Brock noticed the Major glaring at him, but kept right on walking.
“Hey you...you in the camies.”
Camies...! Camies...? Jesus! Without turning around, Brock came slowly to a stop.
“Yes you, soldier.”
Amused, Brock turned around.
“Come here!”
Smiling, Brock walked slowly back down the corridor. He was carrying his bush hat. His short blond hair had been bleached almost white by the sun, and he had the pinched, drawn look of having been outdoors too long. Except for his first lieutenant’s bars and jump wings, there was nothing else on his tiger stripes, not even a unit patch.
“We don’t wear that uniform around here,” the Major said.
“But I’m not from around here,” Brock said pleasantly enough.
“Where you from?”
“Sorry, can’t tell you that.”
“Sir,” the Major corrected sharply. “What unit are you with?”
“Sorry, can’t tell you that, either.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that...sir.”
The Major flushed.
“Lieutenant,” he said angrily, “you’re getting yourself into trouble.”
Unmoved, Brock remained silent, offering nothing.
“Who’s your commanding officer!”
“Right now,” Brock said, turning to observe a patient being rolled past him, “I am.”
“Lieutenant,” the Major barked, his voice echoing up and down the corridor, “junior officers stand at attention when they are talking to their seniors.”
With people stopping nearby, he was gathering himself to go on when Brock suddenly turned on him. His whole posture had changed. The calm indifference had vanished, and now the major found himself facing a cold furious young man.
“You!” Brock said contemptuously. “You, senior! A hospital personnel officer.” The change had been so abrupt, Brock’s contempt so brazenly expressed, that for a moment the Major was startled.
“I want you in my office this afternoon,” he stammered, his face purple with fury.
“I won’t be there,” Brock said quietly.
“You’ll be there, dammit, and when you walk into my office, Lieutenant, I want you in class-A khakis, or you’ll go back to Nam in cuffs. Understand?”
Brock didn’t even bother to answer. He simply turned his back on the Major and continued on his way to the admissions office.
The med evacs had already come in for that day and the admissions clerk had just finished typing up the daily census when Brock walked into the office. Ignoring the Corporal’s stare at his tiger stripes, he handed him a piece of paper. “Could you tell me if these men are still here?”
It is not uncommon for an officer if he is in Japan to visit his men. Almost all the wounded from Nam come there. What was uncommon was the Lieutenant’s list. Everyone was ranger-qualified. Everyone was Special Forces. Each had graduated from Recondo School, spent time at the Royal Jungle Tracking School of Malaysia, had been HALO trained—and each had been shot. There was not a frag wound or booby-trap injury among them. In a hospital full of idiotic blunders, miscalculations, and stupid mistakes, it was an extraordinary group.
Brock did not stay long on the wards. His men—though surprised and obviously pleased to see him—were restrained, treating him with a reserve quite uncommon for a first lieutenant. He ignored their wounds, merely thanked them, offered his help if ever needed, and left. They assumed he was going back.
It was only in the intensive-care unit that his smooth routine faltered. Perhaps it was the shock of the room itself. After the drab, dimly lit green of the surgical and orthopedic wards, it was like suddenly turning a corner and walking into a sunspot. Brilliantly lit, with huge banks of overhead lights, spotless and shadowless, its gleaming tiled floors and walls glared at everyone who walked in.
The patients, brown and lean from Nam, lay naked in rows, with their wounds, chest tubes, and catheters exposed; some had their stumps up, oozing on blocks. Brock hesitated in the doorway.
“Yes?” the ward master asked, approaching him.
“Sergeant Ade,” Brock said, his eyes searching the rows of wounded men.
“I’m sorry, sir, but he’s critical.”
“I know, but I haven’t much time. I’d like to see him. He was part of my team.”
The ward master looked at Brock’s tiger stripes and bush hat. “OK, but put on one of those gowns.”
