by Ron Lealos
A shirtless American soldier in sandals and tiger shorts leaned against a pole that supported the palm roof, smoking a joint and petting the monkey sitting on his shoulder. The GI’s hair hung down his back, and his brown beard matched the tan of his chest. A scar like a thin outline of Laos ran from under his shorts to his left nipple.
The soldier flashed the peace sign at Luong and then scratched the bright-red rash in his armpit.
The strap of my bush pack scraped against my upper arm. I pushed the pack higher on my shoulder, walked behind Luong, stepping around broken pieces from a clay water vase, and approached the soldier.
A naked baby-san waddled to the soldier, bony hips moving side to side, and hugged the soldier’s thigh. A mangy, brown-and-black ’Nam dog yapped at the boy’s heels.
The soldier patted the baby-san’s black hair and said, “Okay, Tran, it’s ban.” Friend.
Ear against the soldier’s leg, the baby-san squeezed harder and watched Luong and me. Dirt was smeared across the little boy’s bulging belly, and his feet were the brown-red tint of Delta soil. Gook sores ran up his bowlegs from his ankles to his knees.
The soldier moved his hand to the baby-san’s arm and held it. He wore a ring carved in green jade that reflected the tropical sun that pierced the ragged palm trees surrounding the vil.
Scrawny chickens searched the clay for rice kernels and maggots. Charcoal burned in a cooking fire next to the damaged hootch closest to the rice paddies. The blue smoke drifted through the vil, mixing with the smell of buffalo and human dung, boiling grease, and rotting fruit.
Two pigs rooted in a pile of garbage behind the soldier’s hootch. One of the pigs limped on three legs, a white scarf tied around his neck. WIA was painted in black on the pig’s haunch. Wounded in Action. Two Purple Hearts were pinned to the scarf.
Luong swatted at three brown-and-black chickens with the barrel of his M16 and walked across the packed earth to the soldier.
“Chao, Vietnik.” Hello, Luong said. He locked his right palm and thumb with the soldier in a hippie peace handshake.
The monkey tried to hide behind the GI’s head and made monkey whimpers. The soldier flipped the roach on the clay, pulled Luong to his chest, arm around Luong’s back, and hugged the ex–Kit Carson scout.
“Hey, zipperhead,” the soldier said. “How goes the war?” The soldier patted Luong’s jungle fatigue and the full ammo belt crisscrossing his back. “You still a strack trooper? Won the fuckin’ Medal of Honor yet?”
Luong let himself be hugged, but the grenades on his chest and the M16 in his hand kept them three inches apart. This was not the traditional greeting of a Montagnard.
A crumbling stone pagoda to the left of the hootch was going back to jungle. Thick vines were woven between the heaps of gray rock like threads of fat creeper snakes. Orchids grew from potting soil made of decaying vegetation that covered the shrine.
The baby-san stared up at the two friends with wide-open black eyes. Flies feasted on Tran’s sores and the trail of dysentery that stained his thighs yellow.
“Number ten good, Nick,” Luong said “Kill many, many dirty VC.” Luong moved to the soldier’s side and pointed to me. “Nick, this Morgan. We on trail to Cần Thơ.”
Nick’s bare chest was indented with the rectangles of Luong’s MK2 pineapple grenades. The white of Nick’s left eye, above a Furry Freak Brother smile, was the red of ripe passion fruit.
“Welcome to my pad, Morgan,” Nick said. “This here’s Tran.” Nick looked down at the baby-san and gently pulled the boy’s ear. “The ape is Lyndon. Smokes more dope than LBJ. Has bigger balls. Damn straight.” The monkey dropped his head onto the white hair on his chest at Nick’s touch. “Don’t need to prove it by wasting kids though. Come into the hootch and share a doobie. Even got a few warm Tiger beers.”
“Nice to meet you, Nick,” I said. We gripped hands in the peace shake and stepped toward Nick’s villa.
Inside the hootch, Nick rolled joints of Laotian Green. Lyndon was tied to a parrot’s crossbar perch, and the monkey scampered back and forth on the three-foot bamboo runway.
My pack held a half dozen Hershey bars that I scavenged from C-rations back at Bien Ha. The monkey let me scratch his neck in trade for a piece of the chocolate.
“Don’t see why the grunts call the VC ‘monkeys,’” I said. Lyndon pressed the wiry fur on his skull into my hand. “This little guy is too cute to be insulted that way.”
