A buzzard circling, waiting for some little kid to get lost and fade into the big pines to a deep beyond “whistling distance,” a place only the buzzards knew about, from which you’d never return . . .
The Lieutenant shook himself and rubbed his eyes and splashed water from his canteen on top of his head.
Fuck it, he told himself reassuringly. All in a day’s work, huh? Yessir, that’s what we’re out here for . . . getting deeply into woods, weirdness, whatever . . .
The Lieutenant skipped an entry on his route plot during the hour after the Battalion halted for a brief lunch, and when he checked the platoon’s position an hour later, he was brought up short by what he found.
He checked it again, scoping out the terrain, comparing it to the lines on the map.
Yeah, there’s that little saddle between two low hills. Yep, there’s the creek we just forded. And over there’s a clearing we could see through a break in the trees. And right up ahead is the dry reservoir edged by a swamp that Sergeant Davis just reported on the radio.
Jesus.
They were in Laos.
Nobody knew it but the Lieutenant, of that he was sure. Laos hadn’t been part of the ops order. They were supposed to skirt the border, watching for crossings by elements of an estimated NVA reinforced battalion known to be operating in the region.
The Lieutenant tried to imagine what had happened. Somebody had forgotten to hang a right back there somewhere, and they had poked into a piece of Laos like a finger pressing into the side of a balloon. There weren’t any signs out there in the boonies reading Attention: You Are Now Entering Laos. No fences. No roads. Just woods. They were pushing the balloon, all right. Only this time the finger was an American Infantry Battalion, and the balloon was the nation of Laos, and the balloon had just burst.
They were in.
Fuck.
What was he going to do? Get that dufus Battalion CO Halleck on the horn and tell him he was violating the sovereignty of an allegedly noncombatant nation?
Ri-i-i-i-ght. And the Pope’s gonna get married and the rabbi’s gonna eat pork and the redneck’s gonna trade in his pickup for a Volkswagen Beetle.
S-u-u-u-u-re.
Christ. They didn’t offer a course in how to correct your battalion commander as an elective at the Infantry School. If they had, the Lieutenant would have been number one on the sign-up list. He had found himself caught between entirely too many rocks and too many hard places with his old man when he was a kid to relish the notion of making a career out of it in the Army.
Besides, what if they were supposed to be in Laos? What if the ops order this morning had been subterfuge? He’d heard of Battalions in the 101st Airborne Division making sweeps into Laos through the Ashau Valley, and another platoon leader had told him that their ops orders never had them crossing the border.
“What’s up, sir?” asked Whoopie Cushion Ridgely, who had noticed that the Lieutenant was being fairly quiet for the last klik or so.
“Somepin’ I can do?” asked Dirtball, who was sitting on a pile of sandbags on the floor of the track, picking his nails with the whip end of the PRC-25 antenna.
“We just crossed into Laos, men,” said the Lieutenant.
“Shit, man, I always wanted to add me another one of these tropical garden spots to my list of vacation destinations,” said Whoopie Cushion. “Lay-ose. I wonder if they got them some bumper stickers say ‘Land of the Pissant Motherfucker, Home of His Mama’? I got to get me one, fer sure.”
“Ain’t pronounced Lay-ose, Cushion,” said Moonface. “Say . . . La-a-a-ose, man. Say it.”
“La-a-a-ose,” said Whoopie Cushion.
“Dere. You got it. What we doin’ in La-a-a-ose, anyway, Eltee? I don’t remember hearin’ no La-a-a-ose in them plans you was layin’ out for us this mornin’.”
“You didn’t, Moonface,” said the Lieutenant.
“Den what we doin’ here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe we better find out, ’fore Charlie learns we in de vicin-ity.”
“Yeah.”
“You think they know where we at? At Battalion, I mean?”
“I’m sure they do,” the Lieutenant said slowly, not knowing exactly what he was going to say. He didn’t want to panic them, and there was nothing more certain to panic a bunch of men who were already so scared and jumpy they felt cold to the touch.