Ade was at the far end of the room. Wearing a white surgical gown Brock walked down the center aisle, and the patients, sunken-eyed, emaciated, barely able to lift their heads, watched him as he passed—boys with amputated arms sewn closed with black thread, like the seams of a purse, kids with abdomens half open, draining pus into liter bottles. A nurse, adjusting an IV, looked up. The smell of sterile soap and rubber was everywhere.
He stopped by the foot of the last bed and waited for Ade to open his eyes, watching the blood dripping slowly out of the bottle into the catheter they had sewn into the patient’s neck. When Ade finally looked up, it took him a while to focus his eyes.
“Made it, huh?” he whispered.
Brock moved closer to the side of the bed. “Yeah,” he said. “Made it.”
“Going back?”
“No.” Brock shook his head. “They offered me another team, but...well, I didn’t want to begin again. I’m going home.”
“You’re gonna be tough in the bars, man.”
Brock smiled. “Yeah—guess so.”
“Still having the same dream?”
“Same one,” Brock said soberly. “Same one, every night.”
Ade closed his eyes against the lights. “Should see somebody about it.”
“Later. How they treating you?”
“I get all the blood I need.”
The ward master was walking toward them.
“I’ve got to go,” Brock said, taking Ade’s limp hand in both of his. “I’ll keep in touch. Good luck.”
Ade looked up at him and smiled wanly. “That’s past, man. Gone. Take care.”
Brock was walking away even before the ward master reached him.
After lunch, the Major called the Far East Personnel Center for the Lieutenant’s records. There weren’t any. An hour later, a colonel from G-4 headquarters, United States Army, Japan, called and asked, why the inquiry. The Colonel listened politely, told the Major to forget about it, and hung up.
That evening Brock threw away his tiger stripes. Before dark, he came to the hospital officers’ club wearing class-A khakis and carrying a small flight bag. His jungle boots were gone, and in their place he was wearing gleaming jump boots. His short-sleeve shirt was ironed; his pants, spotless and creased, were bloused perfectly into his boots. Under his combat infantry badge and jump wings, he wore his ribbons, three rows of them—the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, the deep purple of the Purple Heart, and the Vietnamese Ranger Ribbon. The others—the National Defense Ribbon, the Vietnam Campaign Ribbon, and the Vietnam Service Ribbon—the foolish little everyman medals—had been left off.
He put his case in the coat room and walked into the lounge. It wasn’t much of a place—a bar, linoleum flooring, a few tables and chairs, and a juke box. It had been opened as a place for hospital patients and on-duty personnel, and being removed from the main Army base, without any colonels or colonels’ wives to be concerned, it had all the aspects of a sleazy southern bar. But after Nam it was enough, and as early as it was, the lounge was already fairly crowded.
Brock took off his cap and walked quietly past the soldiers at the bar. Some of them, catching sight of his ribbons, stopped talking as he came by. An infantry captain, who had been standing near the bar when he walked in, approached his table at the back of the room.
“How about a drink?”
Brock looked up. “No, thanks,” he said.
“Come on, I’m buying—anythi
ng you like.”
“Nothing, really.”
“Gin and tonic!” the Captain said, snapping his fingers, and without waiting for Brock to protest, he walked with a slight limp back to the bar. In a few minutes he was back, carrying two glasses. “Here you are, Lieutenant.”
“Thanks.” Brock put his glass down beside his cap.
The Captain sat down and looked at his ribbons. “Winning the war yourself, Lieutenant?” he said, taking a sip of his drink.
“Part,” Brock said. He summoned the waiter.
“Which part is that?”
“A glass of milk, please,” Brock said to the waiter. He turned back to the Captain. “My part.”
“From the looks of it, everyone else’s too.”
“No, just mine.”
“You know,” the Captain said, pointing to the untouched glass, “that’s pretty good gin.”
“I’m sure it is,” Brock said, paying the waiter, “but I had hepatitis.”
“Delta?”
