Fatal Light

by Richard Currey

  In the window rack of the vending box the close-up face of Lyndon Johnson looked withdrawn and defeated. He was gazing down, leaning his face into his big workman’s hand. The headline over the President said MARINES STOPPED NORTH OF SAIGON and, below the headline, LBJ considers bombing halt. A side panel had a football player in the air with his hands on the ball and the caption Redskins clip Oilers in overtime. A blue van turned the corner and slammed to a halt where the newspaper truck had stood. Our recruiting officer burst out of the van, sharp creases and the smell of aftershave lotion, arranging his garrison cap on a crew-cut skull. He moved briskly to the van’s side door, banged it open and turned to face us.

  “Gentlemen,” he said loudly. “Line up. Right here in front of me, please. One single line.”

  We shambled into a line.

  “Outstanding,” the recruiter said. He waited a moment before he spoke again: a memorized speech, and he seemed proud of it. “Gentlemen, you are about to be reborn. You are about to become soldiers, like it or not. May I remind you that these are the last kind words you will ever hear. Best of luck to each and every one of you.”

  He stepped aside. We filed into the van.

  10

  The bus, stopped for a light in the middle of a small-town night, stank. We made it stink, all of us packed in. The fat boy next to me was sweating and finally introduced himself, imitating a used-car salesman: loud voice, extended hand, high-school ring. The bus pulled up at the main gate of the Recruit Training Center, military figures vaulting aboard, swinging the aisle, white helmets, guard belts, nightsticks, crisp green trousers stuffed into scrubbed brown leggings with polished gold eyelets. I stood with the others, prodded and herded inside the ornate gates, feet positioned on shoe soles painted on the asphalt at regular intervals, storm troopers between the ranks shouting into ears. Floodlights on. We were marched into a long armory, Drill Hall 31: white squares on blue-fleck linoleum. I was assigned a square. A middle-aged enlisted man appeared and talked like an auctioneer. We were to strip, place our civilian clothes into the cardboard boxes in front of us. We were not to talk. We were not to grabass. We stood at attention nude in 3 A.M. bare-bulb glare, and for thirty seconds the auctioneer looked bored. Then he sighed and said, You’re in the army now.

  11

  Training blurred by in a Deep South welter, Spanish moss and magnolia in swamps, drill instructors born out of the flat sun and hostile towns. There was a battery of written tests at scarred schoolroom desks; one by one, soldiers were led out of the room as they reached the part of the test that defied them. When I finished I was taken away to an office where an aging sergeant ran a red pencil over my answer sheet and asked if I’d like to be a medic. Wear a white suit he told me, care for the sick.

  I did not answer.

  He shrugged and said it was good duty any way you looked at it. People took care of you, looked out for you. Half the time you’re in the rear, made in the shade.

  I asked about the other half. He shrugged again and said I’d be beating the bush with an infantry company. But, he added, at least I could die a hero.

  I asked him what my choices were. For the first time since I came into the office he looked at me, and he smiled gently. He told me that in this man’s army there were no choices.

  12

  The pilot announced that the smudge of coastline moving toward us was the Republic of Vietnam.

  Vietnam framed by airplane porthole and haze and first light: the plane banked, turned, for a moment was adrift, leveled out, and the coastline was on the other side of the aircraft, pure green into pure blue, innocent, mysterious, dreaming into the sun.

  IN-COUNTRY

  1

  First look: sandbags and fog. And quiet. As if the fog itself were the carrier of silence easing among us, touching us, loving our faces. Hundred-pound sandbags stacked fifteen high and four deep until life itself was a simple connection between sacks of dirt and the mudhole ring inside them where we talked and ate and slept.

  “No, really, man,” Linderman told me, talking quietly. “This is what she said. Her exact fucking words. She will wait for me, and there will be no other guys in between. Not unless she gets word I ain’t coming back.” Linderman looked out on the fog. “God forbid I buy the farm in this shithole.”

  “You got any smokes?”

