“Get in the fucking hole!” Mike screamed, and the new guys dived dutifully into the trench and covered up as the mortar rounds walked in toward them. They all burrowed into the dirt and held their helmets on. The trench was bracketed, explosions left and right, front and back, dirt and shrapnel flying everywhere; and then the second wave of fast-movers came in and loosed their wave of bombs and the world just shook for a while.
When things finally settled down a bit, everyone’s heads eased up. One of the new arrivals looked down at his nice new uniform, smeared now in good old Khe Sanh orange.
“Jesus H. Christ,” he said. “Who’s running this cluster fuck?”
Mike could feel something against his chest, sharp, thick, and heavy, not quite an ache. He wondered for a moment if he’d taken a piece of shrapnel. But it was Stinson’s flask; the kid had managed to slip it into his breast pocket.
“Just some standard-issue idiot,” he told the new guy. “Welcome, gentlemen, to Hill Eight-Five-One.”
THE NEW MEN were given shovels; everyone at Khe Sanh dug constantly—it was a way of life by now. The fresh supplies were squirreled through the maze of trenches: cases of grenades and 60mm mortar shells, M-16 ammo, C-rats, and even some new empty bags for sandbags. Not a bad haul. There was even, miraculously, a case of socks, a dirty cardboard box with one corner caved in, labeled prominently in black stencil, U.S. ARMY REJECTS. Nothing but the best for our boys in harm’s way, Mike thought. But he grabbed a pair of the things before they all disappeared.
There was mail too, blessed mail, the first in almost a week. Mike took his precious handful of letters to his bunker, closed the blast door and lit a candle, and settled back on his cot. The best moment of any day.
There was only one letter from Liz, which was a disappointment after such a long stretch. But any letter was priceless. Mike sniffed and hefted the envelope—no perfume this time, and apparently no photographs—and slit it open carefully with his K-bar.
My dearest Mike…
HE’D HAD MEN DIE beside him and been splattered with their deaths; he’d had men he cared about die in his arms. He’d looked death in the face a hundred times, and he’d had death’s arms close around him more than once and had surrendered to its embrace. But this was different. He hadn’t known death at all, it turned out. All the deaths you thought you knew meant nothing, in the end. It was the one you didn’t see coming that really took you out.
Mike read the letter through a second time, slowly; and then, because there was nothing else to do, he read it a third time, testing every word as if it were a tooth that might come out.
He was sitting upright by now on the edge of the cot, his feet on the dirt floor. The bunker was cool, and quiet as a tomb. No scurrying rats, no radio crackling, no one screaming for a corpsman. Something must have been exploding somewhere, but he couldn’t hear it.
As if the war had ended, Mike thought. Abruptly, impossibly: all quiet on the western front. Piss on the fires and call in the dogs, boys, the show’s over. Let the politicians and the journalists get to work, figuring out what the fuck it all meant.
But that was not quite it. You fought your war and you lived or died, and the men you loved and fought with lived or died beside you, and when it was over it was over and it was what it was. There might even have been some joy in that somewhere, like diamonds scattered in the mud of irony, if only in the knowledge that you had been a good Marine and done your job.
But this was different. This was the thing he could never have seen coming. It felt like the war had ended, yeah; but what it really felt like was that he’d lost.
[ PART EIGHT ]
All night beneath the ruins, then,…
…………………
Where the son of fire in his eastern cloud, while the morning plumes her golden breast,
Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law to dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night, crying
Empire is no more! And now the lion & wolf shall cease…
………………….
For every thing that lives is Holy.
WILLIAM BLAKE,
“THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL”
CHAPTER 29
APRIL 1968
GERMAINE DROVE UP to the O’Reilly house on Thursday afternoon of the week before Easter. It was strangely easy: he pulled right into the driveway behind the O’Reillys’ big green station wagon with no compunction whatsoever. He dropped by several times a week now, and it was hard to really remember what it had felt like to drive past the house all those times and stop a hundred yards down the road, wrestling with his demons and fretting over fine points of divine timing, social repercussions, and dubious motivation. His demons, such as they were, seemed so irrelevant these days. They were like weather: some days stormy, some days clear. You got wet, or you didn’t; you sweated, or shivered. You still had to get your work done.
