The Hotel Company column dissolved instantly as the Marines flattened and assumed firing positions. They lay along the trail, everyone’s eyes wide, scanning. In the jungle all around them, nothing stirred. The shooting continued from the front, M-16s busting caps, an uninterrupted tumult, a mad moment. Stinson handed Mike the radio handset without being asked, and Mike heard Doug Parker hollering over the First Platoon net, “What are we shooting at? What are we shooting at?…Cease fire! Cease fire!”
Mike said, “Hotel One, this is Hotel Six. Whaddaya got?”
“Six, One. I think it was a sniper, Skipper. We’ve got a man down.”
“Try to get the shooting under control. That’s all outgoing fire, by the sound of it.”
“No shit,” Parker said, with a touch of exasperation, which Mike understood. One of Parker’s men was hit, and the First Platoon was enraged. You didn’t just turn off fifty furious Marines bent on payback by saying, “Please.”
Mike had the other platoons send squads out to cover their flanks, then began working his way up to the front of the column, with Stinson in tow. Moving past a quarter-mile column of locked-and-loaded Marines was an American education all its own: face after dirty young face, black, white, Hispanic, each face its own story, but all of them kin in their expressions, uniformly wide-eyed and watchful and dead serious. It was oddly moving, and Mike felt a sort of love welling up. It wasn’t something you could explain, not even something you particularly wanted to talk about. But it was very real. Combat made a kind of family as real and deep as anything he had ever known.
By the time Mike reached the front of the column, Parker had gotten the shooting stopped. Half the First Platoon was out in the bush now, sweeping for the sniper, and the rest of the platoon had set up a perimeter. Parker himself was fluttering like a mother quail near the heart of the protected space, where a corpsman was working on the wounded Marine. Mike recognized the kid who had choppered in with him on his first day with Hotel Company. Something-some-thingski. The kid’s helmet had a rough calendar sketched on it, with August, September, and October x-ed off. And, on the back, mercifully, his name. Krzykrewski. Three months in-country had turned the nineteen-year-old’s acne-scarred face leathery and lean. He looked like they all did now after a week or two of getting shot at, like a stone-cold killer; but his hazel eyes were still like Angus’s, wide and gentle and a bit bewildered. He had a single wound, a neat little bullet hole in his right shoulder that didn’t look like much.
Mike said, “How you doin’, Ski?”
The kid gave him a weak grin. “Been better, sir. I feel like I’ve got a bad case of heartburn.”
“That might just be the C-ration beans.” Mike glanced at Parker. “What’s up with the sniper?”
Parker shook his head angrily. “Fucking Lone Ranger hit-and-run piece of shit. Two shots and he fucking disappeared. We may even have hit him. We fired enough rounds to sink a fucking ship.”
“Yeah, I heard.”
Parker glanced at him sharply, to see if he was being given shit. Mike held his look, then raised one eyebrow, and Parker finally shook his head and laughed.
“Fucking goddamn sniper, Skipper,” he said. “It pissed everybody off, when he shot Krzykrewski.”
“Yeah.” Mike turned to the corpsman, who was setting up an IV line. “How’s it look?”
The man shrugged. “No exit wound. Fucking bullet must’ve bounced around in there and settled somewhere. But he seems okay.”
“Lieutenant Parker said I can keep the slug as a souvenir,” the kid offered happily.
“Fuckin’ A,” Mike said.
“Makes a nifty paperweight,” the corpsman offered.
“Something to tell the grandkids,” Parker seconded.
Mike told Krzykrewski, “That’s a million-dollar bullet, Marine. We’ll call in a dust-off and get you out of here, pronto.”
“I already called it,” Parker said.
“They’ll fly you first-class to a hospital ship and on to scenic Japan, and beautiful nurses will feed you beer and ice cream.”
“Copy that, sir,” the kid said. “I’d settle for a cigarette at the moment.”
“Can he smoke?” Mike asked the corpsman, who shrugged and said, “What the hell. If any smoke comes out the hole, we’ll figure the bullet hit a lung.”
Mike bummed a Salem from one of the men in Krzykrewski’s squad, who were all hovering nearby, placed it between the kid’s lips, and lit it for him.
