by Robin Moore
“We won’t have kids until Lynette finishes college.”
Sergeant Tompkins glanced over his shoulder. “Christ, look at ’em.” Forty men spread back more than three hundred meters. “Damn, they do get tired after a day of walking. They ought to eat better or take vitamins or something. We’d better wait on ’em.”
Stebbins studied the terrain warily. They had reached the edge of the rice fields and were walking parallel to a muddy canal on their right and thick jungle grew up to within a few feet of them on the left. Three clicks straight ahead, on this side of the canal, was the camp.
Stebbins and Tompkins held up, calling to the point man ahead to stop. Stebbins shifted his AR-15 to a ready position. He eyed the three-man mortar crew directly in front of him. The pattern fitted most of the ambushes he had been caught in. Almost back to safety, end of the day, men tired. He was just about to say something to Tompkins when a seemingly unarmed, black-clad figure walked out of the scrub woods on the other side of the canal. The point man called a challenge. The Viet on the other side yelled back and disappeared into the woods just as a hail of fire poured across the canal at them.
Even as Stebbins hit the ground he saw the point man go down, blood spurting out of his neck. Glancing to the rear Stebbins saw what he expected, the whole platoon had broken and run for cover instead of moving forward to add their fire power to that of the men directly in the killing zone. The mortar men dropped their weapon and ammunition and crawled for the jungle.
. In Vietnamese Stebbins shouted at the mortar crew, “Hold on to that weapon or I shoot you!”
The fire kept up from the far bank, raking the edge of the canal, cutting bits and pieces out of the edge of the jungle which shifted down on the men below.
Tompkins was returning fire with his AR-15, at the same time edging back into the jungle. Behind the dead point man, two strikers were firing back with sub-machine guns. The mortar men, more terrified of a wild-eyed Stebbins who alternately returned fire across the canal and turned his weapon in their direction, retrieved the mortar and ammunition and crawled back into the jungle’s edge. Stebbins eased himself back also keeping down. The VC gunners across the canal were better than average, pouring their rounds in low. As soon as Stebbins, crawling backwards, snapping magazines into his AR-15 and firing back at the ambush, reached the edge of the jungle he looked around for the mortar crew and spotted them lying flat behind their weapon. He made his way to the demoralized and ineffectual strikers and grabbed the base plate, propping it vertically against a tree. A green towel dangled from the belt of one of the mortar crew and Stebbins ripped it away, wrapping it around the mortar tube which he socketed into the base plate. The mortar was now aimed point-blank across the canal at the ambush. Tompkins, on the right flank, saw what Stebbins was attempting, but with that grazing fire coming across inches above his head he could only lie low and fire back.
The jungle shredded around him as Stebbins set the mortar for trigger fire and jammed the first round hard down into the tube. With the towel to protect him from the heat that would engulf the barrel after the first round, Stebbins eyeballed the tube at the fire emanating from the ambush. He snapped the firing pin. The round thundered across the canal exploding before Stebbins could ram a second into the tube. By the fourth round firing had ceased from across the canal and the base plate had almost bitten through the tree supporting it.
Stebbins took advantage of the cessation of fire from the ambush and looked for two white phosphorus rounds in the ammunition box. He slammed the two WP rounds across the canal. They hit and spread white-hot flame all over the ambush site. The heat was searing even on Stebbins’ side of the canal. Tompkins stood up and walked over to Stebbins.
“Jesus, Al, I’d forgotten what a wizard you are with a mortar.”
Stebbins grinned. “Like I said earlier, don’t never let the strikers with the mortars out of grabbing range.”
“Guess we’d better send a patrol across the canal to make a body count and photograph them,” Tompkins said matter-of-factly. “Captain Franklyn is kind of low on the kill board back at headquarters. This should help him.”
“Yeah,” Stebbins concurred. “Damn! That was close. Lynette nearly didn’t get to college. I got to do something about that.”
“You earned your combat pay today for the rest of your tour,” Tompkins praised.
