Dog Soldiers

by Robert Stone

  Smitty and Converse together rolled down a bank and landed on the packed earth of the trail. The din of battle swelled over them—bazookas, mortars, rockets, tank guns—it was Dienbienphu, Stalingrad. They scrambled to opposite sides of the trail, Converse moving on his elbows toward cover and low ground. As he crawled into the brush it occurred to him that there was something wrong with the artillery noises. Breath. Spit. There were loudspeakers in the trees. It was someone doing it, someone playing games with a microphone.

  But the column of white flame down the hill rose higher; at its core was the dark outline of a truck. Danskin stood in the firelight without his rifle, he was searching for something inside his jacket. A few feet from him a burning Stetson hat marked the trail.

  The roar of mock battle coming from the trees subsided into drunken laughter—but there was a machine gun firing now, a real one and close by. Converse struggled farther from the trail—shells pounded into the earth around him, peppered the trees, chewing up leaf and branch. He shoved himself farther along, trying to put at least a tree trunk between himself and the automatic fire. The flashing lights blinded him and oppressed his brain.

  As he huddled against the roots of a great oak tree, from the dazzle of lights above his head there sounded a great voice, louder than the weaponry.

  “Form is Not Different From Nothingness,” the voice declared.

  Converse shut his eyes and cringed.

  “Nothingness Is Not Different From Form.”

  “They Are the Same.”

  Converse was compelled to wonder if nothingness and form were not. in fact, the same. He kept his head down.

  When the voice came again, it rose above rifle fire up the trail that was answered by another burst from the machine gun. Converse became aware that the flashing lights above him were revealing his position. As he prepared to crawl again, he saw Smitty run past him along the trail, in the direction of the village. Twenty feet on, Smitty stopped suddenly, sliding on his heels, turned round as though he had forgotten something of importance and charged headlong into a stand of pine saplings; his feet left the ground as though he intended to jump over them.

  A network of violet lights flashed from the face of a sheer rock higher up the hill and Converse saw Angel and Antheil crouching back to back at its base. They had hunting rifles like Danskin’s. A pistol went off somewhere near the burning truck sounding thin and tinny after the heavier weapons; they turned toward the sound and fired together, composed against their illuminated rock like figures in a sculptured frieze commemorating their own valor. Angel fired and loaded with a speed that baffled vision.

  “They Are the Same,” the voice said.

  The machine gun opened up again, first near Converse, spraying the earth and foliage around him, then dusting the trail, finally finding the rock face. The shells rang a demented steel band’s tattoo off its violet surface, and shattered the lights and wires in a phantasmal burst of stinking smoke and electrical flame.

  Raising his head Converse caught a glimpse of Antheil’s figure rolling across the trail. But he had not been hit, his roll was coordinated and calculated, as different—even at a glance—from the sickening spin of a dying man as anything could be. Two figures crashed through the brush behind him, heading downward; he saw them cross the dirt road and disappear into the darkness of the flat ground at the foot of the hill. The machine gun fired on after them. From the flying twigs and leaf meal, Converse judged its angle to be a few feet above his head. The gunner changed clips and went at it again, setting up a line of constant fire that closed off access to the village.

  “They Are the Same,” the voice in the trees declared.

  When the firing stopped, he looked up and saw that all along the range, empty forest was bursting into light. The flashing illuminations lit rank on rank of motionless pine, on remote silent ridges far above them. On the lower slopes, baubles danced and gleamed. He stared in wonder.

  Darkness settled on the place where he hid until the only light close by came from the flames that licked about the hulk of Antheil’s pickup truck and the branches nearest it which had taken fire. The air was thick with smoke.

  Converse crawled along over holly. The gunner had changed position but he kept firing. The darkness into which Angel and Antheil had retreated flickered with licks of flame as dry leaf caught and sputtered out.

  Converse rolled over on his side and urinated sideways into the brush. After a few more rounds, he decided to attempt communication.

  “Chieu hoi,” he shouted to the gunner.

  The firing stopped for a moment, then resumed.

  “Where are you?” Hicks called back.

  “Out in front of you.”

  “You’re in the way, man.”

  Converse got to his feet and approached the trail at a crouch. He moved along the edge of it for several yards until he was even with the smoldering truck. A package wrapped in plastic lay on the ground just in front of him; he picked it up.

  “I’m coming in,” he called ahead of him. He thrust the package under his arm like a football and rolled into the stand of pine saplings on the other side of the trail. A shadowy figure recoiled from his advance.

  “Marge?”

  She was sitting on the ground at the base of a rock; there were hot M-16 cartridges and broken glass bulbs all around her. Hicks was sprawled across the rock itself, with the smoking weapon under him. His breath sounded far back in his throat, almost a moan.

  “He’s been shot,” Marge said. “He keeps passing out.”

  Converse reached up and touched Hicks’ arm. He felt blood on it.

  “What happened?”

  Hicks’ body stiffened in a sudden spasm. He raised himself on his elbows and brought up the weapon.

  “For Christ’s sake. Are you alone?”

  “At the moment,” Converse said. “How are you?”

