by M. J. Bosse
Mr. Smith shrugged. “If you wish, but I don’t believe it’s necessary.”
“For my record.” Virgil turned and told me again to get my pad and pencil.
I did. I took a seat opposite the man where he sat on the couch facing Virgil in his armchair. They watched each other the way those wrestlers do on TV—but their grimacing was inside. Virgil really wanted this written down? Things like this don’t happen in Omaha.
“You seem to know why I’m here,” Mr. Smith began with a faint smile.
I wrote his words down in my high school shorthand.
v: Well, after all, we’ve met before.
s: We have?
v: Not formally, but during the Fort Benning investigation you sat in the back row, every day. Only you wore bow ties then.
s: That’s very observant of you. Since it’s been a year, I’d like to refresh my own memory. (Taking out tiny notebook, silver pen) You and Lieutenant Stuart served together in Alpha Company, 13th Infantry Brigade, Americal Division—
v: (Dropping the British accent) Why go over that again?
s: Sorry, but it helps me get things in perspective.
v: Is this visit official? I want to be sure of the character of this interview.
s: Actually, it’s quite informal. When someone like Lieutenant Stuart dies, especially under such circumstances, naturally we are interested. We check a little. You understand.
v: It’s understandable, but unpleasant.
s: I really am sorry. (Looking at notebook) In September of ’68 you were with Task Force Charlie in Operation Winnow. By the way, what was your company strength then? I don’t have it down.
v: As I remember, it was about 110.
s: Thank you.
v: It should have been 200.
s: Yes, I recall now. You’d had considerable casualties.
v: You could say that.
s: Now, to get my perspective—you were dropped in and split up into three platoons?
v: Yes.
s: Lieutenant Stuart and you had the flanking platoons and Lieutenant Westerman the central platoon. Westerman’s went into Dong Nai?
v: I’m sure you know all that.
s: Now, your account of what happened—would you change it in any respect today?
v: No.
At this point Mr. Smith sighed and looked at me. “Miss Benton, I’ll have that cup of coffee now, if you don’t mind.”
The two men sat in silence while I warmed the coffee. Virgil smoked, his face impassive the way he can make it when he’s under stress. I knew that much about him. Smith took the coffee cup and held it with a kind of old-maidish care and took a tiny sip. Almost daintily, he put the cup down, and he started again. “You met Lieutenant Stuart for the first time in Vietnam?”
v: I was with Alpha a few months before he arrived.
s: And you became close friends.
v: We both had degrees in history.
s: (After glancing at his notebook) You got out of service first and went to England—
v: On a fellowship.
s: (Glancing at the book again) To study—
v: Medieval English History. Don’t you have that in your little book?
s: Medieval?
v: You seem surprised. People like me aren’t wholly restricted to Afro-American History.
“For your record,” Virgil added with a smile, “my specialty is Edward the Third. You know, of course—father of the Black Prince.”
s: The Black Prince?
v: Edward, Prince of Wales, dates 1330 to 1376. The nickname came from his armor, which was black.
I admit that isn’t very funny, except maybe to a scholar, but I knew that Virgil thought he had been quite funny at Smith’s expense. Humor is not Virgil’s strong point. And Mr. Smith had even less of a sense of humor, because he didn’t get the irony at all. He just blinked a couple of times like somebody coming out of a dark room. “From England did you correspond with Lieutenant Stuart?”
v: We wrote, yes.
s: Often?
v: Not until he got out of the Army and returned to graduate school. Then I did some research for him at the British Museum.
s: That was generous of you.
v: No, that was professional of me. One scholar helps another.
s: Then you returned to New York.
v: Yes.
s: That put both you and Lieutenant Stuart at the graduate school.
v: More precisely, he was still taking classes. I was working independently on my dissertation.
s: Yes, but you were both affiliated with the same school, the same department, and you must have seen a good deal of each other.
v: It’s a first-rate history department.
s: Oh, it’s hardly necessary to justify your both going there.
He looked slyly triumphant at these words.
v: I’m not justifying anything.
s: I rather hope not.
“But I don’t like the innuendo. I don’t appreciate it,” Virgil said hotly.
s: I meant none.
v: Mr. Smith, I’ve seen this done before.
s: Believe me, I meant none.
v: During the investigation, you people tried to discredit all of Alpha Company. Obviously to make us look like misfits. Then you could say, “Well, it happened, but it wasn’t typical, because they weren’t really All-American Boys.”
s: Oh, that’s hardly true.
v: What you’re implying now is that Don Stuart and I attended the same school because we were lovers.
s: Now, Mr. Jefferson—
v: You people tried that during the investigation, and it didn’t work then, and it won’t work now. So go on to something else or let’s stop here.
“I had no intention of implying such a thing,” Mr. Smith said in a subdued kind of way. He looked at me, and I knew exactly what was on his mind. He meant to communicate by looking at me that I, a white girl, could share with him the knowledge that black people were unusually sensitive and tended to find accusations where there were none. I hated Mr. Smith.
“You returned to the States in April?” he continued.
v: Yes.
s: And where did you stay?
v: With a friend on Lennox and 132nd Street.
