by Joe Haldeman
When he returned to Saigon, Han took a job in a bank, and amused his fellow clerks with tales of the cool foggy city, its hills and cable cars, its bridges and bay and beatniks. When American customers came in, Han was the one who had to figure out what they wanted and respond, which embarrassed him. He understood English well but spoke it terribly, and usually had to communicate by written notes.
The bank failed in a cynical takeover during the disastrous year of 1964. Han’s parents were thrown out of their house, and the three of them lived in a succession of mean rooms, just making enough from sewing and labor to cover rice and rent. Han detested the puppet government that had brought him and his family to such a state, and so, like many of his friends, he joined the Viet Cong.
For some reason he was not allowed to stay in Saigon. They sent him a couple of hundred miles north, to Tay Ninh, where he had two weeks of arduous training in a secret camp, and was then assigned to this company, which moved around in the forests and mountains of the Central Highlands between Dak To and Pleiku.
He was supposedly the company’s translator, but they had never taken a prisoner. In fact, he had never seen a live American soldier, since he was not exactly a front-line rifleman. (His marksmanship training had consisted of twenty rounds fired with a rattly old bolt-action rifle, the Chinese Mauser that he carried now.)
He had never fired an AK-47 before. He clicked the selector switch to single-shot and stepped up to the first dead American. The shot was a flat sound, muffled, and the result was as horrible as he had expected. His boots were spattered with blood and brains. He wiped them off on the dead soldier’s tunic.
He had never seen a live American soldier but he had felt the fury of their weapons. His company specialized in harassment, hit and run, and what they ran through was often a hail of artillery and air support. A few months ago a napalm strike had blossomed only a few tens of meters away, close enough to singe his hair. He had been stung by small bits of shrapnel several times. None of his wounds had been serious, but he had no illusions. He was not going to survive this war.
He stepped up to the next body and swallowed bile.
He had no doubt that an American bullet or bomb would kill him, but he couldn’t hate the Americans. The ones he had met in San Francisco had been sometimes foolish, always friendly, never malicious. “Laid back,” as they said. He had seen the newspaper accounts of peace marches and draft-card burnings. He knew that most of the black and white men who lay strewn across this bloody clearing had been sent here against their will.
This time he didn’t close his eyes when he fired, and he didn’t bother to wipe his boots. They would just get dirty again.
This last action had been pure serendipity. A messenger returning from the headquarters bunker had seen the small American unit crossing the stream and knew they would probably come up the trail toward the company’s bivouac. He took the ridgeline trail and got to the bivouac an hour before them. The company set up two heavy machine guns in a cross-fire covering the clearing, along with riflemen and grenadiers. The Americans never stood a chance, evidently.
Han had not watched it. He stayed a couple of hundred meters away, by a bunker, along with two reserve squads and some supernumeraries, notably Lieutenant To, the unit’s political officer.
It had been obvious from the sound how one-sided the engagement was, and when the first men ran back with their accounts of how complete the butchery had been, Han showed more honesty than intelligence. He remarked to the medic how terrifying it must have been and what a horrible price was paid for even a complete victory such as this; they were just men like us, after all.
Lieutenant To overheard. He gave Han a quick loud tonguelashing and then switched rifles with him, and ordered him to do the cleanup. All the others would fall back to an assembly area a couple of kilometers away, to avoid the inevitable artillery and helicopters.
Where was the artillery? Maybe they hadn’t had time to call in. Third body.
As Han lowered the muzzle to this one, he started to rise up feebly, not quite dead. He jerked the trigger reflexively and the bullet blew the top of his skull and a mass of brains back into his helmet, which rocked back but remained attached by its chinstrap. Dying, the man threw his arms up as if in supplication. Han yelled at him furiously in Chinese, the first man he had ever killed. Until now there had been a chance he would never have to live with that.
He slumped, looking at his handiwork. He could just wait here for the artillery, for the gunships. But that would be suicide. One new sin per day was enough.
The next two he could skip. One was in a sitting position, slumped over staring at the cooling blue coils of entrails piled in his lap, on his hands, like a Japanese warrior contemplating the results of his pride. The other had no head to shoot.
A big black man, chest-shot, rigid, eyes open and filming, lips drawn back in a grimace. He shot him in the mouth for no reason.
A pair of legs with no body attached; that was a rarity, he supposed. There was a lot of bloodslick on the ground, and small bits of flesh, a length of vertebrae, most of a hand with a gold ring. It was as if the man had burst. Han reached toward the ring and pulled back, disgusted with himself.