“I wish the old man could give it to me on that basis,” Stebbins replied seriously.
“Hell you do, you’d miss the excitement,” Tompkins contradicted.
“No I wouldn’t. A man can go to the luck bank just so often and then he overdraws and that’s it. I’ve had a lot of luck on my three tours.”
“Where are you taking me, Al?” Lynette asked as they climbed the second flight of stairs in the humid, stale-smelling old apartment building in Cholon, the Chinese twin city to Saigon.
“Don’t ask so many questions,” Stebbins replied.
“I told you, I can not go alone to an apartment with you.”
“I want to show you a collection of books.” On the second floor, the third by American count, Stebbins shepherded Lynette down the hot hall and paused in front of a door. He produced a key and opened it, gently propelling a not too reluctant Lynette inside, closing the door behind them. Lynette drew a quick breath of pleased surprise. They were standing in the living room of a two-room apartment, air conditioned to cool, crisp comfort. There were tasteful prints of French impressionists and modem artists on the walls. The room was done in a light, pastel motif, the furniture light, seeming to float above the light-blue carpeted floor. There were two large bookcases against the walls containing books in French, English, Vietnamese, Chinese and other languages. Through the sitting room Lynette could see into the next chamber, dominated by the low double bed covered with a blue bedspread.
Stebbins watched Lynette as her eyes travelled about the room. “What do you think of the place?” he asked.
“It’s lovely. Whose is it?”
“Yours,” Stebbins announced.
Lynette shook her head hopelessly. “But I told you, Al, I can not do anything like this. I can not leave home unless I go a long, long way from Saigon. And I told you, I am a virtuous girl.” She turned toward the door. “Let’s go eat.”
“We’ve got a kitchen here. I went to the commissary and bought everything we need for supper.”
“Al, I am not going to stay with you. I love you but I am—”
“I know, you are a virtuous girl. Now listen to me, will you? I don’t want to steal your virtue. I want to marry you. I can get the papers through in two or three months. We can get married right here when my tour is over. As long as the papers are going through I thought you could tell your stepfather you’re getting out. This will be your home. I’ll pay the rent. The place belonged to the girlfriend of a colonel. He went home and she’s renting the place as is.”
Lynette stared at Stebbins for several moments. “You ask me to live here with you?”
“I said this would be our place, Lyn. If you invite me over for supper and we listen to the record player in the evenings, that’s nice. But I keep my bunk in the barracks.”
Lynette laughed uneasily. “I told you, Al, you don’t understand Vietnam. If I went to America, that’s different. But to be unmarried and live alone in the same city with my parents, why that would make me another bar girl. We aren’t free here as the girls are in America.”
“I don’t believe that, Lyn. I’ve been around the world and people are basically the same. Girls are winning their freedom everywhere. If you want to get away from that miserable old slant, you can.”
“I can’t. And this is too expensive anyway. It would be better to save the money, we’ll need it later.”
Stebbins’ heart leaped. “Don’t worry about money. We’ll have all we need for you to go to college when we get back to the States. I just thought—life is shorter than you think; I know. Why don’t we enjoy it while we have it, right
now?” He took her arm—to his delight she did not snatch it away—and led her to the sofa. They sat down together.
“Like I was saying, Lyn, you do want to marry me and come to the States?”
“I think so, Al.”
“Well what’s wrong with being able to relax together, you living here so we don’t have to watch the clock all the time, worrying someone will catch us kissing good night? We can get to know each other. Maybe we stay here together at night while we wait for the papers, maybe we don’t. But I’ve got four more months to go in Vietnam before I can take you back to the States. Why spend four miserable months when we can have four good ones?”
“You just don’t understand,” Lynette said sadly.
“The hell I don’t. Unless you don’t want to marry me. If you don’t, tell me so I won’t be running around like some dickhead.”
“I can not move into this apartment, Al,” she said stubbornly.
“You don’t want to go back to the States with me—let me send you to college?”