“Eltee, this shit’s gettin’ serious, huh?” Dirtball asked from his perch atop the sandbags on the floor of the track.
“Vietnam . . . Laos . . . what fucking difference does it make?” the Lieutenant joked, trying for levity.
He didn’t make it.
“Hey, Eltee, how much longer we got till we go into a night logger?”
The Lieutenant checked his watch.
“Not much longer, Dirtball. We ought to be hearing something within the hour.”
“What time you got, sir?” asked Moonface.
“Sixteen-fifty,” said the Lieutenant, giving the military version of 4:50 P.M.
The radio crackled.
“Rattail Two, this is Rattail Six, over.”
It was Goose Gardner, the company commander, coming through the Lieutenant’s CVC.
“Six, this is Two, over.”
“We’ve reached our night logger. Suggest you do same. Contact me with grid coordinates when you’re dug in, over.”
“Roger that, Six. Out.”
The Lieutenant took off his CVC helmet and looked around. The tracks were moving through a rolling field on the edge of some woods. The Battalion was several thousand meters to the northwest. He checked his map.
They were about ten kilometers inside Laos.
He punched the button on his CVC.
“Whooooa!” he called, western-style.
He watched the tracks ahead of him and behind him jerk to a halt.
“See that little hill on the left, on the other side of that clearing?”
“Roger.”
“Roger.”
“Yo.”
“Gotchew, Eltee.”
“Let’s get on it and make it ours, men,” said the Lieutenant.
He could hear the whooping from the other tracks. Everybody was in the same mood he was in. Everybody wanted to dig in.
“Dig ’em deep, guys,” the Lieutenant called over the radio. “I’ve got an idea this is going to be a long night.”
“Roger that,” said Repatch.
“That’s a rodge,” said Lemon.
“Yo,” said Sergeant Davis.
“Gotchew,” said Mallick.
All five tracks started for the little hill on the other side of the clearing, clanking and bucking and rattling their way toward the dark.
7
* * *
* * *
From the air, looking out the oval window of a Pentagon jet at 35,000 feet, the coast of Vietnam resembled the Eastern Seaboard of the United States—hundreds of square miles of verdant green space and tilled farmland, interrupted only by the occasional street grid of a seaside town, all of it edged by perfect white beaches. It was hard to see the country of Vietnam as the seething sweathole of hate and terror that it was. Altitude afforded you a sleepy luxury that horizontal distance did not. Being up there amid the clouds allowed you to dream. You weren’t looking at Vietnam, that was New Jersey down there! The resort town on the coast, that’s not Vung Tau, that’s Asbury Park! The airport on the horizon, that’s not Tan Son Nhut, that’s Newark!
Too soon the ground rushed up to envelop dreams in dank reality. Lieutenant General Pelton’s jet taxied to a stop on the tarmac at Tan Son Nhut and lowered the stairs. Ten hours on a 707 had left its mark. General Matthew Nelson Blue, Jr., unfolded himself from his seat, crackling and squeaking like a new book binding. He was wearing a set of World War II khakis, long-sleeved, open at the neck, and a pair of brown Army oxfords. On his head was a panama hat with a wide brim and a black satin hatband. It was the uniform he wore while gardenin
g at home, and he wore the same khakis when he received visitors late in the afternoon on the screened porch overlooking the garden. It was his way of reminding his visitors—and, not incidentally, himself—not of who he was, but of who he had been. The khakis were devoid of military decorations, of course. He had retired in 1947, but seemed as unable to give up his one last vestige of his beloved Army as he was unwilling to stop drinking martinis.
He and Lieutenant General Pelton walked down the aisle to the jet’s door. As it opened, the fetid heat from the tarmac swept over them like bad gossip, wet and nasty and mean.
An olive-drab staff car pulled up and the two generals started down the stairs. Halfway down, the General halted and shaded his eyes against the sun. He was looking across the tarmac at a nearby C-141 Starlifter, a fat green tube of a cargo jet that had its rear ramp lowered to take on a payload destined for the United States. When he reached the bottom of the ramp, he instinctively returned an aide’s salute and barked:
“Captain, is that what I think it is over there?” He pointed to the cargo jet that was inhaling shiny aluminum coffins from an automatic belt loader at the rate of one every thirty seconds.