“Thank you, sir.”
“My pleasure. Hang in there, Marine.”
“Thank you, sir. I’ll do that.”
The sweep for the sniper proved useless. Mike called for a meal break and left the company in a defensive posture, flankers out, while he took a team up to the ridge to find a place for the dust-off chopper to land. Krzykrewski’s squad mates insisted on carrying his litter themselves, and they bore him up the treacherous slope as if they were carrying a load of spun glass. Krzykrewski himself seemed embarrassed by all the attention.
They emerged from the brush into the elephant grass of the hilltop just as the whomp-whomp of the helicopter became audible in the distance.
“Skip—” the corpsman said with subdued urgency from beside Krzykrewski’s stretcher. Mike turned to him. The corpsman stood to meet him and lowered his voice. “His blood pressure’s going through the floor. I’m afraid that bullet caught an artery or something in there. We gotta get him to a surgeon didi.”
“Right, we’re on it.” Mike squatted beside Krzykrewski’s litter. “How you doin’, Ski?”
The kid’s eyes were closed, but he opened them and mustered a smile. “Not so hot, sir.”
“Hang in there, Marine. Your taxi home is on the way.”
“Maybe you could write my mom.”
Mike hesitated, then said firmly, “Nobody’s going to need to write any letters for you, son. You’ll have plenty of time in a nice clean bed to write all the letters you want.”
“She always thought I was a fuckin’ loser,” Krzykrewski said wistfully. “Be nice if somebody said somethin’ good about me.”
The helicopter circled the hilltop, and they popped some purple smoke to mark a landing zone. As the Huey started down toward them, a single shot cracked, and everyone flattened.
“Fucking sniper,” Krzykrewski’s squad leader, a taciturn corporal named Smith, growled, and emptied his clip in the general direction the shot had come from.
The chopper had leveled off at about five hundred feet. The radio crackled, the helicopter pilot sounding peevish. “Hotel, this is Tango Angel. We’re taking fire. Repeat, LZ is hot, over.”
Another single shot popped, and this time Krzykrewski’s whole squad, outraged at the interference, opened up.
“It’s barely even warm, Tango Angel,” Mike said. “It’s just a sniper. We have a wounded Marine down here in need of immediate evacuation. Repeat, this is a critical medevac. Land your fucking chopper. Over.” Mike released the mic key and looked incredulously at Stinson.
“Fucking candy-ass,” his radioman said.
“Yeah,” Mike said.
They waited as the Huey continued to waver; then both men let out their breath as it finally started down toward them. It got to within fifty feet, so close that the elephant grass flattened out from the prop wash. Mike and Smith squatted at either end of Krzykrewski’s litter, ready to load him the moment the bird touched down. No one heard the shot this time over the chopper’s din, but a sudden splay of cracks blossomed in the Huey’s windshield as another round hit. At almost the same instant, a mortar round landed about fifty yards away. Their sniper had apparently found some friends.
“Oh, Jesus,” Smith said.
The helicopter wavered. It was so close now that Mike could see the pilot, a mustachioed young man in a beat-up fatigue cap. The guy looked like a poor man’s Errol Flynn, a real flying cowboy. His eyes met Mike’s through the cracked windshield, and Mike could see him weighing it out: bolt, not
bolt.
Come on, cowboy, show some balls, Mike thought; and finally the guy shrugged and gave Mike a what-the-hell, life-is-short, damn-the-torpedoes grin and started down again.
It all depended on the NVA’s mortar tactics now, Mike knew. They were committed to being sitting ducks for the next thirty seconds. If the bad guys walked the rounds in ten meters at a time, by the book, they probably had time to get Krzykrewski on the chopper and out of here. If the gooks just guessed and bumped the range the right amount, they were fucked.
The chopper got to within five feet of the ground, and Mike and Smith straightened and heaved Krzykrewski’s litter upward. They only got him to chest level on the first try, and two more of Krzykrewski’s squad mates dropped their guns and leaped to help. The door gunner was firing his M-60 right over their heads, and the spent shells rained around them. With four men lifting, they got Krzykrewski aboard on the second try.
