Sympathy for the Devil

by Kent Anderson

  “But he hates the Commies. Get him to show you his scars sometime. He used to be a company commander in one of the camps down south, and he thinks he’s a great tactician. He’ll take over the patrol in a heartbeat. You gotta let him know that you’re the boss. His English isn’t that good, either, and there are times when he’ll tell you he understands when he doesn’t know what you’re saying. To save face. He’ll never admit he doesn’t understand. None of the Vietnamese will. They agree with almost anything you say because it’s not polite to disagree. They’ll say, ‘yes, yes,’ when they’re thinking, ‘no.’

  “So it’s a good idea to know enough Vietnamese—enough to pick out a few words here and there—and pay attention while he translates, then fake him out. Make him think you know more than you do.

  “And you remember this morning, when I jacked him up about those M-60s? It wasn’t really his fault, but you’ve got to do that. Get too friendly with them and they lose respect for you. Can’t get ’em to do shit.

  “Listen to me,” he said. “I sound like some cigar-chewing asshole from Alabama. I used to be a good liberal. Got tear-gassed in a picket line once.”

  He laughed and looked across at the smoldering patches of brush the tanks had shot up.

  “Fire superiority and fear,” he said. “That’s how you enforce the law. That’s why those people back in the States push that peace and love so hard. It’s a real comfort to believe in the innate goodness of man. If you got that, hell, things are all right. You can sleep at night if you believe that.”

  It was after midnight when Hanson woke up. They had set up their night location in an abandoned apple orchard. The story was that some American missionaries had planted it years before, hoping the Vietnamese could get a cash crop out of it. The trees grew, but the apples didn’t taste right. The Vietnamese wouldn’t eat them, no one in the States would buy them, and the orchard had gone to seed. The air was heavy with the smell of rotting apples, and it made Hanson a little homesick. He didn’t know what woke him up. Lieutenant Andre was still asleep on his side of the lean-to.

  Besides the apples, there was the smell of rubberized fabric, wood smoke in his fatigues, and the sharp odor of insect repellent on his neck and face. But there was something else.

  He touched the stubble on his cheek and stared into the dark. The faraway artillery sounded like old wooden windows banging in the wind. The volume of the radio was turned down, and the faint rushing sound of static reminded him of a TV set left on after the stations have signed off for the night.

  Hanson looked at the silhouette of a tree against the dark sky, and the harder he looked at it, the more he felt that it was looking at him, defining and judging him. Something was going on out there. It was a feeling that would become familiar, but it was new to him then.

  He recalled the time when he was five years old, when every night on his way upstairs to bed he had to pass a reproduction of a painting of a French street scene. Some nights the shapes and colors in the painting would look to him like part of a hidden face, and he’d know then that he was in for a bad night. The headlights of passing cars would come in his bedroom windows, hit the mirror over his dresser, and circle the room, stretching and thickening as they passed across the walls.

  Sixth sense is only the other five senses fine-tuned to threat. A shift in the rhythm of the silence that opens your eyes. A shudder in the pattern of shadow. The hint of some smell that brings your head up. Separately they would mean nothing, but together they are enough to lift the hair on your neck, to stir little bubbles of dread deep in the back of your brain, all of them forming like a forgotten name, right on the tip of your tongue. A group of men moving through the dark with plans to kill you gives off an energy you can feel if you pay attention to what your senses tell you.

  Lieutenant Andre was awake and reaching for his rifle as Hanson heard the whisper of metal on metal, then a flash and an explosion. The firing started up like the little two-cycle engine on the lawn mower Hanson had been afraid to use as a kid, sputtering at first, then racing as though it would explode. He sat up as green and red tracers began blinking through the orchard, vanishing in the trunks of trees or glancing off them and droning away at random angles. He felt the thud of a claymore, its pattern of steel balls gnashing into the brush as he began to stand, and a trip flare popped in the black grass, hissing and smoking, burning with a silver magnesium flame that gilded what it touched and threw the rest into flat black shadow, turning the orchard two-dimensional and monochromatic.

