Sympathy for the Devil

by Kent Anderson

  “Oh shit,” Hanson said, as though he had just remembered an important missed appointment. “Gotta be at least a company there,” he said. “Look at those uniforms. That’s hard-core NVA. They must have just slipped over the border. Bad luck. Bad fucking luck.”

  Quinn turned the radio frequency dials to contact the only fire base with guns big enough to reach them. He thrust the handset at Hanson and said, “Talk fast, little buddy. Those guys up there see us.”

  Hanson glanced up at the hills, then spoke into the handset. “Bright Names, this is Strange Address, over…”

  “Address, this is Names, go…”

  “Bright Names, this is Strange Address. I gotta have a fire mission fast. We got at least a company of Main Force NVA at coordinates…”

  He looked down to where Quinn was pointing at the map. “Coordinates Yankee Delta five seven niner, two three three. Go ahead and shoot it. We don’t have time for…” Dust began to kick up from the ground around them. An explosion threw dirt and stones and hissing bits of steel from an M-79 grenade launcher. They were American weapons, M-16s and M-60 machine guns, the brass-jacketed rounds snapping overhead, each making its own little crack of a sonic boom as it passed. Krang ran toward the firing, waving his arms, and Quinn yelled at him to get down, but a burst of small-arms fire caught him full in the chest, throwing him onto his back, dead.

  “Bright Names,” Hanson said, speaking slowly and distinctly into the handset, “it is friendlies. We are being fired on by an American unit.”

  The rounds began coming in lower, kicking up orange dust that shimmered and stank of kerosene, the Americans getting their range. Hanson, on his stomach, unconsciously shifted from side to side as if he could burrow into the dirt. He winced, imagining one of the bullets hitting him in the top of the head, then forced himself to stop thinking of possibilities like that because it only invited them. He dug the fingers of his free hand into the dirt, the way a person grips the armrest of a dentist’s chair during the drilling.

  “Strange Address,” the voice on the radio said, “that’s a negative. There are no friendlies in your AO.”

  The black and orange flash of an M-79 shredded one of Troc’s legs and tore at his side. He fell, then propped on his elbow, looking mournfully at the stump as it bled out until a burst of machine-gun fire slapped him back.

  “Sonofabitch,” Hanson snarled into the radio handset, “it’s fuckin’ friendlies. Get on their push and tell ’em to stop firing. They’re killing us.”

  “I say again, negative…”

  A second voice, angry and full of authority, interrupted the first on the radio. “This is the Bright Names One. There are no friendlies in your AO. You will use no more profanity on this radio net. What are your initials? You are already in big trouble, soldier…”

  Hanson laughed. He was dead for sure this time. Goddamn, though, he thought, I just hope it doesn’t hurt too bad.

  “Shit,” Hanson said, glancing at Quinn, pushing up off the ground, “let’s go.” There was a fold in the hill two hundred yards away that would shelter them until the Americans discovered their mistake.

  As Hanson came up on his toes, like a runner in the starting blocks, he looked over Quinn’s shoulder and saw Mr. Minh go down. He tried to get back up and the machine gun knocked him down again. Mr. Minh had told Hanson that when the soul leaves the body it becomes a bird and can see everything from the sky. His body quivered and jumped as another burst of fire raked it, smoke ooozing from the wounds the tracer rounds made.

  Hanson took one step and was straightening up, striding into another, when the concussion from another M-79 round clubbed him on the side of the head, clapped his ears ringing and droning. His nose stung and his eyes watered with points of light. Quinn drove into him, bucking as he took hits from the machine gun, slamming him to the ground where tiny funnels of dirt and dead grass erupted around them.

  He rolled out from beneath Quinn, the wind knocked out of him, enraged by the concussion as if he’d been sucker-punched and jumped from behind. He turned and looked up at the hill where the fire was coming from, muzzle flashes blinking dirty yellow, saw the tiny red blips of tracer rounds grow to golf-ball size as they soared glowing past him.

  “Goddamnit,” he shouted, standing up again. “Goddamn it.”

