The AP didn’t know Sergeant Major, and he didn’t challenge him. He looked away and pretended not to see him, like someone who has wandered into a tough neighborhood pretends not to notice the stares or hear the insults and just keeps walking, eyes straight ahead.
Sergeant Major was not really a sergeant major, E-9, anymore. He was an E-7. People called him Sergeant Major because that had been his rank before they busted him down to buck sergeant. The reason for his demotion was officially recorded as “conduct unbecoming to a senior NCO.” The real reason was never recorded. A number of ranking Army officers had wanted to bust him out of the Army and put him in Leavenworth, but the CIA told them that a court martial would be embarrassing for everyone and not in the national interest. Sergeant Major agreed to accept the demotion quietly. It was a formality that cut his paycheck but not his power. His status as Sergeant Major was affected very little. He knew too much.
He had done two tours of Southeast Asia that were recorded in his Army 201 file. His other two Asian tours were not recorded in any Army files. His 201 file showed that he had been in Okinawa during those periods.
He had a slight Southern accent that was very pleasant, and it reminded Hanson of Billy Graham, who had commanded him to go to the TV set when he was a kid, to pray and be born again. And no one had ever heard Sergeant Major raise his voice above the level of polite conversation, even in a firefight. In combat he used hand signals to direct his Chinese Nung bodyguards.
There was a knotted rope of scar around Sergeant Major’s ankles, as if he had worn leg irons for years on a chain gang. All the old Southeast Asia hands had the ankle scars. They are from the leeches.
The 3rd Mech supply sergeant responsible for most of I-Corps had his headquarters inside the air base. He was in charge of unloading the big cargo planes and routing the supplies they delivered to bases and warehouses all over the northern part of the country. The officers and enlisted men who worked with him stayed just one year, then were replaced by others interested only in doing their year, avoiding problems, and going home.
The senior supply NCO was big and smart and ruthless. His name was Kittridge. He had been in Da Nang for four years in charge of supplies. A decade before he came to Vietnam, Kittridge had been wounded and lost in Korea. He’d spent three days alone, trying to find his way back to friendly lines in the deceptive Korean terrain, using old and inaccurate maps. He almost bled to death and he almost froze, losing pieces of his toes to frostbite. During those three days he decided that, if he survived, the Army would start paying him what it owed him, what he deserved.
Each year’s new batch of supply personnel knew only what Kittridge wanted them to know. As long as they cooperated with him, they had a pleasant year away from the fighting. But if any of the officers began checking manifests too closely, or asking too many questions, life became difficult for them; their inventory began coming up short, their civilian labor force began breaking or misrouting things, or not showing up for work. As a result, they were not promoted, and they were sent home with bad efficiency reports.
Kittridge had highly placed Vietnamese friends who owed him favors. He had large bank accounts in several states back home, and another in Bermuda.
His office was an olive drab mobile home. Inside, it looked like one of those offices tucked way back on the two-acre lot of gleaming single-wides and wood grain and chrome double-wides, the office where you take the wife to close the deal. It was air-conditioned, carpeted, and richly furnished. The handsome walnut liquor cabinet had been manifested for a major general in 1966 but had been misrouted, along with the sectional sofa Kittridge had against one wall.
Kittridge had a pretty Vietnamese secretary. She was more than pretty—she was perfect. Like a doll. Kittridge had paid for the operation that had removed the Oriental eye folds so she would look more American, a “round eye.” He had sent her to Japan to get the silicone injections in her breasts. She was wearing a miniskirt and spike heels that had been flown in from Los Angeles.
“Sergeant Major,” Kittridge said with the warmth of any successful businessman, “welcome to my hootch. Come on in,” he said as Sergeant Major walked through the door and across the wool carpet that had once been manifested for MACV headquarters.
“Wanted to stop by and settle our account,” Sergeant Major said, “and see if the beer is ready to go. I’m leaving to go up north in the morning, and I won’t get back down this way for a while.”
