Sympathy for the Devil

by Kent Anderson

  “The fucking social contract,” Hanson said. “In a Western democracy everybody supposedly agrees to give up a few rights in order to protect the rest. That’s the contract. So I can’t shoot some guy, or steal his shit, because I’m a party to this agreement. However, I do not remember signing any goddamn contract. I—”

  “Freeze,” Silver said. “Look,” he said, slowly raising his hand and pointing over toward the far side of the teamhouse.

  The back wall of the kitchen was lined with shelves of canned goods, and a rat was making his way across the top of a row of cans. He would dart ahead, stop, raise himself swaying on his hind legs, sniffing the air, then scurry on a foot or two farther.

  “My shot,” Hanson said, taking the combat magnum out of his shoulder holster, a gun powerful enough to shoot through car doors.

  They had gotten used to living with rats. In the bunkers at night they scrabbled across the floor, squeaking. Sometimes they would jump on a bunk, thinking it was empty, and land on your chest, then scurry in panic, digging their little claws in, down your leg or across your neck.

  Hanson’s gun roared and a number-10 can of applesauce exploded beneath the rat. The rat jumped, flipping around in midair, and hit the floor running.

  “Get him!”

  The rat was trying to get to the back door, flattened against the baseboard, moving smoothly, terrifically fast, as if he were being reeled in on a line.

  Hanson’s ears rang like a harmonica.

  Quinn fired, splintering the floor, and the rat slipped through a crack in the screen door like a gray wad of sewage.

  They threw the screen door open in time to see the rat dive into a crack in one of the steps. Hanson got a flashlight and shined it into the crack. The rat’s eyes glowed like tiny glass beads, bright red and absolutely motionless.

  “He’s in there.”

  “His ass is mine,” Quinn said, putting the muzzle of his pistol to the crack. “Die, motherfucker!” he shouted, then fired twice.

  When they shined the light back in the crack, the rat was gone.

  “He got away,” Silver said.

  “Fuck it,” Quinn said. “I don’t have anything against rats. They just take their chances like everybody else.”

  “The social contract,” Hanson said.

  HIGHWAY 14 — CUA VIET ROAD

  Hanson and Quinn went out with a company of Vietnamese to provide security for the small road-clearing unit from the 3rd Mech—two minesweeping teams, two Rome plows, and a deuce-and-a-half. Another unit was working down from the other end. When they linked up, the convoy would come through from Quang Ngai, bringing the guns for the new 3rd Mech fire base.

  It was easy duty, and with a company of troops making enough noise to be sure they didn’t surprise anybody into a firefight, safe enough. No hills to hump, no heavy bush to stumble through, just a two-day hike down the road. “A picnic,” Hanson told Troc. “Same as a picnic.”

  “What is ‘picnic,’ ” Troc wanted to know.

  “Like, when you take food and eat it out in the woods.”

  “Same as combat operation?”

  “No. There’s no combat. It’s—you do it in a secure area.”

  “Training mission then,” Troc said, smiling.

  “Yeah, sort of a training mission. Easy duty.”

  “Yes,” Troc said. “I see. Picnic.”

  Even though the Vietnamese commander, Di Wee Tau, spoke English, Hanson had brought Troc along as an interpreter just in case. Troc was another of Mr. Minh’s nephews and was the only Montagnard on the mission.

  The operation was no picnic for the minesweepers. They had a rotten job. They worked in pairs, the lead man wearing hot earphones—fat foam rubber doughnuts—swinging the metal detector with one arm, back and forth, crossing and recrossing the road bed in shallow arcs. Occasionally he would stop, freeze for a second, as if he’d just had a terrible thought, then step aside and point to a spot in the road.

  The man behind him would step up, kneel in front of the spot, and gingerly probe the flint-hard red clay with a bayonet. It was slow going. The detector picked up anything made of metal—C-ration cans, spent cartridges, pieces of shrapnel, all the combat garbage from thirty years of war—and each piece had to be dug up.

