EQMM, July 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Above the tailgate, Gary stared down at us. Tears pouring from his eyes fell to the metal tailgate where they mixed and ran with the blood. “I didn't know!” he screamed. “Oh, God! I didn't know!” He was holding up a hand. A little, tiny brown hand.

  Cong hadn't been stealing our supplies; it had been the Street Monkeys.

  In less than twenty-four hours, Gary was dead; he ate his pistol.

  I survived.

  * * * *

  I thought of that—thought of my survival—as I made my way back to our own temporary quarters in Chicago.

  I followed mean streets to meaner streets, thinking that hiding in the thickest, thorniest underbrush was the safest way to sleep on a long-range patrol behind enemy lines, and that we had followed this practice—even here. Within the dense concrete foliage of the city, Rick and I had hidden ourselves among its thorniest inhabitants, in a tenement rooming house where the two of us slept on surplus cots, cooked our food on scorpion stoves we'd used in the field, slept on bedrolls we'd brought with us.

  My eyes took in all this when I shut the door to our room, turned to look at Rick. He was bent over picking up a canteen cup from a scorpion stove. He held it out to me. “You want some coffee, Claw?” It was springtime in Chicago—not warm at all to us. Our blood had been thinned on the savanna's savage heat; Chicago winds cut through our guts like cold steel.

  I shook my head, sat on my bunk, looked at the city map we'd tacked up to one wall. My eyes slid over to the two duffel bags standing upright in one corner, the olive drab canvas bulging and misshapen over the weapons and ammo inside. “What did you do, Rick?” I nodded at the duffel bags; they had been moved since I'd left.

  He took a sip of coffee, careful not to burn his lips on the hot steel of the canteen cup. “Cleaned my weapons.” He tossed lank blond hair out of his face with a careless shake of his head. “Nothing else to do while you were gone.” He looked at me. “Did you see him?"

  "No. He's lying low. Looks like he sends out for chow. Even sends out for his girls, from what I heard."

  Rick slipped his skinny body onto the bunk across from me. In the closet-sized room, our knees nearly met. “How are we gonna get to him, Claw? I mean, if he's holed up like that. He must have the money up there with him. Don't you think?"

  I scooted back on my bunk, my horsehide A2C leather jacket creaking as I leaned back against a plywood wall worn smooth by the oil of a thousand backs. I'd found that jacket in a downed DC-3 outside Luanda. Some crazy post-war pilot, who thought he could make a living flying around the unmarked skyways of Africa, had discovered the pitfalls of navigating without reliable radio transponders below.

  He wound up nose-down, his payload stripped years before I stumbled across it, body mummified by the baking heat. But his jacket lay over the back of his seat. The looters had missed it, or maybe it was too dried and cracked to interest them. But I took it, nursed it back to life with saddle soap, constantly rubbing until it was soft and supple again, got a shanty-town seamstress to put in a new lining. Jai ribbed me about it, said if I'd done the same thing to the pilot's mummified corpse, maybe I could have brought him back to life too.

  I kept my voice low as I leaned against the plywood wall, didn't want anyone to hear me but Rick. “I don't know. The money might be in a bank, but I don't think so. Knowing Jai, he's keeping it right there in his room, where he can keep tabs on it."

  Rick leaned over his coffee, let the rising steam heat his face, looked up. “He has to come out to make phone calls, doesn't he? Or does he have a phone in his room?"

  "I think he's got a mobile phone."

  "How'd he get that?"

  "This is the nineties, Rick. We're not in Africa anymore. We're in the States, the land of opportunity and enterprise. Mobile phones are all over the place—even construction contractors have them here; I've seen them."

  He nodded, his eyes like runny eggs. He looked down at his right arm, unwound the bandage there, inspected the burn that was healing, where he'd brushed up against a steam fitting in the freighter.

  That freighter had followed Jai's freighter across the dark unknowable depths of the Atlantic. It was the only way we could travel—the only way he could travel—because we sure as hell couldn't take all that hardware on a plane. We had to make the crossing by ship, work our way across by rusted-out freighter. Work our way home.

