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• • •
THE COUNTRY had been on fire from the moment he had first landed. He’d only ever seen a big civilian city from the insides of planes or airports, and now he was outside on the tarmac—in his undress blues and carrying a seabag, and the uncountable Falstaffs and Singapore slings were exacting their revenge on his head and guts—in a city, Da Nang, that was home to hundreds of thousands and was taking artillery fire, smoke rising like giant ghost trees from the rooftops.
Within a couple of hours he was assigned to the 26th Marines at a supply depot in the rear at Dong Ha, from which he was to run convoys up the dirt roads to the forward combat bases near the DMZ at Camp Carroll, Lang Vei, Quang Tri, something called the Rockpile, and another spot that was just an airstrip really as it turned out—a road, a cliff, and an airstrip on a low plateau outside a village called Khe Sanh, although whatever human life in the village had been raptured lately, right before he passed through it the first time, so lately the cats were still delicately eating scraps in the hot trash heaps, the cats the souls of the sinners left behind.
Convoy orders were nice and simple: keep going. A long line of trucks in single file, twenty, fifty, sometimes a hundred trucks. You get a flat tire, you keep going. He drove an M54, a five-ton truck with ten wheels, and you could afford to lose a tire so long as it wasn’t in front and keep on up the slick road to the combat base. A truck disabled by whatever mechanical failure or land mine, you ditch that truck and keep going. If it obstructs the road you push it off the cliff, don’t matter if your mother’s inside. Do not stop. They were running candy canes and powder charges and everything between, building supplies, shovels, canned milk, but the cargo and any disabled truck could be replaced. Two minutes stopped on a mountain road was plenty long enough for a convoy to get sighted and blown to hell from incoming.
Squads of grunts were guarding the road, on patrol or some of them dug in, or some of them hiding in rock formations because up near the DMZ the place could have been Mars for all the cover any vegetation provided. But you hardly saw these dug-in or hiding squads and fire teams until you were right on top of them. And while the convoy headed back to Dong Ha the afternoon after a drop, the grunts guarding the road would throw a bag into your truck as you drove by, a burlap or polypropylene woven bag usually used for sandbagging but with a rock in it to make it sail like a projectile and you’d snatch it coming in your window. Inside was a passel of rumpled lists of the supplies they needed: razor blades, rations, bullets, cigarettes, soap. Somebody wrote, Chicken soup or orange juice—we all got colds. It was Christmas every day, and Vollie was Santa Claus taking requests. Every list pled for beer, but he couldn’t find any for the longest time.
Do not stop the convoy. He heard it in his dreams, dreams of incoming artillery and RPGs, and when you woke up that was no dream, that was the explosion in the deep distance. One-hundred-twenty-two-millimeter rocket fire and 100-millimeter artillery fire coming from some goddamn place. A little thump, thump, thump. You counted the seconds until you heard the bangs commence and thereby figured out how many miles away the guns were. From up by Khe Sanh came rumors of a new gun. A big NVA gun, never before used in the field. One hundred thirty millimeters, accurate to crazy distances, hitting cargo planes the minute they landed and making Swiss cheese of the airfield. What with the Phantom fighter-bombers crisscrossing the sky at will you’d think they could find those 130 millimeters and knock them out. The 130 was better artillery even than the Americans had, or anyhow than the Marines did. This piddly-size country, in fact half a country, with these piddly-size people, where did they get such a gun? Rumor said the guns were hidden across the Laotian border, in tunnels dug into the eastern flanks of the mountains under dense foliage, and the guns rolled out and fired and rolled back in their tunnels untraceably. Every rumor had a tunnel in it. Scuttlebutt about a wayward shipment of candy bars—where did they go? Some tunnel rat found them later, a whole pallet of Snickers in a room in the earth with a dog guarding it, tied to the pallet and dead.
