day. Poor visibility made tactical control of the troops impossible. The CIDG emerged out of the morning mist laden with plunder attached to their rucksacks: marrows, bunches of bananas, a few live chickens. Carson turned to his Vietnamese counterpart to complain. ‘Listen, Trung Si; this is supposed to be a combat patrol, not a shopping trip.’
The Trung Si simply shrugged.
Carson started to lose his temper. ‘Listen up, Trung Si, stealing is wrong. Looting is a court-martial offence. You better tell them to leave that stuff where they found it.’
A River in May Page 11
