The farmer’s wife brought them fresh lemonade in flowered glasses. “Well,” she said, her eyes shining, “I can start thinking about planting some of these.”
She reached into the bag over her shoulder and pulled out a handful of seed packets. They had wonderful paintings of flowers and vegetables on them, cucumbers, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, light greens and dark greens, beans and carrots, pumpkin and yellow squash, round red tomatoes. “Here,” she said, taking a yellow and gold packet from the bunch. “Crackerjack marigolds. It says they’ll grow this high,” she said, holding her palm straight out. “As big as snowballs. We’ll put these in for you,” she said, smiling at Hanson, “and whenever we look out at them, we’ll think of you.”
Hanson blushed, grinned, and said, “Well, thanks. That’s nice to know.”
Later that day the farmer was sitting at a scarred workbench, looking out the dusty window at the cottonwoods in back.
The shed was full of tools: shovels, axes, bucksaws, picks, sledgehammers, splitting wedges, pulley blocks, pry bars—all hand tools that had cutting edges or that offered extra leverage. An old 45-70 government rifle was mounted on a rack of elk horns, and beneath it hung an old calendar with a painting of a butternut-brown elk. The farmer liked the picture too much to throw the calendar away and had kept it so long that he sometimes transposed the current date with those on the calendar.
A photograph tacked to the wall showed the farmer as a young man, a staff sergeant, standing in front of a gutted tank with two other NCOs. Another figure was visible in the background, but out of focus and blurred. The sergeant to the left of the farmer had been killed a week after the picture was taken. The other one taught school up in Virginia now.
The three of them had been together in the retreat from Chosen Reservoir, the freezing wind and thousands of Chinese soldiers screaming down after them. The farmer still shivered when he thought of the sound the Chinese bugles made before night attacks.
There was a time, the farmer thought, when he’d hated the human race. He’d never suspected that people could do some of the things he’d seen them do. But that was a long time ago, he thought; his life was good now.
He took a last look at the photograph and went back to sharpening the sickle in his hand, filings glittering as they fell to the floor, the curved blade taking on a shine.
When Hanson came in with the machete, he showed him where to hang it on the wall. A row of big steel traps with spikes set in the jaws hung along the length of the rafter above.
“What do you use those for?” Hanson asked him. “Is there anything that big around here?”
“Wolf,” the farmer said. “Those are Newhouse number fourteens. I did some wolfing after the war. They were still paying bounty up in Wyoming and Montana—that’s where those elk horns came from. Things weren’t working out too good for me when I got back home, so I decided to leave this part of the country for a while.
“It was pretty good money too, back then, but it was terrible hard work sometimes. It got cold, and boring, and the dogs would try to kill you if you turned your back on ’em. I never liked dogs much after that, but I got to where I liked the wolves. They killed some range stock, but not nearly as much as people blamed ’em for. It was a few that were into the cattle, but mostly it was wild dogs and bad farm dogs that did it. Besides, the wolf was just trying to stay alive like anything else. The smarter they were, the harder I tried to trap them, then felt kind of bad when I did. That was a bad winter. All I remember about it is the cold and all the dead, frozen wolves.
“You know, I was there the day they trapped the last wolf—what they said was the last wolf—in western Montana, up by Cut Bank. They strung that animal up, shot its legs off, then set it on fire with gasoline.
“Far as I knew, that wolf never bothered any livestock. It’s just that he was the last one. When there’s just one of something, people seem determined to kill it. Maybe it’s just as well. What do you do if you’re the last wolf out there, everybody trying to hunt you down? Like one of those Jap soldiers holed up in a cave all those years after the war was over, holding out for years, and nobody even knows he’s there.”
He looked at the photograph on the wall. “You know,” he said, “after a few days of digging into the snow over there, with shells dropping around me, I didn’t care who controlled Korea. I didn’t know anybody over there, none of those Koreans, and the few I’d seen I didn’t much care for.