“Go, go, go!” Mike hollered, and the bird lifted away, just as the next mortar round hit. The gooks had guessed right, it turned out, and the sky slammed down on them.
He never heard the explosion. There was just a flash that was everything, the world evaporating into light. They always said of guys who bought it that they never knew what hit them, but it turned out that wasn’t true. Mike knew; he had, indeed, a sense of immediate and infinite leisure: there was all the time in the world. Because time had turned to light, and the light was everything, was air and flesh and duty and memory, and everything was plunging as light into the heart of a deeper emptiness still. His life was present without sequence, not passing before his eyes, that old cliché, because there was no passing, and nowhere to pass to. It was just there, all of it, everything, Liz and the kids and his parents and his sister, the company and the Corps, gulls he had seen with sunset light on their wings and the wounded fox he’d found when he was eight and things he’d thought he’d only dreamed that turned out to have shaped everything and snow falling quietly through a streetlight: all of it, simply all. He’d loved it all completely, he saw, and he wished he could tell Liz how much, how beautiful their life looked in this instant of his dying. But there was no telling such things, there never had been, there was just this love that had made the flesh of every instant real, and that had always been so.
The air turned solid and savage, a wallop of needles and hot gravel suffused with a sudden red fog. Mike felt his body slammed away from him like a baseball leaping off a bat. But there was no pain, just a sense of distant impact, the ripple of faraway thunder after a lightning flash. All the pain had been sucked out of the world with its substance, and there was nothing left but this tenderness and this beauty and a sadness too deep and peaceful to be regret.
And then those were gone too, the labor of the specific abolished, and Mike felt free and clean and grateful, and he was floating, flying, rising forever into the embrace of the silence that was deeper even than the everything of untellable love, soaring without movement from somewhere to nowhere, from something to nothing, forever.
CHAPTER 16
NOVEMBER 1967
GERMAINE REGRETTED THE previous night’s excess of bourbon; his head felt like an unripe cantaloupe. The morning mass should have been routine, but he had forgotten that today was the blessing of St. Jude’s new stained-glass window, a depiction of St. Christopher donated by the parents of a young Marine recon sergeant killed in action the previous year in the Co Bi-Thanh Tan Valley near Hue.
The parents had been waiting outside in the dark when he had arrived that morning at 6:01 to open the church. Sergeant Martin Truman’s father, Chet, was a small man with shoulders squared against the world’s skew, a boxy jaw, and a gray crew cut like something hewn from raw silver. A former Marine himself, a World War II veteran of Tarawa and Iwo Jima, he had pushed hard for something gung ho on the plaque for the window. His first choice had been the classic Chester Nimitz line about the Marines in the Pacific: “Uncommon valor was a common virtue.” He’d also considered the third verse of the “Marine Corps Hymn,” in its awkward entirety, and the anonymous poem that ended,
And when he gets to heaven,
To St. Peter he will tell,
“One more Marine reporting, sir;
I’ve served my time in hell.”
His wife, Wanda, trailed him by a step and a half at all times, like an adjutant. She was a sturdy, watchful woman, not entirely resigned, in brown Sears polyester slacks, handicapped by a bad haircut and a slightly crazed husband. Her cautious eyes, soft brown, kept flickering around as if she were looking for a place to hide and cry.
It felt like madness to Germaine, but he steered with the skid. Steering with the skid seemed like the whole of his priestly vocation these days. Danny O’Reilly was serving the mass, which was a break, because the kid had just the right mix of gravitas and attentive flexibility, and a good feel for the subtleties of ritual. The rest of the crowd was the usual suspects, six old women with rosaries, the widower who kept the church lawns mowed, and a middle-aged man of frighteningly earnest demeanor who was probably contemplating divorce or suicide.
Germaine did the best he could, though he found the scripture readings sticking in his throat. Chester Truman had chosen the Gospel text from Jesus’s words in Matthew 16: “If any man will come after me, let him sacrifice himself, and take up his cross and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.” As if Christ had died for his country, Germaine thought. The Son of God as a KIA in another splendid little war. He wondered again what he was doing on this altar.
In the end, he swallowed his bitterness one more time and raised the Host into the mystery. The tiny crowd filed up for communion. Germaine had saved the consecration of the window for the end of the mass, in case anyone needed to leave early to get to work, but the whole crowd stuck around and several of the old women put away their rosaries and came up with small American flags.