  Instead of answering, he swung the piece around and nudged Converse aside with the barrel and fired a round at the rock wall across the canyon. Marge and Converse bent away from the noise, dodging the cartridges.

  “There’s two of them,” Hicks declared. “I got them boxed. I can keep them out there all night.”

  Converse lifted himself to the rock on which Hicks was lying; he could see nothing beyond the burned truck but dark trees and the mass of the rock wall.

  “That fucking guy,” Hicks said. “Who is he?”

  “He’s some sort of cop. He’s not straight.”

  “No shit,” Hicks said.

  “There are more of them,” Converse told him. “Two others.”

  Hicks shook his head.

  “I got one. I guess he got the other.” He leaned his head on the rock and his shoulders trembled. “He was gonna peel everybody’s potatoes, that guy.”

  “Figures,” Converse said.

  “How are you?” Marge asked Hicks.

  He took a deep breath and swallowed.

  “This is what you do. You get down there and get my four-wheel drive. Drive it out to the highway while I keep them in here. Then you’re gonna pick me up on the other side. I have to go back up and cop.”

  “And cop?” Converse asked. “Are you crazy?”

  Marge took the bag that Converse had carried in and tossed it between them.

  “This? This is here. Who needs it now?”

  Hicks reached down into it, took a handful of the stuff that was inside and flung it in their laps. Marge and Converse picked up the grains and sniffed at them.

  “‘The pellet with the poison’s in the chalice from the palace,’” he recited, “‘but the flagon with the dragon has the brew that is true.’”

  He rolled over on his shoulder and fired off another whole clip at the trees.

  “It’s up the hill,” he told them. “I’ll get it.”

  “No,” Marge said.

  “You go in there and get that vehicle. Anything else in there that runs—slash the tires. Don’t leave them anything. When you get on the
highway you go west until you’re crossing flat ground—you’re gonna see dry washes and salt. When you come to tracks crossing the road you turn off and you follow the tracks back here toward the mountains. You’re gonna see me on those tracks.”

  “He’s bleeding,” Marge told her husband.

  Hicks reached down and started punching Converse’s arm with his fist.

  “Go for Christ’s sake—while they’re still back there. You think you know better than me? Do as you’re told.”

  Converse stood up, pulling Marge with him. When he stepped out on the trail, she followed. She held his sleeve as they went and it gave him an odd feeling. Smitty and Danskin had been holding him by the sleeve for days. From the grove of little pine trees, Hicks continued his fire round after round.

  “Are they really back there?” Marge asked.

  “They better be,” Converse said.

  All the lights were on in the village, but the lighted windows were vacant, the tents gone. The field where the rows of trucks had been parked was empty. They went cautiously past car skeletons and the ruined tepee. At the edge of the rubbish pit a woman holding a tartan beverage cooler fled from them.

  In the center of the village street a single truck remained. The driver was a young Mexican; he had the hood up and was working grimly on the truck’s engine while his family stood by. There were three children who were still staring, rapturously, at the face of the mountain.

  Marge and Converse went to the Land-Rover and Converse took a camper’s ax from under the back seat and set about slashing the tires of Danskin’s station wagon with it. The Mexican family watched him in silence. The young man did not look up from his truck’s engine. Hicks’ M-16 clattered on.

  Converse got behind the wheel of the Land-Rover and stared at it.

  “Keys,” he said.

  Marge threw up her hands and shook her head.

  He went through his pockets, found a nail clipper and began working the screws out of the front panel.

  “They didn’t have Janey,” Marge said.

  He was shaving down the insulation on the starter wire.

  “No, they didn’t. She’s with Jay.”

  “Thank God,” Marge said. “That at least.”

  When the engine turned over, the fuel gauge registered a quarter full. Converse exchanged glances with the Mexican truck driver and gunned for the road out. He moved the Land-Rover as fast as it would go until a bad curve frightened him. He had difficulty with the four-wheel drive.

  “Could you always do that?” Marge asked.

  “Hot-wire it? No, I learned it over there. From a Vietnamese.”

  “That’s a switch.”

  “Yes,” Converse said. “It is.”

  There was a clear road ahead of them. For nearly a half hour they climbed—for the hump of the ridge, then the road descended in hairpins along the north side of the wall. Marge poked her head out and looked up and down the track.

  “We’re fucked now,” she said. “There’ll be cops.”

  “It hadn’t occurred to me,” Converse said. “I suppose there will be.”

  “What do we tell them when they stop us?”

  Converse sighed. “I don’t know. If they give us back to Antheil we better get a receipt for ourselves. Antheil,” he told her, “is that guy back there.”

  “He must be a pretty corrupt cop.”

  “Yes,” Converse said.

  “I suppose,” Marge said, “they were waiting for us all the time.”

  “Yes, they were.”

  “I knew it would happen.”

  “I did too,” Converse said.

  She was leaning over to see his face. He kept his eyes on the road.

  “Did they give you a tough time?”

  “Pretty tough.”

  “I knew they must have,” Marge said, “when you said they had Janey.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “You couldn’t help it.”

  “You know,” Converse explained, “they said . . . or else.”

  “Right,” Marge said.

