Sympathy for the Devil

by Kent Anderson

  He was thinking about the Special Forces soldiers he’d seen, how they seemed untouched by the bleakness and oppression of the base. He wanted to find out whatever it was that they knew. Find out. It wasn’t that he wanted to become one of them, whatever that really was. But they had something he thought he wanted. He did not want to go to war with the bullies and sadists and cowards around him.

  Hanson didn’t know that he had decided to do exactly what the Army hoped some of its men would do, what the best ones do—try to beat them at their own game. The game was war, and if you get too close to war, if you look in its eyes it will take you, muscle, brain, and blood, into its heart, and you will never find joy anywhere else. Outside it, love and work and friendship are disappointments.

  The god of war was pleased that night. He had gotten an initiate into his priesthood. He loved the common soldier, the battles of massed infantry, not much changed from the times they had gone at each other, drunk and terrified, with pikes and farm tools. He loved them all. But the priests, the sorcerers, the ones who met his eyes were the ones he loved most, and Special Forces was where they were. Hanson didn’t realize it that night, but he would realize one day that it is not possible to soldier with an army’s free men and best killers without becoming one of them.

  Hanson looked out the window at the wire coiled around the barracks. The fan pushed dead air, twitching after each arc and changing direction, as the shadow of the fire guard passed the window. The fire guard was carrying a pump shotgun and singing softly to himself, “I’d be safe and warm, if I was in L.A.…California dreamin’, on such a winter day…” It was midnight, and sweat beaded his face. While the company slept, he thought about Vietnam.

  Hanson took the Special Forces test from a staff sergeant wearing jeans, tennis shoes, and a red shirt with hundreds of yellow hula dancers on it.

  NIGHT JUMP — PISGAH NATIONAL FOREST

  Hanson tried not to look directly at the bare bulbs in the sheet-metal Quonset hut, but after two nights with little sleep, the glare went into his eyes like grit. The last briefing was almost over, the captain in charge of the insertion going through the prejump procedures, reviewing the correct body positions for the water landing, tree landing, and power line landing. He illustrated each position with a watercolor cartoon of the same terrified parachutist the instant before he hit the water or tree or web of hissing high-tension wires.

  “. . . and, gentlemen,” he went on, “if, when you exit the aircraft, your static line should tangle and you find yourself attached to the aircraft by the static line, place one hand on your helmet so we know you are conscious, and we will cut the static line, allowing you to fall free and utilize your reserve parachute. If you are not conscious, or if, for some reason, we are unable to cut you loose or pull you back inside the aircraft, we will radio ahead and have the runway foamed before we tow you in for a landing. Gentlemen,” he said, grinning, “you will be in a world of foam.”

  Out on the dark tarmac, Hanson got in line behind a two-ton truck where a rigger in a red baseball cap gave him his main chute and another rigger gave him a reserve from another pile. He carried them to a spot on the edge of the runway, beneath the drooping wings of a C-141 jet transport, its engines droning like the night wind through a canyon. He shouldered the main chute, running the harness over his shoulders, under his arms, then carefully adjusting the straps through the inside of his thighs. He tightened the webbing through his crotch for the moment when he would leave the plane at 120 miles an hour, the chute snatching him up and slinging him backward, eight hundred feet above the forest.

  He snapped the reserve chute onto the D-rings across his chest, attached the forty-pound equipment bag beneath the reserve, and strapped on the padded rifle case. He tightened the combination of buckles once more. Then he relaxed and let the main chute pull him over backward, hitting the ground in a sitting position, to wait, looking like he had been buried under a pile of green luggage.

  The operation was a full-dress rehearsal for something they would probably never do—a night parachute jump into the mountains where Hanson and the other “insurgents” would link up with civilian members of the resistance movement against the aggressor forces, a rehearsal for a jump into Eastern Europe in the event of a Russian invasion there, to organize the underground against them. They would soon be going to Southeast Asia, not Eastern Europe. They would not be organizing a civilian resistance, but training aboriginal tribesmen to fight with carbines instead of the bamboo crossbows they had used for centuries.