Sergeant Major had ordered two pallets of beer for the launch site. Two pallets was roughly thirty times the amount authorized for the camp, but the beer had been “diverted from normal channels” and on one of the thousands of yellowing supply records the number “897” had been changed to “895.” The two pallets of beer no longer existed.
“On the dock and loaded up,” Kittridge said. “I got a pilot who’s gonna make a ‘detour’ on his way to Quang Tri. Hell of a detour,” he said with a laugh, “but I’ve got his flight time and fuel records covered.”
“Real fine,” Sergeant Major said. He pulled an envelope out of the fatigue pocket that had the master parachutist wings on it. “That was two-forty, American,” he said, counting out the bills.
“I think we were looking at two seventy-five, Sergeant Major. Rerouting this stuff gets trickier every year.”
“No, it was two-forty,” he said without looking up, still counting out twenty-dollar bills. Kittridge noticed the scars on Sergeant Major’s hands.
“Why don’t we check the books?” Kittridge said. “Sugar…” he called to his secretary.
“I don’t believe there’s any need to check the books,” Sergeant Major said. “We both know what the books will show.”
“What is it you’re trying to say?” Kittridge asked, his voice flat.
Sergeant Major laughed softly. “I’m not trying to say anything. The price we agreed on was two-forty.”
The roar of cargo planes, helicopters, and Phantom jets surrounded the mobile home like rush-hour traffic on a freeway interchange in L.A.
“Sergeant Major. Thirty-five dollars. Thirty-five dollars. We’ve done a lot of business together. I wouldn’t care one way or the other, but it’s gonna throw my books off.”
“It isn’t much money, is it?” Sergeant Major said. He pushed a stack of money across the table. “Here’s the two-forty, and,” he said, counting off a smaller stack of bills, “here’s the other thirty-five. Now, if I pay you what we agree is the fair and honest price, is that beer going to be at my camp tomorrow? I wouldn’t want to have to come back down here to see you about it.”
“It’ll be there.”
“Good.” Sergeant Major smiled. He tapped the smaller stack of bills. “Now, if you think that this money belongs to you, just pick it up.”
Sergeant Major’s eyes seemed to be focused at some middle distance, as though he was mildly interested in something terrible that was about to happen at the far end of a city block. Though his hands were scarred, there wasn’t a mark on his face.
Kittridge had begun to reach for the money when he saw what Sergeant Major saw at the end of that block. His hand stopped and he pulled it back, very slowly, like he’d made a mistake and had reached into the wrong cage, the one where they keep the mean little animal with all the teeth.
“In any event,” Sergeant Major continued, “I’ll see you next time I’m in Da Nang, and we can take care of new business.”
“Of course, Sergeant Major.”
“Fine. Why, look at the money still here. It must be mine.”
He picked the money up. “See you next time then. Chao Co,” he said to the secretary.
A man who’s that worried about dying, Sergeant Major thought, should be smarter or in another line of work.
Besides being big, and smart, and ruthless like the supply sergeant, Sergeant Major had the reputation of being a little crazy. He didn’t mind that at all. He even did things to keep the rumor alive, like the time he’d cut the liver out of an N
VA captain he’d killed, cut it in five pieces, and shared it with his Nungs, eating it raw, the blood dripping down his chin.
“It’s good to have people think you’re crazy,” he’d told Hanson. “Even if they’ve heard you might be crazy, that’s enough. They’re going to be afraid of you, because crazy people aren’t predictable. It’s dangerous to try to second-guess them. No matter how tough a man is, he’ll usually step aside for a crazy person.”
Hanson had grown to love Sergeant Major like a father. He’d learned from him how to stay alive in a place where people try every day to kill you. And Sergeant Major wasn’t really crazy. Not as long as there was a war.
Back in the bar, there was a screech behind Hanson and Quinn, and they spun around, Hanson going for his shoulder holster.
Sergeant Siebert’s monkey was drunk. He was strutting on top of Sergeant Siebert’s table in the bar, his arms raised like a furry little acid rock singer, as if he were shouting, “Awright! Tha’s right! Let’s get it on now, one time!”
