Going After Cacciato

by Tim O'Brien

  Captain Rhallon considered this. “Yes. But in war one nation is able to make up for production insufficiencies by calling on the industrial capacity of allied nations. Is that not so? By citing a great moral purpose, Britain was able to generate American industrial aid to defeat the Germans. In comparison, Germany and Japan were left virtually without allies. Unable to summon other nations to their cause, because, in fact, they had no just cause. So in the end it was an absence of clear moral purpose that produced defeat.”

  “Tell it loud,” the lieutenant said. “You got him by the balls—now squeeze.”

  Music was playing. It was fierce, loud music. Colored lights were flashing, and the students were dancing in groups and pairs. The soldiers along the walls were singing.

  “A nice trick,” Doc said. “But you changed the subject. We’re not talking about winning and losing. We’re talking about how it feels. How it feels on the ground. And I’m saying the common grunt doesn’t give a damn about purposes and justice. He doesn’t even think about that shit. Not when he’s out humping, getting his tail shot off. Purposes—bullshit! He’s thinking about how to keep breathing. Or he wonders what it’ll feel like when he hits that booby trap. Will he go nuts? Will he puke all over himself, or will he cry, or pass out, or scream? What’ll it look like—all bone and meat and pus? That’s the stuff he thinks about, not purposes.”

  “And about running,” the officer said softly, so softly he had to repeat it.

  “What?”

  “Running,” Fahyi Rhallon said. “The soldier, he thinks about running. Will he run or will he stay and fight?”

  Paul Berlin looked away. He watched the dancing students.

  “Yes,” the captain said, “running is also what the soldier thinks of, yes? He thinks of it often. He imagines himself running from battle. Dropping his weapon and turning and running and running and running, and never looking back, just running and running. Soldiers think of this. I know it. Yes? It is the soldier’s thought above other thoughts.”

  “And?”

  The man touched his moustache and smiled. “And purpose is what keeps him from running. Without purpose men will run. They will act out their dreams, and they will run and run, like animals in stampede. It is purpose that keeps men at their posts to fight. Only purpose.”

  The lieutenant cheered. Oscar Johnson muttered something, got up, and moved to a nearby table. He asked four girls to dance before one shrugged and followed him out onto the floor. She wore blue jeans and a polo shirt. She danced with her nose at the ceiling.

  “Maybe so,” Doc was saying. “Maybe purpose is part of it. But a bigger part is self-respect. And fear.”

  “For not running?”

  “You bet. Self-respect and fear, that’s why soldiers don’t run.”

  “Fear?”

  “Right on. We stick it out because we’re afraid of what’ll happen to our reputations. Our own egos. Self-respect, that’s what keeps us on the line.”

  “But does not purpose reflect on self-respect?” the captain said. “Does not the absence of good purpose jeopardize the soldier’s own ego, thus making him less likely to fight well and bravely? If a war is without justice, the soldier knows that the sacrifice of life, his own valued life, is demeaned, and therefore his self-respect must likewise be demeaned. Is that not so?”

  Eddie and Stink were now up and dancing. The clatter of drums and glasses made it hard to hear. The music kept making Paul Berlin think of home—dancing in the high school gym, Louise Wiertsma on his arm, and later going out to a big barn outside Fort Dodge, where there was more dancing and kids drinking, and the smell of hay in the lofts and cattle long butchered and sold and eaten, and Louise Wiertsma’s hair, and home. He held tight to Sarkin Aung Wan’s hand. She was young. They were all so young. Cacciato, for instance. And Eddie and Stink and Oscar, they too were young, and so were Pederson and Frenchie Tucker and Buff and Vaught and Bernie Lynn and Rudy Chassler and Ready Mix and Sidney Martin. Everyone was so incredibly goddamned young.

  Briefly Paul Berlin slipped back to his observation tower along the South China Sea. Partly here, partly there. Hard to tell which was real.

  Concentrating, he took a deep breath and let himself go. Yes, music and flashing lights and people dancing, and it was neither real nor unreal, it was simply there.

