The base was getting shelled incessantly, the airstrip was a mess, and men ran out there to fill the holes with dirt and cover them with steel land matting while new shells made new holes farther up the strip. Meantime, everywhere around him except a few hills was under equally endless but much higher-flaming aerial bombardment from his own government. Yet he saw no NVA, he did not see massed troops. It was a siege in theory only. And there he was outside playing basketball with the grunts sometimes—the NVA couldn’t mortar every inch of the compound at every minute so why not get some exercise?—and when he couldn’t sleep playing George Gershwin or Schumann songs on a mute piano he had made from a sawbuck tabletop and a Magic Marker, and it got so he could hear the music in his mind, even his mistakes, and steadily improved with this perverse way of playing piano, music minus sound leaving only the boy’s body at peace in articulate motion, alive and in time to the moving numbers that measure and govern everything from Schumann to jet propulsion to the pressure of the blood in your arteries. And he boiled rations over the tuna-can gas stoves. And he was probably going to die, they would be overrun, and it didn’t mean nothing.
Sometimes in the distance earth and sky would explode in light at no notice. It was nighttime, then for a long moment it was daytime in front of you. Not a rending of the sky and a flash as from lightning, but a world that opened and opened from below, a world with a sun inside it that burst forth from the ground. Then the skeptical mind caught up and said the source must in fact have come from above. And that was when you looked up wondering where in the hell did that come from? The whole world made new with light out of the darkness.
Only then the roar reached you.
This was an Arc Light. Bombs, many bombs, ton after ton after ton, flown from Guam in B-52s and dropped all at once in the lower stratosphere and falling for miles through the uninterrupted dark, or else if it was daytime through the dome of uninterrupted sunlight that cups the planet like the lid of an eye, through rain and tropospheric disturbances and thickening air into the radiant warmth of the lower atmosphere, falling too fast from too far to be seen or heard or suspected, toward the brown and green smoldering terrain west of a river north of a road, toward a plateau between a mountain and piedmont hills, encampments and trenches, long supply channels underground, people down there armed and waiting in the dark. And it was beautiful when the bombs struck, all at once in one place, and made a roar like nothing on earth. The B-52s flew so high you could neither see nor hear the planes themselves, usually three of them, thirty-five tons of bombs in every payload. You didn’t know they were anywhere in the country until they had long since flown away.
The split second of wild peace before the sound.
Arc Light. And the roar.
And if you were an NVA, that might be a nice way to die, since we all have to die some way. Just there and then not there. A century from now a crater would remain where you had been taking your last piss in a tunnel in the dark, a bowl big as a house in the ground where one night you got Arc Lighted to Paradise.
Then it was dark, late February. The Puerto Rican, Espinoza, had got hold of a pint of bourbon and shared it with Vollie, who had never drunk bourbon or whiskey. It tasted like Coke boiled to a gravy and cut with lighter fluid. He feared to smoke as he drank it lest he catch fire. Espinoza sometimes appeared to be itching his privates through his pocket while working a sunflower seed in his lips; in fact, he kept a rosary in the pocket and was mumbling prayers. He carried on this way even while they drank bourbon and played cards late at night in Vollie’s tent. It was about two in the morning when they had emptied the bottle and Espinoza got up to head back to his tent by the ammunition depot, but a minute later he came back saying he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face out there in the dark and fog. So Vollie made sleeping room for him in the tent he’d made, his makeshift Khe Sanh home on the dirt off the airstrip which was really, the tent was, nothing more than a half tent made from a parachute pegged to the dirt on one side and tied up to the door of his new truck on the other. And Vollie fell into dreamless inebriate sleep.
Then he woke up yelling, “It hit me. It hit me.”
Espinoza could be heard wrestling with the parachute tent walls, tearing the top edge of the thing away from the truck, unable in the total dark of foggy moonless night to see the open flap of the enclosure, the side Vollie kept open to let the breeze in and through which shrapnel had just evidently flown and drilled Vollie’s face, his arms, his throat.
