Charlie decided he had just been thrown into the snake pit, with the unfortunate handicap of being sane.
Then the last sliver of red-orange sun slipped over the horizon, and faster than he could have believed, blackness slammed down on them like the lid of God’s coffin.
The entire world disappeared.
Charlie literally couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. He couldn’t even tell which way was up, which gave him a sense of falling. His face felt hot and prickly and he suddenly found that he had trouble catching his breath. He was glad he didn’t have to run anywhere, because he was sure his legs wouldn’t work any more.
“Hey new guy, where you from?”
“The Iron R…, um, Minnesota.”
“The Iron Rum-in-a-soda. Never heard of that place, did you, Junior?”
“No way, Bong. They got dark like this in Rum-in-a-soda?”
“Sure. Um, ah, no. I don’t know. Down in the mines, maybe. Is it always like this?”
“No, man, sometimes it gets real dark, you know?”
He could hear Junior giggling, and it should have pissed him off, he knew, but he just didn’t care. So much for all the bullshit about brothers-in-arms that they fed him in Basic.
Basic.
In Basic, the targets were all exactly fifty or a hundred yards away. In Basic, you could always see the targets, and they didn’t shoot back. And in Basic, the people around you were dependable, and if they didn’t know what they were doing, the sergeant did.
Basic was Fantasyland.
He didn’t know what this place was.
Then the big 155-millimeter long toms ripped open the night with their thunder. The ground trembled, and multiple shock waves and flashes of yellow-white strobe light came from behind the foxholes. Somewhere, miles away, some forward patrol had called for artillery support, and the firebase was pouring it out.
Charlie looked at the jungle in front of him in flashbulb blinks. Had it looked like that in the daylight? Were there new shapes there now, advancing between glimpses, hiding, coming to kill him? He hugged his M16, pressed the barrel against his cheek and smelled the oil. Had he used enough? Metal corroded in the jungle, he had heard, while you were still putting away the cleaning rag. And corroded M-16s jammed, were already famous for jamming. Hell, they would jam if you gave them a dirty look.
He wanted to cry.
He wanted to be very, very small.
He wanted to die.
No, that was wrong, check that thought. He wanted to live, but he wanted to quit being so very afraid. Hell, he didn’t know what he wanted, except that he wanted to be anywhere at all except where he was. And he hated the goddamned Army.
Then, as suddenly as they had opened up, the big guns fell silent, and all he could hear was the rock music. Jesus H. fucking Christ, some idiot had turned on a boom box!
“Is everybody here completely nuts?” said Charlie.
“Shit, man,” said Junior Sauer, “that’s what this war’s all about. Make the world safe for rock and roll, y’all. Ain’t no other reason to be here.”
“Yeah, but—”
“What’s it matter, anyhow?” said Bong, somewhere in the darkness. “You think Charlie don’t know where we are, after that salvo? He damn sure got us all zeroed in now.”
They heard a rifle shot from off to their left, and the radio died. Charlie figured the sergeant with the night scope had shot it. Whether that was true or not, it touched off a hailstorm of fire up and down the line. Red tracers from the company’s three heavy machine guns went streaming off into the jungle, and the chorus of rifle and pistol fire around them became deafening. Now and then, somebody tossed a grenade into the bush, just to up the ante. People were screaming as they fired, some of them standing up in their foxholes.
Charlie didn’t know what to do.
“Fire your weapon, man!”
“At what? I can’t see a damn thing.”
“It don’t matter. We put enough lead out there, won’t nothin’ get past it. Hell, we’ll kill the fuckin’ bugs.”
“But we don’t have—”
“Will you goddamnit fire your fucking weapon?”
So Charlie fired his M-16. He fired until his magazine was empty and then he locked in another one and kept firing, caught up in the blind frenzy that was sweeping through the company.
And he found that as stupid as it was, frenzy was better than fear.
After a few minutes, a sergeant came by and tapped them each on the forearm and shouted at them to cease firing. And they did so, for just about as long as it took for the sergeant to move on to the next hole. Then the shooting started again, as furiously as ever.
Eventually they ran out of ammunition.
Up and down the line, the foxholes fell silent. And as the frenzy died out, soldiers checked their luminous-faced watches and realized they still had almost six hours of watch left to stand, with no ammunition. They fixed their bayonets, stared intently into the dark, and didn’t speak.
It was the longest night of Charlie’s life.
The next day, the tension dissipated with the first morning light, replaced by a mind-numbing fatigue and a vague sense of shame. They straggled back through the wire, to where the lieutenant who commanded the company was waiting for them, hands on hips, jungle cammos flawlessly cleaned and pressed, jump boots gleaming like patent leather. His mouth was a single, stern slash, his eyes inscrutable behind dark aviator glasses. As they shuffled past him, he returned their salutes with exaggerated crispness.
Charlie couldn’t remember how close he was supposed to get before he saluted, and he probably waited too long. Thus, he committed the Army’s most unforgivable mistake: he let himself be noticed by an officer.
“Stand fast, Private!”
“Yes, sir.”
“You don’t say ‘yes sir’ to that order, shithead, you just do it. Why aren’t you holding your salute?”
