“Dude didn't want to spend no night in no boonies with our sorry asses, huh, Lieutenant?” said Repatch, cleaning his nails with the tip of his bayonet, grinning that sick grin of his. Repatch looked like a reject from a bad litter of pit bulls. Nothing pleased him more than walking point on patrol. He'd glide alone out there so quiet the patrol would lose him and he'd reappear in their midst without their ever knowing he was gone. Snake, they called him. The Lieutenant had watched him a few times on patrol and understood why.
“Guess he didn't,” said Lieutenant Blue. He was still looking over the treetops, listening to the faint thwap-thwap-thwap-thwap of the chopper until it was gone.
“He'll be back,” said Repatch, grinning and picking at his nails. “We one up on his ass. He won't forget that.”
Yes, Halleck would be back. Not much doubt about that. But if he never showed his face again, it would be too soon for the Lieutenant.
Somewhere on the perimeter in a red hole in the red dirt, one of the troops switched on a radio. Out there on the edge of the boonies, with only three sandbags and a few feet of wire between you and hell, a big bass guitar was thunking and the cymbals were filling and the drums were pounding and you could hear Archie Bell and the Drells chanting softly in the dark:
"C'mon now, do the tighten-up,
Do the tighten-up,
Do the tighten-up,
We're tightening-up,
Do the tighten-up,
You can do it to it,
Everything will be outasight,
You can do it now,
Tighten-up, tighten-up, baby,
Tighten-up.”
Dirtball clapped the Lieutenant on the shoulder and handed him a can of C-ration beans and franks.
“C'mon, sir. Let's eat.”
“Wasn't Halleck something today, Dirtball? I mean, wasn't he just beautiful in the boots and fatigues and all? Did you see his belt buckle? You could use it to read by in the dark, it was so bright. I mean, that Lieutenant Colonel Halleck just makes you want to be as beautiful as he is, doesn't he? I mean, he was inspirational.”
“Sure, Lieutenant,” said Dirtball, leading the way. “Gonna be a long night, Lieutenant Blue. Sure is.”
The Lieutenant folded himself into the 113 and collapsed on his air mattress. He reached for his poncho liner and tucked it around his shoulders. Outside, the jungle treeline disappeared into the darkness and the crickets jumped in and were making music with Archie Bell and the Drells.
That was the thing about Vietnam.
The smell
The insects
The darkness
The red dirt
The sudden bright hell of a fire fight
The songs of the dead on the perimeter.
“Another fucking night in fucking paradise, huh, Dirtball?”
“When you right, you right, Lieutenant. And you right.”
Dirtball stood up and stuck his head out the cupola and spat tobacco juice at the jungle and the enemy.
“Take that, motherfuckers,” he said.
Yes, indeed.
Take that.
4
* * *
* * *
Where was that noise coming from?
He sat up in bed and cocked his ear. Outside the window, the saberlike fronds of a royal palm swayed in a gentle breeze that had somehow failed to penetrate the confines of his suite even though all three windows and the balcony doors were open, screenless and shutterless to the weather.
He got up and padded over to the balcony and leaned over the rusting rail and peered into the courtyard below. Nothing down there but the usual midmorning clutter. Over in the corner the hookers’ resident mama-san squatted next to her clay hibachi, cooking noodles and fish heads and cabbage and lemon grass and God only knew what else. A thin plume of charcoal smoke rose from the fire, carrying with it the pungent aroma of the morning meal. One of the hookers stepped into the courtyard wearing a turquoise ao dai slit up to her waist and said something to the mama-san. The mama-san giggled, dropping her head and hiding her mouth with her hand, but he was too far away on his third-floor balcony to hear what all the merriment was about, not that he would have understood either the words or the point of the joke anyway. The hooker teetered back inside on heels that must have made her at least five-one, maybe five-one-and-a-half. Jesus.
There it was again.
