“An interpreter!” Tom was startled. “Look, sir,” he said gently, “I don’t know what they told you about these civilian aid missions, but they ain’t exactly priority stuff. We’re lucky they wasted a jeep on us.”
David was in no mood to be patronized. “How many of these iron pills have you handed out?” he asked.
“Couple dozen cartons.”
“And Captain Morril didn’t worry about the dosage?”
“No, sir.”
“What kind of physician was he?”
“Kind?”
“What was he?” David asked sharply. “An internist, a GP, what? You must have known what he was.”
“I guess he was a surgeon.”
David wiped new drops of sweat off his forehead. “That figures. Well, Corporal … no matter what else we’re going to be doing out here, we’re not going to go around poisoning these people. We’re going to cut down the number of pills in each bottle.”
“They may not like that.” David noticed he didn’t say sir.
“Oh, really.”
“They’re used to getting whole bottles.”
“Corporal,” David said. “I’ll make a deal with you right now. It’ll make both our lives easier. I take care of the medicine, you take care of the driving. Fair enough?”
But the corporal was staring past David so intently that David turned to look himself. Two villagers had stepped onto the top of the rise from the opposite side of the road. When they saw the two Americans, they froze briefly, and then, bowing, quickened their pace as they hurried along to the rear of the line.
“How many pills?” Tom asked.
“What?” David said, confused.
“How many iron pills do you want in each bottle?” Tom was holding the rifle. David hadn’t seen him pick it up.
“About a quarter of what’s there.” David looked back at the two men, both still bowing as they stepped into line. “What just happened?” he asked.
“Nothin’, sir. It ain’t so good to surprise anyone over here, that’s all.”
They went to four villages that day. By noon, David was too weary even to talk. He knew he had let himself get out of shape during his internship and residency, but he hadn’t thought this much. The six weeks of basic should have helped but they didn’t. The muscles in his legs and shoulders were like jelly, and he could hardly breathe. He kept himself going by drinking from the canteens. The water offered little relief from the heat, but he drank it anyway, knowing if he didn’t, he’d never make it through the next hour, much less to the end of the day. He didn’t notice as he emptied one canteen, then the other, that Tom had stopped his own drinking. They left the last village a little after three. David, exhausted, sank into the seat, ignoring the hot plastic.
For the rest of the trip back, David fought to stay awake. Finally, ahead of them, miles away, they could see the 40th. It lay there, a tiny, square speck almost lost in the reflected glare of the plateau.
“Not much, is it?” But David didn’t know whether he thought it or said it.
Half an hour later, they drove back through the main gate. There were still no guards. The wooden tower near the wire was empty. The base reminded David of some outpost in an old Western movie. He couldn’t shake the feeling of amazement at being there. Perhaps he should have extended. Tom drove directly to the motor pool and stopped in front of the office.
“I’ll unload the gear,” Griffen said, getting out of the jeep.
David didn’t offer to help, nor did he go to the hospital; instead, he went straight to the officers’ quarters. The old air conditioner over the doorway was rattling away. As soon as he opened the door, the cool air wrapped itself around him. Like a newly pardoned man, he let out a long, relieved sigh, walked over to his cot, lay down, and for the first time since his internship, fell asleep with his clothes on.
Chapter 2
THE SUNLIGHT COMING THROUGH the shutters reached the far wall of the barracks. David quickly sat up and then, remembering where he was, relaxed again. Despite the air conditioner, he could feel the layer of warm air rising off the floor. He gave the strips of sunlight a bemused look.
“Well, another scorcher,” he mumbled under his breath, mimicking Griffen’s drawl. “Damn,” he said, realizing he’d fallen asleep in his fatigues. He looked at his watch. Seven o’clock. The barracks was empty. He lay back again on the pillow and stared up at the unpainted rafters. This wasn’t going to be as easy as he’d thought, but what was. Anything new was always confusing. There hadn’t been one subject, a single course or clinical rotation that hadn’t been difficult at first. It took time to know what to do, to get a rhythm going. You just had to stay with it and things would fall into place.
