The Trung Si shrugged his shoulders again.
Carson turned back and tried to find Lopez in the mist. ‘In the last war,’ he shouted, ‘I saw soldiers who were shot for looting.’
As if on cue – like a reply from a looter’s ghost – a shot rang out from the mist and Carson collapsed like an old man on sheet ice. His voice had startled a squad of NVA who were also lost in the morning mist. There was a chaotic firefight at close range which lasted about a minute. The only casualties were Carson and a CIDG who was killed by a bullet through the head. Carson had the luckiest wound possible: the bullet struck him just below the buttock and passed through the fleshiest part of his thigh well clear of bone or tendon. Lopez slit his trousers leg from knee to waist with a commando knife, and was relieved to see that the bullet holes were small and neat, though the color was an ugly purple. It looked exactly like someone had pushed a pencil through Carson’s thigh.
During the next few weeks Lopez watched his new commanding officer become obsessed with Phu Gia. Boca spent hours gazing at the village through a pair of ship’s binoculars mounted on the roof of the command bunker. He logged every movement and numbered each hut and paddy field. Dusty claimed that he’d even done a census of the village’s water buffalo and dogs. It was no use telling Boca that Phu Gia had no military significance, that the village was nothing more than a sad ribbon of derelict houses and fields that followed the serpentine twists of the Son Thu Bon as far as the mountain gorge. For Boca, Phu Gia was the enemy – that elusive and invisible enemy that the Americans seldom even glimpsed. Boca couldn’t bear to see the people of Phu Gia and not act. To him it was like finding cockroaches on his kitchen floor – he just had to stomp on them.
A week after Carson was wounded, Boca spotted a man in a tiny boat. The man had just embarked from Phu Gia to paddle to a hamlet on the opposite bank. Boca jumped down into the command bunker hoping to blast the boat with the .50 caliber machine-gun, a comic-strip weapon that fires bullets the size of zucchini. Boca swung the weapon towards his target only to hear the gun’s barrel crunch against the edge of the bunker’s firing slit. The slit was too narrow to allow the machine-gun to fire anywhere near that part of the river. Boca bellowed for help.
Jackson materialized wearing flip-flop sandals and holding a can of beer. ‘How can I help you, sir?’
‘Help me get this goddam machine-gun moved.’
‘You can’t move it, sir, the tripod’s bolted to the floor.’
‘Then get your ass on the 4.2-inch and start putting out mortar rounds.’
Jackson went into the mortar pit, put his beer down and started to adjust the aiming mechanisms in response to Boca’s commands. The boatman was still in the middle of the river when the water spouted and exploded about a hundred meters in front of his boat. The next round landed a hundred meters behind. The boatman was paddling like mad. Jackson looked up and saw Lopez who mouthed an instruction. The third and fourth rounds landed well wide of the boat. Two seconds later, the boatman reached the bank and went running and dodging through a maze of palm groves and bamboo thicket. Two more rounds landed on the riverbank, but by then their target had disappeared. Boca scowled at Jackson for having done a lousy job and stomped off. The boatman probably wasn’t transporting ammunition or rice, but merely taking medicinal herbs to his father who was old and unwell, or some such errand.
Jackson’s casual attitude and poor aim with the mortar irked Boca. The next day he decreed an end to flip-flop sandals and T-shirts and ordered the team to have ‘white-wall’ haircuts. The Vietnamese barber assumed that the Americans were being humiliated and punished for something. Dusty Storm highly resented having his hair cropped, but couldn’t see the sense of being allowed a token inch of hair on the top – so he told the barber to shave that off as well. His overdoing it infuriated Boca even more than his beach-boy mane had. ‘Storm,’ he shouted, ‘you’re supposed to be a soldier, not a goddam Buddhist monk.’
Lopez was grateful for one thing. Hating Boca gave him an emotional life, almost a purpose. He especially hated his looks. He’d never seen a person whose outward appearance so suited his inner being. He found it difficult to believe that Boca – slab faced and protein-glutted – and the Vietnamese – swarthy, fine-boned and taut with lean sinew – belonged to the same species.