He unfolded himself out of the VW and stood for a moment on the concrete, waiting for the pain in his knee to settle. The grass in the yard was calf-deep, and he made a mental note to try to drop by on Saturday and get it cut. And do some weeding: in the border in front of the porch, daffodils bloomed in the unkempt bed, their yellow heads bobbing above the green tangle like life-jacketed sailors in a churned sea.
He would have gone up the sidewalk to the front door, but a call from the yard stopped him. “Father Zeke!”
Germaine peered into the side yard, toward the rise dominated by two oak trees, but saw no one. The knoll was riddled with an impressive maze of trenches and sandbagged holes, some of them covered with cardboard to achieve a bunker effect. Danny and Angus had been digging in to Firebase Fox for months now.
Germaine started walking toward the fortifications. As he approached, he called, “Fox Base, this is Saint Jude. I am inbound on your seven o’clock. Over.”
“Saint Jude, Fox Six,” came Danny’s laconic reply. “Roger that. Hold your position. We will mark LZ, over.”
Germaine paused in the deeper grass. The boys were still out of sight, but he knew the drill by now. He waited patiently, and a moment later a flare of red smoke blossomed from the nearest trench.
“Fox Six, Saint Jude,” he called. “I have red smoke, repeat, red smoke. Over.”
“Jude, Six, roger that. Choo-choo cherry. You are cleared for landing. LZ is hot. Repeat, LZ is hot. Over.”
“Copy that,” Germaine said. “Tallyho.”
He made for the trench, keeping his head low. Landings at Firebase Fox often involved barrages of acorns and even the heavier ordnance of 122mm pinecones. Today he cleared the LZ unscathed except for some shrapnel from a handful of twigs.
Slipping in to the surprisingly deep hole, he found Danny and Angus squatted in a blast recess dug off to the side of the trench, holding plastic helmets tight to their heads. They had a mock mortar set up beside them, a jury-rigged contraption made up of tin cans duct-taped at the joints, leaning on a tripod of spliced-together tennis rackets. As Germaine settled in gingerly, easing his bad knee into as much of a bend as he could, Angus made an explosion noise and tossed a handful of dirt into the air, which duly showered them.
“Whew,” Germaine said, as the dust settled.
“We’ve been taking fire all afternoon,” Danny told him. “But we’ve got their position spotted.”
“Where are they?”
Danny pointed across the lake. “In the tree line over there.”
“Ah,” Germaine said.
“Do you want some beanie-weenies, Father?” Angus asked.
“No, thank you, Angus. I had a big lunch in, uh, Saigon.” Both boys looked dubious. “Da Nang?” Germaine tried.
“Dong Ha, maybe,” Danny allowed.
“Dong Ha, then.”
“Did you bring any potatoes?” Angus asked.
Germaine smiled. “No. Are you low on food?”
“Low on ammo,” Danny said, and gestured to the mortar. “We were just about to f
ire a mission.”
“I’ll bring potatoes next time.”
“Or apples,” Angus said.
“Potatoes are better,” Danny said. “Heavier.” He and Angus turned to the mortar, and Angus took a potato out of the sack beside it. They were down to less than half a dozen spuds, Germaine noted. The mortar was a new twist.
Angus stuffed the potato into the open end of the beer-can tube, and Danny pushed it down into the tube with the end of a baseball bat. The bottom of the mortar was rigged with some kind of plumbing joint, from which Danny unscrewed the seal. Angus took an aerosol can—hair spray, Germaine noted, amused—and sprayed it into the chamber, then Danny screwed the cap back into place.
“Good to go,” he said. “Get the FAO on the horn.”
