by Jon Cleary
“Wisdom is shit, man. I’m fucking wise to all that fucking wisdom.”
I can’t write any of this, Cleo thought, not for the mums back home. She wondered how the grunts would describe the war to their mothers when, and if, they got back home.
The crew of the Chinook helicopter were polite young men, careful of their language in front of her. The co-pilot, brash and boyish, a Saturday night hero back home in Denver who had become a real hero and didn’t want to know about it, winked at her and invited her to sit up front in the jump-seat just behind him and the pilot. The big helicopter was ferrying supplies to an Australian company in the hills—one that was operating quite separately from the main Australian force.
The American captain at the press centre at JUSPAO (some day she would get all the initials worked out; acronyms had become another obscenity) had worked on her like a used car salesman. “Honestly, Miss Spearfield, this is the story for you. The Aussies are doing a fantastic job up there—you ought to tell the folks back home all about it.” She had been suspicious of his hard sell, wanting to question him about An Bai. But in the end she had decided that perhaps he was right. After all, the Sydney Morning Post had sent her here to write about the Australian war effort. The mums back home in Sydney wouldn’t care about what was happening in An Bai.
They were flying through heavy rain, the rotors above them spinning it off in a thick spray; looking up, Cleo had the image that they were flying under a giant circular saw. It was cold here in the bubble and she was glad she had worn her sweater; the four crewmen back in the hold of the chopper had whistled at her, but she had long ago accepted that as part of the pleasure and irritation of being a woman. Unconsciously she leaned back in her seat, lifting her bosom, and the pilot looked back at her out of the corner of his eye.
“Don’t do that, miss. It’s hard enough as it is flying this bird.”
She relaxed, smiled. “Sorry.” She had to shout to make him hear, so that put an end to any flirtation, even if she had felt like it, which she didn’t. She leaned close to him and bellowed in his ear: “Which way is An Bai?”
He nodded to the right. “Somewhere down there. All these gook villages look the same from up here.”
“Can we go back that way?”
“What for, for crissakes? I’m not a fucking taxi pilot.” Up till now he had been careful with his language.
She saw the sudden anger in his face and then recognized the other signs. The young-old eyes, the grey-yellow pallor like that of an elderly, sick man: he was twenty-three years old, but his birthdays stretched behind him like memorials rather than celebrations. Some other pilots, the adventurers, the rebels, might have instantly swung off course to take her down to An Bai. But Lieutenant Hurd, unlike Joe Puzio, the co-pilot, was a career man, even if he was thoroughly disillusioned by his first war.
She sat back, careful to keep her bosom down, and looked out through the rain-cracked perspex bubble at the green, dream-like countryside up ahead. The whole of Vietnam had become a dream, and a bad one. She had come here excited by her first big adventure; now, only a month later, she had begun to hate the war. It was a different hatred from that she had felt during the demonstrations back home against Australia’s becoming involved in Vietnam; this was anger and disgust about the actual war, the death and maiming in the abstract. So far she had seen virtually no real action; it was almost as if the Viet Cong had retreated to make her war more comfortable. But she had seen the bags on the air-strips, like the rubbish of war, all tagged with the names of this week’s garbage: Jeffrey T. Partridge, Mortimer Wineburg, Lester O. Schwabe. She had used the simile of the garbage bags in her first story, then crossed it out. The mums back home did not want to be told that their dead sons resembled rubbish.
Suddenly the helicopter lurched to one side and Cleo saw rather than heard the pilot swear. He swung the chopper in a wide arc, steeply banking; Cleo felt the canvas seat-belt slicing into her. Her stomach seemed to roll around inside her; she thought she was going to vomit. Something hit the floor beneath her with a jarring bump and the chopper bounced. There was a loud crack and the bubble on the pilot’s side burst; it seemed to disintegrate in slow motion. Then she saw Lieutenant Hurd shake his head and the blood began to spurt out of the wound in his throat.