The mess hall was four buildings down from the officers’ quarters. There were no curbs or sidewalks, just a wide graded space between two lines of buildings, though it would pass for a street at least, he assumed, till the rainy season.
The officers were all in the officers’ mess, a small alcove off the main mess hall. Sergeant Bradford and a couple of other senior NCOs were still in the main area finishing their coffee. David nodded as they gestured hello. He walked over to the food line as Colonel Cramer came out of the officers’ area carrying a coffee pitcher.
“Ah,” he said cheerfully, “awake.” His crew cut and horn-rimmed glasses made him look like a junior executive out of the 1950s.
“Well, up, anyway,” David answered.
“A beginning,” Cramer said lightly. “Well, get some silverware. They’ll fry you eggs … how do you like them?”
John Plunkett, the other general medical officer at the 40th, was at the table. A pleasant-looking fellow with an easygoing Midwestern manner, he had been drafted right after his internship and planned, after he went back and finished his training, to open an office in a rural part of Minnesota or Iowa. As far as David could tell from the time they’d spent together the day before, Plunkett bore no ill will toward the Army for having drafted him out of his house staff training. Herb Tyler, the dispensary dermatologist, was sitting across from Plunkett, while Major Thorpe, regular Army and the base commander, sat at the head of the table next to Lieutenant Brown, who doubled as the medical service corps officer, helping out with the hospital, and the officer in charge of the base personnel. It was the same seating arrangement as at lunch the day before. Cramer made room for David on his right and poured him some coffee.
“How did it go?” Thorpe asked.
“Go?”
“You passed out last night,” Plunkett said. “We had a big first-night-back-from-the-boonies party set to go, but you never showed up.”
“Show up,” David answered good-naturedly. “I was lucky I was able to make it to the barracks.” Plunkett laughed.
“They all say that,” Cramer said. He handed David the sugar and cream.
“You get used to the heat,” Thorpe said.
“Acclimated,” Tyler corrected from across the table. “You never get used to it.”
Cramer glanced at him, but Tyler had gone back to his eggs. David had met all the doctors and officers the day before. Tyler had been the least friendly. He was a short, round man, no more than five feet four, with large myopic eyes that never seemed to blink. He wore wire-rimmed Army glasses with thick lenses that magnified his stare, giving the impression that he was peering at you rather than just looking at you. The heat at the 40th had worked on him as it had everyone else, but instead of slimming him down it had dried him out, giving him the overall aspect of a dehydrated, if somewhat morose, Buddha.
“First week is always the hardest,” Cramer went on. “All the travel, the confusion at the 90th, and,” he added, an obvious concession to David’s comment, “the heat. Takes awhile for things to settle into place.”
“Your driver helpful?” Thorpe asked. The major was an artillery officer and, according to Sergeant Bradford, a tough but fair commander. The day before, Cramer had mentioned with some pride that this was Tho
rpe’s second tour.
“Helpful but not very talkative.” David, not hungry, picked at his eggs.
“He should be helpful,” Thorpe said. “He was an LRRP in the Delta—long-range reconnaissance and patrol.”
“Ambushed the bastards,” Tyler said. “Spread fear and terror among the enemy, things like that.”
Thorpe was about to say something but Cramer interrupted. “Anything you need?”
“I’d like to be able to hand out smaller numbers of iron pills. All we have are the three-hundred-fifty-milligram iron sulfate tablets. I don’t want to be treating iron poisoning the next time around.”
“Good idea. Rick,” Cramer said to Lieutenant Brown, “after Captain Seaver’s finished breakfast, why don’t you take him over to the pharmacy. Lieutenant Brown will get you whatever you want. Anything else?”
“Yeah, an air conditioner for the jeep.”
They all laughed.
