“You always had a bit of the pimp in you, Rousseau. You've always liked to display your wares. Protocol may have changed, but you haven't.”
Rousseau started for the General, but pulled up short at the sight of Lieutenant General Pelton and the Ambassador, who were heading their way.
“I guess we are more different than I'd ever supposed, General,” said Rousseau. “Your tastes ran to Clare Boothe Luce, and mine to barmaids and belly dancers. And I see where our tastes have taken us. You're over here with your hand out, wanting something, and I've got what you want. In this way you remind me of Miss Dzu. She has her hand out, and I've got what she wants. What does that say about you?”
“Volumes, Rousseau. But I see you now in a way I was never able to see you before. Carey was right about you. You always were a field hand, and you'll always be a field hand. You had shit on your shoes when I pulled you in out of the rain in Berlin, and you've still got shit on your shoes. I'm glad Pelton talked me into coming tonight. I wouldn't have missed this for the world.”
Just then Lieutenant General Pelton and the Ambassador arrived at the General's side. The Ambassador whispered in Rousseau's ear, and the two men were gone, heading in the direction of the M-16 booth, where little electronic pop-pop-pops could be heard as grown men fired the toy rifle at miniature VC targets.
The General turned to his friend. For the first time since he had arrived in Saigon, he felt truly relaxed, at peace. Jake Rousseau was firmly behind him now, a dim corner of his past where a night light still glowed, showing the way in the dark.
“Who are these people? The civilians, I mean?”
“That man over there is the president of General Dynamics, and the man next to him is his rival at McDonnell-Douglas. The man in the F-4 cockpit is the executive in charge of Dow Chemical's napalm division. The man in the backseat is from the Ford Motor Company. He makes M-60 tanks like those out front tonight.”
The General put his empty glass on a tray carried by a waiter and picked up a full one. He took a long slug of bourbon and swallowed hard. His eyes teared as the bourbon went down.
“A lot of people are making a lot of money from this war, aren't they? Look at them. They're over here feeding like pigs at a trough.”
“Yes, sir. They are.”
“You know something funny? Funny in a sad kind of way, I mean? I learned this many years ago playing polo at the Gates Mills Country Club. I captained their team every summer while I was at Leaven worth. George Patton had the Old Westbury team out on Long Island, and Marshall had the North Shore team up in Boston. All of us were released from our military duties in the Army every summer for three months so we could play polo with important men, industrialists in the main, whose political and economic influence made their friendship important to an Army that had weakened considerably between the wars. You remember, Brownie. When you graduated from West Point, you played for a summer with the team from Webster Groves, Missouri, as I recall.”
“Yes, sir, I remember.”
“What I learned those many summers ago was this: anybody can make money. But there are only a few of us left who can still make war, either on the polo field or the battlefield. I'm afraid we're a dying breed. I despair for this nation of ours when we're gone.”
The old generals stood for a moment watching the swirl of defense contractors and Army officers and embassy officials. Then they turned and walked out the door, heading for the staff car. They were blinded momentarily as the big xenon spots mounted on the tanks across the street painted the front door of the American embassy with broad strokes of blazing white light.
Then the General stepped into the shadows and stood alone with his thoughts.
This is what it's come to. Grown men playing with their toys in the safety of Saigon while out there in the dark men are fighting and dying in a war that is more about toys than it is about those men and what they stand for.
It's criminal, he thought. And I'm a criminal unless I get myself back to Washington and do something for Matt and for those men out there in the dark.
