by Ron Lealos
“Back at my hootch,” I said, “I’ve got a string of ears hanging from the rafter like cloves of garlic. Twenty-three of the black beauties. One for every gook I’ve wasted.” Telling this lie wouldn’t mean anything to Hoang’s next incarnation. “If you don’t want yours to make twenty-four, you better tell me the truth. Okay, papa-san?”
Hoang’s chin touched his hairless chest when he moved it up and down.
“Now that we’re buddies,” I said, “I’m gonna take the sock out of your mouth. If you make any loud noises, your balls will say hello to your asshole. Got it?”
Hoang nodded again.
The Gerber slid back in its sheath. I pulled the sock from Hoang’s mouth and grabbed a handful of his greasy hair.
“I was sent to kill a woman named Liem,” I said. “You know her?”
“No,” Colonel Hoang said.
“I don’t have time for this shit,” I said. “I’ll give you one more chance. Do you know Liem?”
“No.”
Hoang’s leg jumped when I shot him in the thigh. My hand was over his mouth and nose, pressing his head into the pillow. Hoang wouldn’t bleed to death. It was only a flesh wound. The Hush Puppy was back at his balls.
“Last chance, Colonel,” I said. I took my hand away from his mouth and gripped an ear. “So far, I haven’t done much damage. But that’s gonna change in a flash. Who’s Liem?” Blood smeared my finger as I squeezed the knife wound.
“She’s Jimmy Ky’s ba giao,” Hoang said. Mistress. Hoang closed his eyes and sucked air between his toothless gums. “Vice President Ky’s son.”
“Why have her killed?” I asked. “Ky’s got lots of mama-sans around.”
“Ky wanted bigger hoi lo,” Hoang said. Bribe. “No more money left in den cho.” Black market. “Americans taking all profit. How much you want, long nose?”
“But why kill Liem?”
“I not know. Ky say she VC. Maybe trade. More of the den cho for cadre leader.”
“You had Liem killed for no reason other than to keep the hoi lo coming?”
“Americans taught us well.”
“Was Liem VC?”
“Not know. Not matter.”
“Did you have us ambushed?”
“Vang,” Yes. “But Viper said okay.”
“Nay?” Why?
“Said you getting chickenshit. Not trust you.”
The end of the silencer scraped on Hoang’s teeth as I jammed the muzzle six inches into his mouth, the phhffupp sound muffled by his tongue when I pulled the trigger. Hoang’s eyes were open in death. His legs jerked twice, and his body relaxed.
The room filled with the shit smell that was a constant in the ritual of assassination. Except Liem.
The sheet on Hoang’s four-poster hung over the edge, almost touching the crimson rug. I bunched the corner of the sheet into a ball and took the Zippo lighter out of my pocket. Every boonie rat in ’Nam carried a Zippo. If you couldn’t set a bamboo hootch on fire with tracer rounds, the Zippo came in handy. I lit the sheets and went quietly out the door.
On the ground floor, voices came from a back room. Cigarette smoke drifted down the hall. I stayed close to the stucco walls, the Hush Puppy pointed toward the voices. The wet fatigues and Dexedrine caused my teeth to chatter. In the meeting room, the window was still ajar. I shoved the pistol into my webbed belt and climbed through. As my feet hit the mud, the rain increased. Maybe it would put out the flames that leaped from Hoang’s bedroom window before the building burned into the clay.
The deuce and a half hit every pothole and mortar crater in the road between Vin Khe and Bien Ha. Springs on the truck chassis were MIA. Uncle Sam didn’t splurge on the comfort of grunts. That was saved for officers who ate crème de menthe–topped ice cream on tables covered with white linen and china on glossy sampans anchored in the Son Sai Gon River.
A soldier sat next to me on the plywood that tried to pass as a seat, fondling an M26 grenade.
“Hey, man,” the grunt said, “what’s it like out in the bush?”
Clean uniform, polished M16, short hair, wide-open eyes, stiff body, and the quiver in his voice marked him as a cherry. He didn’t have the Indian hunter, slew-eyed, unshaven, exhausted, “I’ve been in beaucoup hell” look of a ’Nam boonie rat. It took a few days to blend in.