  The shelter half above Hanson snapped taut against its ropes, came apart, and vanished as something slapped him in the face, clubbed him in the chest. He watched himself lift and turn in the air through twinkling points of silver light, his ears ringing and roaring, his nose stinging, unable to get air. He watched it happen over and over, each time starting a little farther along, like a series of echoes fading out.

  Then he was back inside himself, on the ground, heard himself grunt as he hit, his head and hip hurting. He stood slowly, testing to see if his body would betray him and collapse.

  He found his rifle and Lieutenant Andre at the shredded shelter half. Bits of shrapnel had punctured the plastic stock of Andre’s M-16, and gouts of white Styrofoam oozed from the jagged holes. The shrapnel had driven through the rifle and into Andre.

  Two men were running past in slow motion. They were silver and black in the flare light, glowing like phantoms, their eyes shadowed into empty sockets as they slowly turned and looked at Hanson, slowly tried to turn toward him as he fired his M-16 into them and they flinched and stumbled, wounds springing from their glittering khaki uniforms like tiny black hands and fists.

  Hanson was sucked into another explosion that took his rifle and threw him down where he lay listening to his body, calling roll on his arms and legs, waiting for the precincts to come in. And he remembered the TV picture of Bobby Kennedy doing the same thing on the kitchen floor after winning his last primary in L.A., remembered seeing in his eyes the message the precincts of his body had sent him.

  The firing was still going on, people were shouting, but it didn’t seem very important. It was as if he were walking down a dark, empty street in a high wind, watching the street lights dim and brighten as the pitching wires arced and flashed above him.

  He heard the helicopter and felt its rotor blast sting him with dirt and bits of gravel, surrounding him with violent sound. A gunship was putting out suppressive fire. The muzzle flash from the door gunner in the chopper that was coming down at him was a blistering yellow-white, a sourceless flame like a burnoff flare pipe in a refinery. The chopper was open-sided like a delivery truck, and in the flash of the gun Hanson could see the silhouette of the door gunner, and of the crew chief shifting his weight in the open door as the chopper sideslipped in. The aircraft-landing light on the nose came on, shuddering and arcing with the movement of the chopper, strobing, everything moving below it like footage in a jerky black and white newsreel.

  He could see the reflection of green instrument lights on the face shield of the pilot and smell the hot sweet odor of jet fuel and gunpowder. The jet exhaust was a quivering cheery red.

  Hanson smelled mildew, wet canvas and soil, creosote and rubbing alcohol. He woke up in a large bunker with gray concrete walls, the roof supported by rough-cut timbers. A shaft of light from the stairway writhed with glittering dust. He touched his face, feeling his nose and cheekbones, his lips and chin, then pulled his hand away and looked at his palm. He felt his crotch, slowly raised his head and looked at his legs, moving them alternately up and down. Above him a rat made its way along one of the ceiling beams.

  He was more afraid than he had ever thought possible, not just an exaggeration of the fear he had known in his life before but a whole new emotion, an emotion as powerful and unexpected as love.

  He got up, his legs still rubbery, picked up his rifle, and walked to the door. Looking out over the wire and gun towers, he remembered for some reason
that Sunday afternoon long before, Stand up, stand up and walk to your television set, when Billy Graham had terrified him up and out of the chair he was sitting in.

  He would begin volunteering for every operation as a means of beating the fear. Far better than waiting passively for his turn to come around again to go on operation. Attacking the fear, taking charge of it, was better.

  It’s not the round with your name on it you gotta watch out for, it’s the one that’s addressed “to whom it may concern,” was the phrase that contained the two ways of looking at life and death in Vietnam.

  Hanson believed in the round with his name on it, in a universe as ordained and relentless as the tracked passage of a locomotive. If he lost his belief in that bullet, he would be hostage to a random universe, to chance and sleepless fear, constantly trying to avoid the coincidence that would kill him, unable to do his job.

  And besides, he thought, recalling the glittering silver soldiers he had killed, if he died now he would still be one life ahead. It occurred to him that the more people he killed, the stronger he would be.

