by Alfredo Vea
The padre’s contorted face somehow managed a look of confusion.
“The infamous blue ballet,” translated the sergeant. “The infamous blue ballet is a French phrase that means lewd acts with underage boys. That’s exactly how it’s described in the French penal code. That’s all this fucking war adds up to, lieutenant: lewd acts with boys.”
The sergeant whimpered, then drew his sleeve across his face and cheeks. He wondered why he had waited so long to speak his mind. He had been a good soldier for so long that he had never seen the good in thinking about the bigger picture. Down below, in a bunker on the northeastern quadrant of the perimeter, a grizzled old Montagnard corporal repeated the sergeant’s phrase: “Ban vu halê xanh nõi tiêng.” The infamous blue ballet. His old eyes had seen the French boys in these same trenches, and the Japanese before them. He had heard the phrase before. He had witnessed this same form of pornography time and time again.
“You’ve heard their crazy philosophy discussions, haven’t you. their supposings?” asked the sergeant. “I know you’ve taken part in some of their bull sessions, I’ve heard you. These boys have two choices out here, either give in to the obscenity or do something to try to keep their sanity. Kids that see this kind of shit always got a lifetime’s worth of questions to ask. Death don’t just brush by you out here, it takes your head in its jaws and sticks its thick tongue clear down your throat. It’s the French kiss from hell. You have to give a shit, padre. It’s your job to give a shit about these guys. Please excuse my French, but, shit, right now is the first time that you’re really capable of it. C‘est la goddamn verité. That’s the God’s truth.”
Behind them, on the range of high hills that hid Laos from view, the sun was just setting. The clear sky was beginning to fill with stars at its western edge, and fingers of amber were shooting up toward the Southern Cross.
“Now you know what terror feels like, padre.” The sergeant lit a cigarette. He had quit smoking on his last trip home, but out here, cancer didn’t mean shit. “I could never have explained it to you before. The old elephant came and sat on your chest, didn’t he? The lightning bolt went through your asshole and up your spine. The electricity is still there, ain’t it? It’ll burn for years.”
The chaplain nodded. The sparks were still dancing on his spinal column. The fear had been overwhelming, suffocating, completely debilitating. The fear had been bestial. He had been paralyzed by the desperate, selfish need to survive. Even hours afterward, his muscles were still quaking spasmodically, coming down from a deluge of adrenaline. The muscles of his jaw were swollen from clenching, his teeth hurt, and his intestines ached from the internal pressure. His mouth and gums burned with the tides of bile that had risen, then fallen in his esophagus all night long. His ears were still ringing from the reports of a hundred rifles, and his knees ached. He had probably crawled ten miles over the face of this hill following the medic from wound to terrible wound.
“You’ve met the beast, padre. You peeked into the dungeon and caught a glimpse at the secret. Now you know what those boys know. To live, you would run with spiked boots on a sidewalk made of newborn babies. You would step on your dear sweet mother’s face to keep from getting dismembered, to keep from having your nuts shot off. You’ve learned that every bullet Charlie takes raises your odds of leaving here alive. But it ain’t all bad. Amazing as it seems, padre, there is one benefit to having your brains and stomach slow-cooked by hatred and fear.”
The sergeant turned to face the sunset. The chaplain watched, relieved to be distracted from the body bags. The Creole sergeant tossed his cigarette away, then unbuttoned the top button of his sweat-stained tunic and leaned forward while exhaling a blast of warm air. His face almost touched the ground as his lungs emptied. He then began to unwind slowly, inhaling deeply but with consummate control. The padre watched as amber strands from the sunset seemed to dive down from the sky, coalesce into a small aurora bore alis, then flow into the sergeant’s mouth and down into his lungs. The whites of the Creole soldier’s eyes began to glow with the inner light.
“Once you been here, padre,” whispered the sergeant as he held his breath, “you can taste a sunset. Everyday air will feel like liquid water on your teeth and tongue. Even the smallest moments, the tiniest ideas, will have their own special flavor. Nothing is ever the same again. Jamaisla même. Nothing. Back in the world they will think you are crazy. If you make it back to the world, you’ll find that you ain’t got a home no more.” The sergeant exhaled the sun as he spoke.
