The Hour of the Innocents

by Robert Paston

  “When do you expect him back?”

  The guy’s stiffness reeked of cop or some other form of officialdom. He was trying to kill the taint, but it wouldn’t die.

  “Look, I don’t know who you are. Or why you’re here asking me questions about Matty.”

  Wounded eyes, downcast face. As if he had blundered badly in a foreign language.

  “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.” He held out his hand. “Larry Masters. I’m a friend of Matt’s. Or maybe I should just say ‘acquaintance.’ We served together in Vietnam. I’ve been traveling around, visiting a few of the guys, and I wanted to look him up.”

  His demeanor had broken and changed. Awkwardly earnest, he became a bareheaded pilgrim on a winter journey.

  There was room at the inn. And the innkeeper had questions.

  “Come on in,” I said. “I’m not sure why he went to Philly, but he’ll be back by evening. We have a songwriting session.”

  My visitor stepped inside, wiping his nose with a well-pressed, whiter-than-snow handkerchief. He brightened. “He’s playing music, then? Everything worked out? Does he have a band?”

  * * *

  Al Kooper wailed through “Wake Me, Shake Me.” I lowered the volume.

  “Groovy music,” my guest commented.

  If any serious human being had ever used the word groovy, it had been at least two years earlier. But there was something so earnest about Larry Masters that I couldn’t bring myself to be a smart-ass.

  “I was going to make myself a sandwich,” I told him. “Want one?”

  “That’d be great. If I’m not imposing.”

  In the warmth, he began to shiver.

  “Take the chair by the radiator,” I said.

  He smiled. “I’m still not used to the cold. I guess you can tell. That’s a nice Christmas tree.”

  Wary of being suspected of sentimentality, I just shrugged and lit the stove, then pulled a ring of Dutchie sausage from the refrigerator. As I sliced the meat for frying, I said, “I met another one of Matty’s buddies. Couple of months back. Little spade dude. Doc Something-or-other.”

  “Doc Carley.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Old Doc. I tried to get him a Silver Star.” He snorted. “Battalion wouldn’t even approve an ARCOM. Sergeant Major just hated him.”

  “Redneck?”

  “No. Sergeant Major Jefferson’s a Negro. But old school. He’d just go nuts whenever Doc pulled one of his Black Power stunts. Terrific field soldier, though. Doc, I mean. Braver than I ever was.”

  “I hear Matty was pretty brave.”

  Flipping the meat in the frying pan, I heard my visitor shift in his chair behind me. “I’ll bet he never told you that himself.”

  “No. Doc mentioned it. Coffee? A beer?”

  He thought about it. “I’d better stick with coffee. Too early in the day.”

  “Matty won a bunch of medals, though. Right?” The record was over. I slipped past my visitor to turn off the stereo. I wanted to hear every word he had to say.

  “Sergeant Tomczik … he seemed like one of the heroes in the Iliad. He was just … I don’t know, different from the rest of us. An old-fashioned warrior.”

  “Not Achilles, I take it?”

  “No. Hector. The reluctant one. Who does it anyway.”

  “Hector dies. Matty didn’t.”

  “I’m still amazed at that. Given the risks he took. I mean, he did things you wouldn’t believe, that other soldiers couldn’t believe. You’d be watching it happen, and you wouldn’t believe he was doing it. There really was something mythic about him, the ‘mighty warrior’ of yore.” He smiled. For the first time. Faintly. “His guitar could’ve been a lyre. Maybe I came here to see if he’s really real.”

  “He’s real. Ketchup on your sandwich?”

  “I guess you don’t have Louisiana Hot Sauce?”

  I’d never heard of it. “I have mustard.”

  “Ketchup’s fine. I was just asking.”

  I set our plates on the kitchenette table and Larry Masters joined me.

  “So … what did you do? In the Army?”

  He paused again. “I was Matt’s company commander.”

  “That means you’re a captain, right?”

  “Was. Past tense.”

  I looked at his faintly shaggy hair, which yearned to be cool and failed.

  “You got out?”

  Another hesitation. “No. I was forced out. I wanted to court-martial a general’s son.” A spectral smile came and went. “My mistake. So the Army gave me the boot.”

