Targets: A Vietnam War Novel

by Don McQuinn

  “I know how old you are,” Hong said. “I was with your mother when you were born and I have been here since. I have not seen you happy for a long time. The American amuses you. I have seen it. A woman your age—”

  “A woman my age is fortunate to have the affection of one so wise,” Ly interrupted. She walked to Hong and took her hand in her own. “I am grateful. But you must understand. He is not a toy I can play games with.”

  Hong nodded and disengaged her hand. She walked away, her gaze on the rug, weariness blotting its bright colors from her sight.

  “That is what I feared,” she said under her breath.

  Chapter 7

  In the crowded off-white cubicle that was their office space, Taylor and Duc relaxed, sipping jasmine tea the American had brewed for the occasion.

  “To the first morning of our own operation.” Taylor raised his glass in a toast. “I’m grateful to you. You’d have been doing something all this time if you hadn’t been my nurse.”

  Duc nodded, answering in his own language. “It is necessary. There are many things you must know. If you did not learn Vietnamese so quickly—” He grimaced.

  As he spoke, he watched Taylor. Colonel Loc always said a white man’s face was a map of his mind. It was true. In Taylor’s he could see embarrassment at the compliment, pride, and anticipation. Duc wondered if he liked Taylor. It was difficult to dislike the Americans. They were so earnest. A quick shudder ran up his back as he remembered the first weeks with Taylor, his insistence they speak only Vietnamese. It seemed they spent half their time silent while his huge hands thumbed an English-Vietnamese dictionary to tatters. Then, suddenly, he began to speak with authority.

  Colonel Loc had smiled when Duc reported the rapid improvement, the tight-lipped expression that could mean anything and always made Duc’s armpits trickle.

  “It is not a trick,” Loc had said. “I have spoken to Dai Ta Winter about this man. He has a mind that grasps languages. It is curious he never mentions other instruction, and our tones come quickly to his tongue. You will learn what other languages he speaks.”

  Duc masked distaste with a vigorous nod. The Americans reported on him and all the other Vietnamese in the Unit, just as the Vietnamese reported on them, but it was unpleasant.

  The memory of the conversation jogged his mind. He was also supposed to speak to Taylor about staying in Vietnam longer than his normal one year.

  He decided to be direct, as the Americans were. “Will you extend to stay in Vietnam?”

  Taylor pulled up from his glass in surprise. “Me? No fucking way, buddy. I have to get back to the States and start making contacts for a job when I retire.”

  “I understand.” Duc carefully stifled boiling resentment. The one thing all Americans did that truly angered him was to treat the war as an unpleasant incident.

  My earliest memories are the sounds of war and the sight of armed men. To me, peace is an incident.

  He retreated to the present. “Do you have any thoughts on the plan we must present tomorrow?”

  Taylor smiled, untouched by complications. “I haven’t thought about much else. Let’s really sell them the truckload of ammunition.”

  “You joke?” Duc sputtered.

  “I hope to Christ I can get a reaction like that from your ice-cube up topside. I’d give plenty for that.”

  Duc frowned. “You better hope he laughs.”

  “I’m not kidding. I mean it.”

  “Crazy,” Duc muttered. “Some small thing, OK. Fool them and arrest them, OK. But trucks? Real ammos?” In his anxiety to be clear, he switched to English.

  Taylor said, “I think we can make it work. I haven’t done all my homework. Let’s get the morning moving and go talk to Kimble.”

  Shrugging, Duc reached for his hat and followed, the irritable clump of his stride inaudible over the untroubled steps of his partner.

  Despite the things on his mind, Taylor found himself remembering the morning Harker drove up to this place with him. It had been General Officers’ quarters at one time and stood isolated from the other buildings in the ARVN compound, its singularity emphasized by a seven-foot-high cement wall surrounding the acre it stood on. The wall was painted a dusty pale rose, the building a tepid yellow—colors that struggled to lift moderation into an environment of tropical vitality.

