He was not alone. Most soldiers saw what Patchway saw. They saw an endless war without meaning. And too often without hope of survival.
At noon, after many hours of patrol through abandoned villages and arguments in Vietnamese and Army English with the two radios that worked only sporadically, Patchway ate his cold food and sat in the brown-burnt brush holding his rifle, trembling with exhaustion and the anxiety of watchfulness.
All this vast piece of country had been defoliated from the air but enough of the browned leaves had not yet fallen to allow fighter-bomber attacks on the buried enemy fortresses beneath the tree branches. The enemy had to be rooted out by men on the ground and his fortresses blown apart. But Patchway’s patrol had found no enemy today.
Just as well.
The trembling of his hands had become so much a part of him that Patchway did not notice it except, as now, when he sloshed on himself water from the canteen he raised to his lips. Three more days in the combat zone finished his six months of combat. He would be eligible for a safe job in basecamp where he would not drown himself drinking from a canteen and where he could stay alive. He did not want to fight in these last three days. He did not want to risk dying three days before he would be safe.
Patchway did not like this corner of the forest because it did not help his three-day survival chances. The leaves here were browned and falling. The trees dying. No good cover for thirty prowling soldiers. No cover for the enemy, either. But he had underground bunkers and what had Patchway? He had the distant chop of Chinook helicopters spraying more defoliant on another part of the forest. That’s all he had, a mist of poison.
The morning’s sweat had blackened his fatigues as though he had swum in them, the fabric itching with salt and brambles. He sat still and quiet, ignoring the itches and bug bites, watching the trembling of his hands, waiting out the last minutes of this rest break as he expected to wait out the last three days of his time in the combat zone. Waiting frightened, anxious, half-panicked. So many months of war and in it there had seemed to him so little combat as justification for the fear that was in him. But what there had been was enough for him.
The Viet soldiers settled down to a noontime nap, clustered around their transistor radios, and Patchway and his GIs heard around them a sing-song of talk and then the snores of the sleepers.
Was Patchway the only one here with fear twisting his belly?
A brushbuck barked in the forest and Patchway started. Fresh sweat burst from his face and chest. He was cold in the light breeze that ran over the top of the long grass, unmoving only in those places where Viets or Yanks had made their siesta.
The buck barked again. This time Patchway did not start.
He read his watch. They had been on patrol five hours and seen nothing but ghost towns. This desolation was the mark of enemy power, drawing away from Yankee support farmers and laborers. But he had not seen the enemy today nor any trace of the enemy. He did not expect to. Because he wanted to survive the war, he hoped not to see the enemy today or ever again.
Patchway lolled back in the shade of the long grass away from the pounding sun. Reading his watch and knowing how many hours he had marched today made him feel exhausted. He fell asleep beneath the leaves and chitter of tiny animals high in the trees.
He slept dreaming of long-haired girls in ao-dai until a hand with the bitter stench of fish paste clamped over his mouth and nose and Patchway woke struggling.
The hand came away from his face and settled on his chest. Dreams of girls were blasted from his mind. With tremendous power, the hand pinned him to the ground. An English-speaking Viet whispered in Patchway’s ear, “You snore. Stop. Or I cut you throat.”
The pressure on his chest was gone. He heard rock-and-roll from the Viet radios.
There was a titter through the grass, as though the sleeping men had begun a sleeping conversation.
Patchway got to a crouch and went through the brush to his five GIs and shook them awake. None had managed to keep awake and on guard.
The Vietnamese commander too was stamping among his troops, striking them awake with a swagger stick. He said to Patchway, “Sergeant, goddamn, we’ve made a mistake!”
The commander slapped his radio operator who offered up the handset to Patchway. Patchway listened to the crackle of static and to the few words of English he could make out through the static.
“Southern Cross taking fire!” said the Vietnamese commander.
The titter among the Viet troops was now like a woman’s keening that rose once and vanished on a note too high to sustain. The troops surged eastward into the trees running toward the Southern Cross and the refugee village huddled beneath the safety of the Yankee guns. Toward their wives and children.
“They don’t mean to run the whole way?” said Patchway.
The Viet commander took the handset from Patchway and grabbed up the radio that for its failure to do its job had betrayed these men and their families and threw them into the mud and dropped a grenade on them and followed his soldiers running into the trees.
Patchway too ran, the five GIs behind him. They ran a distance Patchway did not believe he could run with a full load of ammunition in cloth bandoliers crisscrossing his chest and two heavy canteens on his belt, his jungle boots and his Yankee body that was elephantine beside these swift Vietnamese who seemed to him like dancers through the trees.
It was relief to Patchway to come out of the trees and look across the defoliated zone and see the Southern Cross and the vill. He stood with his hands on his knees, bent over to drip to the ground the sweat from his face so he would not inhale it and drown. He sucked in great gulps of hot tropic air. He wanted to vomit from the run and the heat and the stinging – that is what it was, a stinging – in his brain. A sting of fright for what he was about to find.
