The weather was too socked in to send out any recon operations, and Hanson was getting cabin fever. He decided to walk the mile and a half to the 3rd Mech’s new fire base to compare intelligence reports with the major who was S-2 there. He and the major didn’t like each other, and Hanson knew that the information the major gave him was mostly useless—though all military units were supposed to share intelligence so it could be more effectively exploited, each unit kept its best information to itself—but it was an excuse to get out of camp and take a walk.
On the way out of camp he met Troc. He had been down at the river fishing with hand grenades, and he was carrying a basket heaped with silver fish. Many of them were still alive, their gills working open and closed, so that the whole pile of fish seemed to be shrinking and swelling, making a faint whispering sound.
“Beaucoup fish KIA,” Troc said, grinning. His teeth were black as coal, his gums the color of supermarket beef, from chewing betel nut.
As Hanson crossed the airstrip, he could see one of the 3rd Mech’s 105 howitzers firing. He watched the big gun jump back and felt the concussion against his face and chest as white smoke poured out of the gun tube. The ammonia stink of high explosive hung in the damp air like refinery fumes. He was in full combat gear, with a canvas bag full of grenades slung over his shoulder. It was unlikely that he’d run into any trouble on the road to the fire base, but it was possible. The enemy owned everything outside the wire.
He passed the dumping area off to the right of the road. It flared with trash fires and oily smoke, and the ragged children who lived there watched him from their ammo-crate shelters.
He’d just passed the edge of the dump when he heard shouts and looked up the road at the crew of a 3rd Mech armored personnel carrier. One of them stood on top of the APC, the others just in front of it. They were jumping up and down, waving at Hanson and gesturing at something off the road.
Hanson looked in the direction they were pointing and saw a GI with dirty blond hair running away from the road, pumping his arms and stretching out, as if something was after him. He was doing a kind of broken field run, dodging the circular burial mounds of a cemetery, each of which was topped with a white pennant, like the flags you’d see on a golf course. They’d been staked into the mounds by the land-clearing unit after the Vietnamese had complained that they were digging up the graves of their ancestors with the huge bulldozers called hog jaws.
Darkness was coming on. The wind was pushing another storm front over the mountains. The white flags were whipping in the wind, and the GI was running desperately.
“Sarge,” the soldier on the APC yelled at Hanson, “Sarge. He went crazy, Sarge. Jumped out of that jeep over there and started running.”
“Well, let’s get him,” Hanson shouted and ran after the GI, the bag of grenades ringing, slamming into his hip. He kept the GI in sight, not gaining or losing ground. The GI stumbled and glanced back, panic in his eyes, then plunged on, vanishing behind a hedgerow, part of a maze of bamboo and thornbush hedges as tall as a house and hundreds of meters long.
Hanson followed, but when he rounded the hedgerow, the GI was gone. Hanson turned to direct the others in an attempt to head him off and discovered that he was alone. He was alone and boxed in on three sides by hedgerows. The wind roared in his ears and stung his eyes with rain. He dropped to one knee, holding his rifle against his chest, and listened. He slowly turned his head, smelling the wind, cocking his head against it so he could hear. The hedgerows made a sound like thorns scratching glass. Palm fronds patted each other like fleshy hands, and the sound of his own breathing was thunderous. He made his way back to the road, moving a few feet, stopping to look and listen, then moving again.
“We couldn’t leave the track, Sarge,” one of the APC crew said from behind his machine-gun mount. “The captain would have our ass if we left the track.” The rest of the crew busied themselves inspecting weapons, talking without looking up.
“Right.”
“Fucker was crazy anyway.”
“Who was he?” Hanson demanded.
“Never saw him before, Sarge. He just bailed out of that jeep and took off. I mean, there it is.”
“Must be some new guy. Who knows? It’s a freaky war.”
Hanson walked back up the road to the track unit headquarters building, but it was empty. He heard the crash of acid rock music coming from one of the big tents and walked toward the sound, the music twisting in and out of the wind. He stepped through the tent flaps into a faint odor of marijuana.