The chopper wobbled, began to swing through the air up, down and around, a Big Dipper ride on no rails. Cleo sat petrified, wanting to be sick but with her stomach never in the right place to throw up. Then she heard Lieutenant Puzio yelling at her, jerking his head at Hurd. He got the chopper on an even keel, but it seemed to be bumping its way over a rough road of rain-filled air. She tore off her scarf, a Lanvin piece of silk given her as a going-away present by her sister-in-law Cheryl, just the thing for this year’s combat zone. She strained against the canvas straps, reached across, wrenched off the pilot’s helmet and awkwardly wrapped the scarf round his throat. He was slumped in his seat and made no response. Lieutenant Puzio nodded his thanks without looking at her, peering ahead through the rain which was now beating in through the shattered bubble. The helicopter was still pitching, dropping lower and lower towards the rice paddies that lay like great sheets of mottled glass below them.
Then Cleo saw the three Chinooks rising from beyond a long straggling village to their right. They swung away through the curtain of rain like giant fat turkeys that had learned to fly; as they disappeared Lieutenant Puzio took the chopper towards the village. The helicopter went in sideways above the village; Cleo saw the flower of flame suddenly bloom out of the roof of a hut below her. She saw villagers running in panic to get away from the crashing helicopter; then she realized the chopper was not going to crash and that Joe Puzio was putting it down safely. She saw the soldiers running after the villagers, who were now falling over and lying still in the mud. Lieutenant Puzio put the helicopter down with a bump and switched off the motors; Lieutenant Hurd fell forward and hung in his belting. Cleo had never seen a dead man before, not one who had been alive only a minute ago, and she shut her eyes and waited to be sick, but nothing came up out of her dry, constricted throat.
Then a mud-drenched sergeant appeared outside the shattered bubble, his wild-eyed thin face like a skull under the bowl of his helmet. “What the fuck are you doing here? Get the fuck outa here!”
Puzio shook his head, dumb with shock, and pointed weakly at the dead pilot. Cleo could hear the harsh bursts of automatic rifle fire behind the crackling roar of the flaming huts; the whole village was now on fire, dark clouds of smoke wreathing up to merge with the low rain-clouds. She saw bodies lying in the mud of the long streets, all of them villagers: men, women and children. And she heard the screams behind the rifle fire and then she was sick. She tore off her seat-belt, dived across the lap of the dead pilot and vomited into the mud beside the boots of the sergeant as he came round to her side.
He waited till she had finished, then he put his M-16 into her white face. “Don’t move outa this fucking chopper, you hear me? That goes for you jerks, too.” He swung round on the crewmen who were about to jump out of the side door of the Chinook. “This ain’t none of your fucking business, you unnerstand? Don’t move or I tell you, I’ll blow your fucking heads off! Alla you!” He looked back at Cleo, then he swung away and went running down the street, slipping and sliding in the mud as he dodged corpses, yelling back without turning round, “It ain’t none of your fucking business!”
Cleo fumbled for a handkerchief, wiped her mouth. She eased herself back from Lieutenant Hurd, not wanting to look at him, but everywhere she looked, there were dead. She saw a woman run out from between two burning huts, hands held over her smoking hair; a soldier came out from between the huts and put her out of her pain and misery and her life with a short burst from his carbine. Then he looked across at the helicopter, grinned and waved and ran back between the huts.
“Oh Jesus!” said one of the crewmen in the open door of the Chinook. “Someone tell me this ain’t happening!”
“They’re stoned outa their fucking heads,” said the man beside him. “They gotta be.” Then he looked back inside the helicopter at Cleo. “You gonna write a story about this?”
She found her voice, which she had begun to fear had left her forever. “Where are we?” But she knew, as if she could see signposts all down the long, corpse-strewn street; they were in An Bai, where Brigadier-General Brisson had wanted no correspondents. “How do we get out of here?”
“How’s everything up front?” They were still standing in the doorway of the Chinook, like workers waiting in some loading dock for a truck to arrive.
“Lieutenant Hurd is dead, I think.” She didn’t look at him as she turned back to Puzio. “Are you all right?”
