A River in May

by Edward Wilson

  Lopez didn’t mind having to spend another night at the C-team. He enjoyed swimming away his hangover in the South China Sea and being away from Boca. He swam and swam until the sun was lower than the slopes of Monkey Mountain. He toweled himself dry with his uniform, dressed and went back to the compound. As he walked through the beach gate, a Nung guard carrying an ancient carbine began to prepare for the night by dragging a roll of concertina wire across the opening. The evening was closing in all at once. There were no languid pastel summer evenings in Vietnam, just an abrupt shutdown every evening at six all year round.

  It was Happy Hour in the club bar. Lopez decided to get drunk while the whiskey was still half-price. The mood in the bar was subdued and quiet. A small group of officers and someone in civilian clothes were talking in low voices at the end of the bar. Lopez suspected that the civilian was CIA. He wasn’t one of those Ivy League Rhodes Scholar mandarins who ran the Agency in the 1950s. He was one of the new fox-faced kids from the trailer parks, in mirror-reflective sunglasses and Hawaiian shirt, long black hair greased and slicked back like a country and western singer. Lopez wanted to drink alone and avoided eye contact, but the deputy commanding officer was in an expansive mood and drew him into the group. ‘How’s Sergeant Storm getting along?’

  ‘He’s an outstanding NCO,’ Lopez began the litany of praise: no one would ever criticize a team member in the presence of outsiders. ‘He shows initiative, ingenuity, leadership potential and effectiveness under fire.’

  Then the CIA man butted in. ‘What’s Storm’s personal body count, Lopez?’

  ‘He’s got some kills, but I don’t know how many. He doesn’t brag about that sort of thing.’

  ‘I didn’t mean,’ said Krueger, ‘how many men he’d killed.’ There was muffled laughter around the bar.

  ‘You know,’ said the deputy CO, ‘that we need to put some NCOs in for commissions. Both you and Redhorn recommended Sergeant Storm. Would you still endorse that recommendation?’

  ‘Completely. He’s intelligent, adaptable, shows sound judgement under pressure …’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Lopez. Are you supposed to be Storm’s executive officer or his fucking PR agent?’

  ‘Sir, I…’

  ‘Don’t waste your breath, Lopez. I know exactly what you’re going to say next. It’s going to be all that shit about how an officer has to be loyal to his men, or some such crap. Don’t bullshit me about Storm – real name Pavel Kirillov – he’s a faggot who used to peddle his butt on the Ku’damm. Comrade Kirillov’s not just a fruit, he’s a cunning psychopath of a fruit. Isn’t that right, Krueger?’

  The CIA man nodded. He wouldn’t take his sunglasses off and hadn’t taken advantage of Happy Hour to tank up on cheap booze. He was drinking orange juice. ‘I met Storm a long time ago. He thought he could scare me, get me real scared. No way man, no way. Then I checked him out.’

  A captain who spoke with a slight lisp, winked at the deputy CO and said, ‘Krueger, you ever been to Dallas?’

  ‘Course, I been: I was on the grassy knoll. I thought everyone knew that.’

  Lopez had had enough of their teasing. He finished his drink and ignored their catcalls as he walked back to his billet in the beach house. He felt bored and cheated of a good drinking session. As he crawled into bed he looked at the luminous dial of his watch: it was only eight o’clock. He hung a flashlight from the frame of the overhead bunk. He was trying to read an Agatha Christie that he had found in one of the secondhand book boxes that the Red Cross sent to Vietnam. It was a murder mystery set in Sussex, England. There was a Griselda and someone else known as Colonel Protheroe. After a few pages Lopez had forgotten the plot and couldn’t keep his eyes open. He switched off the flashlight and fell asleep.

  Lopez felt he’d been asleep for decades when the alert siren awakened him. There were often mortar attacks, but usually targeted on the Marine Air Wing close by. Lopez liked watching them. The chance to enjoy a spectacle of exploding helicopters, flaming aviation fuel and general mayhem was well worth the slight risk of being hit by a stray fragment. Lopez pulled on his trousers and padded out on to the veranda barefoot and half-clothed in the balmy night. No luck. The soft purr of the South China Sea was disturbed only by a few explosions which were too mute and muffled to be those of a mortar attack. There were also bursts of small arms fire from what seemed a mile or two away.

