Ryan leaned forward. ‘When I look at you, I don’t see a “gook”. I see a very lovely young woman.’
She stood up, abruptly, as if he had slapped her face. ‘I must go now.’
‘Sorry. That was the wrong thing to say, right? I seem to be making a habit of it. Please. Sit down.’
‘No, really. I must go.’
‘You don’t have to do what you don’t want to.’
She looked at him as if he had just told her the world was flat. ‘Perhaps not in your country, Monsieur Ryan. But in Vietnam only the men do what they want.’
‘You have to listen to your heart. You’ve only got one life.’
She stared at him. She had that look on her face, the look he had seen countless times before on the faces of other women just before he kissed them for the first time. If she was any other woman he would not have hesitated.
She turned away. ‘I must go.’
‘You’re lovely,’ he whispered.
She looked stricken, as if it were the most terrible thing anyone had ever said to her. ‘I hope you are well soon.’ She held out her hand. It was soft and cool.
‘Goodbye, Sister. Thanks for coming.’
She stopped at the door. ‘Monsieur Ryan, there is something you should know about me.’
‘Yes, Sister?’
‘I am not a nun. Not yet. I do not yet take my final vows.’
‘You’re a novice?’
‘Yes. A novice.’ She gave him a look that could have meant anything, and then she was gone. He heard her footfall on the concrete stairwell.
He stared at the open door, wondering.
* * *
The Cercle Sportif was on Hong Thap Tu Street, a handsome French villa whose gardens served the recreational needs of the American and European community. General Westmoreland played tennis there. Men played boules under the tamarind trees, while their wives, their bodies glistening with Ambre Solaire, sunbathed by the swimming pool.
Ryan signaled the waiter for two more gin and tonics. ‘Christ, the Frogs know how to host a war,’ he said.
Webb shifted in his wicker chair. He hoped this was on Ryan’s tab, he was almost broke. ‘I shouldn’t be here,’ he said.
‘Well, you are. Relax. Enjoy yourself.’
The waiter arrived with their drinks and set them on the table. Webb pulled at a piece of wicker on the arm of his chair.
‘Christ, you’re like a cat with a cracker up its ass.’ Ryan took a long swallow of gin and sighed. He fished out the piece of lemon and ate it whole. ‘You can always go back home, Spider.’
‘I don’t have the money for the ticket. Even if I did, I wouldn’t go.’
‘Why not?’
‘There’s nothing to go back to.’
‘So, what’s the problem?’
He heard a woman laughing by the swimming pool, the silky splash of water. Impossible to imagine that a few miles away men were screaming and dying.
‘You thought it was going to be fun?’
Webb lowered his voice. ‘I was scared.’
‘I remember the first time I got caught in a firelight. Scared shitless. Told myself if I got out of it, I was never going back again. But it’s like falling off a horse. You got to force yourself to get back in the saddle.’
‘I don’t think I can do it.’
‘You don’t have a choice.’ He studied Webb with frank, blue eyes, as if he were seeing him for the first time. ‘You’re a desperate little bastard. You’ll do anything to break out of the mold, won’t you?’
Webb looked away, over the lawns.
‘You know how I know that? Because you’re like me.’
‘I don’t have your guts.’
‘That’s not what I heard. There was this nurse at Bien Hoa, told me how you ran back to the medevac when it caught fire and pulled out some lieutenant with a head wound. Now I couldn’t have done that. Not unless there was a picture in it.’ He finished his drink, massaged his injured shoulder. ‘It’s not a question of balls. Your trouble is, you want to be a journo and you want to be squeaky clean. You don’t want the grunts seeing you take snaps of dead bodies, them telling you how you’re a bloody parasite. But you know what, they’re happy enough to have you up there with them when they’re in a contact. If they die they feel like at least it’s not for some anonymous shitfight no one will ever see or hear about. Understand?’
Webb was not sure he did understand.
‘Like you said, I promised myself I’d never go back out there.’
‘You can always go home. I’ll lend you the cash, if that’s the problem. It’s up to you, Spider. It’s up to you.’
