Donny hit reception with his sea bag, to arrange temporary quarters for the night and the soonest chopper hop back to Dodge City.
He felt .. . good. A week on Maui with Julie. Oh, Christ, who wouldn't feel good? Could it have been any better? Swagger had slipped him an envelope as he'd choppered out after debriefing, and he'd been stunned to discover a thousand dollars cash, with instructions to bring none of it back. Why would Swagger do such a thing? It was so generous, so spontaneous--just a strange-ass way of doing things.
It was--well, a young man back from the war with his beautiful young wife, in the paradise of Hawaii, under a hot and purifying sun, flush with money and possibility and so short he could finally, after three years and nine months and days, see the end. See it.
/ made it.
I'm out.
She said, "It's almost too cruel. We could have this and then you could get killed."
"No. That's not how it works. The NVA fights twice a year, in the spring and fall. They fought their big spring offensive, and now they're all stuck up in a siege around An Loc City, fighting the ARVN way down near Saigon.
We're out of it. Nothing will happen in our little area.
We're home free. It's just a question of getting through the boredom, I swear to you."
"I don't think I could stand it."
"There's nothing to worry about."
"You sound like the guy in the war movie who always gets killed."
"They don't make war movies anymore," he said.
"Nobody cares about war movies."
Then they made love again, for what seemed like the 28,000th time. He found new plateaus from which to observe her, new angles into her, new sensations, tastes and ecstacies.
"It doesn't get much better than this," he finally said.
"God, Hawaii. We'll come back here on our fiftieth anni ver--" "No!" she said suddenly, as sweaty as he and just as flushed.
"Don't say that. It's bad luck."
"Sweetie, I don't need luck. I have Bob Lee Swagger on my side. He is luck itself."
That was then, this was now, and Donny stood at the bank of fluorescent-lit desks in a big green room that was reception until a buck sergeant finally noticed him, put down the phone and gestured him to the desk.
Donny sat, handed over his documents.
"Hi, I'm Fenn, 2-5-Hotel, back from R&R on sked.
Here's my paperwork. I need a billet for the night and then a jump out to Dodge City on the 0600."
"Fenn?" said the sergeant, looking at the order.
"All right, let me just check it out, looks okay. You're one of the guys in the Kham Due?"
He entered Donny's return in the logbook, stamped the orders, adroitly forged his captain's signature and slipped them back to Donny, all in a single motion.
"Yeah, that was me. My NCO pulled in some favors and got me R&R'd out for ten days."
"You've been nominated for the Navy Cross."
"Jesus."
"You won't get it, though. They're not giving out big medals anymore."
"Well, I really don't care."
"They'll probably buck it down to a Star."
"I have a Star."
"No, a Silver."
"Wow!"
"Hero. Too bad it don't count for shit back in the world. In the old days, you could have been a movie star."
"I just want to make it back in one piece. I can pay to see movies. That's as close to movies as I want to get."
"Well, then, I have good news for you, Fenn. You got new orders. Your transfer came through."
Donny thought he misunderstood.
"What? I mean, there must be--What do you mean, transfer? I didn't ask for a transfer. I don't see what--" "Here it is, Fenn. Your orders were cut three days ago.
You been dumped in 1-3-Charlie, and assigned to battalion S-3. That's us, here in Da Nang, we're the administrative battalion for what's left of Marine presence. My guess is, you'll be running a PT program here in Da Nang for a couple of months before you DEROS out on the big freedom bird. Your days in the bush are over. Congratulations, grunt. You made it, unless you get hit by a truck on the way to the slop chute."
"No, see, I don't--" "You go on over to battalion, check in with the duty NCO and he'll get you squared away, show you your new quarters. You're in luck. You won't believe this. We closed down our barracks and moved into some the Air Force vacated, 'cause they were closer to the airstrip. Air-conditioning, Fenn. Air-conditioning!"
Donny just looked at him, as if the comment made no sense.
"Fenn, this is a milk run. You got it made in the shade.
It's a number-one job. You'll be working for Gunny Bannister, a good man. Enjoy."
