He wiped his face and dumped the soapy water, wiped the helmet semidry with his shirttail, and put it on his head again. Parker and Perrone were good to go now, and the three men walked together through the thick wet blackness to the mess hall without a word.
Inside, the place was brightly lit and already starting to hum. Isaiah Tibbetts was sitting at a table by himself; most of the enlisted men in the company were too intimidated by the master sergeant to eat with him. Lieutenants Perrone and Parker, who were also too intimidated to eat with him, hurried by to get their own meals. Mike stopped and sat down.
“Morning, Skipper,” Tibbetts said.
“Morning, Top. What the hell is that you’re eating there?”
The sergeant grinned. “Steak and eggs, sir.”
“Steak and fucking eggs,” Mike marveled.
“Guess they think we’re gonna get our asses handed to us today.”
“Fattening us up for the slaughter,” Mike agreed. He stood up. “Well, ours but to do and die. No sense wasting a good steak.”
Tibbetts liberated another slab of meat with his K-bar, stabbed it with the knife point, and conveyed it to his mouth. “My sentiments exactly, sir.”
“Save my spot, Top.”
“Aye, aye, Skip. Ain’t exactly no crowd forming here, though.”
Mike gave him a wink. “It’s lonely at the top, Ike.”
Tibbetts laughed and devoted himself once more to savaging his steak. Mike moved toward the serving line.
More men were streaming into the mess hall now, all of them exclaiming over the unprecedented menu. Near the head of the line, planted attentively like a maître d’, was the company supply sergeant, Bruno Bentano, who looked very pleased with himself.
“Sergeant Bentano, what is all this goddamned steak doing, going to waste in a line company’s mess hall?” Mike demanded.
Bentano smiled smugly, ran a hand over his slicked-back hair, well past regulation length, and bounced a bit on the balls of his feet. He was a natural hustler from somewhere in Jersey who had chosen the Marine Corps over doing time for grand theft auto, and his exploits in the service of acquiring goods and luxuries for the company were the stuff of legend. But he had outdone himself today, and he knew it.
“Must have been a misdirected shipment, sir,” he said modestly. “Probably supposed to end up at the Phu Bai Officers’ Mess or something.”
“Mistakes do get made in wartime, I suppose,” Mike allowed.
“Sad but true, sir.”
“Nice job, Sergeant.”
“Thank you, sir.”
When Mike got back to Tibbetts’s table, Bill Savard, the company’s Forward Air Controller, had joined the sergeant. Mike liked Savard, a grounded pilot who had an almost magical rapport with the Marine aviators and could often get the fast-movers to come in at treetop level for strikes that the Air Force pilots wouldn’t touch from an altitude of a thousand feet. Savard’s call sign had been “Billygoat,” which probably explained a lot; scuttlebutt had it that he had broken his squadron CO’s nose and accepted the infantry liaison position and a loss of grade rather than the brig.
“Good morning, Lieutenant,” Mike said as he sat down.
“Morning, sir.”
“Enjoying your breakfast?”
“Yes, sir. Primo stuff. I haven’t had steak and eggs since I got grounded.”
“It means they think we’re going to die,” Tibbetts informed him, past a mouthful of hash browns.
Savard glanced uneasily at Mike. “Really?”
“Pretty much,” Mike conceded.
The FAC was silent for a moment.
“Well, shit,” he said at last. “In that case, I’m sending this back and asking for medium rare.”
KATHIE’S BLUEBIRD UNIFORM lay half finished beneath the frozen needle of the sewing machine, literally in midseam. Liz turned on the Singer and sat before it for a moment listening to its efficient little hum. It was time to either finish the outfit or acknowledge that the whole Bluebird thing wasn’t going to happen. She had been putting off the inevitable crisis from week to week, finding reasons to delay actually getting Kathie signed up, but Kathie had been increasingly ardent lately. She and Temperance still believed they would be the belles of Bluebird Troop 232. They had reached the point where telling Kathie they were out of blue thread wasn’t going to cut it.