  He seemed relieved. “Got some Salems. You can cut the filters off if you want.”

  “No problem.”

  We crouched behind the sandbags, lit cigarettes where a match flame could not be seen. Against the perimeter, mortar fire started again, booming distantly.

  “How many you think’s out there in them hills?” Linderman asked me.

  I shrugged, flicked an ash. “Captain Bowers heard something like twenty thousand,” I said.

  “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  “Maybe more, is what he was saying. Nobody knows for sure.”

  “You think they mean to overrun us?”

  I drew on the cigarette, blowing a mouthful of smoke between us, and said, “So your ladyfriend says she’ll wait for you?”

  Linderman nodded slowly, looking at me soberly. “That’s what she told me,” he said.

  2

  “I had a cat once when I was a kid,” Linderman said.

  My field glasses were trained into the hills. The shelling had stopped. I saw nothing but the furrowed green textures of mountainside forest. It was nearly six o’clock. Tuesday. An ordinary time in America, I thought: my mother and father sitting down to dinner with my sisters. My older brother and his wife going out for hamburgers.

  Linderman said, “Strange how much I loved that cat.”

  I lowered the field glasses and looked at Linderman. He was crouched inside our sandbag ring, gazing at the ground. I asked him what made him think of his cat.

  Linderman shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said.

  I slid to the ground, back against the sandbags.

  “The strangest thing,” Linderman said, “is that I didn’t know how I felt about that cat until it was gone. Then there I was, crying my goddam eyes out, sitting on the edge of the bed, going crazy my mother told me, pounding the mattress and all.”

  “Well,” I said, “you know, you were a kid. Those kind of things mean a lot when you’re a kid.”

  Linderman looked at his boots.

  “So what happened to your cat?”

  Linderman shrugged. “Got lost,” he told me. “Stolen. Wandered off.” He shrugged again.

  “Know what I was thinking about?” I said. “I was thinking about how there’s no time in this place.”

  Linderman stared at me.

  “Really, it’s six o’clock, dinnertime; back home everybody’s sitting down to eat. Then they’ll watch the news, kick back, but they’ll know what time it is, where they are, what they’re supposed to be doing. Here, it doesn’t matter. There’s no such thing as time. No beginning, no ending, no in-between. Just living.”

  “Until we aren’t,” Linderman said.

  I looked at the ground for a moment and then said, softly, “Come on, man.”

  “Like my old cat. We’re all just here until we’re not here anymore, right?”

  “Hey,” I said, “you don’t know about your cat. You say he just wandered off. Took a walk. Went to the Bahamas.”

  Linderman nodded. “That’s what we ought to do. Walk away from this shit.”

  “You know, Linderman, you’re forgetting Sergeant Queen’s cardinal rule.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Rule number one: nobody dies. You remember?”

  Linderman laughed quietly. “Fucking Queen,” he said. “He told me that when I came on board. He said maybe some people go away, disappear, you don’t see them around anymore, but nobody ever dies. Everybody’s somewhere.”

  Linderman looking at the ground, still laughing, and I smiled too, and I said, “Now, really, Corporal Linderman, you got to remember Queen’s rule.”

  When Linderm
an looked up at me laughing, his eyes were lit with tears. He said, “OK, nobody dies. Not even cats.”

  I grinned. “Absolutely,” I said.

  3

  You got a girl back in the world?

  The oldest opener, a man heard it everywhere in-country. Some carried wallet-size pictures or graduation shots. Some told stories of how fine it was or was going to be. I had a picture but never showed it to anyone. I used to believe the energy of our every moment—Mary’s and mine—lived in that picture of her face, every touch we shared, every private murmur. I had decided it was a charm. My personal good luck piece. If anybody looked at that picture, if I was casual with it, my protection would be lost. A magic at risk. That’s how I felt.

  Those were the early days in-country. I became less dramatic as time passed. The picture of Mary finally disintegrated in my always-wet hip pocket. I went for it one day, it came out in pieces.