“Yes, sir, it is,” said the Captain. “Those are some of our KIAs on their way home.”
He looked over at Lieutenant General Pelton. A grimace of bewilderment and disgust showed on his face.
“Brownie,” the General said, “can you imagine us boxing up our dead on the beach at Anzio and shipping them home? Can you imagine such a goddamned travesty?”
“No, sir, I can’t,” said the man who had been a battalion commander under the General from Anzio through Italy and France and Germany until the General had relieved Patton at Garmisch-Partenkirchen after the war, and Pelton became his chief of staff.
“What’s the reasoning behind that business?” the General asked the aide. He had been dispatched from the military affairs section at the U.S. Embassy to chaperon the visiting dignitaries and prevent just such a display of discomforting imagery from disturbing their visit.
“I’m not sure, sir,” the aide said nervously. “I guess if you have the technical ability to ship your KIAs home, you do it, sir. Then there’s the families to consider. I’m sure they want them home. I think that’s the main thing, sir. What the families want.”
The two generals got in the backseat of the staff car. It was air-conditioned. The driver, a young GI with long sideburns and a pair of Air Force flying glasses, looked as if he knew he had the cushiest job in the war. He glanced in the rearview mirror and announced in the dulcet tones of a tour guide, “Welcome to Saigon, sirs. I hope your stay will be a pleasant one.”
The Captain got in the front seat next to the driver and whispered, “Shut up and drive, Bisket.”
The driver put the staff car in gear and turned left in an arc that took them within a few feet of a forklift loaded with shiny aluminum coffins heading for the belt loader.
“Stop the goddamned car,” the General ordered.
The driver slammed on the brakes and skidded to a halt next to the stack of coffins.
“What happens when they reach home?” the General asked.
“I’m not sure, sir, but I think they’re put on a train with an escort and shipped to the dead man’s hometown.”
“That’s correct,” said Lieutenant General Pelton.
“Whatever happened to the cemeteries like the ones at Anzio and Normandy and Belgium?” the General asked, sounding truly bewildered. He turned in his seat to watch a forklift full of coffins drop its load at the end of the conveyor belt and turn around for another.
“If they buried them over here, parents would want to come to the funerals, sir, and technically, we wouldn’t be able to stop them. You can get a commercial flight to Saigon from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Honolulu, Tokyo, just about anywhere on our West Coast or in the Pacific. We’d have a logistical nightmare and a considerable public-relations problem.”
“What do you mean, ‘a public-relations problem’?” The General coughed out the words like a mouthful of bad meat.
“Well, sir, I heard they don’t want the TV showing a bunch of funerals at a big cemetery over here every night. It wouldn’t look good. A cemetery would create more problems than it would solve. But the parents are the big thing, sir.”
“Hell, I’m sure the fathers and mothers of my boys killed in North Africa or Sicily or Cassino or Anzio, or any other goddamned hellhole for that matter, would have wanted the bodies of their sons home. But what families wanted us to do with our dead just wasn’t among our major concerns. In Italy, my business was to run Kesselring to the ground and keep his army from becoming reinforcements at Normandy. We didn’t have the goddamn time, much less the goddamned inclination, to go through the machinations of sending our dead back to the United States. They fought in Italy. They died in Italy, and they’re buried in Italy, like soldiers ought to be, where they fell.”
“I guess I never thought of it that way, sir.”
“Do you know what those coffins are saying to the Vietnamese, young man? They’re saying that it doesn’t mean as much to us as soldiers, and to the public back home, to have given your life in Southeast Asia as it did to have been killed at Anzio or Salerno or Cassino or on Omaha Beach. They’re saying we don’t goddamned mean it over here. We’re not willing to fight and bury our dead and drive on and fight again. When those coffins disappear into the belly of that airplane, they’re telling the Vietnamese that we don’t want our presence here felt when we are gone.”