  After the next turn, they saw lights ahead—the tail lights of a line of trucks moving before them out of the valley. They had overtaken the main body of the Brotherhood’s retreat. They moved behind the last truck at about fifteen miles an hour. Small brown fingers clung to its tailgate grid, frightened eyes peered from under blankets at their headlights.

  “He wants us to pick him up,” Marge said.

  “I heard him.”

  She was silent.

  “Even if we get that far,” Converse told her, “he won’t be there. You must realize that.”

  She had buried her face in her hands.

  “I’m sick,” she said. She curled herself against the seat.

  “Look,” she said after a moment, “I have to try. But you don’t. Maybe if we get through here you can get up to Janey.”

  “He won’t be there.”

  “Him,” she said, “he might be.”

  “If he is,” Converse told her wearily, “he’ll just have the dope and the goddamn thing will start over again. He’s not a sane person. And he’s not very bright.”

  She wiped her face with her sleeve.

  “He came down for you,” she said. “That’s why he came down. We could have gotten out.”

  Fatigue wore him down. He kept himself hunched forward to see through the dust and gloom ahead and his muscles ached.

  “That can’t be true.”

  “He’s not a sane person,” Marge said. “And he’s not very bright. Sometimes,” she told him, “people do simple-minded things like that. They take a chance to help their friends. Can’t you respond to that?”

  “Yes, I can respond to it,” Converse said. “I’m responding to it. He won’t be there.”

  “Haven’t you ever done anything like that?”

  “Yes and no,” Converse said. When he turned to her, she moved her back to him pressing her forehead against the hard metal seatback. “Like what?” he demanded. “I don’t know what that guy did or why he did it. I don’t know what I’m doing or why I do it or what it’s like.”

  “It’s something simple,” Marge said. She twisted in the seat, bringing her head to rest against the plastic window. “Jesus, I think I’m really sick now.”

  “Nobody knows,” Converse told her confidently. “That’s the principle we were defending over there. That’s why we fought the war.”

  WHEN HE WAS PARTWAY UP THE HILL, THE MOON ROSE over the mountains on his left, tracing the ridge line in hard silver light. Moonlight made the wound hurt more. He eased down on one knee and slowly rolled over a shelf of loose rock until his weight was supported by his hip and good shoulder. Tucking his knees up, he rocked slightly on the ground, trying to shake the pain off. It had seemed bearable at first and he had climbed to the place he was by marching to songs and cadences in his mind.

  It was like eating morning glory seeds. Not so bad at first, you think you can take more and more of them but after a while they’re the worst thing in the world. At first you think, well, I’ve had these before but presently they get to you.

  Part of himself had seemed to come off in his hand; it had taken him some time to realize that the bloody mass he held was a canvas bag, some kind of expanding cartridge that had struck him under the arm and sent him sprawling.

  A man with a beard had fired it.

  It hurt him very much to stand up. He closed his eyes to the moonlight and began to erect a blue triangle against the base of his skull. The background was deep black and there was some effort involved in delineating the borders of blue. At the heart of the triangle, he introduced a bright red circle and within the circle he concentrated his pain. The circle glowed and lit the triangle from within, making it lighter against the blackness.

  Give me a triangle and a song, he thought, and I’ll climb this son of a bitch.

  For the song you wanted something simple and pleasant because you would be hearing it for hours
over and over and it could drive you out of your mind when the pain got to it.

  He started up to “Red River Valley.” His breathing felt so mechanical and unrewarding that he feared his lungs were not filling, that there was a puncture somewhere—but he convinced himself that his trunk was sound, the vital organs untouched and functioning.

  He was glad to be alone. The triangle held and his legs with it.

  The most difficult part of the climb was the rain. It was light rain, that grew warmer and warmer, jungle rain that closed off the breeze—it took an act of concentration for him to realize that it was the clearest of moonlit nights, that the ground on which he walked was dry as dry bones, as chalk, as dry as his mouth was dry.

  At the entrance to the shelter, he took a few deep breaths and brought the bag out and slung it by its straps across the rifle sling on his good shoulder.

  The trees at the top of the hill were full of lights and music; they wrecked his concentration and infuriated him. The mission building was flashing on and off. He made steadily for the carved doorway; when he had climbed the steps and passed through it he was disappointed that the pain did not subside. He would have to take it in with him.

  Dieter had turned off the interior lights. The only illumination in the room came from the flashes outside and the tubes of the console in front of him. When he saw Hicks, he stood up in alarm.

  “How about some light,” Hicks said.

  Dieter lit a desk lamp and closed the switches on his forest. Hicks sat down in the stiff Spanish chair and tossed the little bloody bag which had wounded him on the floor. He had carried it all the way up the hill, clenched in his right hand. He flung the dope at the foot of Dieter’s altar.

  Dieter stared at the things and then at Hicks.

  “What’s the matter with you, Dieter?”

  “You’ve been shot. You’re bleeding.”

  “Did you think everybody was kidding?” Hicks asked, trying to pull his matted shirt away from the wound. “You been away, man. You been living in the country too long.”

  “What happened?” Dieter asked breathlessly. “Who’s out there now?”

  “I got their fucking car with an M-70,” Hicks said laughing. “Did you see it?”