David climbed off the table. Everything hurt.
“Would you like something to help you sleep?” Tyler asked.
“You mean a little Thorazine and when I wake up everything will be okay?”
“No,” Tyler said, “I don’t mean that at all, but you could use some sleep.”
“I’ll lie down, but I got a few things to do first.”
Tyler motioned Plunkett to let him go.
The enlisted barracks was almost empty. Most of the troopers were at lunch. The few who were there looked up as he walked in.
Tom’s bunk was perfectly made, the blanket pulled tight at the corners. David opened Tom’s locker, took out his wallet and a neatly wrapped packet of letters. He was about to close the locker when he saw the dictionary. He stared at it a moment and then reached inside and took it out. There were pieces of paper sticking out from the pages.
The armory was unlocked. David walked down the wooden walkway to the back, where the ammunition was stored. He found the crate stenciled M-79 ammunition, took out two shotgun rounds, put them into his pockets, and then walked back to his own barracks.
Tyler didn’t have to tell him how tired he was, but he wanted to get everything done before he collapsed. He put the shells with the letters and wallet in his locker, hid the launcher under the bed, set the alarm and lay down. He fell asleep holding the dictionary.
David didn’t dream. One moment he was asleep and the next, with the first sound of the alarm clock, he was awake. It was still dark, but through the edges of the curtains he could see the sky lightening. He got up and managed, despite the pain, to dress and leave the barracks without making any noise. Outside, the heavy morning air swirled the mists that covered the open ground between the buildings.
As David passed the mess hall, Tyler stepped out of the doorway. “No breakfast?” he asked.
“I’m going to gas up a jeep. Then I’ll come back and get some coffee.”
“Feel strong enough to go back out?”
“I slept okay.”
“The med caps have been canceled, David, at least until we find out what’s going on.”
“I’m not going to visit any villages.”
“You look in the mirror this morning? I don’t know what you’re running on, but whatever it is, there isn’t much left.”
“I said I feel okay.”
“No one knows what’s happening out there.”
“It’ll only be for a couple of hours. I’ll be back by noon.”
“Sorry, we can’t risk it.”
“Thirty minutes out there is all I’ll need.”
“No one’s going to let you go out alone, and after yesterday Thorpe’s not about to let any personnel off the base. I’m not kidding, David. Not for any reason!”
“Look, Herb,” David said. “I should have stayed out there and looked. I’m not going to make a big search of it. He came here in one piece. The least we can do is send him home the same way. I want all of him buried together. It isn’t a hell of a lot to ask.”
“I’m sorry, David,” Tyler said. “There’s no time to go back. You’re shipping out this morning.”
David thought he hadn’t heard right.
“They need another internist at the 70th, and you could use the rest. If you hadn’t fallen asleep last night, I’d have sent you out then. The chopper’s coming at o-seven hundred.” Tyler looked at his watch. “Better get your gear together. You have less than an hour.”
David didn’t know what to say, but he knew what he had to do.
“You don’t understand,” David said. “A few minutes is all I need. It’ll be simple to look now. If I wait—I mean what happens if it starts raining, it’ll be hopeless.”
“David,” Tyler said, “it’s not going to rain for a while, and this is only going to be for a couple of days.”
“A couple of days!”
“We all know how you feel, David. I saw him, too. But you’ll be back before the end of the week. If you want to go out then and look … okay. But believe me, you don’t have to. No one but us will ever know what happened to him.”
David left Tyler standing in the doorway and walked to the motor pool. As he turned the corner of the headquarters building, he saw that the gate to the motor pool was closed. He didn’t have to walk over. He knew it would be locked. A sense of desperation gripped him. He had to go back. If he didn’t, it would never really be over. It might be enough to try, but he wasn’t even able to do that. Part of both of them would always be there now. There would be no way to forget. For someone who thought he was smart, he’d been real dumb.
