First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

  “We need some information, Major, if you can give it.”

  He nodded. And his men began to spread out around the camp. However, they kept themselves between my men and the tents, effectively encircling us.

  “I need to know,” I went on, “what kind of activity you’ve got in the eastern end of the Bay of Campeche, in the oil fields. We’re new in our sector and getting conflicting reports of infiltration.”

  “You could find that out in Campeche town, better than here. Pemex stages its operations from there, you know.”

  “We don’t necessarily trust the Pemex organization, do we?”

  “Oh, we trust them,” he was nodding, slowly and judiciously. Then fast and eager. “On the oil business, we trust them completely. Don’t we, Lieutenant?” He turned to one of his men on the fringes, who was barely paying attention to our exchange.

  “Sure, sir,” he drawled. Flash of teeth. “Trust ’em with our peckers. For sure.”

  “See?” Pollock said. “You go to Pemex. They’ll tell you all about the rigs.”

  When we landed, the wind had been from the west. I remembered that because we’d had to swing the Stompers into it for the landing. Then, while this strange verbal ballet was going on, the breeze had stopped. Now it picked up from the east, the direction Pollock and company had come from.

  “Gah!” Alcott, beside me, suddenly choked. “What’s that smell?”

  It was sweeter than jungle rot, deeper than the dark earth. Every human nose can identify it, instinctively. This was the stench of a battlefield at every stage of its lingering life, from the first moment of quiet after the firing stops, to the long weeks of silence after the flies, the crows, and the buzzards have done their work. It was the ancient stench of the slaughterhouse, with old blood worked deep into the grout between the tiles and rotten there. Pollock’s men froze at Alcott’s exclamation.

  My men sniffed and then they froze, too. But their rifle barrels came up by millimeters, and I could hear the safeties go off, like crickets all over the camp.

  “The smell?” Pollock asked, as if he had just noticed. “Oh, that! We were just down in the ravine. Butchering a cow. Messy business. But we like to live off the land. Real soldiering. Have to eat, you know.”

  I looked down at the empty ration pack near his boot. The rifle barrels came a tad higher.

  “That’s no fresh kill, Major,” Alcott said.

  “Well, we’ve had to kill two—no, three—cows since we came here. Been here a while.”

  Half of me wanted to take Pollock and his men at their word, smile and wave, and fly out of there. The other half wanted to know what the hell was going on. That half won.

  “Let’s take a look in your ravine, Mr. Pollock.”

  “You really don’t have any authority here, General.”

  “Oh, but I do. All the way to the Candelaria River … Let’s go.”

  I didn’t have to tell my troops to follow. Instead, I had to signal three of them to stay behind and guard the camp. However, all of Pollock’s men hung back.

  The ground underfoot to the east was soft and the slope was gentle. The trees seemed to grow taller to compensate for the falling off of the land. The trunks became more widely spaced, the foliage higher and thinner. From the air we had noticed none of this. The ravine opened up like a great, columned hall. The misty light under the trees brightened. The smell got stronger.

  We had passed the first tree that was not a tree before I recognized it for what it was. A smooth pole had been raised in the dirt. Hanging at about eye level was a dead leaf, or it was a piece of dried leather, or it was a mummified human foot. I looked up.

  The top of the pole went straight up through the corpse’s withered buttocks; its sharpened point emerged from the ribcage. The limbs hung slack and smooth from this center. The skull tipped far back; the neck’s cords and vertebrae were so rotted that the head was about to drop like a ripe fruit.

  In one breath, the ravine came into focus for me: ten, twenty, fifty more of these horrible trees leapt out among the natural foliage. The early dead were on this side. Across the way, the bodies became fresher and the smell even stronger.

  “What the fuck is going on?” I said back in my throat.

  “Prisoners, General. We had to—interrogate—prisoners. These natives are very stubborn. Indians, you know. Have some kind of code of silence. Or just too dumb to know when to talk. You have to do this to a few of them just to get the rest to look at you. It’s really not a lot different from what—”

  “Shut up, Major.” I said that as gently as I could.