“It hit me,” he said. The splatter somehow soft it was so warm. He couldn’t move or see. Unaccountably he had been hit only in the parts of him his fatigues didn’t cover. If he couldn’t get out of here it was probably because his legs didn’t work. “It hit me,” he said to nothing and no one and looked down to where his feet ought to be but saw nothing. However, it was dark.
Mind and body at last rendezvoused, and he sent his foot a message, speaking it aloud to put all his parts on notice to attend. “I’ll stomp my foot, and if I hear it then it’s still there.” The muscles of the upper leg then contracted, and a low quiet peaceful stamp sounded amid the nylon of the tent enveloping him like a shroud. He convened likewise with the other foot.
Outside, Espinoza said, “Who the fuck you talking to? Get under the fucking truck, man.”
He wasn’t hit, Vollie wasn’t, not exactly. Mud had splattered his face, neck, arms. A shell or a rocket had exploded nearby and blasted the mud through the opening of his tent. He discovered this under the truck, itself not the soundest of places to hide from a barrage. A couple of artillery flashes gave them a visual notion how to make it to the trench. They bolted for the perimeter. This entire interval—waking up believing he was hit, the experiment with his feet, the communing of mind with lower extremities, sliding under the truck, and hustling out to the perimeter and down into the trench with grunts already awake in there and firing—had taken about as long as it takes to butter a piece of toast.
The grunts in the trench had mounted the Hog Butcher on their sandbags and they were firing her. They had already used all but one box of the ammunition at hand. But Vollie had stolen and hidden about twenty boxes of it from a Hercules drop he had helped unload, stolen because that is what a marine does, and secreted them in a hooch about fifty yards away under a case of toilet paper, and he saw the ammunition they had streaming out of their boxes and jumped out of the trench and darted top speed at the hooch, which under the circumstances seemed far away as bumfuck Egypt.
He ran fast. Every step a stroke of wild luck. He turned a corner. In another artillery flash the hooch appeared low and dark through smoke. He had never run faster. But somebody had cut down a dead tree for firewood, leaving the stump three feet off the ground, and he struck it at a sprint right in his privates. He convulsed and screamed as though hit again, but wasn’t hit this time either, not for real. He’d rammed his nuts into a tree. A parting of the smoke and something like dawn light coming over the mountain. And he made it to the hooch and overturned the toilet paper, they called them sweet rolls, gathered three ammunition boxes, and hobbled in his nut-crumpled state expecting to be hit and then to explode with all the rounds in his arms and the incoming; and he was going as fast as he could, the eyes on the destination, the trench, to get behind the sandbags; but higher up, going on solid ground and running back toward the perimeter with the little parting of dawnish light, he had another vantage than before; and the light better; one of the boxes threatening to fall; and he tried to keep the eyes on the trench, to get back there; but he had this other vantage now, and the eyes looking upward squinted against the smoke—and that was when he saw them.
He had seen VC before, guerrillas, and he had seen shells coming and the 122-millimeter rockets. But now he saw the enemy themselves, the true enemy out of their burrows, the NVA massed and swarming on human legs.
They were like ants, the way ants swarmed over a dead animal in the meadow,
except they all were running this way. A few had made it near enough already you could see their shirts crisscrossed with bandoliers. And the laggard mind said, Hold on, those people over there want to kill me. All this in the two seconds before he got his head and his boxes down below the line of sandbags. He crouched. His privates screamed in pain. The grunt who had commandeered the Hog Butcher switched with him and got low to feed the machine her bullets from the new boxes while Vollie manned the machine, the Hog Butcher, who was in actual fact an antiaircraft weapon that to fire directly on human beings violated some article of the Geneva Conventions, so said the scuttlebutt. Five rounds, pause, five rounds, pause; microscopic bits of the lands in her barrel flying out of her muzzle; and the red tracers streaming like bits of glowing rope afire, fast at first then slow and peaceful in the deeper distance, then careening off at sharp angles when they hit a rock or for all he knew some kid’s brain bucket, his helmet, whose tracers were coming right back at Vollie reciprocally, but the NVA tracers were green across the low almost-night sky, a field of arcing and suddenly careening red and green tracers, four invisible rounds between every tracer, the colors like Christmas lights, and the Hog Butcher jammed.