  And he was thinking, too, of Lieutenant Andre, who had kept his body alive for Hanson, long enough to bring the choppers in.

  The orders came through for Hanson’s sergeant stripes and the thirty-five-dollar raise that went with them. Mr. Minh arranged a buffalo feast for the occasion.

  The buffalo boys were between the ages of five and ten. They had picked out their bamboo clubs days before. The clubs were the size of Louisville Sluggers, but more flexible; the bigger boys had practiced until they could get a slight whipping motion when they swung, the club hissing through the air. Some of the boys were swinging bull roarers made of jagged artillery shrapnel, making a roar like a Phantom jet dropping its flaps, almost to stall speed, to lay out napalm.

  “The young boys are happy for your stripes,” Mr. Minh told Hanson. “You brought them a buffalo to kill. It is the way they can get power before they are old enough to kill men. When he dies, his power becomes theirs.”

  The water buffalo had huge curved horns and a back as broad as a small car. A black iron ring pierced his nose. He was tethered by the ring to a llana, a giant bamboo pole that had been cut and carried from the jungle, then pounded into the ground. The animal’s large brown eyes rolled up and around, showing the whites, as he pulled against the ring.

  “The power comes off him,” Mr. Minh said, “like heat from a fire, power from the dying wood. And the one who kills him can feel it on his skin. It is the same when you kill a man, but a man has more power than a buffalo.”

  The first boy to hit the buffalo was ten years old. His father had been killed in the fighting a year before. The boy bowed to the llana, then shattered the buffalo’s right front leg with his bamboo club. The animal grunted, almost fell, then balanced on three legs, straining at the ring in his nose and bellowing, moaning. The other boys moved in and broke his other front leg, and he dropped to his chest. They pounded his neck and ribs, and the animal emptied his bladder and bowels. The boys cheered, and the buffalo began breathing a bloody froth from his huge black nostrils. Dust and green flies rose from his dark hide as the clubs pounded him. One of the clubs smashed out a dark brown eye, another broke a hind leg and he toppled over, and the smaller boys were able to hit him in the head.

  “I killed my first man, a Bru tribesman,” Mr. Minh said, “with a bamboo knife. It was tribe against tribe, bamboo knives and crossbows. Then the French came, and they gave me a carbine, and I became squad leader. The world was different before the carbines. The rules of fighting were simple, everyone understood them, and not so many people died. How do you get power from a man killed by a gunship?”

  The boys dragged the dead buffalo to a mound of sticks and heaved the carcass on top of it. The sticks were set afire, and Hanson could feel the heat of the fire and smell burning hair as the dead animal settled and sank into the flame. The buffalo’s good eye stared up at the sky. His hide began to split, and the bloody ribs blackened in the fire. More sticks were heaped on top of the animal, and the carcass began to bloat and steam.

  PART THREE

  BACK IN ’NAM

  “. . . And remember,” the chaplain said from the radio, “God has no problems, only plans,” and his voice gave way to swelling organ music that suggested the inside of a cathedral, polished wood and flagstone floors, rays of blue and rose light splintering through the stained-glass windows and banks of gleaming organ pipes. Hanson’s eyes snapped open. For an instant he thought he was back in the States. Then he remembered. Two nights before there’d been The Hustlers, and Blackie, and Quinn punching out the “college boy.” Hanson relaxed and smiled. He’d kicked the bar over on the Spec 5 and passed out on the beach with Silver talking about men on the moon.

  He rolled over and looked out the narrow screened windows of the ammo shed, over the rope-handled crates, past the perimeter bunkers, wire, and the raw, burned dead zone to where the paddy dikes gave way to foothills that built to mountains where the morning sun was burning the fog away. He smelled wood smoke, sandalwood, and the faint sourness of high explosives from the crates around his bunk. He heard a yapping howl and looked up to see Hose running, crablike, past the teamhouse.

  He’d had a bad dream the night before. All his nightmares were about home now.

