The Fighting Man (1993)

by Seymour, Gerald

  There had been those who knew that he had joined the march. There would have been those who had cheered the young leader, Rodolfo Jorge Ramírez, in front of the church at Nebaj, who knew that he had gone with the march. They would not be hard to find, for the G-2, the Judas men in Nebaj. Because the march had turned there would be a time of suffering in the villages of the Cuchumatanes. It was the duty of the church to share in the suffering of the flock, and to share was to feel the pain.

  He pushed the cart behind Gord and behind the young woman, and the light grew amongst the trees.

  Kramer, roused from his sleep, gutted the signal. He read the name. BROWN, GORDON BENJAMIN. He read the biography.

  He muttered happily to himself, ‘Heh, Mr Brown, are you running? You should be, because your own fire is coming fast up your own ass. You try running, Mr Brown, and you’re going to find there’s no corner to run to . . . Crazy guy.’

  They moved carefully and silently. They sprinted for each rock cover. Arturo had taken a dozen men up the gorge with him. At each bend, each wind, each twist in the gorge they sheltered and listened, and then ran forward on the narrowed path. It was beyond his comprehension. The path had been ground flat. Not a blade of grass had survived, not a fragment of the lichen growth. The path had been smoothed by the tread of so many feet. He could see the sandal prints and the barefoot prints and the shoe prints and the boot prints. They had been there in the night, and they had gone in the night. It was beyond his belief that so great a march could have turned on the width of the path and extricated itself from the block he had made. The morning sun shone on him. At the far end of the gorge, where the new light slanted down to the white spume of the river, he turned. He retraced his steps, back to the exit of the gorge and the communications system of the battalion.

  Where the trees were thinned the sun came down and found them. They were strung out in the pine forest.

  It was retreat and before the turning back Harpo and Zeppo and Groucho had been back down the line, on the snake path in the gorge, to talk of finding a new way forward.

  Retreat.

  No other bloody word for it.

  Harpo and Zeppo and Groucho could talk of ‘strategic withdrawal’ and of ‘repositioning’ and of ‘tactical redeployment’, and the men who had followed them from the jungle and from the forest community and from Playa Grande and Nebaj and Santa Cruz del Quiché would know that they talked shit. It was retreat. He thought the helicopter would be up soon and searching for them. The Indian men would not understand ‘strategic withdrawal’ and ‘repositioning’ and ‘tactical redeployment’, but they would understand retreat. The evidence was there for Gord to see, of the understanding. Sullen-faced men around him, with the spring gone from them. Fearful-faced women around him, scurrying on the track they made. The march went fast, but in fear, not in anticipation. The evidence of understanding was in the bags that were discarded beside the path, possessions and clothes that had been brought for the entry into Guatemala City, and ammunition boxes that were unopened, and heaps of mortar bombs that were heavy to carry, and food cartons. Cases and boxes and cartons dumped beside the track to make the business of retreat easier. Gord saw the sullen faces and the fear faces.

  Fighting at the first food halt.

  Bitter argument over the distribution and Groucho had been kicked flat to the ground and Zeppo had fired in the air and Harpo had punched a man quiet.

  Alex walked with Gord. He had helped her at the food halt and he had seen that when she fed the dog there would be enough of the meal left for two more days. She had looked at him, challenged him, as to where the dog’s meal was to come from after two more days. The women and the children were no longer at the back of the march, not as when they had been going forward, could not be at the back if they were to be followed and the retreat was to be harassed. Because Gord walked with Alex he was among the women and the children.

  It was the Priest who began it.

  The Priest shook them, kicked the life back into them. The Priest had the guitar from off his back and he strummed the chords as he walked. The Archaeologist said that the Priest sang the song of Tecún Umán who was the Quiché hero who fought the conquistadores of Pedro de Alvarado, and came from the great city of Utatlán beside the modern Santa Cruz del Quiché. They were crossing a field strip. The sun beat down on them. The march was in stampede. There was the first distant drones of a helicopter. The Priest ran and he sang ahead of the squealing lurch of the cart and the creak of the wheelbarrow. The children were with him. In the sun the Priest was a moving island in the sea of the children. Only the children had the trust and did not know of retreat. The children sang with the Priest, shouted the song of Tecún Umán. The children were dancing, singing, skipping towards the tree line and the cover from the approaching helicopter. They had a beauty, to Gord, the children. He saw the laughter in their faces and a happiness. They were the future, they were what Groucho had told him, they were the dancing and singing and skipping butterflies . . . and there had been children dancing and singing and skipping in the dust-dry streets of Karbala.

  He called back to the Archaeologist who dragged the cart. ‘This Tecún Umán, what happened to him?’

  ‘He fought Alvarado in hand-to-hand combat . . .’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘You want to know?’

  ‘I want to know.’

  The Archaeologist recited, as if he had learned it parrot-fashion. He said it was from the Quiché Indian history, written down. ‘. . . “Launched himself into the air, for he had come transformed into an eagle, covered in plumes that grew from within himself . . . He had wings that also sprouted from his body, and he wore three crowns, one of gold, one of pearls, and one of diamonds and emeralds. Captain Tecún charged” . . .’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘Alvarado speared Tecún Umán in the guts, killed him. Then he went and burned alive all of Tecún Umán’s hotshots. Then he went and butchered all of Tecún Umán’s people . . . You wanted to know.’

