Special Forces was like a small fraternity within the Army. All the members looked out for each other. At any new base an SF soldier could go up to the first Green Beret he saw and find out who and what to avoid, what he could get away with and what he couldn’t.
“Okay, gentlemen, cover down there,” the staff sergeant announced through the loudspeaker feedback. “Let’s get in some kind of formation. You’re in Vietnam, but this is still the Army. Let’s dress it up a little there,” he said, then waited while the troops shuffled into a ragged formation.
“Gentlemen, on behalf of Captain William Fenners, I would like to welcome you to the Three Hundred Eighty-fifth Replacement Company…”
“Fuck Captain Fenners.”
“And his hard stand.”
“And you too, Jack.”
The staff sergeant picked up the rest of his speech just as the last insults had been spoken. His pauses were as perfectly timed as if he and the troops had been rehearsing, pausing for insults. He had given the same speech several hundred times.
“. . . while you are here, at the Three Hundred Eighty-fifth Replacement area, there are a few rules that you must follow, in order to make your stay as brief and pleasant as possible…” And he began listing the rules in a tired, bored voice while jet lag, fatigue, and anger rose from the troops on the hard stand like an acrid wind.
“Gentlemen,” he went on, droning through the buzzing, hissing PA system, “while you are here, if at any time you hear sirens, that means that we are under enemy attack. When you hear the sirens, get up and put on your boots. Make sure that the men on either side of you are awake, and then go quickly—quickly, gentlemen; move out! The little man is trying to kill you—to one of the bunkers between the barracks. You will stay in the bunker until morning. I say again: You will stay there until morning. If you have to shit, shit in your pants, shit in your sock, shit on your buddy’s back, but do not leave the bunker for any reason whatsoever until morning.
“The more people in the bunker, the safer you will be. People soak up shrapnel. So pack on in. The fat boys soak up shrapnel real good, so if you get in a bunker with a fat boy, talk nice to him and squeeze up next to him until he starts to smile…”
On the hard stand a muscular black soldier patted a chubby white boy on the ass and said, “Sugar, me an’ you gonna be bunker mates. I already know that I’m gonna like you a lot.”
The chubby boy pulled away as the soldiers around him laughed, and the black soldier moved up next to him and put his arm around him. “Now, baby,” he said, “jus’ be cool. You gonna like your daddy.”
“. . . and gentlemen, if you do not hear sirens, but you hear a lot of loud noises, and buildings start falling down, you may assume that we are taking incoming rounds. In that case do not wait for the sirens. You may go to the bunkers on your own.
“Okay. That’s all I’ve got for you. Are there any questions?”
A young soldier raised his hand, and everyone groaned. A few people nearest him cursed him and shoved him. He lowered his hand, and the staff sergeant pretended that he hadn’t seen it.
“Okay, if there are no questions, Specialist Peterson will take charge of you from here.”
Specialist Peterson, a clean-cut clerk/typist, seemed annoyed as he spoke. “All right, as I call your name, I want you to answer up and file into the building on the left,” he said, pointing to the left without taking his eyes off the troops. “Fill all the seats up from front to rear. All the seats from front—to rear. ”
“How’d that go now, Jim?” one of the soldiers near Hanson said, loud enough for Peterson to hear, but just soft enough so he could pretend not to hear it. “Maybe you oughta whip that on us one more time, we all a little slow.”
“Say, I’m a specialist too,” said another, tough-looking soldier. “I specialize in kickin’ ass. When you reckon that little white boy up there had a good ass-kickin’? I mean, something he could write home to his momma about.”
“Too motherfuckin’ long.”
“Awright!”
“There it is.”
They started laughing, then went through the ritual, open hands, fists and elbows, the black power handshake.
Charlie barracks was lit by three bare bulbs hanging above the aisle between the rows of bunks. All the bunks were filled, and people were sleeping on the floor. The barracks looked like a skid-row flophouse. Somewhere a radio was playing. “. . . and now, here’s a request for all the studs in Bravo Company, First of the Ninth, and especially for Abnormal Norman in fire team Delta…”
Hanadon and Bishop were lying on the bunks at the end of the barracks, apparently already asleep. Hanson stood between the bunks, his bed linen draped across him like a toga. In a conversational voice, he said, “Anybody who can’t tap dance is queer.”