He could hear better now. It was music, American music, but where was it coming from? Nobody he knew at the Pension Gravois had a radio, and even if they did, it was doubtful it would be tuned to Armed Forces Network. He padded barefoot back inside and took to his lumpy mattress. He glanced at his watch, a Rolex he'd picked up on the street from a kid with watery eyes and a runny nose and shaky hands, sure signs of a bad opium habit. The kid couldn't have been a day over twelve. He gave him two American dollars and an unopened pack of Marlboros. The kid scampered away down an alley, disappearing in an instant through a doorway no wider than a board. He was amazed to find that the Rolex was a real one that actually worked, and when he saw the same kid a couple of days later, he tried to give him a few more dollars, but the kid ran away before he got his wallet out of his pocket. Weird, what the volatile mix of opium and poverty did to you. Turned you into a rat, you got skinnier and skinnier and skinnier until your fingers looked like claws and your cheeks disappeared and your hair fell out and your ears got pointy and you started scampering into holes and through cracks away from a world that in the absence of your sweet smoke looked more and more threatening and less and less real swimming in the misty edges of a craving that gnawed at you inside . . .
There it was again!
The music was loud now, wafting through the open windows like little bursts of steam from the humid, sunbaked streets below.
"Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane,
Ain't got time to take a fast train,
Lonely days are gone,
I'm a-goin’ home,
My baby, she wrote me a letter.”
It was a Boxtops hit from a few years back, a song about longing and mistrust and a rabid, nasty kind of need, a song with a melody rooted somewhere down in Mississippi dirt where pride mixed with shame and came up smelling like sweat and meat. Somebody was playing it on a piano, singing the song more slowly than the record to a dirgelike march beat in an accent that sounded like rock and roll played through a car speaker wired to a ceiling fan turned on high—a quavering, wispy, shuddering wail that sent shivers down your spine. The music was funereal, eerie, ghostlike in the emerging heat of the morning.
What did it sound like?
It sounded the way the morning smelled, the way the palm tree waved, the way the mama-san giggled, the way the lizard crawled straight up the wall and across the ceiling flicking its tongue at nightflies and wet mosquitoes, the way the sheets stuck to you like bandages, the way the wind didn't blow in, it sucked out, removing rather than replenishing. The Boxtops at 9:00 A.M. on Phuc Do Street was perfect wake-up music, clearing the debris, emptying you, getting you ready to suck it in all over again.
What did it sound like?
It sounded dead.
It sounded like Saigon.
Danny Jannick lived down at the end of Phuc Do Street in the Pension Gravois because the Pacific News Service didn't pay him enough to live anywhere else. The Pension Gravois was a three-story stuccoed flat-roofed fall-down hovel held together with chicken wire and scavenged paving stones and three-dollar-a-week rents that seemed to have been freeze-dried during French colonial days and preserved like some kind of punishment museum, a reminder that similar fates lurked at the end of similar streets for anyone remaining too long in the zone of bad luck, crushed hopes, and broken dreams that had been Southeast Asia since the beginning of time.
Danny Jannick liked it just fine at the Pension Gravois. He paid ten dollars a week for two rooms and connecting bath that produced hot water for one hour every day. The widowed Madame Gravois, who still lived downstairs in three rooms o
n the first floor, had a weak spot for reporters. Her son had been an editor at the French-language afternoon daily, Saigon Après Midi, before the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the 1954 defeat of the French by the Viet Minh after an eight-year war. Dien Bien Phu was a battle that happened a long time ago, but it was suddenly looking like yesterday as the American “commitment” in Vietnam slogged into its fifth year. Madame Gravois was a handy “source” who provided plenty of historical perspective in the dispatches Jannick wired back to his employers in San Francisco, the Pacific News Service, a kind of left-wing AP that supplied the underground press with an alternative point of view on the war. Jannick, for example, was the only reporter in Vietnam who provided his readers with a monthly American body count alongside that of the enemy—a service that hardly endeared him to the handlers of the press over at MACV headquarters.
He was a short, wiry guy who wore granny glasses and looked as though he should have had long hair and probably would have if premature balding hadn't started early and been accelerated by the two and a half years he'd spent in Vietnam scrambling around for the crumbs that fell from the overloaded plates of the wire services, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the networks. The Jannick theory of war reporting was simple. Anything considered unimportant enough to be ignored by the big boys was just the right size for the Pacific News Service. The practice of picking up where others left off had provided its share of news plums over the years, including revelations about the massive black market being run by the high-ranking NCOs who ran the chain of officers’, NCOs’, and enlisted men's clubs in Vietnam.
The Jannick method also made for a more leisurely pace of life than that which was enjoyed by the Dan Rathers and David Halberstams of the establishment press corps.