  “You wouldn’t have quit, anyway? With the war?”

  He waited until he had finished chewing and swallowed before answering. His table manners would have pleased my mother. “No. I wouldn’t have quit.”

  “You liked the Army?”

  Uncomfortable, he rolled his shoulders. A fringe of hair shifted to reveal an ear missing a third of its shell. “It doesn’t really matter. Since the Army decided it didn’t like me. Thanks for the sandwich, by the way.”

  “Want another one?”

  Feeling his way in a world that had moved impossibly fast in his absence, my visitor began to answer but hesitated again. A former officer and a combat veteran, he feared being impolite in a cheap apartment in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. Stranger in a strange land. I didn’t think much of military types—it wasn’t cool to do so—but I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the guy.

  The world didn’t always make sense in that year of lost souls.

  “Well, I’m going to make another sandwich for myself. It’s just as easy to make two.”

  “That’d be great,” he said. “Thanks.”

  “So…,” I began as I went back to slicing sausage, “what did Matty do to get his medals?”

  * * *

  Buck Sergeant Matthew F. Tomczik told his squad to stay put, then made his way up through the jungle, stepping over weary men resting on their rucksacks. He found the new platoon leader and his platoon sergeant crouched at the edge of a trail. With his PRC-25’s antenna folded over, a sweat-soaked radio humper knelt behind the command group. As Tomczik approached, the commo kid shot him a “Please, get us out of here!” look.

  The radio squawked with calls for help.

  Across a low ridge, the sounds of the firefight continued: wild bursts of shooting, with abrupt lulls. Victor Charles had waited until First Platoon was out of the range fan of its supporting 105s before springing an ambush. And this one was serious. Most combat actions were over in five minutes or less, with the VC pulling off before the grunts could get organized and call in fires. This fight gave no sign that the gooks were quitting.

  The new lieutenant ignored Tomczik, something his predecessor would not have done. Instead, the taut young man—who looked like the quarterback on a prep school team—thrust his map at the platoon sergeant.

  Sergeant First Class Campbell was an alkie E-7 hanging on for twenty.

  “We’re going right up that trail,” the lieutenant said. “I realize there’s an element of risk. But First Platoon needs help fast.”

  The platoon sergeant fingered his stubbly chin. His eyes weren’t fully engaged. “I don’t know, sir. That’s asking to get hit. I really don’t know if we should do that.”

  “We can’t just let First Platoon be overrun. Listen to that.” Lieutenant Gibbons gestured toward the radio and the distant gunfire. Mortar rounds tubed and popped. Not friendlies. “There’s no air, it’s all up north. There’s no time to waste.”

  “I’m just not sure, sir,” the platoon sergeant repeated.

  “Sir?” Tomczik said. “We can’t go up that trail. That’s what they want us to do.”

  “Why aren’t you with your men, Sergeant Tomczik?”

  “I just thought—”

  “You need to observe the chain of command. The Army isn’t a democracy.”

  Tomczik glanced at the platoon sergeant, who wasn’t going to be of any help. The radio man looked sick.<
br />
  “Sir,” Tomczik tried again, “this isn’t about First Platoon. It’s us. We’re being set up. First Platoon’s just the bait. They want us to go up that trail. They’re waiting for us.”

  The lieutenant’s expression shifted between irritation and doubt. Then he said, “I don’t need tactics instruction from you, Sergeant. Go back to your men. And get ready to move out. Our fellow soldiers are dying—do you understand that? And I’m not about to abandon one of my classmates.”

  Arriving to replace a lieutenant who’d been shot through the face, Gibbons had let his men know that he’d been eleventh in his class at West Point and first in his class at Ranger School. He counted on his peers to spread the word about his father.

  Tomczik stood up to his full height, something he rarely did in the boonies. “Sir, if we go up that road, you’re going to lose half this platoon. If we’re lucky.”

  “Sergeant Tomczik, I want to see you in the presence of the company commander when we go back in. The era of insubordination is over in this platoon.”

  Matty looked at the platoon sergeant a last time: Nothing.