  “Yes.” He sounded relieved.

  “Alcott.”

  “Sir?” His face was white, but his voice was steady.

  “Special duty for you. Go to the other side and see if any of those poor people are still alive. If so—”

  “We’ll take them down, sir.” He waved a squad of our men to follow him and trotted down through Pollock’s awful forest.

  I looked over at Pollock, who was leaning against one of the poles, as if it were a normal tree. As if he were an innocent bystander in the whole affair.

  “This was pure sadism, not interrogation,” I said.

  “Oh, it was the only way.”

  “Nonsense, Major. Torture—pain—only work when you can offer the prisoner some hope that it will stop. There has to be some reason to talk. What could you offer these men?”

  “A bullet.”

  I held his eyes for a long minute. “They will try you for this,” I said finally. “And I hope they hang you.”

  “Who, General? Some court in New York? In California? Did you plan to take this up with some judiciary committee in Congress? Or do you think you could find a ‘jury of my peers’ in Mexico? No, that may not be so hard: Everyone in this country is a butcher. But just who has jurisdiction here, do you think? And who the hell cares?!”

  “I do.” And as I said it, I knew it was the truth.

  Tom Pollock believed this rain forest existed in some other moral dimension, separated by the gap of a million miles from the society and values in the States. That the old rules did not apply here. And that, coming here, he had stripped off his human feeling, as well as his soldier’s honor, as easily as kicking off his city shoes. A plastic man. The chameleon.

  He would get away with it, too. Unless this crime was made a public example, which meant a media scandal, he would put on his shoes and walk out of here clean. Probably even a hero. Creating a venue for that scandal, and then selling it, was almost hopeless. All the Stateside politicians were orating their heads off about a morally just war to save our economically depressed brown brothers and sisters to the south. They were jingling on the theme of our brave, clean-cut boys—of whom, with a shave and a haircut and a new pair of shoes, Tom Pollock was one. The effort to smear him would absorb time, money, ingenuity, gallons of newspaper ink, miles of videotape, and luck; it would return only a tiny burp of indifference.

  There was a logistical problem, as well. I had twenty troopers and two airplanes to take in Pollock and his squad, who outnumbered us, knew the countryside, and were clearly feeling ugly. If I yelled “Hands up!” he would whistle up his friends and, after a pitched battle, mount my survivors by their assholes on ten-foot poles alongside his Indian prisoners. Would Pollock’s men follow him? Well, he didn’t plant this forest with his own delicate hands, did he?

  All these thoughts went through my mind while I stared into his half-crazy, white-showing eyes. And a final thought came to me, as if I could read it off his retinas: Were some of his men even now quietly gathering up their weapons and moving to disable my Stompers?

  “Major Alcott!” I called.

  “Sir?” came back across the ravine.

  “Leave that crap and get your ass back here!”

  Through the light of leaves, I could see him and his men turn and begin trotting back.

  “Don’t move, General.” The point of Pollock’s knife made itself fe
lt in my ribs, three inches above my holstered side arm. He had about five pounds’ pressure on it, enough to prick my skin through the military blouse. It hurt.

  What happened then was instinct. My body turned to the right, toward the blade, narrowing the field of entry for a thrust. My move precipitated his and he pushed hard, up and in. I could feel the tip snag, cut my skin and the upper layer of fat, then break out. Pollock stumbled forward with the give, and there he was—off balance, with his blade caught up under my arm in the heavy cloth of my blouse. I brought my right forearm under, across, and up; that effectively pinned his knife hand against my biceps. Then I pivoted left, swinging my arm right at the same time and putting intense pressure against his elbow and shoulder joints. They gave with a hollow grating sound, preceded by Pollock’s scream of pain. I ended that by pivoting right again, bringing my left fist up from the hip and into the side of his throat. He sagged. I unlocked his arm. He stumbled back and sat down. Then he fell over on his back, gasping and coughing blood.

