by Tim O'Brien
“Why? Tell me why.” The old man was speaking to a small pine. “Why the clues? Why don’t he just leave the trail? Lose us, leave us behind? Tell me why.”
“A rockhead,” said Stink Harris. “That’s why.”
Liquid and shiny, a mix of rain and clay, the trail took them higher. Out of radio range, beyond the reach of artillery.
Cacciato eluded them but he left behind the wastes of his march: empty ration cans, bits of bread, a belt of gold-cased ammo dangling from a shrub, a leaking canteen, candy wrappers, worn rope. Hints that kept them going. Luring them on, plodding along the bed of a valley; once they saw his fire on a distant hill. Straight ahead was the frontier.
“He makes it that far,” Doc said on the morning of the sixth day, pointing to the next line of mountains, “and he’s gone, we can’t touch him. He makes the border and it’s bye-bye Cacciato.”
“How far?”
Doc shrugged. “Six klicks, eight klicks. Not far.”
“Then he’s made it,” Paul Berlin said. “Maybe so.”
“By God, he has!”
“Maybe.”
“By God! Lunch at Maxim’s!”
“What?”
“A cafeteria deluxe. My old man ate there once … truffles heaped on chipped beef and toast.”
“Maybe.”
The trail narrowed, then climbed, and a half hour later Stink spotted him.
He stood at the top of a small grassy hill, two hundred meters ahead. Loose and at ease, smiling, Cacciato already had the look of a civilian. Hands in his pockets, patient, serene, not at all frightened. He might have been waiting for a bus.
Stink yelped and the lieutenant hurried forward with the glasses.
“Got him!”
“It’s—”
“Got him!” Stink was crowing and hopping. “I knew it, the ding-dong’s givin’ up the ghost. I knew it!”
The lieutenant stared through the glasses.
“Fire a shot, sir?” Stink held up his rifle and before the lieutenant could speak he squeezed off two quick rounds, one a tracer that turned like a corkscrew through the morning haze. Cacciato waved.
“Lookie, lookie—”
“The son of a bitch.”
“Truly a predicament,” Oscar Johnson said. “I do think, ladies and gents of the jury, we got ourselves impaled on the horns of a predicament. Kindly observe—”
“Let’s move.”
“A true predicament.”
Stink Harris took the point, walking fast and chattering, and Cacciato stopped waving and watched him come, arms folded loosely and his big head cocked aside as if listening for something.
There was no avoiding it.
Stink saw the wire as he tripped it.
There were two sounds. First the sound of a zipper suddenly yanked up. Next a popping noise, the spoon releasing and primer detonating.
There was quiet. Then the sound of something dropping; then a fizzling sound.
Stink knew it as it happened. In one fuzzed motion he flung himself down and away, rolling, covering his skull, mouth open, yelping a trivial little yelp.
They all knew it.
Eddie and Oscar and Doc Peret dropped flat. Harold Murphy did an oddly graceful jackknife for a man of his size. The lieutenant collapsed. And Paul Berlin brought his knees to his belly, coiling and falling, closing his eyes and his fists and his mouth.
The fizzling sound was in his head. Count, he thought. But the numbers came in a tangle without sequence.
His belly hurt. That was where it started. First the belly, a release of fluids in the bowels, a shitting feeling, a draining of all the pretensions and silly little hopes for himself. The air was windless. His teeth hurt. Count, he thought. But his teeth ached and the numbers were jumbled and meaningless.
First the belly, the bowels, and next the lungs. He was steeled, ready. There was no explosion. Count, he thought. But he couldn’t get a grip on the numbers. His teeth had points in his brain, his lungs hurt, but there was no explosion. Smoke, he thought without thinking, smoke.
He felt it and smelled it, but he couldn’t count.
Smoke, he said, “Smoke,” and then the lieutenant was saying it, “Smoke,” the lieutenant was moaning, “fucking smoke grenade.”
And Paul Berlin smelled it. He felt the warm wet feeling on his thighs. His eyes were closed. Smoke: He imagined the colors and texture. He couldn’t bring his eyes open. He tried, but he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t unclench his fists or uncoil his legs or stop the draining. He couldn’t wiggle or run.