  “Yes, sir,” Matty said.

  “And another thing,” Lieutenant Gibbons said. “Since you seem to be our resident expert on tactics, your squad can take point.” He nodded toward the firefight. “We’ve wasted too much time already. I want your squad on the move in two mikes. And I expect you to move out sharply.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As Tomczik hustled back toward his men, the line doggies in the other squads grasped from his look that nothing good waited in their future. Soldiers edged farther out of his way than necessary. The short-timers checked their rifles and made themselves small.

  Reaching his squad, Tomczik said, “Let’s go. Now. Christensen, you’ve got point. We’re lead squad. Double the interval. We’re moving up an open trail.”

  The groans, complaints, and curses were instantaneous.

  “That cocksucker el-tee’s brain-dead,” a rifleman said.

  Tomczik ignored him and turned to the platoon medic, who liked to move with his squad. “Doc, tuck in with Sergeant Rodriguez for this stretch. We’re going to get hit. And we’re going to need you.”

  “Somebody needs to frag the fucking el-tee, before he gets us all killed,” another soldier commented.

  Tomczik turned on him. There were sharp limits to the bitching he’d tolerate. “Hammond, I ever hear you say that again, you’ll be in Long Binh until they turn out the lights. Move out, Third Squad.”

  He hated every step. Moving too fast, in the open, along a track that amounted to a shooting gallery. Watching the bush, he counted his paces, trying to judge when they’d step beyond the range of their fire support. The VC knew too much. They always knew too much. Today, they’d known that Charlie Company’s platoons would be moving separately and going deep. He wished he understood how the enemy could know so much, while his side knew so little.

  “Maintain your intervals,” he called softly. “Pass it on.” They had to be out of the 105 mm fan now. On their own, high and lonesome. With the crest of the ridge ahead and the firefight sputtering beyond.

  The close-in quiet was too quiet. Behind Tomczik, the radio broke squelch, rasped, and spoke of casualties in a tiny, frantic voice.

  The humidity weighed the men down like wet sand in the heat. The insides of Tomczik’s thighs had been rubbed raw for days. But misery became just another fact of life. It was unavoidable. Unlike stupid decisions.

  Word came up the line. Lieutenant Gibbons wanted him to pick up the pace. He nodded as if in acknowledgment but let Christensen do his thing. Walking point sucked badly enough without some butterbar lighting a fire under you. Let Christensen worry about the VC, mines, and booby traps. That was enough for any man.

  Tomczik understood that each enlisted man in the column was praying that this wouldn’t be his day to get hit, that by some miracle he’d make it through what was coming. The dense bush on either side of the trail should have been their ally, but now it was an enemy. They should have hacked their way through the jungle, no matter how long it took. Now they were moving over naked earth that begged each man to put his foot down in the wrong place.

  He ached to let the music play in his head. To flee into it. To hide. But he couldn’t. The platoon had become his burden. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. But it was.

  Maybe the el-tee would be all right, given time. But his education was about to turn expensive for other men. Tomczik hated it, and accepted it.

  A devil inside his head tried to lure him to recompute the days and hours until he could get on a Freedom Bird for home. But he needed to concentrate, to stay aware. To see what others might miss.

  With the harness inside his helmet soaked and gripping his skull, the magic switch clicked. In an instant, he developed the vast awareness he couldn’t explain. Every detail of the world became more precise, each color more intense, each faint sound louder.

  The sounds of the firefight had stopped.

  “Break right! Into the bush!” he yelled.

  A soldier behind him stepped on a mine. The VC let loose with everything they had. Soldiers crumpled.

  “Right flank. Charge. Follow me!”

  The wounded screamed.

  He tore a grenade from the side of an ammo pouch, yanking the pin as he ran. He hurled the little green ball directly to his front before hitting the ground, rolling under the blast, and coming up firing.

  “Let’s go, let’s go. Charge through them.”

  He shot his way through a machine-gun position his grenade had crippled, then he wheeled left and collided with a VC rising from the earth to fight. Tomczik caught him under the chin with the point of his rifle butt, pulled back the weapon, and shot him. He knelt and shot two more men from behind.