“No.”
“North?”
“Yeah,” Brock said whimsically, “way north.”
“What unit were you with?”
“None.”
“Rangers, eh?” the Captain persisted.
“Sort of.” The juke box started blaring. Annoyed, Brock looked over his shoulder.
“Were you an LRRP?”
“No,” Brock said. “We worked too far north for that.” He reached into his shirt pocket for a cigarette, and the Captain leaned over the table to light it for him.
“Yes, that’s quite an array of ribbons,” the Captain said.
“Let’s talk about you,” Brock said.
“I was an FO for the 25th.”
“Tracks?”
“Yeah.”
“Fat. That’s real fat.”
“Sometimes,” the Captain said.
“At least you always have enough water. How many gallons does each one of those damn things carry?”
“Thirty...sometimes fifty,” the Captain said, grabbing his leg to help straighten it.
“You know,” Brock said, “I can remember once, getting back below the DMZ—you get real freaky after you’ve been out a while—and the first Americans we ran into coming out of the DMZ were a track squadron, a couple of APC’s, and a track. I just couldn’t believe how much water they had. I mean, I just stood there and couldn’t believe it. We’d been chewing bamboo shoots for almost a week, and before that, for two weeks, we’d been drinking anything—rain water, river shit, stuff right out of the paddies. And then we came out, and the first thing I saw was these guys standing by their damn tracks spilling water all over. I could have killed them,” he said solemnly; “I swear to God I would have, too, if my men hadn’t...”
“I didn’t know we had units up there in North Vietnam.”
“We do,” Brock said.
“Hmmm....” The Captain looked unconvinced.
“You think the whole fucken war is fought with APC’s and tanks?”
“No. I just didn’t think we had ground units working up there. I figured the photograph planes took care of that.”
“We’re there,” Brock said coldly, signaling the waiter again.
“How long were you up there?” the Captain asked.
“A long time.”
“A year?”
“We’d go up on missions.”
The Captain waited for him to go on, but Brock just sat there thoughtfully, pushing the ashtray around. The room was filling up. Despite the crowd, it was not a very loud place. Most of the men were just standing around talking or drinking quietly by themselves. A few were leaning awkwardly on their crutches. Three or four were still in shoulder casts and arm braces, while others were wearing surgical packs.
“How did you get into it?”
“Happened. I majored in Chinese in college, and somebody found out. They’re very good at that—must have a line on everybody. Anyway, they called me at the beginning of my senior year. I said no, but a year later my brother was killed in Nam and I said yes.”
“And they sent you to Nam?” the Captain asked, pointing to the Airborne cap on the table.
“No.” Brock was about to go on when a tray of dishes crashed behind him. He jumped in his chair and turned sharply, tensed, his face hard in the dim light. He was almost on his feet before he caught himself. Disgusted, he settled back in his seat. His hand shook as he reached for another cigarette.
The captain slid his lighter across the table. “You were saying you didn’t go to Nam.”
“Do you know anything about the Special Forces?” Brock asked. “I was with an SMT group—Special Mission Team. After jump school and Ranger training, my team was sent to Malaysia—the Royal British Jungle Tracking School there. They’d send us out in that jungle and then capture us and beat us up and then send us out again. I thought we were tough, too—Airborne, Ranger training, Special Forces school—but they knew how to live in the jungle, how to use it. For Christ’s sake, they even liked it.” He picked up the captain’s lighter and turned it over and over in his hand. “That’s what we learned, all six of us—how to live there, like it was home.”
“Can I sit down?”
The Captain looked up over his shoulder at the trooper. “Sure,” he said, motioning to the chair beside him.
It took the soldier a little while to lower himself into the seat. “Sorry,” he said. “I can’t bend too well yet. Round sort of bounced off my backbone. At least that’s what the surgeon said.”
