Sympathy for the Devil

by Kent Anderson

  “I don’t know,” he said, then laughed. “I guess I don’t know exactly how it went. To explain it, you know?”

  “I guess you’re just happy to be back from there.”

  “Yeah,” he said, trying to think of something else to say. “But I got to like it over there, in a way. It’s a beautiful place. It’s not all swamps like in the movies, you know, ‘the green hell of jungle.’ Up in the highlands they’ve got rolling grassy hills like Montana. No roads, no tourists. Well, occasionally you run across a few tourists, but you get to kill them over there,” he said, smiling.

  The girl didn’t smile. “Hey,” she said, “I’ve gotta run. Ten o’clock class. I’ll probably see you around.”

  As she walked quickly away, Hanson inhaled slowly. He could still smell her.

  The chirping in his ears was worse, and he felt a faint insistent wind against his face and chest, but the leaves around him weren’t moving, and steam from the university physical plant was rising straight up. He sat there most of the morning, afraid he would fall if he tried to stand, trying to prepare himself for the trip back to his house.

  “Goooooooood morning, Vietnam,” a DJ shouted from the radio. “Hey, it looks like a beautiful Sunday morning, all the way from the Delta to the DMZ here in-country. This one’s goin’ out for the motor pool at Firebase Flora, and especially for ‘Smooth’ and ‘Tip-in.’ ”

  Hanson looked at his web gear and CAR-15 stacked against the wall next to his boots, up at the AK-47 and the canvas bag full of grenades hanging from nails. The wooden ammo crates were stacked neatly in the shed, their contents stenciled in crisp black letters on the raw wood.

  He sat up and put his boots on, listening to a pair of Phantom jets off to the west, then checked the CAR-15. He dropped the clip out and pulled the charging handle back, ejecting a round from the chamber. He heard a burst of small-arms fire from the direction of the village, the tinny pop of an M-1 carbine, but no answering fire. He wiped down his rifle with an oily rag, reloaded it, and carried it with him to the door. Hose was running out the main gate, baying, chasing something only he could see.

  Hanson stood in the doorway of the ammo shed and shouted, “Gentlemen. God has no problems, only plans. He does not panic. Goooooooood morning, Vietnam.”

  EDGE OF THE AO

  Three hours before dawn it was cool out beyond the wire. Hanson and the squad of Montagnards slipped past the eastern edge of The Ville, where the local-force militia would be asleep, through the rice paddies that were blanketed with a thin layer of fog, and into the folds of the hills. The walk to the hills took them through the smells of camp, village, rice paddy, the air gradually growing sweeter and less acrid. The moon had set, and the darkness was thick.

  Hanson slumped down against a hillock, shrugged his pack off, and took a Coke out. There was a frail smell of something like magnolia in the air, a sweetness that hinted at decomposition. In the distance harassment-and-interdiction fire was beginning to rumble, comforting as summer thunder. The H&I fire was preplotted each night on the routes NVA units might take to move supplies under cover of the night, and on the trails the VC would take to and from the villages where they spent the nights with their wives and families, leaving just before dawn like commuters to the war. A pink hand flare popped softly near the camp perimeter, showing the rice paddies as a green-black grid work.

  Hanson slipped the thick-bladed knife from the sheath taped upside down on his web gear at the left shoulder and used its point to drill a hole in the can of Coke, opening it silently. He sucked down the sweet liquid, and within seconds he could feel his body begin to burn the sugar. Sweat beaded his forehead and upper lip from the two-hour walk to the hills. Adrenaline and amphetamine burned the sugar from the Coke, and he could feel himself tuning in to the night, his sight and hearing beginning to focus. He pulled the starlight scope out of his pack, put the rubber eyepiece to his eye, and looked out over the paddy, village, and camp. The image he saw was foreshortened, two-dimensional, a grainy green picture of what lay before him, what a deep-sea diver might have seen if the valley were under water, if The Flood had come. He sat back, sipped the Coke, and smiled. This was what he’d come back for.

  It was the hour when people were moving through the jungle, getting ready for another day of killing each other.

