by Robert Stone
The last moral objection that Converse experienced in the traditional manner had been his reaction to the Great Elephant Zap of the previous year. That winter, the Military Advisory Command, Vietnam, had decided that elephants were enemy agents because the NVA used them to carry things, and there had ensued a scene worthy of the Ramayana. Many-armed, hundred-headed MACV had sent forth steel-bodied flying insects to destroy his enemies, the elephants. All over the country, whooping sweating gunners descended from the cloud cover to stampede the herds and mow them down with 7.62-millimeter machine guns.
The Great Elephant Zap had been too much and had disgusted everyone. Even the chopper crews who remembered the day as one of insane exhilaration had been somewhat appalled. There was a feeling that there were limits.
And as for dope, Converse thought, and addicts—if the world is going to contain elephants pursued by flying men, people are just naturally going to want to get high.
So there, Converse thought, that’s the way it’s done. He had confronted a moral objection and overridden it. He could deal with these matters as well as anyone.
But the vague dissatisfaction remained and it was not loneliness or a moral objection; it was, of course, fear. Fear was extremely important to Converse; morally speaking it was the basis of his life. It was the medium through which he perceived his own soul, the formula through which he could confirm his own existence. I am afraid, Converse reasoned, therefore I am.
IT WAS STILL DARK AT TANSONHUT WHEN CONVERSE arrived. Transport was an old Caribou with brown and green camouflage paint. As it fueled, he waited beside the strip with his briefcase in his hand, his anorak folded into a neat square and secured to his belt.
Waiting with him were three young men in madras shirts. They were Harvard lawyers from the Military Legal Defense Committee and from their conversation he surmised that they were on their way to My Lat to try the fragging court-martial of a black Marine. They were Movement people; they had Movement sideburns and Movement voices. Converse kept away from them although they did not seem at all unlucky.
The Caribou took off at first light. When it was airborne, Converse strapped his briefcase to the steel seat beside him and, through the hatch, watched the batteries deliver their morning rounds to the greening horizon. As the sky lightened, dark formations of bloated Dragon gunships spread out between the shells’ illuminated arc and the morning star, coming home from Snuol and the Line.
There was too much noise for anyone to speak and be heard. Converse went to sleep.
When he awoke, the sun was hot in his eyes and he looked down through the after cargo door to see the plane’s shadow running over pale green ocean. They were about two hundred yards offshore. There was a white sand beach lined with coconut palms and behind the beach tin roofs ablaze with the sky’s reflected light.
My Lat was a cluster of warped metal; the scarlet flame trees rose among its rooftops like bright weeds among tin cans. Beside the harbor were the tiled buildings of the old French fort which served as the base headquarters. At the town center were two low church spires of oxidized copper surmounted by twin crosses.
On the port side, Converse could see the ships lying in the roadways—slate gray AKAs and AKs spiky with A-frames and winches. In the center of the line, guarded from amphibious sappers by two patrol boats, was the Kora Sea. The Skyhawks on its flight deck were fast under tarpaulin.
The Caribou came in abruptly, clanking down a runway of perforated steel and halting among sandbags in a storm of white dust. Converse stepped out into a hot wind laced with stinging sand. There was no one to meet them. He and the lawyers made their way past the unmanned emplacements in the direction of some colorless plywood buildings with numbers stenciled on them.
The section of the base where they had landed was like a city of the dead; there was not a soul to be seen. The ground under their feet was gravel and crushed seashell, barren as if it had been sown with salt. Converse had brought no hat with him and by the time he found the public affairs office his hair felt like hot wire.
Inside he found a sleepy yeoman and a cooler dispensing Stateside water. He drank a good deal of it. The yeoman informed him that the public information officer was also the base first lieutenant and had important business elsewhere. He had not been seen for a week. The duty journalist was at luncheon.
Converse sat down on a runner’s bench to read Time magazine. The office smelled of floor wax and stamp pads, odors of the American presence.