  Instinctively, he turned. Just in time to put a burst into a man lifting a rifle.

  After ejecting his empty magazine, he slapped in a full one and scanned for his own men. He could hear them firing, the crisper notes of the M-16 rounds arguing with the rattle of Chinese AKs. But no one on his side was giving orders. The only American voices were either screaming curses or crying out for Doc.

  Tomczik began to work down behind the ambush line. He stayed low to avoid friendly fire, but leaves and stalks fell around him. Fixing on the heavy bark of a machine gun, he tossed another grenade, pitching it with all his strength to drive it through the greenery.

  In the wake of the blast, he heard noises behind him and rolled over, weapon ready.

  Two of his men.

  He sent them hand signals: Quiet. You on my left, you on my right. Follow me.

  Crawling, he led them back through the game-of-chance bullets piercing the undergrowth. Just in front of his hands, a snake shot out of his line of vision. He kept going. Listening. Judging. Magnificently alive.

  He understood what the two men with him were thinking: Where’s he taking us?

  He knew, but he didn’t know.

  Then he knew.

  Tomczik stopped. With the odor of fish sauce teasing his nostrils. Struggling to keep up, his two soldiers could just see him through the stinking mess of greenery.

  More hand signals: On my command, up and charge. Follow me.

  He gave them a short ration of seconds to ready themselves, but not enough time to think. Then he flagged his hand at them and rose. Firing.

  In a half-dozen strides, they were leaping down into the VC command post. Hastily concealed, the position was little more than a big foxhole. In a howling, writhing crush of humanity, Tomczik emptied his magazine, killing men so intimately that their blood splashed back on his face. Dodging bayonets, he knocked down men with his rifle, ripping the jagged sight across their eyes and hammering skulls and spinal columns. The plastic stock broke like an old man’s bone. Fighting at last with his fists, he broke an officer’s neck. Looking into his eyes as they rolled back.

  It was over. Scarpetti sat bleeding, a stunned look on his
face. Byron shook his head at the carnage they had wrought.

  Tomczik picked up his rifle, but it was truly broken. Then he spotted the bugle, the poor-man’s radio.

  He picked it up and blew it for all it was worth. He’d fooled with another musician’s trumpet in a polka band years before, but he couldn’t really play. It didn’t matter: The worse the sounds, the better.

  He lowered the instrument and told Byron, “Get ready. They don’t know what’s going on, but they’ll be coming this way. Scarp, can you get up and fight?”

  The wounded soldier nodded but failed to move. His eyes telegraphed uselessness.

  Tomczik took up Scarpetti’s M-16, loaded a fresh mag, then quickly gathered up two AKs and rammed full magazines into them. He laid the enemy weapons at the ready, then leaned over the edge of the hole beside Byron and said, “You’ve got everybody on the right. Short bursts.”

  That was when the real killing began.

  * * *

  “I never saw him so much as flustered,” Larry Masters told me. A ghost smile visited his mouth and disappeared. “Except one time. We were moving as a company. It was a battalion-level operation, three solid weeks in the boonies. One night, we had to hunker down in this network of rice paddies. It was just a shitty place. Literally. But we didn’t get hit that night, so that was a plus. In the morning, we’re waiting for battalion to give us the order to move out and I see Matt squatting to take a dump—nothing happened in private out in the bush. Well, he hollered like he’d stepped barefoot on a dozen cobras. Only time I ever knew him to lose discipline. It shocked everybody. He had leeches on his dick and his balls. All swollen with blood. They excrete this chemical that numbs you, so you don’t realize they’re on you until you actually see them.”

  My visitor laughed. The sound was almost healthy, as if the bomb of memory had been disarmed. “And Matt’s hung like a horse—I’m sure you’ve noticed.” My visitor grinned. “He used to make the colored guys nervous, I swear. So this went down as one of the company’s memorable moments. Matt calmed down and burned off the little bastards with a cigarette. And he wasn’t the only one. Half the company had them on their legs or all over their backs, even on their faces. We had to medevac an E-4 who had them up his ass. Hey, don’t tell Matt I told you about that, okay?”