"I don't want a transfer," Donny said.
The sergeant looked up at him. He was a mild, patient man, sandy blond hair, professional-bureaucrat type of REMF, the sort of sandy-dry man who always makes the machine work cleanly.
He smiled dryly.
"Fenn," he explained, "the Marine Corps really doesn't care if you want a transfer or not. In its infinite military wisdom, it has decreed that you will teach a PT class to lard-ass rear-echelon motherfuckers like me until you go home. You won't even see any more Vietnamese.
You will sleep in an air-conditioned building, take a shower twice a day, wear your tropicals pressed, salute every shit bird officer that walks no matter how stupid, not work very hard, stay very drunk or high and have an excellent time. You'll take beaucoup three-day weekends at China Beach. Those are your orders. They are better orders than some poor grunt's stuck out on the DMZ or Hill 553, but they are your orders, nevertheless, and that is the name of that tune. Clear, Fenn?"
Donny took a deep breath.
"Where does this come from?"
"It comes straight from the top. Your CO and your NCOIC signed off on it."
"No, who started it? Come on, I have to know."
The sergeant looked at him.
"I have to know. I was Sierra-Bravo-Four. Sniper team. I don't want to lose that job. It's the best job there is."
"Son, any job the Marine Corps gives you is the best job."
"But you could find out? You could check. You could see where it comes from. I mean, it is unusual that a guy with bush time left suddenly gets rotated out of his firebase slot and stowed in some make-work pussy job, isn't it, Sergeant?"
The sergeant sighed deeply, then picked up the phone.
He schmoozed with whomever was on the other end of the line, waited a bit, schmoozed some more, and finally nodded, thanked his co-conspirator and hung up.
"Swagger, that's your NCO?"
"Yes."
"Swagger choppered in here last week and went to see the CO. Not battalion but higher, the FMF PAC CO, the man with three stars on his collar. Your orders were cut the next day. He wants you out of there. Swagger don't want you humping the bush with him no more."
Donny checked in with the PFC on duty at 1-3-Charlie, got a bunk and a locker in the old Air Force barracks, which were more like a college dormitory, and spent an hour getting stowed away. Looking out the window, he could not see a single palm tree: just an ocean of tarmac, buildings, offices. It could have been Henderson Hall, back in Arlington, or Cameron Station, the multi service PX out at Bailey's Crossroads. No yellow people could be seen: just Americans doing their jobs.
Then he went to storage to pick up his stowed 782 gear and boonie duds, and lugged the sea bag to supply to return it, but learned supply was already closed for the day, so he lugged the stuff back to his locker. He checked back in at company headquarters to meet his new gunny and the CO, neither man could be found--both had gone back to quarters early. He went by the S-3 office--operations and training--to look for Bannister, the PT NCO, and found that office locked too, and Bannister long since retreated to the staff NCO club. He went back to the barracks, where some other kids were getting ready to go to the movies--Patton, already two years old, was the picture--and then to the
1-2-
3 Club for a night of dowsing their sorrows in cheap PX Budweiser. They seemed like nice young guys and they clearly knew who Donny was and were hungry to get close to him, but he said no, for reasons he himself did not quite understand.
He was tired. He climbed into the rack early, pulling clean, newly issued sheets around him, feeling the springiness of the cot beneath. The air conditioner churned with a low hum, pumping out gallons of dry, cold air. Donny shivered, pulled the sheets closer about him.
There were no alerts that night, no incoming. There hadn't been incoming in months. At 0100 he was awakened by the drunken kids returning from the 1-2-3 Club.
But when he stirred, they quieted down fast.
Donny lay in the dark as the others slipped in, listening to the roar of the air conditioner.
I have it made, he told himself.
/ am out of here.
I am the original DEROS kid.
I am made in the shade, I am the milk-run boy.
He dreamed of Pima County, of Julie, of an ordered, becalmed and rational life. He dreamed of love and duty.
He dreamed of sex, he dreamed of children and the good life all Americans have an absolute right to if they work hard enough for it.
