by Tracy Kidder
“I’ll shoot you first, asshole,” I said to him, but under my breath and after he’d gone and I was sitting on my cot under a bare lightbulb, staring out toward the dark. The light reached only a few yards beyond my rusty screen walls. I couldn’t see out, but anyone could stand in the patch of tall grass near my hootch and see my lighted silhouette.
GETTING HIT
MY SCREEN DOOR RATTLED AND THE VOICE OF THE COMMO OP ON the graveyard shift called in, “Five o’clock, Lieutenant.” In the half dark, I stumbled through the weeds to my piss tube, a metal pipe inserted in the ground, then trudged up a little barren hill, like a vacant lot between two tenements, to the front stoop of the operations hootch. It had a shaky-legged table at one corner, facing east toward the South China Sea. I shaved there in cold water that I poured from a jerrican, mirror laid flat on the table, gray sky growing turquoise around my face in the mirror. In other outfits in the base camp, early-rising men were pouring diesel fuel onto the shit in latrines and setting the concoctions on fire. The scent came by on the morning wind. When I put my glasses back on and I looked up, across Highway One and the sandy coastal plain, the sun was imminent, a dawn like I’d never seen before—like a lacquered Chinese box, orange and yellow on smoky black, rising out of the sea.
If you have a bad feeling inside you, beautiful scenery often makes it worse. Even now, thirty-seven years later, tropical mornings are polluted with uneasiness for me. The commo op sat at the Teletype in a room at the rear of the building, out of sight. The rest of the men were asleep in their hootches. In the detachment I’d inherited, there was no such thing as reveille. The officer had to get up early to brief the brigade commander, while most of the enlisted men slept as late as they liked. There was some comfort for me in this arrangement. In my father’s house, it was an unspoken truth that if you got up before dawn you’d already won half of your day’s moral battles, and the converse also applied. Anyway, it didn’t seem wise to me, just then, to try to change any local customs.
In the daylight, the men still asleep, Pancho’s nighttime visit lost some of its menace. I was afraid not of what they might do to me but of what they seemed to think of me. Evidently, there was a war within a war out here, at least around my detachment, a war between enlisted men and officers. I still had no doubt that, philosophically, I should choose the side of the enlisted men. That was what my friends Sam and David, and no doubt Mary Anne, would have me do. I’m sure the choice wouldn’t have seemed so clear if I’d been surrounded by other officers. As it was, I was mostly alone, one officer among a bunch of young EM who didn’t like being bossed around by a lieutenant, and were no longer used to it. And I didn’t like being alone—alone in their company like a ghost, or in my hootch, alone with the sound of my own mind. I’d tell Sergeant Spikes to put Rosenthal back on the duty rosters as soon as I got back from the morning briefing.
I picked up our portable map, prepared the previous night by Rosenthal, strapped on my gun belt—if you carried our information out of operations you were supposed to travel armed—and climbed into the jeep alone, propping the map on the seat beside me, a flap of brown paper marked SECRET CODEWORD covering the map.
It felt a little like escaping as I drove away in the early morning. I turned left on the oiled dirt road and drove past the compound of H-Troop, the prisoner-of-war cage, the helicopter pad, then up a hill past the tactical operations center (the TOC), past the colonel’s house trailer, now lodged in a sandbagged hole in the ground. I’d overheard some grumbling about this, that the commander was displaying too much regard for his own safety.
Brigade headquarters was another plywood building on stilts, but better made than most, with a coat of gray paint that always looked fresh. It reminded me of the unadorned buildings at old-money yacht clubs on Long Island. I was nearly late. I hurried up the path, the unwieldy secret code word map in one hand, my steel pot in the other. The helmet was so heavy it gave me a headache. “Good morning, sir,” I said to a major, who was walking the other way down the path.
“Here comes the spot man,” he said.
I smiled.
Then he said, “Hold it, Lieutenant,” and added, as if speaking to a child, “All right. Put on your helmet.”
I put on my helmet.
“Now put that thing in your left hand.”
I obeyed, trying to keep the morning wind from lifting the flap of paper and unveiling the secrets on the map. Even the code word written across the bottom was secret, and this major was not among the few entitled to look at it. No doubt that was the problem.
“All right, now salute me.”