  Fahyi Rhallon was asking now about their touring, and Doc said it was a magnificent tour. Tours of Laos and Burma and India and the highlands of Afghanistan, and now they were touring Tehran, and soon they would be touring all the way to Paris.

  “Paris!” the captain cried. “You are fortunate. My best tour was to Damascus, but compared to Paris it was nothing. Paris! Is it a guided tour?”

  “Yes,” Doc said. “You might say that.”

  He went on to explain how it happened that Cacciato left the war in monsoon season, how they were dispatched to retrieve him, how they were determined to bring it to a rightful conclusion.

  “Purpose.” The officer smiled. “You have a mission with great purpose.”

  The lieutenant made a high scoffing sound.

  Captain Rhallon looked concerned. “But he is a deserter, yes? This Cacciato? And your purpose is to stop him. Deserters, they must be pursued to the very ends of the earth. Hunted down like dogs. Otherwise—”

  “Otherwise what?” the lieutenant said. “What difference does it make? One less soldier.”

  The officer hesitated.

  “You are serious?”

  “No,” Lieutenant Corson sighed. “No, I’m just a sick old fucker who don’t know what’s happening.”

  “But, sir. If this … this Cacciato is allowed to run free, then the consequences—” Again the captain paused, glancing across at Doc Peret. “I can only speak of my own beliefs. My own country. Here, though, desertion is a most serious offense. Only this afternoon a boy was put to death for a similar crime.”

  “He was a deserter?”

  “Oh, no,” the captain said. “No, the boy had merely gone AWOL. For true deserters the punishment is not so kind.”

  “Thank God for mercy.”

  A waiter came and mopped up the table and put down three full pitchers. The music was slow now, aching, and the students danced close. Blurred, melancholy music. Listening, watching the dancers, Paul Berlin felt himself sliding away: the high school gym decorated with lanterns and flowers; Louise Wiertsma’s blond hair and curious smile; the way she hummed as she danced. The same song, the same ache. And in Chu Lai once, on stand-down, again it was this same swaying song, slow and powerful and sad, a Korean girl taking off her clothes to the song, and everyone singing and watching her strip, nobody thinking about the coming morning, everyone just singing and feeling sad and happy, Pederson and Bernie Lynn and Frenchie Tucker, everybody.

  So the students danced slow, and Fahyi Rhallon was asking how the war went, what the strategies were, and Doc said it went very well on the good days and very badly on the bad days, but that in general it was hard to say, hard to know for sure, and the captain agreed with this, it was always hard to know how a war went. The music was low and loud and sad, and the students danced close. Some of them sang as they danced. And Eddie and Oscar and Stink were back at the table now, showing the captain how various ambush formations were set up, the classic X and L and O, and everyone agreed that the O was the best of the formations because it offered perimeter protection and a 360-degree killing circumference. Sad, throbbing music, and the students held tight to one another and danced to it, don’t be afraid, take a sad song and make it better, remember … and Oscar was diagramming cordon-and-search tactics, showing how they worked in some situations and failed in many others, and the officer nodded and took notes.

  The students danced until the song ended.

  Then there was a new song, faster and not so melancholy, and the students separated and danced fast.

  “Tripflares,” Eddie was saying. “Now there’s a useless—”

  Paul Berlin took Sarki
n Aung Wan’s hand and led her to the floor. Unreal, he thought. Just a creature of his own making—blink and she was gone—but even so he liked the way she closed her eyes to the music, the way her chrome cross bounced on her sweater, her braided hair swishing so full. She smiled as she danced. He liked that, too. It was the way Louise Wiertsma had once smiled, guarding secrets. And now Sarkin Aung Wan smiled that same guarded smile and danced with her mouth open and her eyes half-shut, her chrome cross swinging.

  “You are drunk, Spec Four,” she said as she danced.

  “No.”

  “Oh, yes. You are a very drunk Spec Four.”

  At the table again, Fahyi Rhallon was inquiring about sappers.

  “Sleazy sons of bitches,” Stink Harris said. “Up at Chu Lai they had these two converted sappers, Chieu Hoi types, and they were giving this demonstration on how they do it, gettin’ through the wire and all that, and the bastards get all oiled up like fuckin grease, man, like fuckin ball bearings or something, and they just fuckin glide under the wire, glide. Isn’t that right?”

