A River in May

by Edward Wilson

  Lopez picked up his beret. ‘I’d better be going.’ As he walked to the jeep he felt so flushed with pride that he wanted to sing. They really weren’t worth it; they were all sham – all the way back to the Mayflower and beyond. An echo of Vargas’s tasteless joke about the gringo and the onion echoed in Lopez’s memory. He’d been dismayed by the crudeness of the joke then, but now – oh, now he could cut up this particular gringo and never shed a tear.

  Lopez had the midnight to two o’clock watch. He managed to drag the French gilt armchair on to the top of the command bunker with a view to enjoying the tranquillity of bourbon and cool night air. He was trying to stay off the morphine. He slumped into the chair and sipped his drink, and tried to block out the sounds of maternal lamentation coming from the Dead House.

  Somehow the armchair had found its way from nineteenth-century Nantes to Nui Hoa Den. Vietnam seemed to be the final resting-place for the obsolete, the incongruous and the sloughed off. Some odd remnants of colonialism, like the jerky nineteen-twenties’ porn film with French sub-titles that did the camp rounds, had a certain logic. But what about the marble bust of Immanuel Kant in the teamhouse at Ba To? The last time Lopez had seen it, the author of The Critique of Pure Reason was wearing a jungle hat, sunglasses with a lens missing, and had a marijuana spliff stuck in his mouth. And how could pure reason explain why an English bowler hat and rolled umbrella were on display in the Da Nang jeweler’s where Chou had unknowingly bought Lopez the hair-clip for Quentin’s fiancée? It was as if, each night, an occult procession of lost and démodé objects set off across sea and continent to Vietnam. And the people too. Lopez remembered his one and only visit to what the Vietnamese called ‘the German cemetery’. It was at Phu Bai, astride the Route Nationale that the French used to call the Street Without Joy. There weren’t just German legionnaires, but also graves with Algerian and Senegalese names. And now he, Francis Lopez, half or two-thirds Aztec Indian, hybridized by the seed of every Spaniard who had raped or bought his female ancestors, cradled in the language and culture of the next wave of conquerors, was looking out, as had the Prussian and African dead of Phu Bai, into the Vietnamese night with a rifle in his hand.

  From time to time Lopez searched the camp perimeter with the starlight scope, but found nothing of note except for a sentry peeing over the side of his guard post – the scope magnified the urine to such exceptional brightness that the sentry looked as if his prick were on fire. There were footsteps in the shadows. Lopez went down on one knee and put his finger on the trigger. He was worried by his increasing paranoia but didn’t know how to control it, or even if he should control it. He heard a voice; it was Bobby Hatch, wanting to talk about a ‘confidential matter’. But there were too many small spaces and too many big ears. Lopez led him to the 81mm mortar pit.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’ve heard rumors, sir, that you smoke dope. I know that they can’t be true, but I thought you ought to know.’

  ‘Have you got some good shit?’

  ‘Not bad.’ He started to pass Lopez a joint.

  ‘Not here. We’d better go to a CIDG bunker – if Boca smells the dope we can pretend it’s theirs.’

  They went to Mr Kim’s bunker; from the entrance Lopez saw Kim lying in bed trying to sweat off the last stages of a bout of recurrent malaria. Ho Cuc was sitting at a small table writing a letter by the weak light of a smoking oil lamp, and at the same time arguing with poor Kim. Lopez could hear Cuc’s voice rising and falling, exaggerating the tonal nature of Vietnamese; it was a rhetorical trick they used in speeches. He tried hard to understand what Cuc was saying but could only pick out a few words, some names of people, one of whom was ‘an idiot’ who ‘talked too much’. When Ho Cuc saw them he shut up and turned over what he was writing.

  They all shook hands; it was like going to your local cafe in France. Kim was glad to see Lopez and asked if he had read the Vietnamese poems he had lent him. Lopez felt ashamed, like an idle student, and apologized for being too busy. They shared the joint with Kim; Ho Cuc sat in a corner scowling and refusing to smoke.

  ‘Where’d you get the dope – it’s excellent.’

  ‘Massachusetts.’

  Lopez started to laugh. ‘Massachusetts?’ The marijuana made him light-headed and juvenile.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Hatch, you must be the only fucking person in history ever to have smuggled dope into Southeast Asia. My admiration knows no bounds.’