Hanadon and Bishop leapt out of their bunks and began kicking, pounding the floor in their jungle boots. Voices from across the barracks, from the shadows, shouted at them to “Knock it off,” “Get some sleep.”
“We’re tap-dancing,” Bishop yelled. “We’ll sleep when we’re dead.”
“You want to come on down here and try us on?” Hanadon yelled, doing a heel and toe with one boot, “or you want to just shut the fuck up?”
The voices grumbled, then stopped.
“Yeah!” Bishop said, “They don’t want to fuck with three heroes.”
“Three ‘Fighting Soldiers from the Sky,’ ” Hanadon said.
“Three motherfuckin’ legends in the making,” Hanson added.
The three of them roared with laughter, grabbing each other’s shoulders and shaking them, like football players in a locker room.
Hanadon pointed to the only empty bunk in the piss-and sweat-smelling barracks. “Throw your shit there, brothah,” he said. “There was another guy sleeping in it, but we convinced him that it was a good idea for him to find another bunk.”
“Offered to qualify him for one in the hospital,” Bishop said.
“And,” Hanadon said, holding up a half-full bottle of Jim Beam, “SF looks out for their own.”
The night was hot and restless. Loudspeakers announced the arrivals and departures, calling roll. Throughout the night Hanson could hear the PA system clicking on, rough background static and whine, and he waited for the names to be called before trying to go back to sleep. With each announcement there was a stir in the barracks as someone stood, shouldered his rucksack, and walked out the door, headed for the flood-lit hard stand.
When the wind was right, he could smell the stink from the piss tubes.
DA NANG AIRPORT
The red and white sign in the busy concrete-block air terminal was matter-of-fact, like a reminder to have your ticket ready for better service. IN CASE OF MORTAR ATTACK DO NOT PANIC. LIE FLAT ON GROUND UNTIL ALL-CLEAR IS GIVEN. Hanson had processed through the replacement center and had been sent to Da Nang for assignment to a Special Forces unit. Hanadon and Bishop had processed through two days before, and Hanson hoped he would catch up with them before the next training cycle at Hon Tre Island.
One wall of the terminal was lined with souvenir booths. One of them offered hand-painted watercolor scrolls with the words “Memories of Vietnam” at the top and simple sketches of peasants and water buffalo beneath. Another booth had paintings on black velvet of vaguely Oriental-looking Caucasian soldiers glaring, knife in teeth, from the frame, but they were outnumbered by fantastically voluptuous Oriental nudes. There were jackets made from black-market poncho liners—camouflage nylon quilts—a map of Vietnam embroidered on the back and the words “When I Die I’ll Go to Heaven I’ve Spent My Time in Hell—Vietnam.” Display cases of Vietnamese-made “Zippo” lighters bore the inscription, “Yea, Though I Walk Through the Valley of Death, I Shall Fear No Evil—For I Am the Bad-dest Motherfucker in the Valley,” on one side, an enamel image of Snoopy, the cartoon dog, on the other, Charlie Brown’s cute, innocent, and enthusiastic beagle pup who, in the States, acts out his charming and harm
less tough-guy fantasies. In Vietnam he was a popular symbol of the American soldier, the Grunt, arrogant in ragged fatigues, a cigar in his mouth, a smoking M-16 carelessly braced on his hip.
The terminal looked like a shelter for the homeless survivors of some disaster. The floor was crowded with GIs lying on their rucksacks, sleeping, reading, or just smoking and staring at the ceiling. Hanson had to walk carefully to avoid stepping on an arm or a leg.
Dozens of tape decks and radios pumped out noise, Vietnamese and American. It sounded like an argument, a shouting match between two opposing mobs. The Vietnamese music keened and sobbed and mourned the dead while Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison—who would not survive the war—strutted and sneered at it all.
The air seethed with the smell of terror and lust, adolescent rage, and the burnt-almond stink of sweat, mo-gas, fish sauce, Vietnamese cigarettes, gun oil, wood smoke, urine, and stale beer, high explosive and freshly turned earth, the salty sweetness of blood and meat, a gang-rape musk that was always there in Vietnam, a smell that, later on, would seep into Hanson’s dreams, warning him that a nightmare was beginning.