  Hanson spent a lot of time sitting back in the shade and at first felt a little guilty about how easy he had it compared to the minesweepers. He’d move a few hundred meters up the road, hack out a shady place in the bush, and wait for the minesweepers and Rome plows to catch up. The minesweepers would work past, never looking up from the road. They didn’t pay attention. Even though Hanson was visible from the road, they never saw him, and instead of feeling sorry for them, he began to feel annoyed at them for their complacency and inattention. It was the way he’d come to think about most American soldiers. They were poorly trained and lazy.

  At mid-morning of the first day out, a lieutenant colonel from the 3rd Mech Headquarters flew over and landed his little observation helicopter in the road. The lieutenant in charge of the road-clearing unit crouched in the rotor blast and saluted. He had a sparse mustache that made him look younger than he was.

  Quinn took grim satisfaction in the landing chopper, another example of how fucked up the Americans were, letting everyone for miles around know where they were and that they were important enough to justify a command chopper.

  “Watch,” he said. “We’re gonna get mortared tonight. Nguyen Cong and the boys are gonna drop some shit on us. The dumb fucks,” he said, looking at the chopper. “I don’t want to talk to ’em. I don’t even want to go near ’em. It’s embarrassing. Going on operation with them is like going to a dance with an ugly girl. I don’t want anybody to know we’re together.”

  Quinn walked away as the chopper left, and Hanson approached the lieutenant.

  “Sir…” Hanson began.

  “Yes, Sergeant,” the lieutenant said, smiling, pleased at the rubbed-off authority he had gotten from the helicopter visit, a little patronizing.

  “Sir, I know it’s kind of tough when you’re dealing with field-grade officers, but could you, you know, persuade the colonel not to drop in on us anymore? It kind of announces our location to anyone who’s interested. It makes us look a little too important, too.”

  “Right. You’re probably right, Sergeant.”

  “And sir, one other thing I’ve been meaning to mention…”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I’d like you to tell your men not to carry their weapons with rounds in the chamber, and not to fire until you give the order. If we get into any kind of firefight out here, it’s probably going to be a small-scale thing, but in the excitement our Vietnamese are gonna look just like the bad guys to your troops. And I’m a little worried about your guys firing across the perimeter—it’s easy to do—and hitting our people by accident. I know it’s kind of hard not to shoot back when you hear rounds coming in, but that’s the safest thing. Trust us for your security.

  “And I’m going to be moving around out there, too, checking out likely ambush sites. I’d hate to get shot by mistake.”

  “I’ll talk to them, Sergeant.”

  The deuce-and-a-half truck rolled by, the land-clearing unit’s rucksacks piled high in the back. Hanson and Quinn carried all their gear with them. They did it out of habit and were probably overcautious, but if something went wrong, they wanted to have all their gear with them.

  They took a break for lunch, and Hanson and Quinn moved off from the main group to heat water for their freeze-dried rations. Troc went with them but sat off by himself, where he consulted his katha.

  A young buck sergeant, the only NCO with the American unit, nodded as he walked past Hanson. Unlike the other Americans, he seemed to know what he was doing. It was apparent to Hanson in the way he moved, conserving his energy, and especially in the way he watched things.

  “Hey, Sarge,” Hanson said. “Have a seat. Try some of this freeze-dried shit with us. It’s made in Kor
ea, and it looks awful,” he said, holding up the plastic bag of tiny dried fish, their dried eyes flat and huge in brittle gray bodies, “but it’s not bad. And it beats humping Cs.”

  Quinn nodded at the sergeant, indicating a spot to sit down. “How bad you gotta fuck up,” he asked him, “to get stuck with a unit like this?”

  “It’s not so bad,” the sergeant said. “I was down in the Delta with the Ninth Infantry, and this beats the shit out of that. At least I can keep my feet dry up here. These guys are just young and don’t know what they’re doing yet. That’s all. They learn, but you gotta watch ’em close. But hell, they know more about this mine-sweeping business than I do. It’s all new to me.”

  Hanson finished heating the water. He poured in the fish, added an extra packet of spices, and chopped in some pieces of bay leaf he’d picked earlier in the day, and let it simmer.

  Finally he poured some in the sergeant’s canteen cup, then watched him take a tentative sip.