  The building was regularly pierced by tall narrow windows every few feet. In another time they would have been thrown wide open, the lower ones protected by the overhang of the second floor balcony and those upstairs by awnings that would jut beyond the roof line. Jalousied shutters would have been hooked back and a breeze would have caressed the people and things inside with humid smells hammered from the ground by the sun. Now most of the shutters were closed. Metal-rumped air-conditioners poked through carefully cut holes.

  Geometrically centered in the area allowed, the building was like a handsome woman grown old and denied grace, eyes shut to the world, constantly exhaling a breath tainted by smoke and aging insides.

  All American personnel had living spaces on the second floor of the main building, where Loc and Winter had their offices. The first floor was used for working spaces. One large room, set aside for relaxation, contained a television, movie facilities, and reading material ranging from Playboy to two Bibles and a hymnbook.

  A series of three identical small houses squatted a few feet inside the east wall, quarters for the Vietnamese enlisted personnel. Arranged by Colonel Loc, they were an unheard-of privilege.

  Taylor and Duc turned the other way, toward a single cement block building. It was called, simply, the shop.

  As they entered it, a tall, thin Lieutenant turned from a workbench. His sandy hair, cut short, was a furry crown on an otherwise angular set of features. The lips were thin, the eyes intensely bright despite their pale color, a washed-out blue. He blinked rapidly behind steel-rimmed glasses, vision adjusting from staring at the small electronic device in his hand. The walls were all given over to shelf space, full of a jumble of technological bits and pieces. A solitary desk filled a hole between some of them, its surface matted with paperwork. A huge calendar hung from a tack in one of the boards, convenient to the swivel chair. The smell of burnt ozone completed the picture of a scientific monk’s cell.

  “Hi,” the Lieutenant said. “You gentlemen come over to hide out for a while?” He gestured at two straight-backed chairs. “It’s always quiet in here. Everybody’s afraid I’ll electrocute ‘em. Want some coffee?”

  Taylor said, “No, thanks, and we’re not on the run. We’ve got a chore and I think you can help.”

  Lieutenant Kimble said, “We aim to please. Kimble’s Toy Shop. Beepers, blasters, and other odd shit, made to order. Warren Kimble, at your service—Supply Officer, technician, and general good fellow. Name your poison, gents.”

  The angular body folded into the swivel chair and he grinned at the two visitors sitting across from him.

  He hoped his welcome hid the apprehension settling in his bowels.

  Don’t let them want anything explosive. But it will be, I know it. I’ve listened to you, Taylor—you and your rice-burning shadow. You’ve been pawing the ground. I can smell death on you.

  Lenore’s face flashed into his mind, her tears salty on his lips as he kissed her. Lenore, who cried when he left for Fort Benning.

  And when she discovered she was pregnant five hundred miles from her mother in Philadelphia.

  And who cried alone nights when he had the duty.

  And when he left to go overseas.

  So many reasons for so many tears.

  She wrote every day and sent a tape at least once a week in her desperate loneliness. On the tapes she tried to stop the recorder before the sobs broke through. Sometimes she was slow, though, and he heard her first sniffles. His throat constricted as he fought the urge to shout at the two men before him and tell them, make them understand that war was pain, longing, fear.

  “—a small, powerful t
ransmitter,” Taylor was saying.

  Embarrassment stung Kimble. “I’m sorry, Major. I was thinking about this thing.” He gestured with the equipment in his hand. “What was it you had in mind?”

  “I want to know if you can build me a transmitter, battery powered, that’ll fit inside an 81mm mortar round, and what sort of range you can give me.”

  Kimble smiled. “How much range do you need?”

  “Like everything else—all I can get. The dummy round’ll be in a case, and the case’ll be inside a stack of cases. Sooner or later, they’ll all end up underground. I want to be able to follow them wherever they go.”

  Duc squinted at Taylor, understanding.

  Kimble concentrated, eyes shut. “Let me use an interrupted signal and I think I can give you a safe guess of a thousand meters while they’re above ground. I can’t promise anything once they’re buried. Too many unknowns.”