The snack bar attached to the terminal was humid and thick with cigarette smoke. The Young Rascals were singing “It’s a Beautiful Morning” on the jukebox.
Four American soldiers wearing faded jungle fatigues were eating cheeseburgers and french fries at one of the tables. They wore 101st Airborne TIGER FORCE RECON patches and were armed with AK-47s that they cradled across their knees. Hanson thought that he recognized one of the soldiers, but he wasn’t sure until he heard him laugh. It was Henry Johnson. Hanson thought back to infantry school, where they’d both been sent after basic.
It had been early autumn. The mornings were cold and the afternoons hot. Their huts were heated by sheet metal gasoline stoves. A gallon can mounted on a wooden pole dripped gasoline through a spigot onto a hot steel plate. Each drop of gasoline vaporized in a tiny explosion the instant it hit the plate. The stoves burned through the night, glowing a dull red, their pattering explosions like a pulse. Each hut slept thirty-two men in rows of double bunk beds and the quick measured hiss of the stoves entered their dreams as the scrape of footsteps, or the sound of their own exhausted breathing.
The CQ runner woke Hanson for KP. He lay in his warm bunk and listened to the sound of the stove, the ragged breathing of the sleeping men, and static from the Little Rock radio station that had gone off the air during the night. He turned his head and could see the glowing radio dial two bunks away. He pulled his fatigues under the covers to let them warm up for a few minutes and listened to the wind bang the screen door at the end of the Quonset hut, wishing he were somewhere else, somewhere warm and private, far from the Army.
After dressing, he went outside and stepped into the cold, dark, phone-booth-sized chemical toilet that served as a latrine.
As he walked toward the KP tent, the lighted phone booth in the center of the company area looked like a stage prop. Hanson passed it and imagined that the phone might ring. When he answered, a strange voice would give him instructions.
He stopped at the company duty roster and checked his name on the KP list, knowing it was there but hoping nonetheless that it had somehow been deleted during the night. The neon light above the roster buzzed and snapped, and fat, cold-stunned flies staggered across the Plexiglas.
KP started before dawn and lasted until well after dark. Dish water was heated in the cast concrete sinks with immersion heaters that worked on dripping gas like the stoves in the huts. The tent had wooden sides and duckboards over the dirt floor.
As he approached the tent, Hanson heard Henry softly singing, “. . . Open my eyes that I may see—glimpses of truth you have for me…”
Henry was inside, sitting on a pile of fifty-pound bags of potatoes, brown burlap bags with a dark blue outline of the state of Idaho and the words FAMOUS POTATOES. He looked up and laughed when Hanson walked in.
“Hanson, my man,” he said. “You don’t look happy.”
“Damn,” Hanson said, looking around the tent. “I hate KP.”
“Yeah,” Henry said, “but my momma used to tell me that a person can get used to anything. Even learn to like it.”
The waxy-smelling tent was almost comfortable, a lighted little island in the dark, warm from the steaming, still-clean dish water. By the time the first batch of partitioned plastic trays had been washed, the dish water would look like minestrone soup, but early in the morning Hanson could watch the little silver bubbles rise from the bottom of the gray concrete sink as he cut curling slivers of lye soap from the thick tan bars.
It looked like it was going to rain. The sunrise was gray and sodden. But it was almost cheerful inside the tent with the popping gasoline heaters, the clean steaming water, drinking strong coffee from a paper milk carton. And there were the eggs to break, hundreds of eggs to break into big stainless steel bowls. Hanson could crack them four at a time, two in each hand, flipping the shells into the garbage can without breaking his rhythm. He liked to drop them from a foot above the bowl so that the bright yellow yolks soared heavily down through the whites.
Through the canvas doorway Hanson could see a section of the chow line shuffling past. They did their ten chin-ups on the pair of bars on either side of the wooden-plank sidewalk, shouting out as they did the chin-ups, their voices ringing and overlapping, “. . . eight airborne, nine airborne…”
“. . . airborne, three airborne, four…”
“. . . six airborne, seven…”
The smells of bacon and coffee, gasoline and lye soap, damp earth and wet canvas, mixed with the green bite of Georgia pine on the breeze.