There was no explosion.
“Smoke,” Doc whispered softly. “A booby’s booby trap.”
It was red smoke. The message was clear. Brilliant red, acid-tasting, all over them. The numbers were coming now, and he counted them as they came. It was easy. Red smoke spreading out over the earth like paint, then climbing against gravity in a lazy red spiral.
His eyes had come open.
Stink Harris was bawling. He was on his hands and knees, chin against his throat. Oscar and Eddie hadn’t moved.
“Had us,” the lieutenant was chanting to himself. Senile-sounding. “Could’ve had us all, he could’ve.”
“Smoke.”
“All of us. The dummy could’ve—”
“Just smoke.”
But still Paul Berlin could not move. He heard voices. He heard Stink weeping on hands and knees along the trail, saw him, saw red smoke everywhere. The numbers kept running through his head, and he counted them, but he could not move. Dumb, he thought as he counted, a struck-dumb little yo-yo who can’t move.
There was just the silliness and astonishment. The foolishness. And the great folly that was just now beginning to come.
He was vaguely aware of being watched. Then keenly aware. He felt it beyond his vision, over his left shoulder: some gray-haired old goat chuckling at the sorry fix of this struck-dumb ding-dong at the moment of truth. His teeth hurt, his lungs hurt. He wanted to apologize to whoever was watching, but his lungs ached and his mouth wouldn’t work. He wasn’t breathing. Inhale? Exhale? He’d lost track.
You asshole, he thought. You ridiculous little yo-yo.
“He won’t come,” said Oscar Johnson, returning under a white flag. “Believe me, I tried hard, but the dude just don’ play cool.”
It was dusk. The seven soldiers sat in a circle.
Oscar spoke from behind sunglasses. “Strictly uncool. I told him all the right stuff, but the man just won’t give it up. Won’t. Told him … I told him it’s buggo. Sure enough, I says, you bound for doom. Totaled beyond repair. I told it clear, how he’d end up court-martialed to kingdom come, an’ how his old man’d shit molasses when he heard the story. All that. Told him, I says, maybe things don’ come down so hard if you just abandon ship right now. Now, I says. An’ what’s he do? He smiles. Like this … the man smiles. He just don’ be cool.”
The lieutenant was lying prone, Doc’s thermometer in his mouth. It wasn’t his war. The skin on his arms and neck sagged around deteriorating muscle.
“All that good shit, I told it all. Whole spiel, top to bottom.”
“You tell him we’re out of rations?”
“Shit, yes. I told him that. An’ I told him he’s gonna starve his own sorry ass if he keeps it up, and so what’s he do—?”
“The light of the world.”
“There it is, man. The happy-assed light of the world.”
“You tell him he can’t walk to Paris?”
Oscar grinned. He was black enough to be indistinct in the dusk. “Well, maybe I forgot to tell him that. Can’t add injury to insult.”
“You should’ve told him.”
“He’s not all that dumb.”
“You should’ve told him.”
“Dumb, but not all that dumb.”
Lieutenant Corson slid a hand behind his neck and pushed against it as if to relieve some spinal pressure. “What else?” he asked. “What else did he say?”
&nb
sp; “Nothin’, sir. Said he’s making out okay. Said he was sorry about the smoke.”
“The bastard.”
“Says he’s real fuckin sorry.”
Stink laughed bitterly and kept rubbing his hands against the black stock of his rifle.
“What else?”
“Nothing,” Oscar said. “You know how he is. Lots of smiles and stuff, real friendly. He asks how everybody’s holdin’ up, so I says we’re fine, except for the scare with the smoke, and so he says he’s real sorry for that, and I say, shit man, no harm. I mean, what can you do with a dude like that?”
The lieutenant nodded, still pushing against his neck. He was quiet for a while. He seemed to be making up his mind. “All right,” he finally said, sighing. “What’d he have with him?”
“Sir?”
“Musketry,” the lieutenant said. “Firepower. Ordnance.”
Oscar thought a moment. “His rifle. That’s it, I guess. The rifle and some ammo. Truth is, I didn’t pay much attention.”
“Claymores?”
Oscar shook his head.