He had put his hand inside his shirt, taken it out and was staring at the blood on it. He looked across at her as if he had been insulted by what had happened to him. “I got a hole in my side—” Then he winced and fell forward.
Cleo grabbed him, pulling him upright, screaming for one of the crewmen to come forward. She could feel herself panicking: the war was stifling her with its dead, packing them in around her.
One of the crewmen suddenly appeared behind her. He was short and fat and looked like a middle-aged cab driver; but he was twenty-four years old and a rich man’s son from Cleveland, Ohio. She leaned away while he squeezed his bulk over her to look at Lieutenant Puzio. Then he sat back and looked as if he were about to cry.
“He’s dead, too. Christ, what a day!” He looked out past her as if he were commenting on the weather. Just shit, that’s all.”
“Can you fly this thing?”
He looked at her in surprise, as if she had asked him if he himself could fly. “I can fly it if it’ll go. But I dunno if it will—that ground-fire hit us pretty hard. They spattered us with real shit then.”
“I think it’s worth a try.” She could hear herself talking, like listening to someone else in another room. “I think they might come back and kill us, too.”
“Jesus, why would they wanna do that?” The other three men were crammed in behind the fat man. The youngest had spoken, nineteen and more afraid of something he didn’t understand than all the other deaths he had seen. “We’re Americans, like them—we’re on the same side, for crissake!”
“I dunno I want to be on their side,” said the fat one. “I saw a coupla guys like this once before, not a whole goddam company, but a coupla grunts, they went around shooting every slopehead in sight. I got outa there so quick . . .”
“You don’t look like no slopehead.” But no one laughed, not even the young man who said it, thin-faced behind his gold-rimmed glasses, looking young enough to be arrested for trespassing in a pornographic adult area.
Cleo leaned over Lieutenant Hurd, touching him carefully as if afraid she might hurt him, looked down the street and saw half a dozen men coming up towards the helicopter, walking slowly with their carbines swinging back and forth in front of them, looking for game they had missed in the first beating. The huts blazed on either side of them, the flames too bright in the grey day, like botched technicolor; the smoke was a thick black cloud lying like a dark, heaving roof over their heads. They picked their way carefully amongst the bodies clad in black pyjamas lying in the mud, but more as if they thought the corpses might be booby-trapped than out of respect for the dead. She would remember the scene for the rest of her life, the Inferno in which the good had suddenly become the devils.
The fat crewman abruptly pushed into the bubble and began fumbling with the seat-belts. Cleo, all at once feeling useless and female, her physical strength not enough to cope with what had to be done, crept back, pushing her way through the other crewmen into the hold of the chopper. The crewmen were struggling and swearing; then Lieutenant Hurd’s body was dragged from the cockpit. A few moments later Lieutenant Puzio’s body followed it; the corpses were stacked in beside the supplies of rations, ammunition, clothing. The youngest crewman blessed himself and lowered his head for a quick prayer; then he came and stood beside Cleo in the doorway of the hold. He was blinking rapidly and she thought he was going to jump out of the helicopter and run down towards the soldiers coming up the street.
There was a moan from the motor, then the clattering sound that Cleo was still not comfortable with: she was always waiting for the rotor blades to break off and fly away. The rotors began to whirl slowly, spinning the rain away like a giant agricultural spray. Looking down the street she saw the soldiers break into a run as the helicopter began to lift off.
The rotors were spinning swiftly now, but the Chinook rose as if it were climbing through invisible mud.
The helicopter lurched and Cleo grabbed at a strap and hung on. She saw one of the soldiers stop running, raise his M-16 and aim it at the Chinook. She shrank back, turning her head away, not wanting to die with a bullet in her face. The young crewman stood in front of her, holding on to the side of the doorway for dear life, and screamed obscenities at the soldiers. Then the Chinook swung away, suddenly gaining speed, and carved its way up through the rain. Cleo made herself look back and down, saw An Bai disappearing like a nightmare into the mist of rain and smoke, saw the soldiers standing in the middle of the street amongst the corpses, waving to her like the decent, friendly kids they once must have been.