  The sounds were from the direction of the Command and Control compound at the base of Marble Mountain. It didn’t sound too serious. Lopez wondered if one of the Montagnard tribesmen who C and C used on their missions into Laos had drunk too much rice wine and run amok. He was surprised that it didn’t happen more often. The Mongtagnards were taken from a forest world where each tree, rock, stream and animal had its own spirit – sometimes a good one, sometimes an evil one, but the familiar spirits were always there. Then one day the Montagnard was seduced from his forest to a witchcraft world of fire-spitting sticks and metal birds where everything from drinking tins to tobacco leaves were covered with messages to strange gods called Coca-Cola, Hershey Bar and Lucky Strike. Then one day he could no longer connect: nothing led to more nothing. So he picked up his rifle – to him a black magic crossbow – and an American ended up with a bullet between the eyes. The Montagnard always seemed to choose a mortar pit for his last stand. They always brought in a tribal elder who tried to get him to surrender. He never did. Eventually someone would crawl up close enough to lob a grenade into the pit.

  The small arms fire became more intense and then there were sharper, louder explosions. Lopez changed his mind about the mad Montagnard. Something else was happening.

  ‘Get your gear on, this could be serious.’ Lopez recognized the voice, it was the captain from Lang Khe – a camp that everyone knew was truly in the shit. The captain’s face was hidden in shadow beneath his helmet. He was armed to the teeth and fully kitted out with flak jacket, webbing and ammunition. He hadn’t, however, bothered to find his trousers and his legs shone knobbly and sickly white between his boots and combat jacket. ‘Get your weapon and report to your alert position.’

  ‘Where is our alert position?’ said Lopez

  ‘I think it’s the bunker. Get your stuff and follow me.’

  It was a pointless exercise, but Lopez was too tired to argue. He stumbled around in the dark – the captain wouldn’t let him use a light – until he found his rifle and webbing.

  ‘Hurry up,’ said the captain. He beckoned for Lopez to follow and led the way in a half crouching run to a sandbagged bunker half sunk in the ground. Lopez found it hard not to laugh, but he reckoned that being at Lang Khe had made the captain paranoid and a bit crazy. He followed him into the bunker; the interior was dank and utterly black. Lopez felt his shin brush against a bench and sat down.

  ‘Hello, hello, anybody home?’

  There was no answer. The captain told him to keep quiet.

  ‘Do you realize,’ whispered Lopez, ‘that were the only people in here? I don’t think anyone else is on alert.’

  ‘I still think we should stay here until the All Clear.’

  They waited five more minutes. Neither said anything. Finally, the absurdity of sitting alone in a dark bunker while everyone else in the compound was going about as normal got through to the captain. He cleared his throat. They got up and emerged into the open. The small arms fire and explosions had ceased, but a helicopter gunship was pouring a stream of mini-gun fire around the base of Marble Mountain. The mini-gun had a rate of fire so rapid that its tracers formed an unbroken ray of orange light from sky to earth. Lopez found its laser-like death rays a bizarre, almost a beautiful sight. He left the captain, who was gazing mesmerized at the gunship’s tactics, and returned to the beach house.

  One of the other transient officers had taken advantage of Lopez’s brief absence to discard his prostitute into his bunk. She was plump, had oily skin, and her breath smelled strongly of nuoc mam sauce. Lopez tried to push her to one side so he co
uld get into bed too, but she responded by sticking her bottom out even further to occupy the whole mattress. When he tried to lever her against the wall with his knee, she snarled, spat and jabbed him with her elbow. Lopez responded by grabbing her shoulder and forcing her on to her back. As he was about to enter her, she scissored her legs shut, nearly crushing his testicles to pulp, and at the same time raked his back with her nails – the scratches later turned septic. Once again she turned her back and stuck her bottom out like an army of occupation. Lopez tried the knee-in-the-back tactic once more, but this time when her elbow came ramming back he was ready and grabbed it. He got hold of her wrist and twisted her arm up into her shoulder blade until she conceded a thin strip of mattress. A separate war, a separate peace. Lopez, to stop falling out of bed, had to clasp her in his arms like the fondest of husbands.

