“God can get some whenever he wants it,” Jones said. “He was just drunk when he thought of the claymore.”
“. . . poppasan beat feet down the trail,” Henry said, smiling. “We let him go about fifty meters, then we burned his sorry ass down.
“One of the women was still alive, all fucked up and moaning. I mean to say, my man, I never heard anybody make a noise like that. Sound like an animal. ’Ski there emptied a magazine into her head. I’ve still got her hair someplace, hung down to her ass.
“We took ’em out with us on the extraction chopper. Crew chief was pissed about getting blood and shit on his chopper, but we talked him into it. When we were about five hundred feet off the chopper pad, we kicked ’em out…”
“Those clerks at headquarters like to shit,” Orski said. “I mean, they never saw nothin’ like that.”
Henry sat back and laughed. “Raining Cong. ’Ski was hanging on to a strap, leaning out the door, yelling, ‘Get some motherfuckers, getsome, getsome.’ ”
“Fucking clerks were going crazy,” Orski said. “Those bodies kinda turning in the air, real slow, doing goddamn cartwheels through the air. Fuckers bounced when they hit.”
“We thought the CO was gonna be pissed,” Henry said, “but he’s a hard charger. Said it was good training for those people in headquarters company. ‘Those people need motivation,’ he said. Bought us a vacation.”
Later Hanson sat on his duffel bag at the air base, waiting for transportation to the Special Forces replacement center, and from there to Hon Tre Island for a final week’s training before being assigned to a unit.
Out on the far runway F-4 Phantom jets were landing, coming in hot, parachutes snapping and popping out behind their tails to slow them down. They seemed to strut on their landing gear, the ’chutes rippling behind in the jets’ blue-yellow heat. Hanson stood and watched as one of them taxied closer, the furious shrieking power of it buffeting his chest. The canopy slid back and the pilot, his face covered by a shiny black bubble, turned his head slowly so that he seemed to be looking at Hanson. Then his gloved hand came up, and he gave Hanson the thumbs-up, as if they knew each other and shared some secret.
And then he remembered that on the plane from California, he’d been dreaming about the field survival exercise back at Special Forces school, the first one, the one where they’d killed small animals with their hands and used knives on the goats.
It had been on the fourth or fifth day, February in the woods, where there had been a steady cold rain since the night they parachuted in. They’d had no food at all and less than three hours’ sleep each night in the mud, forced marches through the swamps, planning ambushes at night with red-lensed flashlights hidden beneath the dripping shelter halves. It was the week they used to wash out Special Forces recruits who couldn’t or wouldn’t suck up the pain and keep going. The week that won them the right to wear the green beret.
The chickens were simple. You just pulled their heads off, then held them quickly away from you, like a champagne bottle you’ve just uncorked, while the neck pumped blood.
The rabbit they gave him was big, the size of a small dog, white with glittering pink eyes. He held it by its hind legs, its head toward the ground. It struggled in his hand at first, then arched its back, suddenly rigid, its head back, clearly exposing the muscled V where the neck fit into the shoulders. He held the rabbit up with his left hand and chopped down hard with the edge of his right hand into the V. The head, with its thick, delicately pink-veined ears, popped off, spinning to the ground, while the heavy warm body shuddered and leapt in his hand like a bird trying to take flight.
But it was the goat that he remembered most clearly. It was tied between two trees, bawling and lunging against the ropes as tirelessly as a machine. A lot of animals had been killed that day. The blood smell was riding the cold rain, and the goat was wild with panic. He kept bleating and running out the little slack he had, the ropes stopping him, slinging him back into the mud.
Hanson tried to look into his eyes as he walked toward the goat, but the animal refused to make eye contact, looking away, refusing to acknowledge what he knew was about to happen to him.
Hanson went around behind the goat, straddled it, and twisted one of its ears to keep it from bucking. The animal was warm and wet between Hanson’s legs as he dug his heels into the mud to keep control, the wet wool stinking of musk, mud, shit, and wood smoke. The goat arched its neck, and for an instant Hanson saw, reflected in the animal’s wild, dark eye, the pine trees, the watching soldiers, and his own distorted face.