  “How long to make ten? Different frequencies.”

  “Ten?” He opened his eyes, surprised.

  Taylor nodded.

  “A couple of weeks, give or take.”

  “Good enough.”

  Kimble’s joints felt as though they’d been frozen and were pleasantly warming.

  “I’ll need some rigged rounds, too, and some grenades,” Taylor added. The joints began to ache again.

  “I want some grenades with instantaneous pull fuses. I want others with delay fuses that’ll pop, say, two weeks after they’re put in the grenades. On the mortar rounds, I want some that go off when the round drops on the firing pin and some of the self-destruct fuses for them, too. I’ll need at least twenty doctored 81mm rounds—ten with one fuse and ten with the other. Same deal on the grenades. Can you handle that in the same two weeks?”

  The joints were throbbing now. “I’ll need help.”

  “Duc and I can help.” Taylor turned to the Vietnamese. “You see what I’m building up to?”

  Duc said, “Maybe work. What about M-16 ammo. Very valuable.”

  “Is that so? Then we’ll fix some.” He faced Kimble again. “You can get C-3, can’t you?”

  Kimble nodded, wanting to deny the question and not knowing how. Taylor spoke to Duc, pantomiming in his intensity. “We’ll need about five pounds. We pull the bullets, empty the powder and reload with C-3. Then we mix the bad rounds with the good ones. No one can tell the difference until he squeezes the trigger. He knows something’s wrong when he sees the bolt coming at his eye.”

  Duc laughed and shook Taylor’s bicep. “You got some good ideas. Very dirty. Maybe we make VC glad you only live here one year.”

  They stood up to leave. “I’ve got to get this scam approved. If they buy it, I’ll let you know, so you can get started,” Taylor said to Kimble.

  Kimble mumbled at their departing backs. Duc’s remark about one year reminded him he hadn’t marked off the day on his calendar. Picking up a felt-tip pen, he started to fill in the square before noticing he was using black. He’d used black yesterday. He rummaged until he found a green pen—it’d been several days since he used green—and colored the box before looking hungrily at the next date. The small handwritten number under it said tomorrow he’d have two-hundred-seven left. He underlined the numbers.

  He should have been anticipating his R&R in Hawaii by this time. Lenore’s folks said they’d take care of Debbie. Mrs. Hocker had folded her flabby arms and sighed the way she always did and said, “Well, if it means so much to Warren he’s willing to spend all your money just to sit on the beach, we’ll baby-sit. We can get a cab to the doctor’s or the hospital if anything goes wrong. It won’t be no worse than taking care of her when you was ‘way down there in Carolina and Lenore was working. At least the poor little thing’s older now.”

  Lenore had killed the R&R, insisting they’d need the money when he got out. It’d really pissed him.

  “I’ll be going to work as soon as I get home,” he’d explained. “You’ll be working while I’m gone. We’ll have plenty of money. What’s the sense of having money if you don’t use it?”

  Shouting. “I can’t just take off whenever I feel like it. If I tell them I want time off they might fire me. And what if there’s a raise coming? You think they’ll give it to me if they think I might just take off any old time?” He could still see her determined little face, the chin jutting out so defiantly.

  His love for her then had wrenched his heart. She was willing to fight even him to make theirs a solid marriage. Despite knowing her practicality was right, the thought of a year’s separation had driven him to further argument.

  “No bank can be that narrow-minded. It’s not a goddam jail, after all. Even bankers take vacations.”

  Mrs. Hocker had snuffled disgust and clumped her coffee cup on the table.

  “Warren,” she’d said, “when Lenore asked to live here so’s you two could save money, I worried about it. I don’t mind her being here when you’re away. Glad to help. So’s her father.” She paused momentarily, as if a wandering memory had surfaced and drawn back again.

  “I worry about how the Army’ll change you. We try to understand you young people, but we can’t change our ways overnight. I’ve been worried you’d bring back bad language,” her eyes sneaking to Lenore and back again, “and other things. I won’t put up with it in the house.” Before he could apologize, Lenore defended him.

