Mike didn’t rub it in; he just sat quietly beside Edmonds and offered what comfort companionship could provide, a stick of stale gum, and a swig from his canteen. There would be time later to go over the young lieutenant’s mistakes with him, starting with the obvious, that “Hey diddle diddle, straight up the middle” was not the best approach to bunkered machine gun positions. Meanwhile, when they got back to base, the kid had eleven letters to write, informing eleven families that their loved ones had died under his command. That was penance enough for anyone.
At some point after the convoy made the turn onto the relative security of Highway 9 east of Cam Lo, someone in one of the trucks behind Mike’s started singing.
Oh, we lug our guns and ammo, from dawn to bloody dawn,
But they tell us not to fire, unless we’re fired on.
It’s a crazy way to fight a war but a wonderful way to die:
We always let them shoot us first on McNamara’s Line!
Isaiah Tibbetts had already sucked up a lungful of air, to shout a quashing command, but Mike stopped him. It wasn’t like noise discipline was an issue, grinding along the most obvious road in the region in half a dozen vehicles that sounded like dinosaurs in heat. The men, he thought, had earned their black commentary.
More to the point, Mike realized that he just didn’t give a damn tonight. His men had bled and died for a piece of ground and then been ordered to leave it to the enemy again before the sun went down on the battlefield. All Mike could see in his mind’s eye was one of his PFCs, a kid named Hamilton, going down, and the look on Hamilton’s buddy’s face as he lingered over his dying friend with the bullets zinging past; and he could see the bodies of the men in Edmonds’s platoon littering the hillside in front of the bunkers. He could see the fresh-faced corpse of one of his young PFCs, still clutching the jammed M-16 he’d died trying to shoot.
Good men pissed away, in Mike’s mind. In a real war, you fought for ground, you took ground, and you held ground. In a real war, they’d have taken Hill 93 and used it to move toward the next hill to the north and taken that in turn, and then the next hill, and the next, until they took Hanoi and the goddamned war was over and the bad guys had lost. But this wasn’t quite a real war, it seemed. The dead were real enough, though.
And so they rode home in the darkness, Charlie’s darkness, the darkness they gave back at the end of every day, and Hotel Company sang.
Oh, you’ll find us walking proudly in our uniforms of green,
The finest men you’ll ever know, United States Marines.
We’re here to serve our country, we’re noble and sublime,
So what the fuck are we doing, building McNamara’s Line?
BY THE TIME Liz got back from the church that afternoon, the kids had already come home from school, made snacks for themselves, and gotten on with their business. Danny and Angus were patrolling along the shore of the lake and preparing to repel an amphibious assault by undetermined forces; Deb-Deb was swimming, round and round the downstairs, out of the dining room, where she had built her otter’s lodge beneath the table, and into the entryway, back up the hall through the family room, and past the kitchen into the dining room again, with various snacks and objects she had gathered along the way, which she deposited in her nest. Kathie and Temperance were in the garage, sorting and counting their latest haul of empty bottles, which meant a run to the grocery store later to cash their collection in. Everyone seemed perfectly content. Liz decided to leave well enough alone and went upstairs to her bedroom, where she lay down and looked for a while at the ceiling fan spinning lazily above her.
She felt wonderful, she realized, despite the relative incoherence of her confession to Germaine and the absurdity of the penance he had assigned: a good Act of Contrition, three Hail Marys and an Our Father, and a long hot bath. Liz wondered how binding the bath decree was. She would rather he had told her to wear a hair shirt, on the whole.
She got the prayers said, but it was too early to climb into the tub. If she ran a bath now she’d be a sodden happy heap, useless for the nightly homework and bedtime battles. Still, she actually had time on her hands, a rare condition. No one was crying, no one was hurt, no one seemed in immediate danger. Dinner was pretty much set—an unambitious tuna casserole, one of the rare foods all the kids would eat. It was too early to start fighting about schoolwork or what TV programs would be allowed.