An icy rain fell steadily, hissing through the trees, turning the ground and sky a yellowish green. Hanson pulled up and back on the goat’s jaw with his left hand and drove the heavy blade of the K-bar knife into him, through the muscle between spine and windpipe and out the front of the neck.
The goat stopped bleating because the vocal cords had been cut away from the air supply. He began to blow steam and gouts of blood through the severed windpipe, a fine red mist, its breathing loud, wet, and ragged. Then its legs buckled and it dropped beneath Hanson, twitching and kicking, one of its hooves bruising Hanson’s shin, and it died.
“All right,” the instructor said. “Good job. You ’bout took that mother’s head off.”
It would be a long time before it occurred to Hanson that there were no goats or rabbits to eat in Vietnam, that they had not been training him to butcher livestock.
A clerk-typist and a radio operator picked him up in a jeep. They were wearing white tennis outfits, and they argued about their game all the way to the replacement center, another of the many stops on the way to his permanent assignment.
HON TRE ISLAND
Hanson watched the blue waves purl back along the slab-steel hull of the LST, turning into themselves and vanishing as the landing craft worked its way through merchant ships and Navy destroyers anchored in the channel. The destroyers were a uniform gray, as if they’d come off an assembly line like Buicks or Fords. Their decks were empty except for gun turrets as flat and sullen as snakes’ heads.
The merchant ships were from all over the world, painted red and black, buff and electric blue. Most were in poor repair, hulls streaked with brown rust, great scabs of paint flaking off, oil drums full of garbage piled on the fantail. They looked as though they had been designed as they were being built, booms, winches, and generators attached as afterthoughts.
The steel bow of the LST slammed down with a splash and clattering of chains, just like he’d seen them do in World War II movies. The island’s two jagged peaks rose three thousand feet out of the ocean. It was midday, and the peaks were still shrouded in fog.
The boatload of fresh soldiers was greeted by two master sergeants. One of them was bare-chested and tanned, with a blond crew cut and a handlebar mustache that was waxed and curled out to his ears. The other was a huge black man with a woolly mustache, a deep rolling voice, and a savage smile.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “welcome to Hon Tre Island, home of the in-country Special Forces training group and the Two forty-eight-B Vietcong Marine Sapper Company. I am Master Sergeant Burns, the NCOIC here. This is my island. There are a few officers here on my island, but they are here simply as a formality. The U.S. Army had to put them somewhere, but we don’t bother them, and they don’t bother us. So if you have any problems, gentlemen, bring them to me. You will find that I have a warm and sympathetic nature.
“And this,” he said, nodding to the other NCO, “is Master Sergeant Krause.”
Krause looked at each of the troops with mild curiosity, humming softly to himself and nodding his head slightly.
“Well now,” he said in a pleasant voice, “good morning, men.”
“Good morning, Sergeant,” the new troops shouted in unison.
“You know,” he said, “I was just looking to see if I could guess which ones of you all were gonna get yourselves killed in this low-rent war we got going here. Sometimes it happens through
plain bad luck, but a lot of times bad luck is just you or your buddy fucking up, getting careless or sloppy, losing your cool and forgetting what you know.
“Gentlemen,” he went on, “you can step dead in the middle of a shit storm, and if you just keep thinking, keep doing what you know how to do, what you’ve been trained to do, you’re probably gonna get out okay. But it’s something you have to learn out in the field. It’s our job to teach you as much as we can so you can stay alive out there long enough to learn the rest.
“Most of the regular Army troops get blown away during the first two months because they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. They’ve had sixteen weeks of training. You people have had over a year of training and you’re gonna have one more week here. In about ten days those little people are gonna be shooting live ammunition at you. Learn it now. When the little man is coming at ya, it’s too late.”
