A River in May

by Edward Wilson

  ‘You should be grateful. I’m trying to do you a favor.’

  ‘Gracias.’

  ‘Chou’s a useful guy to know. Nice food, nice girls, nice … whatever you want.’ Lopez often wondered if Travis had secret vices.

  ‘Look, when I get better I’ll really regret not doing this, but I have to go out to Lang Khe on the next chopper. So how do I meet this guy?’

  ‘I’ll bring him out to see you.’

  ‘Great idea. We can have us a nice coffee morning with angel food cake and lemon meringue pie.’

  Two days later Mr Chou arrived at China Beach, dressed in tan slacks, a white shirt and a panama hat. Lopez signed him through the security gate and drove him to the helicopter pad. Lopez realized he had made a mistake as soon as he saw the other Lang Khe passengers: they were wearing helmets and flak jackets and looked nervous. He took Chou aside and suggested they postpone the trip, that Lang Khe wasn’t ‘open for business.’ The merchant simply made a dismissive hand gesture and said, ‘War is good for business.’

  As the helicopter climbed to ten thousand feet above the Hai Van Pass, Chou started to turn sickly pale with cold. Narrow-chested and dressed for a garden party, he looked like a porcelain ornament mislaid in a lethal crate full of the chunky green and black paraphernalia of war. Lopez felt guilty. He took off his helmet and flak jacket and gave them to Chou.

  After half an hour Lang Khe appeared out of a thin mist. The camp lay at the top of a narrow valley and was surrounded on three sides by dark mountains with jagged ridgelines. The helicopter came in high and dropped towards the square of green steel planking which marked the camp’s helicopter pad. It was a feint. At about two hundred feet the pilot banked sharply away and veered towards the outer perimeter. Lopez looked behind and watched a pair of gray puffs appear dead center on the steel planking. The exploding mortar rounds looked as transparent as fine gauze.

  The helicopter glided over an outer line of barbed wire defenses; the body of a naked man impaled on stakes flashed by; the door gunner fired a long burst at the tree line, then the pitch of the rotor blades suddenly changed. They were in a stationary hover a few feet above the sandbagged roof of an outer perimeter bunker. The helicopter was unloaded in a blur of sand-whipped turbulence: mortar tube and base-plate, mail bag, Mr Chou, ammunition, cases of beer, personnel replacements were out; and an indistinguishable flurry of figures, some being carried, were in.

  The new arrivals were already inside the bunker when the helicopter pulled pitch and headed back to China Beach, clean sheets, and half-price drinks in the club during Happy Hour. No one moved; they were all crouched down and waiting with their hands over their ears. The re-targeted mortar rounds finally impacted – ten seconds too late to catch the helicopter, but near enough for Lopez to hear the sudden whoosh of air being sucked into the explosion.

  What was visible of Mr Chou – most of him was hidden beneath Lopez’s helmet – looked confused. Lopez grabbed him by the arm and led him, speechless and dazed, down a section of trench line to the LLDB communications bunker. He left Chou with two NCOs who were playing cards in front of a radio receiver which emitted a stream of static interspersed with unanswered but urgent messages in Vietnamese. Chou was invited to play a third hand. Lopez continued on alone to the command bunker, hoping to find Travis. It was a clear beautiful day. After the dull mugginess of Da Nang and the coastal plain the mountain air was invigorating.

  The half of the command bunker that was above ground was a smooth concrete dome, nearly five feet thick. Lopez tripped over something as he entered. A bottle of serum albumin dangled on a stick above it; a medic reached underneath, pulled out the needle and said, ‘He doesn’t need that any more.’ There were a number of Americans; most of them were shouting into radios or arguing over maps. No one paid any attention to Lopez – his being there was silly and senseless, he felt invisible. Lopez leaned down and lifted the corner of the poncho that covered the dead man’s face. It was Travis. He felt sick; he just wanted to leave. He finally managed to find the team sergeant, and told him that he needed a flight back to the C-team ‘urgently’.

  The sergeant replied, ‘Ain’t going to be no more choppers today, sir. But if you got a dime, you can call a cab.’ Someone threw Lopez a quilted poncho liner and told him that he’d have to bed down in an ammunition bunker.