  The 3rd Mech had been working the border of the camp’s AO, and enemy units had been staying out of sight. Hanson had decided to take the small patrol on a three-day sweep of the AO’s border. When the enemy discovered the boundary of two areas of operation, in this case the camp and the 3rd Mech, they often straddled it to avoid contact. It was necessary to establish AOs to prevent friendly units from shooting at each other, but it resulted in narrow corridors of safety for enemy units.

  Rau moved silently over to where he was sitting, clapped him softly on the shoulder, and grinned. Hanson could see his smile in the dark. “Good you are back,” he whispered.

  Hanson smiled and handed him the can of Coke. “Yes,” he said. “Good to be back on operation.”

  It turned into a hot day, like a day in August in the Midwest, very hot but far enough along into the summer that it seemed almost normal. There was a faint tremulousness in the air that suggested the possibility of a storm. During operations on such days, you just tried to keep moving, drinking the warm, iodine-tainted water that was gritty with river sediment. If you stopped to rest, you felt worse than when you were on the move, your muscles and tendons tightening and knotting up, and it was all you could do to heave yourself back up on your feet and start moving again. The passage of clouds overhead seemed to be the only evidence that time was passing at all.

  Hanson wore a small compass like a crucifix on a chain around his neck, aligning him with the magnetic pull of north, anchoring him in those lines of force that girdle the poles. He kept easy track of landmarks in relation to his movement and to each other so that he always knew his position on the earth within a hundred yards. There were days on patrol when he felt that he was locked into the inertia and pull of the earth itself. The air he breathed, full of sunlight, fixed him as part of it all. And with his radio he could orchestrate the guns at the fire bases. While he walked along beneath the artillery fan, he had only to speak a few words into the black handset to make it happen, the combination of letters and numbers that singled out the map-grid locations like musical notation.

  They took a break at the edge of an area that had been leveled by a B-52 Arclight, trees and foliage scythed away, rotting like a mammoth compost heap. They set up inside a bomb crater the size of a living room. As they climbed and slid down the crater walls, they set off small landslides, and breaths of sulfur rose about them.

  Hanson eased his pack off into the soft red dirt wall of the crater and took out his marine stove. He found a stick of C-4 and pinched off a wad, using it to heat a canteen cup of brown river water, watching the silt and tiny debris boil up in little clouds. He dug around inside the pack, down in the bottom, found the yellow packet of Bugs Bunny lemonade, and poured it in the boiling water for hot lemonade.

  The Bugs Bunny presweetened lemonade was contraband. A memo had come up from Da Nang directing all personnel to return any packages of Bugs Bunny lemonade to Da Nang because the surgeon general had found that it caused cancer in laboratory animals and could be hazardous to your health.

  He sipped the hot lemonade, feeling it burn through the taste of sulfur on the back of his throat.

  Rau tapped him on the shoulder, hissing, and pointed over the far edge of the crater, where he could see a soldier in khaki crawling toward the crater through the grass. It was an NVA regular, a fact that set an alarm pulsing in the back of Hanson’s neck. NVA don’t run around by themselves. Where there is one, there are sure to be more close by.

  He pulled a smooth, cool, baseball-sized grenade from his chest harness, lifting it from the harness ring and peeling off the electrical tape that held it there. He twisted and pulled the ring and cotter pin fro
m the fuse, and the spring-loaded spoon throbbed in his palm. As he slipped into those simple, mechanical survival tasks, colors tightened, the smell of pollen and dust in the air grew rich, and he felt a tingling in his scalp and arms. The world was suddenly simple again, and real success, the possibility of staying alive, was in his hands and he was in control of his life.

  He threw the grenade, and as he watched the green steel ball rise against the sky, small-arms fire began tearing and rattling along one arc of the crater, bullets kicking up dust and lashing the grass. A sheet of dirt and black smoke burst and spread where the grenade fell, and Hanson felt the concussion through the wall of the crater.

  He barely heard the rattle of AK-47s and the sharper report of M-16s, the whine and snap of shrapnel. He was at the bottom of the crater, turning radio dials and watching the frequency numbers pop up and vanish behind the little plastic windows on the face of the radio. He was almost serene in the smooth equilibrium of adrenaline, and he radioed for gunships like a businessman making a long-distance call.