And so Liz just lay quietly for a time, in a state she recognized only with difficulty as peace of mind. She could feel the weight of the baby in her womb, unexpectedly, as warmth, as an intimate, vibrant pulse. She had been conscious, at the church, of not mentioning her pregnancy to Germaine; the omission had seemed dishonest at the time, more evidence of her iniquity; but she realized now that she had not confessed to the complexities of the child forming inside her because, when it had come down to it, reduced to the desperation of truth, she really hadn’t felt that her condition was a sin. Not the life in her, and not the tortuous course of her coming to peace with that life.
Outside the window, the clouds were bathed in quiet gold and rose. Liz lay still until the sky had settled into indigo, then got up, moving gently, savoring the sense that her center of gravity had shifted. She crossed to the sewing machine, turned on the lamp, and sat down to finish Kathie’s Bluebird uniform and to begin sewing Temperance’s. She had no idea what she was going to tell Linnell Washington, but there would be time for that. All she knew was that she couldn’t tell her daughter she wasn’t letting her do something with her friend because her friend was black. If all these sacrifices meant anything, if Daddy’s war meant anything, if her own life meant anything, they were fighting for that.
[ PART FOUR ]
And the threat of what is called hell is little or nothing to me;
And the lure of what is called heaven is little or nothing to me;
Dear camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with me, and still
urge you, without the least idea of what is our destination,
Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quelled and defeated.
WALT WHITMAN, “LEAVES OF GRASS”
CHAPTER 13
NOVEMBER 1967
from: Capt. M. F. O’Reilly
H Co., 2nd Bn., 29th Marines, 6th Mar Div FMF
c/o FPO San Francisco, Calif. 96602
Tue 7 Nov 1967
Khe Sanh, RVN
My Dearest Lizzie,
So, here I am in scenic Khe Sanh (pronounced, by the Marines here at least, like “caisson”), the mountain garden spot of Vietnam. We’re a long fly ball to left field away from the Laotian border here, and North Vietnam is within easy artillery range, but it’s pretty much off the beaten track and no one seems to give much of a damn about the place. The soil is a red clay that degrades into the most clinging, pervading dust you have ever seen. The climate, however, is marvelous. It seldom goes above 137° (in the shade) during the day and cools down to a damp, soggy 33° or so at night, except when it rains.
It must be good for the natives, for they seem to thrive on it. They are not Vietnamese here, but Bru tribesmen, kin to the Meo in Laos. They are a sturdy, robust people, averaging 4'2" in height and weighing at least 70 pounds. They all seem to smoke pipes, which I believe stunts their growth. They carry small but very powerful crossbows, which they use to shoot game, tax collectors, any and all lowlanders, unpleasant neighbors, or anyone else who catches their fancy. They are a sort of Oriental version of Snuffy Smith.
We have settled in here for a while, after our adventures circa Con Thien. Did I mention that “Con Thien” in Vietnamese means “Hill of Angels”? The men all get a kick out of that. I don’t believe that’s how they think of the place. We took a few too many flunks around that hill last month to think of it as particularly heavenly. The guys have taken to calling the DMZ the Dead Marine Zone. They have also stopped calling me Lucky Mike.
Ah, well, that’s life in the Nam. Only place in the world where you can
stand up to your knees in mud while dust blows in your eyes. If you don’t like the way things are, wait a minute. They’ll get worse.
Please forgive my jerky penmanship—Charlie Battery 1/13 is firing a mission. They’re not really shooting at anybody, just making noise to keep some idiot happy. TDA: NFI, as they say hereabouts: Target Damage Assessment: No Fucking Idea. It just feels so good to go Boom-Boom-Boom.
They may even be shooting at elephants. Lots of elephants around here—the old emperor of Indochina used to hunt tigers and elephants hereabouts. Also, the Ho Chi Minh Trail runs just west of here, and the gooks use elephants to haul their ammo down from the north. But we have been sternly instructed not to kill any friendly elephants. You can tell the local elephants from the bad-guy elephants by their bellies—the Ho Chi Minh Trail elephants’ bellies are all stained red from the clay soil farther north.
Pink elephants. Really. We shoot pink elephants on sight.