She jammed. He opened her from the top. It was like a vivisection. He had to use his asbestos gloves. She was so hot she could take off his skin if he touched her. And he dumped a bottle of 30-weight motor oil all over her innards and her exposed chamber and closed her up, and the grunt refed the chain of long cartridges and remounted her, and Vollie went back to firing.
Like ants or a tide. And the tracers came rocketing out of the barrel hot and red like wishes that seemed to slow as they sailed farther away, tracers that sometimes took a sharp upward or outward turn like wishes gone wrong when the tracer hit a rock or helmet or another bullet amid the profusion of rounds five times as numerous as were visible, and ricocheted. And he saw some of the people convulse, falling backward through the tracer fire. They were coming fast, and Vollie was near enough the command post to hear a radioman cranking the phone and calling out coordinates.
Do not stop the convoy.
Other scuttlebutt said command had started the rumor about the Geneva Conventions to save money on the big expensive .50-caliber cartridges.
He aimed his weapon at the tide, the tracers like wishes or seed corn you scattered away from yourself and that disappeared into someplace you couldn’t see. It was a wish because you sent it out of you but you couldn’t know what would come of it. The machine sent a shock wave of recoil through all his bones, one-two-three-four-five pause one-two-three-four-five pause. He ducked down to help unload another box of ammunition and asked the grunt, “Who’s he calling?” meaning the radioman.
“New Jersey, I guess.”
That was a joke, the radioman calling the prestigious state back east where Annie Frade had once gone for a cousin’s wedding and come back with a picture book about skyscrapers for her boy.
However, it was neither a joke nor a state. The grunt said, “Naw, man. The ship.”
The battleship. A recommissioned dreadnought, the New Jersey, with 16-inch guns revamped and rumored to be out of dry dock in Philadelphia and headed this way. Vollie fired and fired continuously and yet resignedly; what with the numbers, the ants, they were about to be overrun. Do not stop the convoy. And he kept firing.
Then it was as if somebody far away as Davenport had fired a cannon at the barn in Calamus and hit it square in the roof. And hit it again. And hit it again. Right where the ants were swarming there was a shock wave and a wall of fire and clouds that rose in columns and bloomed flowers of ash, dirt, smoke. Espinoza ran out to the hooch and came back with more ammunition for the Hog Butcher. Vollie kept firing. Turning to his left and right like a radio dial. Those must have been the shells coming from the New Jersey. You heard them shearing the air overhead, then a shock wave and a cloud, impossible magic as if an object could have knowledge—the shells coming from afar in the sea and landing right where the radioman had directed them.
It took less than ten minutes for the Phantoms to fly the hundred miles from Da Nang. All down the long NVA lines the enemy were swarming and firing, and the shells blew them up, and Phantoms flew low dropping napalm on the people. And more 16-inch shells came from the New Jersey, or wherever, shearing the air.
His orders were not to stop the convoy. He looked behind him. His second truck wasn’t there. Motherfuckers had driven off with his truck. No, they hadn’t, the truck was that pile of twisted smoking steel, rubber, and canvas. He had lost a second truck. Each truck cost about what their farm cost, and he had lost two of them.
Nobody had told him what any of this—the airstrip, the siege, the bombardment—was for.
When he got back to Dong Ha after it was over, an Easter card waited for him with his mother’s signature in it alongside his father’s mark, and a two-dollar bill, an old bill dated 1953 but crisp. She had ironed it.
* * *
• • •
HE KEPT ON UNACCOUNTABLY not getting killed. He caught a fragment of an RPG in his foot, the hot flash went right through the toe cap of the boot and the foot and the sole of the boot somehow without striking a bone. That was all right, he found new boots, size 11 wide, in the depot at Dong Ha and he went back to the convoy.