“Keep your head down and you’ll be okay,” I said. “Stay close to the medic just in case. Make sure he’s your buddy.” I leaned back against the steel walls and shook my head from side to side. Fuckin’ dumbass cherry questions.
My beard was years and thirty-four murders ahead of the soldier’s smooth cheeks. I scratched a jaw that was covered in a layer of Delta mud. Sweat coated my body like rifle oil on an ArmaLite. The jarring of the deuce and a half made me slouch forward again or risk back injury from the steel sidewalls of the bouncing truck. Back injuries weren’t a ticket back to The World.
Miles of rice paddies stretched to the horizon. Occasional islands of palm trees and thickets dotted with hootches were all that broke up the landscape. The road was busy with convoys and peasants in dirty pajamas and sandals carrying thatched baskets on their heads. Bicycles and motorcycles slalomed between M48 Patton tanks and M113 armored cavalry assault vehicles. Chieu hoi leaflets fell from the sky through the window of an army 0-1 single-engine Cessna out for a day of VC spotting and propaganda.
“You seen any action?” the cherry asked. His teeth were obscenely white. Not the yellow that came from months of C-ration Camels and toothpaste that went unopened.
My boots were caked in Delta clay the color of ripe pomegranates. I rubbed the bush boots against a green rivet in the truck bed that had shaken loose and stuck up two inches. The red mud came off in wads that seeped to the bed like fresh turds.
“Action?” I asked. “This ain’t The Green Berets, and I ain’t John Wayne. Don’t be so anxious to get your dick in the paddies, soldier. The leeches don’t give a shit if you’re an FNG, cowboy.”
A fucking new guy on his way to the Great Adventure. An innocent in the land of the insane. Grunts dying to take the same festering rice paddy they took yesterday while snipers picked them off one by one. Dead buddies that resulted in the slaughter of women and children. Agent Orange making lush jungle trees stick characters.
“Sorry,” the FNG said. “I’ve only been in-country a couple days. Goin’ to help fill out a Second Battalion squad at Bien Ha. I can’t make sense of anything. The army recruiter said I’d be a clerk-typist.” His chin fell to his chest. The quiver in his voice infected his whole body. Or maybe it was the jiggle of the springless deuce and a half and this pothole of a country.
Comforting the cherry would make me feel like a phony-ass, oily undertaker. Worse even. A medic in the bush telling a grunt with his shredded intestines in his hands that he’d live to see his sweetheart.
But this cherry had dimples. Round, perfect, concave ones in the middle of both cheeks. My grade-school nickname was Dimples. The girls loved to tease me about them. If there wasn’t a beard covered by mud on my face, you could see them now.
“Forget what your momma told you,” I said. “There ain’t no rules over here. You’ll be lucky to have clean underwear once a month. Beat your meat every chance you get. Goin’ blind might be a blessing. Keep the pencil and paper in your supplementals and write home as much as Sir Charles lets you. Mail call is the only lifeline you can trust. Whatever you do, if you get a can of grape Crush, hold onto it. It’s worth double its weight in piasters.” The smell of the truck’s fumes made me cough. I wiped my mouth on a crusty sleeve. “Oh, number ten important, if you’ve got a sharp can opener, guard it like your balls. Or give it to me.”
The cherry looked at me as if I’d jumped the concertina wire at the Long Binh prison psycho ward. He gripped his M16 hard enough to turn his clean, white hands red.
Me giving advice was like Richard Speck telling the local grade school kids how to be good citizens. This cherry had an 18 percent chance of being
killed or wounded, or, with more luck, a 56 percent chance of seeing one of his friends go down. But that was for all of ’Nam. If he humped it in the boonies for a tour, his shot at going home in one piece was worse than the odds of a back-row car winning the Indy 500.
The kid couldn’t be more than eighteen. He looked fifteen. At twenty-three, I looked forty. The black grunt sleeping across from us had to be a granddad. Not even the jolts of the truck or the roar of tanks made him open his eyes. Dog tags hung outside his dusty fatigues along with a carved-metal peace sign attached to a roach clip. But his huge Wilt Chamberlain hands never left the strap of his M16.
“Okay,” I said. I made little mud turd cakes with the toe of my boot. “There’s only a few rules that’ll help you survive. Number one, cover your ass. Number two, cover your buddy’s. When you find yourself in Pinksville, keep that M16 on full rock and roll.” I squished the mud cakes so they spurted out under the soles of the bush boot.