Laos being neutral, he might have asked somebody how come the enemy got to run supply lines through it and bury their monster guns there and fire them, and how come we were building our camps here and waiting to get shelled instead of driving over the border and killing them first? But such questions arose and blew off like mist, because boot camp had trained the mind to sneer at questions and forget them. To live in the body and let it reason in its thoughtless way, to jump and dart precisely, respond machinelike. The machine of the body is at peace with itself and knows only peace. That other structure, the command structure, the mind, the nerves, that part suffers and fears and knows conflict. And what for? When you could be just four limbs, a pelvis, a head, a torso? It seemed silly in boot camp the way the drill sergeant would curse you out if ever you said “I” or “me.” But there was some truth in this practice it took training to reveal. You stop calling yourself your name, that ain’t your name anymore. You stop calling him “I” and call him instead “this recruit,” then that’s all you are. Maybe that’s all you ever were, a bag of flesh and bones at peace. They cursed and beat and humiliated out of you any notion of what was called thinking for yourself. Nobody ever got out of boot camp able to say, Sergeant, I think there might be a better way to get this job done. You’d learn something and think you’d forgotten it until a high-pitched whisper came through your tent. And then you had jumped out of the tent and into the trench with your lid on and your M16 in hand before the laggard mind told you what you’d heard was, rather had been, a sniper bullet. The boy’s dumb body knew faster and better than his mind did.
Sometimes the roadside grunts put mail in the sandbags along with the rock and the rumpled list, and if they were dug in far enough from the road you had to square up, high on the mount atop the cab, to snag the thing from the air like a long fly to the outfield, and inside was a letter to Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Routenberg of Livonia, Michigan, and a rumpled note to the convoy demanding, if not beer, at least a couple of hundred pounds of grass. All Vollie had for them to drink was Coca-Cola. It turned out some guys made a casserole out of rations cooked in Coke. A Puerto Rican from the 2/9 Marines told him that was how you were supposed to cook pork, which was comical, trying to tell a Clinton County boy he didn’t know how to cook a pig.
There were whole villages made of Coke cases, and the ingenious Vietnamese had pleated together roofs for their huts out of the dissected Coke cans. The convoy had to slow up through one such village, and they should have known better because as they rolled into the village no kids were flinging themselves at the sides of the trucks, begging for candy and rations. Everybody was in a hut someplace.
Then a bomb detonated in the road. A Marine artillery shell, most likely, that had failed to explode and been rejiggered into a land mine. The mine blew off the front end of the truck right ahead of his. Three men flew up and away from the explosion, but they still had their legs and scrambled, flesh hanging in strips through smoldering fatigues—the automatic marine body that scrambles before it needs to understand—and climbed into the back of Vollie’s truck. The convoy plowed teetering right over the cardboard village, right over the Coke huts, running who knew what, rice bags or people, under the listing axles, and the convoy did not stop. It got to Camp Carroll ahead of schedule carrying mail, tents, diesel fuel, kerosene, Winston the one filter cigarette that delivers flavor twenty times a pack, two wounded, one dead. He was Santa Claus and the mailman and a teenager driving tons of munitions through a monsoon-slick road in early February with rat-a-tat sniper fire in the distant hills as normal as birdsong. Winston’s got that filter flavor.
Then back in Dong Ha he found the Quonset hut where the squids were hiding their beer. If marines never stole from the army and the navy we could never win a war. A marine is a thief by training, tradition, and necessity caused by, Why are we always out of supplies and they’re so flush? But questions blew off
like fog, and another marine from his convoy group lit a smoke bomb at the far end of the depot, and the squids went running to investigate while Vollie backed up his truck to the Quonset hut, and with a dolly, a ramp, and four men pushing, they got a whole pallet of Hamm’s beer into his truck and covered it, and he was out of there before the quartermaster or anybody else was any the wiser. Clean cut with smoothness aged in—Hamm’s, it’s the refreshingest. Then the whole way toward the Rockpile, they threw warm cases of beer down to the men popping from behind boulders, from under makeshift blinds, men joyous as retriever dogs to see the labels on the cases.
