Mo laughed; his sarcasm was well earned. Her spirits had lifted some with the news of the baby—and, perhaps not so ironically as it seemed, with the advent of her ability to write to her man—and she’d felt more able to enjoy the life she had while she waited for Brian’s return. But at the same time, she’d also found herself a bit more moody and short-tempered than usual. No longer so acutely buffeted by melancholy, which still battered her in moments alone, now she was easily brought to bursts of irritation. The book Aunt Bridie had bought her suggested that mood swings and poor temper were part of the hormonal alchemy going on in her body while she singlehandedly created a whole new human life, so Mo didn’t exactly mind her tilt-a-whirl feelings, but she knew she wasn’t so easy to be around.
Uncle Dave gave her still-flat belly an affectionate pat. “And how is the wee one today?”
Mo covered his hand with hers. “Warm and snug.” She couldn’t wait to feel the baby moving in there. That wouldn’t happen for a few more weeks, according to her book. Until then, even as it changed her body and her mind, the pregnancy seemed half a dream.
Another customer came up with an armload of pink and red, including another of those ostentatious heart candy boxes. This one was a resident of Shayton and a regular at the store. “You’re glowing, Mo,” he said and smiled kindly.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Murray,” Uncle Dave said with a grin of his own. “Looks like Mrs. Murray’s in for a grand Valentine’s!”
Mr. Murray’s smile turned wry. “Gotta keep the missus, happy, Dave. You know what I’m sayin’.”
Mo decided she’d love a ridiculous heart candy box if only Brian could be here to make her happy.
She set her hand again on her belly and remembered that he was.
~oOo~
Mo woke with a start in the dark. March was coming in like a lion, and a wild storm raged outside the windows. The afternoon before, while she was working with Maggie and Uncle Dave, the radio had beeped a warning, and they’d all been tense for a little while, but no tornado had come from it. Just a lot of rain and howling winds.
Living in Oklahoma, a person developed a strange relationship with tornadoes. On the one hand, they happened often enough to almost feel mundane. There was a ‘season’ for them, after all. On the other hand, they could wreak incredible destruction and death, so you ignored the warnings at your peril. When the Emergency Broadcast System whined through the radio or on the television, and the sirens howled outside, the prevailing feeling was both Ugh, again? This probably won’t be anything, either and Better batten down the hatches.
Now, wondering what had driven her so sharply from sleep, Mo considered the rain streaking the windows and listened for sounds of trouble. Just rain and wind. Nothing to worry about.
But she had to pee. That was probably the trouble. She was four months pregnant and barely showing, the baby couldn’t weigh more than an apple, but she had to pee ten times a day.
Sighing her irritation, she tossed back the covers and stood.
Two things happened then, both at once: she felt a heavy, warm wetness around her thighs and hips, and the mortifying thought that she’d actually wet herself began to form. And, right then, cutting off that thought before it could fully happen, a cramp like a knife blade sliced through her middle.
The pain folded her in half, but she kept her feet and, with a terrible fear growing in her heart, switched on the lamp. The sudden flare of lamplight blinded her, and she rubbed at her eyes until she could see. Then she stared in horror.
Her nightgown was soaked in blood, from a few inches below her waist, to a few inches above her knees. Blood had soaked the sheets as well.
She’d just felt the baby move for the first time a few days before.
“DA!” she screamed. “DA!!! PLEASE!!”
~oOo~
“A miscarriage at eighteen weeks can bring complications for the mother, so we’ll keep you here for a few days, just to be sure everything’s healing up as it should.”
Mo sat in the bright white hospital bed and stared at the old man with the thin grey mustache and the severe grey crewcut . He wasn’t even her doctor.
She was in a military hospital, surrounded by strangers. She hadn’t yet been allowed visitors, so since she’d lost Aunt Bridie’s hand while they rolled her away, Mo had been entirely alone and at least half-drugged, rocking on a turbulent sea of confusion and loss. Now, with her wits about her, she could understand how great her loss was, and her loneliness. She needed Brian, but he’d left her. She needed Uncle Dave and Aunt Bridie, but they’d been taken away from her. Or she from them.
They’d taken her away, carted her off to an operating room, done something to her while she was in a narcotic limbo, and now she didn’t have a baby anymore. She wasn’t going to be a fierce mama to Brian’s child.
Michael David for a boy or Eva Bridget for a girl.
Her baby was gone.
But she was in the maternity ward.
After they’d done to her what they’d done, they’d rolled her here. Just on the other side of the flimsy privacy curtain another young woman slept, dressed in a pretty pink quilted-satin bed jacket and surrounded by pretty pink floral arrangements and puffy white stuffed animals with pretty pink satin ribbons around their necks. One compassionate nurse had finally pulled the curtain between them, but Mo could still see a little ceramic lamb planter with Mother-in-Law’s Tongue and English ivy stuffed in its back, and a pretty pink bow.
At least they’d taken the pretty pink baby back to the nursery. Hearing her cries and coos had made Mo’s insides crumble to brittle shards.
“Why did it happen?”
“There are lots of reasons a miscarriage happens. Best not to worry about that, dear, and know that it simply wasn’t meant to be. Now you rest up and let the nurses take care of you, and you’ll be right as rain in no time.”
