“He broke the bread, gave it to his disciples, and said: Take this, all of you, and eat it: this is my body, which will be given up for you.”
Father Winters heaved the Host upward in his theatrically strenuous way, as if the body of Christ were pure dead weight and the sacrament culminated in a three count at the top of a clean and jerk. Danny timed the bells on the upswing, and their jangle resonated sharply, then faded as the priest held the wafer high, his fat arms trembling slightly beneath the burden of the Incarnation, and the dust motes stirred afresh in their shaft of silence, lighter than air, dancing in the hush that let the miracle in.
THE SOUTH VIETNAMESE Regional Forces battalion caught up with Hotel Company just before dawn. Mike could hear the RF coming from a quarter mile away. He’d thought his own company’s noise discipline was loose, but half the Ruff Puffs had transistor radios stuck into their helmets, blaring jazzy Oriental music. Mike moved Hotel Company to the side of the trail to let them pass, and the Marines sat beside the railroad tracks and watched in amused astonishment as the column went by. It sounded like a Chinese disco on the move.
“Didi,” Sergeant Thay, the RF liaison, told Mike proudly, obviously relieved that his people had gotten out of bed after all. “They move fast, hey?”
“Very fast,” Mike agreed. The RF column was tightly bunched, with less than an arm’s length separating each man. With all that music, it had the effect of a rumba line. The South Vietnamese were very relaxed, laughing and joking as if they were going on a picnic, trying their rudimentary English, mixed with the lingering colonial French, out on the Marines, who answered cheerfully in even more rudimentary Vietnamese and the universal language of obscenity.
“Hey, Mah-reen, we kick boocoo VC ass you betcha!”
“Bac-bac, baby! Makee boo-coo boom-boom, you dinky dau motherfuckers!”
“Fuckin’ A, Mah-reen! You got Lucky Strike? You got cigahrette?”
Mike saw that many of the Vietnamese soldiers’ packs were stuffed with live animals, mostly cats and chickens, and the occasional pig. He could hear the cats yowling and clawing at the canvas, trying to get out.
“What are they carrying those animals for?” he asked his RF liaison.
“Lunch,” Sergeant Thay said.
The RF command group approached, bristling with radio antennae like a porcupine. The battalion CO was a major wearing leopard-pattern camouflage and a jaunty bush hat with one side of the brim pinned up. He looked like he was about seventeen years old. He saluted Mike, bowed, and held up a sack with something wriggling inside.
“Major Ngai would like you to have this cat,” Sergeant Thay told Mike.
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly—” Mike began but caught himself at the looks on the faces of the South Vietnamese. “I’m honored,” he amended. “Please thank the major for me.”
He looked around for something to give to the RF CO in return. What did you give a guy who was leading a six-hundred-man conga line and half the livestock in the Quang Tri Province toward the DMZ in the dark? A flak jacket, maybe. A good helmet. But the major shook his head cheerfully and said something prolonged. Thay listened respectfully, then summarized, “He say, You shoot good today. Maybe get big cannon to shoot too.”
“Okay,” Mike said. “I’ll do my best.”
The Vietnamese major smiled, showing crooked, stained teeth. “O-kay,” he said. “Numbah One.”
“Ichi-ban,” Mike agreed, and the Ruff Puff command group moved on, leaving him with the cat still clawing inside the sack. Mike glanced back for someone to hand the thing to, but Stinson had alertly found something crucial to do with the radio. Noting the quiet light in Sergeant Thay’s eyes, Mike offered the sack to the RF liaison.
“Oh, I could not take your cat,” Thay demurred.
“I had cat for breakfast, actually,” Mike said.
LIZ STOOD BY the station wagon after mass, waiting for her older son and trying to keep Angus and Deb-Deb out of the traffic while the St. Jude’s parking lot emptied hectically around them, as if the liberated congregation were fleeing a fire. She was feeling edgy and peevish; the morning had lost its crispness in the labor of getting the kids to church at all, and the afternoon seemed doomed to dissipate into the usual Sabbath torpor. Danny and Percy always took an incomprehensibly long time to disvest—or whatever they called taking off their liturgical whatchacallits, their smocks and robes—after serving mass, and Kathie still had to be picked up at Lynnhaven Pentecostal, where she was actually singing in the choir now, standing proudly between Temperance and her mother. By the time Liz had all her kids in one place, she’d have to begin thinking about dinner.