In one of his delicate monkey fists he clutched a french fried potato, in the other a rubbery red Penrose hot sausage. He was wearing diapers. It was a club rule that monkeys had to be diapered or they would not be admitted. The club had few rules, and they were all reasonable.
“Hey, Sergeant Siebert,” Hanson asked. “How’s the new monkey working out? We heard that the other one crashed and burned.”
“Yeah, too bad. Furry little fucker just couldn’t get the hang of maintaining altitude. Kept a glide angle of just about dead vertical all the way down.”
Sergeant Siebert’s other monkey had acquired the habit of masturbating whenever it got excited, whenever it got mad, or hungry, or frightened. All the time. Sergeant Siebert’s “A” team wouldn’t have minded an occasional hand job, but the monkey did it all the time. It was like having a pervert in camp.
The monkey would grab something solid with his left hand—a chair leg, or an engineer stake—and jerk against it like a strap hanger on a lurching bus, while he pounded away with the other hand, shrieking tirelessly. The “A” team built a wire cage where they could give him a chicken to fuck once a week, like some of the other camps, but he ignored the chicken, grabbed the wire, and began to rock and shriek. It was not considered manly for a Special Forces mascot monkey to jack off when he had chicken pussy available. It was considered even less manly to pull its pud out of fear, but the hiss and flutter of incoming mortar rounds always aroused him.
Sergeant Siebert had the monkey with him one day in a C-130 full of supplies for the camp. He was in the cargo plane’s tail section with the supply bundles that were draped with huge blue and green cargo chutes. He was the “bundle kicker” and wore earphones so the pilot could tell him when they were close to the drop zone.
The four big engines were roaring as the plane went into a steep dive to avoid ground fire and then leveled off at four hundred feet to hit the small DZ. The slanted tail of the plane cracked, then slowly opened downward with hydraulic whines and groans, the opening filling with dark green jungle.
Sergeant Siebert knelt at the shining caster tracks, watching the small red light, waiting for it to blink out and for the one next to it to flash green. He didn’t see the monkey above him jerking wildly at a piece of nylon strapping, its little monkey eyes full of fear, looking out the wind-roaring open tail.
The light flashed green, the plane went into a steep climb, and Sergeant Siebert started the food pallets and rope-handled ammo crates rolling out, static lines snapping past where they caught, pulled taut, and snatched each chute open as the bundles fell.
Then, as he later phrased it in his Alabama accent, “It felt just like somebody had hawked him up a big goober and spit it on the backside of my neck.”
Without missing a bundle, he had grabbed a handful of fur and sidearmed the convulsive monkey out the tail.
“Last I saw of him, the hairy little sumbitch was still whackin’ it, getting smaller and smaller.”
The new monkey was sitting on the table looking mournfully between his knees like a drunken little king, holding the french fry and sausage like scepters of his authority. He pitched forward, and the sausage skittered across the table.
“Goddamn,” Sergeant Siebert said sadly. “An’ this little dud can’t hold his liquor.”
He sat back in his chair and looked at his drink. “I think we’re gonna have to have a team meeting back at camp and decide on a new kind of animal for mascot. Somethin’ a little more stable.”
Sergeant Major strode into the club. He was wearing what he called his fancy fatigues, the ones with all the patches. He wore them because headquarters regulations required that while in Da Nang, “all unit and award insignia will be properly displayed.” Sergeant Major and the other old hands referred to the patches and wings, all the arrows and lightning bolts, daggers and stars, as “trash” because they all had them, and they weren’t interested in impressing anybody in regular army units. Sergeant Major was uncomfortable wearing them because they attracted attention, and he had spent twenty years learning not to attract attention. At the launch site he wore camouflage fatigues without any insignia. All equipment at the launch site was “sterile”; it could not be officially traced back to the American military.
“Sergeant Major,” Quinn called, “step on over and let young Sergeant Hanson buy you a drink. He’s buyin’ for all of us today.”