David broke down the launcher and put it in his duffel bag, tucking it in under his clothes along with the grenades and shotgun rounds. He put the Stedman’s on top of his clothes and, leaving the duffel in the barracks, went to the freezer in the rear of the supply building.
He opened the large steel door and stepped inside. The door closed automatically behind him. A single unshielded bulb lit the frosted shelves. David walked down the aisle. They had put the body in the back on the bottom shelf. The cold began to stiffen his fingers.
He had come to say good-bye, but in the cold, he realized there were to be no farewells. What you needed to say your good-bye was time, and that was gone. How blind he’d been. They had been all alone, only the two of them out in the middle of nowhere, a fake radio, pretending nothing could happen.
Tom would have had a better chance, David thought, if he’d stayed in the Delta. There’d have been plasma there, medics, a real radio. They both would have had a better chance.
There was a tag attached to the body bag. David, with an aimless gesture, turned it over. Printed on the surface in block letters were the words REMAINS NONVIEWABLE. SO that was what Tyler had meant about no one else knowing. David continued to stare at the tag. How many of these were printed, he wondered; ten thousand, fifty thousand, a million? At least someone knew enough to think ahead. He let the tag drop and looked at the body.
“We should have burned the tires,” he said. “You could have seen the smoke out on the flats for miles. Someone would have come. I could have stayed then. But you knew that, didn’t you …”
David stayed with Tom until the cold drove him out.
Tyler was out at the helipad. “Got all your gear?” he yelled over the noise of the chopper.
“All I need, anyway.”
“I hope you won’t mind,” Tyler said as he moved closer, cupping his hands over his mouth so David could hear, “but I wrote Tom’s parents last night …”
David nodded.
“Well, take care … see you in a few days.”
The crew chief in the doorway took David’s duffel and then, reaching down, helped him climb on board. The sound of the engine rose in pitch.
The chopper lifted off the pad and rotated slowly about its axis. In a single moment all of the 40th swung past. David remembered his first impression, that it wasn’t much of a base. Then, with a surge of power, the chopper lifted off the pad. Within minutes they were out over the plateau.
The door gunner pulled the machine gun away from its wall mounting, pointed it out the hatchway and cleared the chamber with two short bursts.
David sat back on the seat and watched the flats pass under them as he thought about everything that had happened. From that height the plateau, with its muted mixture of browns and greens, looked tranquil, almost innocent, and yet this land had tried to kill him twice, and had murdered … My God, David thought, leaning his head wearily against one of the door struts, had it only been four months?
David felt a tapping on his shoulder. The crew chief leaned close and pointed down toward a tree line. The trees had been burned. In the middle of the grove were the charred remains of three tanks. “Russian tanks!” he yelled over the din of the engine, and then, leaning forward, gave David a quizzical look. David turned and looked in the direction of the 40th and kept looking for a long time.
The 70th
&n
bsp; Chapter 31
THE CHOPPER LANDED AT the 70th, and for David it was as if he had been transported into another world. Boots were shined. Fatigue sleeves were all rolled to the regulation three inches above the elbow and everyone saluted everyone else.
In utter amazement he walked past the huge commissaries, down streets lined with bowling alleys and penny arcades. He stopped and looked into barber shops and pizza parlors where civilians and soldiers alike laughed and joked. Air Force and Army colonels and generals were everywhere. They walked around together like businessmen at a convention. There were billboards and advertisements tacked to lampposts. David stopped and with a mixture of bitterness and amusement read a sign in front of one of the beer halls announcing the arrival for a one-week engagement at the 70th of the Blue Bells, a country-and-western singing group “straight from Alabama.” There seemed to be almost as many women as men at the 70th: nurses, WACs, stewardesses from the commercial planes using the base, and USO tours. He stood in the center of one of the side streets and gawked at two blondes who walked past in nothing but shorts and halter tops.