“Frags?”
“Don’t know. A couple probably.”
“Swell recon job, Oscar. Real pretty.”
“Sorry. The man had his stuff tight.”
“I’m a sick man.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Goes through me like coffee. You know? Just like coffee. What you got for me, Doc?”
Doc Peret shook his head. “Nothing, sir. Rest.”
“That tells it. What I genuinely need is rest.”
“Why not let him go, sir?”
“A sick, sick man.”
“Just let him go.”
“Rest,” the lieutenant said, “is what I need.”
Paul Berlin did not sleep. Instead he watched Cacciato’s small hill humped up in the dark. He tried to imagine a proper ending.
The possibilities were closing themselves out, and though he tried, it was hard to see a happy end to it.
Not impossible, of course. It might still be done. With skill and daring and luck, Cacciato might still slip away and cross the frontier mountains and be gone. He tried to picture it. Many new places. Villages at night with barking dogs, people whose eyes and skins would change in slow evolution and counterevolution westward, whole continents opening up like flowers, new tongues and new times and all roads connecting toward Paris. Yes, it could be done.
He imagined it. He imagined the many dangers of the march: treachery and deceit at every turn, disease, thirst, jungle beasts crouching in ambush; but, yes, he also imagined the good times ahead, the sting of aloneness, the great new quiet, new leanness and knowledge and wisdom. The rains would end. The trails would go dry, the sun would show, and, yes, there would be changing foliage and seasons and great expanses of silence, and songs, and pretty girls sleeping in straw huts, and, where the road ended, Paris.
The odds were poison, but it could be done.
He might even have tried himself. With courage, he thought, he might even have joined in, and that was the one sorry thing about it, the sad thing: He might have.
Then in the dark it rained.
“The AWOL bag,” Oscar whispered from beneath his poncho. “There’s the weirdness. Where in hell did he come up with the AWOL bag?”
“Your imagination.” It was Eddie’s voice, deeper than the others.
“No, man, I saw it.”
“You say you saw it.”
“I saw it. Black vinyl, white stitching. I speak truth, I saw it.”
Quiet beaten by rain. Shifting sounds in the night, men rolling.
Then Eddie’s voice, disbelieving: “Nobody. Not even the C. Nobody uses them bags to go AWOL. It’s not done.”
“Tell it to Cacciato.”
“It’s not done.”
And later, as if a mask had been peeled off, the rain ended and the sky cleared and Paul Berlin woke to see stars.
They were in their familiar places. It wasn’t so cold. He lay on his back and counted the stars and named those that he knew, named the constellations and the valleys of the moon. He’d learned the names from his father. Guideposts, his father had once said along the Des Moines River, or maybe in Wisconsin. Anyway—guideposts, he’d said, so that no matter where in the world you are, anywhere, you know the spot, you can trace it, place it by latitude and longitude. It was just too bad. Dumb and crazy and, now, very sad. He should’ve kept going. Should’ve left the trails, waded through streams to rinse away the scent, buried his feces, swung from the trees branch to branch. Should’ve slept through the days and run through the nights. Because it might have been done.
Toward dawn he saw Cacciato’s breakfast fire. It gave the grassy hill a moving quality, and the sadness seemed durable.
The others woke in groups. They ate cold rations, packed up, watched the sky light itself in patches. Stink played with the safety catch on his rifle, a clicking noise like the morning cricket.
“Let’s do it,” the lieutenant said.
And Eddie and Oscar and Harold Murphy crept off toward the south. Doc and the lieutenant waited five minutes and then began circling west to block a retreat. Stink Harris and Paul Berlin stayed where they were.
Waiting, trying to imagine a rightful but still happy ending, Paul Berlin found himself pretending, in a wishful sort of way, that before long the war would reach a climax beyond which everything else would seem bland and commonplace. A point at which he could stop being afraid. Where all the bad things, the painful and grotesque and ugly things, would give way to something better. He pretended he had crossed that threshold.
He wasn’t dreaming, or imagining; just pretending. Figuring how it would be, if it were.
