by Joe Haldeman
Sarge said the geiger counter was going crazy, 200 roentgens. Be thankful for the suits. We’d just take a look around and then go back down under. Lock and load and get into formation.
I got the rear position, center file, which made me nervous. We could walk a couple of hundred yards past a sniper and then he’d pop the guys in back and run like hell.
But there couldn’t be anyone alive up here, I told myself. Not unless they lived underground and only came up in suits like ours. Russians? Forget it. We blew them to atoms the first day. While they were doing the same thing to us.
We walked around Bethesda for several hours, stunned by the magnitude of the destruction. Almost every building was a charred ruin, overgrown with comealong vines and honeysuckle. The Peoples Drug Store was half standing, though, and we raided it for cigarettes. The candy was all spoiled.
We were almost back to the shelter entrance on Highland when they hit us. Mutants, dozens of them, armed with rifles, machine guns, and shotguns. They’d been hidden behind a low stone fence. When they popped up and opened fire, I didn’t even have time to raise my weapon and get a sight picture. Batman went down and then Moses, who was in front of me, just exploded. They must have hit his demo bag. I was wiping the blood off my faceplate when a big round must have hit my helmet. Bulletproof, but it was like being clubbed by a baseball bat. I went down, out cold.
I don’t know whether it was minutes or hours later when I woke up. I could hear individual shots, a “pop” every thirty seconds or so. Through my smeared faceplate I could see one mutant walking around with a rifle, shooting people in the head.
He was an ugly son of a bitch. His eyes were twice the size of humans’ and blood red. His teeth were long and pointed; it looked like he couldn’t close his mouth. His hands had three fingers and a thumb and were covered with hair, but his head was bald, scaly.
He wasn’t paying a lot of attention to what he was doing, just shooting corpses at random, sometimes stooping to take some ammo or other stuff from a utility belt. I thought maybe if I lay still, he might go on past me. My M16 was locked and loaded, but I didn’t know whether it worked. Besides, if I tried to sit up and aim, I’d probably faint again. My head was pounding, vision blurry.
I was still thinking about it when he walked over to me and pointed the rifle at my head. Before I could react, he pulled the trigger—but it went click, out of ammo. I tipped the M16 up to point at his crotch and pulled the trigger. Eighteen rounds ripped him wide open. He fell over with a terrible high-pitched squeal.
I staggered to my feet and looked around. No mutants, but I reloaded anyway. God, it was a terrible sight. All of the platoon had been blown away, some of them literally shot to pieces. The street was slick with blood and there were flies everywhere. There were four dead mutants over by the stone wall.
I scarfed up an M79 and a bandolier of grenades and headed back to the shelter. No sign of any of the mutants, not until I got there.
The door was open, deadly radioactive air flooding the chambers. I stepped inside but didn’t have to go past the anteroom, piled high with corpses. I knew there was no-place for me to go. I grabbed a box of air filters for my suit and found another bandolier of grenades. Then I went back topside to hunt mutants. I think I went a little crazy. But then I knew I was going to die.
Well, it was interesting. He wondered about the 200 roentgens. Did Speidel make that up? Folsom was embarrassed to realize that he didn’t remember whether the effect of radiation was measured in roentgens or volts or what. Rams?
So he shot the enemy in the crotch. In the genitals. Speidel’s father was balding and had hair on the back of his hands. Prominent teeth. At the last interview, he’d had bloodshot eyes, a drinker’s eyes.
Was Speidel acting out some oedipal fantasy here? Perhaps it was something less conventional. Probably anger at his own homosexuality, since shooting is a pretty obvious symbol, and he shot at the other man’s penis. Ejaculating on his father’s penis? A desire for sexual domination of his father?
Folsom opened the file drawer and took out Spider’s previous essay. He set them side by side and opened his top drawer, where he had 335 cards in five pastel colors plus white, in orderly stacks. It was Friday, pink day, so he selected a third of an inch of pink cards and slid all but one of them into his breast pocket. He titled one “Specialist S’s fantasies,” and read through the space-opera one, which he didn’t realize was loosely modeled on Starship Troopers, a novel by Robert Heinlein. Captain Folsom had never read any science fiction, which he thought was trivial; nor fantasy, except for some pornography, which was of professional interest.