“I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at, sir,” said the Captain.
“I’m not sure you do either, Captain,” said the General.
The driver drove toward a gate in the fence around the tarmac. An MP dressed in perfectly starched fatigues and spit-shined boots motioned them through with a flip of his white-gloved hand. The General shook his head in wonder. MPs directing traffic on the beachhead at Anzio were immediately recognizable by the layer of mud that had been thrown on them by passing trucks and tanks. The only spit-shine the General had seen during the entire war was on the boots of a German general the day he surrendered twenty-five divisions of troops in northern Italy. And in war he’d never seen a pair of white gloves on anybody wearing a uniform.
An air-conditioned staff car in a combat zone was another first for the General. He rolled down his window and sniffed the air. He wanted to get closer to the ground beneath him. Vietnam had the same hot, humid, wilted indifference of every country at war. The road to Saigon was like every road the General had driven from North Africa to Germany. Its surface changed within a mile from asphalt to gravel to dirt to dust to mud and back again. Where rice paddies had overflowed their banks, the staff car splashed through slimy puddles.
All wars were fought in the hole between rage and indifference, in the heart between love of God and sympathy for the devil, down rubble-strewn roads between mud and dust. The only thing different about Vietnam was a spit-shine of cheap technology that tried vainly to hide the truth.
Sweat still glistened.
Mud still stuck.
Cannon fire still rang alarms in the ear.
Gunpowder still burned sweetly in nostrils immune to anything but the smell of fear and pain.
Blood still flowed the color of heat and hate.
The truth about this war, like all wars, still hurt.
A newly polished escort jeep with an M-60 machine gun mounted behind the driver kicked up a cloud of red dust ahead of them. Along the sides of the road, peasants slapped the broad flanks of water buffaloes, driving them from one flooded rice paddy to another. The roads were hot and straight and dusty and the fields were muddy and the peasants were poor and the war was someplace else, a low thunder in the distance, audible and unforgivable but ultimately forgettable. The war after all was only visiting; the dust and the mud and the water buffaloes and the peasants and their bottomless hunger for a calm day and a good night’s sleep and a bellyful of
rice that had escaped them for twenty years would still be here long after everyone else had gone home.
Six F-4 Phantom fighter jets roared by overhead at low altitude, standing on their tails, heading for the sun. The staff car shuddered under the backblast of twelve fully lit afterburners spraying burnt kerosene at the ground like a hot yellow curse.
One of the water buffaloes spooked, running in front of the car. The driver hit the brakes, missing the man driving the buffalo by inches. The General turned and looked out the back window. He was about the same age as the General, a deeply wrinkled man, bent over like a question mark from working in the fields. He was wearing peasant’s pajamas and a straw hat and he was standing in the middle of the muddy road, scowling and shaking his fist at the retreating staff car.
The General leaned back and closed his eyes. He could still see the scowl on the man’s face, his fist in the air. He was in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, France, Germany. It didn’t matter where. Wars never changed. The men who made wars didn’t change, and neither did those against whom they made war. The victims of war varied in diet, costume, skin color, and location, but they all spoke the same language.
The General opened his eyes and turned around to look out the back window of the staff car again.
The grizzled little man’s fist stood still in the air, brave and eloquent and alien, like thunder in the sun.
A pair of remote-controlled cast-iron gates opened silently and the staff car pulled into a walled compound somewhere on the outskirts of Saigon. Inside the compound was a flat-roofed, stuccoed villa in the Mediterranean style that had been the great house of a French rubber plantation. The United States Embassy used it to house visiting dignitaries. It had the advantage of being a secure location far enough from the seamier side of Saigon that it was reminiscent of simpler times, when the colonial impulse came not from ambition but obligation. The villa had hosted several visits by a prominent senator on the Armed Services Committee who had been so taken by its well-stocked bar and gourmet kitchens that he never left the compound, leaving to his staff the messy rounds through base camps and captured tunnel complexes.
Army Blue Page 14