There’s not much shooting going on here otherwise. Our strategy at Khe Sanh appears to be to let Ho Chi Minh die of old age. Their strategy appears to be to wait for the monsoon to come and hope we sink out of sight. It is conceivable that, if we wait long enough, both outcomes will occur simultaneously. We shoot a few rounds now and then, dig a little bit to improve our position, shoot a few rounds, and so forth. We annoy them, anyway. Sometimes. A few patrols, some recons, up and down the mountains through triple-canopy jungle with wait-a-minute vines grabbing your ankles and rock apes throwing things at you. We fish more than we hunt; we’re walking bait, basically. But Charlie ain’t biting much lately. Every once in a while, there will be actual fighting elsewhere and they haul us down to Dong Ha with much urgency and throw us on a truck or a chopper, but it’s usually over before we get there.
There seems to be something wrong with my lightbulb or with the generator. The light keeps going out. I’m going to secure for the night, before the rats take advantage of the darkness to steal my cot. I love you, my dearest Lizzie. I miss you more than I can possibly say.
your loving
Mike
“MOM, WHAT’S A ‘floonk’?” Angus asked, from the kitchen counter.
“I don’t know, sweetie,” Liz said distractedly. She was in the dining room, rummaging through the accumulation of miscellaneous debris on the table there. In the failure of regular dinners, the big walnut table she had inherited from her mother had come to serve as a staging area for all the neglected paperwork of her life—bank statements dating back to midsummer, birthday cards received and never acknowledged, birthday cards purchased and never sent. She had gotten stuck on the unfiled copy of the final papers on the purchase of their house, which Mike had signed just before leaving for Vietnam. The mortgage agreement made for ironic reading. This beautiful house with the lake out back, her long-awaited dream home, felt like a tent at this point.
“‘We took a few too many floonks around that hill last month to think of it as par-part-partick-p-a-r-t-i-c-u-l-a-r-l-y…’”
Liz realized that her son, who was supposed to be doing his arithmetic, was reading Mike’s latest letter, which she had absentmindedly left on the kitchen counter. She normally took pains to keep her husband’s letters out of the children’s reach, though she sometimes would read snatches of them aloud to the kids after dinner, taking the opportunity to edit out the sex, violence, and cynicism, which left remarkably little of substance. Mike’s laconic “flunks,” to characterize his unit’s deaths in combat, was not a concept a first-grader should have to come to terms with.
“‘Particularly,’” she supplied, setting the mortgage agreement down and moving into the kitchen. “Particularly means ‘especially’ or, uh, ‘very.’”
“And ‘floonk’?” her son persisted.
Liz took the pages from Angus as calmly as possible and scanned the paragraph in question, thanking God that Angus had not gotten to the sentence about the men calling the DMZ the Dead Marine Zone.
“It’s pronounced ‘flunk,’” she said, to buy time.
“Like flunking in school?”
“Yes.” Liz could feel a bubble of rage forming in her belly, the gaseous fizz of an unreasonable resentment. It wasn’t Mike’s fault that war was terrible and that the men fighting wars had their cold ways of minimizing that emotionally. But such obscene flippancy was not something she would have imagined possible in the man she had married. And this was not a conversation she had ever wanted to be having with one of her children.
Angus was waiting, his hazel eyes innocent and alert. His math homework still lay before him. Eight minus three equals five. Two plus five equals seven. One flunk equals a failure, and the failures in war are dead.
Liz said, “It’s sort of complicated, Angus.”
“Uh-huh,” Angus said carefully.
Liz could see that he was baffled by her subliminal anger, and suddenly she was tired of it all, tired of having to justify the indefensible ways of men to children, tired of being a good military mother, tired of trying to translate the world’s madness, and her country’s, and her husband’s, into something her sons and daughters could salute.
She took a deep breath, folded the letter, and put it back into its blue and red airmail envelope.
“It’s a Marine thing, sweetie,” she said. “It’s just a Marine thing.” And, briskly, before Angus could say anything else, “Are you finished with your arithmetic?”
“Almost.”
“What else do you have to do?”
“Reading.”