As he and the lieutenant walked down the street, they kicked up little clouds of fine red dust that hung motionless in the air. There was no breeze, and the sun, as it had the day before, bore down from a cloudless sky. The buildings were all prefabricated plywood with wooden or steel roofs. They were painted Army green and every one was sandbagged up to the windows. A few of the larger Quonset huts had sandbags on their roofs. There were no frills here, no waste. The buildings, like the earth itself, had a grim sparseness. They passed a few enlisted men with M-16s who nodded rather than saluted.
The door to the pharmacy was open. Except for moving the air around, the two large fans inside did little to cool the building. The lieutenant introduced David to the sergeant in charge, Parker.
“Yes, sir,” the sergeant answered when David told him what he wanted. “Corporal Griffen was in about just that last night.”
“He was?” David said.
“Yes, sir. He explained the problem; said you’d rather lower the dosage of the pills than hand out a smaller number, so I made up twenty-fives instead of the usual three-hundred-fifty-milligram capsules. That’s all right, isn’t it, sir.” It wasn’t a question.
“Why sure, yes. That should do it.”
“Anything else?” the sergeant asked.
“No …” David answered. “Not right now anyway.”
He and the lieutenant walked back outside. “Efficient, isn’t he?”
“Griffen?”
“Apparently,” David answered. “And Captain Morril.”
“Oh, Captain Morril liked him. In fact, the rumors were he wouldn’t go out on the med caps unless Major Thorpe assigned Corporal Griffen as the driver.”
“And Major Thorpe agreed?” David asked. He had learned enough about the Army to know captains didn’t tell majors what to do.
The lieutenant hesitated. “Well, Captain Morril had a way of doing the things he wanted.”
“What happened to him?”
“The captain went back to the States.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Five weeks.”
“Who did the med caps till I got here?”
“Did them?” the lieutenant asked. “Why, no one.”
David stopped.
“We hadn’t been doing it all that long,” Brown explained. “Colonel Cramer thought it would be best to wait for you than to start shifting duties around and then have to shift back again.”
“And what would have happened if I hadn’t been assigned here, if there hadn’t been a replacement?”
“Oh,” the lieutenant answered noncommittally, “someone would have done it. These civilian programs come right down from military command in Saigon, MACV.” It wasn’t an answer, but David didn’t push it.
David left the lieutenant at the headquarters building and went back to the officers’ headquarters. He made his bed, organized his gear, and with nothing else to do, went back to the hospital.
Morning sick call was over. Cramer was in his office at the back of the small dispensary, cleaning up some paperwork.
“Get that iron thing settled?” he asked.
“It was settled for me,” David said dryly.
The atmosphere of easy goodwill that Cramer tried to exude diminished slightly.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” David said, seeing Cramer’s response. “I guess our Corporal Griffen’s just a little more efficient than I expected.”
Cramer relaxed and leaned back in his chair. “We have good people here. Hell, we have good people all over Southeast Asia. In fact,” he added with equal seriousness, “all through the military.”
Cramer stared at him as if expecting some kind of wisecrack. When David didn’t say anything, Cramer regained some of his good humor.
“I don’t know what you may have heard about Vietnam,” he said, obviously comfortable again, “but I can tell you this—we’re winning. Granted, it looks like a lot of little pieces, but the whole thing’s controlled, monitored. All you have to do is look at the reports to see how well we’re doing. I’ve been to Saigon. It’s amazing how they keep track of everything, fit it all together. MACV has the biggest computers made—IBM and Sperry Rand, dozens of them. I tell you,” Cramer said, warming to the topic, “it’s amazing. Those generals can find out in an instant exactly what’s going on anywhere in Vietnam … anywhere! They even know the number of bullets fired per month. The facts put the doomsayers to shame. We’ll be out in a year, two at the most. All everyone has to do is his own job. If everyone just does his own job, the whole thing’s guaranteed to work.”
