The worst thing was, he had always suspected that something would occur that would make him regret the financial inadequacies of a military career, regret the fact that when all was said and done, he had passed up several opportunities to get out of the Army and really make some bucks. Now here he was, a middle-aged man with the son he loved in big trouble, and he was lacking just about every resource that was necessary to help him out. He racked his brain, trying to remember something that would give him an edge on this thing. He knew it was there, a memory of something in his past that would give him a leg up. He knew it.
The Colonel’s old Ford crested a hill and started a long bend to the left. Up ahead, past the curve, he could see a small rural airstrip. A light plane was taking off; the path of its climb took it over the Colonel’s Ford into the cloudy distance.
That was it. The weekly courier plane out of Saigon. It was a C-141 Starlifter that left Saigon every Monday and made twenty stops in seven days as the plane completely circled the globe and returned to Tan Son Nhut Air Base with classified documents and passengers it had picked up along the way. He could catch a ride on the courier flight. It stopped every Friday at Warner Robins Air Force Base near Macon, only forty minutes from Fort Benning. If he took the courier flight, he’d be in Saigon on Monday. Sergeant Gilbert, his battalion motor pool sergeant, could get him on. He had spent ten years as an aircraft maintenance specialist in the Air Force before he got tired of it and switched enlistments to the Army. He still had pull with the flyboys over at Robins, and he was well known around the brigade for playing fast and loose around the edges of the motor-pool supply rules. If anyone could arrange a free flight halfway around the world to Saigon, South Vietnam, it was Sergeant Wilbert W. Gilbert.
There it was. The first little curve in the road through his past, a quick jog around the conventions governing who was and who wasn’t allowed to fly the courier flight. Sergeant Gilbert could get him on the flight. There was no doubt about that. He could pull the strings necessary to get you on Air Force One. The fact that such string-pulling would bend and stretch the protocols of flying military standby a little would simply have to be overlooked—just as his father had overlooked the convention of the “give” in polo that afternoon so many years ago.
The Colonel clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and shook his head slowly from side to side.
I’m going to scrape a few shins before this thing is over, he thought to himself. The time had come to be a son of a bitch. It was going to be a long trip—into the future and through the past—and it was going to hurt. The Colonel rolled down his window and spat into the wind.
“The hell with it,” he said out loud. He could barely hear himself in the sixty-mile-an-hour noise inside the Ford.
“The hell with it!” he yelled. That was better, much better.
“THE HELL WITH IT!” he screamed.
He felt about twenty years younger, and he had a hunch he was going to need to feel that young during the next couple of months. He was going to have to think like a younger man to understand how his son had gotten himself into so much trouble. And he sensed that he was going to have to act like a younger man to get him out of it.
All wars are young men’s wars, and Vietnam was just like the rest of them. He thought back to Korea, when he was a young man fighting his own war. He remembered the feel, the smell, the sounds of the war in Korea—the boom of the big guns, the scream of F-80 close air support overhead, the rattle of machine guns in the night distance. And he remembered the hollow, empty feeling after the armistice, when the war was over, neither won or lost. It wasn’t as if it had all been for nothing, but it was pretty close. All those mothers and fathers he had written to when their sons had died . . . how would they feel now that the American Army had simply given up, drawing a line in the dirt at the Thirty-eighth Parallel, calling a truce a victory? What happened to the invincibility of the Army of his father, who had marched through ten countries on two continents, finally driving Hitler to suicide in his bunker? It wasn’t fair, the Colonel remembered thinking. They sent us to war, now they’re sending us home, and they never told us why either time.
His son’s war, the war in Vietnam, was showing disturbing signs of turning into another Korea. The Colonel had never really been free to engage the enemy down in the Delta when he’d commanded a Battalion there. Too much time had been devoted to “pacification” and the establishment of “strategic hamlets” and other nonmilitary, essentially political activities. The war in Vietnam was another “limited” war. Korea had been a “police action.” This one was a “brushfire war.” The Colonel wondered when they would stop labeling and start fighting.
The war in Vietnam had all the sounds of Korea, but there was a soundtrack to the war in Vietnam, too, a rock-and-roll soundtrack. He’d heard it every day in his Battalion over there, radios playing, tape recorders blaring, guys hooking up tape decks so they’d play through the headsets on helicopters, guys whipping rock tunes on the psy-war chopper speakers that were supposed to broadcast anti-Vietcong propaganda down on rice-paddy-treading villagers, blasting the villagers with Ike and Tina Turner instead.
Somehow his son had run afoul of his war, and the Colonel only hoped he could understand why and how and when. It was going to take a lot out of him, but then he had a lot to give.
The Colonel took the exit off I-185 and drove down Victory Boulevard. He pulled up to a stoplight opposite Honest Frank’s Used Cars. Something clicked in his memory, taking him back twenty years or more. He had bought his first car from Honest Frank. Things were coming back to him now, memories, images, sounds, feelings. He made the turn onto Marshall Avenue and headed west. A warm feeling reached his neck and his face. He was almost home.