“Well, you said—”
“I said stand fast. I did not say fuck off.”
Charlie added a frozen salute to his braced posture and thought about how much he hated the Army. The lieutenant did not return his salute.
“Did you learn anything last night, Private?”
What could he say to that without getting into trouble?
“Sir, yes sir.”
“All you men stand fast! Private Shithead here is going to tell us what he learned from your pathetic little mad-moment fireworks binge last night.”
Jesus, he just wasn’t going to let it go, was he?
“Let’s hear it, Private. Loud and clear.”
And before he had time to think about what he was doing, the words came tumbling out of his mouth like heretical lemmings, gleefully bound for self-destruction.
“Sir, I learned that there is a great lack of leadership and direction in the field. Sir.”
And that was how Charlie came to be designated as the company’s replacement tunnel-rat.
***
He survived as a tunnel rat for over nine months, which was long enough to get a betting pool started on the date of his eventual death. Short-timers always bet on tomorrow or the day after, but more and more, the smart money was saying that he might actually survive his tour of duty.
In a country full of ways to die, clearing the VC tunnels was notable for being one of the worst. If you ran into an AK-47 round or a poisoned punjii stick or one of those hard-to-see, blink-quick, deadly little green snakes that were everywhere, it was an open question whether or not anybody else in your unit would even go down after you and pull out your body.
But as he survived more and more descents, Charlie started to get deadly, too.
He learned to hear and even sense bodies in the pitch dark and he learned when to pursue and waste and when to retreat or hide. He found that if he plugged his ears up with huge wads of chewing gum, he could drop grenades into lower, intersecting tunnels without giving
himself a concussion. He learned to shoot by feel, in places so dark that he couldn’t see the sights on his guns.
He acquired a pair of .45 pistols, called John Wayne rifles, a seven-shot .38 revolver, and a long machete that he filed down to make into a sort of double-edged sword. He also got a three-foot-long bamboo stick that he taped an extra flashlight to, so he could light the tunnel ahead without giving away his true location.
The gear gave him confidence, and the confidence gave him time. Time to learn how to be invisible and time to learn to kill. He learned to kill in very confined quarters, at very close range. He learned to kill without hesitation or remorse or even thought. He began to be famous. He was known as Chazbo the Tunnel King.
He was a great disappointment to Lt. Rappolt.
Then one day his company abandoned him.
***
It was a high profile, supposedly high-percentage operation, with reporters and TV cameras. Three full companies were choppered into the bush around a ville that I-Corps was sure was a VC sanctuary, if not an actual stronghold. The plan was to surround the ville on three sides, kill off the VC who stood and fought, and drive the rest of them off into a low mountain pass, where another two airborne companies waited in ambush.
It was textbook air-mobile tactics. It was guaranteed to work. Officers like Rappolt actually accompanied their own troops, though not in the first wave of choppers. It was a photo op for an officer on the way up.
And it was “fugazi” from the get-go, the Nam-era name for SNAFU.
For openers, the place was abandoned. There was nobody there but a few chickens and pigs, who seemed to mock the American troops as smugly as did the empty huts.
There were a few baskets of rice and other foodstuffs, and when the grunts kicked them over, they blew up. There were also a few weapons, which they didn’t touch. And there were a few tunnel entrances. Rappolt let himself be photographed dropping a grenade into one of them. Then he sent the photographers away and sent for Charlie.
Charlie waited a few minutes for the smoke to clear, dumped all but his essential killing gear, and dropped into the biggest and most complicated underground maze he had yet been in. After he passed three branching points, he backtracked to the beginning and started all over again, this time spreading a trail of baking soda behind him. He had learned that baking soda worked better than a string, which the enemy could move.
He found a lot of shafts leading back up to more entrances into the village. He found two large galleries where troops had probably slept and an electrically lit medical dressing station. From there, a string of bare light bulbs lit a long tunnel in a direction he thought was back into the mountains. He jerked on a wire from one of the bulbs, and far down the tunnel, something exploded and took all the lights out with it.
He turned his flashlight back on and followed the trail of white powder back the way he had come. To press farther ahead was practically asking to trip another booby trap or walk into an ambush.
Twice on the way back, he thought he heard a sound coming from a cross-gallery, and he emptied his .45s into the opening as he passed it.
When he finally came back out into the daylight, he looked at his watch and was surprised to see that he had been underground for almost two hours.
And his entire company was gone.
He ran through the ville, first in disbelief and then with a rising feeling of pure panic. It couldn’t be. Not even the dead were totally abandoned, unless the company was under such intense attack that it was impossible to take them out. But there was no sign of any battle here at all. No shell casings, no burning huts, no smell of cordite or HE in the air. His people had simply flown away and left him down in the tunnels.
But they had left a radio.
He found it not far from the first tunnel hatch, and a little red light and some static seemed to say that it was operational. He keyed the SEND button and spoke, surprised to find that his panic was now almost totally replaced by anger.
“This is Private Charles Victor, Golf Company. You guys left me, over.”