  That night the mountain seemed to wink at Lopez. Each wink was the back-blast of a rocket being launched. Two or three seconds later it would impact with a shatteringly loud crack. The noise was the worst thing about rockets. They didn’t throw out much shrapnel and seldom found their ways into mortar pits or trench lines. Rockets were intended for penetration, for use against armored vehicles, bunkers or buildings. Because Lopez was in a sunken mortar pit at the time, he wasn’t too worried about watching the mountain wink in the night. Mortar rounds, on the other hand, were lobbed in a high trajectory and could, theoretically, land in the bottom of a well shaft. They didn’t penetrate; they splattered. Mortars were intended for ‘soft targets’, which was what the weapons manuals called humans. A mortar round leaving its tube makes a sound like a bottle of wine being uncorked. Whenever Lopez heard eternity’s wine waiter opening another bottle, he ducked back into the bunker.

  His companions were two Bru Montagnard tribesmen and an American sergeant. The Montagnards smiled and giggled continually, their way of expressing nervousness. The American grumbled continually – that was his way – until Lopez told him to shut up. The sergeant had been complaining bitterly about the poor quality of support they were receiving from the C-team. He had the impression that Lopez was personally responsible for a missing mortar tube – ‘I requisitioned two tubes, sir, not one tube and a baseplate. Why do we need a fucking base-plate? What did you send it for? We sit out here getting our ass shot off, people back there don’t give a fuck. What the fuck we want a baseplate for? Can’t shoot it, can’t shit it. Goddam thing weighs a ton, can’t even throw it at them. What we fucking supposed to do? Drop it on their goddam toes when they walk in the door?’

  Lopez explained for the twentieth time that he was only there ‘as a tourist’ and had nothing – ‘absolutely nothing whatever’ – to do with the supply section. He wanted to order the sergeant to shut up, but he hated pulling rank. Someone sent up an illumination round from the 4.2 pit. Suddenly the voice became a person. The sergeant’s face, illuminated by the greenish light of a parachute flare, had the twisted features of a medieval saint carved in stone and lit by Lenten tapers.

  The previous evening a shell had dropped into the mortar pit. The explosion had killed a Montagnard and bent the mortar tube, but hadn’t damaged the virtually indestructible base-plate at all. Earlier in the evening Lopez had noticed a bit of ‘soft target’ – a piece of brain, barely enough to fill a teaspoon – lying next to the side of the pit. A fly was crawling on it. When he looked again, it was missing. Presumably it had been carried away by a rat, probably one of the same rats that had run across his body in the dark watches of the night after he had wrapped himself in the poncho liner and settled down to a fitful sleep between two rows of stacked boxes of 81mm high explosive.

  The morning was strangely quiet. Lopez was waiting for the helicopter in a perimeter bunker with two Americans and a number of Vietnamese. An LLDB officer, who had been wounded in the hand, wore his arm in an elaborate sling. One of the Americans was Eric Rider, who had been transferred from Tien Phouc to the Mobile Reaction Force and was visiting Lang Khe to report on the feasibility of sending reinforcements. The other was Captain Carlsson, the chaplain. Carlsson had recently replaced the previous chaplain – the one Rider and Redhorn had handcuffed over a chair in the officers’ club. The new chaplain had porcelain blue eyes, smoked a pipe and wore a tranquil smile which radiated reassurance. He came from a place in Wisconsin where there were a lot of dairy farms, and where the girls – clean-limbed blue eyed descendants of Scandinavian immigrants – made their boyfriends wear condoms.

  Chou
was nowhere to be seen. The last time Lopez saw the merchant he had been playing dominoes with the Vietnamese camp commander, negotiating the canteen buyout arrangements. Chou had told Lopez ‘not to worry’.

  The sound of distant helicopter blades began to echo, intermittently at first then steadily, against the mountainsides. Outranked and unwounded, Lopez realized that his chances of getting a place were slim. He decided to wait for the next one. The staccato beat of the rotors became louder and more intense. A sergeant pulled the pin of a smoke grenade, but waited until the helicopter was nearly overhead before he dropped it outside the bunker. The pilot homed in on the smoke and the sound of the blades suddenly rose to a crescendo as the helicopter landed on the roof. The hopeful passengers scrambled out into a maelstrom of stinging sand and acrid yellow smoke. After a second or two there was a great vibrating noise as the blades changed pitch, and then the clatter of the rotors decreasing into the near distance.