“I didn’t say that.” Lynette looked at Stebbins a moment and then went on hesitantly. “While I am going to college maybe you could study and become an officer. We could get married when I graduate.”
Sergeant Stebbins breathed deeply twice. Then quietly, he said, “I’m not becoming an officer. Just because your old man was a captain, sorry, a major, doesn’t mean it’s beneath you to marry an American enlisted man. We make more money and we’re better soldiers and men than the officers of any other army in the world. And besides,” the words he knew he shouldn’t say poured out of him before he could check them, “this here GI is asking you to marry him all legal. Not the way that French gentleman,” he sneered the words, “had your mother for his girlfriend and never married her.”
Abruptly Lynette stood up. Quietly she said, “My father left me a pension until I was nineteen years old. I’m sorry I can’t stay here, Al. I hope you did not pay the rent already.”
Sergeant Stebbins stood rigidly as Lynette walked out of the room in which he had hoped to spend many pleasant hours with her. He felt justifiably hurt and angry. He hadn’t put any strings on the arrangement, it was this half-Viet girl who laid down the conditions. If he’d send her to college, if he’d become an officer, maybe she would marry him. Some favor she’d be doing him.
Stebbins followed Lynette out, slamming the door behind him. On the sidewalk she paused a moment, her back to him. Impulsively he started to reach and take her arm. He remembered her aversion to his touch in public and turned, jerking open the door of a small taxi with his still-outstretched hand. “Mai-Kim bar,” he said in loud tones so that Lynette could not help but hear.
For the next two and a half weeks Sergeant Stebbins stayed in his office as much as possible during the work day. Those times he had to walk through the secretary-interpreter section he looked straight ahead.
At first in the evenings Stebbins had gone to the apartment on which he’d paid a month’s rent. But without Lynette it was no good and he couldn’t bring himself to take another girl there. He developed a routine. A beer in the off-duty lounge after work, supper, the movie (no matter what it was) and a couple more beers. Sometimes he went to the Mai-Kim bar, although its attendant distractions only made him more aware of his bitter longing to be the right man for Lynette.
With only a few more days left before going out for combat pay he studied the situation maps carefully. All reports from the field indicated that Captain Flagg’s team seemed most likely to have contact with the VC in the next few days. Agents told of ladders being built in the VC villages around Captain Flagg’s camp. This was almost a certain sign that an attack was being planned. Ladders were used for breaching barbed wire and walls. They also served as litters for taking the dead and wounded off of the battlefield.
Stebbins sent a radio message to Captain Flagg’s team sergeant and with almost unprecedented lack of delay received an invitation that was almost a summons to come on down and lend a gun. In the final analysis, the Americans could only count on each other when the fighting got hot, and a camp was close to being overrun.
Two days before he was due to leave for Captain Flagg’s camp Stebbins was walking through the interpreters’ section and, perhaps unconsciously, he slowed down as he approached Lynette’s desk. The trouble was, and he was always conscious of it, the way he had been of the wound that wouldn’t heal in Laos, he loved Lynette and wanted her even though instinctively he knew it was not Sergeant Al Stebbins she wanted to marry.
Perhaps his emotions showed on his face for when he reached her desk she looked up at him with a quizzical smile. Something caught in his chest. His feet stopped.
“How about chow tonight?” she asked as though nothing had ever happened between them.
Stebbins grinned happily. “Mais oui.”
“OK. See you in front of Cheap Charlie’s at seven.”
That evening in the cool, nondescript back room of Cheap Charlie’s Lynette sipped a sweet-orange drink and Stebbins drank a bottle of Vietnam’s famous “Ba muai ba” beer. Neither knew how to begin the conversation. Suddenly Lynette leaned across the table towards Stebbins. “Why do you go back to the Delta again?” A fine line of pain appeared between her eyes. “You don’t have my college to think about now.”
“There are a hell of a lot of Americans down there in the fight,” Stebbins answered.
“But you have done more than your duty already,” Lynette pleaded.
