Sympathy for the Devil

by Kent Anderson

  “Comin’ up,” he said. “Good…good,” and he spiked the rounds down, giving them a spin as he let go.

  “Bombs gone,” he said with a laugh. Then he began slapping at his chest, shouting, cursing.

  “You hit?” a voice said over the intercom.

  “No. No, damnit. Got some hot M-60 brass down my shirt.”

  Suddenly Hanson’s earphone was full of electronic, shuddering laughter. The bend in the river looked peaceful, distant. Two columns of black smoke rose from the jungle and spread downriver. A short burst of green tracers rose from the jungle and fell away behind them.

  “Goddamn, Sarge,” Mr. Smith said, “looks like we missed. He’s a ballsy little gook. We’re way out of range now. He just wanted us to know he’s still there. I ought to call in an air strike on his ass, but I’d kind of miss him. He’s my gook.”

  They climbed still higher to cross a range of mountains, and it got colder.

  Wire surrounded the raw launch site at Mai Loc like a barrier reef around an island, gray triple-strand wire lashed around engineer stakes, piled coils of concertina, and webs of tanglefoot. The concertina was a new design. Instead of the knotted barbs there were little galvanized bow ties of raw-edged tin pinched onto the wire, designed to cut rather than scratch. It was a design that couldn’t be used to fence in livestock because it would hurt them too badly.

  The wire was littered with paper and plastic and cardboard, like a parking lot hurricane fence, cluttered with silver trip flares, squat claymore mines, and rusting beer cans filled with pebbles. Out in the wire it smelled of kerosene, burned grass, and hot metal.

  Quinn was squatting in the wire, twisting tanglefoot around short steel stakes. He was wearing heavy leather gauntlets, the palms studded with staples. His face and bare chest were slick with sweat and red dust, and he had bright little cuts on his forearms. The bottom layer of wire was cutting into his ankles, the other into his knees, and sweat was stinging his eyes. As he twisted the wire, he tried to shake off a fly that was walking on his cheek.

  He tossed his head, snorted, then bolted upright, tearing one leg of his fatigue pants from knee to ankle. He threw down his wire cutters and began swinging at the fly, unable to move in the wire, swaying awkwardly with each of the blows that, in the studded gloves, would have broken a man’s jaw, but which the fly easily avoided.

  He took off the gloves and stood catching his breath. “Goddamn flies,” he grunted. “Goddamn slopes.” He’d started out that morning with a work party of Vietnamese to repair the wire. As usual, the Vietnamese had played dumb and worked so slowly that Quinn lost his patience and did all the work himself because it was faster than trying to coax and threaten them into doing it. Two of the Vietnamese who were supposed to be helping him lay wire were sitting in the shade of a water tank. They waved at him, then looked at each other and giggled.

  “Lazy little bastards, little thieving scumbags,” he muttered. Quinn didn’t like the way the Vietnamese looked, or talked or smelled, or the mincing feminine way they moved and sometimes held hands like slant-eye faggots. He’d be damn glad when they left and the Yards took over all the company areas.

  Once the camp was finished, the Vietnamese would leave, and only Montagnards and Americans would work out of the launch site. All the South Vietnamese were security risks, so classified documents that came through camp arrived in two versions. One set was shared by the Americans and Vietnamese, but a second set marked NOFORN was seen only by the American personnel. The NOFORN version contained all the facts, while the other set was used to maintain the illusion that the Americans were only advising the Vietnamese in conducting their war, when in fact the Americans seemed to be fighting the war in spite of the Vietnamese.

  Quinn tugged at his pants leg to free it from the wire and heard a soft pop behind him, not unlike the sound of someone opening a beer, and Quinn froze. He reached for the .45 holstered at his hip. Then he crouched as though he was going to dive into the wire, then he said “Shit,” and stood slowly, having realized what he’d done. His pants were still snagged on the trip wire.

  A loud hissing erupted behind him, and he turned to watch the brilliant white glare and thick smoke boiling up from the trip flare that he had triggered, its fuse having made the same pop that a grenade fuse makes five seconds before it explodes. The flare was bright even in the sun, burning furiously, urgently as a false alarm that won’t turn off.