  The captain from Lang Khe, who had prowled the compound for a while after leaving the bunker, finally returned to his bed where he tossed and turned until dawn. Despite the noise of the captain’s bedsprings, the whir of mosquitoes, the heat, the smells of sweat and nuoc mam, the snoring of the girl and of an adenoidal helicopter pilot in the top bunk, Lopez held his partner close and fell into a blissful sleep.

  The news at breakfast was that the Command and Control compound had been hit by enemy sappers the previous evening and sixteen US personnel had been killed. The sappers had landed on the beach from tiny round fishing boats, like Irish coracles. They had then cut their way through the wire. Someone, probably an insider, had already done ‘silent kills’ on the sentries by muffling their mouths and sticking a commando knife up their rectums. The sappers proceeded to throw satchel charges into the billets, killing most of the sixteen Americans while they slept. The survivors quickly became aware of what was happening and managed to shoot down four of the sappers before they escaped.

  Lopez had known one of the dead Americans and recognized the names of a few others. The captain from Lang Khe, who was sitting next to him at breakfast, had known most of the dead. One had been a roommate of his at West Point, but that didn’t stop the captain from gobbling his scrambled eggs and sausages.

  ‘What did you think of all that?’ said Lopez.

  ‘Of all what?’

  ‘The C and C sapper attack.’

  The captain from Lang Khe took another mouthful of scrambled eggs. ‘If your security is lousy, you deserve to die.’

  If anyone deserved to die, thought Lopez, it was Boca. He was determined to kill him. The ideal opportunity would be on a patrol, but Boca was too aware of the enmity to risk being on the same rota. Sometimes the best idea seemed to be fragging – blowing him up with a hand grenade – but the narrow confines of the camp made getting Boca alone difficult. Simply shooting him was the easiest option, but also the most likely route to four years in a military prison; and Boca just wasn’t worth it. Lopez knew he was becoming obsessed and started to fear that one evening he’d have too much to drink and would just do it. Lopez found it best to keep out of the way; he started to volunteer to go on patrols. If he spent too much time in the camp he’d either kill Boca or go crazy.

  IT WAS AFTER THE DAI BINH PATROL that Lopez first became aware of the blood smell. No matter how much he washed, scrubbed and even burnt his hands with disinfectant, he still couldn’t get rid of it. Each time he sniffed, the blood smell was still there. In the past, when he had gutted game or cleaned fish, the smell always went away after a day. Why not this? Maybe he really was going crazy.

  Dai Binh was a prosperous village that sold supplies to the enemy. It was such a beautiful village that Lopez expected to be greeted by harp music and showers of lotus blossoms. Dai Binh was protected from floods by high river banks and curled itself like a lazy cat into a bend of the Son Thu Bon.

  Lopez’s patrol arrived on market day. The center of the village was all color, spice smell and movement. Baskets of live chickens and ducks, piglets for fattening, trays of dried shrimp, cured tobacco leaves twisted into plugs, rice wine, tin utensils, woven baskets and endless bottles of nuoc mam – all were on sale. Cool shaded lanes radiated from the village where lovers could stroll through mature plantations of palm and banana trees. Here the children had fewer running leg ulcers, the people were better fed, and the eyes of the old were less likely to be blinded by trachoma or milky with cataract than in the upper valley.

  The Communists were excellent customers – they paid cash for everything and bought rice at double the market price. No one wanted to lose their business. For this reason, none of the patrols from Nui Hoa Den ever made enemy contact at Dai Binh. The VC and NVA were always warned well in advance and withdrew to the foothills.

  The village chief, a smiling man with gold capped teeth, invited Lopez and Dusty to spend the night in his own house. They would have preferred slinging their hammocks between a couple of palm trees. Vietnamese beds were just hard wooden platforms – even the pillow was a plain block of wood – but turning the chief down would have caused him to lose face.

  In the morning there was a breakfast of fruit, oven-warm bread and café au lait. The coffee was prepared in an ancient gray metal cafetiére and dripped on to a two-inch-thick layer of sugared milk in the bottom of a glass. As Lopez watched the coffee drip he wondered if the Communist officers received the same hospitality.