Puss from the gook sores ran down my legs and into the top of my bush boots. The flimsy socks I wore had vanished into the slime of the monsoons and the green crud between my toes. I rubbed my fatigue bottoms even though I knew it would just cause more bleeding and infection. Sometimes the itch made me want to rip off my fatigues and scratch to the bone.
The deuce and a half jerked to a stop at a thatched lean-to alongside the muddy road. A small boy ran up to the truck, his hand barely able to hold the frosty red can. “Coca-Cola, GI?” he pleaded. Two mama-sans sat in the hut out of the light rain, a tub of Coke on ice between them.
Ice in the middle of kilometers of rice paddies. When the sun popped through the clouds, it was over a hundred degrees and the humidity was close to 100 percent. But these mama-sans had ice. When the Hueys dropped beer on ice to a squad in the boonies, the ice that was left was smaller than a baseball. Ice was a letter from The World. It was like finding a dropped grenade in the middle of the brown water of a paddy.
“Vang, baby-san,” I said. “Hai, lam long.” Yes. Two please. I turned to the cherry. “Drink’s on me, soldier.” I handed the boy ten piasters for another Coke and gave it to the cherry.
The black grunt still hadn’t budged.
The driver and his copilot argued with the mama-sans over whether they could use their worthless MPC scrip. “Khong,” the black-toothed mama-sans clucked. No. “Piasters.”
Two burned-out jeep seat frames sat next to the lean-to, out of the drizzle. Someone had thrown grass mats on top.
“Grab a seat,” I said to the cherry. “Those grunts will be a long time trying to con the mama-sans out of a coke.” I walked toward the bent, blackened chairs, the newbie and his M16 right behind. The baby-san sat in the lap of one of the old women and stared with round eyes while he picked his nose. Gook sores ran from the baby-sans ankles to his thighs. Some were scabbed over. Others dripped yellow puss.
The twisted springs poked through the grass mat and into the butt of my fatigues. The cherry sat next to me, M16 between his legs and Coke in his hand.
“Has anybody but an REMF wanted to know your name since you’ve been in-country?” I asked.
“No, now that I think of it,” the cherry said. He looked at a gray sky, the color of the Hush Puppy Super Val bullets in my belt. Rain dripped from the edge of the thatched roof and pooled at our boots.
“Do you know why?” I asked. The Coke was still cool in my hand. I took a hit and watched a bulldozer wheeze and rumble by on the road followed by a squad of engineers in jeeps.
“No,” the cherry said. The corners of his mouth were turned down, and there was only a hint of dimples. The frown made him look like he had been asked the meaning of life. Or why the fuck we were in this godforsaken hellhole.
“Because they don’t want to know,” I said. I watched a girl in a conical hat and gray pajamas lead a water buffalo through a paddy to the north. “It ain’t no frat-house hazing. Even having your name in their heads makes a bush rat a little responsible for you.” The girl stopped and fished something out of the mud. It looked like a big piece of shrapnel. “Besides, you remind them of what they were at the start of their tour. An innocent with a clean slate. They can never go back there.”
The wind blew the garbage and diesel smell through the hut. I blew my nose on the sleeve of my fatigues. “Too much blood. Too many green LTs ordering them to die for some useless swamp. Too many buddies in body bags. Too much skin melting in napalm ooze. Too many nightmares. Believe me, they’re more scared of you than you are of them.” The sky above the girl was the color of her pajamas. “You’re someone they’ll never, ever be again.”
The cherry took off his unchipped green helmet and put it on his knee. The leather strap still smelled like cowhide rather than sweat.
“I don’t get it,” the cherry said. “No one’s ever been scared of me.”
“Look,” I said. “It ain’t you. It’s who you are. You’re their conscience. Sitting here, you can’t imagine what they’ve seen. And done.” I crumpled the empty Coke can and threw it in the muddy water of the ditch behind the lean-to. “They didn’t teach you shit in AIT. The cute marching songs about ‘killing Uncle Charlie’ are just that. Silly songs to get you to want a taste and do what you’re told. But nothing can prepare you for what you’re gonna see. I talked about rules. There’s really only one. Live long enough to get on that Freedom Bird home. And don’t look back.”