11
* * *
* * *
Years ago, when the Colonel was a young man and the Lieutenant was a boy, the Colonel used to stand in the doorway of his sons’ bedroom and serenade them to sleep with his harmonica. Matt and Terry, who was two years younger than Matt and as different from him as night from day, used to lie in bed listening to the old man wail away in the dark. He played a long Hohner with a flat bar and twenty holes, and his hands were so big he could cup the Hohner and the instrument would disappear within them. His hands would swallow the Hohner, and he'd blow a few notes to warm up, then he'd start to play, making the notes wha-wha by cupping and uncupping his massive hands, feathering the music as it flowed from the reeds of the Hohner. He'd play standards from the 1940s and 1950s like “In the Mood” and “Begin the Beguine,” music he had grown up with, the latter tune flavored with the exotic syncopated dance beat of Martinique and St. Lucia, the dusky islands soaked in rum and sun down in the south Caribbean. He'd play hot stuff from the radio, like “Mack the Knife,” and ballads by Nat “King” Cole and horn solos by his favorite musician of all time, Louis Armstrong. The Lieutenant often mused, lying there in the dark, that if his father could have been anyone else in the whole world, he'd have wanted to be Satchmo.
Then there were the nights when the old man would stand in the door and play something the boys liked—some of “your music,” he called it—like “Devil or Angel” by the Clovers, or “Georgia” by Ray Charles, or “Up on the Roof” by the Drifters. This would usually occur, of course, a night or two after he had punished one or both of the boys for some domestic offense, real or imagined, such as failure to clean out the day's ashtrays, which were full of his and their mother's cigarette butts and ashes.
He would come home in the middle of the night from a party and wake his oldest son, Matt, and march him around the house silently, pointing to ashtrays that had not been emptied or wiped clean, then he'd stand him in the living room in the dim light of a lone table lamp and talk to him very slowly and very deliberately about how disappointed in him he was, about how this was “the third goddamn time this month” that those ashtrays had failed to have been cleaned by the time Matt went to bed; about how, as the oldest child, Matt had to accept responsibilities the others didn't; and about how maybe a couple of weeks restricted to his room would help him remember to clean the ashtrays next time.
The Lieutenant never understood his father's mood swings, from warm and loving to cold and exacting, until he got his platoon. Then he understood his father in a way he could never have predicted. With his platoon he learned the power of guilt to cleanse you in its backwash. The Lieutenant's platoon reminded him of those nights he and his brother would lie in their beds in the dark. They had been young and vulnerable and imperfect. So was the platoon.
As much as he tried not to, he treated the platoon the way his father had treated him.
First you whack them over the head for some shortcoming that has more to do with you than with them, then tomorrow night you learn “Yesterday” by that damn bunch of British longhairs the Beatles, or “Lonely Avenue” by Ray Charles, or “Cry to Me” by Solomon Burke. You stand in the bedroom door and play the old mouth harp well enough to earn forgiveness—your own as well as theirs. On those nights his harmonica would soar with passion and swoop with pain and on those nights usually he played the blues.
The Lieutenant had no way of knowing what his father felt in those moments or why, because like most fathers in those days, he didn't talk much about his feelings to his sons. He couldn't find a way to tell them that the most painful thing about being a father of a son or two or three was the split personality you sank into as naturally as falling asleep.
On the one hand, you didn't want to repeat the mistakes of your father. On the other, you wanted your sons to turn out at least as well as your father's son—you. For this reason you wanted your sons to emulat
e and love the man who had sculpted you and made you who you were. That man was, of course, your father, their grandfather. But by the same token you were afraid that if they listened to him and loved him too much, they'd forget you and lose track of their love for you.
It was hard enough being the father. If you were the son, caught in the vise between father and grandfather ... the Colonel could only imagine what it must have been like for the Lieutenant and his brother, growing up in the narrowing space between a Colonel no longer on his way up and a General on his way down.
And what of his wife, Martine, Matt's mother? She was caught where mothers usually are, in the middle of the middle between her husband and her son, who was caught between her husband and his father. It was painful and it was confusing and the whole thing was going somewhere she didn't want to go, but what choice did she have? When you're caught, you're caught, so you buckle down and wait it out and hope for the best, the way girls have been taught by their mothers as long as there have been mothers to teach them.