Two together, one a medic killed while wrapping the other’s shattered arm. The medic had flopped over on his patient, flinging the gauze out in a stark white ribbon. The patient may have been slightly alive; he shuddered when the bullet shattered his forehead. The medic was firmly dead, two matching exit wounds in his back exposing lung tissue and ribs. He shot him in the back of the head anyway, leaving a relatively clean round hole.
Now three together, who had all died while operating, or trying to set up, a belt-fed machine gun. A fortuitous rifle grenade had landed close enough to destroy the weapon and kill all three men, boys. One must have been very handsome, in a movie-star way. His jaw had been blown off, or blown into his neck, but Han could block the gore off with his hand and see the perfect nose, the high cheekbones, the strange blue eyes and the pale hair. He had drawn a complex mandala on his helmet cover, ornate lettering spelling out “San Francisco Hippy.”
There was a faint squeaking sound. The boy was trying to breathe through his shattered jaw and throat.
“I’m sorry,” Han said in English, and killed him. He shot the other two quickly.
For a minute Han wiped his eyes and studied the clearing. Had he missed anybody? There, one over by the trees.
He walked toward the body. At first it looked as if he could skip this one, dead of a head wound, but on closer inspection he could see that the blood was superficial, from a cut on the forehead. He carefully set the muzzle on the center of the line that joined the man’s eyebrows, slightly higher—
When the hot muzzle touched his skin, his eyes opened wide. Han could read the terror there, and felt a moment of sympathy and self-loathing, but he pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. But there was plenty of ammunition. The AK-47 had jammed.
The boy’s eyes were closed again. He was waiting to die. Han had no idea how to clear the AK-47 and make it fire. He had little inclination to experiment.
He remembered a thing a beatnik poet had said to his audience in San Francisco, six summers before. He’d been amused because the poet had said it was an ancient Chinese curse, and Han had never heard of it.
He spoke it softly to the boy in nine flat syllables of bad English, and moved on. For the rest of his life, Spider would hear that phrase in his dreams, and never decipher it:
“May you live in interesting times.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS and DEDICATION
A lot of Vietnam veterans helped me with this book. Thanks to Bill Hutchinson and John Chambers for checking me out on ground combat memories; special thanks to Bob and Patience Mason for their expertise in helicopters and PTSD. Their books Chickenhawk and Recovering From the War were especially valuable.
There’s not much science fiction in this book, but I got a great deal of help from
the science fiction readers and writers on GEnie’s SF Bulletin Board, who saved me a lot of library footwork when I needed to know the color of the walls in Walter Reed in 1968 and how doughnuts are made. It’s pretty science-fictional to have a group mind of over a thousand brains just one modem call away.
And then there are two veterans whose names I never learned.
On the 4th of October, 1968, I was in the army hospital at Tuy Hoa, Republic of Vietnam, my first day on crutches after being confined for several weeks to bed and wheelchair with multiple bullet and fragment wounds.
The hospital was suddenly crowded to overflowing with injured Vietnamese civilians, mostly women and children. It had been Election Day, and the Viet Cong decided to demonstrate against the election by simultaneously attacking various polling places.
The hospital was a madhouse, a charnel house. Orders came down to transfer to other areas every American patient who could be moved. I hobbled aboard a crowded DC-3 borrowed from Air America, the CIA’s airline, and as I moved toward the rear I passed the man who would become the rough draft of Spider.
Most of the passengers were obviously wounded or ill, but this man was tanned, healthy-looking, smiling—and strapped down to a stretcher, confined within a straitjacket, staring, evidently Thorazined to the gills. Pinned to his straitjacket was a tag saying PARANOID SCHIZOPHRENIC. I sat down behind him and wondered about using him in a story—maybe you had to be crazy, to make sense of this crazy war. This crazy time.
Two years later, happily out of uniform, I was visiting patients in the neurological wing of Bay Pines VA Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida. There were some sad cases there, and no doubt some of them are still there, but the one who sticks in my mind is certainly dead by now. He was about ninety, the hospital’s only patient left over from the Spanish-American War. He was legless and blind. They said that for forty years he had done nothing but call out for his mother.
This book is for those two men, obviously, and for men and women everywhere who are trapped day and night, locked away in the dark prison of their memories of war.
A Biography of Joe Haldeman
Joe Haldeman is a renowned American science fiction author whose works are heavily influenced by his experiences serving in the Vietnam War and his subsequent readjustment to civilian life.
Haldeman was born on June 9, 1943, to Jack and Lorena Haldeman. His older brother was author Jack C. Haldeman II. Though born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Haldeman spent most of his youth in Anchorage, Alaska, and Bethesda, Maryland. He had a contented childhood, with a caring but distant father and a mother who devoted all her time and energy to both sons.
