After Sergeant Major left, Hanson studied the map, planning where to fly in and where to walk out, imagining what the terrain would look like from the air. He saw himself moving across the surface of the map itself, over the hills whose contour lines looked like huge fingerprints, around the white spaces of rice paddy, crossing black grid lines and elevation numbers, past the clusters of tiny black squares that were deserted and destroyed villages, and down the loose blue river lines.
He swung his legs up onto the desk, stripped a piece of red clay from between the worn black boot tread, rolled it into a ball between his thumb and forefinger, and looked back at the map. He aimed like a dart player and lobbed the mud at the map. It stuck to the plastic just across the border, north of the red highway that slipped through the fibrous contour lines like a blood vessel through a bundle of nerves.
Hanson could imagine himself on the hillsides, feel the ground underfoot, smell the heat and dust, gun oil and grass and his own sweat. He could feel his breath in his chest and throat as he moved down the slope toward a stream, stopping every few yards to listen for anything that seemed wrong, turning his head so the breeze didn’t slip sound past him, moving into it at an angle so it would bring the sounds to him, smelling the wind like a man listening for faint music.
He was calm and happy sitting alone in the command bunker with the map of the AO, the rectangular section of the earth that was all his, whose contours were as familiar to him as the lines on his palm and fingers and knuckles. He studied his hand and imagined himself leading a patrol across it.
Outside the bunker the two-cycle generator roared and paused like a stricken pulse. Hanson felt as though he were inside the brain of some larger organism. The generators were its heart and lungs, the map a diagram of its arteries and organs, and the radios its eyes and ears. Hanson himself had become the consciousness that directed it.
The two troop-carrying helicopters were flat black and had no markings. They throbbed like shadows on the linked-steel airstrip, the rotors turning lazily with a sound like bone hitting muscle—whop-whop-whop—the sound of a smiling, patient, professional interrogator matter-of-factly hitting a suspect with a sap.
The door gunner, his face hidden behind his tinted helmet shield, was slouched in the exposed, wall-lockershaped position behind his gun. When the engine whistled, wailed, and began to rev, he shook his arms and head like a runner in the blocks, loosening up as he waited for the starter’s gun.
Hanson looked over his shoulder. Quinn’s back filled most of the open door, Troc looking like a child next to him. Hanson smiled at Mr. Minh and at Krang, another of Mr. Minh’s nephews, sitting on either side of him. He began to laugh as the chopper throbbed beneath the rotor blades, then lifted a few feet off the ground, shifting and sideslipping as it hovered. It was like a carnival ride, the Tilt-a-Whirl or the Octopus, where you paid your quarter and the tattooed carnie with bad teeth and dilated pupils locked you in and shifted the car a few feet up, where it rocked above the tents and booths of the midway and you began to wish you had stayed on the ground.
Reaching between his feet, the door gunner pulled a brass belt of ammo to the breech of his swivel-mounted machine gun, flipped the stamped steel breech cover up, then slammed it down over the first rounds in the belt. With his right hand, palm up, he pulled the cocking handle toward him and let it slam back, like a clerk pumping the handle of a massive credit card printer.
The helicopter was as dented and scraped as a dump truck. The gunner had bolted a beer can to the breech of the gun so the ammunition would feed smoothly over the curve of the can, the kind of homely, matter-of-fact modification that made the war seem as normal and civilized as suicide, an occupation where men dress up in funny clothes and kill each other with machines.
Off to the side of the airstrip, two Cobra gunships, streamlined and wasplike, seemed impatient to take off, their skids bumping and sucking in the mud.