When the sky was half-light, Doc and the lieutenant fired a red flare that streaked high over Cacciato’s grassy hill, hung there, then exploded like a starburst at the start of a celebration. Cacciato Day, October something in the year 1968, the Year of the Pig.
In the trees at the southern slope of the hill Oscar and Eddie and Harold Murphy each fired red flares to signal their advance.
Stink hurried into the weeds and came back buttoning up his trousers. He was excited and very happy. Deftly, he released the bolt on his weapon and let it slam hard into place.
“Fire it,” he said, “and let’s move.”
Paul Berlin took a long time opening his pack.
But he found the flare, unscrewed its lid, laid the firing pin against the metal base, then jammed it in.
The flare jumped away from him. It went high and fast, rocketing upward and then smoothing out in a long arc that followed the course of the trail, leaving behind a dirty white wake.
At its apex, with barely a sound, it exploded in a green dazzle over Cacciato’s hill. A fine, brilliant shade of green.
“Go,” whispered Paul Berlin. It did not seem enough. “Go,” he said, and then he shouted, “Go!”
Two
The Observation Post
Cacciato’s round face became the moon. The valleys and ridges and fast-flowing plains dissolved, and now the moon was just the moon.
Paul Berlin sat up. A fine idea. He stretched, stood up, leaned against the wall of sandbags, touched his weapon, then gazed out at the strip of beach that wound along the curving Batangan. Things were dark. Behind him, the South China Sea sobbed in against the tower’s thick piles; before him, inland, was the face of Quang Ngai.
Yes, he thought, a fine idea. Cacciato leading them west through peaceful country, deep country perfumed by lilacs and burning hemp, a boy coaxing them step by step through rich and fertile country toward Paris.
It was a splendid idea.
Paul Berlin, whose only goal was to live long enough to establish goals worth living for still longer, stood high in the tower by the sea, the night soft all around him, and wondered, not for the first time, about the immense powers of his own imagination. A truly awesome notion. Not a dream, an idea. An idea to develop, to tinker with and build and sustain, to
draw out as an artist draws out his visions.
It was not a dream. Nothing mystical or crazy, just an idea. Just a possibility. Feet turning hard like stone, legs stiffening, six and seven and eight thousand miles through unfolding country toward Paris. A truly splendid idea.
He checked his watch. It was not quite midnight.
For a time he stood quietly at the tower’s north wall, looking out to where the beach jagged sharply into the sea to form a natural barrier against storms. The night was quiet. On the sand below, coils of barbed wire circled the observation tower in a perimeter that separated it from the rest of the war. The tripflares were out. Things were in their place. Beside him, Harold Murphy’s machine gun was fully loaded and ready, and a dozen signal flares were lined up on the wall, and the radio was working, and the beach was mined, and the tower itself was high and strong and fortified. The sea guarded his rear. The moon gave light. It would be all right, he told himself. He was safe.
He lighted a cigarette and moved to the west wall.
Doc and Eddie and Oscar and the others slept peacefully. And the night was peaceful. Time to consider the possibilities.
Had it ended there on Cacciato’s grassy hill, flares coloring the morning sky? Had it ended in tragedy? Had it ended with a jerking, shaking feeling—noise and confusion? Or had it ended farther along the trail west? Had it ever ended? What, in fact, had become of Cacciato? More precisely—as Doc Peret would insist it be phrased—more precisely, what part was fact and what part was the extension of fact? And how were facts separated from possibilities? What had really happened and what merely might have happened? How did it end?
The trick, of course, was to think through it carefully. That was Doc’s advice—look for motives, search out the place where fact ended and imagination took over. Ask the important questions. Why had Cacciato left the war? Was it courage or ignorance, or both? Was it even possible to combine courage and ignorance? How much of what happened, or might have happened, was Cacciato’s doing and how much was the product of the biles?
That was Doc’s theory.
“You got an excess of fear biles,” Doc had said one afternoon beneath the tower. “We’ve all got these biles—Stink, Oscar, every body—but you’ve got yourself a whole bellyful of the stuff. You’re oversaturated. And my theory is this: Somehow these biles are warping your sense of reality. Follow me? Somehow they’re screwing up your basic perspective, and the upshot is you sometimes get a little mixed up. That’s all.”