  An hour later he was packed into the big C-141 with 150 other soldiers, squeezed in tight on the collapsible benches made of aluminum tubing and yellow nylon webbing. It was hot inside the plane, stuffy with the anxious breathing of the troops, whose faces were shadowed by the dim red light. The plane smelled of sweat, electricity, and farts.

  He could feel the plane bucking in a crosswind as it crabbed in to approach the drop zone eight hundred feet below, the jet engines sobbing and whining as the pilot throttled up and down, through the wind, into the correct azimuth and altitude. The door at the front of the plane was opened, letting in a rush of cool sweet air.

  Hanson was weighted down with a hundred pounds of equipment; a rucksack, an equipment bag between his legs, and the padded rifle case strapped to his leg like a splint. He was sandwiched between the main chute and the reserve, strapped so tightly that it was difficult to expand his chest to breathe. He fought the feeling of suffocation and claustrophobia, breathing calmly and shallowly.

  Up near the door, the jumpmaster’s shout was drowned out by the engines as he motioned “up” with both hands, like a minister inviting the congregation to stand.

  Hanson and the others pulled themselves to their feet and snapped their static lines over the steel cable running the length of the plane. They stood bowlegged for balance as the aircraft rocked and bucked, throwing the soldiers into one another. Hanson was anxious to get out the door before he got airsick, or before the man behind him did.

  The dim red light in the plane turned green and the line of soldiers, Hanson trapped in the middle of the column, pushed, staggered, and then began to run with short, shuffling steps toward the wind-sucking door like some overburdened chain gang, the jumpmaster screaming, “Go, go, go!” Yellow static lines whipped back from the door as the jumpers grunted and shouted, pushing forward. It seemed as if the planeload of men was taking a terrible mechanical beating.

  As he went out the door into sudden silence, Hanson could see a forest fire off to his left, a dirty orange flame with a ragged perimeter of white smoke. An instant later it was gone as the chute snapped open and slung him back and up. And then he was flying backward through the dark.

  The moon had not risen, but he could make out the shadows of other canopies and hear the ruffling of nylon in the air. A canopy sideslipped beneath him and he felt it brush his leg. Voices muttered and called out in the air above and below him like spirits as he pulled the release on his equipment bag and felt it fall away. For a moment the hiss of the wind gave way to the pine-scented silence of the ground. The shadow of the earth rushed up and hit him and he heard himself grunt as though it were another person making the sound. All around him there were the thuds and clanks and groans of others hitting the ground.

  He had been avoiding the roads, cutting across fields, paralleling the roads when he had to. The night was chilly, spicy with the smells of wood smoke and rotting leaves, and Hanson was still soaring on the adrenaline of the parachute jump, warm in his wool sweater, sweat beading the acrid camouflage paint on his face. He checked his map with a red-lensed flashlight.

  The compass declination in the North Carolina mountains, the difference between true north and magnetic north, was exactly the same as that of Vietnam on the other side of the earth. It was a handy coincidence. Twelve hours and twelve thousand miles from where he stood on that mountain, Vietnam waited, a mirror image of geography and polar lines of force.

  The st
ars will be different, he thought. He looked up, found the North Star, and felt elation and something like homesickness rising in his chest. The air made him think of the beginning of school and the smell of a girl’s sweater, brushed with perfume and cigarette smoke and a hint of musky perspiration. The stars above him, in their turning, were indifferent as diamonds.

  The farmhouse looked small and lonely against the foothills, a soft light glowing in the front windows. He approached it carefully, circling it once before knocking at the door.

  A big man in bib overalls and a blue work shirt opened the door. He was a tobacco farmer who worked two fields, the legal one that he had an allotment for, and the one hidden back in the hills, concealed like a moonshine still from federal agents. He had a faint smell of black soil and sawdust about him.

  “Come on in, son,” he said. “We been waiting supper for you. You have any trouble with those aggressors?”