Angus, after several close calls with absconding vehicles, settled in the back of the station wagon. He rolled the window down and took his plastic M-16 out, sighting in on the church’s side door, preparing to snipe at Danny and Percy when they came out. To Liz’s immediate right, Deb-Deb was practicing her latest trick, an unnerving mock faint. She would stand normally for a time, then let her eyes roll back in her head and keel over without warning, falling straight backward, stiff as a board. Liz kept catching her daughter and propping her back upright, but she was afraid she’d miss sooner or later and have to add a trip to the Oceana emergency room to have Deb-Deb’s head sewn up.
The church door opened and Angus’s finger tightened on the plastic trigger, but it was Father Germaine who emerged, unvested now himself, a square peg in the round hole of his ill-fitting black street clothes, tugging at his white collar with one finger as if it were a too-tight tie. Liz said, “Hold your fire, Angus.”
The priest noticed her across the parking lot and waved, then hesitated, blinking in the sunlight. Liz couldn’t tell whether he wanted to come over and say hello or was trying to decide whether it was all right to simply flee.
His dilemma was solved when the door banged open behind him and Danny and Percy surged out into the fresh air on a wave of laughter. Germaine fell in with them for the walk across the parking lot, looking a little stiff and self-conscious. The boys had their usual unsettling postmass swagger and smirks. Liz suspected that Danny and Percy were doing something vaguely outrageous in the sacristy during the cleanup, like tippling the altar wine, but this was probably not the best time to confront them about it.
“You guys are dead,” Angus said, safing his M-16 as Germaine and the boys reached the car. “I shot you the minute you got outside.”
“No, I’m just wounded, I had my flak jacket on,” Danny countered.
“I’m just wounded too, and this is a grenade!” Percy added, crumpling his church program into a ball and tossing it into Angus’s sniper’s nest through the open back window of the station wagon. “Kaaaaa-boom! Now you’re dead.”
“I am not!”
“Yes, you are, you’re blown to bits!”
“Boys!” Liz said. “Can’t you at least wait until we get home from church to start killing each other again?”
“Hello, Mrs. O’Reilly,” Father Germaine said.
Liz turned to him, feeling a ridiculous pleasure that the man had remembered her name. “Hello, Father. How are you?”
“Just wounded, thanks.”
Liz laughed uneasily, suspecting an implied critique of her parenting. “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?”
“I’m ready for some real fall, to tell you the truth. I don’t do well in the heat.”
“That must have made Vietnam tough for you.”
“That, and all those young men dying.”
So much for talking about the weather, Liz thought. Conversation with Germaine was like hiking on a glacier; things had a way of falling through the covering snow of small talk into dauntingly deep crevasses.
Danny, with Angus momentarily finished off by the grenade, piped up, “Father Germaine said Percy and me can quit studying Latin.”
“Itquay atinlay,” Percy seconded.
“Percy and I,” Liz said.
“Yeah. Percy and I.”
&n
bsp; “Atinlay isway upidstay,” Percy elaborated, and both boys giggled.
“I thought we agreed to keep that confidential,” Germaine said.
“It’s okay, Mom’s cool,” Danny said. “She won’t tell Father Winters.”
Liz raised an eyebrow at Germaine, who shrugged uneasily. “Father Winters believes Vatican II is a Communist plot doomed to fail,” he said. “But it’s ridiculous to have these kids memorizing a mass that isn’t going to be said anymore.”
“So you’re subverting your pastor and corrupting the minds of these innocent altar boys.”
“I see it more as fostering an independent liturgical understanding.”
Danny and Percy turned their attention to Angus; having blown him up, they now enlisted Deb-Deb as a corpsman and began administering battlefield first aid. Danny called for a medevac chopper, using the car radio. Angus continued to deny that he was a casualty.
Germaine was also watching the boys. Liz met his eyes self-consciously, sure by now that he disapproved.