He printed neatly with a Rapidograph drawing pen:
HOSTILITY TOWARD AUTHORITY
SARCASM
“MOSES” IN BOTH/ANTI-SEMITISM?
—EXPLODES IN BOTH, BLOOD
“BATMAN” IN BOTH/NEGRO? RACISM?
“I GUESS I WENT A LITTLE CRAZY”
IN BOTH
HOPELESSNESS IN BOTH
HOSTILITY, REVENGE
He studied the card. Actually, patterns were emerging. He should encourage Specialist Speidel to write some more.
He did have more pressing things to worry about; patients in worse condition. But a lot of them would never be helped. It was gratifying to work with the ones like Speidel, where you could identify the problem and see that it was amenable to solution. He took out an Interoffice Memo tablet and routed to Dr. Tolliver a request to begin aversion therapy with Speidel, augmented by electroshock.
No news is good news
Beverly woke up the next morning feeling happy. She had decided that algebra was less important than working for Dr. King and saving a little money so they could go spend the summer with Lee’s friends in San Francisco. The world was changing fast, and she wanted to be in it, not imprisoned in a classroom.
She looked at Lee’s face for a long time in the thin dawn light. He looked childlike, almost pretty, when he was sleeping. She suppressed the slight urge to wake him up. He probably didn’t have much juice left after last night, and besides, they ought to save their strength. They’d volunteered to go down to the Mall and help with the construction of the shantytown that was being built for the Poor People’s March.
She slipped out of bed and dressed quietly, jeans and a MAKE LOVE NOT WAR sweatshirt. She liked the defiant, sexy feeling of not wearing underwear—Lee didn’t so she didn’t, except for her period. But she wouldn’t go braless. That was a little too much, too public. And she wouldn’t walk the ten steps to the bathroom naked, even though other people did.
She made as little noise as possible in the bathroom and decided not to shower; she’d be grimy in a couple of hours, anyhow. Maybe they could take a bath together when they got back.
Downstairs, she put on water for coffee and brought in the paper. It was a good-news day, March 16th. Bobby Kennedy announced that he was going to run for President! Martin Luther King was pressing Johnson on human rights. Alexander Dubcek was defying Moscow—a Communist himself, he was declaring an era of democracy and freedom in Czechoslovakia.
Later in the year, there would be sadder news about Kennedy and King and Czechoslovakia. But one important thing happened on March 16th that wouldn’t make the papers for more than a year.
At 7:30 in the morning, a wave of assault helicopters landed a company of infantrymen outside of the Vietnamese hamlet My Lai-4. Told that it was a “hot LZ,” they jumped out of the helicopters shooting. Nobody shot back.
This was Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Brigade—part of the Americal Division, the Army’s newest, largest, and least well-organized division—and though the company had lost forty-two men killed and wounded by land mines and sniper fire, they had never engaged the enemy in combat. They were more than ready.
Their company commander, Captain Ernest Medina, had said that this was their big chance to “get even” with the Viet Cong. The 48th Viet Cong Battalion was holed up in My Lai, and altho
ugh they outnumbered Charlie Company two to one, Medina had confidence in the Americans’ superior firepower and fighting ability. All the women and children should be out of the hamlet, getting an early start for their weekly sojourn to the market in Quang Ngai, six miles away.
There was no one in there but VC. Kill them all. Destroy all crops and livestock, and burn the fucking place to the ground. It would be a lesson to the whole province.
It wound up being the wrong kind of lesson. Eventually, it would have as much effect as the Tet Offensive toward demoralizing America and losing the war. Medina was wrong about the VC and he was wrong about his men’s competence: other people in the Americal Division derided them as “the Butcher Brigade,” a gang of undertrained thugs who beefed up their body counts with dead civilians.
The LZ wasn’t hot. The only man killed in the disembarking firestorm was an old farmer, unarmed. The enemy must have been holding their fire. Charlie Company advanced cautiously on the hamlet. A few people tried to flee the village and fell in a hail of bullets: two women, three children.