“There was some who liked the war, though, who went kind of crazy for it. They’d volunteer to go out at night, past our lines, and try to kill a few Koreans. As if it mattered. I used to wonder what became of them. If they lived to come home again.
“They gave us a couple of parades when we got back, but nobody was glad to see us after that. There weren’t enough jobs to go around, or women for that matter, and even folks who knew us before were kind of, well, afraid of us.”
He finished the sickle and hung it on the wall. “Must be about time for supper,” he said. He glanced up at the traps.
“Went to a zoo once,” he said, “over in Charlotte. They had an elephant there, chained to a pipe. Said he’d been there forty-three years. Had a wolf in a concrete pit. Gone crazy. All he did was pace around and gnaw at his own leg. Wish I hadn’t gone.”
After supper Hanson looked out the window at the dark, as he had been doing all through the meal. He was going to have to leave in the morning before dawn. He could feel the cold flow from the rippled window glass like a faint, icy wind.
“Let’s go burn that pile of brush we cut today,” the farmer said. “It should make a real good bonfire.”
They poured gasoline around the edges of the brush and touched it off with a rotten cottonwood branch. The gasoline caught with a soft boom, and yellow light poured toward the center of the pile, spread and grew brighter, then began to rise, the pile of brush burning from the inside out, towering over them and dappling their bodies with light.
The lengths of thorn-studded vine twisted in the fire, and for a moment it seemed that the mound of dead vines was not being consumed but was taking on a life of its own. Then the first flames tore away from the yellow glow in the middle of the pile and swaths of fire were everywhere sweeping up through the vines into a single gold flame that turned into and against itself at the top of the pile, curling slowly to a tip where ribbons of flame tore away, apart and burning free in the air for an instant before they flared black and became part of the dark. The fire rushed through the vines, cracked them like seeds, and sucked away anything that would burn. But just beyond the edge of the light, it was still dark and cold, as unchanged as if the fire had never started.
The next morning he watched from the wood line as the aggressor forces, an 82nd Airborne unit from Fort Bragg, interrogated captured members of the unit he had planned to link up with. In a soupy, flooded parking area they tied the prisoners to a jeep bumper with ten-foot lengths of rope and drove through the shin-deep mud while the prisoners tried to keep up, stumbling and finally falling, to be dragged slowly along, kicking up wakes of mud, turning and bouncing at the end of the rope.
They tied one prisoner’s arms behind him and shut him up in a metal wall locker. They kicked the locker and it toppled over, sending up a wave of mud. They walked around the locker, pounding on it with sticks, then raised it up and toppled it again.
Another group was using a technique that had been turning up on the six o’clock news from Vietnam, laying a prisoner on his back, his arms bound behind him, then stuffing the corner of a towel down his throat, pinching his nose shut, and pouring water over the towel until the prisoner felt as if he were drowning.
Hanson watched for a while, then turned and went back downhill through the shade-dappled woods, his feet slipping on the layers of pine needles. He came to a creek that bordered a pasture of knee-high grass, where he waited and watched for several minutes before crossing the creek. The water was clear and cool as he waded through it, his legs split
ting the water into silver-brown rivulets that caught the sun.
As he climbed the far bank, he was startled by a scream, a sound with the terror of a wounded rabbit and the mockery of a crow, yet almost human. He froze on the riverbank, and when he heard the cry again he inched his way up the bank and looked across the pasture.
What he saw seemed to be a giant snake, an iridescent green and blue snake slipping through the grass, undulating, dipping up and down as it moved, its scales shimmering, fixing Hanson with its black lidless eye. It seemed to slip out of focus for an instant, and as Hanson squinted to bring it back, he heard the cry again and the snake shuddered, became a blur and blossomed into a peacock, its tail quivering, gleaming in the sun, crying out.