  “That’s right,” Eddie said.

  “Fuckin-A, it’s right. Unbelievable. Sleazy, oily little runts. Ugly.”

  “Stink speaks truth.”

  “Sure, it’s the truth. They fuckin carry the charges strapped between their legs, right here, an’ I swear they’re no bigger than—”

  “Stink’s size.”

  “Eat it, man. No bigger than—”

  “Stink, he’d make a swell sapper.”

  And later there were war stories.

  All along it had been coming to this, and now the war stories started.

  The students danced and the music was loud, and Eddie told the story about Pederson, then Oscar told about Big Buff. “You should’ve seen it,” Eddie said when Oscar finished. “Old Buff, we found him just like Oscar says. Hunched up over his helmet like a prayin’ Arab. No offense.”

  Fahyi Rhallon smiled and said there was no offense in the least, he was a practicing Christian. And then he told his own war story, one about a battle in the snow and how the snow looked afterward, and there was a respectful silence when the story was over, and then Oscar put his hand on Doc’s shoulder: “Tell him,” he said. “Tell the man the best story.”

  The music kept getting louder. The drummer was using iron pipes. The room moved under the music. The lights blinked white and yellow and black.

  “Tell him,” Oscar said. “Tell him the ultimate war story.”

  Paul Berlin was sick.

  “Billy Boy. Tell him about Billy Boy Watkins.”

  Sick, Paul Berlin thought. A queasy feeling—something moist and slippery at the back of his throat. And so when Doc began to tell the ultimate war story, starting with what a hot day it had been, how it was hot like never before, Paul Berlin got up and managed his way outside.

  Cold now, very cold. His legs were weak. Cold and drunk, and his legs were weak, but not so cold and weak and drunk that he would listen to the ultimate war story. Not that drunk.

  He buttoned his collar and leaned against a stone wall. The street was dark. He could hear the music inside, the drums and singing, but he did not hear the ultimate war story.

  Sarkin Aung Wan came out.

  “Yes,” she said, smiling. “You are a very drunk Spec Four.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Very drunk. Am I safe with such a drunk?”

  “Not that drunk. Not all that dumb drunk.”

  She took his hand. They walked up the street until the music was gone. They passed along an arcade, then through an alleyway, then across the deserted brick plaza where the execution platform looked frail and seedy in the moonlight, and where Sarkin Aung Wan’s shoes made sharp clicking sounds that echoed off the banks and government offices. They stopped there for a time. Things were quiet. Then they turned onto a boulevard with statues and iron fences and winter shrubs.

  “No,” he said. “Drunk maybe, but not that crazy drunk.”

  Sarkin Aung Wan kissed him.

  “Perhaps not,” she said. “Anyway, it was such a silly story. So silly.”

  Thirty

  The Observation Post

  Four o’clock, he thought. Ten minutes to four.

  He bet himself twenty bucks on it, then knelt down behind the wall of sandbags to check his watch. Eight minutes to four. Twenty easy bucks—he should’ve joined the circus, a time-teller.

  It was colder now. The breeze had become a wind.

  An hour till the first glistenings, an hour and a half until dawn.

  He could tell time by the way it came. By the cold and the wind, and then later the silver gleaming in the tips of the waves, then a spreading gleaming that would fill the wave troughs and give them shape, wrinkles like the skin of boiled milk, then the birds, then the breaking of the sky. He could tell time by all of this, and by the rhyme of wind and sand, and by the beat of his own heart.

  It was a matter of hard observation. Separating illusion from reality. What happened, and what might have happened? Why, out of all that might have happened, did it lead to a beheading in Tehran? Why not pretty things? Why not a smooth, orderly arc from war to peace? These were the questions, and the answers could come only from hard observation. Doc was right about that. He was right, too, that observation requires inward-looking, a study of the very machinery of observation—the mirrors and filters and wiring and circuits of the observing instrument.