  He was already dead, he thought, as he reached down and took hold of Quinn’s fatigue shirt, stood him up, leaned into him, and lifted him onto his shoulders. “If they kill us, they kill us,” he shouted, talking to Quinn over the pop and whine and hiss of small-arms fire. “Not a fuckin’ thing we can do about that. But we’re not gonna play the fool for ’em,” he yelled, walking steadily through the tracers, pebbles and dirt stinging the backs of his legs. “Fuck ’em,” he said. He stumbled and almost fell with Quinn’s weight, got his balance and looked back at where the fire was coming from. “Fuck you!” he shouted.

  “Something like this was bound to happen,” he muttered to Quinn, “with those dumb fuckers. Gotta be the Third Mech up there. They can’t read a motherfucking map. Shit,” he said, trudging through the fire, shrugging Quinn more solidly onto his shoulders, moving as steadily and mechanically as he did when he shuffled the length of a C-130 to parachute out the open, roaring door.

  An M-79 jarred them and something burned into his arm.

  “Goddamn it,” he said. “Fuck your pissant little shrapnel.”

  “Fuck ’em, you know,” he said to Quinn. “And the man says I’m in big trouble for saying ‘shit’ on the radio. There it is, ‘big trouble.’ Is this some kind of fucked-up war or what?”

  The fire slackened, less accurate in the growing gloom as Hanson reached the fold in the hills, knelt, and rolled Quinn onto the grass.

  It took Quinn less than a minute to die. The color in his face faded layer by layer as regularly as a pulse until the face was dead except for the eyes that looked at Hanson, and then they were dead too. The skin seemed to settle around his eyes and cheekbones, its color fading under layers of gray like a photograph that has been overexposed in a developing tray. He was alive and then he was dead so quickly, but it didn’t seem quick to Hanson. It was like watching someone you love turn his back to you and walk away in long deliberate strides and knowing that nothing you do or say can make him stop and turn around, but thinking that there must be something if only you could think of it in time, and then it is too late because he is gone, because in all that long time you watched him walk away, you didn’t do whatever it was you should have done, to say what it was he needed to hear so he could stop and come back.

  It was almost dark, and Hanson was still alive behind a little peninsula of rock, crouching next to Quinn. “I’m sorry, man,” he said, placing the palm of his hand on Quinn’s chest and speaking softly into his ear. “I know you can still hear me. You’re still in there.” His arm stung just behind the elbow where the tiny piece of shrapnel had struck him. “I wish you could do this with me. They won’t send a patrol down here before dawn. You know how they are. They’re afraid to move around in the dark.” Quinn’s chest was still warm.

  “Listen. Listen, I’ll see you soon, or whatever the fuck happens, and Silver too.” He was crying now. “I don’t know. What the fuck do I know. Believe me that I’m gonna kick some ass. I wish you guys were here.” He patted Quinn’s chest lightly. “You’ve been great. You were just great.

  “I’ll see you soon,” he said, lifting his hand. Quinn’s blood on Hanson’s fingernails was translucent, like thin nail polish. “I’d better borrow this,” he said, taking the silenced Swedish “K” slung over Quinn’s shoulder. “It’s payback time.”

  It was some time later before he killed the first of them. Security around their night position was sloppy, as it usually was around American units. He cached the radio and extra equipment, and crawled up the hill toward the 3rd Mech, feeling for trip wires as he got closer. He passed several claymore mines and turned them around so they would fire into the Americans if they trig
gered them. He thought about the time Mr. Minh had taught him the VC trick.

  A metallic snap, the sound of a grenade fuse or trip flare, froze him, then someone nearby said, “What you got?”

  The snap of another can of soda being opened was followed by a voice that said, “Fuckin’ orange pop. When we gonna get some Cokes? I’m pissing orange pop.”

  “Fuckin’ CO don’t give a shit about us,” yet another voice added. “I ain’t seen Coke one in weeks. CO don’t care about nothing but fuckin’ body count.”

  “There it is.”

  Hanson worked his way around them, stood up, and approached them from inside the perimeter, “Hey, what’s happenin’,” he said to them. “I fuckin’ got turned around out here. Which way’s the TOC?”

