Another nurse arrived to wash Bobby and do his mouth care, Dusty grabbed her tray and said, ‘We’ll do that.’
The nurse tried to pull her tray back. ‘You’re not qualified.’
‘Yes, we are. He’s our comrade and we’re going to do it.’
Bobby looked into Dusty’s eyes. ‘Please kill me. Please, please, kill me.’
‘You’re going to be OK, partner. Me and Lieutenant Lopez are going to look after you.’
Bobby’s tears turned into high-pitched howls of despair. The nurse looked Dusty straight in the eyes. ‘Now look what you’ve done.’ Her pupils were dilated from the Benzedrine that she had to take to stay awake and alert. The wounded had been flooding in since Tet.
Still Dusty wouldn’t let go of the tray.
‘OK, Sergeant, you do the care if you want to. You might learn something.’ She flicked back the sheet from the bed cradle. What was left of Bobby looked and smelled like it had been blow-torched. There hadn’t been enough skin to close the wounds, so they had been left open and covered in tulle gras, a cotton net material impregnated with Vaseline. ‘Perhaps you’d like to change the dressings as well?’
Bobby’s body felt hot, dry and feverish. When they were finished, Dusty said, ‘We’ll try to see you again before you get shipped back. You’re going to be OK.’
Bobby turned his head away and didn’t say a thing.
As they left the ward, the nurse followed them out. They were halfway down the corridor when she ran up to Dusty, grabbed his collar and threw him against the wall. ‘You fucking asshole! This is a hospital, not a film set for Beau Geste auditions. Both of you – fucking assholes’. Going back to play soldier now? Going back to zap some more gooks? You see what it’s like here? This is good, man, this is the best fucking trauma care in the world – and it’s pretty, isn’t it?’ She turned on Lopez and flicked his Special Forces shoulder insignia with her fingers. ‘I know what your job is, it’s changing the color of the corpses. What do think happens when a Vietnamese soldier gets fucked up? You been to one of their hospitals? No problem with changing the sheets, there aren’t any fucking sheets. If they ran an animal hospital like that, the SPCA would close it down.’ She turned away and started to walk back to the ward. ‘Just go,’ she said tiredly. ‘Just go away.’
On the way out, they passed a ward where a body with a tag tied to a big toe lay on a trolley. The empty bed had already been stripped, carbolized and remade.
As they drove back to the C-team Lopez told Dusty to take a detour into Da Nang. He wanted to visit the consulate. He wanted to see Archie. Lopez wasn’t sure why he wanted to visit, but he was wearing his .45 and there was a round in the chamber. He didn’t know what he intended to do. Part of him was saying ‘stay cool’. Lopez knew that if he could only manage to shoot one person before getting arrested, it ought to be Boca. The going tariff for killing a colleague in the field was three years at Leavenworth. For shooting diplomats it might be more. And there was also a good chance of his getting shot by one of the guards.
When Lopez walked into the consulate, the layout had been rearranged. The villa’s entrance foyer had been turned into a reception area staffed by two typists and two marine guards. He told the nearest typist that he had come to see the consul. A white-shirted civilian, in his early thirties, was leaning over her desk signing letters.
‘How can I help you?’ he said without looking up.
The new consul told Lopez that Archie had been ‘reassigned’. No reason was given.
Two days later Lopez went back to the Monkey Mountain Evac Hospital and was told that Bobby had died the night before. The zombie nurse told him everything: how Bobby had managed to break loose and pull out all his drips, screaming, ‘Kill me, kill me,’ over and over. They sedated him and tied him down. The next day it became apparent that he wasn’t responding to antibiotics and his urine output began to diminish. The nurse told Lopez how she smoothed Bobby’s pillows and moistened his lips while he was dying. She told him about how guys in the path lab had joked – ‘You’re not gonna believe this’ – about the levels of bacteria in his last blood sample. Two hours later, Bobby was in a body bag in the back of a truck on his way to the mortuary at Da Nang Airfield. She told Lopez she had cried, and said how much she hated it all. When he asked her why she still did it, she just said, ‘It’s my job.’