  Gord laughed, grim. ‘And that’s worth a song?’

  The Archaeologist said, ‘It’s worth a song because these people think, one day, Tecún Umán will return. They’re simple people, Gord, they believe he will return, just like they believe that Gaspar the spirit cannot be killed by the army . . . Don’t you understand, Gord, what you have been playing with, what trust you have taken . . . ?’

  He let the Priest go ahead with the children, let them go far enough for the singing and the sound of the guitar to be swallowed by the forest.

  He had the plan. He told the men with him to find wood that would burn.

  They were late into the air because the equipment had failed. The equipment on the Huey bird had received only an intermittent signal, not constant. They were late because the technicians from the military aid mission of Israel had had to be flown up from Guatemala City to the forward control point. Tom had not seen it before, the beauty of Guatemala from the air. Rich sun brightening the luxury of the green forests and mountains breaking scattered cloud mass and the shine of winding rivers and the cut of mud-yellow roads. Ahead, burnished by the sunlight, were the corrugated-iron roofs of the New Model Villages in a Pole of Development. He felt the freedom . . . Arturo was beside him. He ignored the Kaibil colonel. He was his own man with the power of flight. The headset and the helmet suppressed the rotor thrash and he heard only the faint and broken signal from the transmitter on the ground to the receiver that the technicians had bolted again down onto the floor area forward of the cyclic stick and alongside the left-foot directional control pedal. He homed in on the faint signal, heard it grow casually in intensity. He flew high. Not as when he had flown the Apache, low against the level contour of the desert, but high altitude where machine-gun fire could not have reached him.

  Arturo saw the smoke.

  It was the flying that he lived for and that brought him happiness.

  Arturo tugged at Tom’s arm, point
ed ahead and right.

  He felt the glory of the country below him and the rain-cleaned air around him, a bastard it had been when he was grounded by the weather, and he could head further back into memory. The long, endless three years when he had worked out of the DEA office in St Louis, three years endured before he could join Airwing. The guy at the flying school who owned the Huey 1H-B, and who charged him big rates because the bird was precious to the guy, and who gave him a lecture in Safe Flying each time the bird was hired out like he was talking to a teenager about condoms and Safe Sex. Three years of shit from a guy who knew nothing of Safe Flying in the combat zone. It was what Tom Schultz lived for and the bird rolled to his touch on the cyclic stick and rocked in the headwinds . . . The signal was not strong enough. The smoke spirals came in five places from amongst the tree canopy.

  Arturo’s voice, excited, broke over the signal that was not strong enough, and clamoured in Tom’s ear.

  ‘I can get the Cessnas in. We have a squadron, A-37Bs, I can get them in and bomb the bastards, napalm the bastards . . .’

  Tom said, ‘And I’d reckon you’d be wasting your time.’

  ‘That’s too much fire for loggers . . .’

  Tom shook his head. ‘Forget it.’

  ‘. . . That’s not lumber people, that is them.’

  ‘Sorry to be the wet towel.’

  Tom hitched off his helmet and he gestured for Arturo to get his helmet off. Tom worked his own helmet onto Arturo’s head. He let him listen. He took his own helmet back, nestled it down again over his scalp.

  ‘We’re not with the signal, not yet, the signal is ahead and out east . . . It’s the oldest one in the book. Sorry if I’m teaching you egg-sucking . . . In Vietnam the ’Cong and the NVA used to heat up water and fill their food jars with it, good and hot water. We had the gear to detect body heat from the air. The B-52s would come in from Guam island and blast shit out of the jungle where the heat was. The ’Cong and the NVA, they’d gone. All we did was give the monkeys a bad time. What I’m telling you, you go down there and what you’ll find is a load of burned-out fires, no bodies . . . It’s about domination. You’ll dominate them, stress them, a hell of a sight more by following them, shadowing them, than by bombing the hell where they aren’t. You with me, the domination thing . . . ?’

  They hovered, they flew on. They passed the smoke spirals. They flew circles. They tracked the signal.

  Gord was talking, distracted, to Jorge.

  ‘It buys us time. They’ll have a reconnaissance platoon stalking us. We can’t help that. Nothing we can do about it, not in daylight where they can follow us. In darkness, yes, not in daylight. They’ve a helicopter up, right . . . ?’

  The helicopter was there, distant, always there.

  ‘. . . They’ll have seen the smoke. They’ll call up an airstrike on the smoke . . .’

  He had a hundred men slashing with their machetes. A hundred men, frantic, cut branches from the lower trunks of the trees around them.

  ‘. . . When the fixed wing go in they have to keep the reconnaissance platoon back, or they have a “friendly fire” job. We buy time back there, and we buy time here . . . I’m trying to lose them, Jorge.’