  Quinn kicked his leg free and walked out of the wire, ignoring the laughing Vietnamese, past the inner perimeter bunkers and the final defensive firing positions, beneath the sandbagged gun tower that looked like an old wooden oil derrick, and on into the teamhouse.

  The teamhouse was a long tin-roofed building. Screened windows ran the length of the two long sides, covered at night and during rainy season by heavy wooden shutters. It was divided into three sections: a kitchen/pantry, a narrow dining area dominated by the big picnic table where the team took their meals, and the largest section, taking up half the building, where the team spent their free time. Big wooden footlockers, one for each team member, lined the walls. There were book and magazine shelves, a card table with heavy handmade chairs, and another crude table near the back door that supported all the backup commo gear. Web gear, weapons, and pouches of grenades hung from nails along the walls. A bar was set in one corner, and Silver’s gigantic stereo speakers were mounted on the wall over the bar, the reel-to-reel tape deck on a shelf behind the bar.

  A battered old refrigerator hunkered down behind the bar, and next to it, on the wall, a plastic-covered chart listed each team member by name and job. An eight-by-ten close-up of a woman’s crotch was taped to the door of the refrigerator and at a glance looked like an aerial photo of some strange jungle terrain.

  Quinn took a beer from the refrigerator, put a slash next to his name with a grease pencil, and sat down on one of the wobbly bar stools that they’d had made for them in the nearby village they called The Ville. Pictures from pornographic magazines had been sandwiched beneath the Plexiglas bar top, and months of spilled beer had seeped beneath the acrylic, bloating and discoloring the already contorted women.

  Quinn was sketching in a little spiral notebook when Silver and Dawson came in.

  “Hey, Mr. Bob Wire,” Dawson said, “you been givin’ those little people some of that on-the-job training? Teachin’ ’em, you know, how to help their own selves against those bad old Communists?” He started laughing.

  Silver got two beers and threw one to Dawson.

  “I thought the little bastards had fragged me,” Quinn said, still sketching. “I tripped a flare, heard that fuse pop, and thought my ass was blown up. Thought it was a grenade. They thought it was real funny. Lazy little bastards.

  “You know what I like about them? Huh? Nothing. Not one fuckin’ thing. I don’t like their skinny, bony faces, or their ass-tight fatigues and the faggy way they walk, or their rotten goddamn fish breath when they get up in your face like they’re gonna kiss you, to talk to you in that whining, for-shit language of theirs, and blòw that stinking rice and fish breath past their rotten teeth into your face, only they don’t know how to talk in any kind of fucking normal human voice, all they know how to do is yell. I hate a gook motherfucker to get in my face and yell at me, and wave their scrawny arms around.”

  “You got to learn how to communicate with the people,” Dawson said. “Remember, you a kind of ambassador, winnin’ hearts an’ minds, like the man said in the movie.”

  “Right,” Quinn said. “Why fuckin’ Vet-nom?”

  “What you drawin’ there, my man?” Dawson said, putting his arm around Quinn. “Looks like some kinda trick radio.”

  “You got it right. Something for those thief motherfuckers to find next time they break into my bunker. What you do, see,” Quinn said, showing Dawson the drawing, “is take a little transistor radio, scoop out all the guts except the battery and the on/off switch, and replace ’em with half a stick of C-4. Put in an elect
ric blasting cap and hook it up to the battery and the switch, then leave it sitting where one of those rice-burning little zips is gonna be sure to steal it.”

  Quinn tapped the sketch with his wire-cut knuckles. “Huh? Is that all right or what? Thievin’ little fuck gets him a radio next time he rips my bunker off. He gets back to his bunker with his dope-smoking asshole buddies, and they’re gonna listen to that whining and moaning they call music, and turns it on. His slack-jawed, slant-eyed head just—goes away. His buddies lose their eardrums and start bleeding from the nose. And nobody knows what happened.” Quinn was grinning hugely.

  “Kay, Bee, Oh, Oh, M, Kay-Boom,” Silver said, holding his hand up to his ear like a headphone, imitating a disk jockey, “Comin’ to you like C-4 at forty thousand feet a second. News, weather, and sports, and, my friends out there, the top-forty countdown—the sounds that made us what we are.