“What’s happenin’, Sarge,” a soldier shouted to him against the music and wind. He was wearing a fatigue shirt with the sleeves torn off, and he had a tattoo of a peace sign on his arm with the words FUCK IT below. One side of the peace sign was swollen, infected and scabbed over. The walls of the tent were decorated with posters of rock stars and Day-Glo peace signs.
“Where’s your CO?” Hanson shouted over the noise, fighting the urge to empty his rifle into the stereo.
“I guess he’s down at the motor pool looking at the deer. Him and every other swinging dick. One of the mechanics shot a motherfuckin’ deer, man. They’re gonna clean it or eat it or some shit. Not me, though, man. I don’t eat the flesh of dead animals anymore. That’s one thing I don’t do. It’s wrong, man, it’s…”
As Hanson turned and went through the tent flaps, the soldier gave him the peace sign and said, “Later.”
Two olive drab armored personnel carriers were parked in the motor pool, slab-sided and blunt as steel safes, shuddering in clouds of diesel fumes, each of them mounting a pair of .50-caliber machine guns that could chop down trees two miles away. They had the green triangle of the 3rd Mech painted on their sides, and the names OHIO’S FORGOTTEN SON and STONED PONY. The APCs had a peculiar odor, mo-gas and hot metal, perspiration and urine, something half-machine and half-animal. Brown crates of C-rations and rolls of concertina wire were lashed to the tops and sides of the APCs, and standoff wire was staked around them like little fences.
The deer was in the mud in front of the APCs. It wasn’t a dog-size barking deer, the kind so common up in Northern I-Corps, but one as big as Hanson had ever seen, the size of a quarter horse. A GI walked over to it and, looking down at the dead animal, said, “He looks sick.”
“Yeah,” another soldier said. “Jimmy shot him in the head. Blowed his eyes out,” and they both laughed.
The two of them cut slits on each side of the neck, through the thick hide and muscle, and one of them began shoving a warped piece of two-by-four through the slits. He had trouble forcing it through, and the muscled meaty gash surrounded by matted hair looked like a beastly vagina, the two-by-four a giant penis.
“Goddamn,” he said, “I think I’m falling in love,” twisting and shoving the bloody wood through the neck.
“Get passionate with that thing, Bobby,” someone yelled as the wood tore through.
They hooked chains around the two-by-four and raised the deer with a winch on one of the APCs, raising it so its hind legs were just off the ground. The carcass twisted in the wind, its head lolling to the side, pellets of feces dropping from the corpse.
Two soldiers took the hind legs, forced them apart and held the deer steady while a third ran his hand over the deer’s belly. He worked a bayonet through the skin and muscle just beneath the ribs and pulled it down to the tail, opening the abdomen.
He jumped to one side, almost falling, as a glistening purple bubble as big as a beer keg popped out of the wound, hitting the mud with a wet thud, splashing him with blood and blue gouts of membrane.
The fully formed fetus, its fur matted, looked with pearly dead eyes toward the hills.
Hanson turned and walked away without trying to find the CO. He stayed off the road all the way back to camp and kept his weapon on full automatic.
YANKEE DELTA 528917—NVA FIELD HOSPITAL
Cabin fever was setting in at the launch site. Cross-border operations had been suspended f
or three weeks because of diplomatic gestures in Paris, the local-force VC weren’t moving around for some reason, and things were slow. Quinn had gone into Da Nang to pick up supplies, and Mr. Minh had taken a leave to see some of his people. Officially he was in Dong Ha, but in fact he was somewhere up in the DMZ. Through talking to Mr. Minh, Hanson had come to see the DMZ as a sanctuary at the far end of the looking-glass of the war, where tiger and deer, cobras and hawks waited for the war to end, waited until it was safe to come out. All of Vietnam had once been like the DMZ, a place where, Mr. Minh said, the animals still talked like they did before men came.
Meanwhile Warrant Officer Grieson was getting on everyone’s nerves, especially Silver’s. He had been assigned to the camp to coordinate a highly classified communications system, and in that position had assumed the role of senior commo man. He didn’t have Silver’s genius with radios, but he outranked him. In fact, he outranked everyone at the camp except the captain, and he had a lot of unofficial clout through the 3rd Mech headquarters. The captain tried to run interference between Silver and Grieson because if their arguments got much worse, one of them would have to be reassigned, and that would be the junior man, Silver. The captain had tried, through unofficial channels, to get rid of Grieson, but he’d had no luck.