He returned my salute. “Now isn’t that better?” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
I hurried on, another day of hating the Army well under way.
The briefing started at 0600 sharp, and no one came late. All but a few who attended were officers. All of them outranked me. I sat on a bench in the back of the room with my map leaning against my knees. Now and then I listened to the briefings that preceded mine. Now and then my thoughts drifted away. Now and then I turned field grade officers around me, like that major, into barnyard animals. But I was always aware of Colonel Mahoney, seated in a canvas-backed chair up front. He was a full colonel, one step below general, a full-bull colonel. One wanted to know where he was, the way songbirds want to know the location of the local owl. This was only partly because of his status as lord and master of the place. He was short and dark-haired and the nattiest-looking man I thought I’d ever seen. On him, jungle fatigues looked like a tailored suit. He held a swagger stick in one hand, a stubby thing made of stainless steel, in fact a branding iron, with the first letter of his surname, M, forged in the circle of its business end.
One after the other, captains and majors walked up beside the map that stood at the front of the room and then came to the position of attention as they addressed Colonel Mahoney. One young captain who reported on air strikes always clicked the heels of his spit-shined jungle boots. “Sir!” each would say, with the pointer stick in his hand, and then would tell the colonel what had happened in his kingdom the previous day and night, what had actually happened and also, especially in the report from Artillery, what might have happened. “And here, sir, we fired seventy-three rounds of HE Quick, results thirty-two VC KIA.” I knew the terms by now. HE meant “high explosive” and Quick a fast-acting fuse; KIA stood for “killed in action”; VC I’d known all along. Every day Artillery reported dozens of rounds of high explosive and exploding white phosphorus, raining down on dots on the map, some of them dots that Rosenthal had made in grease pencil on our map, some onto spots unknown to me. How in the world could anyone know how many of the people we’d killed were Vietcong? To be fair, though, most reports sounded more honest: “One hundred fifty rounds of HE Quick here, sir. Results unknown.” Which to someone back home might have seemed worse—all those shells lobbed into the countryside, all that sudden heat and shrapnel tearing through trees and hootches and people who didn’t have guns.
Already I had begun to feel that indignation was of no use to anyone but me. I wasn’t certain, deep down, if what I felt was even indignation. I didn’t listen carefully to the briefings, but I would crane my neck to see how the colonel was responding. Flashes of his branding iron in the briefing room, well lighted now by the morning sun. A tap on the knee to the report of a firefight there on the map, of an air strike here. A slap into his open palm at the news of a cavalry assault. Sixty enemy troops mowed down in a rice paddy by the tanks and APCS of the First of the First. I had a view of Colonel Mahoney’s broad face as he turned to smile at his operations officer, his S-3. His voice rang out, “The First of the First. They kill vc.” Out in the audience, smiling faces turned to others. Was I smiling, too?
This all seemed like a board game. I would sit there, thinking: I don’t care about this, they all assume that I’m like them, if they only knew. But I always felt relieved when the colonel was happy, because his mood dictated t
he mood of the room. He grew emotional at reports of the brigade’s own losses. Although I knew it wasn’t fair of me to assume a true difference in his feelings, it looked as if his grief took two distinct forms, one for enlisted men, another for officers. News of the deaths of two of our own enlisted infantrymen—killed in action, never just KIA, the voice of the briefing officer lowered and solemn—and the branding iron fell to the colonel’s leg and his head bowed and the room went so still I could hear people breathing. But at the news of the death of a certain captain, perhaps a favorite of his, he cried out, “No!” The swagger stick coming down hard on his leg, a glimpse of his face, of his small body twisting in his chair, and a longer silence in the briefing room, during which I don’t think I could even hear breathing, until at last the colonel said gruffly to the briefing officer, “All right. Get on with it.”
Suppose, as was sometimes reported, a private in one of the infantry units out in the field had shot himself in the foot with his own pistol. The swagger stick slammed hard into the palm of the colonel’s hand, once, twice, a third time. Cold fury, the colonel turning to one of his aides. Clearly, self-inflicted wounds for the purpose of getting out of the field would not go unpunished. I didn’t hear of this often, but when I did it woke me up, and reminded me again that I never wanted to be an infantry platoon leader. The life of a grunt must be even worse than I had imagined if to get clear of it a person would aim at his own foot and pull the trigger, actually pull the trigger, and blow off his own toes. Or maybe the grunt had gotten a Dear John letter.