  The smoke and dust settled and the ones who had failed to get a place returned below. There was a lot of cursing in Vietnamese. Lopez was surprised to see Rider still there. ‘Couldn’t you get on?’

  ‘There was room for only one more.’ Rider’s deep-set eyes gave his face a sinister skull-like quality. ‘The chaplain offered me the place, but I somehow felt he deserved it more.’

  Lopez watched the helicopter as it gained height against the backdrop of still crystal-clear blue sky. Soon it was a small dark silhouette, gradually losing form and diminishing. Then it appeared to cough – it shuddered and released a puff of black smoke. The helicopter spun slowly downwards until it disappeared behind a stark and jagged mountain ridge. Something about it reminded Lopez of Madame Binh’s forlorn silk-screen birds.

  He finally managed to get a place on a helicopter in the afternoon. They were all terrified, all thinking the same thought: ‘How many more heat seeking missiles do they have?’ No one said a word, not even after they got back.

  EVERYONE HAD TO ATTEND the eight o’clock morning briefing at the C-team, even if they were ‘just visiting’. Lopez always sat in the back row hoping that he wouldn’t be noticed and asked any questions. He had celebrated his safe return and mourned Travis until well after midnight. He would have had a thumping hangover if it hadn’t been for the morphine.

  When Lieutenant Colonel Cale strutted in he was obviously in one of his don’t-fuck-with-me moods. The staff snapped to attention. Cale was followed by his deputy and the adjutant, both with gray serious faces. The colonel plumped himself into an armchair positioned a few inches forward of the ordinary folding chairs in the front row. He coughed and the staff sat down again. The adjutant drew back a curtain that was stenciled SECRET, to reveal a huge topographical map which covered all of I Corps. Lang Khe, inconspicuous in the top left-hand corner, had been reduced to a small blue rectangle surrounded by several red rectangles. Each section leader marched to the map – each officer a brisk automaton with left hand open against the small of his back, left forearm parallel to ground, pointer firmly grasped in right hand – ‘never reach untidily across body’ – and reported as appropriate on the intelligence, operational or logistical developments of the past twenty-four hours. The supply officer was given an impressive grilling about Lang Khe in particular and about his inadequacy as a human being in general. After he was permitted to return to his seat, the colonel twisted around in his armchair and scanned the rows of well-scrubbed staff-officer faces to find his next target. It was Johnson, the medical officer.

  ‘Captain Johnson.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Have the chaplain’s dental records been forwarded to Graves Registration?’

  ‘No, sir. But will do ASAP.’

  ‘Do it now.’

  The doctor excused himself and trotted off. Archer, the lieutenant from Tra Bong, leaned over and whispered to Lopez, ‘Is he dead?’ Archer’s eyes were sparkling with mischief. He wanted Lopez to pass the message on so that everyone in the back would be squirming and trying not to laugh at the grotesque understatement.

  ‘It’s not funny.’

  ‘Oh, come on. When you got back from ID’ing Redhorn, you got drunk as a skunk and went around singing the Baggy Song.’ The Baggy Song was sung to the tune of ‘Camptown Races’: Sonny got killed in Vietnam, doo dah, doo dah. Lopez didn’t like being reminded that he had been like that. It seemed such a long time ago.

  ‘It wasn’t funny then, and it’s not funny now.’

  ‘Something’s wrong with you, Lopez, you ought to see a doctor.’

  Lopez was sick, sick of the army, sick of war. He didn’t want to be with any of them. He wanted to be in a meadow that sloped down to a slow river lined by willows. He wanted someone to hold him tight and breathe on his neck; he wanted to fall asleep with his head in her lap. He felt as if someone had pushed ‘fast forward’ on a tape recorder – everything seemed to be coming apart all at once.

  When Lopez got back to Nui Hoa Den there was a new medic. He had replaced Huber, who had only been at the camp a month, and who had to return to the States because his wife had become depressed and suicidal. The chaplain, the one who had just been reduced to dental records, had managed to get Huber sent home for compassionate reasons.