Lyndon’s tight muscles relaxed as I rubbed, and he hunkered lower on the bamboo runway.
After Tran finished his half of the candy bar, he laid down on the grass mat, sucking his thumb and staring at the new giants in his world.
Nick, Luong, and I sat around a table made of empty cardboard C-ration cases stuffed with chunks of bamboo for support and covered by a smooth piece of door from a downed Huey. The chairs were eighteen-inch-high rounds of dark hardwood polished by years of rice farmers. A picture of Grace Slick fronting the Jefferson Airplane in concert at the Fillmore Auditorium hung from the bamboo wall next to a psychedelic poster of Moby Grape. The bed in the corner was a thatched mat of elephant grass with a GI-issue green blanket on top. Roaches and Camel butts filled an ashtray made from a coconut husk. Slanted eyeballs were carved into the hairy outside.
A rat poked his black head through a hole in the bamboo slats near Tran’s head.
“Dat ra,” I hissed. Out. The rat pulled his pink feet back and turned tail. “I hate them ugly fuckers. At least they speak dinkese.”
I watched Tran’s thin cheeks move in and out from the meal he made of his thumb. Tran was a poster boy for all the guilt-trip charities and antiwar jingoists back in The World. Perfect. Pitiful and beautiful at the same time.
“Why did they make you a CAG ghost?” I asked Nick. “And how are you still alive?” An M16 rested against my shoulder, butt in the clay of the hootch floor. The pin on one of the smooth grenades pinched the skin on my chest. I pushed the M26 closer to my arm and took a hit from a joint.
“Blows my mind, Morgan,” Nick said. He fired up another number and passed it to Luong. “Should be KIA by now. The survival rate of Civilian Action Group guys is worse than traitor’s row at Long Binh. I think the Charlies figure a peacenik in the hamlet is better than a rat in their tunnels.”
“Used to visit two ex-grunt CAGs in a vil outside Bien Ha,” I said. The floppy brim of the Aussie bush hat drooped in my eyes. I hung the hat on the barrel tip of the M16. “One day, a squad of marines found their heads on bamboo poles in the middle of the vil. The crows had picked out their eyes, but their dicks were still in their mouths.”
Luong passed the number back to Nick.
“Ain’t our government sweet?” Nick asked.
Nick took a long hit on the joint and held it in. Smoke came out from between the gaps in his yellow teeth, and he hissed, “I crawled down moldy tunnels with just a flashlight, a knife, and a Colt semiautomatic for six months. Got booby-trapped, stabbed, shot at. Could have gone back to The World twice with my Purple Hearts.”
Nick flicked the ashes of the joint on the clay floor and ground them hard with his calloused bare feet. “But when I didn’t, and refused to crawl in again, they made me a CAG. If you don’t like this war and won’t do their asshole shit anymore, you got a better chance of dying than if you’re humping it in the paddies. There it is.”
When Nick leaned back on the hardwood chair, a centipede crawled further back under the mahogany round. Nick’s tanned brow was squeezed tight and furrowed with ripples like paddies in the wind.
“And if I said I was scared, they might have reassigned me. Sent me to the chaplain. But I told them I wouldn’t fight at all. That the war sucked and we were killing the wrong people. Should be Westmoreland.”
Tran jumped at the sound of Nick spitting on the floor. The pool of saliva wouldn’t sink into the hard clay and formed the shape of a swamp turtle.
“The fucking LTs wanted me to grease women and kids.
If they were in the tunnels, they were VC. Those kids didn’t have a thing to do with whether a grunt got blown to Hanoi. Or took another vil for a day. Nuthin’s gonna win this war. And I ain’t gonna kill anymore, even if it means dying in this dusty ghost vil. There it is.”
Nick closed his eyes, neck covered by a brown beard from the chin that was now drooped to his chest.
I set the rifle on the clay floor and touched Nick’s knee. The muscles on his leg were tight as the leather wrap on the handle of my Gerber fighting knife.
“Both of us have done things that won’t go in our scrapbooks, Nick,” I said. “At least you’ve got the courage to stop. That makes you worth more than a thousand Westmorelands.”
The burnt-grease smell of the cook fire came through the door on a gust of wind.
Nick’s body was in a Mekong coma.