See Dick run. See Dick flunk. See Jane grieve. It seemed to Liz that Angus had already read enough. She said, “Why don’t you just take a break for a while and I’ll help you finish up later?”
Angus looked startled, and then delighted at this unexpected reprieve. “Can I go watch TV?”
“Yes,” Liz said resignedly. So much for Mother of the Year. But letting her son numb his brain with mindless entertainment seemed preferable at the moment to trying to find a way to explain to him that his father’s humanity had passed into appalling eclipse.
Angus hopped off his stool and trotted into the family room, clearly intent on getting out of there before she changed her mind. Danny, who invariably finished his homework on the bus home from school, was already watching Dark Shadows.
Liz took a couple of deep breaths and returned to the dining room, where she went back to rummaging through the paper piles on the table, sifting desultorily through long-expired magazine subscriptions, unanswered birth announcements from obscure cousins, and newsletters for things she didn’t give a damn about, until she finally excavated what she had been looking for, the copy of the National Enquirer she had found on the gas station floor in Detroit. She hadn’t been sure she remembered correctly, but there was Jeanne Dixon’s prediction for 1968, in bold black headline type: “1200 to Die Soon at Khe Sanh.” Her husband’s new address. Somehow it didn’t help that the psychic had also predicted the emergence of incontrovertible evidence of a government cover-up of UFO landings in New Mexico.
In the family room, Dark Shadows had yielded briefly to a commercial, and Liz could hear her sons talking.
“Danny, what’s a ‘flunk’?”
“It’s a KIA,” his brother told him matter-of-factly.
“Oh,” Angus said, and then the show came back on and they were silent again.
HOTEL COMPANY came in through the wire late that afternoon, moving through a thick mist that made the clayish red dirt treacherously slick. The main drag of the Khe Sanh combat base looked like Dodge City in its gunfighter days, a rutted dirt road running between the airstrip and a shanty row of green tents, sandbagged bunkers, and rickety shacks with tin roofs and open sides. The base was crowded with an assortment of grungy frontier types, the Seabees who were working on the airstrip, flyers and artillerymen, officers in relatively clean uniforms, and line company grunts with M-16s slung over their shoulders, but Hotel Company moved through them all like an alien tribe from a different world. They were
a grim and furious crew, soggy, filthy, and exhausted, and no one wanted to meet their eyes.
They’d been out on patrol for five days, working northward along the Rao Quang River into what the Marines at Khe Sanh called “The Slot,” the river valley between Dong Tri Mountain and the hills to the west. The valley led straight into North Vietnam and amounted to an invasion highway for the NVA, but Hotel Company hadn’t seen a single enemy soldier the whole time they’d been out. The conventional wisdom had it that there weren’t any in the area. But the conventional wisdom didn’t spend much time in the field. Hotel Company had found many signs of the enemy’s presence along the network of well-worn trails that threaded through the hills, from piles of freshly whittled punji sticks smeared with dung, the makings of the fiendish pit traps Charlie favored, to the still-warm ashes of cooking fires and a pot of slightly underdone rice. They’d even found two 122mm rocket launchers in a clearing, staked down with fresh-cut branches tied off with vines, aimed right at the Marine combat base on the Khe Sanh plateau. The earth of the site was scorched from recent firings, and the ground was littered with cigarette butts. Lucky Strikes, Mike had noted. The goddamned gooks were smoking Marine C-ration cigarettes.
They’d also lost a man, to a Bouncing Betty, a perversely clever mine that popped up to waist level before exploding. It had happened less than a klick from base, right about the time everyone was starting to feel like they’d made it, and so it was particularly galling. You wanted some payback after something like that, but there was nothing to do. The poor guy, a PFC named Thomas, just lay there in the mud, screaming for morphine and his mother while a medic tried to keep his intestines in his abdominal cavity and everyone else tried to find somewhere else to look. Mike called a dust-off, but by the time the chopper got there ten minutes later, Thomas had lapsed into merciful unconsciousness and died. Mike had sent the Huey back empty and picked up one end of the kid’s litter himself. Hotel Company would carry its own dead home.
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