The worst thing, absolutely the worst thing, thought Lopez, was identifying the body. The new regulations were really strict about that. The 199th Light Infantry had recently sent back a dead GI to the wrong family – their kid, in fact, was still alive – the sort of thing, thought Lopez, that would have caused Redhorn endless mirth. But at least the Redhorn experience had taught him the trick of going to Graves Reg: you just didn’t get curious about what was there, you just didn’t look. This time Lopez kept his eyes focused on his boots and on the floor until the attendant told him he had found Bobby’s coffin. He listened to the sound of it popping open and then looked. Bobby was naked in a shroud. It was the first time that Lopez had really looked at him. His chin seemed weaker than it had been in life, and the other features too were more pinched and delicate. He looked like a child martyr. One eyelid was slightly open, Lopez touched it with his finger to try to brush it shut, but it wouldn’t move. The attendant handed Lopez a clipboard and he signed the necessary documentation – twice, because one of the carbons was too faint.
Once again Lopez had been appointed Survivors’ Assistance Officer. The procedures had been tightened up since Redhorn’s death. You had to draft a letter of condolence for the signature of the group commander. The letter had to be tactful and full of praise for the deceased. There was even a list of useful phrases – ‘so-and-so’s selfless personal bravery reflected great credit upon himself and his family’, etcetera. It reminded Lopez of an Infantry School instructor who wasn’t famous for tact and sensitivity. His way of inspiring military competence went: ‘Ah hope ah nevah have to write a letter to your poor mama sayin’ “your son is daid because he was one stupid fuckah". Hopefully that letter’ll just say, “your son is daid".’ There were also strict guidelines about dealing with the deceased’s personal belongings. You had to use discretion: you weren’t to send condoms, drugs, pornography or letters showing evidence of adulterous affairs back to the next of kin. You were supposed to destroy them in front of a witness.
When Lopez got back to Nui Hoa Den, he had to pack all Bobby’s belongings into a footlocker for sending back to his family. There were quite a few letters from his family, from school friends and a girl named Jennifer. There was a cheap camera, a radio cassette and tapes – Joan Baez, Dylan, Julian Bream, Country Joe and the Fish, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Supremes, Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata – and family photos too. Lopez knew it was prying, but he wanted to piece things together. He started turning the pages of Bobby’s photo album. They were an outdoor family, fond of cross-country skiing, canoeing, picnicking and swimming in lakes. There was a picture of Bobby and his mother on a sled – ‘Chiputnetcook, December 17th, 1954’ – and with his father in a canoe – ‘Moosehead Lake, July 1st, 1959’. It was a canoe that Bobby and his father had built together: it had beautiful curved ribs gleaming with layers of varnish. The father was wearing a gray sweatshirt and a floppy white canvas hat; Lopez could almost hear him saying, ‘Hold the paddle like this, Robert.’ Lopez closed his eyes. For a second, he became Bobby. He could feel Mr. Hatch’s hand around his own, showing him how to grasp the paddle just above the blade. The sun was so bright and the water so clear. There were dragonflies, and a brown trout somersaulted in the shallows.
Lopez heard the muffled sounds of artillery impacting on a nearby mountain ridge. The marines at An Hoa, he thought, still had shells to waste.
Bobby’s books were piled next to the footlocker. There were a half-dozen paperback novels, some natural history texts, a manual on how to build your own birch bark canoe and Robert Frost’s
Collected Poems, a fourteenth birthday present from his mother. She had written in the cover: Dearest Robert, I hope that over the years these poems will give you as much pleasure as they have your father and myself. Then she had copied out one of the poems:
The Pasture
I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I shan’t be gone long. – You come too.
I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan’t be gone long. – You come too.
LOPEZ HAD HEARD THE RUMORS BEFORE, but at first he didn’t believe them. It would require too big a conspiracy; they wouldn’t get away with it. But every month in Vietnam peeled off another layer of naïveté: rational thought became obsolete; the boundaries of the credible spiraled into infinity like expanding galaxies; the bizarre became routine, gothic nightmare a commonplace; the most grotesque perversions too banal for comment.