FORT HOLABIRD
Fort Holabird was a pleasant, well-manicured little army base that hadn’t changed much since World War II. It was outside town, and when the wind was right you could smell the paper mills down the river. A small, polluted stream ran through the center of the base. There was a post movie theater, library, USO club, and snack bar, all built of whitewashed ship-lap siding. The officers’ club was elegant, with a circular drive, covered walkways, and a golf course.
The base was the U.S. Army Intelligence Headquarters, where MP detectives and CID officers were trained to do background security checks and drug investigations. Those detective trainees were easily picked out on the street because of their short hair, black low-quarter military issue shoes, and the tan raincoats they all bought at the PX. It was almost a uniform. “Agent handlers” were trained there, too, and you could see them following each other around in downtown Washington, taking their coats off and on, switching hats, backtracking and watching the street reflected in store windows, playing at being spies.
In many ways it was a relaxed base. Most of the personnel wore civilian clothes, and those in uniform were not, as they say in the Army, sharp-looking individuals. Their uniforms were sloppy and poorly maintained. Most of them were college graduates, draftees who had volunteered to serve an extra year in order to attend the intelligence school and so avoid the possibility of being assigned to the infantry.
Several times a year the base reluctantly played host to a class of Special Forces intelligence sergeants, offering courses in interrogation, terrorism, propaganda, lock-picking, countersecurity measures, sniping, selective assassination, aerial photography analysis, and psychological operations.
Most of the Special Forces people attending the courses were old Southeast Asia hands with three or four tours behind them, and they considered the two-month school a vacation. They had only to listen to second lieutenants tell them things they already knew, that they had themselves discovered and developed years before, and the rest of the days and nights were theirs. They had a tradition of terrorizing the regular personnel and cadre at the base, swaggering around in tailored, starched fatigues with all their patches and badges, spit-shined hundred-dollar jump boots, and, of course, their green berets.
Because of the number of intelligence sergeants being killed in cross-border operations in Vietnam, a group of younger soldiers were allowed to take the course as replacements. Hanson was one of them. He had finished basic training, infantry training, jump school, and seven months of Special Forces training. Vietnam would be next.
The march to the classroom building involved crossing a small steel bridge over the polluted stream. A sign at the bridge said BREAK STEP WHEN CROSSING BRIDGE, but the twenty-five Special Forces troops never did. They stayed locked into step, and the bridge bellied and quivered and swayed from side to side under their boots. It was a small gesture of contempt for the rules, for a warning sign, for caution, for the regular Army, for any soldiers who weren’t hard-chargers, ass-kickers, eye-shooters, and hard core widow-makers.
It was a crisp morning. The only clouds were contrail streaks from high-altitude aircraft. Hanson was at the rear of the formation, with the rest of the junior NCOs. The SFCs and master sergeants were up front, some of them big and barrel-chested, some small and wiry. There were red-veined whiskey faces, hard-eyed Chicanos, a Korean, a couple of mustachioed ladies’ men, and a pair of businesslike sergeant majors. Every one of them was genuinely tough, physically and mentally, the kind of men Hanson had, not long before, disdained, but whom he now admired. It was seductive, the kind of blunt threat they carried with them everywhere, and Hanson was learning how it was done.
He liked it that people stayed out of your way, gave you room. He liked the way it simplified arguments, the way The Threat said, You may be right in your argument, it’s an interesting idea and I’ve enjoyed talking to you, but I can still kick your ass anytime I want to. And the way women, no matter how they might deny it at first, were attracted to it.
What had surprised him most was that those tough soldiers at the front of the formation knew what they were doing with The Threat. They understood it and used it the way a diplomat uses protocol. They were smart, tough, and articulate. And, most of all, they got things done.
The classrooms had red and white SECRET placards slipped into brass frames on the door, and armed guards stood outside the door while classes were in progress. It was not uncommon to see men in Russian or Red Chinese uniforms walking the halls. Notes taken during the lectures had to be left in the classroom, and at the end of the day they were stamped with the appropriate security classification and locked in a safe.