“I have classes. I’m a student at OU.” She didn’t know why she’d said that. Nothing mattered less than school.
The doctor laughed paternally, humoring her like a child. “Well, I don’t know about that. What I know is you’re staying put, missy, until we’re sure you’re strong enough and there are no complications.” When she turned from him and looked out the window at the sunless, cheerless morning, the doctor patted her hand. “Not to fret, little lady. You can always have another baby. You can try again in about six weeks, in fact.”
Mo kept her attention on the grey world beyond the windowpanes. “Get buggered, doctor.”
~oOo~
When the doctor left, they finally allowed her to see her family. Aunt Bridie and Uncle Dave came in together, hand in hand. Without a word, they broke apart and each took a side of the bed. They leaned close and folded her into their arms.
In that huddle, Mo picked up her grief and wrapped it around heart.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The war D had come back to was not the one he’d left.
Or maybe it was, but with the skim scraped off to show the rot.
Dak To had been, for him and every other man who’d survived the meaningless fight to the top of that godforsaken hill, the thing that made them see. Those still breathing when the air went quiet looked around and knew. Then they got the order to move on, and the last quivering flame of hope guttered out. They’d all known then that they weren’t fighting for anything worth winning. Certainly not for democracy and righteousness.
By the end of 1969, when he’d landed back in his old unit but on a different base of operations, nobody was even pretending they were fighting the good fight. After My Lai—which had happened in March 1968, scant months after he’d scraped the fucking mud off his boots—went public, the whole combat force knew they were dying for no good reason, and now they couldn’t even pretend they were good guys.
My Lai was an aberration, but not the only one. Only the worst, or at least the worst that got known. But every man on the ground knew horror like that was too close for comfort to the things they go
t ordered to do on a regular basis.
Every stranger an enemy. Kill or be killed. Guerilla warfare.
And the men here now, they knew straight up, from before they’d been drafted, what they were getting themselves into. Before they’d put their boots down on Vietnamese soil for the first time, they were already angry and disillusioned. They were thus less disciplined and more rebellious.
That was the very reason D had come back. He knew the way these boys felt, and he understood how to lead them so they would be the men the truly were, and not allow the feral beast that was this war to devour them from the inside out.
Commissioned officers weren’t the men the men followed. Commissioned officers were the men the men obeyed. NCOs were the men the men followed. And that was why D had come back. He was good in the field. He could do good here, and here, he knew what he was doing.
But the war had changed. The combat had quieted. In the first years, hardly a day seemed to go by without active engagement with the enemy. Some stretches got so bad they ran out of body bags and had to leave their dead exposed and lined up, waiting for resupply. There were stretches of quiet, too, but the threat hovered always just above their heads, so even boredom crackled with tension.
Here at Bong Son, there were whole strings of days of routine patrols and trainings. Landing Zone English was a significant Army base of operations, with established infrastructure and administration, and the 173rd had been stationed here and become well established while D was stateside. A base on the middle coast of South Vietnam, at an almost comfortable distance from the DMZ, LZ English offered more rhythm, less chaos. More approximations of normalcy.
That hadn’t been D’s first experience of this war. He’d hardly left the muck for two full tours and spent untold nights in raggedy tents or just out in the weather, leaning on his pack, holding his M16 like a lover. Now, he slept most nights on a cot, and found himself spending hours, some days, on his ass at a desk near Major Cornish, helping him organize patrols and missions and track the movement of the enemy around them.
All that desk duty had him rethinking the benefits of getting promoted. He was a soldier, not a paper-pusher.
Some days, D felt a little bit of distance from the brutal slog of the war, and the slightest sense of safety.
But there was an enemy here, close by, and no amount of routine could dull the blade of that truth. Nor should it.
Here, it was the Viet Cong they engaged with most often, rather than the North Vietnamese Army. VC were the true guerillas, the least organized and the most unpredictable. So, despite the generally friendly South Vietnamese inhabitants of this area, despite the seductive calm of quiet days, any unexpected Vietnamese person in a place they should not be was cause for alarm.
D stared hard at the old woman before him.
Tiny and seeming frail, she smiled up at him and spoke in Vietnamese, holding up a hat, a conical shape like the rural Vietnamese wore so often. D knew only enough Vietnamese to get people to move along or stop, and barely that. He had no ear at all for foreign languages. But he knew that hat was called a nón lá, or ‘leaf hat.’
The old woman held it inverted, and it was full of rice. She held it up as if offering it to him, and smiled and bobbed her head as if to encourage him to take it.
She was, by all visual evidence, alone on this path.
For his part, D had his M16 pointed at her head. As did every one of the ten men with him on this clearance mission.
The tiny hamlet behind the woman was supposed to be empty. It had been mostly destroyed a few weeks before D had arrived in-country again, after VC had ambushed a patrol only a few miles outside the LZ perimeter. Six of eight men on that patrol had been killed, and the 2nd/503rd had come down hard on the little community harboring the VC cell.
This little community. The civilians had been rousted, the VC allies taken prisoner or killed. Now what was left was charred ruins, and D’s squad had come through to make sure it was still empty.