* * *
The next day Ryan arrived at the orphanage with two cartons containing medicines, soap and tinned food. Soeur Marie, the old French nun, opened the gate. A few days later he went back, and the old nun was there once more.
He asked for Soeur Odile and was told she was at her prayers.
He had spent a week’s retainer on food and medicine and he was getting nowhere. He would have to try another way.
Chapter 6
The morning after his conversation with Ryan at the Cercle Sportif, Webb hitched a ride on a Huey and went out with a Marine patrol in the Delta. The company made one light contact and Webb found, to his surprise, that this time he felt quite calm, and was even able to run off several frames of the action. He got the shakes again afterwards, but not as bad as the first time.
When he got back to Saigon that afternoon he developed his film in the AP darkroom, but none of it was usable. But as he walked back down the Rue Pasteur, he felt a curious sense of accomplishment. Ryan was right, it was like falling off a horse. You just had to get back in the saddle.
He spent the next few weeks slogging through bone-sore days filled with adrenalin, sweat and ochre dirt, building a folio of stark film and sweat-crinkled notebooks crammed with unreadable notes and impressions. He surfed on a cocktail of pills and cigarettes, bennies to wake you up, Seconal to help you sleep, opium to let you unwind.
He hitched choppers to the Delta, slogging through paddy fields and leech-infested streams with the 25th, or rose before dawn to catch the first flight out to Danang. He slept overnight at the Press Centre, with its unmade single beds, dirty sheets, beer cans and cigarette butts littering the floor; out to Dong Ha next morning and then a Marines supply chopper to one of the field units.
He jumped into Hueys like taxis, riding out to Quan Tri and Pleiku and the firebases in the Highlands, hooked up with Special Forces and First Air Cavalry companies and hunkered down with them through long nights of mortar and rocket bombardment, then flew back with the wounded next morning to Qui Non or Danang, covered in blood and mud, to be served T-bones and ice-cream in a spotless mess, laying a starched white linen napkin over his soiled fatigues.
He washed off the dust and sweat at China Beach, where the white soldiers splashed in the surf and the black conscripts hung in the beach cafe eating greasy burgers and playing Motown on the jukebox. They said China Beach was okay because the Viet Cong liked to swim there too.
Through long black nights in the Highlands, huddled in a bunker, mortars and rockets hissing in just before the NVA sappers came through the wire, he thought about Mickey van Himst. He even wrote to her twice, but she never wrote back. Well, he wasn’t in Vietnam to make love to nurses; he was here to carve out a career from nothing.
He discovered something Ryan called the haunting beauty of war. He found it in a water buffalo bellowing at a helicopter gunship in a rice field; in the face of a Montagnard woman carrying a pannier of vegetables, while a long-legged black Marine stared back at her, a transistor radio held to his ear; a hand lolling over the side of a stretcher; the face of a battle-haunted crew chief, Burn Baby Burn scrawled on his helmet.
One day he got back to the AP offices in Saigon and glanced at the photograph of the severed heads floating down the Mekong and the crude speech bubble scrawled on it and caught himself grinnin
g.
Crosby was grinning too when he came out of the office. ‘These are fucking A,’ he said, spreading the black and whites across his desk. They were still sticky wet from the developing fluid.
Webb wondered whether he should feel proud. A Marine fired a hooch with a Zippo lighter, ignoring the protests of a Vietnamese woman with two children screaming around her legs; another Marine sat, head bowed with his helmet at his feet, his dead buddy lying a few feet away, a poncho thrown over his body so that only the oversized jungle boots protruded; a small girl, half her face disfigured from napalm scars, huddled under a thatched veranda with the family pig.
‘We can’t use these,’ Crosby said. He pushed two prints to the side; a row of decapitated VC heads, lined on a wall, cigarettes stuck in their mouths; a LURP with a necklace of ears. Their owner called them love beads.
‘This one I love,’ Crosby said, pushing one of the glossies across the desk, as if Webb hadn’t seen it before.