  “You’re turned around, all right. It’s way the hell over that way.”

  “Right,” Hanson said. “Hey, what’s the skinny on those fuckers we shot up down there?”

  “Platoon of VC. Twenty-five or thirty of ’em. Killed most of them. Where have you been?”

  “I was out on a little recon patrol on the other side of the hill. Missed the whole thing.”

  “Hey, they fuck with us, they die.”

  “All right!”

  “There it is.”

  Hanson walked toward the Tactical Operations Center, past APCs and tanks whose crews were listening to rock music and laughing, through pockets of marijuana smoke. A soldier stumbled backward into him, spun around, and demanded, “What the fuck’s your problem?”

  “No problem, your honor. Just looking for the TOC.”

  He moved on, toward the sound of the generators. When he found them, next to the TOC, the command center, he took a grenade from his web gear, taped the spoon down with electrical tape, and pulled the pin. He dropped the grenade in the generator gas tank and walked off. It would take the diesel fuel about half an hour to dissolve the adhesive on the tape, allowing the grenade to go off. He’d be ready by then.

  He waited in the dark, just outside the perimeter. Four perimeter guards were bunched together nearby, eating and talking.

  “Naw, man, it’s gonna be a Charger, a hemi-head Charger. I don’t have no use for no Ford. When I get back to the world, first thing I’m gonna do—after I get drunk and laid, by a white woman—is buy a Charger. Dark green. Hey, I owe it to myself, right? That’s what this whole fuckin’ year is about. At least I’ll have something worthwhile to show for it.”

  “Yeah,” another voice said, “that McQueen flick back at Camp Carroll. The dude driving the Charger? Was that cool or what? The way he just snapped on his seatbelt and punched that big hemi. You could tell he had a low impedance air cleaner on that baby. I don’t believe McQueen could have caught him in that Mustang.”

  “I don’t know. You put you that big Cobra V-eight in…”

  The generator blew up with a quick double explosion, a sheet of burning gas illuminating the camp like lightning. Hanson cut the four guards down with the AK-47. The green tracer rounds from the Chinese weapon fluttered and bounced through the camp. Hanson changed clips as he sprinted for a gully fifty yards away, hearing the claymores he had reversed go off, sending their pattern of ball-bearings gnashing through the grass into the American position.

  The whole perimeter opened fire in all directions, most of it too high to hit anything. A red fan of .50-caliber tracers slapped past Hanson, the pattern spreading, then silently winking out, point by point. Another grenade went off inside the perimeter, one that must have been dropped or bounced off a tree, and there was more shouting and confusion until the officers began to get the panicky firing under control, whole clips of M-16 rounds arcing straight up into the night sky.

  Hanson pulled out the fat, foot-long starlight scope, attached it to a mount on the AK-47, and scanned the perimeter, seeing it as a grainy green TV picture that reminded him of the TV pictures of the moon walk, remembering that night on the beach with Silver. He watched soldiers duck-walking and low-crawling, officers and NCOs waving their arms. One soldier lit a cigarette and stood out as though he were spotlighted, the cigarette tip bright as a flare in his mouth. Hanson aimed for the cigarette and it spun away like a little comet.

  He swallowed a capsule of speed and lay back, listening to the chaos behind him and looking up at the stars. He felt good, as if this was the job that had been waiting for him all his life. He didn’t plan to live through the night, and that gave him a big advantage. He could do anything now.

  The Americans were amateurs, more concerned with survival than with killing the enemy. Most of them had never learned the lesson that aggression will save you when caution won’t. Most American units went out only in company-sized and larger operations, and the smaller, lighter-armed VC units rarely did anything more than harass them with snipers and booby-traps. The Americans were not used to being attacked.

  Hanson smiled. By now the Americans would have radioed that they were taking heavy hostile fire from a platoon or larger unit. He moved around to another section of the perimeter and studied the position with the scope. Three soldiers were moving a machine gun under the direction of a fourth. They glowed and sparkled emerald green in the scope, as if they were radioactive. The picture in the scope was two-dimensional, and Hanson had to estimate the distance, using trees that he could make out against the sky. He took out two baseball-sized grenades from the canteen cover at his belt, threw them overhand at the four men, fired a burst of green tracers behind them, and flattened on the ground.