“And who said I wasn’t still helping you go to college in the States? Just because you’re going to marry some big officer someday doesn’t mean I can’t help you now, when you need it.”
“Oh, Al. I never say anything like that.”
Stebbins laid down his chopsticks. “I shouldn’t have let you walk away, Lyn. I didn’t know what to say at all.”
“No sweat.”
“Like I said, you help me see something that makes it all worthwhile. Like what we’re doing over here might be important someday. God damn, I wish I had more education. I know what I mean but I can’t say it.”
“I think I know what you want to say.” She looked at him searchingly. “So you still want to put in those papers?”
“You bet!” He frowned briefly. “I just wish, if we’re really going to be engaged, that we didn’t have to go through all this harassment from your family.”
“We can’t live together until I can get out of Saigon, Al. After that, well, we’ll be married and no sweat. Will you wait?”
Stebbins twisted his chopsticks. “I guess I’ll have to. But goddamn, Lyn, I’m a man. You said yourself once you didn’t want me hanging around those bar girls. What the hell am I supposed to do? Seeing you two or three times a week until ten o’clock? Maybe you get a midnight pass if we’re lucky?”
To Stebbins’ great surprise Lynette reached across the table right in Cheap Charlie’s and deliberately took his hand in both of hers. This was a very significant gesture.
Lynette said in low tones, “I can’t hurt my mother after all she’s been through, but when you come back from the field this time we will be together—no sweat.” She smiled softly. “I promise.”
“Hey, you know, I love you, Lyn.”
“I love you, Al. And I’m not just trying to get a college education from you.”
“No?” He smiled and winked to soften the words. “I thought you were.”
“Perhaps I thought that way once. I was so bitter I couldn’t get a scholarship I decided I was going to get to college in America no matter what I had to do.”
“You’ll go. We’ll write tomorrow to the University of North Carolina. It’s not too far from Fort Bragg. We can have every weekend and vacations. Hey? How you gonna feel being a college girl married to a sergeant?”
“I love him, and I was very unhappy the last three weeks.” Lynette poised her chopsticks above the bowl of rice and shrimp. “I wish you wouldn’t go out to the field every month.”
“We need my
combat pay. And besides, I guess I do kind of like getting out with the men.”
“I finally heard what happened last time. You almost got killed. And you said everything was routine.” “Well,” Stebbins grinned, “it was a routine ambush and I broke it up just like we teach, with a mortar.”
“I’ll be glad when your tour is over.”
“So will I, because then I’ll have you for my wife. There won’t be a sergeant at Bragg with as educated an old lady as I’ve got.”
“I’ll try to make you happy.” Lynette gave him her most impish look. “I just hope that I’m married to a Top some day.”
A confident, expansive look came over Stebbins’ face. “No sweat,” he said decisively.
The following Monday Lynette bought the English Language Saigon Post on her way to work. Of Saigon’s forty-five newspapers published in the four different languages she could read, the Post gave the best news coverage about happenings in the United States. She tucked the newspaper under the saddle of her motorbike and concentrated on threading her way through the throngs of mobile humanity clogging the streets.
Lynette had spent the weekend happily reading books, going over old examinations and looking through the myriad American college catalogues she had written for over the past three years. This weekend though, as she read and dreamed, certain disturbing thoughts clouded her mind. She was sure she loved Al, and she was very worried about him down in the Delta which made her feelings for him seem even more intense. An indistinct foreboding about the future prevented her weekend from being completely serene.
It wasn’t the prospect of carrying out her promise to Al and for the first time giving the absolute of herself that worried her. It now seemed right not to withhold herself from the man who was going to make her dream of college come true and who would be her husband in less than six months.
It was a strange prescience in the back of her mind that increasingly bothered Lynette. She pictured herself and Al under a big shade tree on the green lawn in front of their red brick house, for that was how she imagined their home in America would be. They were sitting there and Al was drinking beer and they kept trying to communicate with each other and there was nothing to talk about, nothing they could do together.