  “It was a slip, Mama.” She’d patted Mama’s hand. “We know you try to understand. It’s not like he wanted to be in the Army, anyway.”

  Mrs. Hocker had peered at Warren suspiciously. “He never even tried that conscientious objection thing. If he’d worked harder in school he could have stayed longer, like the Morgan boy is doing. And those boys going to Canada aren’t risking their lives or leaving their families.”

  Both women had poised for an answer, their eyes reminding Kimble of birds’. It had made him uncomfortable.

  “I’m doing what I think’s best,” he’d said lamely. “I don’t like it. I think it’s best.”

  Lenore had been disappointed. Mrs. Hocker smiled.

  He’d lost both arguments and couldn’t even remember how the second one had started. He said he’d be leaving early in the morning to get back to the base. Lenore left with him to go upstairs, her mother scowling as she cleared off the table. The stairs were old and they sighed under the burden of each step. The thought of the unimaginable year away from her pounded in Kimble’s head and in the darkness of their room the warm woman-scented night settled in his loins and expanded. He took her in his arms.

  She buried her face in his chest. “Oh, Warren, I’ve been so upset I forgot to take my pill. I just couldn’t, anyway. My head is spinning.”

  Kimble jerked himself away from the past and the calendar in the same movement. There’d be plenty of time to think about that sort of thing tonight. All it could get him now would be a hard-on and it’d be just his luck someone would come in and see it.

  He looked to the notes on his conversation with Taylor and Duc. The smile slowly returned to his face. It was simple stuff, really. With luck, he’d farm the ammunition out to some engineers or an ordnance outfit. He’d handle the transmitters. It’d pass the time. Besides, they didn’t explode. His stomach rumbled at the thought of explosives. It was bad enough putting together charges for that idiot Harker, but rigging ammo—ugh!

  His hands and eyes automatically continued the work of constructing the electronic timer on his workbench. His mind refused to consider anything but the explosives and he cursed the companion who’d sold him on ordnance school.

  It had tied in so well with his knowledge of electronics and the immediate follow-up request for the Defense Against Sound Equipment course at Fort Holabird had been an inspiration. It meant more time in the States and it was only a couple of hours from Philly.

  Lenore was fascinated by the cloak-and-dagger hints that surrounded the classes. When he confided he hoped to be assigned to a security unit in the States, she was ecstatic.<
br />
  “You won’t have to go to Vietnam?”

  “I hope not.”

  “What’ll you be doing? Where’ll you go?”

  “We run sweeps and stuff to make sure our phones and offices aren’t bugged, that’s all.”

  “But what if you find something? Then what?”

  “We report it. Someone else decides what to do about it.”

  “You don’t put any bugs anywhere, do you?”

  “No, all I do is look for other people’s.”

  “But the papers and TV always say the Army is spying on the protesters and the black-power niggers and all. Don’t you do that?”

  “Not me.”

  “Would they keep you near home?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Oh, me too.”

  Then came the orders for Vietnam. The next weeks had been a nightmare of applications for other schools and trying to comfort Lenore.

  He thought again of the stupid sonofabitch with his ideas about an ordnance course. His finger brushed the hot soldering iron and he cursed it and his former friend simultaneously.

  That was what happened when you didn’t think things through, when you listened to other people.

  He sucked on the burned finger, almost sickened by the already hard patch of skin against his tongue.

  That’s exactly the way it goes, damn it. You start taking advice or let yourself get distracted and you end up burned every goddam time. Make your own decisions, like about Lenore. If I’d listened to the rest of them about that, I’d have missed out on the only true beauty in my life.

  Lenore.

  His groin began to ache again.

  Chapter 8

  The sharp knock jerked Taylor upright from his paperwork. Corporal Ordway met his questioning stare impassively, confident that pressed utilities and freshly barbered hair were talismans against aggravated officers. His short, heavy legs spread in a sharp parade rest stance, supporting a thick torso that tapered from wide shoulders to a narrow waist. The face was blunt, pugnosed, tough.