After lunch they finished the pots and pans, cleaned the sinks, and scrubbed down the floor. The unpainted wood was silver with daily scrubbing, and it steamed under the soapy water. The sun had burned through the clouds, turning the day hot and humid, and Hanson watched the steam rise from the floor, his wet fatigues sticking to his back and legs.
In the late afternoon they began shucking the crates of corn. The ears were freshly picked, their light green husks fragrant and crackling as they pulled them off like skirts. The husks and silk piled up quickly, and they stacked the heavy ears. The cornsilk looked like golden-brown pubic hair, and Hanson absently brushed the side of his hand against it as he worked. Once, when Henry was looking away, he pressed his lips against the cool, smooth kernels.
“I could do this for the rest of the day,” Henry said. “KP’s not so bad. I can think of worse things. Like momma said, you can get used to anything, once you get your mind right.”
The husks snapped and crackled open, and the fresh sweet smell surrounded them. The yellow-brown silk came off in Hanson’s hands, and the ripe kernels squeaked.
“Check out this little dude,” Henry said, holding an ear of corn out to Hanson. A white worm was burrowing through the fat kernels, splitting slowly through the meat.
“Now this young man of a worm knows what he’s doing—eatin’ and movin’,” Henry said, carefully stacking the ear so as not to crush the worm.
The night after KP was warm, and Hanson and Henry Johnson jogged the three miles down to the showers, a big reinforced concrete installation that hung like a balcony out over the river. It was pleasant to walk back and drink beer and watch the fog rolling in with the cold. Hanson spotted a rabbit hopping tentatively across the road and saw its eyes blink red in the light of an oncoming truck.
“Hey, Henry,” Hanson said. “How long you been in-country?”
The soldier turned, and for a moment Hanson thought that he’d made a mistake. The flat hard eyes he found himself looking into weren’t Henry Johnson’s. Then the soldier smiled.
“Hey. Hanson! Come on over here and sit down, my man.
“I been here awhile,” he said. “Took my thirty-day leave after infantry school, and I was gone. Assigned to the One-oh-First. Three days later the little man was shootin’ at me. It was fucked up. Nobody in the unit knew much mo
re than I did. So I volunteered for long-range patrol. They know what’s goin’ on.”
The three soldiers with Henry acted as though Hanson were not quite there, as if he were an idea someone had brought up that they did not want to acknowledge. A new guy. Hanson was suddenly uncomfortable and self-conscious about his stiff OD fatigues and his shiny new jungle boots. He hadn’t even been issued a weapon.
“Well, goddamn,” Henry said, turning to the other three. “Hanson here’s a partner of mine from AIT. Introduce yourselves.”
The soldier with the drooping mustache was Martinez. The other two were Orski and a big black guy named Jones.
“So what’s it like?” Hanson asked, feeling foolish as he spoke. “You know, the war?”
“Like a fucking movie. That’s no shit. It’s a TV show out there. There’s the jungle, there’s a fuckin’ trail, and sometimes you look, and there’s Charlie.”
“There it is,” the one with the mustache said. “The war’s a movie and we are the stars.”
“We’re on stand-down, the four of us,” Henry said, “trying to get transportation to Vung Tau. Killed five Charlies last operation. CO gave us a seven-day leave.”
“Yeah,” Jones said. “Four cunts and an old man.”
Orski laughed. “Are we bad or what? Four cunts and an old man. Are we cold? Are we some stone killers?”
Henry laughed. “There was these four women coming up the trail. The one in front had an old 1906 Springfield strapped to her back. The two in the middle didn’t have weapons. The last one had an SKS. We could have taken them prisoner, no problem, but this old poppasan behind them had an AK. Didn’t want to take a chance with him. So we laid back and hit the claymores, had six of them set up on the trail. Blam! All the women went down…”
“I hope to shit they went down,” Orski said in his Southern accent. “Had to be God invented the claymore. It is an instrument of his retribution. Thought of it one day when he was pissed off ’cause he wasn’t getting any.”
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