I hadn’t gotten one of those, but every day on which I didn’t get a letter of any kind, I imagined that the next day would bring the one I dreaded.
The officer briefing the colonel began to tell a story. Stripped of its military jargon, it went like this: A platoon had entered a hootch out in some ville and found a VC soldier—had to be VC, because there was a rifle standing in a corner of the room—having sex on a bed with a woman. “Two VC KIA, sir,” the briefing officer said to the colonel, ending the story. I couldn’t see the colonel’s face. I wasn’t sure he laughed, but everyone else in the room did. Afternoon naps in my hootch and furious masturbation, as the strains of Simon and Garfunkel songs wafted through my screen walls from the tape deck of the commo op on duty: This time I knew exactly how I felt. Maybe that VC wasn’t just a soldier getting his rocks off. Maybe he was in love. For a moment, I thought I knew war. And I knew whose fault it was.
I glanced at the field grade officer who was sitting beside me. He had been chewing a toothpick, eating an apple, and smoking a cigarette all at one time, an overweight man with a face like a pig’s. Now he was shaking with laughter. Yes, he looked just like a pig. Maybe he’d choke on his toothpick.
When the main briefing ended, the room emptied. Only Colonel Mahoney and his S-3 and his intelligence officer, his S-2, remained. I stood at the front of the room with my map, waiting to uncover it until the screen door closed behind the last of the officers who weren’t cleared to see these secrets.
“Good morning, sir.”
“Good morning, Lieutenant.” Colonel Mahoney leaned forward, peering at my map. I’m sure he was fascinated by this special view, this special intelligence view, of his area of operations, his brigade’s AO, and I sensed that he thought of me as especially intelligent because the news I brought him, locations of enemy radios, was so highly classified. But there was no lingering over my map, because whatever time my briefing consumed kept Colonel Mahoney from what everyone in the base camp knew to be the source of his greatest pleasure, which was flying over his infantry in his helicopter. Later, when the rains came and he was sometimes grounded for a day or more, I would hear that he had temper tantrums inside the TOC, that he’d throw chairs around the place. His temperament seemed to resemble mine; he was disposed to share his feelings. But the weather was still good for helicopters, and I imagined he was looking forward to getting airborne. I finished showing him the previous day’s locations of enemy radios. He smiled and said, “Thank you, Lieutenant,” then hurried away.
I had one more official duty, an unpleasant chore. For some reason, the brigade’s executive officer, the second in command, lacked a top-secret crypto security clearance. Papers had probably been misplaced. Maybe he had a foreign-born wife. More likely, he had chewed out the wrong clerk-typist. At any rate, he couldn’t sit in on the briefing I delivered to Colonel Mahoney. So I gave the executive officer his own sanitized briefing afterward, in his office at headquarters. I’d show him the map and point at the dots on it, one after the other, saying, “And here, sir, is an enemy unit.”
“Which one?” he said, smiling up at me from his chair.
“I’m sorry, sir. I’m not allowed to say.”
I’d felt sorry for him two weeks before, even tempted to swear him to a personal pact of secrecy, then tell him all. But why should I trust him? Why give him special power over me? One heard many stories. I didn’t believe the one some of my men told, that during the last monsoon a thirty-foot-long snake had slithered past their hootches. I didn’t believe the story about the island where soldiers got sent for perpetual quarantine after they came down with incurable venereal diseases. Or the story about the ASA lieutenant who was punished for some offense by being made an infantry platoon leader. Or the story I’d heard from a black enlisted man from H-Troop, while shooting baskets with him—that he himself had done time at Long Binh Jail outside Saigon and was kept inside a steel drawer for a month. I didn’t ask him what he’d done. It didn’t matter, not around a corner in my mind where these things lodged, where I was like the child who, when told that witches aren’t real, explains, “I know. That’s why I’m afraid of them.”
By now the executive officer’s smiles looked suspiciously like sneers to me. He was the one who had dubbed me the “spot man.” He’d get his sanitized briefing and no more from me. No way I’d take a chance on his behalf.