THE M-79 GRENADE LAUNCHER is designed to protect idiots. The rounds it fires require a minimum number of rotations before they are armed to go off. This means that, for example, if someone fires an M-79 without checking his overhead clearance and the projectile bounces back off an overhanging tree branch it won’t blow up the idiot who’s just fired it. It also meant that there were a lot of unexploded M-79 rounds lying all over Vietnam. They weren’t harmless duds; they just hadn’t had sufficient spins to be armed. It suited the Communist ‘use war to feed war’ doctrine. The Viet Cong paid people a bounty for collecting them so they could use them to make booby traps.
The M-79 round is about the size of a hen’s egg. A ten-year-old girl found one beside a busy cart track near her village. She was delighted: her find was worth enough to buy her family a bottle of fish sauce. She teased her younger brother and his friend, who were eager to examine it themselves, by tossing the dud explosive from hand to hand, pretending that it was too hot to handle. It was a good joke, and they were all laughing. She didn’t realize that by tossing it she had added the number of spins required to prime the arming mechanism. Then she dropped it. She hadn’t meant to.
The children were carried to Nui Hoa village where there was an infirmary and a radio link. The village nurse radioed the camp and explained what had happened. She was upset, crying and begging for a helicopter to evacuate the children to a hospital in Da Nang.
Boca refused. He said he wasn’t convinced that the wounds were as serious as the nurse had reported. Lopez had just come into the comm room. Boca looked up, ‘You can’t trust gooks; they all exaggerate.’ Lopez found himself shaking and almost deranged with anger and hate. He told Boca that he would go down and find out for himself. He didn’t wait for Boca to answer: he just turned and left. He had to get away from Boca, to stop himself from smashing in that gross self-righteous face.
Lopez was so angry that he nearly killed himself as he drove down the hairpins of the mountain road. He wasn’t paying attention and almost ran over one of the camp’s own anti-personnel mines that had been washed down the hill and on to the road by a recent storm.
The village infirmary was a stucco building with gray shutters. The shutters were closed; it was dark and cool inside. The room was packed with people. It seemed to Lopez that the whole village was there: there was hardly space to stand. In a room so crowded with humanity, the utter silence was unnatural. Without anyone saying a word a path was cleared so that Lopez could make his way to the children. The three were lying next to one another on stretchers placed on two tables which had been pushed together. A middle-aged woman with a heavily lined face held a cloth to her eyes and swayed backwards and forwards groaning. There was no other sound, except for rasping labored breathing from one of the boys. The girl was completely swathed in bandages from head to foot. For a second Lopez was confused, not realizing that this thing, bound like an Egyptian mummy, was a child. Then he saw that in places the mummy’s bandages were stained with blood. Her death was real; it was fresh too. The boy with the rasping breath was struggling against death, barely conscious, and his face was as gray and pale as moonlight. Lopez placed his hand on the boy’s forehead: it was damp with sweat, but so cold. He wanted to stroke him, to hold him tight, anything to make him warm again. The blast had caught the boy full in the middle of his body. There were severe abdominal injuries, and he had lost his penis and testicles. The other boy lay beneath a coarse gray blanket and stared at the ceiling with dull eyes which never blinked. Lopez radioed for a helicopter.
Boca was boiling with anger when his lieutenant got back. The captain looked like a freshly steamed crab; his face was pink and bead
ed with sweat. Lopez knew that Boca liked being angry: it made him feel that he was in charge, that he could really kick ass. He was seething and shouting at Lopez for calling in an emergency priority medevac.
Lopez tried to explain what had happened, even though he knew it was a pointless on-deaf-ears exercise. Boca said that it ‘didn’t fucking matter, because you only request emergency priority medevac when there are American casualties.’ He went on to tell Lopez that it wasn’t his job to run ‘a fucking gook ambulance service.’
By this time Boca had ceased to be a person, he was only a thing with sound coming out. If it had been a human being, Lopez would have walked away or hit it with a stick. But it was a thing like a radio or television that you want to turn off but can’t find the switch. So he kept foolishly, mechanically, responding to the sounds coming out of the thing hoping that it would eventually turn itself off. ‘And the girl was dead.’
‘Then she sure as fuck didn’t need an emergency priority medevac,’ said the object.
Lopez then tried to explain how one of the boys had horrible abdominal injuries and had his lost his genitals.