  “No, sir. There was a roadblock down the road there at that bridge, but I just went around it. They were mostly concerned with staying warm and comfortable.”

  The man laughed. “It’s the same every year,” he said. “Come on in here and get you something to eat.”

  An electric line ran from the road to the house, but the dining room was lighted with kerosene lamps. “This is my wife, Tracy,” the man said.

  She was a handsome woman with high cheekbones and dark red hair. Premature crow’s-feet set off her startlingly clear green eyes that made Hanson almost dizzy when he met them, embarrassing them both in a moment of unexpected sexual contact.

  “Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

  “And this one here is our girl Helen.” She was in her early teens and looked like her mother, with the same cheekbones and eyes, auburn hair, and a dusting of freckles.

  In the burnished lamplight they looked, Hanson imagined, just like their Anglo-Saxon ancestors who had settled the mountains before the Revolutionary War, or the ones who, a century later, walked down from the hills to die for something called the Confederacy.

  They prayed before they ate, closing their eyes and bowing their heads, the father saying, “Dear Lord, we thank thee for this, thy bounty we are about to receive, and ask your blessing on this house, and also on this young man who will soon be fighting for our country. Amen.”

  They passed plates of fried chicken and squirrel, biscuits, green beans and cold mashed potatoes. There was buttermilk, dark brown molasses to go on the biscuits, and coffee from a blue enamel pot. The dishes had a faded tracery of a floral print, the kind of dishes that come free, packed in large boxes of detergent.

  The family and others like it scattered around the mountains had been playing the role of insurgents for a decade, getting a token payment from some CIA/Special Forces slush fund but doing it mostly out of simple patriotism. They knew as much about guerrilla warfare as anyone in the Army. But before they started playing the role of insurgent, that was what they had been, in the Revolution, in the Civil War, in their fights against federal agents to keep from paying taxes on moonshine and bootleg tobacco.

  In the World Wars, and police actions, and border skirmishes, their own sons had always gone, not simply out of patriotism or adventure, though that was part of it, but because they still recognized the human need for the blood and redemption of warfare.

  Hanson wondered how many other Special Forces soldiers had eaten at that table, and how many of them were dead now.

  As they ate, the woman and the girl glanced up from their plates to look at Hanson. He was a romantic character that night, wearing jeans, a black turtleneck sweater and black knit cap, green and black paint on his face, and he wished that he could enjoy it. Wished that he could be fighting for these people who had no TV and whose water came from a hand pump beside the kitchen sink, people who heated their dish water on a wood stove in a time of pollution and men walking on the moon.

  “What part of the country are you from?” the woman, Tracy, asked. “You don’t sound like you come from around here.”

  “No, ma’am, but my grandmother lives up in Virginia. We lived out in Oregon for a while, but now we’re up near Chicago. My family’s moved around a lot.”

  “We got some cousins moved out there to Oregon,” the man said. “Oregon’s where the Davis boys moved to, wasn’t it?” he asked his wife. “Dewey and his boys. Somewhere, didn’t he say, near Portland? He drives a schoolbus and works in a sawmill out there.

  “We hated to see ’em go,” he said, “but they just couldn’t make a living back here. I know somebody who was sad to see ’em go,” he said, looking at his daughter and smiling. “That Ronnie Davis still writing you letters?” he asked her.

  “Oh, Daddy,” she said, blushing in the lamplight.

  “Why don’t you clear the table and bring us some of that pecan pie, sugar,” her mother said.

  “Do you think we’re winning that war over there?” the man asked Hanson as his daughter cleared the table. “Seems like we been at it a long time, and we keep seeing new faces come through here. I hate to sound like one of those protesters, but we’ve met some nice boys out here and I hope we’re doing the right thing by them.”

  “I don’t know, sir,” Hanson said. “It’s hard to know what to believe. I guess I’ll find out when I get over there.”

  They heard the whine of a big truck’s transmission, getting closer, grinding up the dirt road. The girl hurried in from the kitchen.