Liz ran through a few desultory stitches, but her heart wasn’t in it, and at last she turned the sewing machine off and crossed to the telephone. She knew the Williams’ home number better than her own; she and Linnell talked several times a day, coordinating Kathie and Temperance’s relentless sisterhood.
The phone rang six times, but Liz waited patiently, knowing that Linnell Williams was home from work by now and probably changing a diaper or something.
“Hello?” Temperance’s mother said at last, sounding somewhat breathless.
“Hi, Linnell, it’s me.”
“Oh, hey, Miz O’Reilly. How are you today?”
“Fine, thank you.” Liz had long since given up on trying to get Temperance’s mother to call her Liz, but that “Miz O’Reilly” still felt like a defeat every time. “And you?”
“God help me, honey. DeeJay has figured out climbin’—”
“Uh-oh.”
“But he ain’t figured out gettin’ down, except by landin’ on his head.”
“I remember when Danny got to that stage. He’d get halfway up the bookshelf and just hang there, pulling things off the shelves.”
“Maybe he could teach DeeJay some of that hanging, ’cause that little boy’s head ain’t gonna hold up. I can’t keep him on the ground, I swear. I turn my back for a second, and next thing I know I hear the clunk. Half the time he’s just sitting there laughin’, ready to start up again.”
“Thank God they’re so durable.” Liz hesitated. “Listen, Linnell, there was something I wanted to talk about—”
“Oh, I know, honey. I told Temperance she had to give Kathie’s lunch box back to her. But you know those girls—”
“No, no, it’s not about the lunch box, that’s just sweet. Kathie gave it to her and that’s that. She already made me buy another one exactly like it so they’d be lunch box twins. No, it’s this Bluebird thing.”
There was a cool silence before Linnell Williams said, “I thought we were done with talking about that.”
“You and I were, maybe. But Kathie and Temperance still think they’re joining together.”
Linnell was silent again, and Liz thought she understood the woman’s dilemma. No mother wanted to tell her daughter something couldn’t happen because of the color of her skin. Liz herself had been hard-pressed to explain the delay in the Bluebird registration to Kathie without invoking race and had taken refuge in her deficient sewing skills. But you could only delay the inevitable so long by pleading poor time management.
The silence on the other end of the phone showed no sign of relenting. Liz offered, awkwardly, “Linnell, maybe it’s really not that big a deal. I’m sure if we just show up, if we just give everyone a chance, everything will—”
“Just show up.”
“Well, I mean—”
“I know what you mean. You mean well. You think that’s enough. But the thing is, honey, Temperance is a little girl, she ain’t no battering ram. It’s all fine for you, get on your high horse, do the good thing. We gonna change the bad bad world. But it’s my little girl who gonna come home cryin’ when those white girls call her ‘nigger.’”
“I wouldn’t let that happen.”
“How you gonna stop it? You gonna get some of them whatchacallits, them National Guard troops from Alabama, with their rifles and helmets? Just walk my little girl up the sidewalk between ’em, make the news shows, let everybody see what a fine progressive white lady you are? I seen the looks on those children’s faces on the TV, sitting on them buses lookin’ out the windows. I don’t want my girl lookin’ like that.”
“Then we’ve
got to figure out what to tell the girls, because they aren’t taking no for an answer, and I can’t keep telling Kathie it’s because I can’t get her damned dress finished. She’s already gone out with some of her own money and bought me more blue thread.”
“That ain’t my problem. All I gotta do is tell Temperance it ain’t gonna happen.”