His convoy had nearly reached the Rockpile, midday, when a marine appeared like a vision hovering above the road in the distance. At first it seemed the warm beer was giving Vollie fantod hallucinations, but he’d only drunk the one, nice and slow to let the stomach take it, not even the one, a swig remained in the can he held with fingers that meantime guided the steering wheel. The hovering marine wore a painted wood sign around his neck. You could see his busted helmet and flak jacket, but the feet were too loose to be standing. He floated midair. A miracle as they approached. A marine with invisible wings. Then as they got close you could see the spike that had been introduced through his ass and into the torso, a thin spike you could spy only when you were near enough to see his face, in fact a dead Vietnamese face about fifteen years old with flies nesting in the nose, dressed in old shreds of Marine fatigues. The sign around his neck read
CAUTION:
THIS ROAD PATROLLED BY THE MAGNIFICENT BASTARDS
2ND BATTALION, 4TH MARINES
And a little drawing of a seahorse for a signature.
They slept that night at the Rockpile, or anyhow under it. There wasn’t any need to drive up the crazy mountain, or any road to climb it, didn’t seem. And in the morning they drove back to Dong Ha, unstopping and sometimes throwing C rations of ham and motherfuckers at the Vietnamese in their loose-fit rags who lined the roads sometimes begging for food and sometimes pretending to beg for food so you would slow down if you were stupid and they would throw a grenade in your cab.
They pulled into Dong Ha, and the grinning screeching children swarmed begging frenziedly, and the trucks pushed through with all due haste. Farther along, near the base gate, an old woman—or not so old but without any teeth, the brown smiling gums gone to leather from chewing betel nut—waved her straw cone hat sweet and friendly by the roadside. Suddenly she bent low and fished at her skirt bottom. Vollie in the cab unholstered the 1911 pistol from his shoulder, or his hand unholstered it, jutted it out the window, and aimed it, the peaceful fleet hand that did its work while the laggard mind raced to understand what was happening.
Then the old woman, unfazed by an automatic pistol aimed at her face by a dumb white teenager in a truck, pulled her skirt up over her belly and pulled down her shapeless drawers calling, “Fucky-fucky five dollars.”
His hand drew his pistol back within the cab. The trucks rumbled on inside the gate, inside the compound, and the men refueled and parked at the tire shop and went to the mess and then to their bunks.
He had never seen a woman’s privates before, he had seen pictures and he had dreamt dreams, but the mind so unswerving in its misguided notions and expectations could not shake all night the weirdness that the fucking part was in the front of her, whereas in the female of all the other animals he could think of, you found the fucking parts behind. The frontwardness, the face-to-face aspect of human fucking was itself backward. But no, that was another lie of the discordant mind. The body didn’t know we were made to do things the wrong way—it didn’t know this thing that wasn’t true. It got a hard-on all the same to see a woman without her clothes, even decrepit; though perhaps the hard-on came from the pistol he had aimed at her face and had not fired.
Ham and motherfuckers was ham and lima beans and even the starvelings up at Khe Sanh didn’t want them.
Do not stop the convoy.
But then one day while they were taking apart their pallets at Khe Sanh—uncommon to stop at Khe Sanh, rumors of a hell of a ruckus up there what with the RPGs and the 130-millimeter guns, so the Marine Corps was supplying mostly from the air—he heard a noise. He was unloading into a hooch and he heard a noise. He looked around him. The four other guys in the hooch unloading with him were already gone. The smoke from their cigarettes hung where they had stood, but the men had vanished, and he ran out of the tent aware he was a step behind something important, and the body knowing more as always threw itself in the trench outside the hooch and landed on a dead grunt who, wait, was not dead but crouching, ducked and covered, in a stream that, wait, was not a stream but a trench filled two feet deep with water. The grunt threw Vollie off him. Vollie landed in the water of the trench. Six men crouched there half submerged. The sun was setting through the drizzle. I have heard incoming real close and so I am in a trench, reported the idiot laggard mind, and I am afraid. Then the artillery was everywhere, the surface of the airstrip around him bubbling like the surface of boiling stew, and they stayed in the trench until the sun had set two more times. Somewhere in there he heard a whistle and saw his truck blow up and he figured he would be here at Khe Sanh a while longer.