  “That’s some of those aggressors,” the man said. “Helen, go hide him in the cellar.

  “Don’t worry,” he told Hanson. “They’ll just ask me if I’ve seen any strangers around here lately, and I’ll tell ’em no, give ’em some biscuits, and they’ll go on back where they came from. They’re nice boys, but it’s pretty hard for them to catch you all when everybody who lives around here is on your side. That,” he said, getting up and motioning Hanson toward the rear of the house, “is what bothers me about that war over there.”

  The girl led Hanson to a trapdoor in the back of the kitchen that opened to a root cellar beneath the foundation of the house. Down in the musty darkness he could hear the sound of boots overhead, walking, stopping, turning around and going back the way they’d come in. He heard indistinct voices and laughter. The truck started and he listened to it grind and clatter back down the road until he couldn’t hear it any longer.

  The door above him opened, and Helen looked down. “They’re gone,” she said, smiling. “Daddy told them that he’d come down to the bridge and let them know if he saw any strangers.”

  He had a cup of coffee before he went to bed, and he watched the girl in the kitchen as she pumped water and heated it on top of the wood stove to wash the dishes. He thought about the girls at the marches and peace vigils, fashionable and sure of themselves, burning with self-righteous anger. They seemed a long way off.

  The weathered wood of the barn where he spent the night glowed like pewter in the moonlight. It was a lopsided old building, and in the hayloft he could feel it sway in the breeze. An owl was hunting from the air near the barn, and Hanson could hear, from time to time, the muffled sweep of his wings. Somewhere out of sight was the faint sound of the Interstate, of downshifting trucks, the ringing hum of tires. The sound of the real world. The owl dropped to the grass and something squealed. Hanson covered himself with straw, pulled his rifle close, and went to sleep.

  He awoke early the next morning, the sunlight banded as it came through the slats of the hay door into the dusty loft. The morning was crisp, but it would be warm by noon. It would be another day before he was to link up with other guerrillas, and he had offered to clear an old garden plot that had been overgrown with blackberry vines and Johnson grass.

  Down in the tool shed he scoured the old machete with steel wool and oil until the pitted blade shined, then worked on the edge with a file. He put on leather gloves with pictures of donkeys on the cuffs, and waded into the blackberry vines that were ten feet tall and dense as a bamboo grove. The
stalks were the thickness of broom handles at the ground, and they slapped back as he hacked into them. He found that they severed smoothly if he cut down into them rather than swinging from side to side, and he began to take each stalk down with two cuts, one at eye level, then, turning his wrist, backhanding the rest off a few inches above ground level.

  The sun warmed his back and drew the cool scent of the earth up through the severed stalks. He changed the machete from hand to hand, cocking his wrist, focusing his strength into the blade as he drove it down, the stalks parting and falling before him.

  He heard a sound like cloth being torn, inch by inch, rip—rip—rip—behind him, and turned to see the farmer cutting the Johnson grass with a bentwood scythe, pulling the silver crescent blade into the grass in short easy strokes, shocks of grass falling with the ripping sound, the farmer seeming only to shrug his shoulders, turn his wrists, and another bundle of grass dropped. His tireless concentration reminded Hanson of the martial arts instructors he’d had in training.

  “Good morning,” he called. “Got done with the tobacco sooner than I expected. Thought I’d give you a hand with this. She’s been after me for weeks to do it so she could get that garden planted. The vegetables are sure good, but I think her flowers are more important to her.”

  And they worked together, keeping pace, Hanson chopping through the vines, the farmer working through the Johnson grass, parallel to him, the ringing chop of the machete and the rip of the scythe developing a rhythm as they worked faster, gradually turning it into a race to the far edge of the plot. Hanson’s arms and shoulders began to ache, but, exhilarated, he worked still faster, more efficiently, occasionally looking up and exchanging grins with the farmer.

  They raked the lengths of blackberry vine and the wide-bladed grass into a single pile the size of a small car. The thorny vines looked like huge crab legs stuck and snarled with seaweed, washed up from some hostile ocean.