  “Savage Names, Savage Names,” he said, “this is five eight, over…” and the camp put him in touch with the pilots of a pair of Cobras that were in the air only minutes away. Hanson gave them his location, and the lead pilot said, “Uh, roger. Watch for us to come in from the east…looking for work,” his words metallic through the radio speaker, his voice shivering violently with the vibration of the rotor blades.

  A Cobra gunship looks like what it is, as simple as a wedge. It is a machine designed to kill people from the air, and every rivet and toggle switch in it is part of that purpose. It makes the kind of blunt, unapologetic statement that Hanson had learned to admire, cold simplicity, as unadorned as physics, without apology or qualification, requiring no “point of view” or situational perspective. It was like the inevitability of death or the existence of evil in human life, like part of a language that required no modifiers or metaphors, a language in which, when you said something, everyone knew exactly what you meant.

  Hanson heard or felt them come, a stirring in the air toward the east. At the same time he saw the grass bending in the still air out beyond the edge of the crater. He took another grenade from the cluster in the canteen cover that hung at his hip and threw it, hearing clearly the tiny ping of the spoon flying off, the snap of the fuse like a kitchen match being struck. The grenade went off and he saw a body rise weirdly on all fours through the smoke and dirt, then vanish.

  He saw the gunships, dots low on the horizon. “Redskin flight,” he said, “I have you in sight. Turn to nine o’clock. I have a marker out.”

  The gunships got closer and louder, the thud of their rotors overtaken by the wailing of the turbojet engines. Hanson pulled the folded Day-Glo orange nylon panel out of his fatigue pocket. He opened it out, the size of a scarf, and snapped it open then crumpled it closed, open and closed, as the ships roared over, taking small-arms fire from the tree line, the glowing orange cone of their exhausts and blinking strobe lights clear against the bright sky.

  “Mark, mark!” Hanson shouted.

  “Uh, roger, we got you below us,” the lead pilot said. “Orange panel.”

  “Roger the panel.”

  “Okay,” the pilot said, “how do you want these runs to go in?”

  “Make your passes from northeast to southwest. Bring ’em right up to the crater. They’re getting close, and if they drop a grenade in here, we’re in a lot of trouble.”

  “Roger that.”

  The gunships began to swing back around, their rotor blades slowing, digging in, straining against the ships’ momentum, whop-whop-whop.

  The lead Cobra looked more like a jet fighter than a helicopter, like a giant steel wasp, the long, delicate tail angling slightly up, tapering to a tip erect and poised like a stinger. The cockpit and nose drooped slightly, the revolving gun tub and grenade launcher like a heavy, low-slung jaw. Some Cobra units painted tooth-studded snarls across the gun tub, but they looked silly, redundant, an alligator wearing makeup.

  They circled in and began their passes. The lead Cobra drove in from the northeast, its two crewmen behind their green blister canopy sitting in tandem, the gunner in front, pilot behind and slightly above him as if they were sitting in bleachers. There were only a few inches between their shoulders and the Plexiglas canopy, the gunner perched at the very nose of the ship, as exposed as a hood ornament, hurtling face-first toward the ground. The lead ship fired a cluster of rockets from the pods attached to the wing stubs just below the cockpit. The rockets streaked past the pilot and gunner, trailing jagged streamers of white smoke, accelerating ahead of the Cobra to detonate with sharp cracks in the tangle of bomb-torn jungle. The hognose, the automatic grenade launcher beneath the gunner, began to spit out grenades with a popping sound like an idling gasoline engine, firing the egg-sized gold grenades from the snubnose revolving turret and, instants later, the grenades began to explode on the ground, throwing up shovelfuls of dirt and grass and people along their path.

  A dozen khaki-clad soldiers rose from the grass and began running directly toward the oncoming Cobra, firing at it as they ran, knowing that the minigun was about to fire. By running toward the Cobra, into its field of fire, they were exposed to its minigun for less time than if they had stayed crouching in one spot.