  4

  “So anyway,” Linderman was saying, “we go in this liquor store, it’s maybe like two in the morning, all-night liquor store, right? So you know, we’re just kids, out on the night and messing around, not a goddam thing to do, and we’re thinking we need something to drink. I mean, we’ve already polished off a couple bottles of Mad Dog Twenty-Twenty between the three of us and we’re drunk enough anyways. For kids anyways. And anyway there’s only one of us eighteen, old enough to buy a bottle, right? So me and Jackie Franco, we’re both underage, we’re in this store and our buddy, the guy that’s eighteen, he’s a little behind us, locking the car or something, right? So we’re just looking around, you know, I mean, what do we know from liquor? Store full of the shit and we’re probably gonna buy a couple pints of Thunderbird or something, but anyway we’re just walking around, talking, bullshitting, and the guy at the counter asks us, you know, big voice, full of authority, Can I help you boys? So Jackie shrugs, waves his hand at the door, says something like we’re waiting for a friend. So the guy running the place, old Italian guy, bald head except for these two or three hairs he’s got combed down into place, he says Well you can do your waiting somewheres else. And Jackie says But our buddy’s coming right in, he’s right behind us. And the old Italian guy says This look like the goddam bus station? Go wait somewheres else. Well, I guess we don’t move fast enough—I mean, I can see Bobby coming across the lot, he’s almost at the door—and the old wop, you ready for this? The old fart pulls a gun on us! No shit. He’s got a pistol out and holding it on us and he’s saying how we better walk and all, and he’s nervous as shit, you know, and about this time Bobby hits the door and stands there a minute, looking at all this, then he says, What the hell is going on? But the old wop is worked up now, he tells us to take a fucking walk, and Bobby goes straight over to the old guy—Bobby was always one real cool son of a bitch—and puts his face up real close to the gun. You know, I’m thinking, Jesus Christ, Bobby! but he’s looking at that gun and then he looks at us and then he looks back at the old guy and he starts laughing! And I don’t know what the fuck is going on, right? And Bobby says Hey guys, know what? This gun here probably cost about a dollar ninety-eight down to the toy store. And the old guy lets the gun drop, looking disgusted as all get out, and me and Jackie go up there and sure enough. Fucking thing’s a toy! Old dude’s gonna blow us out of the store with a toy gun. Can you believe that? You know, though, funny thing, we got to be good friends with that old guy. I mean, we ended up going in there all the time, he got all our Saturday night business, we were always laughing, jiving him, you know, about that little toy pistol. He made us promise never to tell anyone, though. Said he’d had to use it a time or two, said it worked both times. So, you know, we said Hey, no problem, right? The secret rests with us. Swear to God. Turns out this guy has a heart attack one night when someone really did rob the place. Weird thing. He was probably going for his toy but was so goddam scared his heart went out on him. He was old and all, but still, weird kind of thing. We missed him. We all went to his funeral up to Little Shepherd. I still think about him, you know? I mean, here I am, corporal in the crotch, and these guns I’m packing sure ain’t no goddam toys and if we’re stuck in this motherfucking valley much longer I’ll probably get so old I’ll die of a heart attack too. You know, that old guy was always giving me a load of shit about the nobility of the armed forces, the importance of sacrifice, of serving your country, all that shit. Man, if he only knew. If he only fucking knew.”

  5

  The tent flap lifted from outside. The MP came in, watching us and saying, “You cocksuckers got nothin’ but cake.”

  Howard continued to lay down cards. I was in a hammock to the rear with a month-old Time reading how Jackie Onassis was harassed by an enterprising photographer always trying to catch her in the bathroom or sunning in the nude.

  The MP turned and said on the way out, “You boys got a shipment.”

  Howard stood, stretched, picked up his coffee cup, and started for the flap. “You coming?” he called back, so I swung out of the hammock and followed.

  Howard stood with the MP at the rear of a military police van. “Check out this shit,” he said to me.