  And homecoming—that homecoming—made me think of the last time I'd come home, the first time I'd come home.

  I had returned from Vietnam with the fire in my heart smothered to nothing more than a smoldering coal—but still hot to the touch.

  I returned home, having fought as honorably as I could for my country, in a war far from its shores. Only to find ragged, meandering files of young people screaming at me, hurling insults into my face, telling me that I had acted dishonorably. In a dishonorable war.

  I wondered how they could say those things when their boots had never touched that foreign soil, when they hadn't slogged through even one rice paddy, had never cleaned the mess that had once been Gary Chandler out of their bunker—his blood and brain matter dyeing dark the wood supports, soaking iron-brown into the earthen floor.

  The coal of warmth in my breast grew cold.

  It wasn't a big step from there to realizing that I no longer fit in within my own homeland, and then to making that fateful move to do the one thing I did understand, to go to the one place where I knew I fit in. Looking at the Army, however, I could see that it was winding down, getting rid of people, preparing to wage peace. Television footage of the fall of Saigon, of Huey helicopters being pushed off a carrier, was like a final punctuation to the thought.

  So I looked for the military life elsewhere. I found it on the plains of Africa, in the bush and, sometimes, in the heat of an African jungle so very different from the jungles of Vietnam. Yet, so similar in hot lead, in agony writ large on the faces of the dying, in the fierce stab of revenge as I beat the kill-zone with red-hot rounds during an ambush.

  I found it in Angola, the Congo, Mozambique—a hundred nameless places, hundreds of pain-filled marching miles, thousands of miles flown or ridden across, hundreds of thousands of rounds expended. Thousands of dollars flowed into my pockets—and out the other side. Paid out in shanty-town bars, high-end restaurants in well-heeled cities, on a Rolex Submariner I picked up in Cape Town, and in the everlasting pursuit of women. Women to whom I made love, without love; perhaps in unsuccessful search.

  Somewhere along the way, I met Jai. He was cadre at a training compound—when I joined 6 Commando, I think, somewhere in Zaire, or maybe Cabinda. I can't be sure anymore; they all run together.

  I hated Jai at first, for that smirk he always wore, a smirk that shouted how tricky he was. He shouldn't have advertised, I thought, should have kept it hidden—like a long sharp blade up one sleeve. Instead, he flashed it, banked on it, used it to gain the confidence of his superiors. And this just made me hate him more.

  Then, one night in a firebase in the bush, at a place where we were acting as advisors—acting unit leaders for our African employer's indigenous troops—things changed.

  Some very bad guys started out by laying down a heavy mortar barrage. I don't remember who they were; things changed so fast back then, all those acronyms and initials jumble into a meaningless paste within my mind these days. They softened us up for five minutes with those mortars, and continued laying it on pretty thick as they came running with torches, firing on the run, from the south—looked like thousands of them.

  But when we checked the bodies next morning, we found every man with at least four torches strapped to him. The torch-lit army on the south side was fake, a feint attack; they broke in through the north wall—swept in quick and silent, so that no one knew they were there until their Bangalore torpedoes breached our wire and mines.

  They took over our .50-caliber machine gun in the northwest corner, tried to turn it against us as their comrades poured in through our breach
ed defenses. I saw the men on the north wall trying to stand, to climb out of their trenches to meet the invaders on even ground, only to be cut down, overwhelmed.

  Lying beside me, in the south wall defenses, Sergeant Savimbi, my platoon leader counterpart, looked up at me. He tried to speak, but his voice was caught inside his bulging eyes, sweat glistening in the fire light reflecting off his blue-black skin, face muscles sketched in fear.

  I stood and grabbed him by the collar, yanked him to his feet. “Get up! If we lay here and they overrun us, they'll kill us all. Get everybody up!” He ran down the line in one direction, pulling soldiers to their timid feet, as I did the same in the other direction. We formed a hasty skirmish line, facing in, aiming our weapons into our own camp, against the invaders pouring through the north wall. We worked to make the men move out.