The two troop-carrying slicks began to move sluggishly forward, nose down, seemed to hesitate, then banked suddenly toward the hills. Hanson caught a glimpse of Sergeant Major smiling behind his sunglasses, giving him the thumbs-up. Then he and the airstrip became a blur as the chopper banked away and gained speed, and the twin points of silver light from Sergeant Major’s sunglasses vanished. In the mountains to the east Hanson could see a waterfall full of rainbows. The pounding of machine guns startled him as the door gunners test fired their weapons, gun oil burning off the barrels as a blue and yellow nimbus. Below and behind them, the Cobras skimmed down the strip, tails up like poised stingers. They rose quickly, easily overtaking the slicks, and positioned themselves on their flanks.
The sun was low in the west. The slicks and Cobras, the clouds and sky, the trees and streams and blinking rice paddies below moved against each other like parts of a solar system, wheels within wheels, and Hanson felt his muscles and eyes working to move it all together as if he were the center of the universe. A patchwork of rice paddies, like panes of variously shaded green glass, blinked and flickered below.
Hanson’s legs hung out over the side of the slick, blown back and up by the eighty-knot wind, held at an angle by the slipstream. The slick banked to the right, then leveled off and tipped slightly back. Centrifugal force, gravity, pure physics moved Hanson in response to it as he looked out and down at the jungle, his trouser legs flapping, cold now at altitude.
The Cobras banked away as the slicks began to descend across the border, the sun sinking with them. It was almost twilight. The pilot pointed down as they passed over their ultimate destination, and Hanson recognized a saddle-shaped hill and a stream from the map in the command bunker. They were going through the looking-glass of the map.
The two slicks touched down, then rose as they moved west, like flies too nervous to settle, camouflaging their true destinations with simulated landings. It was almost dark as they headed back east to the saddleshaped hill, and Hanson tightened his hold on the scarred aluminum lip of the door. He braced one foot on the landing skid, then noticed an exposed bolt on the floor and shifted his hips so he would not tear his fatigues when he slipped away.
The slick went in with its nose slightly up, like a horse reined in. The other troop carrier, the empty one, passed above them to mask the sound of their descent. The dull red of its exhaust lapped through the rotor blades of Hanson’s ship, showing the blowing elephant grass in flickering bars of red and black where it whipped and broke like waves. Once over the edge, there was no turning back, and little chance of rescue before dawn. No one knew what was down there. There were no options, no past or future to consider, only that instant, that euphoria of adrenaline and fear, as he slid off into the stroboscopic bars of red and black, the prop blast like a great wind at his back.
He hit the ground off balance, on his heels, the impact snapping his head back, his heavy pack almost pulling him over. He regained his balance and looked at the departing choppers, their blue-red exhausts bobbing and growing smaller. He and Quinn chose a compass course away from the LZ and followed it for half an hour. When they came upon a grove of bamboo and thornbushes, they gingerly worked their way inside to wait until dawn.
Hanson lay on his back, looking up through thorn-bushes at the scudding clouds, and smiled in the dark. He was eight thousand miles from home in the middle of a thorn patch, illegally across the border, surrounded by the enemy, and he was happy. There was fear, of course, but he was as happy as he could imagine ever being. All he had to worry about was staying alive. If he failed, he’d be dead, and his troubles would be over. At the very most, he had to plan only three days ahead.
The enemy soldiers unloading the trucks were wearing khaki uniforms and jungle hats. Hanson noticed that as in any army, individuals and small groups wandered off in an attempt to avoid work details. He looked down on them most of the day through binoculars he had braced on a log, well hidden above them in high grass, and he became familiar with individual soldiers and gave them names.
Th
e map on the ground in front of Hanson was a pattern of pale green ovals shading off into brown as the elevation contour lines grew closer together, mountains piling up higher and steeper in the west. He inked in a blue dot on one of the slopes, marking the truck park below, then placed a plastic protractor on the map and drew a blue line from his position to the dot. He drew another blue line down the length of the valley. That was the way the air strike would come in.
At dusk he set up the bombing beacon, assembling the olive drab radio components like pieces of a puzzle.
“How does the damn thing work?” Quinn asked him. “You need at least two known points for a heading. How do they lock in on just one?”
