The next morning the patrol went back to Nui Hoa Den. Lopez learned that a Viet Cong platoon, probably the one he failed to ambush, had overrun the Regional Forces outpost at the base of Black Widow Mountain and killed sixteen soldiers before withdrawing.
LOPEZ WAS EATING BREAKFAST in the C-team mess hall next to a major wearing the twin snake insignia of the medical branch, but it was somehow different from any that he had seen before. The major was completely bald, but had a splendid dark moustache with curled and waxed ends. Lopez thought he resembled the actor in the team-house’s jerky old 1920s French porn movie: ‘Madame, je suis médecin. Allongez-vous sur le divan, s’il vous plaît…’
The major looked up from his scrambled eggs. ‘Are you on the staff?’
For a second, Lopez was surprised to hear the major speaking English. ‘No, sir, I’m from one of the camps. I have to come here once a month to pick up the pay for the CIDG Strike Force.’ The major was wearing the shoulder patch of the Saigon HQ. ‘You’re from MACV, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, but I don’t spend much time down there. My job means I have to move all over the country, but I seem to spend a lot of time up here in I Corps. In fact, I’m here right now to deal with your chaplain. There seems to be a bit of an identity problem.’
Lopez wasn’t surprised. As far as he was concerned all chaplains were weirdos. He tried to imagine what the problem might be – marital, mid-life, sexual orientation – or maybe the chaplain had simply wised up to the fact that God doesn’t exist and felt guilty about drawing his pay under false pretenses. Lopez was trying hard not to smile, but he also suddenly missed Travis – he would have loved this story. He looked closely at the major and tried to sound sincere. ‘You’ve got a really interesting and important job. I don’t know many of my colleagues who appreciate the psychological strains and damage that this war is causing people.’
The major wiped his mouth and looked at Lopez in a curious way. There was a look on his face that hovered between suspicion and total incomprehension.
Lopez leaned forward and said, ‘You are a psychiatrist, aren’t you?’
The major frowned at Lopez for a second. Then his face softened and broadened into a smile. ‘My dear boy, I am neither a psychiatrist nor a psycho-therapist of any sort. I am Vietnam’s one and only dental pathologist. The chaplain’s helicopter flew right into a mountain. I’m trying to match up a piece of charred jawbone recovered by a marine recon team with his dental records.’
Suddenly Lopez remembered the helicopter that was lost near Lang Khe – it seemed so long ago.
Lopez met the replacement chaplain later that day. The new padre was an intense looking Roman Catholic priest with bushy eyebrows. The chaplain confided to Lopez that he suspected his presence was pointless. ‘I don’t know why they sent me here. There don’t seem to be any practicing Catholics among the US personnel.’ The only serious Christians were a small band of fundamentalist Southern Baptists, one of who lost no time in telling the priest, ‘Rome is the whore of Babylon and your Pope is the Antichrist.’
When it became apparent that the chaplain was the only staff officer who had nothing to do, the adjutant suggested that he could help draft letters to the bereaved families of dead soldiers – since Tet there had been a lot of them to write. He was sure that the priest’s experience with funerals would be useful. ‘It’s nice,’ said the adjutant, ‘if the letters have a personal touch, like we’d actually known the poor fuck: you know – kind of music he liked, position he played on the baseball team, the name of his dog. Now, padre, you’ve buried lots of folks and always had to give a nice little talk about the departed, and I bet you knew less than diddly-shit about them …’
The priest agreed to help, but was still reluctant to accept that he had no pastoral mission. He knew there were a large number of Vietnamese Catholics among the local population. Eventually, he sent a letter of introduction offering his services to the bishop of Da Nang.
Lopez was about to go back to Nui Hoa Den when the priest told him that he had been invited to the cathedral for “an audience”. ‘The adjutant says I can use his jeep, but I don’t know my way around Da Nang. Is there anyone…?’
‘No sweat, Father, I’ll be your driver.’
Lopez had begun to like Da Nang. He liked its seediness, its secretiveness, the decaying ambience of its French past. As they drove past the RMK girls – Suck ‘em Silly Sally and company – Lopez was tempted to make a crude comment to embarrass the priest, but held his tongue. The chaplain was, he thought, just a harmless fool and not worth baiting; he probably had more than enough of that from the C-team.