  A hundred men making stakes from the branches and cutting sharp pointed ends, and running from the safety comfort of the trees and burying the stakes deep enough for the pointed ends to be just below the swaying tips of the high drying grass fronds of the clearing. And he was urging them hard and calling for the fires to be lit, and yelling at Jorge would he get the fuck out and have the march swing west.

  ‘And in a day, two days, we will turn and fight them.’

  ‘Yes, Jorge.’

  ‘Fight them and beat them, go again for Guatemala City.’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  He could hear all the time, against the slashing of the machetes, the constant distant thunder of the helicopter.

  He was surprised they had taken so long to fly the bombers.

  He rated it as five miles ahead of the first smoke spirals. Two more white-grey columns from the burning of damped wood. With his fingers Tom gently tuned the receiver. A little to the right and less to the left. He held the signal. He pointed to the new smoke. He shook his head, grimaced. Arturo leaned against the window and was staring down onto the tree carpet and the smoke and into the green of the clearing and there were bright scarlet flowers growing through the grass.

  He heard Arturo’s voice, distorted. ‘It is the time they must eat, they cannot keep going without food. You cannot feed that number of people on the hoof. They are feeding, and we could put in the birds. We have good ground for a landing, close-quarters fighting with the Kaibiles and they will break . . .’

  ‘Are you looking for another lesson in egg-sucking?’

  ‘Shit on you, Schultz . . .’

  ‘I’ll take you down . . . Don’t swallow that egg, might choke you . . .’

  He pushed the stick. Did it fast, violent. They dived. Arturo had his arms flailing in front of him for something to catch and steady himself. Nothing there. They dropped. Arturo’s hands smeared against the side window hatch as if that might hold him. The tree canopy rushed to them, and the clearing rose to them. Good flying, great flying, hammering the Huey bird down from 3000 feet above the tree top level. He steadied. He flattened out from the drop to the hover. He was above the grass of the clearing. He edged the last few feet. Not looking at Arturo. Letting the man look for himself. He was above the grass, flattening it. Above the scarlet flowers, devastating them. The down thrust from the rotors beat the grass aside and the flowers. He held the hover. He looked down onto the stakes with the sharpened points that were erect in the downed grass and scarlet flowers.

  Tom heaved back on the stick.

  ‘It’s the second oldest one . . . back to the ’Cong and the NVA . . . hope you didn’t swallow it . . . You attract a helicopter force in, and when they set down they’re amongst sharp poles and that’s what the infantry have to jump onto, and it plays hell with the undercarriage of the birds. If you’d put your ugly bastards in there, if, you’d have taken casualties and you might have lost a lift, and then you’re cautious, and then you don’t try it the next time. It’s like I said, it’s about domination.’

  He climbed again to the cruising altitude.

  Tom chuckled.

  The signal took him away to the west. The direction of the march had changed. It was a game to him, and the game made Tom Schultz comfortable.

  ‘You have my full and warm congratulations, Mario.’

  He basked. He stood by his jeep. There was a loudspeaker attachment that linked to the radio hook-up. He was surrounded by officers and NCOs. They were on the road that ran from Zaculeu to the Los Encuentros Junction, eleven miles due south from Santa Cruz del Quiché. Ahead of him, clear in the afternoon light, the blued mountain range stretched above the forest, and further and paler were the Cuchumatanes.

  ‘They are in retreat, most definite.’

  The voice of the general commanding G-4 (Logistics) boomed across the road. ‘You go for the kill, Mario.’

  ‘I take the analogy of a grape that falls from a vine. The grape falls to the ground. The flesh of the fruit rots. What is left is the seed. It is the seed that I seek. I will stamp with the full force of the Kaibil battalion on the seed, split it, break it, destroy it. The seed will never produce further fruit when the Kaibil battalion has stamped on it. Oh yes, I go for the kill . . .’

  He broke the radio link. Two helicopters were in descent onto the road. The helicopter of the American was refuelled and the engine was on power. More troops spilled from the helicopters that landed. He tossed off the headset. The American was in the air. He looked into the smirking faces of his officers and his NCOs.

  ‘They will run and there is nowhere for them to hide. They will manoeuvre and there is nowhere for them to go. They are the chicken in spasm without the head. No, I will not engage them while they still have the capacity to fight
, I will not sacrifice any of you for a gesture. But, and I promise it to you, you will have no cause for impatience. It will be the Kaibiles that destroy them, the baby whore Ramírez and the Englishman with the fire, you have my promise . . .’

  The helicopter of the American was a diminishing speck framed against the mountain majesty. Unseen, they were there, and tracked.

  It was the drone of a sweet honey bee. They had gone west as he had instructed and the helicopter had been with them, high and hidden by the mat of the tree branches. They had gone north and he had dared to hope. They had gone north in a window of silence. The helicopter was with them again. Sometimes it was behind them, and sometimes it circled them, and sometimes there was the deeper throb of the engines as it hovered ahead of them. They went east now. Only the one bird, an albatross flying with them. The aircraft had not come and bombed behind them, as he had promised they would. A wing of helicopters had not come to land among the stakes and disgorge troops into the trap, as he had promised they would. The drone of the bird, unseen, the bee cut at the nerve of the men.