  The new medic, Bobby Hatch, was a conscientious objector. He came from a place in northern Vermont near the border with Quebec. When the team first heard about the new medic, there was a lot of grumbling. ‘Last thing we need is some fucking anti-war peacenik creep.’ But Hatch turned out to be a tall blond athlete who drank, told rude jokes, didn’t believe in killing but didn’t mind using his fists, and had the looks of a film star. He was big, self-confident and gentle. He became the most popular team member. But Lopez didn’t want Bobby Hatch at the camp – he was too innocent, too clean.

  Bobby’s family were descendants of a nineteenth-century Utopian New England sect famous for their handmade furniture. When he was drafted, he claimed exemption as a conscientious objector. The tribunal turned him down because there was no evidence of his having a coherent religious or philosophical belief that opposed war. He just wanted to keep making chairs and cabinets, and play in his rock band at weekends. So they drafted him anyway, but conceded that he wouldn’t have to ‘bear arms’ if he became a medic.

  While he was in basic training, Bobby was talent spotted by one of the army’s slickest PR operators. He told him how much they respected him for being a conscientious objector. It was, in fact, ‘a cherished right of every American’ and wouldn’t prevent him from playing a valued role in the army. Bobby was nïave enough to take the bait, and ended up volunteering for Special Forces. The PR types knew he was a keen outdoorsman, and they managed to make all the parachuting, scuba diving and outdoor living irresistible. The PR people loved him and at first Bobby was flattered by all the attention. There were lots of news articles about ‘The Green Beret Pacifist’ – just what was needed to counter SF’s psychopath image. Later Bobby found it all embarrassing and realized that he had been used. But he had gone too far to quit, and he still rationalized that being a combat medic was ‘doing good’.

  What happened to Bobby was proof of what Lopez had learned only too well. The military industrial complex were not all dumb shits like Boca – they had brains too. And those brains knew so well how to twist and re-package everything, they could market dog shit as baby food.

  It was three in the morning and Lopez was sweating and murmuring in a twisted morphine-induced dream. He was having straight sex with one of Mr Chou’s girls. Just as the girl started to have an orgasm, her face shriveled into a pale skull, eye sockets full of maggots. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’ Then there was a tunnel and Lopez was running down it, and he tripped, and there was a ditch full of bodies …

  ‘Hey, Trung Uy. Trung Uy Lopez, wake up.’

  Someone was whispering and shaking his shoulder. It was Dusty Storm. Lopez felt so relieved, he wanted to embrace Dusty for releasing him from Hell.

  ‘You awake now?’

&nbs
p; ‘Yeah, what’s happened?’

  ‘Shhh, listen -I found out a few things.’

  Lopez didn’t ask what, he just let him talk. It wasn’t the first time that Dusty had passed on gossip and information. He knew that Dusty ransacked all the files and document packets whenever he was on duty in the communications bunker late at night. But he didn’t know that he’d also cracked the combination to the top-secret safe – only the commanding officer was supposed to have access. Lopez was slightly impressed.

  The first file that Dusty had gone through was Covert Operations, which detailed the extent to which the assassination group, Program Phoenix, had been let loose on the local population. Lopez had already suspected as much from meeting Krueger at Dai Binh. Dusty then told him what he’d found in the Counter Intelligence file. ‘Listen to this, Trung Uy, it’s estimated…’

  ‘Hey, keep your voice down, man.’ Lopez was worried about Boca and his spies.

  ‘… there are twenty to twenty-five sleepers in the camp, all hardcore agents. And your pal, Mr Kim, is one of them.’

  ‘Those reports are full of shit.’

  ‘Not this one, Trung Uy, it’s got the Top Reliability rating – the stuff on Kim comes from “multiple and independent” sources.’

  Lopez grabbed Dusty by his T-shirt. ‘Don’t say a fucking word about this to anyone else. Kim is clean; I know that for sure. You can’t trust those counter-intel agents – they’re all doubled. It’s called orchestrated misinformation.’

  ‘Keep your cool, Trung Uy, none of this spook shit matters to me. It doesn’t matter at fucking all, it’s just fun and games for boy scouts. And it’s not why I woke you up.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Boca has put in a request to G3 Air for a grid destruct beacon run on Phu Gia.’