The trucks were running as before along Route 9, such as it was a route. Anyway it was passable now, and they were resupplying the forward combat bases again as though the months at Khe Sanh had never happened. He wondered what his father would say to learn Vollie was on his third truck. He missed his father and mother too much to write to them. Espinoza didn’t write home either, on the clever theory you did everybody a favor letting them assume you were dead: if later you turned up living it would be a bonus, assuming they liked you.
Nobody said the siege at Khe Sanh had been broken. The place, having been an island surrounded by erupting clay and towers of fire, had simply gone quiet; and a crew from one of the rear bases had patched up the road. Vollie had ridden at last back to Dong Ha, where the dispatcher congratulated him on being alive and assigned him yet another M54. His father would have said, If every time you give this boy a truck it explodes, don’t give him any more trucks.
He sweated in his bunk at the witching hour reading by flashlight a pocket manual on mines and booby traps that advised him to stay off trails, footpaths, cart tracks, other likely routes of travel. He must move where local inhabitants moved, avoid patterns, maintain intervals of fifteen meters between men and one hundred meters between men and tracked vehicles. He must move slowly. He must not attempt to outrun the explosion. He must not immediately rush to the aid of marines wounded by mines or booby traps. Frequently there was a second booby trap in the vicinity of the first. Many booby traps were themselves booby-trapped.
Sometimes on the way to resupply Quang Tri the convoy would overtake a creeping Volkswagen bus or suchlike loaded like a clown car with Vietnamese civilians—and from their perch atop the gun mounts, the men would whip empty shell casings at the roofs of the vehicles, then watch as the vehicles stopped and the doors swung open and the terrified civilians jumped out screaming and scattering.
Did he partake of this sport? Yes.
And at night he lay awake in his hooch bunk asking the dark what was this force invisible and inescapable as gravity or wind that made him want to do what it would have bewildered and sickened his mother and father to know he did, the force that seemed equal to, and caused by, the love he felt for them but opposite in its direction?
At present, he read, the best mine and booby trap detector in the Marine Corps was an alert and observant marine. He must be watchful for mud smears, mud balls, dung, a board on the road, apparent road repair, wires leading from the road; tripwires along road shoulders, through dense vegetation, fords, ditches, rice paddy dikes; suspicious items in trees and bushes. To support his mine warfare operations the enemy frequently exploited mat
erial discarded as trash: C rations, beer and soda cans, batteries, bandoliers. All items considered unusable by free world forces must be completely destroyed or properly disposed of.
He must not travel alone.
He took his out-of-country R and R in Australia with some guys from his battalion, flying Da Nang to Sydney with a layover in Singapore. They rented rooms in a Sydney boardinghouse, where his own room had a color TV in place of a window. He switched it on, curious as to the jingles in this hemisphere. The first thing the TV presented was an international news story reporting $13 million of damage caused today by a single strike on the American air base at Da Nang in South Vietnam. He asked the screen, “What the fuck?” A VC rocket strike had hit a plane on the runway evidently an hour after he had taken off from there, struck it and blew it up while he had been smoking in the cabin of a civilian airliner over Java or Borneo, where there still lived mountain people uncontacted by what was called civilization, meaning the kinds of people who made of the earth a farm, a runway, an Arc Light. What must this uncontacted fellow consider the airplane overhead in which Vollie had been flying? That it was an animal or a lesser god or cosmic litter that made its own long line of white cloud. Already the Pentagon had reported the damage of the rocket strike in U.S. dollars.
Then came ads on the TV for Tarax carbonated lemonade, because today was a family kind of day. And Caltex gasoline was butane boosted. And Desert Flower CornSilk powder gave you that natural look, no caking, no shine. Then more about the war, which according to the gentleman on TV was going poorly although there was footage of bombs stacked like cordwood, footage of the enemy running from mass bombardment, a clip of President Johnson saying, “Make no mistake about it, we are going to win,” and by all accounts a wholesale routing of the enemy everyplace he had shown himself in the recent offensive.
The Volunteer Page 6