“Gentlemen,” Sergeant Burns said, “we are goin’ to be practicing our patrolling techniques here on the island. We don’t expect to make any contact, but if we do, here’s some advice. The best time to search a prisoner is after he’s dead. And, gentlemen, if you blow away any Vet-namese personnel here on the island, and he doesn’t seem to have a weapon with him, if you can not locate his weapon, he will have a weapon on him before the body is brought in, at least a grenade. We do not shoot unarmed civilians. He will have a weapon.”
“I’ll try to make this as brief as possible,” Krause said, “so you can get some chow and find a bunk. We’ll start fresh in the morning.
“You are in Vietnam, and there is a war going on over here. Do not base your impressions of this country on what you saw over there in Cam Ranh. They got ice cream parlors, they got tennis courts, and they got Air Force personnel sunbathing. That is not what it is like in the rest of the country. I can assure you that you will see death and destruction when you are sent to an A-camp. You will see some of your friends dead before you leave this country because it’s a place young men come to die.
“In the event of an enemy attack while you are here, get up and put on your boots. I say again, put on your boots. Most of the casualties we get during alerts come from barefooted individuals who jump on engineer stakes. Gentlemen, they tell me that it is painful. So put on your boots.
“In the event that we do come under an enemy ground attack, we will throw the Vietnamese personnel out of the machine-gun towers and man them ourselves. All weapons positions will be manned by American personnel. If you encounter a Vietnamese who refuses to leave a weapons position, shoot him—shoot him several times—be sure he is dead, and throw him out.
“You’ll be pulling some guard duty here. You will report to the sergeant of the guard, draw a weapon, and man your post until relieved. No Vietnamese personnel will enter or leave after nineteen hundred hours. While on guard duty, check the gun towers every hour. Throw rocks at them to wake the Vietnamese guards up. They go right back to sleep, but it gives you something to do while you walk the perimeter. Again, the towers will be manned by Americans in the event of a ground attack.
“The Vietnamese personnel are assigned to this camp because this is their war. We are only here to assist them. That’s what we are told. Ten to twenty percent of our Vietnamese personnel are Vietcong. Be polite, gentlemen; win their hearts and minds, but watch your backs. It’s a funny kind of a war.”
The barracks was a large two-story building, clean and pleasant, unlike the rundown transient barracks of the regular Army units. From his window Hanson could see a large rice paddy, then low hills and the sea. The barracks was separated from the rice paddy by rolls of concertina wire and a system of slit trenches, bunkers, and machine-gun towers. At dusk the yellow floodlights snapped on, turning the paddy into a flat pattern of green and black shadow.
The farmers had begun work before dawn, and when Hanson looked out the heavy wire screen, past the concertina, the slit trenches and gun towers, he saw dozens of people in the rice paddy. The old men were hoeing, the women herding huge flocks of ducks that flowed over the green paddy like the shadow of a passing cloud. Small naked boys watched the water buffalo, keeping them out of the rice by beating them with bamboo sticks, slashing savagely at their flanks until the lumbering animals snorted and bolted away.
One of the gunships on perimeter security low-leveled over the paddy, its shadow racing crazily across the ground. The flock of ducks flattened against the green rice, then exploded in all directions. The old men didn’t look up at the helicopter pounding past only a few feet above them. They didn’t even break rhythm with their hoes. They knew that they might be shot as an enemy for running and had learned to ignore a steel machine the size of a dump truck racing just overhead at eighty miles an hour. In Vietnam one of the most important things you had to learn was what to ignore.
He could see a Special Forces A-camp out on the mainland, peaceful-looking, set into the dark green hillside, mist clinging to the ravines around it like snow. The tops of the hills were solid white, the whole scene like a Japanese watercolor.
Hanadon, who’d gotten there the day before, came to Hanson’s bunk and the two of them went to have lunch in the air-conditioned mess hall, where the tables were covered with white linen and set with fresh flowers. Dark wood speakers were bolted to the walls, and from them came the sound of radio station AFVN, Armed Forces Vietnam. The other stations, Hanson would find out, were Vietnamese, and all they seemed to play were endless wailing ballads of death, grief, and mourning.