“Their father’s sons,” she said, but that sounded disloyal to Mike, and she added, “with my sense of drama thrown in to boot.”
“They’re good kids.”
“Interesting, at least.”
He gave her a sharp glance, saw that she was teasing, and conceded ruefully, “Which is better than good.”
Liz felt another rush of peculiar joy, that he had remembered their conversation in the dentist’s office. “No,” she said. “It’s just the reality of incarnation.”
Germaine, to her delight, was left speechless.
“Father Zeke, could you give Angus last rites?” Danny called from the back of the station wagon, where they had laid Angus out to await the chopper.
“I do not need last rites!” Angus insisted. He did appear lively enough; it was all Percy could do to keep the younger boy on the beach towel that was serving as a medevac stretcher.
“Would you rather just go straight to hell when you die?” his brother demanded.
“Mom! Danny said I was going to hell!”
“Danny—” Liz began in exasperation, but Father Germaine interrupted firmly, “Nobody’s going to hell.”
Angus gave Danny a triumphant glance, and his brother, for once, had no reply; the older boys had been awed into silence by the priest’s eschatological turn. Germaine stepped over to Angus and knelt beside him.
“It looks to me like Angus is going to make it anyway,” he said.
“I told you,” Angus said smugly.
“On the other hand, with the danger of infection, and so forth—” Germaine continued. “It couldn’t hurt to give you the sacrament, Angus.”
Angus looked freshly alarmed. “Does it mean I have to die, if you give it to me?”
“No, no. Whether you live or die is in God’s hands. The last rites just covers all the bases. Makes sure you’ve got God’s attention, whatever happens.”
Angus weighed it out, then nodded his approval, relaxed back onto the blanket, and closed his eyes. Father Germaine took out his stole and looped it around his neck; he made the sign of the cross on Angus’s forehead and began, “Go forth, beloved soul, from this world in the Name of God the Father Almighty, who created thee; in the Name of Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, who suffered for thee; and in the Name of the Holy Spirit, who was poured out upon thee….”
Liz watched, gooseflesh pimpling her arms, as first Danny, then Deb-Deb, and finally even Percy slipped to their knees on the pavement in a solemn semicircle around Angus and bowed their heads. Liz felt an urge to tell them all to get up, for God’s sake, and quit all the nonsense; death was no game, and it was too easy to see her husband lying there beneath the priest’s useless hand, waiting for the helicopter that would come too late. But it seemed worse to stop the play—it made it too real—and she held her tongue.
“Make speed to aid him, ye saints of God; come forth to meet him, ye angels of the Lord; receiving his soul, and presenting him before the face of the Most High. Rest eternal grant unto him, O Lord; and let perpetual light shine upon him. Amen.”
“Amen,” the children echoed, even Angus. And Liz whispered, past her tears, “Amen.”
IT WAS ALMOST two hours before Mike reached the battleground himself, with Hotel’s Second Platoon. The medevac helicopters were still landing, ferrying the Regional Forces’ casualties out. Chopper space was at a premium, and the South Vietnamese were loading only the worst of their wounded; those who could walk back to Gio Linh would have to, and the dead were being wrapped in ponchos and lashed to carrying poles like deer. As the Hotel command group approached the RF battalion field CP, they passed clusters of South Vietnamese soldiers sitting around open fires, cooking their ration of small animals on spits; along with the lingering bite of cordite and blood, the air was thick with the smell of roasting pig and duck and cat. The Ruff Puff soldiers, even the walking wounded, all seemed business as usual; these men had been fighting for years, and their approach to battle was very blue-collar by now.
The circle of antennas marking the South Vietnamese battalion CP was much smaller than it had been that morning; a number of their radios had been destroyed in the fight. Several of the radio operators themselves, along with the other command group dead, lay to one side, bundled in a neat row of ponchos-cum-shrouds, looking horrifyingly like freshly wrapped cigars set out to dry.