  As the last grenade exploded, the ship began to pull out of the dive, its rotor blades straining and popping. For an instant it seemed frozen, neither climbing nor diving, rigid in the tripod of force—the dive, climb, and turn. Only the little gun turret beneath the nose seemed to move, turning back toward the ground as the chopper began to bank away. The air was suddenly alive with the drone of the minigun firing a hundred times a second, pouring out tiny copper-jacketed bullets the size of pencil erasers that lose their stability on impact and begin to tumble end-for-end through muscle, six thousand rounds a minute, a sparkling cauldron of red tracers in which people dissolve in a bloody mist. Hanson could feel the sound of the minigun like a file on his back teeth.

  Red tracers filled the air like an electrical storm, skipping and ricocheting up, down, out; whining, snapping, droning, spreading to the lip of the crater and crackling over it like monster static. In the bottom of the crater Hanson began to laugh and shake the radio handset above his head like a trophy, just as the second ship, in its choreographed attack to cover the flank of the first, let go its rockets.

  “Good, good,” Hanson shouted into the radio. “Keep it coming.” It was like calling lightning out of the sky. The gunships made pass after pass, shredding the jungle, sending shrapnel chirring and droning over the bomb crater, and Hanson knew he could not be touched that day as long as he kept his nerve, standing there in the fire.

  A new voice came through the radio. The 3rd Mech had been traveling near the AO when they overheard Hanson’s call for gunships, and they wanted to get into the fight. The enemy had managed to avoid their noisy tracked vehicles for weeks. The battalion commander, whose call sign was Green Hammer, low-leveled in his command chopper, took ground fire, and shuddered overhead and past the bomb crater, trailing black smoke.

  As the Cobras, out of ammunition, headed back to their base, Hanson switched to the 3rd Mech radio frequency and heard Green Hammer calling for help to secure his downed chopper. The commander of a unit of APCs responded, saying that he was on his way. Hanson could hear the APCs squeaking and moaning in the distance, getting closer. Then he heard a dull boom, and a column of black smoke rose from the direction of the approaching APCs. There was shouting and confusion on the radio, calls for medivacs. An APC had hit a mine. Half the unit was left to guard it while the rest continued on.

  Small patches of grass were on fire around the bomb crater, dense white smoke hiding the flame like ground fog. Except for the rumble of APCs and their random bursts of fire, it was quiet. Rau eased himself out, over the edge of the crater, and vanished into the smoke. A few moments later he appeared again, walking slowly and carefully, both hands over his stom
ach. “NVA,” he said, almost thoughtfully, and sat down inside the lip of the crater. Some of the enemy out in the smoke and dust were still alive, and they would want to take as many with them as they could when they died.

  Staring straight ahead, Rau said, “VC,” grimacing this time, spittle dropping from the corner of his mouth. His hands were still clasped over his stomach, and Hanson tapped them lightly with his finger. Rau looked timidly down at his stomach and slowly opened his hands. The small hole in the middle of his brass belt buckle was a perfect circle, as if it had been punched out by a machine.

  Rau looked on mournfully as Hanson, tenderly as a lover, tried to unbuckle the belt. But the bullet had wedged the buckle shut, and he had to cut the belt with his K-bar. He unbuttoned the pants and pulled them down over Rau’s abdomen. It was just a purple-black spot, like a bad bruise, smaller than a smashed fingernail.

  Rau turned his head and vomited out the fish he had eaten that morning, matter-of-factly, like someone burping, but fear was in his eyes. His body was beginning to betray him. While Hanson called for a medivac, Rau reached over and gripped his hand.

  They could hear the APCs in the distance, and the medivac was coming in from the south. The radio barked with excited voices. Hanson popped a yellow smoke, and the medivac identified it, pounding down into it, sucking the yellow smoke up in its rotors along with dirt and grass, its strobe lights sparking through the smoke that corkscrewed up and out of the rotors.

  The yellow smoke bubbled and poured out of the canister, spreading over the bomb crater, then filling it. It was as if the atmosphere had turned to sulfur and jet fuel, wind and noise and the sour smell of vomit. And very faintly, beneath it all, the sound of people dying, of life lifting away with a sigh.