The Colonel and the General hadn't talked in ten years—with the exception of the other night—and they were bound to collide, the way things were going. The Colonel could only hope that Matt wouldn't be caught between them when the collision came ... or that there wouldn't be a clashing of egos, out there on the edges of the psychic battlefield where sons and fathers cling desperately to their maleness hoping against hope it will save them.
That was the other thing about being a father: more often than not, fatherhood stripped you bare of earned and learned abilities and left you with only one thing:
Hope.
It wasn't much to go on, but it was all he had. Like his wife, the Colonel had to buckle down and wait it out and hope for the best, and one blessing he'd picked up somewhere along the way was patience.
For one reason or another, he had never been in much of a hurry in raising his sons. There was always time to try something over and over again, and if that failed, there was always punishment. A week or two restricted to one's room, he knew from experience, tended to stop time.
But now his son Matt was, for better or worse, raised. There was no time left for doing it over again, or for punishment if it wasn't done right the first time, or for Matt or he himself to “grow into” a new situation.
Now someone else held the reins of the punishment demon, and was whipping them on Matt with a vengeance. The Colonel's son was facing a capital charge, an accusation that could take him to the gallows, to the grave. Someone else had stepped in and stopped time.
There wasn't a moment left for mistakes or apologies or corrections. His son's life was at stake and every second counted. He was learning just how much he truly loved his son—both of his sons. He could only hope—there it was, hope again—his son loved him just as much.
Maybe the Colonel and his son stood a chance of meeting halfway between love and hate instead of wasting time as he and his father had done. They were still burning away their lives, like waiting for the passing years to cook off the ills between them. The only place left for them was halfway between tomorrow and the end of their lives. If they wasted any more time, the Colonel knew, death would solve the problem for them, and guilt would come visiting again to cleanse him in its backwash.
Heaven had always been advertised to the Colonel in Sunday School and church as a good place to mend the wounds in your past, but he knew now for the first time in his life that heaven could wait.
He wanted the love of his son and his father now.
Maybe if he and his son succeeded in overcoming the trouble his son found himself in, he and his father could heal their wounds.
Maybe.
He hoped. Good God did he hope.
The Colonel picked up his stride then broke into a run as he passed through an alley on the way to Madam Ky's. Dark faces peered at him through cracked doors, and he could hear the soft shuffle of feet on the cracked pavement behind him. Overhead, laundry dangled on lines run between windows across the alley. Down the dim sidestreets he could smell the aroma of charcoal-burning hibachis boiling fishhead stew, sauteeing hindquarter of yellow mutt with cabbage, warming last night's fricassee of scrawny street pigeon.
It wasn't yet noon.
It felt like midnight.
He was in-country. He was back.
He rounded a corner on Ham Nghi Street and headed for the river. When he reached the docks he turned right and followed the river until he reached the Ben Nghe Canal, then he followed the canal until he saw the bridge. On the corner was Madam Ky's. The Sergeant Major had been right. It was a wee hole in the wall. It was also a dark hole in the wall. He entered.
In a far corner he could make out the glowing tip of a long cigar. Sergeant Major Bennett had beaten him to Madam Ky's. As he approached the table, the Sergeant Major stood and pulled out a chair for him.
“This here's how the other half lunches, sir,” said the Sergeant Major. “What's your pleasure? I'm partial to the local beer.” He held up a brown bottle. It didn't have a label.
“Sure. I'll have some. How've you been, Sarenmajor?” The Sergeant Major heard his rank and title said the way it was supposed to be said and he smiled.
“I'm pretty happy with the way life's treatin’ me, sir. Health's good. Recently I socked in a goodly supply of these here Cu-ban-o seegars . . .” The Sergeant Major took a long puff and grinned. “That's one of the things about hardship duty, sir. There's ways you can sorta reduce the hardships, if you get what I mean.”
“I see you're not having any trouble keeping down the local cuisine,” said the Colonel, pointing to the Sergeant Major's ample gut. “If you were still in my Battalion, I'd have that spare tire off you in a month.”