“Do you have a family, sergeant?” asked the padre, amazed by the display.
“I have a beautiful wife who I don’t deserve,” answered the sergeant with some reluctance. Suddenly a thought stung him, a poignant thought that carried with it a bitter taste. Why had he never inhaled her? Why had he never sucked in her words just as they left her lips? There had been a time when his eager tongue had probed her throat for the merest possibility of a syllable. Why had he never inhaled her?
He had gone home between tours but found that he couldn’t be alone with her anymore. He couldn’t sit and smooch or watch television or choose a restaurant for Saturday night dinner. He had been distracted and unable to sleep, incapable of small talk, but worst of all he had been a liar. He could make love to his wife, but he couldn’t love her. There had been physical relief in their bed, but no passion.
Pensively, he exhaled another chest full of golden light. He and his wife had made some business plans, but his heart hadn’t been in it. He had brought the war home with him along with his luggage and the jungle rot in his crotch and shoes. Here in Vietnam was where he belonged, but even here he had made mistakes.
“Hey, padre, let’s play us a game of suppose,” said the sergeant, wanting to distract himself from the memories of his wife and the horror at hand. He knew that the chaplain had long, outrageous conversations with some of the men in which they collectively rearranged history, and the world and its laws.
“Let’s you and me talk about a different kind of world. You might call it philosophizing, but with these boys, it’s called supposing. Let’s suppose this. Let’s suppose that. Suppose you tell me what you and Jesse and them were supposing yesterday.”
“Cornelius wondered what America would be like if there had never been any African slaves,” answered the chaplain after closing his eyes and inhaling slowly to collect himself and his thoughts.
The sergeant laughed. “That’s some supposin‘! What answer did they come up with for that one?”
“They had some remarkable ideas. They supposed that there would be no jazz in America, which also means that the blues and rock-and-roll would never have happened in the States. Jesse and Cornelius supposed that jazz would have been born in Morocco, where French, Spanish, and African rhythms would have collided. Billie Holiday, under another name, would’ve sung her songs in French.”
“Alors!” cried the sergeant. “Mademoiselle Billie Jourde Fête. She would have sounded so good in French!”
“They further extrapolated that the collision of African music and Welsh-Irish that became rock music would have taken place on the Normandy coast, where Celtic roots are still very strong. Jesse supposed that because of the immense popularity of Moroccan jazz and Afro-Celtic rock-and-roll, French would be the predominant language in the world today rather than English. French ballet, not yet set in its ways, would have been transformed by Africans into impro visational and fusion ballet. They would be tap-dancing in Calais. It seems that everything turns on jazz.”
“That Jesse’s got some strange notions. C‘est vrai.Il est original,” mused the sergeant, who realized in the same instant that he seldom lapsed into French these days. “Everything turns on jazz, eh? I kinda like that one. Everything turns on jazz.”
The old Montagnard corporal down below echoed the phrase, “Moì thú dêù lên nhac jazz. ”
The sergeant rose from his knees and shaded his eyes to survey the western perimeter, his platoon�
��s area of responsibility.
“Well, the bunkers are back together and the perimeter is as good as we can get it,” he said, still shaking the persistent image of his wife from his mind. He noticed that each position had been dug in deeper than usual. “After last night, none of these boys will be digging any bullshit bunkers. Still it’s not much of a night defensive position. If we put listening posts thirty meters out, we’d be shaking hands with Charlie. Because of all the brush down there the killing zone is real shallow. Too damn shallow. The LZ ain’t really secure, but it won’t get no better than this. Thank goodness the fifty-calibers are working. If we get some support, we’ll be all right. I wish to hell the chain of command up here wasn’t so green.”