Hanson shrugged. “I just push the right buttons, the pilot feeds the information into the little black box in the airplane he’s driving, and he locks on. Radio signals? Satellites? Magic!”
He flipped a toggle switch and a low humming grew to a whine that made him think of insects and dentists’ drills, the electricity building a charge. The dials began to glow. Frequency numbers popped up and disappeared behind their thick little windows as he clicked the dials around.
“All set,” he said, standing up. “When the plane locks on, this little light here starts to blink. As long as it keeps blinking, we know he’s on course.”
“Gentlemen,” Hanson said, imitating an Army instructor, “if you can get yourselfs a can of Coca-Cola outta the machine in front of the 7-Eleven store, you are qualified to operate the bombing”—he spun and jabbed his finger at the radio—“beacon! You are limited in its use and application only by your imagination. This equipment is the finest in the world.”
Behind them they could hear the clicking sound made by Mr. Minh as he sorted through the contents of his katha, trying to work out the omens as darkness settled into the mountains.
“Strange Address, Strange Address, this is Ringneck three eight, over…”
The words came from the radio speaker, rasping like a file on sheet metal. Not a human voice. The voice of one machine talking to another.
“Ringneck three eight,” Hanson said, “this is that Strange Address, how do you copy, over.”
“Lima Charles, Lima Charles, how me?”
“Comin’ in good, over.”
“Uh, rodge. What have you people got for us tonight?”
“People and trucks,” Hanson said. “You prepared to copy?”
“Roger. Send it.”
Hanson sent the data and the voice replied, “Roger. Good copy. I read back for possible correction,” and he repeated the strings of numbers and letters like an algebraic chant.
“Wait one,” the radio said, “while I do my thing here.”
And then they saw him, a blinking red and green light high over to the northwest, floating slowly toward them, bobbing slightly in the dark sky.
The small red light on the beacon began to blink.
“Strange Address, this is Ringneck three eight. Am locked on and beginning my run. Will give you ‘mark’ at eight miles and five miles. Give me a ‘go’ or ‘no go’ on my mark, over…”
“Strange Address rogers that.”
“Mark.”
“Go.”
The red light blinked insistently, like an alarm on the radio beacon.
Hanson could hear Ringneck three eight, the faraway roar seeming to have nothing to do with the delicate lights floating in the sky. In the cool early fog of evening, he could smell the soil, centuries of mulch, the elephant grass, the slightly metallic smell of thorn-bushes.
The anxious little light on the bombing beacon was as irritating as a facial tic.
“Mark.”
“Go.”
Hanson watched the lights and imagined the pilot and the radar intercept officer, behind and just above him, in the green instrument light of the cockpit, breathing raw bottled oxygen through rubber tubing.
“Bombs gone…”
A rippling line of orange flashes bubbled and burst along the base of the ridgeline, fading out but consuming themselves slowly, the dull thumps reaching Hanson only after the hillside had gone dark again. The concussions stuttered through the air, puffing against his cheeks, an instant later moving up from the earth, gently patting at the soles of his feet.
“Strange Address, this is three eight. All ordnance expended. Good coverage on that ridgeline. Some crispy critters down there. Hey, we enjoyed it. Come on down and see us next time you’re at our place. We’ll buy the first round, over.”
“Roger that, Ringneck. Good show. Thank you much.”
“Our pleasure. You all step careful down there.”
The Phantom jet passed over them on the way out, a low shadow against the sky, a concentrated piece of the night trailing flame and seeming to suck the air out of their lungs. After it had passed, there were secondary explosions in the valley, and flames sprang up. By the light of the flames Hanson could see soldiers running in and out of the dark. The Red Moon Battalion.
They couldn’t know it, it hadn’t gone through channels, but on a morning not long before, two silver C-123s had leveled off nearby, flying low, one to the left and slightly behind the other. Giant crop dusters. Their shadows had flashed, onetwo, across the jungle floor. And then, silently, thin silver trails of Agent Orange appeared behind the planes, spinning out like spiderweb. They seemed to hang in the air for a moment, then turned to mist.