  Pollock’s men stared in shock. One of them started to move toward me and I nailed him in the solar plexus with the heel of my boot. He doubled over and the second snap of that kick cracked the top of his skull. The rest of them backed off, hands wide at their sides to show they had no weapons.

  “Trouble, sir?” Alcott asked, arriving with his squad on our side of the ravine.

  “Put these men under guard. Then get on the radio and bring a force of at least company strength down from Merida. But tell Barrows to send no fewer than six officers of battalion rank or higher. Got that?”

  “Yes sir!” Alcott saluted, then paused. “Why so top-heavy with officers, sir?”

  I pointed at Pollock. “We’re going to try that son of a bitch and execute him right here.” Alcott nodded grimly and ran off.

  Within ninety minutes, men and women of the 64th AirCav were mobbing the place. I wanted to retire to one of the tents to have the gash in my side dressed, but the smell in there drove me out. So I ordered a sergeant to unpack and set up a clean one.

  Alcott at one point was conducting tours of the ravine. I think he enjoyed the green faces and sometimes unexpected “upheavals” the sight was causing among our delicate lads and lasses. By the time he was through, not one of them was able to see Pollock and his men as quite human. I had to make it an order before one of my officers, a Lieutenant Longacre, would volunteer to defend them at the court-martial.

  “I can’t do this, General,” Longacre said when she took me aside. “All I want is to shoot these creeps. There’s nothing anyone can say to defend them. This was just inhuman butchery.”

  “True. The last man to plant a forest like that was Vlad Tsepes, the Impaler, who was the historical antecedent for Count Dracula. Still, these men are U.S. soldiers. Someone has to at least say words over them—before we execute them. Just try to explain what happened.”

  “I’ll do my best, sir.”

  “Sure you will.”

  We tried Tom Pollock and his men as a group, not singling him out as their leader or making a special case against him. Five of my majors and lieutenant-colonels sat as the court, along a log we had pulled up to the head of the ravine and cleaned off. The defendants squatted on the ground, their hands tied behind their backs, facing their judges. Between the squatters and the log, opposing counsels stood. Around this space, the rest of my soldiers watched and waited.

  Major Alcott spoke for the prosecution. He worked strictly from the evidence, his own personal survey of the dead in the ravine. He had counted the bodies, noted their condition in life and in death, and drawn the necessary conclusions.

  “Four months,” he told the court. “That’s how long our medevac corpsman, Gregson, believes the oldest body has been hanging there. There can be no plea of temporary insanity here because what act of desperation or rage goes on for four months? No, these soldiers systematically hunted, caught, and killed, in most barbarous fashion, every Mexican national and Indian who came near their camp.

  “There can be no justification of war here, that they were, as claimed, carrying out some kind of interrogation of prisoners. What military secrets does a five-year-old baby girl hold? Who would mistake a man well into his seventies for a combatant?

  “This was simple brutality. Done by men who have put themselves beyond the bounds of justice. For which you can never find …” Et cetera. Et cetera. Alcott spoke for almost an hour, working himself up into a fine lather. I believe, in civilian life, he had studied for and practiced corporate law; he should have gone into criminal practice.

  Longacre, as I expected, took the more emotional approach. She tried to describe the psychological state Pollock’s men could have entered, stationed week after week in this gloomy coastal forest, surrounded by enemies speaking a strange language, losing touch with the realities of home and loved ones.

  “I think the least this court could do,” she said softly, without much conviction, “is send these men back to the States for psychiatric evaluation. Then, if they are fit to stand trial, they can be dealt with as humanely as possible.”

  Finally, Pollock was invited to speak for himself and his men. Kneeling on the ground, hands still tied, he rambled for twenty minutes trying to justify the torture of old women and babies to obtain military information. He dug his grave with his mouth.