Mike, with Sergeant Major Thay beside him, made his way to the edge of the RF command group, where Major Ngai lay on a litter, propped up slightly, smoking a cigarette. He had refused to be evacuated until all his wounded were out; in any case, it looked to Mike like the RF battalion commander would be going back to Gio Linh wrapped in a poncho. Ngai had a handful of field bandages stuffed into an abdominal wound, and the bright leopard pattern on his camouflage fatigues was submerged beneath a quiet tide of black-red blood. He looked like a soaked kitten who had been hit by a car, but he gave Mike a smile as he approached, and spoke.
“He say, Thank you for the howitsahs,” Sergeant Major Thay supplied.
“I wish we could have done more, sooner,” Mike said.
Thay translated. Major Ngai gave a weak, dismissive flip with the hand that held the cigarette. “C’est la guerre,” he said, his accent making it sound like a Vietnamese proverb.
“Oui,” Mike said, groping for his Jesuit high school French. “Et à la guerre comme à la guerre. Mais je suis desolé néanmoins.”
“It’s hokay,” Ngai said. He closed his eyes for a moment, and the cigarette slipped from his hand into the bloody mud beside the litter. Ngai opened his eyes again and looked woefully at the ruined butt. Sergeant Thay hastened to offer him a fresh one, and Mike dug a strike-anywhere match from his pocket, dragged it into flame across a rough spot on his helmet, and bent to light the cigarette for Ngai.
“Merci,” the South Vietnamese major said.
“De nada.”
Ngai smiled weakly and closed his eyes again. Mike would have moved on, but as he turned to go, Ngai opened his eyes and said something softly, almost wistfully, in Vietnamese. Sergeant Thay leaned in to listen, then gave Mike an uneasy glance.
“He say, He hoped you have enjoy the cat.”
Mike met Ngai’s quiet, unfathomably dark eyes, the eyes of a dying man at peace, and smiled. Don’t fucking cry now, he thought.
“Tell the major it was the best cat I ever had,” Mike said. He touched his chest. “Tell him, Thank you, from my heart.”
Thay looked relieved, and translated. Ngai, still holding Mike’s gaze, winked.
“De nada,” he said. “Numbah one.” He closed his eyes, keeping a firm two-fingered grip on the Lucky Strike this time, though he did not raise it to his lips again. Mike waited until the cigarette melted into a long drooping ash and the ash dropped into the mud, then moved off, feeling his own eyes sting. But there was so much to do, if they weren’t going to get their asses handed to them that night. It wasn’t until he got Hotel Company back to Gio Linh the
next day without further incident and learned that Major Ngai had died before the last helicopter went out, that he wept, alone in his bunker, looking at the empty cot across the dirt floor.
[ PART THREE ]
The first night of our marriage
He showed me forthwith how good a man he was
For he did attempt no violence
That might hurt me.
And before time to arise
He kissed me a hundred times, I remember
Without a single villainy
Ah, indeed, the sweet man is fond of me…
CHRISTINE DE PISAN,
“A SWEET THING IS MARRIAGE”
(TRANSLATED BY HELEN R. LANE)
CHAPTER 8
OCTOBER 1967
ON THE FIRST Saturday of October, Liz loaded the kids into the station wagon and drove north to Maryland, for Mike’s parents’ thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. It was a four-hour drive under the best of conditions, five with the weekend traffic, and then six with the cold, sloppy rain that began to fall near Richmond, and the whole time Liz grappled with the recurrent temptation to pull off the highway, claiming engine failure, and go home. She pictured herself on the truck stop pay phone, tearful, stressed, regretful. She was actress enough to pull it off easily. So sorry, car trouble, the kids are so upset, we’re all upset, of course, but you know how it is. It was even possible to imagine Mike’s parents being secretly relieved; the four O’Reilly children always hit their grandparents’ tiny house like a storm.
In the end, though, she drove on. Because it was family, it was what you did. The Beltway was the usual nightmare, and by the time they reached the tidy gray house in suburban Silver Spring, she was exhausted, unable to imagine putting on a civil face. She pulled into the driveway and the kids all piled out and ran ahead to the door, and Liz let them go, feeling a surge of despair. This was the visit on which she would have to announce her pregnancy, and she felt brittle and emptied in advance, incapable of the expected joy.
Lizzie's War Page 10