At O-dark-30, he arose quietly, showered in. the dark, pulled on his bush utilities and gathered up his 782 gear and headed out to the chopper strip. It was a long walk in the predawn. Above him, mute piles and piles of stars were humped up tall and deep like a mountain range.
Now and then, from somewhere in this dark land, came the far-off, artificial sound of gunfire. Once some flares lit the horizon. Somewhere something exploded.
The choppers were warming up. He ducked into the Operations shack, chatted with another lance corporal, then jogged to the Marine-green Huey, its rotors already whirring on the tarmac. He leaned in, and the crew chief looked at him.
"This is Whiskey-Romeo-Fourteen?"
"That's us."
"You're the bus to Dodge City?"
"Yeah. You're Fenn, right? We took you outta here two weeks back. Great job at Kham Due, Fenn."
"Can you hump me back to the City? It's time to go home."
"Climb aboard, son. We are homeward bound."
CHAPTER nineteen.
"You will crawl all night," Huu Co explained to the Russian.
"If you do not make it, they will see you in the morning and kill you."
If he expected the man to react, once again, he was wrong. The Russian responded to nothing. He seemed, in some respects, hardly human. Or at least he had no need for some of the things humans needed: rest, community, conversation, humanity even. He never spoke. He appeared phlegmatic to the point of being almost vegetable.
Yet at the same time he never complained, he would not wear out, he applied no formal sense of will against Huu Co and the elite commandos of the 45th Sapper Battalion on their long Journey of Ten Thousand Miles, down the trail from the North. He never showed fear, longing, thirst, discomfort, humor, anger or compassion. He seemed not to notice much and hardly ever talked, and then only in grunts.
He was squat, isolated, perhaps desolated. In his army, Huu Co's heroes were designated "Brother Ten" when they distinguished themselves by killing ten Americans: this man, Huu Co realized, was Brother Five Hundred, or some such number. He had no ideology, no enthusiasms, he simply was. Solaratov: solitary. The lone man. It suited him well.
The Russian looked across the fifteen hundred yards of flattened land to the Marine base the enemy called Dodge City, studying it. There was no approach, no visible approach, except on one's belly, the long, long way.
"Could you hit him from this range?"
The Russian considered.
"I could hit a man from this range, yes," he finally said.
"But how would I know it was the right man? I cannot see a face from this distance. I have to hit the right man, that is the point."
The argument was well made.
"So then .. . you must crawl."
"I can crawl."
"If you hit him, how will you get out?"
"This time I'm only looking. But when I hit him, I'll wait till dark, then come out the same way I came in."
"They'll call in mortars, artillery, napalm even. It is their way."
"Yes, I may die."
"In napalm? Not pleasant. I've heard many scream as it ate the flesh from their bones. It's over in an instant, but I had the impression it was a long instant."
The Russian merely glared at him, no recognition in his eyes at all, even though they'd lived in close proximity for a week and had for days before that pored over the photos and the mock-up of Dodge City.
"My advice, comrade brother," said Huu Co, "is that you follow the depression in the earth three hundred meters.
You move at dark, in maximum camouflage. They have night scopes and they will be hunting. But the scopes aren't one hundred percent reliable. It'll be a long stalk, a terrible stalk. I can only hope you are up to it and that your heart is strong and pure."
"I have no heart," said the solitary man.
"I am the sniper."
For the first recon, Solaratov did not take his case, which by now all considered a rifle sheath. He carried no weapons except a SPETSNAZ dagger, black and thin and wicked.
He left at nightfall, dappled in camouflage, looking more like an ambulatory swamp than a man. Behind his back, the sappers called him not the Solitary Man or the Russian but, with the eternal insouciance of soldiers, the Human Noodle, because the stalks were stiff like unboiled noodles. In seconds, as he slithered off through the elephant grass, he was invisible.
Huu Co noted that his technique was extraordinary, a mastery of the self. This was the ultimate slow. He moved with delicacy, one limb at a time, a pace so slow and deliberate it almost didn't exist. Who would have patience for such a journey?