As a child, Haldeman was what might now be called a geek, happy at home with a pile of books and a jug of lemonade, earning money by telling stories and doing science experiments for the neighborhood kids. By the time he entered his teens, he had worked his way through numerous college books on chemistry and astronomy and had skimmed through the entire encyclopedia. He also owned a small reflecting telescope and spent most clear nights studying the stars and planets.
Fascinated by space, the young Haldeman wanted to be a “spaceman”—the term astronaut had not yet been coined—and carried this passion with him to the University of Maryland, from which he graduated in 1967 with a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy. By this time the United States was in the middle of the Vietnam War, and Haldeman was immediately drafted.
He spent one year in Vietnam as a combat engineer and earned a Purple Heart for severe wounds. Upon his return to the United States in 1969, during the thirty-day “compassionate leave” given to returning soldiers, Haldeman typed up his first two stories, written during a creative writing class in his last year of college, and sent them out to magazines. They both sold within weeks, and the second story was eventually adapted for an episode of The Twilight Zone. At this point, though, Haldeman was accepted into a graduate program in computer science at the University of Maryland. He spent one semester in school. He was also invited to attend the Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference—a rare honor for a novice writer.
In September of the same year, Haldeman wrote an outline and two chapters of War Year, a novel that would be based on the letters he had sent to his wife, Gay, from Vietnam. Two weeks later he had a major publishing contract. Mathematics was out of the picture for the near future.
Haldeman enrolled in the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he studied with luminary figures such as Vance Bourjaily, Raymond Carver, and Stanley Elkin, graduating in 1975 with a master of fine arts degree in creative writing. His most famous novel, The Forever War (1974), began as his MFA thesis and won him his first Hugo and Nebula Awards, as well as the Locus and Ditmar Awards.
Haldeman was now at his most productive, working on several projects at once. Arguably his largest-scale undertaking was the Worlds trilogy, consisting of Worlds (1981), Worlds Apart (1983), and Worlds Enough and Time (1992). Immediately before releasing the series’ last installment, however, Haldeman published his renowned novel The Hemingway Hoax (1990), which dealt with the experiences of combat soldiers in Vietnam. The novella version of the book won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, a feat that Haldeman repeated with the publication of his next novel, Forever Peace (1997), which also won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
In 1983 Haldeman accepted an adjunct professorship in the writing program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He taught every fall semester, preferring to be a full-time writer for the remainder of the year. While at MIT he wrote Forever Free, the final book in his now-famous Forever War trilogy.
Haldeman has since written or edited more than a half-dozen books, with a second succession of titles being published in the early 2000s, including The Coming (2000), Guardian (2002), Camouflage (2004)—for which he won his fourth Nebula—and The Old Twentieth (2005). He also released the Marsbound trilogy, publishing the namesake title in 2008 and quickly following it with Starbound (2010) and Earthbound (2011).
A lifetime member and past president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, Haldeman was selected as its Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master for 2010. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2012.
After publishing his novel Work Done for Hire and retiring from MIT in 2014, Haldeman now lives in Gainesville, Florida, and plans to continue writing a novel every couple of years.
The author and his brother, Jack, around the year 1948. The image is captioned “Stick ’em up or I’ll shoot. Woy Wogers and the Long Ranger.”
Haldeman in third grade, the year he discovered science fiction.
Haldeman’s mother, Lorena, and a bear cub in Alaska around the year 1950.
Joe and Gay Haldeman on their wedding day, August 21, 1965.
The author, with a cigarette, a beer, and a book, waits for a helicopter to arrive on the tarmac in Vietnam, July 1968.
A pamphlet with details on how to handle prisoners of war. Haldeman carried this with him in Vietnam.
The author in Vietnam, examining bullet holes on a US Army vehicle.
Haldeman and the actor Jimmy Stewart in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, 1968.
The author in Vietnam with a book and sandbags.
Joe and Gay Haldeman with their friend, prominent science fiction personality Rusty Hevelin (at right) in Alaska, 1993.
The author with his Questar telescope in 2004.
Janis Ian, Joe Haldeman, and Anne McCaffrey at the 2005 Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards weekend.
Honoring tradition, Haldeman wears the infamous tiara after winning the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for his novel Camouflage.
Celebrated science fiction author Harry Harrison (at left) and Haldeman dressed as pirates during the 2005 World Fantasy Convention in England.
Joe and Gay Haldeman enjoying the Valley of the Kings in Egypt during a trip to see a total solar eclipse in 2006.
The author outside St. Augustine
, Florida, on the first day of a cross-country bicycle trip with his wife in February 2013.
The author’s Hugo and Nebula Awards.
Joe and Gay Haldeman, 2013.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author᾿s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1995 by Joe Haldeman
Cover design by Michel Vrana
ISBN: 978-1-4976-9543-6
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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