  “Hey,” he said, “this is good. Tastes like gumbo. It’s good. Those greasy Cs get kind of old.”

  “What’d you do back in the States?” Quinn asked him. He never said “back in the world,” maintaining that only punks trying to sound salty used the term.

  “Fucked up, mostly,” the sergeant said, laughing. “But to tell the truth, I don’t know what I’m gonna do when I get back there. It’s got me a little worried. I extended to stay over here an extra six months so I could get out of the Army early, but part of it was that I’m not ready to go back home. I guess I could go to college or something, but I wasn’t much good at that when I tried it before.”

  The private who called himself Froggy, wearing linked M-60 ammo across his chest, crashed through the brush and found himself looking at the muzzle of Quinn’s rifle. “Hey,” he said, in a voice so loud that it made Hanson wince. “So this is where you guys went, huh? How’s it goin’?”

  Even in a “secure area,” eating lunch, Quinn and Hanson talked in low voices. An enemy squad in the bush could be eating, too, fifteen yards away.

  “Hey,” he said, “these Vietnamese are really something. It must be really interesting, you know, living with them like you guys do.”

  “Yeah,” Quinn said in a flat, nasty monotone. “They are wonderful little people. But we don’t have to live with them.”

  In the silence that followed, Froggy began looking at his hands.

  “Why don’t you go on back to the rest of the outfit, Spangler. I’ll be down there in a few minutes,” the buck sergeant said, giving him a way out.

  “Okay, Sarge,” he said. As he turned to go, he aimed a half-hearted kick at a rusty C-ration can sticking up from the roadway.

  Hanson and Quinn were already lifting themselves off the ground as Froggy’s foot began its slow arc down, and then they were in the air, throwing themselves backward, a silver spout of gumbo flaring over them as the kicked can jumped harmlessly across the roadway trailing a fine brown smoke of dirt and rust.

  “Man,” Hanson said, picking himself up off the ground, “you don’t just kick things like that. If you didn’t put it there, don’t move it, don’t touch it, don’t pick it up. I don’t care if it’s a can or a rock or a pile of buffalo shit.”

  “But Sarge…” Froggy began.

  “Everything,” Quinn said, standing, the front of his shirt covered with tiny dead fish, “everything in this fuckin’, fucked-up, goddamn gook country either bites or stings or blows up. And if you can’t understand that,” he said, the wide-eyed little fish dropping fitfully from his chest, “the next time you do anything like that I’ll kill you myself.”

  “It’s okay,” Hanson said, stepping in front of Quinn. “Just remember it next time.”

  “Okay, Sarge,” he said, nodding his head. He turned and lumbered off.

  The buck sergeant smiled wryly. “Just young,” he said. “He’ll smarten up.”

  “If he doesn’t get killed first,” Hanson said, “or get you killed.”

  That afternoon they encountered a large grass fire that spread well beyond both sides of the old road. Charred stubble and clumps of greasy scorched brush extended to the perimeter of the fire, where white smoke bubbled over a sullen orange glow. Hanson sent two squads around the perimeter of the fire, but they found no sign of Charlie. Still, Hanson thought he had seen movement in the smoke, and even though it had probably been only the superheated air rippling, it made him uncomfortable. It was not a good omen.

  “Number ten,” Troc said, shaking his head. “Maybe no picnic.”

  Less than a kilometer beyond the edge of the fire they found some fresh one-seven-five craters, H&I fire from the night before. A dead Vietnamese was sprawled on his back amid the craters. The body had no visible wounds and had probably been killed by the concussion. Hanson imagined the dead man, hearing the shriek of incoming rounds, trying to decide which way to run.

  His head was thrown back, his eyes and mouth wide open. Columns of ants passed one another as they marched in and out of his mouth carrying tiny white bundles. Occasionally an ant from one column would break formation to go over and touch antennas with an ant in the other column, then resume his place and continue to march.

  The Americans were clustered around the body like spectators at a bad accident on a country road. Troc walked past them stiff-legged, stood looking down at the body, then spit on it and kicked it in the head, caving in its temple.