Nine A.M. was indeed an early morning. Usually the sounds and scents of the Pension Gravois went unappreciated by the man in the third-floor suite until his gradual arousal around noon. Only the mournful wail of the old Boxtops hit had sufficiently disturbed the much-needed sleep of Danny Jannick on this sunny fall morning in Saigon and caused his awakening.
He lay on his cot under an open window, waiting for the breeze that never came. What time was it? Nine-fifteen? Wonderful. Forty-five more minutes of hot water, a luxury he usually missed on mornings that disappeared amid blubbering snores and wheezes that persisted as late as noon.
What day was it?
Was it November?
Did it matter?
He decided not.
Jannick eased his legs over the side of the cot and sat up. He was twenty-five years old. He looked thirty-five. His frame was small, his limbs scrawny, his neck ostrichlike, his nose “pronounced,” an adjective on the generous side of the descriptive equation, and his hair—well, his hair was AWOL. He reached under the cot, pulled out his Dopp kit, and rummaged through its collection of ointment tubes and pill containers, finally extracting from its depths a brown glass bottle about the size of a half-pint. He unscrewed the cap and dumped a small pile of white pills into his palm.
“Ah, Ritalin, breakfast of champions,” he said to no one in particular, his voice ricocheting from one whitewashed stucco wall to the other. He popped the pills into his mouth and headed for the bathroom, where he found a bottle of Evian water and took a long swallow. His arms vibrated and his legs shivered and his forehead quivered as the pills went down. In a moment the shakes would pass and the pills would take hold and all would be well.
He shuffled back into the other room and sat down on the edge of the cot. Every morning when he woke up, every time he dropped a half-dozen Ritalin and waited for the desired effect, he collapsed under the guilty notion that the ready availability of Ritalin, Dexedrine, Dexamil, Desoxyn, and a score of foreign strains of amphetamines of varying strengths were a good part of the reason he was still in Vietnam after two years. What if he had to go home to Frisco, and he couldn't get the speed to pick him up in the morning? What if those little orange triangles, those little blue squares, those incredible bulletlike black beauties weren't around when the typewriter beckoned, its black keys gleaming like the rotting teeth of the journalism demon, smiling in that come-hither way of all typewriters, whispering across the room the terrifying truth: Within this grinning maw lies victory and defeat, fame and ignominy, fortune and destitution? Would inspiration flee, would words wither, would sentences succumb, would paragraphs poof? What then, indeed?
Easier to remain within the comforting confines of the pad on Phuc Do Street, a friendly pharmacie dispensing goodies at the end of the block, far from the pokings and proddings of editors, the worried clock-watching of fact-checkers, the prissy thumb-twiddling of publishers, that's what. Where were all those fuckers when the hammer came down, anyway? Where were they when the typewriter sat over there across the room belly-laughing at you, the carriage ttttttttttthhhhhhting back and forth, those black-ass fucking keys dancing their twick-twick-twick dance of death in the fading light when all you had between yourself and the beast was a fifth of Scotch and whatever pills you'd been able to gather around yourself, litter-carrier pills toting your sorry carcass past the cathedral of total journalistic failure while attendants of doom danced down a poppy-strewn aisle hungering for a pound of flesh . . .
Where, indeed, were the lousy bastards who sat behind desks screaming for copy from the front? What front, you blithering blank-firing zipgun asswipes? What do you know from fucking fronts, or rears or midsections, come to think of it? Zero. Zippo. Nada. El-hole-o. That's what you know. Fucking nothing.
Danny Jannick lifted his right arm over his head and sniffed his underarm.
Yes.
Yes!
The speed was taking hold, dribbling down his ribcage in great rivulets of swamp-stink, delicious tinklings of death-knocker-doom-sweat, clear flowing streams of joy-tears, rot-scent rivers of hope, eyewash for the telex-devil, its bloodsuck black irises staring down the twisted tunnel of the copy-maw . . .
Yes!
Cleareyed at last, Jannick leapt to his feet and stepped into the closet-sized shower and let the rusted shower head dribble some canal water over his head. He soaped up fast, afraid the thing would sputter and quit on him as it usually did. When he was finished washing, he stood under the dribbling shower for a while, letting it rinse away the fear. As he stepped from the shower and wrapped himself in the tissue-thin, pension-supplied towel, he heard a knock at the door.
“Yeah?” he called from the bathroom.
“Danny-san! Danny-san! Message Danny-san!”