“Well, you haven’t done that yet, have you?” Liz said pointedly. Temperance, she knew, had been told that the main reason she couldn’t join was the time lost for schoolwork, but Temperance and Kathie had responded to this by getting Danny to help them with their math homework, and both girls’ grades had climbed from something near D to solid Bs. Money had also been invoked, but Temperance and Kathie now spent most of their afternoons combing the ditch along Little Neck Road for discarded bottles; cashing them in at two cents apiece, they had a working Bluebird fund of $21.85 at last report. They had drawn up a little chart, complete with a target sum, and were coloring in the rising column of money raised in red crayon. Liz would personally rather have had them rob a bank than spend so much time tempting fate near traffic, but she couldn’t see any way to stop them short of offering to pay the fees and expenses herself. Which is what she wanted to do anyway. But here they were.
Liz realized that the silence on the phone had changed to a dull hum. Apparently she’d hit a nerve; Linnell Williams had hung up on her.
She thought about calling back and decided they’d probably both had enough for the moment. Instead, she went out to the car, checked both ways for incoming green sedans as she pulled out of the driveway, and drove to the church to light candles. It was something she’d taken to doing lately, and it worried her; her prayer, such as it was, seemed mostly to involve a concession of complete defeat.
OUTSIDE THE MESS HALL, the drizzle had turned into a hard rain. The company formed in the dark beside the trucks with a minimum of fuss, and the platoon sergeants moved through the ranks, more attentive than usual to checking the company roster. You didn’t want to spend time later looking for the body of someone who hadn’t shown up in the first place.
The sergeants gave the orders, and the platoons moved toward their trucks. As the men stood quietly waiting to board, the rain drumming audibly on their ponchos, someone in the depths of the Second Platoon began to sing.
Oh, my name is McNamara, I’m the builder of the Line,
The grandest project in the land, a notion just divine—
Other men took up the song, a low swelling.
A barrier impregnable, to seal the DMZ,
And all I need to make it work is a thousand dead Marines!
The song spread along the convoy as the men continued to clamber aboard the trucks one by one. Ike Tibbetts, the platoon’s First Sergeant, gave Mike a questioning glance, and Mike shrugged: Let it go for now. The SecDef’s ill-conceived scheme for a Maginot Line along the Demilitarized Zone was no more popular with the troops than it was with the officers, and he hated to quash the essentially healthy gallows humor and defiant spirit of these combat Marines; but there was a fine line between robust cynicism and demoralizing resentment, and he didn’t want things to go too far.
Oh, the cannons boom and the wire’s strung and the mine fields lie in wait;
From Khe Sanh down to old Gio Linh we all await our fate:
We’re sitting ducks for every gun that Charlie brings on line:
We’re target practice dummies building McNamara’s Line!
The trucks were loaded now. Dermott Edmonds, whose Third Platoon was in the lead trucks, trotted up and said, “Good to go, Skipper.”
“Let’s roll, then,” Mike said. Edmonds turned and hurried back up to the head of the convoy. As another verse of the song began, Mike told Ike Tibbetts, reluctantly, “Time to belay that shit, Top,” and the sergeant roared, “Company, shut UP! The singing light is OUT!”
The singing ceased at once. In the silence, the lead truck’s engine could be heard starting up, and the noise rippled along the convoy truck by truck as the big motors roared to life. By the time the last truck’s engine had started, the lead truck was moving. Mike looked around one last time, like the conductor on the platform of a departing train; but you couldn’t see shit in the rain and darkness, and there was nothing more he could do anyway; and finally he stepped up into the middle truck and settled in among his radio operators for the rough ride west and north.
THE PARKING LOT at St. Jude’s was empty; no afternoon rosary group today, thank God, cranking out industrial-strength Hail Marys. Liz slipped in the side door, moving gingerly, self-conscious in the church’s daunting silence; every noise she made seemed amplified by the emptiness into a kind of sin. The afternoon light through the stained-glass windows had a watery, chastened feel, suffusing the cool stillness with aquamarine and the deeper blues. She wet her fingers in the last drops of holy water in the shallow marble font, genuflected to the altar, and crossed to the doe-eyed Virgin in her arched stone niche in the west wall. Someone had left a fragrant sprig of Carolina jasmine at the statue’s feet. Half a dozen candles flickered in the rack, old prayers, red and lonely in their crimson cups.