It was a PFC from Ohio, a spindly farm boy with a mop of fair hair and huge ears. His buddies in the platoon called him Flapper. He was sitting in a rice paddy, his M-16 resting against his knees, his hands clasped as if in prayer. He stared directly at the camera, his eyes utterly empty.
‘The thousand-yard stare,’ Crosby said. ‘You’ve got it right there.’
‘Yeah,’ Webb said. ‘I got it right there.’
Flapper’s real name was Judge. Lenny Judge. Webb had been in Quang Ngai with a company from the Americal division, they were patrolling a freefire zone, an area designated as hostile. The platoon had lost five men that day to booby traps; one had fallen in a punji pit, and had been eviscerated on a wooden stake that had been sharpened to a point and smeared with excreta; another had picked up a booby-trapped teapot in one of the hooches and had lost both his hands; a third, the platoon clown, had seen a wooden plough abandoned in a paddy field and had been unable to resist the temptation of jumping behind it. As soon as he moved one of the handles it released the pin on a grenade and he had been killed. Two Marines with him had sustained serious shrapnel wounds.
The platoon commander had retaliated by ordering his men to torch the village, killing all the animals they found - water buffalo, chickens, pigs.
That afternoon a Marine called Tonelli saw an old man leading a water buffalo across a rice paddy in a village about five miles away. ‘How come everyone in this damn country looks like Ho Chi fuckin’ Minh?’ he had said.
‘Maybe it is Ho Chi fuckin’ Minh,’ a black corporal told him. He had Death Is Nature’s Way of Telling You to Fuck Off scrawled on his helmet.
Tonelli unslung his M-16. ‘Bet you five bucks I can drop the fuckin’ water buffalo.’
‘You couldn’t hit jack shit from here, Tonelli.’
‘Watch me, motherfucker.’
He fired a short burst, three rounds. The buffalo dropped to its knees. The farmer shouted in despair as he tried to pull the wounded beast back to its feet.
‘What do you think he’s saying, Flapper?’
‘I think he just called you a dick-grabbing, spaghetti-eating Mafioso, Tonelli.’
‘Maybe I should teach him a lesson.’ He fired another short burst and the others laughed. ‘Missed the little motherfucker.’
Flapper had laughed along with the others. ‘I told you, Tonelli. You couldn’t hit your own dick with a howitzer.’
There was shouting from the front of the line. ‘It’s that fucking Lieutenant Bradley,’ Tonelli said. ‘What’s his problem? We got a contact here.’
The black sergeant fired at the old Vietnamese. ‘Shee-it,’ he said. ‘Missed the muthafucker.’
‘No wonder you guys never hit any VC,’ Flapper said. ‘You always aim too high.’
He was still laughing when he put the M-16 to his shoulder and pulled the trigger. Webb saw the man’s conical straw hat disintegrate. His head exploded and the almost decapitated body slid down the body of the dying water buffalo.
When Webb looked around Flapper wasn’t laughing any more. The lieutenant bawled him out and threatened to put him on a charge. But they all knew it would never happen. Bradley didn’t want to get fragged because of some dead gook peasant. Chalk him up to the VC body count and let it drop.
When they stopped to rest an hour later, Flapper came looking for Webb. ‘It was just a joke, right?’ he said. ‘I never meant to hit him or anything. We was just fooling around.’
‘Sure,’ Webb said. ‘You were just fooling around.’
When Webb joined Baker Company, Flapper was nineteen. When Webb left them, three days later, he looked about thirty-five.
By then Tonelli had kicked a mine and had been choppered back to Long Binh. Webb had jumped on the same medevac. Just before it lifted off, Flapper had grabbed his arm. ‘I didn’t mean to do it,’ he said.
Crosby brought him back from his reverie. ‘Had this guy just been in a firefight?’
‘I guess so,’ he said.
Bien Hoa
She was having supper in the mess hall with some nurses and doctors from the ER. When she saw him, her expression changed from weariness to surprise. She came over. Webb was aware of everyone staring.
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘Hello yourself. You look done in. Where have you been?’
‘Up at Quang Ngai with the Americal.’
‘Yeah? Get some snaps for the family album?’
‘Something like that.’