  Hanson’s first day back from Vietnam had begun with a perfect spring morning. His jeans and blue T-shirt had been folded in a drawer for eighteen months, and the track shoes felt weightless after a year and a half of combat boots. He was tanned from the Asian sun that had been burning down on him only two days before. When he walked out the door he still had that slight bounce that had given him so much trouble in basic training. The air was cool and fresh with the smell of cut grass and pine trees.

  But by the time he’d walked the first block, it had begun to seem like a different kind of day. At first he felt just slightly confused, unsure of his judgment, like a hangover when you seem to be just a split-second behind the rest of the world. And the chirping in his ears seemed to be getting worse. The doctor at Fort Bragg had told him that a lot of people came back with high-frequency hearing problems, that it was no real problem, just an annoyance. But the sound, like the chirping of thousands of distant birds, made it difficult to pinpoint the source of sounds, as if he had lost some sort of auditory depth perception.

  And there was so much sound: cars, and slamming doors, barking dogs, kids laughing on their way to school. A truck backfired and he almost threw himself to the ground, the adrenaline starting to pump. He dropped to a crouch and swung toward the sound, holding his hands as if there were a rifle in them, and found himself staring at a couple of high school kids across the street.

  “What the fuck are you looking at,” he yelled at them, suddenly enraged.

  “Nothin’, man,” one of them yelled. “Don’t sweat it.”

  Hanson stalked across the street. The two kids were about his size, and cocky, but as he got closer, they looked at each other and seemed less sure of themselves.

  “You don’t call me man, punk,” Hanson said. “You don’t say shit to me.”

  “Okay,” the kid said, holding up his hands. “Take it easy.”

  “You don’t tell me to take it easy, either. Get the fuck out of here before I kill your ass.”

  “Okay, okay, we’re goin’.”

  They walked away, and as Hanson continued in the opposite direction, he heard them laugh. He almost turned to go after them, but stopped himself.

  As he walked, he cut his eyes from side to side, high and low, looking for movement. At the same time he kept track of potential cover—trees, parked cars, ditches—hole-to-hole movement, he’d called it in Vietnam. On patrol he always knew where he was going to jump if the shooting started.

  He looked for objects he could use as weapons: rocks, bricks, garbage cans, broken bottles, bits of lumber, lawn furniture, a garden sprinkler. When he passed someone on the sidewalk, his right fist was ready at hi
s side, listening to the stranger’s footsteps after he passed to be sure they didn’t stop and swing around on him. There were people moving everywhere.

  The cars were the worst. They made so much noise that he couldn’t listen for sounds that might be “wrong.” When he crossed a busy street in front of the staggered lines of idling automobiles, it was difficult for him not to break into a run. He kept rechecking to be sure that the light was green. Silently he chanted airborne cadences to keep his pace steady and glared at the drivers through their windshields. By the time he reached the quiet, manicured college campus, he was exhausted.

  He sat with his back against a low brick wall and watched the students on their way to classes. The girls were pretty and clean. Impossibly clean. He wanted to walk up to one and smell her. The thought scared him. He might do anything, he thought, remembering the high school kids. He could have killed them.

  A girl began walking toward him, and he didn’t know whether to look away or run. For a moment he was terrified of himself.

  “Oh, wow,” she said. “How long have you been back?”

  She looked at him and brushed a strand of blond hair back from her face, her smooth, white, perfect face that had no pockmarks or scars or running sores. Her green eyes were clear, and when she smiled, her teeth were dazzlingly white.

  “Remember?” she said. “Suzanne?”

  Then he remembered that she had been in some classes with him, and his words came out in a rush. “Sure, sure. Of course. Hi, Suzanne. Wow, I’ve been feeling a little weird. Jet lag, I guess. Yeah, I just got back. Last night.” He laughed. “Huh.”

  “Far out. It must be great.”

  Hanson felt a little light-headed.

  “Well,” she said, “how’d it go?”

  Hanson was smiling, but he felt embarrassed and a little frightened, like someone who has forgotten something simple—his birth date, or his name when about to sign a check.