He heard the scurrying of small feet as his morning bearer of bad tidings descended the stairs. It was the dead Mr. Gravois’s illegitimate daughter’s aunt, he knew, a wizened old mama-san who ran errands and cleaned up around the pension. Mr. Gravois was ten years in the grave and still the pension supported an extended family of a dozen or so, Mrs. Gravois accepting with a shrug her mixed French-Vietnamese offspring and their half-brothers and half-sisters and their offspring. There was little sense in fighting the tide while you were swimming in it, she figured. Once Jannick had asked her about the scurrying mama-san, and Mrs. Gravois had smiled a Galoises-stained smile and said, “Henri truly loved this country. Vietnam was Algeria in his dreams.”
Yeah you betcha Madame G., Jannick thought. And Saigon is the Paris of the Far East and Beirut is the Paris of the Near East. You keep talking like that, and you’re going to be comparing grilled leg of dog favorably with braised breast of chicken, the way the French Foreign Legion vets do after two warm beers and a cigarette. Going native was for dream-besotted romantics with a strong streak of the eager fool in them, the kind of goofs who threw the I Ching before sugaring their morning coffee. Staying native, on the other hand, could be deadly.
He opened his door and picked up the envelope lying on the sisal mat. Instantaneously, the other three doors down the hall opened a crack exposing low-slung pairs of slanted black eyes squinting into the gloom. The doors closed just as quickly, before the twenty-five-watt hall light could i
lluminate the dark faces of the watchers. He closed his door and took a bamboo chair out on the balcony and sat down. The sun flickered through the palm fronds and flies buzzed around his ankles. He zipped open the envelope with a switchblade he had found in his desk drawer the first day he checked into the Pension Gravois.
Bush-beater: Check out the TDY assignment roster for captains over at MACV HQ. Your pal Alvin Dupuy Esq. from your hometown finally hit it big. He’s headed up to II Corps on some deal they got the lid screwed down so tight on not even Alvin’s talking.
The note was unsigned, but Jannick knew it came from Specialist Fourth Class Thomas J. Calhoun, one of the clerks in G-1 Personnel at MACV. Jannick had cultivated Calhoun’s predecessor as a source, and Calhoun had inherited his sourceship when the guy he replaced rotated home. Jannick kept the personnel poop flowing with an occasional bribe of a Motown tape that a secretary back at Pacific News sent over every month. Listening to Motown, sharing a joint . . . enlisted sources in Vietnam hardly needed encouragement when it came to blowing the whistle on the bullshit. He wondered if the powers-that-were ever knew how cheaply bad news could be had. He doubted it. They were safely cocooned inside the Time-Life and television orbit. Not even the straight newspaper reporters penetrated the secure perimeter of the top Saigon command, a zone where all enemy body counts were “up!” where search-and-destroy sweeps always wiped out an enemy command and control headquarters, where casualties were always “light,” where the only news that reached the sun-pink little ears of the staff officers was good news and time on the embassy tennis courts was easily scheduled.
Alvin Z. Dupuy, Esq., belonged in that zone, yes indeed. Born with a silver spoon the size of a goddamned front-loader in his mouth on St. Charles Avenue in uptown New Orleans, Alvin Z. Dupuy was one of those priss-pot stiff-necked sons of bitches who had never drawn an anxious breath in his life. He had graduated from Tulane in the same class as Danny Jannick, followed quickly by three years at Tulane law school and an ROTC commission. Now he was a JAG captain assigned to MACV HQ, a duty station he didn’t hesitate to tell you had been engineered by his father’s close friend, Louisiana Congressman F. Edward Hebert, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. You could say Danny Jannick was a draft dodger, though his 4-F draft status had been legitimately come by, owing to chronic asthma. But Dupuy was something worse. He was a rear-area hawk, one of those lily-livered saber-rattling fucks who spouted opinions from the vantage point of his air-conditioned quarters in Saigon about the strategic need for more division-sized month-long sweeps of enemy territory by troops who were already worn to a frazzle by an enemy that was as invisible as it was vicious. Yeah, Alvie Dupuy wanted to bomb the north, mine Haiphong harbor, and drive the NVA from their “sanctuaries” across the border in Cambodia and Laos. He was a regular Richard Nixon, that Alvie, always ready to take the old war wagon right down Charlie’s alley, as long as he didn’t have to ride shotgun.
Army Blue Page 10