THREE
* * *
* * *
Thunder in the Sun
Firebase Zulu-Foxtrot Day Three
* * *
* * *
The operations order came at 0130. Lieutenant Blue’s weapons platoon had already broken out of its night defensive perimeter. It took them from 0200 to 0500 to pull in the Claymores, roll up the concertina wire, and rebox the trip-flares. When they were finished, the whole platoon went on alert. Until they left, they were essentially defenseless. At 0515, the tracks were fueled up and idling at the treeline. Then the radio crackled to move out.
Lieutenant Blue gave the word.
“All right,” he said into his CVC mouthpiece. “Let’s go.”
The lead track, the two-four, jerked forward, commanded by Lucky Lemon, rattling and clanking into the bush. Blue’s track followed, trailed by the two-three, Platoon Sergeant Davis’s track, and the two-two, Repatch’s, and the two-one, Mallick’s. They made a hell of a racket, tracks churning dirt and crushing small trees and rumbling over rocks and sluuuuurping through mud bogs, throaty exhausts echoing across the clearings like kids goosing their Chevies at a stoplight.
Whoopie Cushion Ridgely was standing in the two-six, the Lieutenant’s track, manning one of the M-60 machine guns mounted behind the commander’s cupola, covering either side of the vehicle. The M-60 jerked and bucked against his grip as the track rolled over fallen tree trunks and dipped into streambeds.
“Fuck this Army and fuck this war and fuck this gun and fuck this track and fuck it all is what I say, you ask me,” said Whoopie Cushion with his usual eloquence.
“Nobody axed you, Cushion, you white-ass motherfucker.” Moon-face Samuels grinned from his position at the other M-60, swaying with the awkward rhythm of the track.
“I got a higher callin’ than your sorry ass, Moonface,” said Whoopie Cushion over his shoulder.
“Yeah? Who dat? Yo’ mama?”
“My Lord God and Savior,” said Whoopie Cushion, intoning the words like an evangelist. “I got the ear of the big dude, the master of ’em all, my main man.”
“You got yo’ ear stuck upside yo’ ass thinkin’ it be yo’ haid,” said Moonface. “Sound you be hearin’ be la
st night’s beans and franks, dude. You listenin’ to refried C-ration, Cushion. Yo’ shit be in de street, man. As per us-u-al.”
“Knock it off back there,” said the Lieutenant, without turning around. “We’re supposed to be maintaining combat road-march discipline. We could use less wisecracking, and more examination of the state of our flanks.”
“Yes, sir,” said Whoopie Cushion Ridgely.
“You got it, sir,” said Moonface Samuels.
The radio crackled a couple of times and cleared.
“Rattail Two, this is Rattail Six, over.”
It was the company commander, Goose Gardner, a loose-limbed captain out of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, who had played first-string basketball for Vanderbilt University before he passed his physical and got drafted and opted for OCS. He had been told he’d flunk the physical because of his knees, both of which had been operated on twice, one of which still locked up when it got cold. The only problem was the X-ray machine was broken the day of his physical, and as the doctor said during his interview, “It doesn’t get very cold in Vietnam.”
“Rattail Two, over,” said the Lieutenant.
“We’re passing the line of departure, over,” said Captain Gardner.
“This is Two. We’re on it right now,” said the Lieutenant.
“Six out.”
“Roger that.”
The brigade was making a “sweep,” also known as a search-and-destroy mission, of the region west of Dak To. This meant that three battalions crashed around out there in whatever boonies showed on the map, spoiling for a fight—and, in the case of the troops, hoping like hell that nobody took the bait and actually took a shot at them. The weapons platoon was running parallel to the rest of the Battalion, about four kilometers to its south. This was necessary, since in order to support the Battalion with close-in mortar fire around the perimeter, the platoon had to be far enough away for effective mortar firing. It was a little lonely, way out on the flank of a larger unit like a Battalion. But there were side benefits out there on the side.
For instance, the battalion commander couldn’t see what you were doing, so he had to take your word for it on the radio. A unit the size of a Battalion, some sixty tracks strong, made a huge ruckus and got most of the attention from those in the vicinity who had an interest in loud, lumbering things like American Mechanized Infantry Battalions . . . such as Battalions of North Vietnamese Infantry regulars. The NVA would definitely be interested in an American Mechanized Infantry Battalion. Thus it was in your interest to remain clear of anything that drew their attention . . . like an American Mechanized Infantry Battalion.
Then, of course, there was the satisfaction of taking your own path through the wilderness, going it on your own, and still having the rest of the Battalion count on your knowing precisely where you were and where they were at all times.
Artillery or mortar support fire demanded exact locations of firebase and target. Not approximate. Not close. Not almost.
Exact.
In order to place accurate fire on a target, you had to be able to plot your position and the position of the target on the map precisely as you set up to fire. Once the mortars were zeroed in, you could fire on the target and begin receiving adjustments of fire from the unit commander whom you were supporting.