On the way out of the building, I passed by the open door of the personnel office and heard a loud voice saying, “I’m tired, man.” I glanced in. A very tall black man, a private, no doubt a grunt, was leaning over the desk and speaking to a sergeant. The enormous grunt didn’t look tired to me. He looked lithe and muscular. He must have been right on the edge of being too tall to be drafted. “I’m tired of wearin’ a green suit!” he said.
I didn’t hear any more. I headed back to my detachment with my map. I never saw the very tall black soldier again in the flesh, but he incubated in my memory. By the time I started my novel, he had become “the largest man in the Battalion, maybe the largest in the whole Division.” A man who in sunlight “gleamed like a black jewel.” In the novel, he is beautiful and frightening: “Black-fire, dark-pink coals were the lips that framed the shining teeth, they threw shape around the sounds, the wind that rushed between their parting.… The strength of his voice and the shine of his body and the noonday sun on his pure black skin made him: Black Gorgeous, Gift-Giver, Emperor, Warrior Prince.”
I’m not entirely sure where I got the name. At a military airport somewhere, I heard a voice on the PA system calling for a soldier with the first name of Ivory. I think Fields was the surname of the man I shot baskets with, the one who told me about Long Binh Jail.
WHEN I GOT BACK TO MY DETACHMENT, I WENT LOOKING FOR SPIKES RIGHT away. He nodded when I told him we should put Rosenthal back on the duty rosters. For the next week or two, I kept an eye out for Pancho. But now he hardly seemed to notice me. He’d dealt with me and now had other things to do. That was how it seemed. Unlike the others, he didn’t watch much TV, and he wasn’t very interested in fiddling with stereo equipment. When I caught glimpses of him, he seemed to be moving around to interior music, in his gold-framed dark glasses, sometimes carrying a machete as he prowled through the little wooded hill beside the operations building. Ask him what he was doing and he’d say, “Pheebing around.” Occasionally, when I joined Spikes in the drinking hootch, Pancho would arrive and, after a few beers,
make a declarative statement, about “lifin’ beggin’ pukes.” Or he’d say, speaking of the Vietnamese in a nearby village or of a fellow enlisted man who had been acting strangely of late, “Shaky.” Then he’d make a laugh that sounded like his definition of the word, genuinely mirthful and rather sinister all at once.
Around this time I wrote to Sam complaining about the Army and the way the higher-ups treated enlisted men. I, however, was getting along well with my men. “I treat my men like men.”
There was an important advantage in having the ultimate judges of my performance situated back in the United States, back in the World, as my men said. I got to provide all the evidence. But a couple of weeks later an answering letter came from Sam, a consoling letter, except that he added in a postscript, “Please do not take so much pride in the fact that you treat your men like men, for they are … men. Indeed.” The unfairness of this rankled. It’s bad enough to be misunderstood when you have tried to describe something you’ve actually been doing. It’s a lot worse to be admonished for fabricated deeds. By the time the letter arrived, though, the composition of my detachment had begun to change and Sam’s letter seemed a little out of date.
More than half the men I had inherited were scheduled to leave within six weeks or so of my arrival. In the morning I’d hear them in their hootches, making the announcements.
“Short! I am fuckin’ short! Eat your heart out, new guys.”
Some men would spend the entire day spreading the news. If you asked them to do something, they’d say, “I’m too short for that shit.” If you simply said hello, they’d say, “Five days and counting.”
I’d hear this and think, Three hundred four days and counting. (Against all advice, I’d begun to cross days off my calendar and add up the ones that remained to my DEROS.) I’d feel a pang, but I wasn’t sorry to see most of those disaffected old-timers leave. Certainly not the one with the master’s degree and the contemptuous smile who had been in the jeep when I put diesel fuel in it. I forgot his name a few days after he left, and the names and even the faces of a couple of others almost as soon as they were gone. I had mixed feelings about one, a young Spec. 4 who, improbably enough, had come across a paperback copy of The Brothers Karamazov and had wrestled with it to its end. I don’t think he’d finished high school, but I never met a more ardent reader. Periodically, he’d yell, “I’m not readin’ this fuckin’ book anymore!” and hurl it across his hootch. Half an hour later he’d be on his hands and knees reassembling the scattered pages. I hadn’t read the novel myself but a year or so before had experienced Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment—and with strong feelings, too. I thought we had a bond.