Liz knelt and tried to summon an appropriate emotion. Humility, maybe. Gratitude for God’s unwavering goodness. Faith, and brotherly love. Compassion, a breadth of sympathy for the suffering world. But all she really wanted was for her husband not to be killed or maimed, for her children not to lose their father, for Maria not to eat her elephant dose of sedatives. For Kathie and Temperance to enjoy being little girls without having to reorganize society in the fleeting moments between their after-school play and their bedtime. For her baby to be born with ten fingers and ten toes. Pure personal greed, specific and local.
C’est la vie, Liz thought. Ask and ye shall receive; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. That was the promise. That was what she was here for. She closed her eyes. Help, God; please help. Help me, the helpless one. Help those I love, as I cannot.
CHAPTER 11
OCTOBER 1967
AND THOU, son of man, be not afraid of them…
Zeke Germaine slipped into St. Jude’s as he always did, like a rabbit testing the fringes of a grassy clearing, scanning the sky for hawks. It was an ugly thing, it amounted to an ongoing mortal sin, for a priest to dread his congregation so. But his first prayer was always that the church would be empty.
…neither be afraid of their words, though briars and thorns be with thee, and thou dost dwell among scorpions.
He could tell at once that someone else was there. The quality of silence was different. It took him a while to locate the lone woman kneeling at the shrine of the Virgin Mary, her head bowed. Germaine hesitated in the shadow of a pillar, tempted to just cut his losses and withdraw, but the woman seemed immersed enough in her prayer for the moment. If routine ruled, the minute he closed his own eyes, she would be tapping him on the shoulder and asking something about the bake sale.
And thou shalt speak My words unto them, whether they will hear, or whether they will forebear…
She truly did seem absorbed. Germaine stood for a long moment, feeling the quiet deepening again, in spite of himself, the silence opening like an emerald meadow in the sunlight, irresistibly; and finally he slipped into the back pew, eased the kneeler to the floor, and knelt, wincing at the bite of the shrapnel in his knee, the metal grinding on the bone. He crossed himself and closed his eyes, surrendered to what came.
But thou, son of man, hearing what I say unto thee: Be not rebellious like that rebellious house; but open thy mouth and eat what I give thee.
He breathed, slowing his respiration consciously at first, and then letting his breath be, letting the prayer be all he knew; he let go of everything, and sank into the peace that lay beneath it all. And into the dangerous lucidity: the country of prayer was so like the jungle, a still, vast realm of luminous green, the light uncannily placid beneath the triple canopy of vegetation, the silence steeped with the nearness of death and rent with the cries of s
trange birds and monkeys, that Germaine was never surprised to find himself beside the river again, with the dying Marine in his arms.
He couldn’t even remember how they’d ended up in that shell crater on the muddy bank. He wasn’t supposed to have been in the field at all that day, had clambered into the chopper at the last minute, almost on a whim, and the company’s sergeant had laughed as he gave him his zip number, the tag that would identify him should he become a casualty, saying, “Padre, bring a gun this time.” The combat Marines always treated him with rough affection and a certain maddening protectiveness, like a pet, like the company mascot. Before a mission they would turn gruff and sober for a moment and urge him to “Pray good,” to use his supposed in with God, but that was more superstition than anything else, like rubbing a rabbit’s foot or smacking a hockey goalie’s pads before the game. Germaine knew that no one really took him seriously until they were hit. He often felt like Gunga Din among the troops, scorned and despised until the bullets began to fly. It was a point of what he knew to be unseemly pride.
But if it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water,
An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.
They’d stumbled into a bunker complex that day and been pinned down for hours by a flesh-savaging cross fire, the enemy machine guns clipping off everything that stuck up more than eight inches from the ground. Late that afternoon, they’d been hit from the flank and driven toward the water, where they’d regrouped as twilight fell and made a stand.
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