“. . . simple isolation combined with random beatings takes a little longer, but is extremely effective. The subject has no opportunity to anticipate the beatings and so cannot prepare himself psychologically for them. After a beating he might be subjected to another one ten minutes or ten days later. He is alone, with no one to confide in, no one to share his misery or to help him evaluate the situation, and he finally must turn to the interrogator for this.
“With adequate facilities, the subject loses any sense of time, of night or day, while waiting for the next interrogation session. Anticipating the next session or the next beating, he is unable to sleep, and he quickly weakens.
“We do not, of course, approve of or advocate these interrogation techniques,” the lieutenant continued from behind his podium, “but we feel that you should be familiar with them in the event that you are subjected to them.”
“Right, El-Tee,” one of the E-7s in the class said. “We wouldn’t do any of that bad shit.”
The class laughed, and the lieutenant tried to smile.
“Hey,” a big master sergeant said with a grin, “don’t let these guys bother you, sir. They’re just a bunch of fun lovers. Go ahead, sir, please continue.”
There was more laughter, and the lieutenant’s face flushed. It was like a classroom full of tough kids who have a substitute teacher.
“Sir, go on ahead. We’d like to hear more about those techniques, how to keep that little fucker from evaluating his situation.”
“Wire him up,” a Chicano SFC said. “Sit him in a puddle with a TA-312. A couple hundred volts through the head of his dick will get his attention right away.”
The lieutenant attempted another smile. “I say again, gentlemen, these methods are neither advocated, recommended, nor approved of by the U.S. Army. Aside from the fact that they go against the Geneva Convention and simple humanity, they are not reliable. I’m sure that you all agree that they are not reliable. You know that the subject will tell you anything he thinks you want to hear in order to terminate the session if you use those techniques.”
“Yeah, that may be, but it still makes me feel a lot better about having to listen to the little bastard lie to me.”
“You know how I can tell when the little bastards are lying to me?” another SFC said from the back of the room. “Whenever I see their lips moving.”
“Hey, sir, what do you do if you need information in a hurry? You know, when you don’t have time to win his heart and mind.”
“Give him to the ARVN, let them torture the asshole,” another student offered.
�
�Unless they’ve got money, or relatives with pull,” a red-faced sergeant major said. “I took this prisoner once, my first tour, this slack-jawed gook who just happened to be in the area before we got ambushed. I know the little fucker fingered us for the ambush. But I gave him to the ARVN.
“Couple months later I picked him up again in our AO. I gave him to the ARVN. A month later I found him hiding in a hole in a riverbank, down where we’d been running into a lot of booby traps. He came out, didn’t even have his hands up, grinning like a possum eating sweet potato, like me and him were old buddies. Pretty funny. Third time I’d picked him up. I grinned back and put about ten rounds through his scrawny chicken chest. Last I saw of him, he was floating south. I decided not to bother the ARVN anymore.”
Someone had written, “Get ’em by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow,” on Hanson’s desk. An old joke. He checked his watch and looked out the window. In the distance a smoke stack rose above low clouds. The red lights at its tip blinked like beady little eyes.
Late that afternoon Hanson went to the NCO club with Bishop and Gallager, the two other junior NCOs in the class. The club had a garish Hawaiian/Tahitian motif—Tonga torches, bamboo, wicker, and dark wood tables that had been beaten with a ball-peen hammer and blowtorched to give them a weathered look, then coated with a quarter-inch of clear plastic. A soupy string orchestra version of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” was coming out of speakers in the ceiling.
There were fishing nets and cork floats on the wall behind the bar, the parchment-yellow light coming from half a dozen spiny blowfish with lightbulbs inside their distended bellies. The bar specialized in Mai Tais, Planter’s Punch, Zombies, and Coconut Rum Sunsets. The women in the bar, the wives, girlfriends, mistresses, and secretaries—satellites to the men, soldier groupies—drank the specialties, while the men drank bourbon and blended whiskey.
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