The bush boots on Luong’s feet bounced up and down on the laterite clay. His black eyes blinked faster than I could fire the M16 on single shot.
“You number ten tunnel rat, Nick,” Luong said. “Smoke many, many VC. Old squad miss you.” Luong smiled from a mouth filled with the filed black teeth of the Montagnard hill people.
Luong was five-foot-two, the perfect size for a tunnel rat. The tunnels were usually only two feet wide and the same height. A scar ran across Luong’s forehead and onto the front of his skull. No black hair grew from the pink ridges of the scar. The ARVN fatigues hung loosely from his hundred-pound body.
Tunnel rat scars usually were on the upper body, running from the head down. That was the direction that the bullets came from when the rats crawled into the darkness.
Nick opened his eyes, reached out and ruffled Luong’s remaining hair. The tip of the little finger on Nick’s hand pointed out instead of straight up, and the nail was black.
“Don’t hassle it, Luong,” Nick said. “I haven’t defected to the NVA.” Nick scratched the scar on his chest with the crooked finger. “Remember the bitch tunnel outside Cai Ba?” Nick asked. He handed me a joint, took a slug of Tiger, and grinned at Luong. “I went point. You were on my heel. This one held every trick the VC had. The first was the fucking snakes. Them green bamboo ones tied to grass vines. If I hadn’t seen the creepers, them suckers would have made us stiff as JFK’s dick.” Nick pushed the long brown hair out of his eyes and gripped it in a ponytail behind his neck.
A cockroach crawled across the dirt headed toward the brown clay rice jug sitting against the slats of the bamboo wall. Luong crushed it with his bush boot.
“Many dead VC in that one,” Luong said.
The rash under Nick’s armpit looked like an advanced case of tropical measles. White peas surrounded by bright red circles. Nick scratched with the bent finger.
“The fuckin’ VC love to leave rotting corpses by the entrance,” Nick said. “Drag the dead ones down the hole. Think the smell will keep tunnel rats out. Flesh ripens fast in this humidity.” He pinched his freckled nose and stared at me. “Our orders were to bring back a fucking body count. Had to crawl past piles of them, counting, ‘One, two, three, another dead VC.’”
Nick pushed the pool of spit in the clay lazily with a filthy toe.
“So what’s your MOS, Morgan?” Nick asked. “You don’t have any insignia on. Look sterile to me. Like a spook. Sometimes, they used to send Luong out with the SOG assassination squads for some night action. Is that your jacket?”
The lips of Nick’s smile were covered by mustache hair but couldn’t hide the cynical grin.
I fingered the Hush Puppy Super Val bullets in the pocket of my fatigue pants. Phoenix operatives were surrounded by an aura of secrecy and evil. Nick knew it. Luong played a small role. But there was no way I could explain it to a man who had risen from the Dead Zone and spit in the face of the machine.
Trickles of sweat soaked into the back of my fatigues. I watched the monkey pick fleas from his armpit.
“We’re doing recon in Cần Thơ,” I said. “More like R&R than any Special Operations Group business.”
The monkey watched me like there was a bamboo snake winding its way up the pole.
“What happened after you got by the snakes and bodies?” I asked.
The deformed nipple on the left side of Nick’s chest was a straight line with a small pink bump. He rubbed the scar with the palm of his hand.
“That tunnel was the number ten worst,” Nick said. “Had to be careful that we didn’t land in a punji pit. The VC put trapdoors in the floor. If you fall in, the punji stakes are sharper than a KA-BAR and smeared in gook shit.”
The hotter the afternoon, the more Luong’s head scar turned red. Today, it was the dark-wine color of wet Delta clay. Luong touched the crescent shape of red that marked his hairline.
“Vang,” Luong said. “VC dig holes in side tunnels and wait. When rat go by, they stab in head with sharp bamboo pole or choke with wire.”
One of the scabs on Nick’s leg made the outline of a leech. But it was dried brown and flaky, not wet and black. Nick rubbed it.
“We had a rule,” Nick said. “Never fire more than three shots in the tunnels without reloading. The VC knew you’d be out of ammo and be in your face. And no rat was ever, ever left in a tunnel. We always brought them out. Dead or alive.”
The monkey squatted on the perch, black toes wrapped around the pole, scratching his pink balls. Milky ooze dripped from the corner of his left eye.
The roach burned the tips of my fingers yellow from C-ration Camels. I pinched the roach and watched the ash and Zig-Zag paper float to the clay floor.