The sound of distant VC mortars came from the south. The Type 63s made a pop sound different from the blam of the US M1s. Traffic on the road came to a halt. Soldiers spit tobacco into the mud and lit Camels.
The cherry jammed his helmet on his head and looked for a place to hide. His jaw worked from side to side with the grinding of his teeth.
“Relax,” I said. The cherry’s pants felt soft and clean when I patted his knee. Not like the stiff crust of my fatigues. “Those mortars are at least two klicks down the road.” I leaned back in the seat as far as I could without tipping into the bamboo of the hootch.
A Loach scout helicopter flew down the road toward the fighting, trailed by three Cobra gunships. The 20mm cannons pointed south at the sound of the mortars and rifle fire. A copilot who manned the 7.62 miniguns waved through a cracked windshield. Bullet holes dotted the undercarriage of the Cobra.
At least the day’s light rain kept the dust away. It was either the fucking rain or the fucking red dust.
“Isn’t the procedure to take cover?” the cherry asked. His M16 was across his chest. He scanned the horizon as if the Indians were about to ride over the hill and blow away his wagon train.
“Where you from?” I asked. A puddle of water formed in the bottom of my helmet. Pieces of leaves and rice floated in the pool. Or maybe it wasn’t rice. I poured the black soup onto the packed clay.
“Lacrosse, Wisconsin,” the cherry said. “How about you?” He sat back down in the steel chair and fastened his leather chinstrap.
“Seattle,” I said. “Grew up there. Went to the University of Washington to play football and chase pleated skirts.” A piece of thatch stuck from the mat on the frame. I cut the piece off with the Gerber and broke it into little chunks with my fingers. “Got thrown into the slammer for helping shut down the interstate to protest this police action. The judge gave me a choice. Army or jail time. I was a quarter away from a degree in Asian studies. Figured it was time to get my learning someplace other than a book.” Lies came easy here in the Kingdom of Mirrors, and this cherry didn’t need to know about the Colonel. The rice kernels on the clay crawled toward my boot. I used the fighting knife to squash them into the dirt, one by one.
“What unit are you with?” the cherry asked. “You don’t have any patches.” The canteen that hung on the cherry’s web belt was dented and chipped. Everything else on him was new. The pile of used canteens next to the processing center outside Ton Sen Nhut was smaller by one. The shrapnel scars held their own horror stories.
“On every base in ’Nam,” I said, “there’s a se
ctor you don’t go near. You don’t talk to anyone going in or out. You don’t sneak a peek. You don’t ask questions. You don’t want to know.” I didn’t tell the cherry that the few files on my black ops were marked in red EYES ONLY OF THE DIRECTOR and went back to Langley chained to the wrists of couriers in civvies and reflecting sunglasses.
Traffic on the road started to move. “Saddle up,” the deuce and a half driver said. He carried three Cokes in his hands, and the mama-san pulled at his sleeve. The driver brushed her away and kicked an empty toward the other mama-san, who squatted in the mud, eyes raised to the gray sky. The baby-san held onto the woman’s arm.
On my way to the truck, I handed a hundred piaster note to the mama-san and bowed. She snapped the bill at both ends, and the creases on her face turned up in a black-toothed smile. She cackled, “Cam on, GI, cam on.” I knew the money would be split with the local VC chief. But what was left would feed these three for a month. Maybe the Charlie that extorted the Coke sellers would be my next assignment.
The cherry climbed into the truck in front of me. His M16 caught on the steel tailgate and dropped to the clay.
Mud coated the rifle and smeared my fingers when I picked it up. “Gotta learn to take as good care of this as your dick,” I said. I slid the rifle onto the bed of the deuce and a half. The cherry grabbed the ArmaLite and hugged it to his chest.
The black grunt still slept on the plywood seat, but he had turned his face to the sidewalls of the truck. A rabbit’s foot caked in dirt was hooked to his belt. A clenched Black Power fist was drawn on his fatigue shirt, and curly hair covered the ripped collar.
In a cloud of blue smoke, the deuce and a half moved. The cherry sat next to me, wiping at the M16 with a red bandanna. The canvas canopy over the truck bed kept the increasing rain off our heads. Black clouds joined gray where heat lightning strikes zapped the paddies to the north. Loaches and the Cobras raced back to their base.