“Bastards!” shouted the Vietnamese commander. “Bastards bastards bastards!” He ran across the burned zone with his troops in skirmish line, running – never having stopped running as Patchway had – for the village.
The village was burning. There were bright clanging flashes over the guns on the Southern Cross beyond the concertina wire that separated the soldiers’ families from the artillery. There were children and women screaming and tearing through the wire to get away from the village flames and GIs reaching to them through the wire and shouting to them and in none of it could Patchway see what was the cause of it all.
More crash and flash over the guns. Orange flame from the wicker hooches.
Now it was as though Patchway’s jungle dream of long-haired girls writhing in silk had transformed itself into another sort of sensual image and he saw green lights all around him buzzing past.
Lights he could touch! Streaks of green. Sheets of green. A world of green.
Bright electric green above the dull green of the long grass and the waxy gleam of the leaves. Green that colored his vision and the sky and, as he raised his hands to look at them in the lazy way of dreams, that colored his flesh.
“Sergeant, goddamn!” shouted a GI as he was swept away on a tide of green light.
“Mother!” cried another being hammered to the earth by green-tailed enemy tracer bullets.
Patchway was out of his half-second dream. He was standing in the enemy gunfire that came from the burning village. He was shooting back. The three survivors of his recon team were shooting back with good Yankee orange tracers. Shouting and screaming and running toward the wicker hooches and the flames and the women and children fleeing through the rings of barbwire around the firebase.
Patchway was with the Viet soldiers running through the village. They were howling the names of their wives and children. He was screaming his war cry. They all were firing long streams of orange at all those bursts of green light.
Patchway followed the enemy through the winding village streets, shooting them through the wooden walls they chose to hide behind, shooting them as they ran from him, shooting them as they lay wounded. Was this
another part of his dream?
He saw that his rifle was empty of ammunition, that he had used up all the magazines he had carried in the bandoliers across his chest, that his war was about to end because he no longer had anything with which to kill the enemy and he was going to die.
Patchway began to shout and it was not his war cry. It was panic. He shouted English at the screaming women and children who did not understand him. From a child he snatched an enemy rifle and he saw in the child’s eyes that this was not a child but an enemy and he shot the child. He ran through the village hunting enemies and he shot them. The green light going out from his stolen rifle exceeding the volume of green light coming at him.
Above the sound of rifle fire was something flat, like the dropping of a brick into the bottom of a garbage can, and Patchway knew he had lost this fight and the village. “Mortars!” he shouted.
Thump-thump-thump! It was clear! So clear! Above the blasts of the firing of the Yankee artillery just up the slope he could hear the sounds of mortars firing. Then the bursting satchel charges the enemy had flung over the concertina wire to blow up the artillery. Above the crashing burning of the vill. Thump-thump-thump! One, two, three mortar tubes – more! A battery of mortar tubes!
Patchway looked up into the sky that was still green, made that way by the fire coming out of his stolen rifle, searching for the fat, black, slow mortar rounds up there.
While the mortar rounds were arcing over the defoliated zone and before they could strike into the village, Patchway ran shouting through the village spraying bullets on the enemy, the living and the dead, those running from him and at him, those putting up their hands shouting, “Surrender, GI!” and those shooting at the women and children caught in the Yankee wire, at the GIs shooting back at the enemy firing through the women and children, everyone shouting, Patchway’s face and belly burnt from the fire all around him, and the Viets stumbling and cursing and crying, shouting for their families.
When Patchway could run no further because of exhaustion and the denseness of the fire and the hooches collapsing across his path, the mortars came in. Coming in on the Vietnamese soldiers hurrying their families into the Yankee wire where the gate had been pulled open and where GIs stood with a howitzer firing point-blank into the enemy charge.
Patchway ran on firing, firing into the enemy, into the women and children, into the Arvins, into the Yanks.
The mortars came down around him and there was no confusion in his mind. He knew the direction he must take to find the Southern Cross and safety. He ran upslope and into the wire that the mortars had broken open. Clang! and crash! around him, yellow light, dust driven into his eyes, his legs pulled out from under him, the air pounded out of his lungs, things like shovels were smashed on his head. He remembered firing, firing, firing, not caring what he fired at so long as he fired.
Patchway did not want to sleep. He did not want to move. He stared at the earth walls. “What do I do with him?” “Call a medic!” Patchway jerked up his head and woke himself. What was this thing in his belly? He stood up in the underground room – so tiny – and stamped his feet and fell asleep standing, so cold. “Where is my stomach?” he shouted and woke himself. A soldier in Army green boxer shorts was there, saying, “What’s the matter, fella? What’s the matter? Fella? What’s? The matter? Fella?”
“Dreams!” Patchway said to him.
“You have them, too? To hell with ‘em.” The soldier had a bottle of vodka. “Can’t smell this on your breath so they can’t bust us for being drunk.”
They drank together sitting on the hospital cot.
“What dreams this time?” the soldier asked.
“From after the war.”
“Worst kind. No guarantee there’ll be anything after this war. Nothing but us. And what are we but unholy crap? Drink up!”
Patchway was frightened.