  The rest of the day was spent providing security for a veterinary team who were inoculating water buffalo against rinderpest. Two Americans in civilian clothes accompanied them. They were CIA agents pretending to be officials from the Agency for International Development. Lopez recognized the one who seemed in charge – he had seen him drinking orange juice in the club at China Beach. After deploying the CIDG in a secure perimeter, Lopez and Dusty made their way through tall sharp grass to liaise with the vet team. The morning dampness of the grass soaked them to the waist. The China Beach agent was talking to the veterinarian in fluent Vietnamese.

  ‘I know that bastard,’ said Dusty.

  The agent looked at Dusty over his mirror sunglasses. His eyes were cold, dead. ‘Listen up, Kirillov; I hope you’re not talking about me, ‘cause I don’t take that kind of shit.’

  ‘You listen to me, punk!’

  Lopez saw the confrontation leading to fists or bullets. He grabbed Dusty by the arm and pulled him away. He was surprised to see Dusty so angry, so close to really losing it. Lopez half dragged and half pushed him through the damp grass. Dusty started shouting, ‘The guy’s not just a drama queen, he’s a fucking faggot queen! Who does that fruit think he is?’

  The agent pretended not to hear him.

  Dusty tried to pull free. ‘Let me go, OK. I’ll cool it, OK. I’ll tell you about it someday, OK.’

  Lopez let him go, and they rejoined the others.

  The agent pretended that Dusty wasn’t there and addressed himself to Lopez. ‘I think we met before. My name’s Krueger, Launcelot Krueger. We’re going to be spending a lot of time in your area of operations. And the only thing you have to know is the following: we are not -I repeat not – required to clear our ops with you or to liaise in any way. Is that clear?’

  ‘I’d like to make something clear too. Don’t you ever speak to me or any of my NCOs like that again.’

  Krueger didn’t say anything, he didn’t move. The sun reflected off his lenses and made Lopez shield his eyes. The other agent, a red faced balding man in his forties broke in, ‘Lieutenant, if you’d been brought up on an Alabama farm like I was, you’d know what we’re doing. You see, you just got to keep the stock healthy. This means you got to inoculate some of ‘em.’

  Krueger pushed his sunglasses back on to the bridge of his nose and added, ‘And it means you got to cull, thin out, the rest of ‘em.’

  The rinderpest inoculation was only their cover story. Dai Binh had been targeted by Program Phoenix. This meant that Phoenix assassins disguised as Viet Cong guerrillas and carrying Kalashnikov rifles would come to the village in the dark watches of the night. They would kill the village
chief, and all the farmers who had been selling rice to the North Vietnamese – and many who hadn’t. The bogus Viet Cong uniforms would fool no one; they were just a fig leaf to ‘sanitize’ the American involvement.

  Lopez heard from Krueger again in the evening. One of his ‘veterinarians’ brought an intelligence report about a supply unit of local force guerillas and rice carriers who were camped in the lightly wooded hills overlooking the rice fields. The VC were waiting for the patrol to leave before returning to Dai Binh to fetch more supplies. Lopez decided to act on the information. Part of him hated the war and hated the killing, but another part of him thrilled to it and needed the catharsis of action.

  They set out two hours before dawn. The CIDG column entered the wood just as the damp grayness of pre-dawn twilight began to sketch individual trees from the dark mass of night. Lopez was having an adrenaline rush for breakfast – heart pounding, pores open, goose-bump skin, his mouth dry and copper tasting. He knew it was wrong, but it was exciting.

  The platoon was strung out in single file and moving fast, then it slowed to a crawl, then it stopped. A message was passed back: there weren’t any words, only fingers on lips. Everyone crouched like cats about to leap. Lopez watched Dusty thumb the selector switch of his rifle from safety to semi-automatic. ‘This time,’ whispered Dusty, ‘we’re gonna get some.’ A second later the wood in front erupted into a clatter of automatic weapons fire. They all started running towards the noise. The trees were just saplings, the undergrowth was sparse. It was easy to move. The platoon fanned out from single file into a sweeping assault line. Trung Uy Tho was smiling and lashing about with a baton like a mad conductor bullying a tired orchestra. He was hitting CIDG in their faces – some were bleeding – and he was making them run faster. Lopez felt like a halfback sprinting towards a winning touchdown. But when he reached the goal line, the shooting had already stopped. It had been all over in less than a minute.