  The Americans looked around at each other uncomfortably. One of them laughed, and the buck sergeant said, “Okay, let’s get moving.”

  That night the Rome plow dug a chest-high pit as big as a garage for the Americans to sleep in. They built up berms around the edge of the pit with the excavated earth so the hole was deep enough to stand in without being exposed.

  “Nice mass grave,” Quinn said.

  He and Hanson slung hammocks well away from the Americans. They were green nylon sheets that, folded, took up no more space than a pound stick of C-4. They slung them so that their backs just brushed the short grass when they were lying in the hammocks, and dug shallow fighting holes below them so they could roll out into their protection if there was any shooting. Before stringing the nylon parachute cord, they wrapped foil from their rations around the saplings used to support the hammocks. The foil would keep water from running down the tree, onto the cord, and into the hammock if there was a rain. It also kept bugs from crawling from the tree onto the hammocks, much like a rat guard on a ship’s mooring line keeps rats from coming on board.

  They lay in the hammocks and listened to the H&I artillery coming over, some of the rounds sending tremors through the earth, up into the saplings, down the parachute cord into the hammock. It was pleasant lying there, legs and shoulders aching from the day’s long walk, face and neck sunburned, feeling the gentle pulse of distant artillery.

  “Shit,” Quinn hissed. “Goddamn,” and Hanson laughed softly.

  “What’s so fuckin’ funny?” Quinn hissed.

  “You forgot about the elephant grass cuts on your hands when you squirted insect repellent on them to rub on your face. Stings like hell, doesn’t it?”

  “How the fuck did you know that?”

  “Just listening. I can read you like a book, Quinn. Even in the dark.”

  “Shit.”

  Hanson laughed and pushed off the ground with one foot, making the hammock swing. “Hey, Quinn,” he said, “is there any kind of decent hunting up there in Iowa?”

  “What do you want to know that for?”

  “Oh, man, come on. I was thinking that I might come up there and visit you sometime. Maybe we could go hunting.”

  “Naw. Deer season’s about three days long. The fuckheads go out in the cornfields and murder these fat little deer with shotguns. But come on up anyway. We’ll go to a bar and beat people up.”

  Hanson heard Quinn muffle a laugh, and he grinned in the dark. He closed his eyes to go to sleep but couldn’t ignore the noise coming from the pit full of Ame
ricans. It had gotten louder, and one of them was playing a radio.

  He swung out of the hammock and walked over to the trench, standing just beyond the lip. He stood looking down at them, his submachine gun in his hand, wondering if he could kill them all before any of them fired back. He’d have to change clips at least once, he thought, but he’d still have time. It would be easy if he threw in a grenade first. They were smoking and laughing and had two radios going.

  Hanson crouched down at the lip of the trench and said, “Hey, guys. Hey.”

  One of them noticed him, grabbed a couple others, and in a moment they were all standing quietly, looking at Hanson, the radios playing a tinny stereo.

  “Better knock off the noise,” Hanson said. “Charlie’s gonna start dropping some mortars on us. Okay?”

  They nodded and mumbled yes, looking like high school kids who had been caught smoking behind the gym or torturing their biology-project frogs.

  “Better get those radios off,” Hanson said. Several of them dove for the radios and turned them off.

  “Where’s the lieutenant and your sergeant?”

  “They’re set up in the back of the truck with the radio.”

  “Okay,” Hanson said. “Good night, then.”

  They muttered their good nights as he rose and walked away.

  When he got back to the hammock, Quinn was asleep. Hanson lay in his hammock listening to artillery fire, staring up into the sky looking for shooting stars. He fell asleep with his boots on and his CAR-15 cradled in the crook of his arm.

  Sometime during the night he heard, far to the east, the sound of crying babies and the wail of Vietnamese funeral music. It grew louder and harsher, snapping Hanson wide-awake, and then it was blaring from directly overhead, mixed with the clatter of rotor blades: a psychological operations helicopter playing funeral music and the cries of orphaned children.

  It was hot the next day, the Americans listlessly swinging the metal detectors in arcs through the dead air, stopping to probe, moving out again.