Within half an hour Journalist First Class Mac Lean arrived and introduced himself. Journalist First Class Mac Lean was a small round-bellied man wearing parts of a Seabee uniform with a forty-five holstered on his guard belt. His arms were freckled and thickly tattooed; he had a pink boozer’s face adorned with a sinister goatee and wraparound sunglasses. It seemed to Converse that they had met before, in a bar near Santa Monica Beach. But then Mac Lean had been wearing sandals and carrying bongo drums.
“You wanna see the beach?” Mac Lean asked. “You gotta see the beach. It’s the best in the country.”
Converse had come to associate Vietnamese beaches with leprosy because of the beggars at Cap St. Jacques; he declined with grace. Instead of going to the beach, they went to sick bay, where Converse obtained his malaria pills and had his temperature taken. It was just over a hundred.
As the afternoon progressed, it became apparent to Converse that the PIO was utterly uninterested in his existence so that there would be no necessity for the tiresome business of pursuing a non-story for appearance’s sake. However, it was difficult to detach from Mac Lean, who hungered for news of the Great World.
For what seemed to Converse a very long time, they chatted of Music, Literature, Film, and the pleasures of California. Mac Lean showed Converse current copies of the Gulf Gazette, of which he was the editor.
“I try to keep it hip,” he explained.
He also showed Converse the file cabinet in which he kept his pornography collection and the movie film can that was loaded with Laotian Red. Converse promised to come back the next day and smoke it with him. As he went out, Mac Lean gave him the peace sign.
Heat lightning was breaking outside and there was a breeze from the ocean that was good for the soul. He walked past the helicopter pad and along a sandy road that led toward the church spires. Far off to his right were the low gray buildings of the wharf area, to his left thick stands of trees beyond the wire fencing. The ground within the compound was the color of ashes and looked as barren.
He walked wearily, shifting the briefcase from hand to hand. After a few minutes a jeep with two Marine MPs pulled up beside him.
“Come along, cousin.”
Converse placed his bag inside the runner and climbed aboard. The driver asked him where he was from in the world. Converse said California and that made them laugh.
He asked them about the sappers.
“Oh wow,” one of the marines said. “Fantastic. Unbelievable.”
The other marine agreed.
“They got skin-divin’ girl sappers, you know that? They swim over from the beach with charges in their teeth. They put adhesive mines on the hulls of those big AKs and blam!”
He opened his hands to signify an explosion.
The marines were deeply suntanned and under their green camouflage helmets they looked very much alike. They smiled constantly and had crazy doper’s eyes.
“What I think about,” one of them said, “is catchin’ a sapper girl and fuckin’ her to death. I’m a vicious freak.”
“You know what else they got? They got porpoises out there. They got porpoises trained to kill gooks. Don’t you wish you could get a picture of that action?”
Converse nodded. He was picturing the silent depths of the Bay, Navy-gray porpoises with spiked collars locked in combat with knife-wielding sloe-eyed sapper girls. The Battle of My Lat Bay, illustrated by Arthur Rackham.
“This is a very strange war,” he told the marines.
“Yeah, i
t’s weird, man. We’re not supposed to talk about it.”
Beyond the main gate was an open space from which the town of My Lat had been removed to a discreet distance from the wire. The base end of town had been mortared out of existence during Tet, 1968. What remained of it began with a fleet street of open-fronted stalls furnished with stolen Navy chairs and iceboxes full of “33” beer. The fleet street led to a larger artery, which in turn led to a square before the double-spired church. It was a pleasant square with tamarind trees, an ice cream parlor and a cafe framed with fancy ironwork. Long ago My Lat had been a resort.
Converse crossed the square and found a street market in the shade of the church. Across from the market was the bus depot and behind that a narrow street of Chinese noodle restaurants. Among them, a square cement building, was the Oscar Hotel.