“Don’t know how you guys could crawl into those tunnels,” I said. “I don’t have the cojones for it. Heard of a system up by Cu Chi that was like a city. Hospital, theater, nursery, wedding chapel. Everything a gook in Saigon would need.”
The baby-san sighed from the mat. A corner of the GI blanket was stuffed in Tran’s mouth, replacing his thumb. Nick watched him suck for a few seconds and walked to the sleeping mat, calloused feet quiet in the dirt. He covered the baby-san with the bottom of the green blanket and stroked the boy’s head.
“Di nam tot, Tran,” Nick whispered. Sleep well.
Nick backed up to his chair, eyes on Tran, and sat.
“Once I greased a VC riding a stationary bicycle in a tunnel,” Nick said. “He was pedaling a generator that ran the lights in the operatin’ room next to him. The sweat ran down his back like a monsoon. Could have been in the Olympics. Waited for an hour and watched from a side tunnel.” Nick sat forward and crossed his thin arms on his chest. He stared at the green fungus between his toes. “You know, the VC don’t have the luxury of anesthetics. The doc was sawin’ off legs and arms and sewin’ intestines back into stomachs while the patients bit down hard on a piece of bamboo. It’s amazing how tough the zipperheads are. There it is.”
Nick’s hair brushed across his bare shoulders with every back and forth shake of his head.
“We got medics carrying enough morphine to last a gook bac-si a year,” Nick said. Doctor. “They’ll shoot you up for an infected hangnail.”
The bent finger caressed Laos on Nick’s side.
A fly the size of a dime landed on the lip of my beer bottle. I swatted it away.
“Do they really have a Bob Hope–type show that goes from tunnel to tunnel singing opera?” I asked.
Nick looked up and sat back on his hardwood stool. The lid over his red eye was beginning to droop. Maybe ringworm.
“Never saw that,” Nick said. “Did see rooms with little stages that could hold a couple hundred dinks. If they put Dante’s ‘Inferno’ to music, it would be perfect. There it is.”
In the trees outside, a family of monkeys howled and scolded. Lyndon froze and stared out the hole in the bamboo wall that served as a window.
Tran was asleep. Only his cheeks moved with the continued sucking on the GI blanket. His knees were tucked to his chin. The smell from his corner of the room and the dark stain in the blanket below his butt made me reach for
another of the joints on the tabletop.
Luong’s fingers couldn’t make it all the way around the pineapple grenade that he fondled. The bush campaign hat was stuffed into the ammo belt that crisscrossed his chest.
No ice in this vil. The Tiger beer was warm, but tasted cool when it went down my throat.
“Didn’t see any mama-sans in the vil,” I said. “Or papa-sans. Where is everybody? You the babysitter?”
“Mama-sans are in the paddies,” Nick said. “Papa-sans are too old to work. Probably chewing betel nut and dreaming in their hootches. The young ones got drafted by the VC. You know, Uncle Ho wants you.”
“What about Tran?”
“He’s a war orphan. Parents got under an Arc Light mission. Not even a finger was found.”
“So you adopted him?”
“Kinda. His uncle lives here, when he’s not away doin’ somethin’ else I don’t wanna know. Mostly at night though.” Nick winked. “I suspect he might be doin’ the same thing as you, Morgan.”
“Heard a rumor about orphans. Seems there’s an underground back to The World. You can buy a baby-san cheap and cure the guilt of shopping at the mall while your cousin bleeds out in a paddy across the ocean. The story says sometimes they ain’t even orphans. Supposed to be run by somebody high up the government ladder. Sellin’ kids is supposed to bring a thousand bucks a head to the bosses. You hear anything about that?”
“Damn straight,” Nick said. “Wouldn’t mind if Tran got a chance to go to the Big PX too. His life expectancy ain’t too long here. And no mama-san or papa-san to miss him.”
“Yeah, but I also heard some don’t make it to The World. At least not the one we know. A lot of them are shipped to places where it’s sand, not jungle. Or the girls get to be raised by madams ’til they sharpen their skills. Or not. There’s always a high price on virgins, no matter how many times they get sold that way.”
Luong’s head moved back and forth between us, trying to follow the words. Once in a while, he even smiled, believing we cracked a joke. Tran turned over with a sigh, while Lyndon watched me like I was a huge banana.