After lunch, David walked around the base. He hadn’t noticed the day before, but half the supply buildings were boarded up. In the middle of the base, encircled by an open cyclone fence, were four concrete huts with steel doors. Open padlocks hung from the doors. On the fence was a hand-painted sign: ARMAMENTS AND AMMUNITION. The motor pool, nothing but an open field next to the munition supply, lined by stacks of fifty-five-gallon drums of gasoline and oil, was empty except for a few jeeps and two armored personnel carriers. Like everything else, the drums and vehicles were covered with a thin layer of red dust. The enlisted men’s barracks were behind the motor pool, a group of long, narrow buildings connected by a raised wooden walkway. The sound of Jimi Hendrix drifted across the open ground of the motor pool. In Texas, it had been country music. No Beatles or Brahms in this army. No wonder he didn’t know anyone who was in the military.
The helipad lay along the western end of the base, two hundred yards from the motor pool. David walked down the asphalt path past the communications building to the landing area. The path merged with the asphalt apron at the edge of the helipad, the remainder of the landing field nothing more than hard-packed earth. All that separated the 40th from the miles of surrounding countryside was a half-inch of graded dirt.
As he turned away, David noticed on a small platform at the edge of the pad out near the wire a flag drooping in the stagnant air. There was no radar, no wind indicators. So much for the technology and wonders of the modern age, he thought.
Early the next morning the corporal was in the jeep waiting as David emerged from the mess hall. He did not mention the iron pills until they were well out in the flats.
“Yes, sir,” Griffen answered. “I was in the pharmacy so I figured I might as well get the iron pill thing out of the way.”
“Don’t get the wrong idea,” David said, making sure he didn’t sound too harsh. “I’m not complaining, but I would like to know in advance before you make any changes that affect the medical aspects of these missions.”
Tom continued to watch the road.
“It’ll make things easier for both of us.”
“Yes, sir.”
David, not wanting to face a second day of one-word answers, decided to give a little. “You did use your head, though,” he admitted. “Cutting down dosages is as good as decreasing the number of pills. It’s never a good idea,” he said with some effort at humor, “to leave patients sicker than you find them.”
“Yes, sir,” Tom
answered flatly, ignoring David’s attempt at goodwill, “but I wasn’t thinkin’ of them gooks.”
“Oh.”
“I was thinkin’ of us. It ain’t gonna help any if one of ’em dies and they get it into their heads—or someone puts it there—that we poisoned ’em.”
For a moment—but only a moment—David thought he might be joking.
Chapter 3
THEY WENT OUT EVERY other day after that. The searing heat never diminished. There was no place to hide from it. Out in the open, the earth reflected back the heat, mixing with the sunlight so that moving through the flats was like crossing a great blast furnace. The air itself was so suffocating that moving into the shade made almost no difference. Indeed, it was only when they moved back out into the sunlight again that David could sense the little relief the shade had offered. The dust, though, remained the same; all that changed were the lengths of the trips and the sizes of the villages. The villagers, too, remained the same. The old, wrinkled and bent; the women shuffling along; the children staring back with blank expressions.
Tom never talked about the Vietnamese. But he watched them. More than once as they handed out the pills David caught Tom glancing up at a group of villagers who’d stayed out in the fields, or at a man or woman who didn’t get into line quickly enough. More than once when David thought they were finished and ready to pack up, Tom would tell him to wait. A few moments later a villager would materialize out of a nearby gulley or appear at the doorway of what David had thought was an empty hut.
Tom remained detached but polite. He’d answer any of David’s questions, but the answers were always so to the point that they’d stop any further discussion. He’d make little comments, giving out scraps of information: “The 40th ain’t so bad; it can put out a lot of firepower, and with support bases, air strikes are only minutes away.” Or “Vitamins ain’t no good for nothin’. The gooks like sulfa the best, probably sell ’em on the black market or give ’em to the VC to keep ’em friendly.” But he never embellished or pursued an issue, nor did he ever start a conversation. Back at the base, he never sought David out. Despite their long hours together, he acted as if each trip was their first, content, it seemed, as he had been from the beginning, just to drive the jeep and watch the road, hidden behind his sunglasses.
Another War, Another Peace Page 2