The Oscar was a hotel in the neo-oriental manner—there were cubicles separated by bamboo partitions, mats on the floor, an iron teapot in one corner. Converse carried his own bag upstairs. In the next cubicle a card game was in progress; Converse could smell the players’ cologne and the raw alcohol aroma of the local whiskey they were drinking.
He squatted down on a mat, the briefcase supporting his back, and found himself eye to eye with one of the sports next door. The man was a dark-skinned Asian of indeterminate nationality, perhaps, Converse thought, a Malayan seaman. He had come down on all fours to check Converse out, and they exchanged hostile stares until the man snorted with disgust and withdrew. It was said that Asians detected the presence of Westerners through the latter’s exuding a scent like rancid butter; Converse wondered if the man had been able to smell him. He stood up and opened the shutters. As he did, the rain came down like a shell on the street below.
He had nearly dozed off when he looked up and saw a young girl standing in the doorway holding a cluster of cushions in her arms like an oversized bouquet. He stood up and watched her come in.
The girl dropped the cushions on the floor and looked at Converse as though he were in some way desirable. She was wearing Western clothes which she had probably made for herself and she looked perfectly marvelous. It was extraordinary how commonly one saw beautiful girls there.
“You know Ray?” Converse asked. It occurred to him that she might connect with Hicks in some way. She shook her head blankly, and advanced on him, cushions foremost.
The girl would not have been out of place around the Caravalle in Saigon; she wore the same eye makeup the Caravalle girls used to make their eyes rounder. Parisian chick was out at the Caravalle—in response to customer demand the Saigon girls had taken to imitating the style, and even the accents, of Delta Airline stewardesses.
“Fuck,” the girl said.
Converse tried to appear amused. She came closer.
“Number one fuck.”
He reached out and leaned a hand on her buttocks. It was always a kick; their faces made them look so ethereal and then you found that their asses were disproportionately full. She leaned a tit into the crook of his elbow. That was as high as her tits went. Looking past her, Converse found that he could see the upturned crepe sole of one of the card players squatting in the next apartment. The sole was new; it had a price tag pasted to it.
“Later,” he told the girl.
She reached down and touched his belt.
“No,” he said. “Not now. Later.”
The expression on the girl’s face looked like a smile, but wasn’t.
“No fuck?”
“No fuck,” Converse said.
She raised a finger to her nose and blew air through the free nostril. For a moment Converse thought that she would blow her nose on him. It was one of their gestures, he supposed. He had never seen it before. She bent down, picked up most of the cushions, and looked him in the eye. He took out his wallet and gave her two hundred piasters.
“More green,” she said.
“No,” Converse told her.
“Yes!” With the shrill Vietnamese inflection. Some people said it was a pretty language. Converse had never thought so. He jerked his head toward the open door.
She stooped for the rest of the cushions, fixing him with her non-smile. It was not pleasant to look at.
“You fuck little boy?”
Converse picked up the last cushion and handed it to her.
“Diddy mao,” he told her. “Fuck off.” He had never said diddy mao to a Vietnamese person before.
He stayed in the room for as long as he could bear it, waiting to see if Ray would come round. But after five-thirty, he had had enough. He picked up his bag and went downstairs to find the proprietor eating soup under a photograph of Chiang Kai-shek. The girl he had met earlier was standing by with a worried expression. As Converse came down the stairs she began to speak rapidly, pointing at him. The proprietor raised a hand to quiet her and continued eating.
“You get fucked?” he asked between mouthfuls.
“No,” Converse said.
“You sure?”
“I’m sure,” Converse said. “I always know.”
“You know Ray?” the Chinese asked.
Converse nodded.
“Ray at seaman service geedunk. You know seaman service geedunk?”
“I’ll find it.”
He retraced his course through the wet streets; the base sentries passed him back inside on his press credentials. He set out wearily for the harbor area. The rain had stopped but the mosquitoes were out in alarming numbers and there was no jeep to ride in. At the perimeter of the base they were testing their searchlights for the oncoming night. Small patrol helicopters hovered over the treetops beyond the barbed wire.