He looked downward at the chaplain, who was still kneeling. On any other day the frightened face before him would have angered him. On any other day he would have given the platoon leader’s bullshit speech about fear being the true enemy. But the tears on the padre’s face had become the tears of his wife, his face had become hers. He saw her piercing eyes beneath his brow. She had seen through everything. Even on that last night in San Francisco, she had seen his distracted and dying heart.
“The dustoff choppers will be here in a little while,” he said in a strangely gentle voice. “If there’s room after they load these here bodies and the walking wounded, you can go back to battalion. I know you won’t fire a gun, padre, so it don’t matter to me what you decide to do. I need guns up here, not religion. But no one should have to die for this shitty mission. Before you leave, padre, I’ll tell you a little something about this mission. I guarantee you’re gonna love it. I sure hope the choppers brought some resupply, more gun juice and more star shells. We can’t work without light.”
A shiver ran down the length of the sergeant’s back as he anticipated what would happen without resupply and reinforcement. The NVA in this sector was a disciplined corps, while his own troops were like a pickup band in Harlem, players from everywhere. The sergeant took a heavy, hard step and the dust on his boots rose like a cloud of steam around his bloused trousers. It was a step of resignation, of acceptance. The LZ wasn’t really secure. His wife had been right.
Down below the sad array of green pods, below the Creole sergeant and the frightened chaplain, a group of young men had gathered to smoke and to calm one another down. Except for a swatch of olive drab here and there, they were all the same color as the clinging red dust around them. They moved and spoke awkwardly, sleepwalking their way through wave after wave of inexpressible grief and fatigue. The hair on the napes of their necks would be standing for hours, their semipermeable skin would crawl for days.
The ground around them was littered with shell casings, claymore bags, ration cans, discarded harnesses, and torn rucksacks. There were broken sandbags everywhere, smoke grenades, and the ominous wrappings that had once held field bandages. Here and there were the empty pith helmets of the North Vietnamese.
“Jesse,” said Cornelius, a young black man from Oakland, “how come a college-boy pogue like you is here with his ass in the grass like all us illiterate grunts? You ain’t eleven-bravo, is you?”
Cornelius was referring to the military occupational specialty number for an infantryman.
“You too smart for eleven-bravo. Is you one of those spooky crypto dudes?”
Cornelius was tall and thin, impossibly thin. His skin color had gone past black and looked purple in the sun. All of his classmates at Castlemont High School had been unmerciful with him for four full years. Back home at chicken dinners with his family, his mother had set aside all the gizzards and chicken skins for him to eat, but it had never made any difference in his weight. She’d made rice and gravy just for him using nothing but rice, flour, and pure bacon drippings, but the boy never gained a pound. She made him suck on spoons full of Crisco, but his skin remained stuck to his ribcage. No one knew where he got the strength to lug an M-60 machine gun around. An extra barrel and belt of cartridges were strapped across his narrow back. The letters FTA were written on every square inch of Cornelius’s clothing, flak vest, and helmet. Fuck The Army.
“I went to Berkeley for one year, two semesters,” sneered Jesse with a distracted, stunned air, “and I’m here because I’m a fucking idiot.” His voice was raspy and brittle. He could not keep his teeth from chattering. Death’s tongue had reached down into his small intestines. He removed his flak vest as he spoke, then used his T-shirt to wipe the mud and sweat from his face. He didn’t mind the questioning. No one did. Conversations after great sorrow were now a necessity of life. They often took strange and unforeseeable twists. The discussions had a life of their own. They had to.
“Jesus,” Jesse said softly, “I think I aged ten years last night. I never, ever want to go through that again. My teeth are all loose from the stress. My gums are black. I’ve had enough of this.”
“Now, even I know you ain’t no idiot,” said Cornelius. “First time I talked with you I could tell that right off. Word is you coulda been the driver for a full-bird colonel.” He placed both hands on an imaginary steering wheel and managed a smile as he spoke. “Now, that would surely be the gravy train.” He smiled. “Colonels don’t get shot in this here war. A man who drives for a colonel done fell into a real fat spot.”