“That’s Harlem, man,” Virgil added sarcastically. You had to admire Smith for breaking through Virgil’s composure.
s: And later you moved into this building.
v: It was close to school, and the girl living in this apartment was going to Europe, so Don got me the sublet. Have you any idea how difficult it is for me to get an apartment?
Smith shifted uncomfortably. “I understand. And Miss Benton—” He turned to look at me.
“Virgil asked me to live with him two months ago,” I stated in a loud, clear voice.
Smith sighed and lightly slapped his knees, as if ready to get up. “Then that’s about it. You told the police you had no idea what happened upstairs. Is that right?”
“No idea at all,” Virgil said. “They say it was probably the work of an addict.”
“That seems logical, doesn’t it.” Smith sat there with his hands on his knees. “Have you heard from any Alpha people?”
“I don’t keep in touch.”
“You’ll be interested to learn that Colonel Phillips is now at the Pentagon.”
“I’m not interested in Colonel Phillips.”
“Your sergeant caught it.”
“Jack Sterba?” Virgil leaned forward.
“He stepped on a Claymore.”
Virgil slumped back in his chair and put down his pipe.
“You really didn’t know that?”
“I told you I don’t keep in touch.”
“Well, you know how it is. I just thought you’d see some of the old Company now and then. A lot of them live on the East Coast these days.”
“A lot of them?” Virgil seemed interested.
“You’d be surprised. At least twenty right in this area.”
Suddenly Mr. Smith got up and cleared his throat. “I am sorry for this intrusion. You understand, of course, I had to see you. Lieutenant Stuart wasn’t just another soldier. For that matter, none of you were. When an Alpha man dies under rather unusual circumstances, you can’t blame us for wondering why.”
“No, I can’t blame you for that,” Virgil said, visibly shaken, and he saw Mr. Smith to the door.
*
“He was a terrible man,” I told Virgil when he closed the door.
“He was just doing his job. Actually the problem was mine.”
“What do you mean? He was awful.”
“He was goading me to see if I knew anything. And I reacted defensively, although I had nothing to hide.”
“I know you didn’t,” I said eagerly.
“You never get completely rid of the ghetto,” he said with a smile.
“Or of Omaha.”
“Good girl. You understand. When a white man attempts to put me down, to make me feel guilty, I react with anger as if I really were guilty. I fight it, but as you just saw, sometimes I give in to it.”
I went to the oregano jar with two cigarette papers. As I rolled us joints, I said, “Omaha makes me feel guilty every time I have a smoke.” With the curtains drawn against the heat of midday, we sat with our grass and slowly relaxed. After a long silence, Virgil said, “I’m going to tell you about it.”
“Not if you don’t want to.”
Getting up, Virgil began pacing in the small room as if he were caged. The only other time I had seen him so agitated was when he’d discovered Don’s body. The agitation was mostly in his hands; they moved at his sides, gripping and ungripping, the slender fingers never stopping.
“It’s hard to describe,” he said after a while, not looking at me but at the space just ahead of each step he took. “Probably it was similar to My Lai in its suddenness. But nobody seems able to describe accurately what happens in this kind of situation. That’s a question to keep hundreds of Mr. Smiths busy for years: what exactly happened to our beautiful army in the villages of Vietnam? Anyway, as Smith said, we were in three platoons just outside Dong Nai. I was to flank it on one side, Don on the other, and Westerman was to go straight in. The VC 42nd had been spotted in the area. They’d given us hell for weeks, so at the LZ—”
“What’s that?”
“The Landing Zone—where the helicopters let us out—we were all touchy as usual. We made no initial contact with Charlie, but that was typical of him. He let you feel nice and safe and then he’d grease you good.”
Virgil was changing before my eyes. He looked tough and quick, like someone hunted. Even the words he used were different, and his voice was lower but seemed almost out of control. He was no cool scholar, no groovy lover at that moment; Virgil had walked back into a war.
“I went south with about twenty-five people,” he continued. “I remember we had to stop frequently, because there was a lot of diarrhea. You aren’t supposed to stop, but even after you’ve seen dead men with their pants down, you stop anyway.
“I remember an old man on a bike. He tried selling us porno snapshots. Typical. In the middle of a firefight, when you’re crouching in a paddy field, some ten-year-old pulls your sleeve and shows you pictures of his sister doing it with three guys or a dog. But the old man, I remember him because he was so happy, you know? Happy. Always laughing. He rode along beside us for a while, pulling his long white beard and laughing. Well, we seemed fine, we were all right, not a sign of VC. We began to relax. Even the cherries did.” Virgil looked at me. “They were the new men.”
I watched Virgil suddenly clasp his hands tightly. “We heard firing from the direction of the village, then plenty of it. But our plan was to sweep south and then west no matter what we heard from the village. The 42nd was tricky, and we had to be sure they weren’t blowing the bushes.”
I asked him what that was.
“Laying ambushes. The 42nd was beautiful at it. We went south, then west, and doubled back, and didn’t get to the village until a couple of hours later.” He paused a moment.