  “Hey, GI. Have you taken your ‘damtril’ today? That’s right, the little orange pill. Sure, it’s easy to forget, but you’re no good to your buddies out there if you have malaria! So think about it. You owe it to yourself, and your buddies. Awright, this one’s goin’ out for Honcho and the guys at the Forty-first radar company…”

  They could hear or feel the faint disturbance in the air that was the mail chopper coming in.

  “Hope they’ve got some movies,” Silver said. “I don’t want to watch The Night They Raided Minsky’s again.”

  The chopper was a black dot to the south of camp, like a speck of dust in the eye.

  “New man comin’ in,” Dawson said. “Lieutenant Andre says we’re getting a new intel man who can take over when Myers leaves.”

  “Good,” Quinn said. “We could use another experienced hand up here.”

  “Nope. It’s his first tour. He’s an E-Four fresh from training group.”

  “When did they start putting E-Fours in intel slots?”

  “Just lately. They need the bodies. They been using too many people up across the border,” Silver said.

  The thudding rotor blades became more distinct as the chopper circled the camp and began to spiral down to the landing pad, dropping quickly to avoid possible sniper fire.

  Red dust corkscrewed through the rotors as the chopper set down on the pad. The staff sergeant from Da Nang got out with two orange mailbags, followed by a soldier wearing stiff new jungle fatigues and shiny new boots.

  “There’s the new guy,” Dawson said.

  “Hey,” Silver said, “I know him. I gave him a ride to Monkey Mountain to ask Sergeant Major for a job. I guess he got it.”

  “Great,” Quinn said. “Shit. A fuckin’ college kid. Just what we need.”

  “How can you tell that?” Dawson said.

  “I got eyes. Look at that peaches-and-cream college-boy face. Look at the cocky goddamn way the little fucker walks. Thinks he’s hot shit. He’s gonna last about a week, then they can send him back to Da Nang where he belongs and send us somebody who knows what he’s doing.”

  “Hey,” Dawson said, “give the dude a chance. He might be okay.”

  “We’ll see,” Quinn said, watching Hanson walk toward the teamhouse. “We’ll see soon enough.”

  The next day Hanson was on a work party building new, mortar-proof bunkers. The heat was stunning. There was the sound of steel on iron as shovels chipped at the baked clay earth. Clouds of gnats floated through the heat, dropping down over men’s heads like nets. They couldn’t be waved away or outrun. They moved along with you as you ran, getting inside your nose and ears with a whine that was almost too high to be heard, that you could almost taste. If you tried to breathe through your mouth, they flew down your throat. It was like drowning in heat and bugs.

  Hanson was trying to forget the heat, and bugs, the loneliness and uncertainty that shaded off into fear as he shoveled sand off the back of a deuce-and-a-half. The shovel hissed and thudded as he drove it into the sand, polishing the blade, working out a rhythm with the long-handled shovel; filling it, lifting, pivoting toward the cement hopper, tipping the blade of the shovel just as it reached the apex of its climb so that the sand hung, weightless, for a moment, then splaying the shovel, sending the sand to the ground in a sparkling tan curtain. It was reassuring, the rhythmic hiss and thud. He could ignore the ache in his arms and shoulders, the sweat in his crotch and under his arms, working out variations of the rhythm, the pivot and release.

  “Hey, I said, you want to give me a hand here,” Quinn shouted up at him, startling him out of his rhythm. “We got enough fucking sand.”

  “Right,” Hanson said, speared the shovel into the sand, and jumped down. Quinn walked away without saying anything, took hold of a strap on an aluminum pallet, and stood glaring at Hanson.

  “Over there,” Quinn said, gesturing with his head, and began to pull the heavy pallet. Hanson snatched up another strap and began to pull. But Quinn pulled against him, and each time Hanson tried to adjust the direction of the pallet to compensate for Quinn’s movement, it seemed as if Quinn tried to work against him in a new direction. It was like moving bulky, sharp-edged furniture with an angry stranger.

  The pallet banged Hanson’s shins with each step. Sweat stung his eyes and a fly bit him on the back of the neck.

  “Hey, Quinn,” he said, dropping his end of the pallet. “Something bothering you?”

  “Nothing bothering me, man.”