“Shit,” said Jesse, trying hard to shake the fear and shock from his thoughts, “that’s ancient history. They offered me that job way down in Bien Hoa when I was still pissin’ stateside water. The colonel almost shit when I turned him down. They got so pissed at me that they sent me up to the DMZ, to Dong Ha, the armpit of the fucking world. The day I got there the Têt offensive kicked off. I swear to God, the second I stepped off that chopper some sappers hit the ammo dump. The zips were probing and pounding that place for weeks.”
“You avoidin’ the question, my man,” insisted Cornelius. “I’ve heard you talkin’ that parlez-vous French with them Montagnards and talkin’ that Mexican lingo with Mendez and Lopez. You must’ve done something real bad to end up here with all the bloods and spies. How did you get on this hill? And why the fuck are we up here guarding a fucking radio installation in the first place? And why the hell does Charlie give a shit about this place when I sure as shit don’t?”
“We’re a communications relay,” answered Jesse in a hollow and mechanical voice. “Something is happening out there past the free-fire zone and across the border—air strikes, black operations. You saw the crypto guys that they airlifted out of here yesterday?”
“Yeah, just before the feces come into contact with the fan,” said Cornelius with a disdainful laugh. He hated army intelligence. They were never right, and they never stuck around to see what happened when they were wrong. Last night they had fallen all over themselves in their mad dash for the safety of the choppers, all the while assuring field command on the hill that there were no NVA units in the area larger than platoon strength. The chicken-shits left behind most of their equipment, two half-full cups of warm coffee, and three battalions of seasoned North Vietnamese regulars with mortars and heavy armor just beyond the treeline.
“Those army intelligence officers sure know how to stand by their predictions,” sneered Jesse as he recalled the special treatment that had been given those men. They had been hustled off like a gaggle of spoiled, self-indulgent celebrities. By now they would be buying Saigon tea for some half-naked bar girls in Da Nang. Right now they could be eating slices of pepperoni pizza at the Special Forces compound or swimming at the Air Force pool near China Beach. Jesse shook his head in anger. They didn’t draft college kids, and the boys with the lowest test scores in boot camp were stuck in the infantry. It was always the sons of the poor who ended up on hills like this.
“I think we’re a conduit into Laos from I Corps command in Da Nang, that’s why we have both a tropospheric scatter dish and a line-of-sight relay system,” explained Jesse.
“Jesus, hijo de Dios!” moaned a voice with a Mexican accent. Someone wanted a translation of that
last sentence.
“Someone very far away is talking to somebody just on the other side of the Laotian border,” explained Jesse. “It’s all scrambled when it comes through here, and they’re rotating codes and frequencies every twenty minutes. Everything’s in code. Top-secret shit.”
“Shit is right,” said Cornelius. “It’s them CIA fuckups again. I shoulda known it. I shoulda known! I bet the spooks is sticking them poor South Vietnamese rangers in there again, trying to infiltrate the troops that is coming down old Ho’s trail. It never fucking works,” said Cornelius disgustedly. “Poor bastards always get caught and the CIA always leaves them twisting in the breeze, pretending it never happened. I tell you, if the CIA ever wants my black ass to do anything, I wants the money up front, in small unmarked bills. Talk about the gravy train, all their fuckups are a secret.”
“Yeah,” said Jesse, “I’ve heard it described as an insertion operation. I’ve been told that the spooks have been pouring money and guns into some turncoat Pathet Lao cadre. They’re supposed to help with the infiltration. They’ve been doing the same thing above the DMZ for years. But hell, for all I know, everything I’ve heard is bullshit. But getting back to your question about how I got here, the staff sergeant over there convinced me to come. He said that my ass needed to be farther out in the grass, that Dong Ha was easy street compared to the bush. He knew that in my confused heart, I wanted to come and see what the grunts were up to. I know how to fix all the radio equipment up there, and you needed a second RTO, so here I am.”
Jesse pointed toward the PRC-25 at his feet, a radio the size of a large rucksack that had a very conspicuous antenna. The first radiotelephone operator was lying in one of the body bags at the top of the hill.