“I hear that, sir,” laughed the Sergeant Major. “That's one of the side benefits of my new situation, sir, up at the NCO Club. No colonel standin’ around lookin’ over my shoulder, worryin’ about my waistline.”
A waitress in a miniskirt and white go-go boots shuffled over to the table, blew a bubble-gum bubble and said:
“Madam say beer on house, Sar-jant, special deal special guest.”
“That's right nice of the Madam, ain't it, sir? We'll have two more of these.” The Sergeant Major held up the brown bottle and tapped it with a gold ring the size of a roll of Scotch tape.
“You've known the Madam for a while, Sarenmajor?”
“Since ‘62, sir. She's okay. Her old man's definitely VC, but she don't give a shit either way. Us or them, she don't care, long as she can move enough beers and rice to keep herself and the kids fed good. Her old man don't come around much. He's down in IV Corps messing up our riverine patrols, probably. When he does come around, he don't do nothin’ for her. Takes a month's profits and buys himself some black-market M-16s and a few boxes of ammo and heads south to fuck up a few more patrols. You know how it is with these people, sir. They got to get by any way they can.”
“Yeah, I know how it is, Sarenmajor. What's your connection with her? Supply her with a few surplus sodas, maybe a case of Scotch or two?”
The Sergeant Major puffed nervously on his cigar and shifted this way and that in his chair.
“Oh, you know how it is, sir. We got to win their hearts and minds. Only way I found to do that is through their wallets. We don't keep the local saloonkeepers supplied with a little good cheer to spread aroun’ to their friends, ain't much sense in us bein’ over here, is there now, sir?”
“That's the line they're putting out in Washington these days, Sarenmajor. It seems we aren't fighting to win a war anymore. We are fighting to win hearts and minds. I'm glad to see you're up to snuff on your political poop. Don't get too close to that political heat, Sarenmajor, or you'll burn your nose.” The Colonel lifted his beer in a toast and took a sip.
The Sergeant Major laughed so hard he almost choked.
“You sure do get to me, sir,” he coughed. “I mean, I never had it so good as when we had you in the Battalion. I don't guess I knew it at the tim
e, but that was the best damn unit I ever had the pleasure of bein’ in, sir. Yes, it was. Fine outfit. Damn fine.” He sat back and pulled on his cigar.
“Yes, it was, Sarenmajor,” said the Colonel. “I miss the old Battalion.” He gazed out the door at the canal. Sampans brushed against one another going in opposite directions as they plied their trade up and down the busy waterway.
That was the thing about Vietnam. They took up every inch of the place busying themselves at whatever it was they were busying. Not even a sewer like the Ben Nghe Canal was passed up. They used it for a highway, a shopping center, a supermarket, a restaurant, an apartment complex. They traveled the canal, bought food there, ate there, lived there, and slept aboard sampans and barges and floating docks tied there.
Vietnam. Whew. It didn't take up much room on the map, but as a culture of many and varied ethnicities, customs, and habits, it was as big as all outdoors.
“Damn fine outfit, sir. The best. Yes, sir. Here's to the ol’ Battalion.” The Sergeant Major raised his bottle of beer and tipped it toward the Colonel and stared out the open door too.
They were doing the Dance of the Old Troopers, the Colonel and the Sergeant Major. Sergeant Major Theodore Bennett was literally an old Cavalry trooper, having served in the horse Cavalry when the horse Cavalry still had horses. The Colonel was the son of a horse Cavalryman, having grown up on one Cavalry post after another, getting up before dawn to feed and water his old man's polo ponies, holding their reins during the polo matches, seeing to their grooming afterwards. Once or twice the old man had even let him accompany the troop when they were on maneuvers, living out in the field for a week with the men and the horses. That's what the Dance of the Old Troopers was all about—the shared memories of a time when boots were still brown and sabers still rattled along the flanks of a pony at full gallop and taps was still played on a real bugle and soldiers still shot straight and drank straight and stayed out late and never missed reveille (played on a real bugle, not a tape recording) in the morning.
Army Blue Page 21