  Getting terrified men into motion is an exercise in overcoming inertia. There is a lethargy which men develop when they believe the end is near. It is a sort of giving up, of giving in to what must come, of hoping to hurry their passing, get it over with. They just want to get terror out of their beating hearts, even if it pumps itself out through bullet holes or knife wounds. It's a desire to make their passing as painless as possible, as peaceful as they can achieve, to make quick the jump from this frightening place into one of rest and no more fear forever. Getting men moving, forging them into an attacking unit, means breaking thislethargy, overcoming the inertia that roots them in place, stock-still.

  Sergeant Savimbi and I did it at knife point, jabbing men in the buttocks to key them forward. They began to move.

  Once moving, the terror shifts, the inertia works for the attack instead of against it; once moving, men never want to stop. They want to run forever—run out of this place of death and keep running—to run for life. If left unchecked, however, this inertia will break them, will cause them to run willy-nilly to their deaths, because they will meet the enemy as individuals, instead of as a collective force grouped into active teams. So, as they moved, Savimbi and I threw them together into fire teams, issued orders they could wrap their minds around, pin their hopes to. We constructed organization from the chaos.

  Then we ran into the tide of men receding from the north wall defenses. Broken men, running in terror and confusion. Blind men, mindless in their route. They crested against us, as a wave crests against a beach. My platoon faltered.

  I grabbed one of the fleeing men who still had his AK-47. I slapped his face to wake him up, spun him around and pushed him forward. When he tried to turn around, I reached my arms round him and grabbed his AK, brought it to his shoulder and fired a burst into the enemy twenty yards away—one went down. I felt the shift in his body then, released him and watched him run back into the fight. My platoon had seen me, and my men now followed suit. Soon we were one large force moving in counter-attack. Our pace was not a run, but was more than just a quick-time. We hustled toward the enemy.

  As I moved, I spotted a figure on the ground, a ragged bloody crater where his chest had been. He had an M-60 machine gun strapped across his shoulders. I yanked it loose. Something snapped under his back, where the strap ran across it. Or maybe it snapped inside his back; his eyes came open and he looked at me. No voice could be created by those shredded lungs, and yet I heard a mewling sound. He looked at me as a baby might look at a man who broke its arm—as if asking why I had done this to him. I scooped the M-60 into my arms and moved out, the salt tang of tears biting my tongue, the weapon slick with blood. The man beside me grabbed the spare ammo box.

  I fired the M-60 as I moved. The heavy thud of the weapon kicked reassuringly back against me as I fired. Its deep-throated voice—whop-bop-bop-bop-bop—comforted me. And then Jai appeared on my right.

  It was like a magic act: he wasn't there; then he appeared. He wore that tricky smile, carried a Swedish automatic rifle. His weapon had a faster rate of fire than my M-60. I heard him empty a magazine—Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip! Then I opened the deep voice of the M-60—whop-bop-bop-bop-bop! The twin sounds made my heart sing. It was the same beat, the same tune played by the lawn sprinklers of my childhood in Arizona—only louder and in a lower key. I recognized it and, in the midst of battle, I laughed. Tears ran down my face as I raced forward. Jai and I alternated fires, until the enemy was routed.

  Friendship was forged; hatred turned to admiration, perhaps a type of love.

  * * * *

  Rick dumped the dregs from his canteen cup out the window into the narrow alley. “Is the door to his room as weak as the one on ours, do you think? If so, I can crack it with just one shell.” He was talking about his shotgun, about jamming it between the doorknob and jamb, blowing the bolt off the door with one shot.

  I peeled off the false beard I had been wearing, worked at the spirit gum with my fingernails. “The room I rented there had deadbolts.” I looked up at him as he walked back from the window, set his canteen cup upside down on a bunk post to dry. He was thinking two shots would crack it. Two quick shots from his pump shotgun, then we'd be in, be on him.

  I shook my head. “They also have dressers in those rooms. Heavy dressers. Wide, but not too tall. I think he'll have one across the door.” I saw Rick nod. “I think we need to blow a hole through the top half of his door. Maybe use the det cord to blow out a hole we can get in through. I've seen that done a couple times. It works. Maybe one of us outside, providing cover fire, while the other one goes in through the hole, makes sure with a head shot—maybe Mozambique him. Then we take the money and run."