  Lopez felt good. Despite Kim’s malaria, the sounds of mourning from the Dead House, the earth floor and the dank oiled presence of weapons, it was all so normal. For a few minutes they were no longer soldiers, but ordinary young men talking about motorbikes, girls, which bands they liked and swapping stories of wild beach parties.

  Bobby rolled another joint. ‘By the way, Captain Boca says that I have to go on some kind of “humanitarian operation” with you.’

  Lopez tensed up. ‘Did he say Phu Gia?’

  ‘That’s the place.’

  ‘That fucking asshole.’ Lopez wanted to kill Boca more than ever. It was wrong to send someone as inexperienced as Bobby on an operation like that. It was wrong in other ways too: Bobby was the only one on the team who didn’t have blood on his hands, the only one who didn’t deserve to get hurt.

  ‘What’s wrong? Is there a problem?’

  ‘Boca’s made a mistake. You’re not going, I’m changing it.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t. I don’t want to be treated any different from the others. No special privileges. I may be a peacenik pacifist, but I’m not yellow-bellied.’

  ‘Listen – you see this?’ Lopez touched the lieutenant’s bar on his collar.

  ‘Don’t make a fool of yourself.’

  ‘OK – that’s the way you want to play it?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Bobby paused and looked directly at Lopez. ‘Don’t, Lieutenant Lopez, use your rank to take away my dignity, my right to make choices.’

  ‘Thanks for the dope.’ Lopez went back to his armchair on top of the command bunker.

  After a while an American reconnaissance plane appeared and began to slowly quarter the nearest ridgeline. The aircraft was a ‘people-sniffer’, fitted with highly sensitive infra-red instruments that could detect human body heat. The North Vietnamese thwarted the people-sniffers by hanging up pots of urine, which caused the infra-red detectors to go wild and often tricked the air force into obliterating vast tracts of empty jungle.

  Lopez watched the aircraft inscribing ever-tighter circles over the nearby ridge. He wondered if it had found a whole regiment of pissoirs. Suddenly, a line of green dashes rose from the jungle and followed the aircraft as it banked and turned. It took Lopez a few seconds to register that the plane was being fired on by a .51 caliber machine-gun. It was odd, because there wasn’t any sound, just the graceful pyrotechnic arc of the tracers. After a while, the plane wriggled its wings and flew off apparently unscathed and perhaps unaware. The machine-gun stopped, and then, after a few seconds had passed, Lopez saw the tracers coming towards himself. He felt perfectly safe – there still wasn’t any noise – and the green line of tracer burnt out well before it reached where he was sitting. Something went pop past his right ear: Lopez remembered that the phosphorous element that made tracer bullets glow burned out long before the bullets stopped flying. He still, enthralled perhaps by the night air and the marijuana, felt no sense of panic or urgency. He finished his bourbon and calmly dragged his chair and radio link to a less exposed place. What had happened seemed secret and unreal, like an intimate conversation between strangers on a train late at night.

  Suddenly everything seemed pointless, empty and lonely. Lopez almost wanted the machine-gunner to find him again, then guilt, responsibility and decisions would vanish into the void. Decisions were the worst thing: they were never perfect, they were always tainted, but you always had to choose. He still wanted to kill Boca – it would be personally satisfying – but it wouldn’t
solve the problem. Or would it? Killing people like him wasn’t like cutting off a Hydra’s heads: Bocas were finite. But it was really the pilots and the air war planners who needed to be killed. It was still a court-martial offence, still murder, to shoot unarmed civilians – especially babies – on the ground, but it was all right to incinerate them or blow their bodies apart from the air. Especially if the babies were non-white and lived in places with names like Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Phu Gia; then it was OK to roast their smiling little faces into yellow goo under a layer of black ash. Pilots were the Herods of the skies. You could even make a Freudian joke of it by naming the bomber Enola Gay after your mother, and calling the bomb Little Boy.

  There were signs that the infantry were getting into the act too. And there were some pretty sick rumors going around, about something terrible that was supposed to have happened in a village in Quang Ngai, on the coastal plain. Its name made Lopez think of the Roman sea victory that led to the destruction of Carthage. He remembered that T. S. Eliot had used it in ‘The Waste Land’:

  There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: ‘Stetson!

  ‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!…

  THE NIGHT BEFORE THE PHU GIA EVACUATION Lopez got the shivers. Morphine withdrawal had messed up his body’s temperature control. At three o’clock in the morning, he pulled on a sweater – he was feeling really awfully cold – and wrapped a blanket around himself, feeling like an addict huddling in a 126th Street doorway. He was suspicious about Boca’s willingness to let him evacuate the civilians, and wondered if Boca had hidden motives, a hidden plan. He knew that he could only sleep if he used morphine. But he wanted to keep a clear head, so he was going cold turkey. He was more frightened than he had ever been before a patrol.

  Lopez had ignored Bobby’s plea and tried to get him replaced with someone more experienced, like Carson or Dusty; but Boca had insisted that a medic was more appropriate because of the ‘humanitarian nature’ of the operation. Lopez suspected that Boca’s real reason was that he wanted him to fail, wanted to discredit him or even get him killed. He knew that the operation had only a slim chance of success. Casualties had reduced the number of CIDG troops available to just ninety – not enough for the job. He needed twice as many soldiers as well as air and artillery support to secure the high ground on both sides of the river, especially Hill 110.

  Lopez could hear Boca snoring two cubicles away and, closer, the rhythmic sound of furtive masturbation. It was, he thought, not one of the details that Homer had mentioned in the Iliad.

  Earlier in the evening Bobby had given Lopez a piece of fruitcake that his mother had baked and sent in a tin. He wondered what it must be like to have a family like Bobby’s. They were so young and so full of the future. His mother was hardly forty and his father not much older. Tom and Rosie were in their seventies; in fact, Tom was nearly eighty. Lopez had been adopted into the past; it didn’t bother him, it made it easier to see how it all linked together. He finished the cake, washed it down with a glass of whiskey, and then, as if he had swallowed a potion, fell asleep.

  An hour later, he woke again. Something soft and gentle was nibbling at his fingertips. It was ever so delicate, more gentle than the touch of the most considerate of lovers. It was a rat, which had scented the cake crumbs under Lopez’s fingernails and was lapping them out with its tongue.

  THE HILL OVERLOOKED PHU GIA AND THE RIVER. It was bare of trees and sparsely covered with grass and low scrub. Lopez knew that if they lost the element of surprise they were going to be in trouble, were going to get ‘wasted’. When he spotted a couple of CIDG silhouetting themselves against the evening skyline he grabbed Trung Uy Tho and shook him so hard that he thought he could hear his brains rattle. ‘Tell those dumb fucks to get down.’ It was a lousy start.

  Lopez wrapped his poncho and poncho liner tight around his body and lay down. He had been asleep for ten minutes when the noise woke him. There had been three shots. The shots were quite near; it sounded like they had come from the base of the hill, no more than a couple of hundred meters away. Bobby grabbed his arm. ‘What were those?’

  ‘Don’t know. Could be signal shots.’

  ‘They know we’re here, don’t they?’

  They did, but Lopez didn’t want to tell him that. He took a half-bottle of whiskey out of his rucksack and passed it to Bobby. He was longing for morphine. Bobby drank, and curled up in his own poncho. He looked, thought Lopez, so out of place: tucked up like a little boy with his fair skin and blond hair. Lopez’s dark skin and compact body had, at least, the advantage of making him a less obvious target for snipers.

  Lopez fell asleep again, but then the dream came again and spoiled it. A coffin is sliding out of a hearse, it falls to the ground and splits open. There is something tiny wrapped up in a shroud that rolls out and spills on to the wet gravel road. It’s always a child – this time it’s a little girl with a pretty smile, the one Dusty described riding a water buffalo … Lopez woke in a cold sweat, like he always did when the dream came back. Then, relieved that it was only a nightmare, he went back to sleep. Why was there, he wondered, always such a big coffin for so small a child?

  They rose at 4 a.m. Lopez had nearly two hours of darkness to get the company into their start positions. They descended the hill as silently as possible. At the base of the hill, the company divided into three. The sweep element headed for the river where they would enter Phu Gia at the upstream end; their job was to move through the village in assault formation rounding up the civilian population and flushing out any Viet Cong or NVA. The second element were to form a blocking force at the other end of the village and to shoot any enemy who fled before the sweep. The third element – including Bobby and himself – were to occupy Hill 38, the high ground overlooking Phu Gia. From Hill 38 they could cover the flank and rear of the sweep element.