After almost a week of nonstop desk duty, he’d actually been glad for the mission. The thought that he might have climbed high enough in the NCO ranks to be taken out of the field completely had been chewing holes in his gut.
And here was this tiny old woman, holding up a hat full of rice.
She had to be eighty, ninety years old. Her face was like one of the topographic maps he’d been staring at until his eyes crossed. Her hair was pure white, faint wisps like smoke. Her mouth was empty of teeth, except for one dark chicklet at the center of her bottom gum. She wore the traditional pajama getup, once dark but washed to grey. She was dirty and skinny. What did the evidence of his senses tell him?
What was under that rice?
Any stranger was a possible enemy.
Kill or be killed.
What if he shot her and there was nothing but rice in that hat? What if she was offering the rice in exchange for safe harbor?
Or: What if he took her rice and let her go and there was a bomb in that hat? What if he stood here like a fucking statue and she blew them up While-U-Wait style?
Why the fuck was Kaur down with dysentery? The bastard was the only one who spoke fluent Vietnamese.
“Sarge, where’d she come from?” Tweety muttered.
D didn’t know. She’d been standing right there when they cleared the bush.
He considered that hat. Size and shape, the biggest bomb it would hold without being obvious was a grenade or maybe a fistful of C4. Small blast area, but devastating within it.
It would have to have a hair trigger. An unpinned grenade waiting to be jostled, or a wad of C4 with some kind of pressure switch, he guessed. If it was there, he’d set it off when he checked.
He knew only one thing he could do and live with himself, if he lived at all.
Mo was home waiting for him, growing his child inside her. He’d promised her he’d come home. He’d promised her they’d build a family together.
But Mo was thousands of miles away from him, and this old lady was not even ten feet in front of him. More importantly, the squad of men who’d followed him on this mission were at his back.
“Fall back,” he said, raising his voice to be heard, and to be firm, but without any tone that might startle the woman. “Thirty paces minimum. Right now. Call it when you’re clear.”
“Sarge, what—” Tweety started.
“Shut the fuck up and do what I say, private. Fall the fuck back.”
A low-tide sweep of protests and complaints swelled, but D felt his men falling back.
“Clear!” Tweety called. There was mourning in his tone already.
I ain’t dead yet, kid, D thought. He let his weapon drop from its aim on the woman.
She smiled and took two steps toward him.
D put up his hand, and she stopped. “Easy, mama san, easy. Put the hat on the ground, please.” He tried to pantomime the request. “Easy.”
Smiling and nodding, she lifted the hat in offering again and rattled off more words that could have been I’m going to eat your liver with chopsticks, you Yankee pig, for all he knew.
“Put it on the ground, mama. Real slow.” He heard himself doing that asinine thing where he raised his voice like that would make her understand better. Clearing his throat, he tried again in a more conversational tone. “The hat. On the ground. Slow.”
Finally she got it. Her eyes flared wide with understanding, and she nodded excitedly and set the hat down.
She didn’t do so with any particular care, except to try not to spill the rice, and she didn’t back off right away. These were exceptionally encouraging signs. Not proof-positive she wasn’t a threat, but definitely checks in the right column.
With a quick look over his shoulder to ensure his men were at safe distance—they’d fallen back to not an inch more than the minimum he’d dictated and were all still drawn and aimed—D crouched before the hat and pushed his hand in before he could lose his nerve.
Rice. Nothing but rice. He heaved
a great sigh of relief.
He looked up at the old woman. Her hands were together now, and she bowed. Thanking him? “I don’t understand, mama san.”
Another rush of words spilled from her lips. Then she backed away, turned, and tottered off down the road.
That was very strange.
She was too old to be out here alone. No way she was alone. And why give him a hat full of rice if she didn’t want anything?
She was a decoy.
So D’s squad could be surrounded. Well, mystery solved.
D stood and aimed again. “Fall in! Look sharp!” he called and heard the soft thunder of boots running toward him. He’d been focused on that goddamn hat, and he’d left his men sitting ducks. “Get to cover,” he ordered. “Watch your six.” The men scattered carefully into the ruins. D kept one eye on the road until they were off it.
A rustle in the bush to his left. D fired, one shot, aimed high, looking to draw fire and get a location, but holding out one last flicker of hope that it was a frightened civilian and not a VC lying in wait. Knowing what he was doing, his men held their fire.
No shot was returned. But was that a voice in the bush?
“Look sharp!” he called again.
In the bush, Brian saw movement, and a flash of black—all he needed to know it was a rifle. One of the Russian AK-47s these bastards carried. Far more reliable than the M16, which jammed repeatedly and always picked the worst possible time to do it.
He fired, and this time, he didn’t aim high.
A VC fell forward, a chunk of his head missing, and then the afternoon thundered with the sound of war.
As squad commander, D was both soldier and tactician. He had to keep engaged in his own fight and understand the progress of the whole battle and the well-being of his men. As he shot another VC jumping from cover before him, he caught more movement from the corner of his eye and yelled “Douglas! On your three!”
Wait: The Brazen Bulls Beginning Page 16