“Well, what we came into was My Lai all over again. The hootches on fire, dead everywhere, sixty or seventy or eighty or ninety or a hundred. Who knows how many. But none of them our people. Westerman had already gone through. So had Don. Then we went through and ate our lunch by the side of the road.”
What I felt then must have shown on my face, because Virgil stopped pacing and said sharply, “Yes, that’s right, we ate lunch. And then we joined up with Don and Westerman, and the choppers came in for us. We never met the 42nd that day.”
I sat looking at my hands.
“Ironic, isn’t it.”
I glanced up.
“You, a peace marcher,” Virgil said, “living with someone from a Vietnam massacre.”
“But you didn’t do any of it.”
“I wasn’t first into the village, either. What if I had been in Westerman’s place?”
“You wouldn’t have done any of it.”
“Who can be sure? We were all keyed up that day. We were scared. We had been up to our necks in death for weeks. Westerman said if a couple of villagers hadn’t run when they saw the platoon, it wouldn’t have happened, and he might be right. When they ran, it became a hunt, just something moving, and after that it was—mechanical.”
“You wouldn’t have done any of it.”
“Don’t you think I’m capable of killing?”
“Another soldier, sure, but not a civilian.”
“Judy, when we were eating lunch we heard moaning from a nearby ditch. I took a man with me and found a half dozen people lying there. They were all dead but a teen-aged girl. Her stomach—”
“Don’t!”
“I called over a medic, and he took one look and shrugged. But she was conscious, looking right at me, saying something. Even with her stomach half out, she might have been saved. I’ve seen people like that saved. And she was saying something to me. And she was still talking, trying to ask me something, when I put a new clip in and just—finished her.”
I didn’t want to hurt Virgil, but I began sobbing. I couldn’t help it, having this image of him not knowing what to do and of him finally shooting her because of frustration and helplessness and maybe even from fear and anger.
“I need a joint,” I said. “I really do.” Virgil didn’t answer me, but stopped pacing and came over to the couch and took me in his arms. I felt his body trembling, and that made me cling to him. “Love me,” I asked. “Please get close to me.” And he did.
I lay there later staring at his dark arm thrown across me, at our contrast, and I began sobbing again. “I don’t want the world to come between us,” I said, “but I’m afraid. I mean, not only of things like war. I mean, of how people are to each other.” I waited for him to answer and comfort me the way he did when I was on a down, so when he didn’t say a word, I turned my head on the pillow and looked at him and I was startled to see on his face the very strange and kind of troubled expression that I had seen more than once since Don Stuart’s death.
“You haven’t told me everything,” I said. “There’s more, isn’t there?”
Virgil took so long to answer, I wasn’t sure that he had heard me. Then he said, “Yes. Yes, there’s more, and I think you’d better know it. You see, Westerman was court-martialed, and the majority of his platoon, for what happened in Dong Nai. Because my platoon came through the village much later, we weren’t involved, but there was doubt about Don and his men. There was no firm evidence against them, but a rumor went around during the investigation that his people had participated. The thing’s complex; these situations always are. To save its own face, the Government wants to know exactly who was pulling triggers that day. Names, times, places. Think of the pressure this puts on men who were there. You see, don’t you, if someone ever suspected Don of having information that could lead to a court-martial—well, conceivably the motive for his murder goes back to t
hat day in September ’68.”
*
Virgil Jefferson comes out of Harlem, and though he never talks of his childhood, I have this image of him as a little boy playing stickball in the streets and running down garbage-choked alleys, and his mother fanning herself on the fire escape while his father drinks beer at an oil cloth covered table. This is my middle-class TV mentality at work, but all Virgil will do to modify the image is simply say, “After a Harlem childhood you’re eighty years old.” I can’t imagine the effort of will and intellect it must have taken for him to show up one day in the Reading Room of the British Museum and take his chair at a table beside Oxford scholars.
I suppose some people consider him an Uncle Tom because he doesn’t study Afro-American culture, as Henry does, for example. The thing is, Virgil studies what interests him, and that has happened to be the intrigues of medieval English barons. Sometimes I read to him from his musty books—the ones in modern English, at least; not those in that awful Middle English language—and I have this feeling that he is really there, with them, those knights of old, I mean, riding up and down the English countryside. Maybe from them he learns about the struggle for power and about intrigues and politics and all. Maybe someday he will bring it all together, the then and the now, and as the scholars say, “illuminate the times.”
Who knows what Virgil Jefferson is capable of, a man who won’t fit into categories? At least, that is how I think of him. And the day following Smith’s visit, the terrible question occurred to me, what if Virgil died before he had a chance to use his talents? And what if Virgil had been in charge of the leading platoon: would he have been court-martialed? And what if he had been in charge of Donald Stuart’s platoon: would he be dead now?
And in a leap of the imagination, I asked myself, What would I do if I suspected a man of having evidence that could put me on trial as a mass murderer? I would kill him, that’s what I would do. It wouldn’t be too difficult if I had been a mass murderer. Thank God that platoon had not been Virgil’s. Even while I was reading my Fine Arts assignment, I thought of the implications of Don’s murder. Through the print describing Assyrian plaques I saw Virgil lying on the floor instead of Donald, and I had to smoke a joint of grass to calm myself before going to class.