  Insight, vision. What you remember is determined by what you see, and what you see depends on what you remember. A cycle, Doc Peret had said. A cycle that has to be broken. And this requires a fierce concentration on the process itself: Focus on the order of things, sort out the flow of events so as to understand how one thing led to another, search for that point at which what happened had been extended into a vision of what might have happened. Where was the fulcrum? Where did it tilt from fact to imagination? How far had Cacciato led them? How far might he lead them still?

  Facing the night, he tried.

  He tried again to order the known facts. Billy Boy was first. And then … then who? Then a long blank time along the Song Tra Bong, yes, and then Rudy Chassler, who broke the quiet. And then later Frenchie Tucker, followed in minutes by Bernie Lynn. Then Lake Country. World’s Greatest Lake Country, where Ready Mix died on a charge toward the mountains. And then Buff. Then Sidney Martin. Then Pederson.

  Yes, then Cacciato led them away in slow motion. But how far and why? Mandalay, Delhi, Tehran, and beyond? Order was the hard part. The facts, even when beaded on a chain, still did not have real order. Events did not flow. The facts were separate and haphazard and random, even as they happened, episodic, broken, no smooth transitions, no sense of events unfolding from prior events.

  Moving to the south wall, he found the starlight scope under Eddie’s poncho. He unscrewed the lens cap and placed the heavy instrument up on the sandbagged wall.

  Observe, that was the trick: He put his eye to the scope’s peephole and flicked on the battery switch.

  The night was moving.

  A bright green shimmering dazzle, and it was all moving. The countryside moved. The beach, the sea, everything. But he did not look away. He pressed his eye against the peephole and watched the moving night, turning the big plastic dial to full focus, high resolution, and he watched Quang Ngai move.

  It was a trick of the machine, he knew this. So he concentrated.

  He concentrated on the order of things, going back to the beginning. His first day at the war. How hot the day had been, and how on his very first day he had witnessed the ultimate war story.

  Thirty-one

  Night March

  The platoon of thirty-two soldiers moved slowly in the dark, single file, not talking. One by one, like sheep in a dream, they passed through the hedgerow, crossed quietly over a meadow and came down to the paddy. There they stopped. Lieutenant Sidney Martin knelt down, motioning with his hand, and one by one the others squatted or knelt or sat in the shadows. F
or a long time they did not move. Except for the sounds of their breathing, and, once, a soft fluid trickle as one of them urinated, the thirty-two men were silent: some of them excited by the adventure, some afraid, some exhausted by the long march, some of them looking forward to reaching the sea where they would be safe. There was no talking now. No more jokes. At the rear of the column, Private First Class Paul Berlin lay quietly with his forehead resting on the black plastic stock of his rifle. His eyes were closed. He was pretending he was not in the war. Pretending he had not watched Billy Boy Watkins die of fright on the field of battle. He was pretending he was a boy again, camping with his father in the midnight summer along the Des Moines River. “Be calm,” his father said. “Ignore the bad stuff, look for the good.” In the dark, eyes closed, he pretended. He pretended that when he opened his eyes his father would be there by the campfire and, father and son, they would begin to talk softly about whatever came to mind, minor things, trivial things, and then roll into their sleeping bags. And later, he pretended, it would be morning and there would not be a war.

  In the morning, when they reached the sea, it would be better. He would bathe in the sea. He would shave. Clean his nails, work out the scum. In the morning he would forget the first day, and the second day would not be so bad. He would learn.

  There was a sound beside him, a movement then, “Hey,” then louder, “Hey!”

  He opened his eyes.

  “Hey, we’re movin’. Get up.”

  “Okay.”

  “You sleeping?”

  “No, just resting. Thinking.” He could see only part of the soldier’s face. It was a plump, round, child’s face. The child was smiling.

  “No problem,” the soldier whispered. “Up an’ at ’em.”

  And he followed the boy’s shadow into the paddy, stumbling once, almost dropping his rifle, cutting his knee, but he followed the shadow and did not stop. The night was clear. Before him, strung out across the paddy, he could make out the black forms of the other soldiers, their silhouettes hard against the sky. Already the Southern Cross was out. And other stars he could not yet name. Soon, he thought, he would learn the names. And puffy night clouds. And a peculiar glow to the west. There was not yet a moon.