Everywhere there was a sense of confidence. The air was filled with the roar of fighter bombers as they took off from the Air Force base that occupied the whole northern end of the 70th. The hospital was next to the main airstrip, separated from the rest of the 70th by the motor pool. Twice a day, on his way to and from the hospital, David would walk past the acres of trucks and armored personnel carriers, the hundreds of tanks and self-propelled weapons. The 70th was not only the personnel center for central Vietnam but the supply depot for all of II Corps.
Whoever had cut his orders at the 40th had made them so vague that no one at the hospital knew what to do with him except assign him to the general medical clinics. The truth was that his orders had been written virtually to guarantee him a holiday. He could have done as he pleased, losing himself at the officers’ club, in the beer halls, at the movies, swimming, loafing around in the bachelor officers’ billet or finding a woman. But he didn’t want to do any of those things, so to the surprise of the hospital adjutant and his new colleagues in the dispensary, he took his assignment seriously and showed up each day for the clinics and even agreed to take night call.
The doctors were all pleasant enough. At first there had been questions about his cut face and taped ribs, which David dismissed by saying he’d had an accident. And a few of the physicians his own age had asked about what it was like to be out in the boonies. But neither issue was ever pursued. Inevitably the talk would turn to home, the next R and R, or the stewardesses and nurses at the 70th.
The majority of doctors saw their time at the 70th as a job. David didn’t blame them. The hospital was huge, with everything from arterial bypass grafts to retinal surgery being performed. It was the largest evac hospital in Nam, and its size and complexity, like that of the base itself, made the war seem very far away. The patients who arrived at the helipad were taken immediately into triage, where they were evaluated, and from there into the stabilization room or surgery. It was like any major trauma center in the States, and, indeed, the physicians acted as if they were dealing with patients pulled in off some nearby freeway or intersection down the block.
But at night, David noticed, things changed. As soon as it started to get dark, heavily armed gunships took off from the airfield and began to patrol the perimeter of the base. Star shells, too, would be fired at fifteen-minute intervals, lighting the sky with a metallic glow so unearthly that no one acted or talked as confidently as during the day. It was then that some of the physicians sitting around in the clinic or on the wards would voice their concerns about the possibility of being transferred out of the 70th. David listened, wondering if their optimism and cheerfulness during the day were nothing more than a strategy to keep from being labeled as malcontents and running the risk of reassignment.
The main hospital buildings lay right up against the northeast perimeter of the base. Each time David arrived, he would stop at the hospital gate and look out over the fence and coils of razor wire past the rows of claymores to the patchwork of paddies and hedgerows a quarter-mile beyond the perimeter. The second day, walking back to the hospital with one of the surgeons, he paused.
“You know,” David said, looking at the wire, “putting the hospital out here wasn’t so smart.” He pointed to the tree line. “If an attack comes from out there, there’s nothing to stop ’em. They could use the broken ground from that tree line to get through the claymores. At night with all the shadows, there’d be enough cover, star shells or not, to get right to the fence, and then a few snips with a wirecutter and they’re into the hospital. Be hard to contain them in here, and once in the hospital compound it’s a short run to the choppers and flight line.”
“Oh,” the surgeon said, mistaking David’s comments for worry. “I wouldn’t be concerned. They might as well try to hit Saigon as the 70th.”
“But in Saigon,” David said dryly, “they wouldn’t have to move patients.” He nodded toward the orthopedic ward, the back door only a dozen meters from the fence. “There’ll be no time to get out the patients in traction. They’ll be killed in their beds.”
“That’s a little morbid, isn’t it?”
David, incredulous, stared at the surgeon. “For who?” he asked. “You or the kids pinned to their beds?”
On his fourth day, a little after noon, he was leaving through the back door of the dispensary when he saw, a quarter-mile past the wire, a group of Vietnamese traveling cross-country. He couldn’t see them clearly, but he was sure they were all men.
He sat on the back steps and waited. Half an hour later he saw what he was looking for—another group out beyond the tree line. He didn’t go to lunch. An hour later a third group appeared along the horizon.
There were dozens of aircraft and choppers taking off and coming into the 70th every hour. Someone had to have seen the Vietnamese, maybe even have checked them out. He was not going to waste his time explaining to anyone, but he wasn’t going to ignore it either. He didn’t intend to make the same mistake twice.