“Well now, I’d be pleased. Special occasion and all.”
They took their drinks to a table, and Sergeant Major said, “Ah, Trooper Hanson, you wouldn’t listen. Giving up the military for a world of slack-jawed, out-of-step civilians who have absolutely no supervision or individual initiative. They’re going to be everywhere, and they can’t even decide to cross the street unless there’s a light flashing on telling them to ‘walk.’ If it weren’t for those lights they’d all die of starvation at intersections trying to make a decision.”
He took a sip of Bushmills, looked at Hanson, and said, “And here I had plans to mold you in my own image.”
Sergeant Major smiled his pleasant fatherly smile. Hanson and Quinn were his best recon team leaders. When he’d first seen them together at the launch site, he’d thought it would work out that way. He could usually tell. He’d processed enough of them through, and done enough paperwork on the dead ones. He could usually tell now.
Quinn was tough, good and mean, but he’d never have been more than just competent on recon if Sergeant Major hadn’t put him with Hanson. Some of Hanson’s craziness rubbed off on Quinn, and that was what had made the team so good.
More often than not, Sergeant Major thought, the crazy ones lived through it, even though they took chances that made you think they were trying to get killed. But aggression served them better than caution could. The crazy ones like Hanson killed a lot of Communists, and brought back a lot of good intel. And they were always the ones who knew, just as well as Sergeant Major did, that none of it mattered at all.
It was early the next morning, and the heavy web gear over Quinn’s left shoulder swung up, then back as he walked. He carried the Swedish “K” submachine gun in his right hand, the fat silencer on it a dull black. He was wearing his camouflage fatigues and a floppy brown jungle hat he had taken from a dead NVA. They were better than the American-issue hats; they had a plastic insert that kept the rain out. But they were dangerous to wear if gunships were working the area. From the air you looked like the enemy.
Hanson looked like a child next to him in jeans and a green T-shirt. He was singing softly, trying to sound like Dylan. “ ‘John Wesley Hardin’ was a friend to the poor, well he ta-raveled with a gun in everee hand…’ ”
Charlie McCoy, Hanson thought. Silver was right. That’s who plays bass on that.
But the PFC radio repairman didn’t notice Quinn and Hanson approaching. He was watching his baby ducks. He’d bought them from a woman in Da Nang City, paying her twenty times what they were worth, smiling and repeating, “
Thank you, mama-san.” She’d smiled back with her black teeth, hating him for a stupid rich American, and that smile had made the PFC happy for the rest of the day.
He didn’t know he’d been cheated, but it wouldn’t have mattered if he had known. He was accustomed to being fucked over. He was big, pudgy, and awkward; very pale, and his stiff black hair grew out in tufts, as if his head had been burn-scarred. At a glance there seemed to be something “wrong” about him, the kind of soft, frightened, oversize boy who always wore a slide rule on his belt in high school, and who had no friends.
The five yellow ducklings were swimming in the rubber dishpan he’d bought at the PX.
“The only part I like,” Quinn slapped the “K” into his left hand, crouched like a bowler as he swept a duckling from the water and rose gracefully without breaking stride, “is the head.”
He bit down, pulled with a twist—the delicate grinding crack like a precision machine under an enormous overload—and the body came away. He threw it carelessly over his shoulder, and the fuzzy wings twitched madly as though the ruined bloody little bird refused to believe that it was dead.
The PFC had the same bewildered look that they always have in the newspaper photo with the headline, MASS KILLER SURRENDERS: FORMER TEACHER SAYS HE WAS BRILLIANT STUDENT.
Hanson listened to the erratic little brush and thump of the headless bird behind them as they walked casually on.
When they were out of sight of the PFC’s hootch, Hanson said, “The timing. The pathos of it. I think we have a nine-five, maybe a nine-seven here…as soon as you swallow it.”
Quinn spit the wide-eyed yellow head out and laughed. “You’ll be back. You won’t get along with those people, my man. They have no appreciation for that kind of talent.”
Sympathy for the Devil Page 5