‘Lieutenant Lopez, your name suggests a possible Catholic past.’
‘You mean because I’m a spic? And spies, like micks and dagos, are almost always Papes?’
‘Well, I guess it wasn’t the most tactful way of asking if you were a Catholic.’
‘Not any more, not at all. I gave up all that mumbo jumbo years ago.’
‘Why did you offer to help me then?’
‘Because my commanding officer at Nui Hoa Den is a total shithead and I will use any excuse I can to stay away, because if I spend too much time in his proximity, I will eventually shoot him. And killing that piece of scum is not worth three years in Leavenworth. I hope that answers your question.’
The priest laughed. ‘God’s grace works in funny ways.’
‘Where’d you get that line, father? Out of some Graham Greene novel?’
‘I know you, Lieutenant Lopez, perhaps better than you know yourself. You’re too sophisticated to believe, but not sophisticated enough to have faith in something that lies beyond your own intelligence.’
‘Can’t you do better than that, father? You make me feel like I’m arguing with a Mormon.’ Lopez used to say the same thing when Ianthe nagged him to go to Mass. ‘It’s like going on believing in the tooth fairy after you’re grown up,’ he would tell her. ‘All that God stuff’ll get you a closed cell at Spring Grove.’ In the end, he thought, Ianthe had gone against her religion; she’d had sex outside marriage and an abortion, and she’d died.
The cathedral was a grotesque monstrosity of too-bright red brick and pinkish stone. Lopez pulled over, jumped out of the jeep and pressed a buzzer on a locked rusty iron gate – it didn’t work. He shouted through the railings, ‘Hello – chao – bonjour – anybody fu–…’ Then he noticed a gong with a length of steel rod hanging on a string; he gave the gong a few solid strokes which shook the mid-day peace. A pedicab driver shouted something rude as he passed. Lopez made an obscene gesture with his thumb and shouted, ‘Hôn dit toi – kiss my ass!’ at the driver’s back. An old woman on a bicycle laden with bales of coriander leaves grinned and called something bawdy.
‘You seem very at home here,’ observed the priest.
Lopez just said, ‘Someone’s coming.’
A plump laughing nun came hurrying across the sunny courtyard with short quick steps; she carried a set of keys so huge and ancient that they might, Lopez thought, serve to open the gates of heaven and hell. They followed her into a mock-gothic cloister with scrubbed tiles and then into an inner sanctum heavily curtained with red velvet and smelling of incense and stale tobacco. At first Lopez thought they were alone, but then he heard a cough. As the chaplain’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw an elderly, wizened Vietnamese priest who introduced himself as Monsignor Chuyen. He apologized for the bishop being unavailable, and added that the bishop was likely to remain unavailable for the foreseeable future. The monsignor’s speech was punctuated by a racking chain-smoker’s cough that seemed to rattle his bones almost audibly. He begged his visitors to sit down and offered his hospitality with such fervor that they felt obliged to accept for fear that the old Monsignor would otherwise collapse into a heap of brown sticks. A servant was summoned and laid out a silver coffeepot, a crystal decanter of cognac and a tray of sticky rice cakes.
Monsignor Chuyen spoke in French, but it was obvious that the c
haplain was finding it difficult. Chuyen apologized for not speaking much English. Lopez was about to offer to translate when the chaplain said something in Latin. The Monsignor smiled and answered in Latin. He spread out a map of the diocese on the table, and continued to speak in Latin as he drew his fellow-priest into the Byzantine web of Vietnamese Catholicism. Lopez looked on, abashed. He felt he’d fallen into a time warp, as if the two priests were naturalized Roman pro-consuls, of different tribes, charting frontier provinces in the language of their common conqueror. The Monsignor pointed out Hue, Quang Tri, Hoi An, Tam Ky and An Hoa as he traced the web of influence of another Roman power that spun its threads down river valleys and across mountain passes, threads that wove in and out of political loyalties and bound together opposing armies as though the continuing bloodshed was almost irrelevant, war simply a vulgar and profane distraction that belonged on a lower plane.