They gathered before the new window in the east wall. Danny O’Reilly got the incense going and stood to Germaine’s right, holding the chain of the censer at arm’s length, stoic with the smoke wafting into his face. Chet and Wanda Truman stood on the priest’s other side, and the rest of the congregation clustered around behind them. The stained-glass image showed a burly St. Christopher with a live tree as a staff, wading across a stream with the Christ child on his broad shoulders. The window’s colors were subdued in the predawn; they really should have done this ceremony midmorning, Germaine thought, when the light coming through would have made the mosaic properly translucent.
He sprinkled holy water on the window and began the benediction from the Rituale Romanum: Benedic, Domine, hanc aquam…Beside him, Danny O’Reilly’s eyes were streaming from the incense. Wanda Truman was weeping too, frankly, at last, and Chet Truman stood at parade rest with his shoulders hunched, his hands clenched behind him, and his head bowed as if against a wind. They all said an Our Father, and Wanda tugged the veil away from the window’s plaque, tentatively, as if it might explode. In the end, Sergeant Martin Truman’s parents had settled on the simplest of inscriptions, from Paul’s second letter to Timothy: “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.” And just below it, “Beloved Son.”
When the ceremony was over, the church emptied quietly, as if after a funeral; but Germaine stayed long afterward, kneeling alone in the silence and the shadows until the sun was up and the window came alive. Perhaps it was best after all, the priest thought, that the ritual had ended before the image grew too vivid. To Germaine, the saint, thigh-deep in the water with his poncholike robe flaring, his staff at port arms, and the Christ child on his shoulders like a sixty-pound pack, looked way too much like a Marine in a rice paddy, wading toward a hamlet somewhere in the Co Bi-Thanh Tan Valley.
HE WAS CONSCIOUS first of a nagging sense of demands on his attention, of a persistent ruckus unraveling the peace. Like a Sunday morning, being awakened by the kid
s tumbling into bed with him and Liz and bouncing, laughing, only it wasn’t Sunday, that much he knew, and it wasn’t bed, and this wasn’t kid tumult, it was something not good. It was more like being in a forest fire, at the center of a riot of flame. And there was something else going on, something that had been important.
Krzykrewski, right, getting him on the chopper. They had gotten him on, Mike was pretty sure of that: he could see the wounded Marine’s boots in his mind’s eye, muddy, splayed, and sad, as the litter slid in, and he remembered the clamor of the door gunner’s M-60 and the hot brass rain of the spent shells clattering down on him and Smith. They’d gotten poor Ski on the bird and then gotten hit.
Accomplish your mission; take care of your people.
Mike could smell the powder of the mortar round; his nose burned with it, which meant he wasn’t dead and he still had a nose. But he could see only the dimmest black shapes swimming in a blacker haze, and he couldn’t hear and he couldn’t find his body at first; and then he realized that his sense of encompassing conflagration was pain, a raw fire of undifferentiated agony, that his body was blazing with pain, everywhere, that everything he could feel was pain.
He was being handled, someone was wiping his eyes, a searing pressure across his face that swirled fresh flames of pain into prominence, and Mike’s vision cleared into a working blur. It was Parker, with a handful of blood now, looking appalled. The lieutenant bent close, hollering something, and Mike felt his urgency and, simultaneously, the concussion of explosions nearby. Incoming, mortar fire. Right, there was a war going on, that hadn’t stopped. He was on fire, but he wasn’t dead, he still had to deal with it. Accomplish your mission; take care of your people.
Mike nodded, which seemed to be the right response. Parker motioned, and two Marines bent down on either side of Mike to carry him to cover, but both men recoiled as they reached for him, a simultaneous double take, almost comical. Mike looked down and saw that he was covered in blood, his flesh unrecognizably roiled. He looked like something in the catch tray of a badly calibrated meat grinder, like one big wound, and the Marines didn’t know where to grab him to pick him up. Poor Liz, he thought: they’re going to have to scrape me up and send what’s left of me home in a plastic bucket. He was a closed-coffin funeral waiting to happen.
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