  “About me,” Hanson said. “Something bothering you about me?”

  “Like I said, nothing bothers me. Not for long. Something bothers me, I just squash it. No problem.”

  Quinn gave the pallet one last tug, then let it drop, almost on Hanson’s foot, and walked away.

  It took Hanson’s eyes a minute to adjust to the darkness in his new bunker, to see beyond the dusty shaft of light from the sandbagged entrance. He sat on his bunk and began unlacing his boots by feel. When he saw the cobra, he started up to reach for his rifle, but the snake wasn’t moving. It didn’t look right. He backed toward the door, fumbled for his red-lensed flashlight, and shined it on the packed-clay floor. It was an empty cobra skin as long as a man and thick as his arm.

  He checked every corner of the bunker with the flashlight in one hand and an entrenching tool in the other, throwing black and red shadows, but he found nothing. The snakeskin rustled like paper when he prodded it with the entrenching tool. As he bent to pick it up, a voice behind him said, “He stayed here in the night, but now he is gone. He left you his skin.”

  Hanson spun around and saw a Montagnard framed by the heavy-timbered doorway. He smiled, and Hanson saw that his teeth were capped in gold, with jade insets of stars and crescent moons.

  “He left you his old life,” the Montagnard said. “The snake is a very powerful person, and now you have his old life. He is a powerful person, but he is not a man. A long time ago, in the dream time when the animals could still talk, man had to choose between being a man and being a snake. It was a hard choice. The snake never dies. He just sheds his old life and grows a new one. Man chose to stay a man, and walk and keep the pain of his life, and finally to die. The snake thinks we are fools. We try to kill him whenever we can. It’s hard to tell who is right.”

  Then he stepped back out into the sun, out of the shadow of the doorway, where he took on sharp definition: a small, dark-skinned man in a tiger suit, wearing a green bandana and a small leather bag around his neck. His eyes seemed black in the sunlight, like little caverns with a light deep inside. He had a handsome, broad face, Mongolian as an Eskimo in the shimmering heat, and he could have been anywhere between the ages of thirty and sixty. He smiled, waved, and walked away.

  Hanson picked up the snakeskin and looked at the diamond pattern of gray-green scales. It hadn’t been there the night before, and he thought about the cobra…and he thought about the cobra, blind and ready to strike at anything that moved, shedding its skin in the bunker while he slept.

  He took off his boots and socks, put powder on his feet, and lay on the bu
nk staring up at the timber and sandbag ceiling. The doorway shimmered like a movie screen set into the dark wall of the bunker, shapes warping and bloating in the heat.

  Above his head, the firing port looked out over the rows of tanglefoot and concertina, the field of view spreading until it reached the jungle. The claymore firing devices on the ledge below the firing port looked like swollen green clothespins. Squeezing them generated tiny sparks of electricity that would travel down the wires that disappeared into the grass and blow the bank of squat little antipersonnel mines.

  Hanson looked at the light on the ceiling and wondered what it was he’d done to piss Quinn off.

  Quinn spent most of the next day with a squad of Vietnamese, trying once more to show them how to string tanglefoot, putting in two layers of short engineer stakes ankle high and shin high, then running barbed wire in random webs around them, on two different levels so that to walk through it you had to step high and carefully, exposing yourself, cutting your ankles and shins and the backs of your calves. The Vietnamese stood around and smoked Salem cigarettes, joking about the big American who always lost his temper and did the work himself.

  The angrier Quinn got, the more he nicked himself on the wire, little cuts on his forearms mixing blood with sweat and dust. He squatted carefully to inspect a claymore mine set in a base of rotting sandbags, and when he picked the mine up, he found a nest of mice, blind furless babies. They were pink and translucent, webbed with purple blood vessels, their blind eyes just gray bulges under the skin.

  “Goddamn dumb mice,” Quinn muttered. “Even the fuckin’ mice in this country are dumb. Gook mice. Build a nest under a claymore, sure. What kind of shit-for-brains parents have you got?” he demanded of the squeaking, wriggling pile of tiny bodies.

  He checked the blasting cap and wiring, set the mine back on its little folding metal legs, and re-covered the nest with grass, the high-pitched mewling barely audible.