“Jesus,” said the young crewman; his shout was a whisper of despair in her ear; there was no obscenity now but that of the scene below. “Whatever happened to us?”
III
“There was no incident today at An Bai,” said the briefing officer. “It was just a routine change-over. Turning to the Bu Dop area, the body count for today was—”
“Excuse me, Major.” Cleo could feel all the other correspondents looking at her, bored and irritated that she was going to stretch out the baloney. Most of the correspondents in Saigon no longer came to the daily briefing, the Five O’Clock Follies; it was accepted that JUSPAO and MACV (some day she would write an ABC of the American forces) were fighting a different war from that out in the field. She saw two of the women correspondents, the French girl whose name she could never remember and the Italian woman who saw the war only in terms of politics; both of them nodded encouragingly to her, taking her side in the other war between the sexes. She looked back at the briefing officer.
“Major, I was there in An Bai today—it was no routine change-over—”
“General Brisson himself was there supervising the change-over. There was no incident of any kind, Miss Spearfield. There is enough happening in the war without the press manufacturing stories—”
Even the male correspondents laughed at that. Cleo, suddenly losing control, shouted, “Why don’t you listen to the bloody truth for once? I tell you, I saw—”
“Who’s that?” said an American voice. “I’ve just landed here.”
“Her name’s Spearfield,” said an Australian voice. “Her old man’s a big-shot politician back home, he’s dead against the war. She trades on his name.”
She turned round ready to kill the correspondent from the Melbourne newspaper. He was fat and bearded and always wore dark glasses, even at night; it was rumoured he had once worn them down a coal mine. He grinned at her and gave her a mock thumbs-up sign.
“Attagirl, Cleo. Daddy would be proud of you.”
She measured the distance, worked her mouth, then spat. The spittle landed on one of the dark lenses. Then she turned back to the major.
“I repeat, Major, why don’t you tell the truth for a change? Let’s see General Brisson so I can ask him face to face—”
Then a strong hand pulled her down into her seat. She turned angrily to see who had done it: Tom Border sat beside her. “I just came in, Cleo old girl. Take it easy, you’re not going to get anywhere with that guy up there. They say there was no incident at An Bai, there was no incident at An Bai. It’s not the first time. This is the most incident-free war you’re ever likely to cover. Come and I’ll buy you dinner.”
She wanted to strug
gle with him to stay where she was; but all at once she realized it was useless. As she went out of the big press room the major was once more giving the body count for the day. She closed her eyes, saw the pyjama-clad bodies in the mud of the village; she stumbled and Tom straightened her with a firm grip on her elbow. She opened her eyes and one of the male correspondents, sitting on the end of a row, smiled and shook his head at her.
“Write the story, honey, then see if they’ll print it back home. It’s a waste of time, I tell you from experience.”
She was still angry and upset when she and Tom reached L’Amiral restaurant. The Indian money-sellers were going past on their way to their temple; the Catholics were heading for evening Mass at the cathedral. Prayers would be offered for another day of survival, another day of profit. She felt herself surrounded by corruption, caked with it as if with mud.
“You know, I’d never tasted wine till I came out here, even during the year I spent in Europe. I was just a beer and bourbon man.” Tom ordered a bottle of Meursault with the same careless confidence as he might have ordered a Schlitz or a Jack Daniels. “’Nam has been quite an education for me.”
“Meaning it should be for me?”
She had recovered enough to put on a new face and comb her hair. She remembered that her mother had always frowned on women who did their hair or repaired their make-up at the dinner table or in restaurants; but Brigid Spearfield was dead now, her world of small conventions dead with her. Maybe mine, too, thought Cleo: at least something she had believed in had died today.
“Cleo, every guy who has been here a year, two years, whatever, has got a story like yours. I’ve got my own. I saw four dinks, villagers, no one knew for certain if they were VCs, taken up in a chopper with their hands tied behind their backs and pushed out, maybe from a thousand feet, I don’t know. All I know is they seemed to take forever to fall. I was on the ground and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”