  Lopez knew that the big problem was Hill 110, an ugly lump on the opposite side of the river which was pitted with camouflaged firing positions. The frustrating thing was that Hill 110 was just a few meters beyond the maximum range of Nui Hoa Den’s biggest mortars, so that once the enemy got dug in they were impregnable.

  Lopez and his element moved quickly along the paddy dykes and arrived at the base of Hill 38 well before the other elements were in position. He knew that they had to secure the hill quickly. If the enemy got there first, they would all be chopped to pieces in a crossfire between Hills 38 and 110. It was still dark as pitch when Lopez and his element began to ascend Hill 38. The point of his column were three abreast so they could shoot their way out of trouble. Nothing happened. It was, thought Lopez, going to be OK.

  The point had nearly reached the summit. Then a flash of light illuminated the top of the hill. For a split second there was the silhouette of a detached limb etched against the dazzling white light.

  Lopez’s first thought was that the light was the back-blast of a rocket and they were about to be chopped to pieces in an ambush. He knew it was the end. He hugged the earth as if it were the sweet mother that he had never known. He waited. Four seconds passed and he opened his eyes. All was quiet, except for the low moaning of the wounded. Bobby was the first to move: he started to crawl up the hill to tend the casualties.

  One of the CIDG had tripped a booby trap and had lost a leg and three fingers. Another soldier had lost an eye. Bobby covered the torn face with a field dressing, but there were even worse wounds staining the CIDG’s uniform with treacle-dark blotches. For Lopez there was no sense of reality. It was less than a dream; it was like a film of a dream. He sensed a camera zooming in on a close up of Bobby’s left hand as he felt for a pouch over his left hip, unsnapped the pouch and took out a morphine syrette. He watched the film of Bobby removing the plastic cover from the syrette and plunging the needle into the remaining thigh of the worst casualty. A voice-over was explaining that Bobby was squeezing only just over half the morphine out of the tube ‘because the smaller body size of a Vietnamese cannot toler
ate an American size dose.’

  The third wounded man was Ho Cue. There was a liquid gurgle of air escaping from a hole in his chest cavity. Lopez held a piece of plastic wrapper against the hole while Bobby pulled the dressing tight. Cuc was also badly wounded in one hand and had a leg full of fragments. He was in excruciating pain: Lopez could see pain-fever sweat beading his face. But he still refused to groan or utter a word. It reminded Lopez of a tableau from the Stations of the Cross, and how when he was little he used to imagine he was a Roman soldier watching the nails go into Jesus. In that misty gloom of pre-dawn twilight, nothing was real. Lopez felt like he had stumbled on to a stage where some primal nightmare had to be acted out all over again. And it was so dark, as if daylight would never come. The other two wounded moaned and pleaded in counterpoint, ‘Cho toi may bay, Trung Uy, cho toi may bay – Get me a helicopter, Lieutenant, get me a helicopter.’ They kept chanting it, like the mind-throbbing litanies of early morning Lenten masses – Cho toi may bay, Trung Uy, cho toi may bay.

  Lopez blocked out the noise and suffering of the wounded. He had to think clearly, had to get the facts straight, to decide what they were going to do next. He knew that most of the platoon were still strung out and exposed on the slope of Hill 38. The top of the hill was heavily mined and booby-trapped. If they tried to occupy the hilltop in the dark they would blow themselves to pieces. On the other hand, if the platoon remained exposed on the slope of the hill they would be slaughtered at first light by fire from enemy positions on Hill 110. One of the casualties moaned again for a helicopter – Lopez almost told him to shut up.

  He didn’t know what to do – that was why he had wanted someone like Carson on the operation, so he could have passed the buck. Lopez looked around for Tho, but couldn’t find him. He had to do something. He told Ly, the interpreter, to get the CIDG to come up the hill – carefully – on their hands and knees, feeling for trip wires. He knew there would probably be land-mines as well. The drill for finding them was to probe every square foot of ground with a bayonet lying loosely on the palm of the hand, but there wasn’t time for that.