‘So what?’ said the thing. ‘Fucking Vietnamese don’t know what they’re for anyway.’
Lopez gave up – it just wouldn’t stop making noise – and walked away. The sun was beating on his bare head. He tried to remember where he had left his hat. A hammer was beating behind his forehead. He turned to say something, but Boca was only a blur. He needed to get out of the sun.
It was better in the cool of the bunker. Lopez poured himself a glass of bourbon, took off his boots and lay down on his bunk. He looked at his .45 hanging on its hook and prayed that Boca wouldn’t come looking for him. Then he tried to remember what had happened, but he could only remember the bloodstained bandages. He remembered, perfectly clearly, that he had spoken to the nurse, but couldn’t recollect any of the words. He closed his eyes and tried to conjure up a single face or word, but his memory was blank – except for the spreading stains of blood oozing through the bandages.
Nothing else mattered. Not Redhorn’s death, not all those waxy bodies at the I Corps mortuary. None of them mattered. No soldier’s death could ever matter again. Never. The child’s blood was only that thing counted, that blood seeping through – spreading, staining – her bandages. Lopez forced back the tears. She deserved more than tears. She deserved action.
It was a dream in which the layers of time and the boundaries of space had dissolved into a lunatic synthesis. They were alone in the kitchen at Rideout’s Landing. It was late at night and she had just come down from New York – she was all right now, everything had turned out fine. Lopez was still in battle dress and boots, as if Vietnam were only a few miles away – perhaps someone had towed it up the Chesapeake Bay. He told her how much he loved her and how he needed to do penance. She looked at the floor and began to cry. Lopez started to kiss her, to feel her mouth moist and hungry against his – and then Dusty Storm woke him up.
Lopez wanted to kill him. He grabbed Dusty’s T-shirt and threw a punch, but somehow usty managed to duck and swerve. ‘Why, you fucking shit, why did you take her away from me?’ Dusty told him to calm down, that he was only waking him up because he was next on the watch rota. Lopez told him to go away, then got up to dress. When he got to the comm bunker, Lopez saw the date in the duty log – and it all came back again. He put his face in his hands and prayed for God to punish him. He cried for a while and then went up to inspect the perimeter defenses.
He took with him a secret night vision device called the Starlight Scope – they were supposed to test it and write a report. Boca had volunteered Nui Hoa Den as a site for testing prototypes in ‘an actual combat environment’. The device was the size and shape of an ordinary telescope. Lopez sat down on top of the .50 cal bunker and removed the lens caps. When he looked through the eyepiece he saw the dark void of night mutate into a too bright world of luminous emerald. It polluted the sweet night and changed the sleeping world into a submarine horrorscape in which the only colors were shades of green putrefaction. Lopez searched the perimeter for enemy sappers, but the only creatures he spotted were rats foraging in the wire – queer puke-green creatures, like bottom-feeding fish snouting through seaweed fronds and blissfully unaware of his techno-eye.
The next morning another R&D prototype arrived for testing. It was no more than a plain metal box, about sixteen inches square. It looked like something a high school student might have knocked together in a sheet metal craft class. Other than a jack for an antenna and an off/on switch, it was just a plain metal box. It was called ‘the beacon’.
In the afternoon, Boca brought the team together for a beacon training session. The box was supposed to beam highly accurate and calibrated signals. Aircraft could then fix on the beacon and deliver precision bombing patterns called ‘beacon runs’. The advantage was that the bombers could fly so high that they were virtually invisible and totally safe from ground fire. Then suddenly, with no warning and for no apparent reason, a quiet green landscape would erupt into fire and smoke. Efficient, accurate and safe.
Boca explained that the only thing you had to do was radio a compass bearing and distances to the pilot, then a description of the type and shape of the target. The pilot’s on-board computer took care of the rest, even ensuring that the bombs fell in geometrically spaced patterns, thus avoiding any wasteful overlapping of the kill-zone radii.
To demonstrate, Boca set up the beacon on the roof of the command bunker. It was the best place to view the valley below. Lopez regarded a pattern of riverboats, water buffalo and brimming silver paddy fields while Boca tried to make radio contact with the bomber pilot. It took several attempts and Lopez could see him getting red in the face and beginning to perspire. If the beacon failed to work, Boca knew that he would look a fool. When he finally did make contact with the pilot, the transmission was weak and garbled. Boca announced that he was going to bomb a rivulet in some foothills where there were supply caches of ammunition. He radioed the necessary information.