This was known as adjusting fire, and it necessitated definitive manipulation of the weapons and absolute accuracy in map-reading, a skill the Lieutenant had picked up from his father when he was a boy.
His father, who was then a captain of Infantry, would mount on the refrigerator door a scale-drawn map of the area the Blue family lived in, cover it with a piece of acetate, and hang a grease pencil from the map on a string. Every day, the boy and his brother would have to plot with a grease pencil where they intended to play, and the route to and from their destination. This entailed placing a circle around the woods or creek or tree house or recreation center they intended to play in for the afternoon, and tracing a route from the house to the place of intended play. One or two mistakes at playground or woods or creek or baseball diamond route-plotting, such mistakes having their attendant punishments and restrictions-to-room of varying severity, had a tendency to create a precociously adept map reader. This the budding Lieutenant had indeed become.
As a kid, he had considered all the map nonsense an enormous pain in the ass, but now he had to admit that his early trials as a refrigerator-door map plotter were paying off. If there was one man in the entire battalion who knew where he and his unit were virtually all of the time, it was Lieutenant Blue, the former boy map-reader. The other lieutenants derisively called him “Pathfinder” behind his back, and he knew it, but he didn’t care.
Many was the time that one of them would quietly radio his approximate position in grid coordinates to the Lieutenant, and then describe the surrounding terrain features for him. The Lieutenant would plot the alleged grid coordinates on his map and match them against the observed terrain features . . .
Let’s see, he’s got a mountain on his left and a river on his right and he just crossed an ungraded dirt road . . .
In a minute he’d have new grid coordinates and relay them to the lost platoon leader on the other end of the radio. They kidded him a lot, but that’s all it was. Kidding. Not only did Pathfinder Blue know where he was, he fucking knew where you were, and that was spooky.
The battalion and its attendant weapons platoon ambled west at a pretty good clip. The Lieutenant checked his platoon’s progress against his map periodically, noting his position with red grease-pencil marks on the acetate.
Sometimes his mind wandered, and the very process made him feel like a kid again . . .
He was in the boonies . . . the deep boonies . . . woods all around . . . big woods . . . trees and trees and trees without end . . . scary woods, so damn scary the first hundred yards made your hair stand on end, and the second hundred yards just plain froze you with fear . . . and he could hear the voice of his old man echoing in the trees . . .
You could get lost out there in those woods, son . . . that’s why I want you to plot your route and your destination on the map . . . I’m not trying to harass you, I just want to do what’s right, I just want to handle this thing efficiently, I just want to know where you are in case something happens . . .
The old man’s voice would ring in his ears, deep and caring and truthful and honest and sincere to the point of fucking tedium . . .
He’d always wondered if his old man knew how goddamned boring it was, being efficient and logical and useful and helpful and caring and . . .
The tracks rumbled and clanked and grunted forward, but in his mind he was back at Wild Acres with his brother in the forest. He remembered just what it felt like.
It felt like these woods do right now . . . foreign and dark and wet and mossy and smelling of sweat and dirt and musk and fear . . .
They were Southern woods, and you could walk endlessly through the stands of stately white pines and scrub oaks and mountain laurels and maples and you’d never get anywhere but deeper and deeper into more and more woods. They were thick and impenetrable except insofar as they could be explored on foot by little boys, and somehow they felt more uncharted and wild than even the massive expanses of forest he would come upon later in life in the West, most of which had been declared national forest and seemed for that reason to feel like a gigantic governmental tourist attraction.
People owned the forest around Wild Acres. The Randolphs owned Wild Acres of course, but farther back in there were other woods, owned by other people. There were good old boys he remembered who could lead you to the biggest whiskey still in the county, or show you the pond where you could catch the biggest bass, or take you to a tree where the buzzards gathered at dusk to roost, looming overhead, black and sinister and forbidding against the graying sky.
There weren’t any fences or dirt roads that wandered into the woods in search of how far they went back, or where they ended up. So when you went i
nto those woods, you went in tentatively. Maps didn’t help much. Those woods were way beyond the meager control of maps . . .
They were sinister . . .
Provocative . . .
Sensual . . .
That was why you always wanted to wander off the refrigerator map, heading back in there, way beyond what was called “whistling distance,” the extent of the old man’s quite substantial whistle, which he created, two fingers tucked tightly beneath his tongue, with an entire lungful of air. His high-pitched shriek would simply deaden and drop off when it hit the deep woods. So anyplace you went in there was technically beyond “whistling distance,” and thus deliriously illegal.
Ravines were back in those woods. Bridges that were crumbling and had only enough timbers left for a boy to scamper across. Swamps sprang up out of nowhere, damp and mossy and foggy and mysterious. Turtles. Snakes. Wild things.
Occasionally a buzzard would circle overhead . . . you could see him through breaks in the canopy of leaves above you . . . and when he thought of the woods around Wild Acres, that’s what the Lieutenant remembered best:
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