Grieson took things too seriously, especially himself. He was from Texas, tall and lanky, and he talked with a John Wayne drawl. He had no part in combat operations, but the push for “Vietnamization” was on, the new commo system was a big part of that, and the camp was stuck with him.
For some reason, Hose hated Grieson even worse than he hated the Vietnamese, snarling whenever he saw him. Grieson threatened to shoot the dog, and he and Silver had almost come to blows over it.
“Who says the world isn’t predictable,” Silver had said to Hanson and Quinn soon after Grieson came to the launch site. “I’ve never met anyone from Texas who wasn’t an asshole. Not one. Not one swinging dick.
“Did I ever tell you,” he went on, “that I spent a little time down in Texas? Huh? Yeah, I was down there playing drums with this for-shit band that called themselves Electric Apple. They broke up and I was stuck in Lubbock—Lubbock fuckin’ Texas. Broke. So I got a job as a short-order cook in the Big Eight Truckstop on graveyard shift.
“They had this sign you could see from the Interstate. A big neon number eight that turned all night long, kind of grinding all the time out in the parking lot. I hated that place.”
Silver paused, as if he were listening to the sign, then said, “It was just like a Popeye cartoon,” and looked back at Hanson.
“Remember Bluto?” he said. “The big guy with the beard in Popeye cartoons who’s always throwing Popeye up against walls so hard that Popeye just sticks there like a wad of snot, then kinda, you know, sliiiides down the wall onto the floor? And then Bluto laughs. He has that laugh, real deep,” and Silver hunched his bony shoulders over his skinny chest, squinted through his wire-rim glasses and smiled grimly, then laughed like Bluto, “Huh! Huh, huh, huh.
“Right? That’s how Bluto laughs whenever he really fucks Popeye up. Okay? One night about two in the morning I’m cooking burgers and eggs, and grits. Grits! At the Big Eight Truckstop. This young guy comes in, skinny guy, about like me, I guess. He’s a truck driver, but not a bad guy. He’d been in before. Anyway, he’s been driving for about three days without sleeping, and he’s all fucked up on speed. I mean, he’s wired, he’s about ready to chew on the linoleum tile.
“So he’s sitting at the table having a beer, looking out at the parking lot with his twelve-gauge pupils, and he says, ‘I can jump over that cattle truck.’
“So the conversation in the place sort of misses a beat, but starts back up until this one guy says, ‘What’d you say, Jim?’
“ ‘I can jump over the cattle truck out there.’
“So some of the boys get him going. You know, one of them says, ‘Naw, no way, Jim. You’re full of shit.’ Another guy says, like, ‘Hey, I think he can do it. If Jim says he can do it, I’ll take the man at his word.’ Another says, ‘No way,’ and another offers to bet ten dollars that he can do it. Like that. They get him in a spot where he’s all pumped up and has to perform. He’s so wasted on the speed he doesn’t even notice how they’re all kind of laughing.
“So they all go outside. I go outside to see what happens. There’s this cattle truck. You know, with the aluminum sides with holes in them. You can see the cattle in there, packed inside, grunting and mooing and shitting, banging against the side. Some of ’em got their heads turned sideways, looking out the holes with those big cow eyes. The Big Eight Truckstop sign is turning above the lot there. Kinda, like groaning, urrerrurr, and Jim trots back to the edge of the lot—these guys out there are saying, ‘Good, Jim, get a good running start,’ and laughing. Jim starts running, and they’re all yelling, ‘Go, Jim, go. You got it, boy.’
“This guy Jim runs full-speed into the truck, about a foot off the ground when he hits it. Those aluminum slats go whang, the cattle inside go batshit, trampling each other in there, falling down, walking on each other. Jim is all fucked up. They gotta call an ambulance for him. And all these guys out in the lot are laughing, ‘Huh, huh, huh,’ just like old Bluto. It’s life imitating cartoons. I don’t know, man. What a shitty thing to do. Why do people act like such assholes?