The company was not fired upon as it swept into the village. Nobody knows what started it, but a couple of soldiers began shooting into the grass huts, and then more people started shooting, and the situation degenerated into a massacre. There was no return fire; there were no VC. Young women were raped and sodomized and then shot point-blank. Old men and women and children were herded into a drainage ditch and exterminated with aimed single-shot fire; target practice. Fifteen or twenty women and children were discovered kneeling, praying, around burning incense. They were executed with shots to the head.
Medina’s men killed more than 300 old men, women, and children on 16 March 1968; their only casualty was one man who shot himself in the foot. The official battle report was 69 Viet Cong killed in action, with no mention of civilian casualties.
Since Spider wasn’t over there any longer, Beverly didn’t pay much attention to battle reports. Her Sunday Post the next day would report Americal’s successful engagement in two paragraphs that had more typographical errors than facts:
Troops of the U.S. Light 41th Brigade killed 128 Vietcong on the central coast Saturday.… two Americans were killed and ten wounded in the fight on the coastal lowlands just outside Quangngai City 330 miles northeast of Saigon. Then enemy force had been softened up before the U.S. ground assault by an air attack. Helicopter gunships and artillery covered the infantrymen’s advance, which began around 7:50 a.m. and ended around nightfall.
One company of the American brigade swept into the enemy area shortly after the air attack. Then a second company landed in helicopters an hour later two miles to the north to try to cut off the Vietcong’s escape routes.
About a year later, one of the men who had witnessed it would step forward to tell the truth. Fourteen soldiers were tried for war crimes. Thirteen were acquitted. Lieutenant William Calley was convicted of the murder of twenty-two civilians and sentenced to life imprisonment. The term was reduced to ten years; he served three and was given a dishonorable discharge.
The Americal Division would be deactivated in 1971. Its own people called it “the outfit that couldn’t even do wrong right.”
Stuff and nonsense
Among the artifacts available for Folsom’s analysis were a sketchy account of Spider’s service in Vietnam, an evaluation form filled out when he finished Advanced Individual Training at Fort Leonard Wood, and a plastic bag with the wallet and a small notebook that he had carried with him in the field. The notebook’s pages, stained with red laterite dust, had the names and home addresses of other soldiers, notations about IOUs, and several pages of Vietnamese words and phrases with English equivalents, in somebody else’s handwriting. The last page had several puzzling statements, ending with “We had sexual intercourse” and “I got run over by a tank.”
In the wallet there was a school picture of Beverly and another picture of Beverly and Spider at a picnic. A tightly folded-up mimeographed copy of “The Ballad of Eskimo Nell,” a pornographic poem. Payment records and receipts for money orders he’d sent home. A single playing card, the ace of diamonds. There was an interesting “conduct card” issued by MACV, the Military Assistance Command/ Vietnam:
THE ENEMY IN YOUR HANDS
As a member of the US military forces, you will comply with the Geneva Prisoner of War Conventions of 1949 to which your country adheres. Under these conventions:
YOU CAN AND WILL
DISARM YOUR PRISONER
IMMEDIATELY SEARCH HIM THOROUGHLY
REQUIRE HIM TO BE SILENT
SEGREGATE HIM FROM OTHER PRISONERS
GUARD HIM CAREFULLY
TAKE HIM TO THE PLACE DESIGNATED BY
YOUR COMMANDER
YOU CANNOT AND MUST NOT
MISTREAT YOUR PRISONER
HUMILIATE OR DEGRADE HIM
TAKE ANY OF HIS PERSONAL EFFECTS
WHICH DO NOT HAVE SIGNIFICANT
MILITARY VALUE
REFUSE HIM MEDICAL TREATMENT IF
REQUIRED AND AVAILABLE
ALWAYS TREAT YOUR PRISONER
HUMANELY
Folsom smiled grimly at that. He knew how humanely GIs treated prisoners. He had read all about atrocities like torturing people and shoving them out of helicopters. Some of his patients had lots of stories about such things, although most of them did not. That was probably denial, of course, and understandable.