  Rick sat on his bunk. “We'll need wheels."

  I nodded. Rick could do that; he'd been sent away for joy riding to begin with. That's how he wound up in the Air Force. Then he got out, went to work running guns.

  Rick had turned up, not long ago, in Angola. We were hanging out—Jai and I—acting in an advisory capacity at a dog-and-pony-show UNITA headquarters, which claimed to control the Angolan equivalent of a state. There were about thirty mercenaries on post, with Jai in command, plus several hundred UNITA soldiers who thought the fighting was over and dreamed of going home.

  A lot of agreements had been signed between UNITA and the government, and a cease-fire had set in. The first round of elections had just been held in Angola, but no one had gotten enough votes to secure victory; a second round was being set up. Rick had come in-country on one of the Santa Lucia Airways planes flying arms and ammo to UNITA awhile back. Since then, he'd bummed around Africa, until he'd finally decided on merc work and wound up being dropped off the back of a truck on our doorstep.

  Rick showed up when UNITA and the Angolan government had started bumping heads over who had to leave the country and who could stay; discussions about the upcoming elections were growing heated. For the last few weeks there had been a lot of saber rattling, and when I looked at the slack crew around the headquarters I worried. If those sabers came out, we'd be right in the middle of a zone the government would want to control. And they had men—Angolans, as well as twelve thousand Cuban troops—to take us out. The home-looking soldiers around post had become soft, wouldn't stand a chance if we got hit by angry men who knew what they were doing; Jai and I didn't want to get killed with them.

  We made a plan and took Rick into our confidence, gave him impromptu training when we tried to train the UNITA soldiers we were stationed with. The UNITA guys blew us off. Didn't we know the war was over? Rick listened to us, did what we told him, didn't have to be told twice. He was a smart kid, but young. Two weeks after he arrived, the payroll came in. UNITA flew it in on a twin-engine Cessna—a huge sum, meant to pay off all the back wages owed to every UNITA supporter in the state.

  The day after it arrived, all hell broke loose. The government had started killing people in Luanda. They attacked a UNITA post there, then the police force armed civilians and led them house to house killing anyone associated with UNITA. They brought them in from outside the city limits, too, trucked them into Camama Cemetery where they gunned them down and
plowed them under in mass graves.

  The slackers at our post wandered around in shock.

  That was when we started taking mortar fire. The mercenaries bailed out of the barracks and tried to rally the UNITA guys. I'd worked a lot with UNITA, and most of the field men were very good, extremely tough, dependable. But these guys were toast, and they knew it. When Cuban trucks rolled up out front, with two BRDM armored scout cars, the UNITA guys started running the other way. They threw down their weapons, tore off their uniforms as they ran. The Cubans and their Angolan counterparts cut them down like stalks of grain in summer sunshine.

  It was bedlam. I ran to the building Jai, Rick, and I had designated as our “Go to Hell Point"—the place we'd meet up if everything went to pieces. When I got there, Rick had hot-wired one of those old Land Rovers UNITA used as jeeps. I stepped on the gas and we flew past UNITA guys running in their underwear, blood mingling with the sweat on their backs. I dodged the Land Rover among groups of men running in terror, screaming to each other, seeking help from others who could provide none and were seeking help themselves. I drove through them, headed straight for the airport, because Jai knew how to fly a plane. Rick had only been a load master; but having spent some cockpit time, he was the designated copilot.

  The airport was worse than the base. A logjam of UNITA soldiers was trying to squeeze through the gate in the chain-link fence, while others tried to hold them out. I hit the horn, but in all that confusion nobody noticed. Government soldiers and Cubans came around a far corner—a flanking maneuver. They poured tracer rounds into the crowd up ahead. Behind us, armored scout cars and trucks were coming on fast, mowing down the mob of UNITA men we'd just passed.

  I spun the wheel and floored it, ran the Land Rover right through the old fence. It was shabbily constructed to begin with, and had years of rust. It split open like an egg, and we were running over the tarmac. For a moment we dragged a length of chain-link with us, but then it dropped off.