“I got out of there pretty soon after that. I was drunk and got picked up by this chick who liked me for some reason. She was on her way to California, and I went with her. Stayed drunk for three days, and she dropped me off in L.A. Only thing I remember about her was that she had bad teeth and a purple GTO.”
That morning there was a team meeting. The weekly meetings gave everyone a chance to make suggestions and air complaints about conditions and procedures at the site. The problems were usually about small things, but small things sometimes blew up out of proportion if they weren’t caught in time. The camp, scraped out of the jungle, surrounded by mines, wire, the jungle, and the enemy, was a lot like a ship on hostile seas. Minor problems could quickly become serious.
After a breakfast of canned bacon, fresh eggs scrambled with ham, onion and peppers, papaya, orange juice, and homemade biscuits, Co Ba and her daughter cleared the big wooden picnic table. Silver reluctantly took off the stereo earphones he was listening to, and all the Americans sat around the table with coffee. They planned the next supply run to the air base at Quang Tri, worked out plans for stealing a jeep at the 3rd Mech base, and complained about the poor selection of movies they’d been getting on the mail chopper. Then Grieson brought up the mo-gas.
“Captain,” he drawled, “those Montagnards have been stealing mo-gas. They claim it’s to burn the shit in their compound, but they been taking a lot more than they need for that. They been gettin’ blatant about it lately.”
Silver looked at Hanson and rolled his eyes. He raised his hand and said, “Sir, I’m concerned about the gas shrinkage situation, too; we all are,” he said, looking sternly at Hanson. “But it’s tough to prove.”
He looked out the screen window a moment, then said, “What we need to do is establish a standard unit of Montagnard shit, making allowances for diet patterns, protein content, and so on.”
Silver pursed his lips, held a finger up, tapped the table. “I mean,” he said, “does a turd that’s primarily, say, canned mackerel burn at the same rate, with the same intensity, the same—efficiency as one that’s mostly just rice? Somebody, perhaps Mister Grieson would volunteer, has to observe the Montagnard compound to determine the amount of fecal matter produced by the average Yard in a twenty-four-hour period…based on weight, I think, rather than volume, because, you know, density varies. Some float and others sink. And finally, we have to, uh, seize a shit sample and test it to establish the amount of fuel, hi-test or regular, it takes to oxidize a given unit of shit. We’ll have ’em by the balls then, sir.”
Hanson and the captain were both laughing. Quinn just glared at Grieson.
“Silver,” Grieson said, “either that sarcasm of yours has to go, or you do.”
“Jesus Christ,” Silver said, his voice breaking on the second word, “who the fuck cares if they steal a little gas?”
“You’ll sing a different tune when they sell it on the black market and it ends up being used against you.”
“Used against me? How?” Silver asked, standing up. “They gonna sneak up and pour it on me and set me on fire? That’s about all I can think of. Or does Mister Grieson here know something we don’t? They gonna use the gas to attack us in taxi cabs, or…”
“As you were, young sergeant,” the captain said, seeing that things were getting out of hand. “Why don’t you take a walk?”
Silver left the teamhouse muttering, “Sing a different tune,” and Hanson realized that it was time to plan some kind of operation to get Silver out of camp for a while.
Grieson had bought a TV set at the PX in Da Nang and installed it in one corner of the teamhouse, mounting it on a plywood shelf suspended from the ceiling. When the weather was right, they could get the AFVN station, which was mostly old sit-coms, panel discussions, and travelogues. Once, during some sun-spot activity, they’d gotten a Bangkok station that was showing an episode of Gunsmoke dubbed in Thai, where slow-moving Matt Dillon screamed at everyone in a high Asian singsong. But the main reason Grieson had bought the TV was so he could watch “Hee-Haw,” his “favorite program.”
The night after the team meeting, Silver was drinking beer and listening to his reel-to-reel tape deck on the earphones he’d ordered out of an electronics catalog. He was fanatic about what he called sound fidelity and kept replacing his earphones with a newer, improved set every time one came on the market.
Sympathy for the Devil Page 31