The pilot’s reply was so distorted and static-broken that Lopez feared that he was about to witness a horrible bombing error. He thought there was a distinct possibility that the pilot had been so confused by Boca’s instructions that he had mistaken the beacon location for the target location, that at any moment 750-pound bombs were going to rain down on their own heads. Nonetheless, a few seconds later the precise spot that Boca had indicated erupted into a chaos of flame and broken earth, vindicating him and his metal box.
‘Did you see the secondary explosions?’ Boca asked. He wanted Lopez to endorse his claim that there had been ammunition caches in the rivulet.
Lopez said no. Boca said he needed to get his eyes tested.
ONCE A MONTH Lopez had to go the C-team HQ at China Beach to pick up the CIDG payroll. While he stood next to Travis at the latrines, Travis asked if he had noticed that most of the gecko wall lizards had their tails amputated. He explained this was because a number of officers amused themselves while pissing by swiping at the lizards with their commando knives. ‘Wouldn’t it be funny,’ said Travis, ‘if, when these officers die, they discover that God is an almighty giant celestial wall lizard who will chase them through the ether for all eternity slashing at their dangling dicks with a gleaming machete?’
There were often brawls in the C-team officers’ club bar. The sheer hatred between the officers who came in from the field and the China Beach staff officers was legendary. Many of the field officers spent their entire stay drunk and shouted ‘rear echelon motherfucker’ at any staff officer who crossed them or even made eye contact. The staff officers, many of whom had been badly wounded during their time in the field, often answered with a left hook or an empty bottle.
When Lopez entered the bar he saw that Eric Rider, the CO at Tien Phouc, and two other field officers had handcuffed the Protestant chaplain wrist to ankle over the back of a chair. They had already pulled the chaplain’s trousers dow
n and Rider was shouting, in a falsetto imitation of a desperate bar girl, ‘Who wants to brown the padre – only ten dollar MPC? He no butterfly, he faithful bride, Trung Uy. He got virgin asshole, he cherry tight. Where’s Murphy? Hey, Lopez, get your papist ass over here: Catholics get a second poke for free.’ The chaplain was screaming for help in thin high-pitched wails, as if he really did believe his anal virginity was in peril. An officer with an Alabama accent said, ‘Thaat thang sounds like a hawg in a castration clamp.’ A number of other field officers had started to practice parachute-landing falls off the bar and there was broken glass everywhere. Two officers having a fistfight over the favors of a bar-girl had slipped on the broken glass and were rolling around on the floor trading punches. Travis was trying to cool the situation by spraying them – and everyone else – with a foam fire extinguisher. An alert siren from the next compound was wailing a mortar attack signal. Lopez was sitting in a corner with his feet propped up on an unconscious second lieutenant and quietly drinking a quadruple Scotch and soda. Lieutenant Colonel Cale came in and was immediately doused with extinguisher foam. Someone shouted, ‘Hey, chocolate sundae with whipped cream!’ Cale decided it was time to call in the Chinese Nung guards. The last thing Lopez remembered was having his neck clamped in a blackout restraint hold by a massive Nung known as Beaucoup Kilo. Considering the circumstances, Lopez found Beaucoup incredibly gentle – he thought he’d be great as a nurse in the high security ward at Spring Grove. When he woke up in the morning Lopez found himself handcuffed to a bunk and lying in his own vomit.
Lopez left on the morning chopper, but then had to spend another night at China Beach because the flight was diverted to Tra Bong for a medevac and limped back to China Beach packed and overloaded with CIDG who had been shot up in an ambush. Lopez was crushed next to a soldier whose face was the color of stale milky coffee. At first the CIDG’s pulse was faint and rapid, then fainter, then there was nothing, except occasional gasping breaths, like a fish that had been lying for a long time on the deck of a boat. There was also a black American sergeant who had been wounded in the arm and had his good arm around an elderly Vietnamese woman who was racked with grief and whose blouse was stained by blood – not her own blood, but still her blood. Her dead son’s.
A River in May Page 12