‘You came straight out here?’
‘Kind of.’
She seemed impressed with that. ‘You eaten?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Come and join us.’
‘Just some coffee, maybe.’
She made the introductions, and then the doctors got back to their shop talk, a surgical procedure that should have worked but didn’t. Back home there would be a post mortem and the family would sue. Here you just moved onto the next patient.
She came back with his coffee. ‘How’s your friend?’
‘He’s fine. He’s got more scars than an old tomcat.’
‘He was lucky. T&Ts count as minor wounds in here. What brings you out this way?’
‘You, I guess.’
‘Really?’ She pushed an errant lock of hair out of her face and put her chin on her hand. ‘Well, you know, one burning helicopter and I’m anybody’s.’
‘I didn’t mean …’
‘Don’t look so serious, I was just fucking with you. Hey, I’m bagged. I guess it’s the heat. Plus I’ve been changing dressings on pseudomonas all afternoon.’
She was right; she had the same look in her eyes as Wally Judge.
‘A few of us are having drinks in the lieutenant’s hooch. Want to come over?’
‘Sure, why not?’
The lieutenant was the hospital’s neurosurgeon. He was celebrating being over the Hump - halfway through his twelve-month service in Vietnam. His hooch was equipped with the luxuries of rank; a record player and a refrigerator. Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Mrs Robinson’ was playing when they arrived; the doctors and techs and nurses were all drinking but none of them seemed drunk. There was shop talk, medical jargon Webb didn’t understand, complaints about the ‘lifers’ and the army regulations. A few people were talking about the first things they were going to do when they got home.
Mickey drifted away among the crowd. Webb thought he had been dumped. He stayed for a while, talking to an ER tech from Georgia who wanted to tell him about the trout fishing in the Alleghenies. He was about to leave when Mickey magically reappeared at his side. ‘Let’s go back to my hooch,’ she whispered.
Mickey shared a hooch with five other nurses, and her room was not much bigger than a store cupboard. There was a bed and a small wardrobe with hanging space, little else.
She flopped down on the bed and Webb shut the door. The only light in the room filtered through a small window high in the wall. ‘I’m drunk, Hugh,’ she said. She put up both her hands, like a child, and let him take off h
er T-shirt. She slid out of her fatigue pants.
She held out her arms. ‘You want to sleep with me?’
Webb guessed that in a few moments she would be asleep. ‘I’m not big on necrophilia,’ he said.
‘Oh boy, dead people! If it’s corpses you want, I can really help you out.’
Her arms flopped back to her sides. Webb lay beside her on the narrow cot and put his arms around her. She snuggled her face into his chest. She was crying. ‘It’s okay,’ he said.
‘No, it’s not.’
He didn’t know what else to say or do and so he just held her.
After a while she stopped crying and he thought she was asleep. But then she reached up and stroked his cheek.
‘Two this morning, I got out of bed, I was still mostly asleep, and I’m staring at this farm kid from Kansas, he’s a virgin, doesn’t even shave yet, and he’s had his penis blown away by a bouncing mine. On the next gurney there’s a guy who tells me his wife’s just had a baby, and I lift up the dressings and he’s never going to see that baby because something just blew his face off. And he’s not going to be able to throw that kid a ball either because whatever it was took his hands off as well.’
Webb held her tighter.
‘Then, right in the middle of all this good shit, they wheel an NVA chest wound into theatre. And the guy with no eyes and no hands is still waiting in the corridor and we’ve got this fucking NVA colonel in there, because that’s triage, because this gook fucker is not stable. But Nurse Mickey van Himst puts on her latex gloves and she spits on them. If he gets an infection and dies because of her, well, fuck him. I wanted him to die, I wanted to push him right off that gurney and let him choke on his own blood. Only now I’m ashamed, because now the war owns me too, it’s made me hate like everyone else. It’s me so I don’t even want to go to sleep because of what I might wake up to.’
He thought about McCague, killed posing for a photograph that eventually earned him sixty dollars from AP. ‘We all do things we’re ashamed of,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t mean we’re bad people.’
War Baby Page 5