A few weeks later, one of the padre’s invisible threads led him back to Lopez and the camp at Nui Hoa Den. Things had deteriorated: every night now the Communist battalions flowed past the camp as though it were merely a small rock in a large stream. Despite the bombardments and displacement, a large number of Vietnamese Catholics still lived in the villages of the river valley.
Although Phu Gia had been almost obliterated by high altitude carpet-bombing, the hollow ruin of its church still stood on a small knoll just outside the village. Its function as a place of worship was long forgotten. For years its only function had been as a reference point for directing air strikes and artillery fire – ‘See that church? Lay down the napalm just behind it.’
Boca was annoyed that the priest wanted to say Mass in Phu Gia. He had no intention of providing a security force to protect him. ‘You go down there, padre, you’re on your own.’ On the other hand, if the priest were captured or killed, it would make him look bad. Even worse, he might have to organize an operation to get the priest back, alive or dead. Either way, the whole thing was ‘a pain in the ass and a waste of fuckin’ time.’
But the priest was determined. ‘I’ve spoken,’ he said, ‘to the people in the valley, and they say there hasn’t been a priest in the village for years. Leave it to me, Captain Boca; I take full responsibility.’
‘You gonna go by yourself, padre?’
‘If no one else will come with me.’
‘Padre, I don’t think you’re gonna find anyone stupid enough to do that.’
Lopez, who was busy writing an after-action report, rapped the table with a beer can for attention. ‘I’m stupid enough, father; I’ll come along.’
‘Well done, padre, you’ve brought Lieutenant Lopez back to the faith. How about that?’
A half-dozen Vietnamese also agreed to come. Lopez drove down to the river in the two-and-a-half-ton truck, the priest beside him and the others in the back. At Nui Hoa village, they hired a boat to carry them down the river as far as the landing at Xuan Hoa. Something about the journey reminded Lopez of Easter in a warm spring. But it was still a stupid and dangerous thing to do.
As they walked up from the landing, the priest asked, ‘Have you changed your mind about the church since our last conversation?’
‘Fuck, no!’
The priest kept quiet and smiled.
Lopez wanted to see what was left of the village after the bombing. A shortage of aircraft meant that they had only half done the job. Most of the village had been craterized, but the derelict church, a handful of outlying houses and the paddy fields furthest from the river had escaped. The church had been built on a flat mound that dominated the surrounding paddy. Its thatched roof and beams had been burnt away by napalm, but the stone walls remained intact. The Catholics of the valley had prepared for the mass by building an altar and communion rail from freshly cut bamboo. The local Viet Cong and a North Vietnamese patrol had looked on at first, and then joined in to help. The sanctuary was decorated with jungle ferns and perfumed with dried herbs and spices. Bright flowers and palm leaves had been woven into the communion rail. Instead of bells to signal the elevation of the Host, a large ox-hide drum was suspended from a bamboo frame.
The priest donned a purple chasuble and began the service. It had to be an old fashioned Latin mass: it was the only mass that the villagers remembered. Lopez found the whole thing – ragged Vietnamese peasants chanting Domine non sum dignus and Et cum spiritu tuo – surreal, the Mass of his own childhood refracted through a maze of broken mirrors, and all around him the too-human vestiges of an antique faith.
The sexton, a dried and shriveled man – Lopez wondered if he had been unwrapped from a dust-sheet for the occasion – struck the ox-hide drum once as the priest raised the Host, and again as he elevated the chalice. Lopez had no intention of receiving the Eucharist. He didn’t believe in it, and, even if he did, his soul was not in the necessary state of grace. Besides, he wasn’t certain that he even had a soul. But he knew that if, supposing Pascal’s divine lottery ticket was a winner, he did have one, it was black and pitted with murder, selfishness, deceit, willful cruelty, lies, blasphemies and – the worst sin of all – hurting someone that loved him.