Dusty told Lopez about it during an ambush patrol. It was a wet black moonless night and they were lying in a cemetery on the outskirts of Xuan Hoa. The individual graves were landscaped into circular plots, representing the cycle of existence, and from the air it was easy to mistake them for shell craters.
‘Poor Bobby, with his reamed-out asshole they’ll be sure to use him for a mule.’
‘So how’d they get the stuff out of Laos?’
‘The Agency have their own choppers, but a lot of the shit comes out on the unmarked Sikorskis that SOG use for out-of-country insertions.’
‘And then the embalmer freaks take over. Someone should rocket that place.’
‘No, Trung Uy, no. Graves Reg and the mortuary are totally out of the loop. The heroin’s passed on to an air crew flight chief who sticks the stuff up the dead guys’ asses after the coffins are loaded on the daily C-130 flight that takes the stiffs to Cam Ranh. This guy, Trung Uy Lopez, is one badass black motherfucker. He used to be a professional basketball player, one of those enormous black dudes whose hands are so big he can actually palm a basketball. They call him Fingers – his middle finger is twice the size of a white boy’s dick. You need someone with big strong fingers to get the condoms up past the sphincter deep into the lower colon. They put about six ounces of heroin into each condom – priceless stuff, priceless – cut and processed from Golden Triangle opium, the purest and finest shit in the world.’
‘Shhh, Trung Uy.’ Phong whispered. ‘Something moving, up in the tree line.’ Lopez had arranged the ten-man ambush team to cover a trail coming out of the trees with paddy fields on either side. He doubted they were going to get any kills, the trap was too obvious. Phong had probably heard a stray water buffalo or an escaped pig.
Lopez wrapped his arms around himself tighter to keep warm; it had stopped raining and turned cold. He laid his head on his rifle stock and began to half-doze while still listening to the night. Images rolled through his brain like a slow motion porno film – the cargo-hold full of aluminum coffins, the wheeze of hydraulics, the internal aircraft guts of tubes, conduits, wires and perforated metal ribs. He visualized a big black American checking the documentation on each coffin until he found Bobby’s, snapping open the spring-loaded levers with a slight pop, for the coffins were hermetically sealed. Bobby’s body, pale, waxy and naked in its shroud, is rolled on its side, the wad of cotton wool inserted in his poor burned-out ass to stop seepage removed. And then commences the final violation as Fingers breaks Bobby’s virginity with a quarter-million-dollar drug phallus – women, thought Lopez, aren’t the only rape victims of war.
Lopez sat up, woken suddenly by the sound of small arms fire and explosions from the camp. He looked back toward Nui Hoa Den and saw tracer fire streaming from the machine-gun positions. It was suddenly as bright as day as parachute flares illuminated the surrounding valley.
‘I’m glad we’re not back there,’ said Dusty. ‘Do you know that, statistically, you stand a better chance of getting killed inside the camps than you do going on patrol?’
‘Tell that to Redhorn, tell that to Bobby.’
‘But, Trung Uy, when they knock off a camp, they kill lots of guys all at once.’
The firing began to peter out and then stopped altogether. ‘Looks like just a couple of mortar rounds and a ground probe,’ said Dusty. ‘Not the real thing.’
‘Are you part of this drug thing, Dusty? Straight answer, please. Remember, I can’t prove what you say without a witness.’
‘No, I’m not part of the inner circle. It tends to be the older NCOs, SOG guys mostly. Remember when you were back at Bragg? Did it ever occur to you, Trung Uy, how the fuck those guys – E7s on $5,000 a year including jump pay – were driving Porsches and wearing enough personal jewelry to make a Vegas whore look like some Mormon hausfrau?’
‘Don’t know. Guess I thought they had rich wives, or stupid bank managers.’
‘But the big honchos aren’t SF at all – they’re in the Agency. And that bastard Krueger is one of the biggest of all. Whenever there’s a big shipment, he disguises himself as a Medical Supply Corps major – false ID, false travel docs, the works. All the dead guys are shipped in the baggage holds of the chartered airliners that take the live guys back as well. Krueger pretends to be this major at the end of his tour so he can follow his heroin mules back to Travis Air Force Base – all the corpses go through Travis.’