When the handset had nothing to say in reply, he tried again, this time forcing himself to remember to release the sending button after he talked. He got an immediate response.
“What’s your radio code, soldier?”
“How the hell should I know? I’m not a radioman; I’m the guy you left behind, okay? Over!”
“That’s a negative on swearing over the air, private. Try again, with the code for the day, and this time, tell us where you are. Over.”
“I’m wherever Golf got choppered today, where do you think I am?”
“That would be a classified location, over.” The voice continued to be infuriatingly calm.
“Well of course it is, you dumb fuck! I didn’t ask you to broadcast it, I just want you to come back and get me. The sun goes down here, this place is going to be nothing but void vicious.”
“You were told not to use profanity on the airwaves, private. And if you have no radio code and no location, there’s no way we can…”
“What kind of dumbfuck tripwire vet am I talking to? GET ME THE HELL OUT OF HERE!”
“You are talking to Lieutenant Rappolt, soldier, and you’re either an imposter or somebody way out of line. Either way, without a code, you’re SOL. Over. And. Out.”
Charlie shouted every obscenity and swear word he knew into the radio. Then he threw it on the ground and kicked it several times. Then he shot it. Finally he hunkered down on the ground and wept.
And when he had wept long enough, he picked up his gear and walked into the jungle.
Chapter 9
Faux Box
My shadows had managed to become invisible now, but I was sure they would still be with me. Maybe I should write Charlie an obit, I thought, and I smiled at the reaction that would have gotten from him. And then I did a mental double take and thought maybe that was exactly what I should do. In a way, anyway. First, though, I wanted to set up a little street theatre.
I headed up the Fourth Street hill and back toward my office, but I went on past it and then across the street and down the block to Nickel Pete Carchetti’s pawnshop. Its name is Pawn USA, but I always call it the Emporium of Broken Dreams.
An old-fashioned jingle bell clanked as I went in the door and saw Pete brooding at his usual perch behind the teller’s cage. With a jeweler’s loupe stuck on his troll-like forehead, he looked like one of the seven dwarfs, just back from the mines. Grumpy, to be exact. His bottle of Pepto-Bismol was on the counter in front of him, half full, and I guessed his Panzer-class heartburn was staging another major offensive.
“Herman, old friend.” He raised his chin by way of greeting and gave me his idea of a smile. Then he took a swig of his pink elixir. “All by yourself, for a change, instead of bringing me one of your sleazy clients with some piece of junk to hock. I feel honored. No doubt you came to take me out to lunch.”
“After you called my customers sleazy?”
“Well what do you call them, pillars of society?”
“Pillagers, more often. But you’re not exactly in the carriage trade, either, you know.”
“Hmm. No, I guess not. I had a great-grandfather who was, sort of, but they called it something different back then.” He sighed, spread his hands on the counter, and stared up at some invisible object to his left.
“Like robbing trains?”
“Stagecoaches.”
“Much more elegant. I need a cigar box.”
“Excuse me?” His eyes snapped back down and refocused, and he looked a little pissed that I had interrupted his reverie.
“You know, one of those little wood things with phony brass hinges and circus graphics on the lid? I think cigars used to come in them once, though I can’t honestly say I’ve ever seen any.”
“I know what a cigar box is, Herman. I’m an educated man. What I don’t know is why you would come to me for one. Try maybe an antiqu
e store. Hell, try a cigar store. I’m not in the box business.”
“I will make no comment on what kind of business you’re in, Pete. Do you have one or not?”
“I might could find one. Mind telling me what you want it for?”
“It’s kind of a long story.”
“So give me the made-for-TV version.”
“Okay, the short take is this: it’s possible that I’m being followed right now. If that’s true, I want my shadow to see me come out of a pawn shop carrying a ratty-looking old box that you just might have been holding for me.”
“That all sounds very B-movie-ish. Which by the way, I got a good assortment of. I even got Beta.”
“Beta is deader than Elvis, Pete.”
“No it’s not. It’s good stuff, always was. I got the players, too, is the thing. Give you just a hell of a deal on a whole package.”
“We were talking about boxes, I believe.”
“Yeah, yeah, all right then.” This time he gave me his Oscar-quality sigh. “You care if anything is in this box?”
“It might actually be better if there is.”
“How about a pasteboard item that’s held together by a couple of big rubber bands and is full of some costume jewelry that’s so crappy, even I can’t peddle it?”
“Sounds perfect. Stick a phony claim ticket on it and it will be better yet.”
“The things I do for you.”
***
The box turned out to be white, with a picture of a two-corona owl on the front, and it looked suitably junky and also light-colored enough to be seen from a good distance away. I borrowed a Magic Marker from Pete, peeled back the rubber band temporarily, and wrote:
CHARLIE VICTOR—-HIS BOX OPEN WITH CAUTION
I smiled at my handiwork and gave him back the marker. He didn’t charge me for the box.
“But you realize, of course, that now you really do owe me a lunch?”
“Fair enough, Pete.”
“Damn straight it is. Just don’t make good on it until you lose your tail, whoever it is, okay? What I do not need in what’s left of my wretched old life is a bunch of cloak and dagger shit, is what.”
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