When it came time to approach the altar to receive Holy Communion, Lopez was the only one who didn’t move. He closed his eyes and lost himself in a daydream of flesh that was a million miles from the austere penance of Phu Gia. He was jerked awake when he felt a hand on his elbow. Lopez tried to pull his arm free, but the grip tightened like a vise. He turned and looked into the hollow eyes of the elderly sexton. The old man was pushing him towards the communion rail. Lopez was amazed that there was so much power in such a frail body. He couldn’t stop that ancient strength from pushing him forward, and the sexton knelt at the rail beside him as if to block an escape. Lopez closed his eyes and waited for the Host to land on his tongue.
When they returned to their places, the sexton was murmuring Hail Marys in the lilting singsong accent of Annam and counting the thick beads of his rosary. It was an elegant rosary – large beads of polished hard wood and a silver crucifix. Lopez felt nauseous – rosaries were bad omens, Old World voodoo relics. He remembered a black rosary, with beads like cockroaches, wrapped around his mother’s cold stiff fingers. They had packed the coffin with ice – it was a hot August – to preserve the body, to keep it uncorrupted pending his late arrival in Vera Cruz from the States so that he could see his mother, for a once and only time, before they buried her. It was a mother that he had never seen – at least could not remember – in life. And there she was, stiff and frozen for him to see and remember. Lopez’s first impression was of an old Indian squaw in a cowboy film: brown skin drawn tight over high cheek bones and black hair pulled straight back. The comparison was banal. He felt ashamed; he wanted to think of her as otherwise – this woman’s face belonged to a stranger.
Many of his Vietnamese soldiers wore rosaries, as if they were magic charms to ward off bullets. One had been blown up at Dai Binh, when a booby trap took away half his face and most of his right arm. The cheap plastic beads were soaked with blood, but the rosary was still in one piece and hadn’t been torn from the soldier’s neck by the force of the blast. Lopez sat beside the soldier and watched him die. During the pitiful minutes before losing consciousness the man kept trying to make the sign of the cross. But his hand was no longer there – it had vanished in a flash of fire and shrapnel. Lopez remembered the jagged ends of two blast-blackened bones protruding from the stump, their futile reaching for forehead and shoulder. It was a horrible reflex, unbearable to watch.
Lopez was conscious only of the cold empty sky, and a pair of fighter-bombers – trim, gleaming silver darts – intersecting the perfectly clear blue above the church. He tried to empty his mind of everything but the dry, bland taste of the Host dissolving on his tongue, but the infinite suffering of stupid vulnerable human beings kept spinning in his brain, and he began to cry. The sexton put his arm around him and tried to press rosary beads into his hands. Lopez pushed the sexton away; he felt nauseous and want
ed to be alone. The chanting – Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem – was echoing inside his head, reminding him of masses half-heard in childhood, and of Ianthe dragging him to mass on hot summer Sundays. Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace. Oh, please.
Afterwards everyone shook hands and bade one another farewell. As they departed Lopez looked back and saw the Phu Gia Catholics still smiling and waving, framed against the backdrop of blackened stone, until the closing matrix of young bamboo, banana leaves, and palm fronds shut them from sight.
Just as they reached the river, Lopez felt the earth shake under his feet. A thousand meters away high explosive bombs were screaming into the church. Boca had called in an airstrike to massacre the congregation before they had a chance to disperse. The priest’s face turned pale, he looked at Lieutenant Lopez; his lips kept mouthing ‘why’, but no sound came out. He finally found his breath and whispered, ‘This is sacrilege. This is blasphemy against God.’
Lopez’s face was soaked with hot tears. He couldn’t believe what the priest had just said, couldn’t believe he was still babbling superstition and nonsense. ‘It’s worse than any of your fucking sacrilege.’
The priest reached out towards him. ‘I care about these people too.’
Lopez pushed his hands away. ‘You understand nothing, priest, you make me sick.’
The napalm came next. Lopez hadn’t expected that. But he wasn’t surprised either – it was part of the pattern. He watched the thick gray smoke billow above the tree line, and something began to roar inside him, something so deafening and so just that he would never again hear anything else.
Lopez got into his jeep and roared off back to the camp. He screeched to a halt, jumped out, chambered a round in his M16, and went to find Boca so he could kill him.
A River in May Page 24