Lopez thought he could hear small arms fire from the other side of Black Widow Mountain. It was too far away to worry about.
‘Krueger controls the whole California supply chain – most of the guys are his personal catamites. He beat the shit out of one of them a few months ago, might even have killed him. Poor fuck was a medical technician in the warehouse where they store the bodies. His job was draping American flags over the coffins and making sure they were put on the right onward flight. By the way, your family gets to keep the flag, but they have to send the coffin back. They’re government property, have to be sprayed with disinfectant and re-used. So, this guy’s other job was to find the bodies with the heroin and remove the drugs. One day this stupid fuck managed to split a condom, leaving a hundred thou’s worth of heroin in some corpse’s lower alimentary tract. Any decent SF medic would have extracted the stuff with a pair of blunt toothed tissue forceps. Needless to say, Krueger was not a happy bunny. I heard he took the guy up into the hills and beat him to death with a shovel, then spent the weekend celebrating in his favorite Frisco bath house.’
‘How do you know these things, Dusty?’
‘You remember that corny line from a Peter Lorre film, “Ask me no questions, I tell you no lies”?’
‘Do you really hate Krueger?’
‘Not completely. He’s an evil shit, but he’s also one fucked-up guy. There’s this really funny story about him on one of those repatriation flights. Twelve hours after take-off, a soldier breaks into convulsions. Of course, it’s the stewardess’s first time on a Vietnam charter run and she’s never seen heroin withdrawal symptoms before. So she wakes Krueger, who’s the senior ranking officer on the aircraft, to tell him she’s going to ask the pilot to divert to Hawaii. Krueger just looks at her without blinking. “You do that, you’re going to have a fucking mutiny on your hands. Let the degenerate fuck die, he deserves to die.” So the stewardess has a confab with the pilot and by the time she comes back to Krueger, two more guys have started to twitch and the first one looks like he’s having a grand mal seizure. So she asks Krueger to go talk with the pilot. Five minutes later Krueger’s on the PA asking any medics on board to report to him. There’re six of them, and Krueger tells them, “You are responsible for these assholes. Do whatever is necessary to keep them under control – sit on them, smack the shit out of them, but keep them quiet.” Meanwhile the stewardess says the pilot’s radioing ahead to have an ambulance wa
iting. This really pisses Krueger off. “No fucking ambulance! You radio for the MPs, these assholes are going straight in the slammer. Do as I say, I take full responsibility for the decision”.’
‘What’s funny about this story.’
‘Krueger is. Guy’s got no sense of fucking irony. He really does hate drugs and the people who use them. In his own twisted way, he’s an American puritan. I think that’s really funny.’
Lopez started thinking about the tactical situation again. He knew they weren’t going to get any kills where they were, and it was too late to move to another position. Earlier in the evening, before they left the village, an old man came to see Lopez and gave him the location of a small Viet Cong unit. Lopez studied his map and saw that there was another trail, one that branched off behind Black Widow Mountain, where the Viet Cong were more likely to be caught. He tried to get the Vietnamese squad leader to move his men there, but he flat-out refused. Lopez tried to pull rank on the obstinate Vietnamese by radioing Dai Uy Ky, but Ky made some feeble excuse about their needing an Area of Operations extension. You were supposed to stay within certain map-grid squares, otherwise you might shoot up another friendly unit. Lopez was annoyed, because he knew this was just a stupid technical quibble and there weren’t any ‘friend-lies’ within miles. He should have gotten Boca to twist Ky’s arm, but he didn’t want to have to talk to Boca. He now felt guilty, because he had put personal loathing before professional duty. Was it is just duty? Why was it that, after all the senseless heartbreak, a part of him still wanted – ached and longed – to kill enemy soldiers? He remembered how, a few days before, thumbing the selector switch on his M16 to fully automatic, he had run towards a stream junction where they had surprised a group of bathing Viet Cong. He had felt no fear or doubt, only adrenaline-rush excitement and the desire to kill. Was he just another murdering Krueger?
A River in May Page 23