He puzzled over the cryptic statements in the back of the notebook. If he had asked Spider about them, he would know that Spider was just continuing a practice he’d begun in civilian life: whenever he heard a joke he liked, he jotted down the last line of it, to help him remember. Those last two were from the last jokes he’d heard in Vietnam:
Joke 1
Two GIs are in a barracks. One is telling the other about the fantastic time he had on his weekend pass:
“I take the fuckin’ bus into fuckin’ Jonesville and go into this bar, you know, right by the fuckin’ bus station?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m not in there ten fuckin’ minutes and in walks this fuckin’ BEAUTIFUL babe, and she can go anyplace in the fuckin’ bar but she sits down on the fuckin’ stool right next to me!”
“No shit?”
“No fuckin’ shit. We start to fuckin’ talk and it turns out we’re from the same fuckin’ town—went to the same fuckin’ high school, she used to watch me play fuckin’ basketball.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“Fuckin’ A. Anyhow, we go down to fuckin’ McDonald’s and we go to some fuckin’ movie and, can you dig it, she pays for MY fuckin’ TICKET. We’re watchin’ this fuckin’ movie and all of a sudden she grabs my fuckin’ cock and whispers how fuckin’ horny she is and can we leave the fuckin’ movie and go to her place?”
“Aw, you’re fuckin’ shittin’ me.”
“No, shit, man, she’s a fuckin’ LIVE one. We go one block to her fuckin’ pad, man, and it is fuckin’ gorgeous. She must be a fuckin’ millionaire. She pulls me into the bedroom and tears off all her fuckin’ clothes and jumps on this big fuckin’ waterbed, and then we, uh, we had sexual intercourse.”
Joke 2
This new ’cruit’s been incountry about a month and he’s frustrated. He goes to the Field First Sergeant and says, “Sarge, I signed up to come over here and kill gooks and make the world safe for democracy, but I ain’t even seen a fuckin’ gook. They just hide in the bushes and take a shot at you and split. Am I ever gonna get one of them bastards in my sights?”
The sergeant smiled and said, “Son, you just been goin’ about it wrong. You got to use psychology! You go out in the boonies and get yourself a good field of fire, hide behind somethin’ solid and shout at the top of your lungs THE HELL WITH HO CHI MINH! You just shout it over an’ over. Pretty soon the dink gets so pissed at you he starts to shoot. But you’re behind somethin’ solid, so you don’t get hit. You just peek out and see where the muzzle flashes are comin’ from—puffs of s
moke, leaves fallin’—lock and load and empty a clip at the son of a bitch. I can guarantee you’ll get your gook that way. He might even get so pissed he’ll step out in the open.”
“Gosh, thanks, Sarge. I’ll go do just that.”
About two weeks go by. One day the Field First Sergeant is walkin’ to the tennis court—did I say he was Special Forces out in Kontum?—and along comes two medics carryin’ a stretcher, and on it is that private. He looks like shit warmed over, man, all bloody bandages and blood bags drainin’ into each arm.
“Good God, boy,” the sergeant says. “What the hell happened to you?”
He spits out some blood and teeth and says, “Well, Sarge, I did just like you told me. I got this clearing with a great field of fire and got down behind a big fat rubber tree and yelled out THE HELL WITH HO CHI MINH at the top of my lungs. I yelled it three times and it was just like you said. Fuckin’ gook ran right out into the clearing.”
“Yeah? So what the hell happened?”
“Aw … the fuckin’ gook yelled THE HELL WITH LBJ and while we were in the clearing shakin’ hands a fuckin’ tank ran over us.”
Exit
Spider and two other patients were in the day room working on a jigsaw puzzle of an aerial photograph of Washington, D.C. They were all wrapped in blankets. The day room windows were open, orders from Captain My Captain, and a stiff morning breeze blew in.
The puzzle was a challenge. There was no picture to guide them; it just came out of a shoebox labeled PITCURE OF WASH. D.C. They had assembled all of the border and were slowly building from there.
His blond friend, who had “poked” his wife, was named Arlo Sanders. The other puzzler was Frank White, who was not white and not particularly frank. In fact, he was downright evasive.
“This piece gonna go here,” he said, and carefully positioned a piece exactly in the middle.
“Yeah, sure.” Sanders turned to Spider. “We got a fuckin’ genius on our hands.”