  “Musta run over a mine,” the MP said. “You shoulda seen the jeep.” I climbed into the van: shoveled bodies like piles of old hose. One Vietnamese man, a prisoner, had lost his right arm and his pants. A sergeant looked like he was sleeping. A decapitated lieutenant’s head had rolled to the front of the van where it stuck, looking at me. “Let’s move this inside,” I called out, my voice clouding in front of me, and I leaned for support and my hand went through the sergeant’s shirt into his gut that was still warm and the darkness of him froze around my hand, jerking awake from a nightmare, pushing my arm out, into the night, folding back a sleeve to reach blind into black, acidic water, his body talking between my fingers, sending one short gut moan for the bad light the explosion let in, and I lifted my hand out covered with his blood and shit.

  I looked at Howard. It was raining into his coffee cup, coffee splashing to his thumb and wrist. “Man,” the MP said, “you shoulda seen that jeep.”

  6

  Lifting off from near Hue, Wednesday dawn. I was born on a Wednesday, this time of day, laborers rolling to catch the alarm, blinking in the sudden vacant spot of the bedside lamp.

  There is a recurring notion of violin music in the dark. I can’t trace it: a thread of what’s recalled or forgotten. Looking at everything I can see, sun rising out of the Pacific, transcendental magenta and scarlet, rain forest rowing north into a settled haze and mountain, mythological, azure and green. Me at the open port of a helicopter dreaming the view of more than one river at once.

  7

  The hamlet was ordinary enough, kids chasing us for candy and powdered chocolate and cigarettes, their parents silhouetted by the half dark of doorways. Near the end of the hamlet an old woman was squatting with a skinny, panting dog. We were nearly by when she spoke, Vietnamese, to no one in particular. The lieutenant looked back, around the edge of the column to see the woman, then halted the platoon. He walked within a few feet of her. She did not move.

  The lieutenant abruptly shouted “VC?”

  She stared at his face.

  The lieutenant called Corporal Howard out; Howard knew some Vietnamese. He leaned close to Howard, an illusion of secrets. “Did you hear what she said, corporal?”

  Howard looked at the old woman and did not answer. The lieutenant asked again, louder, more authority, “What she say, Corporal Howard?”

  I watched a spider touch its way along the sill of the hootch doorway behind the old woman. She squatted and stared at the bridge of the lieutenant’s nose.

  “Well, sir,” Howard said. “She called us...uh, dogs, something like that. Maybe like go to hell, something like that.”

  “Yeah, well.” The lieutenant nodded. “You ask her what she knows about Charlie.” The lieutenant spit Texas-style, turned sideways looking into the distance, job delegated. Howard hesitated, said something to the woman, a
nd she broke a semi-toothed betel-nut grin. Then she laughed, full-throated, head back.

  The lieutenant studied her, reached to unbuckle his holster flap. “Perhaps an understanding can be arrived at,” he said, “as to just who the dogs are.” He withdrew the .45, clicked the safety off. The blood drained away from my eyes: I stepped toward him, slowly, called his name as calmly as I could. He was leveling the pistol, aiming. He spoke as quietly as I did. “Back in formation, soldier.”

  Holding the pistol in both hands, arm’s length, he fired.

  The dog’s head turned inside out, splashing the woman, its body bursting like a dropped sack.

  8

  Dear Mary,

  I am enclosing a photograph of myself. The dark stains on my shirt are mostly sweat, a little blood. Not my own, so not to worry. The chain around my neck carries the St. Christopher medal you sent me: even though I am not religious its power seems immense. I wear it with the embossed tags that will identify me in the event of my death. Please excuse my lack of expression. Forgive the look of fatigue and dull hatred you see in my eyes. The thousand yard stare somebody here called it, and I thought I didn’t know what that meant, but here it is, reaching back in my eyes.

  The weapon in my right hand is a pirated Ithaca Magnum-10 shotgun, gas-operated, semi-automatic, a full-choke barrel sawed down to ten inches for ease in single-hand handling at close quarters. It was captured from a North Vietnamese officer, later presented to me as a gift.