"He is mad," one of the sappers said to another.
"All Russians are mad," said the other.
"You can see it in their eyes."
"But this one is really mad. He's nuts!"
The sappers waited quietly underground, in elaborate tunnels built in the Year of the Snake, 1965. They cooked meals, enjoyed jury-rigged showers and treated the event almost like a furlough. It was a happy time for men who had fought hard, been wounded many times. At least six of them were Brothers Ten. They were shrewd, experienced professionals.
For his time, Huu Co studied the photographs or waited up top, hidden in the grass, using up his eyestrain to stare at the strange fort fifteen hundred yards off, which looked so artificial cut into the earth of his beloved country by men from across the sea with a different sensibility and no sense of history.
He waited, staring at the sea of grass. His arm hurt. He could hardly close his hand. When he grew bored, he snatched a book from his tunic, in English. It was Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkein, very amusing. It took him away from this world but always, when Frodo's adventures vanished, he had to return to Firebase Dodge City and his deepest question: when would the sniper return?
The fire ants were only the first of his many ordeals.
Attracted to his sweat, they came and crawled into the folds of his neck, tasting his blood, crawling, biting, feasting.
He was a banquet for the insect world. After the ants, others were drawn. Mosquitoes big as American helicopters buzzed around his ears, lit on his face, stung him gently and departed, bloated. What else? Spiders, mites, ticks, dragonflies, the whole phyla drawn to the miasma of decay a sweating man produces in the tropics on a hot morning. But not maggots. Maggots are for the dead, and perhaps in some way the maggots respected him. He was not dead and, moreover, he fed the maggots much in his time on earth. They left him alone.
It wasn't that Solaratov was beyond feeling such things. He felt them, all right. He felt every sting, bite, prick or tweak, his aches and swellings and blotches and throbbings were the same as any man's. He had just some.
how managed to disconnect the feeling part of
his body from the registering part of his brain. It can be learned, and at the upper reaches of the performance envelope, among those who are not merely brave, willful or dedicated but truly among the best in the world, extraordinary things are routine.
He lay now in the elephant grass, approximately one hundred yards from the sandbag perimeter of Firebase Dodge City, just outside the double strands of concertina wire. He could see Claymore mines facing him from a dozen angles, and the half-buried detonators of other, larger mines. But he could also hear American rock and roll bellowing out of the transistor radios all the young Marines seemed to carry, and listening to it was his only pleasure.
"I can't get no satisfaction," someone sang with a loud raspy voice, and Solaratov understood: he could get no satisfaction either.
The Marines were unbearably sloppy. He had seen the Israelis from extremely close range in some of his ops and the British SAS and even the fabled American Green Berets, all were sound troops. These boys thought the war was over for them, they were worse than Cubans or Angolans.
They lounged around sunbathing, played touch football or baseball or basketball, sneaked out to smoke hemp, got in fights or got drunk. Their sentries slept at night. The officers didn't bother to shave. Nobody dressed in anything resembling a uniform, and most spent the days in shorts, undershirts (or shirtless) and shower shoes.
Even when they went on combat patrol, they were loud and stupid. The point men paid no attention, the flank security drifted in toward the column, the machine gunner had his belts tangled around him, and his assistant, with other belts, fell too far behind him to do him any good in a fight. Clearly they had not been in a fight in months, if ever, clearly they expected no such thing to occur as they waited for the order to leave the country.
Once, a patrol stumbled right over him. Five men, hustling through the elephant grass on the way out for a night ambush mission, walked so close to him that if any had been even remotely awake, they would have killed him easily. He saw their jungle boots, big as mountains, just inches from his face. But two of the men were listening to radios, one was clearly high, one so young and frightened he belonged in school, and the platoon leader, stuck with these silly boys, looked terrified. Solaratov knew exactly what would happen, the patrol would go out a thousand yards and the sergeant would hunker them down in some high grass, where they'd sit all night, smoking and talking and pretending they weren't at war. In the morning the sergeant would bring them in and file a no-contact report.
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