Angus picked up a pair of toy binoculars and peered over the top of the trench toward the island. Germaine leaned back against the dirt wall of the trench and watched their play, keeping his right leg as straight as he could. His heart hurt. There was no way around that. Danny, he knew, still wanted to be a priest. They had talked about it after morning mass just the week before, sitting in the back row of the silent church after everyone else had left. A priest, or a painter. But clearly duty called, in the afternoons after school. Danny apparently wanted to be a priest who fired mortars.
“Fox Six, I have the target in sight,” Angus said. “Fire your mission, over.”
“Roger that.” Danny reached to the base of the mortar and clicked something that looked like the flint sparker from a lantern lighter. Germaine flinched involuntarily, but nothing happened. Danny, unperturbed, waited a moment, then pressed the button again.
Boom!
Germaine jumped at the surprisingly loud explosion. He hadn’t quite believed the thing would go off. He stuck his head up above the trench line, expecting to see potato fragments strewn across the yard, but there was nothing.
“Shot,” Danny said, and, a moment later, “Splash.”
Across the lake, the potato landed in the shallow water by the shoreline, raising a distinct explosive plume.
“Does your mother know about this?” Germaine asked.
“Yeah,” Danny said. “She only lets us shoot at the lake and the island. The houses are a no-fire zone.” He sounded a little disgruntled at such constraints.
“War is hell,” Germaine said.
Angus was still looking through the binoculars. “Fox Six, Lakeview here,” he said. “Adjust fire. Right five meters, add five meters. Fire for effect. Over.”
“Copy that,” Danny said. “Right five, add five, fire for effect.”
He crammed another potato into the mortar and went through the hair spray routine again, and this time when he hit the button Germaine had the sense to cover his ears.
THERE WERE STILL three potatoes left when Germaine left the trench and made his way to the back door of the O’Reilly house, but the boys were taking a break from their fire mission to eat some beanie-weenies and let the mortar cool down. Apparently the firing chamber had a tendency to explode if it got too hot.
Germaine knocked on the sliding glass door. Inside, he could see Elizabeth O’Reilly at the kitchen counter. She was on the telephone, but she gestured him in.
As the priest stepped inside, Deb-Deb walked up to him, carrying a doll. “Hello, Father Zeke.”
“Hello, little otter,” Germaine said. “How are you today?”
“I’m not an otter anymore,” she informed him.
“No?”
“No. I have a baby now.”
“Ah.” Germaine bent close as she showed him the doll. “And what’s her name?”
“Anna.”
He felt his eyes sting and straightened to keep them from spilling. “She’s beautiful. I’ll bet you’re a wonderful mother.”
“I think she’s hungry,” Deb-Deb said.
He rummaged in his pocket and came up with half a pack of gum. Deb-Deb took it, gave him a smile, and wandered off into the living room cradling the doll. It was strange, Germaine realized, after so many months of getting used to her distinctive otter locomotion, to see Deb-Deb simply walking.
Liz was off the phone. “Hello, Father.”
“Hi, Liz. You didn’t have to get off the phone for me.”
“That’s okay, it was just my usual cocktail hour check-in with Betty Simmons.” She glanced with amusement at Germaine’s dirty pants. “I see you dropped in at Firebase Fox.”
“They were shooting potatoes across the lake. That mortar is scary.”
“They keep taking all my hair spray,” Liz said. “You’ve got to use steel cans for the tube. It turns out that aluminum cans blow apart.”
“Imagine that.”
Their eyes met, briefly, and Liz smiled. “Do you want a beer?”
“Thanks.” Germaine sat down at the counter as she went to the refrigerator. She brought back two Schlitzes, popped the tops, and handed him one.
“How is Betty doing?” Germaine asked as she sat down.
Liz shrugged. “She’s a drunken wreck after 5:00 p.m. But otherwise holding up pretty well. I think she’s going to go back to school in the fall.” She sipped her beer. “She’s turned out to be way tougher than I thought.”
“Funny how that is.”