  The court voted unanimously for the death penalty. Then they stood up and stepped back over the log. A team that I had personally counted off moved in among the prisoners. Their rifles were switched to manual, for single-shot firing. They gave each of the men a bullet in the head. Some of the prisoners tried to scramble out of the circle on their knees, but the rest of my soldiers kicked them back. Tom Pollock was the third to die and he never took his eyes off me—until the high-velocity bullet pushed them sideways out of his head.

  A group of volunteers cut the corpses down from their poles. One hundred and six bodies were laid in a new mass grave, alongside the fresh kill of Pollock and his men. I wrote a short description of what had happened, signed it as military governor of the area, and sealed it in a plastic pouch that had once held fruit cocktail. That we put under the stones of a three-foot-high cairn to mark the spot. The impaling poles we left where my men had cut them down.

  I tried to make contact in Champoton with whatever remnants Pollock had left of the civilian authorities. We had set up my headquarters in a tiny whitewashed hotel on the edge of the town square.

  On the evening of the third day, an ancient panel truck drove into the square, drew up before the hotel veranda, and parked. It was painted dull gray, splashed with mud, and stained with the green juices of jungle travel. Clots of mud and dust obscured the windshield. In two seconds, my men on guard duty surrounded it with their rifles leveled.

  The driver’s door opened and an Indian climbed down with his hands locked over his head. He was shaking it side to side, as if denying a string of terrible accusations. Slowly, he moved through the soldiers and, when he reached a clear space, ran for the side streets.

  Longacre, who was on duty that night, later said they opened the van cautiously. They half- expected a delayed mine to blow them all up. Inside, on simple canvas stretchers, they found three men in torn uniforms and white bandages. The unconscious bodies were hung with intravenous drips and webbed with restraining straps. It was Billy Birdsong and the two crewmen who had crashed with him on Rig 32.

  There was no note, and never a communication since, to say why they had been returned. My guess is that there were hidden witnesses to that court-martial in the jungle. Somewhere deep in the collective native mind, some tide of opinion may have turned. But that’s just a guess.

  I had Billy and the other two flown out of the country to a clinic in San Diego. They had bad burns and scars on their lungs. Recovery would take some months.

  However, before Colonel Birdsong was fit to continue service with the unit, I had left Mexico myself. The Homeless Bastards of the California 64th AirCav stayed in Y
ucatan under the active command of Michael Alcott, who had recently been promoted to lieutenant-colonel. Nominally, I was still in charge as general.

  “Remember,” I told him the night before I flew out of Merida in a transport, “you want to work among the village structure. Support the traditional headman or jefe whenever possible. Keep sowing doubts about the aims of the Communists, of course, but don’t try to ram a free-market economy, two-party system, and all that norteamericano crap we brought with us down their throats.”

  “No, sir,” Alcott said with a smile.

  “If these people are going to take up American systems, they’ll do it in their own time. In their own way. Your job is to keep them from flopping down toward the East, not make them over into good little Iowa corn farmers overnight.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Infiltrate the Communist cells where you can. In the deeper war, don’t try to destroy them, but guide them. The opposition clearly serves some need among the people. Don’t deny it, but use it where you can to shape your own ends.”

  “I think I told you that once, sir.”

  “What? Well, possibly. At least you understand what we’re trying to do here.”

  “Building, sir.”

  “Exactly. Take local volunteers into the unit if you can. Make them auxiliaries, specialists. Train them. Don’t just use them for runners, spies, and gun fodder. And pay them parity wages, minus our out-of-country stipends, of course.”

  “What about the local economy, sir?”

  “I’ll give you a blank check up to three hundred million. Put it where it will do the most good. Hospitals, schools, real Peace Corps stuff. But remember, too, that a starving sheep dog is a species of wolf. Keep the local funcionarios just a little fat for now.” He grinned at me. “Oh, and I’ll be sending a team of archeologists down.”

  “Archeologists? What for?”

  “To see if they can put back together the ruins at Dzibilchaltun. There must be photographs and drawings in the States they can work from. I’ll see what we can turn up.”