“Wanta live forever?” The soldier laughed. “Hey, of all the oodles of matter in this infinite universe, a little grubby smidgen of it quivered, congealed and walked upright and said, ‘I am Sergeant First Class James Evan Patchway.’ That’s a rare stroke of luck since almost none of the matter in the universe becomes animate and so little of that almost nothing became you. But here you are. After a while you will not be animate anymore. You will be dead. But you’re still lucky – you were alive once.”
“Am I dead now?”
“You have to ask?”
“Yes.”
“No such luck, Sergeant Patchway.”
“You mean I’ll have to live with myself after this?”
“After what? Killing a few Viets?”
“It wasn’t just the enemy. It was women and children.”
“You sure they weren’t the enemy?”
“How can I be sure?”
“Even if you’re sure, it wasn’t you who killed them. It was the Agent Orange in you.”
“The what?”
“The poison we brought here to this country. It defoliates the jungle. It defoliates the people. It defoliates you, Sergeant Patchway.”
“Sergeant Patchway!” cried a voice. “Are you talking to me?”
“With his guts opened up like that?” said another voice. “Naw.”
“Make it easy on him – give him something for it, Doc.”
“I’m not a doc. I’m just a medic. I can’t do that for him. Besides, he’s too far out of it to feel anything.”
“But you can do something for him, can’t you?”
A combat surgeon said, “Do you know what Army medicine is all about, General? It’s about spare parts. A soldier is an expendable, interchangeable part. Not too expensive because he’s easily replaced. Conscription keeps costs down. He’s cheaper to provide to the war zone than morphine. That’s why I’ve got more wounded GIs here than I’ve got morphine or any other drug.”
“Put this one on dust off,” said the General. “I want him in hospital and alive to pin a medal on him.”
“For what he did out there? He killed as many of the good Viets as the bad Viets.”
“Do you know what Army medals are all about, Doctor? They’re about your spare parts. About giving a medal to a guy who went nuts doing his job so that he and the U.S. Army don’t have to remember just what he did. So that this spare part can become a good soldier again and make more war.”
“Damn,” said the combat surgeon, “I almost forgot.”
In the high, sere plains land, with the snort of buffalo and the smell of saddle leather, with a light snow falling, Patchway’s wife was pregnant. She would have his child. He lay his head on her belly to listen. The child’s heart beat but what had it to do with him who had orphaned so many children? Who had put children to starve because he had burnt their rice and polluted their wells to deprive his enemy of forage? Who with his country had finally abandoned children to the Communist enemy? His wife screaming in childbirth, the doctor reaching into her body to twist out a mucousy infant. How could Patchway father a living thing? The child screamed. Patchway screamed! They put the infant in his arms – alive! He had made a living thing!
He felt a sudden and astonishing love in him for the child.
For all the children who had been caught in the green spray of his rifle in a burning village.
And then the baby was not a living thing.
Patchway’s child died in Patchway’s arms.
The poison in him had killed his baby.
Now Patchway sat in his empty apartment on Kucheh Kiabone, Tehran, with his water glass full of Persian vodka, listening to the winter ice crack on the roof, sheer away and crash down into the alley.
He thought of another man who could not escape from an unbearable life. He thought of Madjid Afkhami, dead in America. Was Gitty right – was this the revenge of Colonel Ardjovani for those who had helped his wife and child run away from him? Or was it just one more unhappy death in an America so self-poisoned with its own Agent Orange that it went to war against itself for no other reason than t
o make war?
* * *
The cab from the train station left Saifallah at his San Francisco hotel. He went to his room, hung up his clothes, put on a robe and was sitting in a chair with his hands on his knees when his supper was brought to him on a tray. He had in him the exhaustion of a man who wants only to be left alone for a century, and he could not allow himself to wonder why he felt this way or he would know he was a traitor to his king.
But Saifallah, staring into the bedroom mirror, could not stop himself asking, What am I doing here for Ardjovani? Is this an honest assignment or something else? How can I tell? What will happen to me if I discover…
He could not afford to think further. Do the job quickly, he thought. Do everything quickly, as the Prophet Jesus said. Do it without thinking. Thought is treachery. Do it and be gone. To hell with sightseeing. Kill this woman and go home and never think again.
Saifallah picked up the telephone and dialed the number he had memorized. “You’re damned early, damn you,” said the answering voice, speaking English.
“I’m here now. Bring me what you have for me,” said Saifallah.
“You’re at the hotel?”
“Of course.”
“It’ll be there in the morning.”
“I said now.”
“It’s almost midnight.”
Saifallah waited in silence while the owner of the voice considered what might happen if Saifallah went home without finishing his San Francisco assignment. He said, “Yeah, okay. One hour.”
Saifallah hung up the phone.
He bathed in cold water to drive the fatigue from his muscles, dressed and went down to the front desk. His package was there with the keys to a car. He buttoned his suit coat against the Bay fog and chill, regretting again the loss of his heavy winter coat in New Hampshire, and went to the car. He flung the package on the seat, got in and drove away.
The Runaway Man: A dying man, a dying world, a child to be saved Page 7