He had meant it, obliquely, as a compliment of sorts, but Liz gave him a sharp glance and said nothing. Her eyes drifted to the window, and Germaine wondered if he had blundered. After a moment, though, Liz said, mildly enough, “It’s like an archeology dig, I think. I’ve seen it in Maria too. You’re sitting there in the ruins of everything you built your life around, and eventually, to get anywhere, you have to dig back down through all the trash and dirt and wreckage of previous civilizations, to who you were at eighteen. Or twenty, or whatever, whenever it was that you put yourself on hold to become a wife and a mother and an all-around solid citizen. And so you dig, and cry, and cry and dig, and eventually, there it is, under all those layers of debris.”
“The road not taken?”
“Something like that. The self you never got to be, maybe. And you think, Jesus Christ, who was I all those years when I wasn’t me? And who the hell does that make me now?”
Germaine had no answer for that and didn’t even try to find one. They were silent for a time, a comfortable silence, sipping at their Schlitzes. Deb-Deb came through briefly with her doll, glanced disapprovingly at the beer cans, and walked back out with a handful of graham crackers. Aretha Franklin was playing on the turntable upstairs, accompanied by a rhythm of light footfalls as Kathie and Temperance worked out a new dance routine.
“Have you heard from Mike?” Germaine asked.
“Yeah. He was in Australia last week, on his R & R, telephones and everything—he called five nights in a row. So I’ve been able to relax. I mean, at least in Australia nobody was shooting at him, as far as I know. Not that he would tell me if they were.”
“I can see how that would be a relief.”
“We had originally planned to meet in Hawaii. But I told him I didn’t feel ready to travel yet. I blamed it on the doctors, but I think it still hurt his feelings.” She hesitated, then met his eyes. “I’m just not ready to see him yet. I’m not sure if I could stand it.”
“Sure,” Germaine said.
“I’ll be ready by August,” Liz said. “I hope.”
From the side yard, the boom of the potato mortar sounded. Apparently the firing chamber had cooled sufficiently for further barrages of the island. Liz and Germaine exchanged a smile.
“Another beer?” she asked.
“Actually, I should probably get going,” he said. “It wouldn’t do for me to show up late for Bingo with beer on my breath.”
“Again.”
He laughed. “Besides, I want to get there in time to try to rig the machine to come up with a winner for Mrs. Malewich.”
“God bless you, Father. It’s a life of true service you lead.”
“Yeah,” Germaine said as he stood up. “Poverty,
chastity, obedience, and attempted fraud.” He hesitated, then drew a packet of photographs from his pocket. “I, uh, finally got these developed.”
“Ah,” Liz said.
They stood in silence for a moment, looking at the package. It had been almost eight weeks since she had handed him the Brownie camera when he walked into the hospital room and asked him to take pictures of her and the baby. Germaine hadn’t had the heart to get the pictures developed right away; and for a long time after he had gotten them developed, he had found he didn’t have the heart to give them to Liz.
“Did you…look at them?” Liz asked at last. “Did any of them come out?”
“Yes.”
“Were her eyes open in any of them?”
It would do no good to lie, he knew. Germaine said, “No.”
“I suppose that was too much to hope for.”
“She is beautiful. That comes through.”
“Yeah,” Liz said.
He was still holding the packet out to her, but she made no move to take it. After a moment, she said, “Why don’t you just hang on to them for me, for a while?”
“Of course,” Germaine said.
“I mean, put them in a safe place, and all. I’m going to want them. Just…not yet.”
“Of course,” Germaine said again.
“And—could you send one to Mike?”
“What?”
“He should have one. I mean, I want him to have one. I just think…it would be easier, somehow, for him—for me, for us—if it came from you.”
“I’m really not sure—”
“Please,” Liz said.
Germaine tried to put himself in Mike’s place, receiving a photograph of his dead child from a stranger. And then he tried to put himself in Liz’s place, sending a photo of their dead daughter to her husband. And then he gave up entirely and thought, Thy will, not mine, be done, and put the photographs back in his pocket.
Lizzie's War Page 28