  The thud of the grenades rocked him, and the night position was visible for an instant in the yellow blast, the men frozen, two of them in the air, caught as if in a snapshot, and then it was black again. Red tracers snapped over and past Hanson, hitting the ground and glancing up, deflecting off bushes and leaves, boiling through the grass.

  Hanson began laughing, probing the position at will, making it twitch. They’d start popping flares now, he thought.

  Mortars coughed, sending their rounds up with faint red nimbuses that moments later burst into spiky points of light, their small parachutes opening with gentle pops, the flares swinging beneath the parachutes like fiery pendulums, dripping sparks, pop, pop.

  They gave off a dead white light that didn’t show color or depth, lighting the hilltop in black and silver-white, objects flat and deceptive as plywood stage settings. They threw shadows in conflicting directions, dizzying, confusing, and Hanson ran through the grass and froze, changed direction, ran, froze, just another shadow.

  He unstrapped Quinn’s Swedish “K,” its fat silencer designed to hide the gun’s muzzle flash. Hanson ran, froze in a crouch, and when the shadows converged on him, he fired a burst, the only sound the dry clicking of the bolt, and soldiers fell. He slipped in and out of the perimeter like a wraith. The Americans could hear him laughing, hidden by the light from the flares, like strobe lights at a rock concert, overlaying movement and shadow and darkness. By then some of the Americans, in panic, were firing across arcs of their own perimeter, shooting each other in the back, and those accidental casualties, perceived as the result of enemy fire, threw them further into fear and confusion.

  They’ll be calling in artillery, he thought, scrambling and sliding down the hill to where he’d left the pack and radio. He sat with his back against a tree in a depression that hid him, and watched the hilltop, occasional fans of tracer fire spreading gracefully above him. He felt detached from the situation and wished only that Quinn were alive there with him. And Silver. They’d all be laughing.

  He covered himself and the radio with a poncho and turned it on. Dim yellow lights began to glow, and the ocean-surf rushing sound of static grew. Using the red-lensed penlight, he checked a list of radio frequencies that the 3rd Mech might use to call in artillery from their fire bases. Beneath the hot rubberized shelter, in the dim yellow and red light, he began changing frequencies like a man trying to find a radio station that played just the kind of music he liked.

  “. . . heavy con
tact all around our position,” an excited voice said, and then began calling in the coordinates of the hill, requesting eight-inch artillery fire.

  “Shot. Over…” a voice from the fire base said, indicating that the first round was on its way.

  “Shot out,” said a voice from the hilltop.

  The round blossomed against the base of the hill, setting the tall dry grass on fire, throwing shrapnel into the trees above Hanson, red-hot twisted shards of cast iron the size of human hands, ripping branches loose. Then he could hear spent pieces of shrapnel falling to the ground around him, thunk, thunk, where they hissed in the dew that had begun to form on the grass.

  Hanson keyed his microphone, cutting off the voice from the hill, and said, “That looked real good. Add one hundred and fire for effect.” The added hundred yards would put the fire on top of the hill.

  “Shot. Over…”

  “Shot out.”

  The next three rounds came in together, roaring over like low-flying jets in close formation, screaming into the hill, into the American position.

  “Looking good,” Hanson said. “Keep it coming. Fire for effect.”

  Another salvo of three rounds roared in, setting off secondary explosions from ammunition and gasoline on the hill, then three more. Trees and grass on the hillside were in flames as Hanson walked back down the hill to the bodies of Quinn and Mr. Minh.

  He chopped down two wrist-thick lengths of bamboo and used them to make a litter with nylon line and a poncho. He placed the two bodies on it and began dragging it away by a shoulder harness rigged out of the green nylon line. The hilltop behind them danced in flame and smoke and shadow, the sound of grenades, small-arms fire, and heavy machine guns rising and falling as the surviving Americans fought the empty darkness, the fury fading as Hanson trudged toward the river, until finally he was able to hear the hiss and thump of the bamboo poles and his own heavy breathing.