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LUCKY HE HAD DISMOUNTED his .50 caliber from the truck an hour before that first barrage, intending to take her apart and clean and oil her that night and remount her the next morning when they would have headed home to Dong Ha, sort of making nightly love to her, or to be honest not making love, about which he knew only the basic engineering strategy, more like grooming her, getting her ready like a sow before the fair, brushing, greasing. That the .50 caliber had not been destroyed with the rest of the truck was to prove useful in the two months he was stuck at Khe Sanh and made his home on the ground between the airstrip there and the trenches at the base perimeter.
Everybody in the convoy who manned a .50 caliber had a name for it, usually stenciled with spray paint in the mounting plate above the cab. Guns named Winter Night, Mafia Inc. I, Mafia Inc. II, Voss, Shirley. His he named Hog Butcher, and his intimacy with her was such that, some weeks later, when the grunts mounted her atop the sandbags on the morning the NVA finally came at them in person, a crush of figures like ants, innumerable, he almost snatched her down from the trench lip, fearful lest some harm should come to her and resentful these thieving bastards should touch her. Despite her name and job, he knew the Hog Butcher to be female.
He wasn’t the only truck driver stuck at Khe Sanh. Once that big assault started, they couldn’t get anybody through to sweep the road for mines and his whole convoy was stranded. Later, no road remained to sweep. Nothing fitting the term appeared to lead from the place. The base was an island in a lake of clay that bubbled with incoming and aerial bombardment. Mortar attacks killed several of the other drivers in the convoy, and he inherited one of their trucks, another M54, thankfully a diesel.
One guy stuck there had come in driving a gasser so old it might have seen action in the Second World War, and almost certainly in Korea. Unluckily for the driver this model had a stopcock in its gasoline tank, and as supplies ran short, the tank became the only source of cooking fuel for anybody in that part of the base. Theoretically you could cook with diesel fuel, if you liked the taste in your food of licking the Devil’s sulfur ass. The thing to do was to get yourself an empty tuna can and fill it with dirt, soak it in gasoline purloined from that old truck, and set it afire under the grate of your pot. Good eating could be prepared this way, but rations ran tight. And it seemed the Marine Corps had no plans to attempt another convoy anytime soon. For weeks, the perimeter of the airfield was bombed and rocketed and napalmed to an extent that he was kind of getting used to the noise. He lived on a plateau with fire surrounding it everywhere. The question-asking apparatus having been extracted, it didn’t occur to him to ask anybody what was out there to bomb so. He couldn’t really see what
they were trying to hit. It was another driver who asked one of the infantry sergeants what were they bombing. “The enemy, knucklehead,” the sergeant said. “Don’t you know when you’re under siege?” Vollie could not see any enemy. He saw earth afire.
The enemy was underground.
Then there were transport planes, C-130s mostly, the Hercules, supplying them now because evidently no more convoys, but it pleased him the pilots followed the old convoy rule. Do not stop. A Hercules sitting still on a landing strip made a plum target, juicier probably than a stopped convoy since the flames would rise higher in the sky if it was hit. If you are too far away to count the number of your enemy dead, how else to measure success but by the height of the flames? So the pilots did this number where the plane flew low over the strip, sometimes low enough to knock off a man’s head if he were standing there. Its hatch dropped open in back, and a grappling hook in the airstrip snagged a loop of cord dangling from the hatch, and the plane kept going, the plane did not stop, but the cord inside was attached to a long succession of supplies on pallets that shot out of the cargo bay and somersaulted as the Hercules cleared the strip, never having touched down.
The Volunteer Page 5