“You’re lucky,” Brock said. “Since the bombing halt, the VC and NVA have been moving tons of new weapons into the South. They’re all carrying brand new chicon Soviet block weapons now, AK’s, Simonov carbines, RP-46’s, RPD light machine guns. You were really lucky. You must have got hit with an old FN or carbine. A round from one of their new weapons would’ve broken you in two. Sure it wasn’t a frag?”
“I don’t know,” the trooper said. “It was almost dark. Nearly everyone in my platoon was killed.” Brock, about to interrupt, stopped himself. “It could have been a frag; hell, it could have been a piece of an A-bomb for all I know. God knows there was enough shit going off.”
“How come you all got killed?” Brock asked quickly.
“We got caught.”
“Nobody gets caught.”
“We did.”
“You don’t get caught,” Brock repeated. “You just fuck up.”
“We didn’t fuck up,” the trooper said stubbornly, shifting his weight in the chair, “we got caught.”
“It’s all the same.”
“Look!” He stared angrily at Brock, then turned to the Captain, “We were coming back through an area the ARVN’s had just swept. We were almost home. They let the point and the slack through and got the rest of us boxed in. Then they popped their claymores. It didn’t matter where we moved, they had us. Everybody was hit or dead in the first thirty seconds.” He turned back to Brock. “You know, we didn’t try to get ambushed.”
“Nobody does,” Brock said, looking at his watch.
“Wait a minute,” the Captain said, “that’s not really fair.”
“Fair?” Brock looked amused. “No,” he said, “I guess it’s not. How were you moving, soldier?”
“What do you mean?”
“Were you in a traveling overwatch, in column, squads flanking? Were you coming back through one of the ways you had gone out?”
“Column.”
“And you were almost home?”
The trooper nodded. A few fellows from the nearby tables had gathered around to listen.
“We weren’t cherries, man,” the trooper said drily. “They’d have had anyone. There was no way out. It was an X ambush. Once you’re in it—you’re in it.” He looked at Brock’s ribbons. “You must know that.”
“There is only one way to move through the jungle,” Brock said. “The point takes everything out in front of him, the whole 180 degrees, not the overhead, just eye
level, and below. The slack takes the left overhead and the 90 degrees to his right. The third man takes the left overhead and the 90 degrees to his left. The fourth man takes the area to his side and the overhead to his right. The fifth, the area to his side and the overheads. The last man covers the rear and, if he has to, cleans the track. And,” he went on slowly, almost pedantically, “you walk carefully, at a British slow march, putting your foot down slowly, stopping every five or ten meters. I know,” he said, stopping the interruption. “But that’s the way it has to be done or you get caught. Even...” he went on slowly, looking across at the trooper, “even if you don’t want to. You get a feeling then, when you move like that—a rhythm. You know when there’s something up there, when something is wrong. Little sounds, mostly.”
“Did you rotate points?” asked a patient who was wearing Airborne and Ranger patches on his uniform.
Brock looked up but seemed reluctant to go on.
“Did you rotate points?” the Ranger asked again, a bit louder. The conversation at the surrounding tables stopped.
“No,” Brock said.
“I’m sorry, Lieutenant,” the soldier said, “you’ll have to speak louder, I got my ears fucked up, too.”
“No,” Brock said louder. “But we never left him alone out there, either. When our point saw something and knew he’d been seen, he’d fall backwards, firing off single rounds. The slack, even if he didn’t see anybody, would step forward and spray the same area with automatic fire. By the time he was out of ammunition, the point had his weapon reloaded and was firing again. Most of the time, though, we saw ’em first and just moved away.”
“But companies aren’t six men,” someone volunteered. He was wearing a shoulder cast, with his fingers in steel traction.
“The New Zealanders do fine,” Brock said, “and so do the Australians.”
“They’re all volunteers.”
Brock looked coldly at the soldier who had just spoken. “Tell that to the draftees who get killed,” he said. “I’m sure they’d love to know.”
365 Days Page 18