The section of the base around the old fort was more agreeable than the rest. There were royal palms and banyan trees and shell and gravel paths across the shaded lawns. There was an enlisted men’s club, where marines and Seabees sat in the fading twilight drinking beer from pitchers and the jukebox inside played Johnny Cash at full volume. There was a movie theater playing True Grit and a plywood chapel with lawn sprinklers around it. The sprinklers had signs on them in English and Vietnamese that said DO NOT DRINK THE WATER.
The United Seaman’s Service geedunk took up one wing of the old Legion barracks. Converse located the bar, which was large, pleasant, and nearly empty, and bought a gin and tonic with what remained of his military scrip. There was no sign of Hicks.
He waited at the bar until it was completely dark, then painfully took up the briefcase and went to check the outside tables in the back. His arm and shoulder were completely numb from the weight of the thing—he bore it through the heat like a festering limb, expecting that at any moment some passerby might protest at the smell of it or its unsightliness. He was almost too tired to be afraid.
JUST AFTER DARK, WHEN HE HAD FINISHED THE SECOND beer, Hicks looked down and saw Converse in the small garden below him. When he switched on the reading light on his table, Converse looked up and saw him.
Converse came up the steps slowly, hauling a huge old-fashioned briefcase. He dropped the case on the floor and sat down heavily in a bamboo chair.
“I been carrying this forever,” he said.
He reached over, picked up the Portable Nietzsche which Hicks had set on the chair beside his, and inspected the front and back covers. There was something slightly contemptuous about the way he looked at it.
“You still into this?”
“Sure,” Hicks said.
Converse laughed. He looked wasted and flushed; there was pain in his eyes compounded of booze, fever, and fear.
“Jesus,” he said. “That’s really fucking piquant.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Hicks said.
Converse raised a hand to his forehead. Hicks took the book back from him.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t meet you on the beach. How’d you like the Oscar?”
“I been in worse.”
“Did you get laid?”
“Everybody asks me that,” Converse said. “No. I
didn’t feel like it.”
“You were probably too scared.”
“Probably.”
Hicks lit a cigar.
“Too bad. You’d of liked it.”
“I should have been taken off thirty times. It’s a miracle I got that shit here.”
Hicks looked down at the case and shook his head.
“That’s about the sorriest piece of packaging I’ve ever seen. It looks like something out of the House on Ninety-second Street.”
“I was hoping you could help me with that.”
Hicks smiled. “O.K.,” he said. “What you got?”
Converse looked over his shoulder.
“Don’t do that,” Hicks said.
“Three keys of scag.”
Hicks had discovered that people disliked his looking at them directly and, out of courtesy, he often refrained. He looked into Converse’s eyes, engaging the fear he saw there.
“I didn’t know we were that way. I thought you’d have something else for me.”
Converse stared straight back at him.
“We’re that way.”
Hicks was frowning down at the table.
“It’s bad karma.”
“Think of it in terms of money. You take it straight to Marge’s in Berkeley. We’ll pay you twenty-five hundred bills.”
“You and Marge? Who’s we?”
“That’s a story in itself,” Converse said. “If your stash is as good as you say, it’ll be easier than carrying grass.”
“It’s unmakable. I got a whole aircraft carrier with practically no one on it.”
“When do you get to Oakland?”
“Seventeen days, if we stop at Subic Bay.”
“Then there’s no problem. Deliver on the nineteenth. We’ll have Marge home all day. If there’s a hassle you can call the theater where she works after nine. It’s called the Odeon. Third Street in Frisco.”
“The thing is,” Hicks said, “you’re wasting your money. You ought to carry yourself.”
Converse shook his head wearily.
“I’m on all the shit lists. Mac-V doesn’t know whether I’m a Viet Cong spy or a poison toad. I wouldn’t want to carry a joint through.”