In the days that followed, the jungle below began to snap and shatter and crack, branches swelling and tearing free, falling end-for-end onto the dying undergrowth and splintering tree trunks. It was growth gone out of control, like a factory or an assembly line speeded up beyond any recall. Triple canopy jungle that had taken centuries to grow broke and fell to pieces as though caught in a slow forest fire without flame. The cells of the trees and plants grew until they ruptured and died, like the inner cities of America, the spirit-killing suburbs, the urban freeways and commuter air corridors, as if America’s passion for growth had been concentrated into the oily mist that made the jungle swell like a cancer, burst, and die.
In the midst of it, tiny barking deer ran in confusion and panic. One of the last tigers coughed, bellied down into the dying grass, and slunk off. Gray jungle rats began gnawing their own flanks and eating their young. And down in the centuries-old loam of the jungle floor, centipedes stiffened, arched, and stung themselves to death.
“You think we’re across the border yet?” Hanson whispered.
“Beats the dogshit outta me,” Quinn said. “I don’t see no broken yellow line that says ‘Border.’ ”
“I think we came this way before,” Hanson said. “Didn’t we?”
“Here,” he said, pointing at the map. “It’s good cover all the way across this stream, and by then we’re less than a klick from the border. Remember? Then there’s this hill here.”
“Yeah, I remember. That was the time…”
They heard a single shot, back from the direction they’d come from.
“Shit.”
“Trail watcher,” Quinn said.
“Do you think they know we’re here, or are they just guessing?”
“I don’t know, little buddy, but my military mind tells me we better beat feet outta here and across that stream. Fast. They’re gonna be pissed off about last night.”
They checked the map again and moved on to the border crossing area they had used before and were familiar with.
“What the fuck…Over,” Quinn said.
“This is it,” Hanson said. “We’re there. There’s the hill. There’s the stream.”
“Where the fuck is everything else?” Quinn said.
It was as though some kind of chemical forest fire had swept through, up and down the stream as far as they could see. Decayed foliage drifted down like ash. Leaves and brush were black and slimy with decomposition. Black-orange dust rose in puffs with each step, stuck to their sweaty skin, and got into their eyes, ears, and noses. Nothing seemed to be alive in the area. The only sounds were
their footsteps, their labored breathing, and the creak of their web gear. It was like walking through a graveyard or ground zero. The black-orange dust hung in the sunlight around them, malevolent, with a smell of kerosene.
“Somebody defoliated the border,” Hanson said, “and forgot to mention it to us.”
Mr. Minh was horrified. He had seen the tiger’s tracks. “This is very bad,” he said. “The tiger has left his home. It is all killing itself. There is no time to go around.”
The stream reached up to their armpits in spots. It was sluggish and smelled like kerosene, choked with rotting leaves and dead fish. The bloated body of a small monkey drifted past, its eyes eaten away. Something moved against Hanson’s foot beneath the water and he jerked his foot away, almost losing his balance and falling into the stinking stream.
They crawled into a peninsula of brush and bamboo to wait for dusk before sprinting across the dead jungle to the first of the foothills where they could wait out the night. Hanson pulled leeches off his stomach and ankles, soaked them with insect repellent, and set them on fire. As they swayed and twitched in the saffron flame, he thought about the pictures of the monks in Saigon who had doused themselves in gasoline and set fire to themselves for peace.
They moved out at dusk, feeling exposed and foolish, but there was no other way to go. They had barely begun when they saw them, eight soldiers coming over the hill to their left. Then there was another group of six or eight, and another, all wearing fatigues and packs and helmets, silhouetted against the orange sky. The only enemy soldiers who dressed that way were Main Force North Vietnamese Army troops.
Sympathy for the Devil Page 36