Whatever happened, it wouldn’t be during the day. Dawn or dusk, that was what Tom had said and that was when it would be.
In the evening David waited until he was alone in the barracks, went to his locker and took out his duffel. Sitting on his bed, he removed the Stedman’s, unpacked the launcher and assembled the parts. He loaded it with a grenade and taped a shotgun and second grenade round to the stock, and then he sat there, staring at the dictionary. Finally he picked it up and, holding it gently for a moment, being sure not to loosen the paper markers, put it back in the duffel. He quickly wrapped the launcher in a towel and, leaving the barracks, went back to the hospital, where he hid it under the steps of the dispensary building. Any attack would take time to reach the barracks. He’d be able to get away from there. The hospital was the dangerous place.
In the end it was the silence that saved him. He was taking night call and was in the surgical wing of the dispensary building helping one of the surgeons sew up a trooper who’d cut his leg in a fall when he held up his hand, stopping the surgeon from putting in the next suture, motioning everyone to stay quiet.
David walked softly to the window, which had been left open to let in the cooler evening air. The crickets had stopped chirping. There wasn’t a sound. No one in the room moved. It was as if they, too, had suddenly sensed the danger. A moment later he heard a faint metallic click.
“Get down!” he yelled and started running for the door as the side wall of the clinic blew. The blast hurled him forward. A second explosion caved in the back wall, sending splinters of wood and steel ricocheting down the length of the ward. The force of the second blast threw David through the screen door. Outside, bluish-green tracers skipped and skidded through the morning darkness.
As he scrambled to his feet, a series of explosions like tiny flares went off, lighting up the perimeter. With the explosions, the noise of the automatic fire r
ose in intensity, the tracer rounds growing so thick they caused the mist to glow. A hundred yards away a great geyser of flame shot up into the air as the OR exploded. The flames lit the compound. All up and down the perimeter he could see figures moving in through the wire.
A rocket roared past. David threw himself down as it crashed into what was left of the clinic. The heat from the blast seared the back of his neck, and for a second or two he couldn’t hear anything, but he could see that the firing had increased and was now coming from the whole perimeter. He crawled quickly back to the steps. Dragging out the launcher, he moved away from what remained of the dispensary. There were more explosions. As the buildings behind the clinic burst into flames, people began to scream. David was preparing himself to move across the open space to the shelter of the ortho building when a mortar round exploded only a dozen yards away. He pressed himself flat waiting for the next round when a star shell exploded, lighting up the compound.
Everything came into instant relief as the compound and perimeter became flooded with the eerie silvered light. The shell started to drift downward as two half-naked troopers, one carrying a rifle, were caught in its glare. David lay motionless as the troopers hurried to the corner of the ortho building for cover. Another mortar round hit near the building. Both the troopers stopped, silhouetted against the wall.
As he began to crawl forward, a string of tracers ripped through the air so close that he pressed himself flat again. When he looked up, the corner of the orthopedic ward and the two troopers were gone. There were new screams from inside the building. David looked behind himself to his right. In the fading glow of the star shell, three figures, no more than thirty meters away, crouching as they moved forward, stepped out of the smoke and mist. Another rocket shot overhead, but David kept his eyes on the men. The three figures kept moving closer, picking their way carefully across the cluttered ground.
Still watching, David started to move. As soon as he did, one of the figures suddenly dropped to one knee and shrugged a satchel charge from his shoulder. The figure next to him stood still. David froze. A round hit the ground a few feet in front of him. He fought the impulse to get up and run. He knew as surely as he’d ever known anything that one of them had seen him move. The certainty that they’d kill him the moment he moved again and the knowledge of what he had to do were strangely calming. He had the edge. The flames and shadows had confused them. They weren’t sure. Tom’s warning came back to him. “You’ve got to stop everything and get them first.”
Another War, Another Peace Page 15