After he ate Hanson rolled up the mattress at the end of his bunk and used it for a pillow, lying on the bare springs. He read, looked out the window, and thought about all the choices and accidents that had led him to where he was. The sky was a very pale blue, as though the color had been thinned out by the heat. Sometimes a shit smell would drift in from the paddy.
A white stone Buddha the size of a two-story house overlooked the city on the mainland from the hills above. At dawn he caught the first rays of the sun and seemed to emerge from the dark. At dusk he was brighter than the sky or the gray-green hills, the first thing to appear and the last to fade each day. He had not yet been damaged by the war, and his peaceful face was clearly visible from the barracks through the wire grid of the window. At night Hanson would look out and see the blinking lights and red exhaust cones of the gunships swarming the sky around him. The Buddha had great dignity, and the gunships seemed as inconsequential and vexing as insects.
But in the noontime heat of that first day Hanson drifted in and out of sleep and dreams, sometimes bolting awake, not knowing where he was in the midst of radio music and the conversation of other soldiers.
“. . . counting ’em down and rocking ’em out on a beautiful Thursday in-country with a weekend on tap…”
“. . . an’ so the captain says to me, ‘Is that prisoner still alive?’ Now, this Charlie layin’ there is all fucked up. He’s hurtin’. You know, he’s gonna die anyway, man. An’ to medivac him I’m gonna have to hump his sorry ass all the way up to the LZ. Dig it, that sorry fucker gon’ die anyway. So I walk over and put a burst into him and say to the captain, ‘Naw, sir, he’s dead.’ Captain just nods and walks off. He’s a cool dude.”
“. . . and here’s a request for all the guys at the fourth support battalion, Charlie Company of the Third Mech, and especially for Ringo and Big-time…”
That afternoon all the new arrivals were marched to a small auditorium for orientation. A movie screen was pulled down, the lights turned off, and the audience groaned as the film began. They had all seen it several times since joining the Army, but MACV regulations stated that no soldier would be assigned to a combat unit until he had seen it, and they were showing it one more time to catch anyone who might have missed it.
The film opened on Lyndon Johnson sitting at a massive desk, absorbed in paperwork. The camera moved in closer and the narrator’s voice said, “The President…of the United States.”
Johnson looked up as if this were an appoint
ment he had forgotten about in the midst of the duties of his office. He paused thoughtfully, took off his glasses, and looked directly into the camera.
“The other day,” he began, speaking slowly in his Texas accent, “I received a letter from the mother of a boy who had died in the jungles of Vet-nom. She had sacrificed her boy to a war she didn’t understand in a strange land thousands of miles away. So she wrote her President and wanted to know, ‘Why…Vet-nom?’
“History has taught us that force must be met with strength. Munich taught us that. When Britain sacrificed the peoples of a few small countries to a tyrant in the hopes of ‘peace in our time,’ they found that a tyrant will never be satisfied until he has everything. Those that do not learn from the lessons of history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.
“As your Commander-in-Chief, I pledge to meet force with strength, and as your President, I give my solemn oath to support the struggles of the freedom-loving people of Vet-nom.”
The President’s long, gloomy face was replaced by the words “WHY VIETNAM?” The words faded to newsreel footage of North Vietnamese troops marching to the sound of pounding kettle drums, intercut with jerky footage of fleeing refugees. There followed scenes of American troops handing out food and medical supplies, giving candy to children, and helping old villagers walk to aid stations, all to a sound track of French horns and violins. It was a battle of the bands, the ominous kettle drums and oboes of the Communists versus the French horns and violins of the Americans.
Hanson, Hanadon, Bishop, and some others walked to the “Playboy Club” after the film to get a beer.
“I see what it’s all about now, thanks to that film,” Bishop said. “We’re not going to let those Nazis take over Vietnam this time.”
“Fuckin’ tyrants in the jungle, man.”
“Why Vet-nom. Why?” They laughed as they walked.
Sympathy for the Devil Page 18