Vollie sat on the bed with the clean cheap sheets and smoked and could not take his eyes off this program that now began to speak of “the” Tet Offensive, “the” battle of Khe Sanh. Footage followed of Khe Sanh looking rusty as Mars, accurate enough. He figured they were talking about some engagement that had happened under the French or Chinese in centuries past. But no, the man in the tweed jacket and tie on the screen looked squarely at the viewer from the authoritative noplace where they make TV and alluded to events at Khe Sanh from the present year as if everybody watching knew all about them and needed only an update. There on TV, the C-130s shat out their tumbling pallets and did not stop and took off into the smoke with antiaircraft fire scrambling up the sky after them. He looked for himself amid the footage of the dirty boys shirtless or in fatigues shoveling mud into sandbags. He smoked in the small room on the alien continent and ate black olives and spat the pits into his hand and dropped them in an ashtray. He pared his nails. He searched the screen, not finding himself in the footage. If he wasn’t in the footage, had he really been there? The olives tasted like bacon cooked rare and pickled. He couldn’t stop fishing them out of the jar as he watched.
NVA mortars struck an ammo dump, flames consumed it, tar-black smoke overflowed the screen. He himself had seen the dump blow, then heard it blow, then choked: it sucked all available oxygen from the blast perimeter, and he hit the pavement choking. The TV knew the dates, elevations, tonnages, kill rates. It showed the viewer what had happened and why. Yet nowhere in this comprehensive program appeared the face of Vollie Frade.
He was watching his own life without him in it.
And there was a rightness to this. A flash of recognition and hope. That he could watch without having to appear. Then something stranger but just as right. An eerie conviction returning to him from deep time. That his body wore a self like a jacket, and the jacket could be removed. Vollie Frade might look for himself in the footage; but his body looked for nothing: it only watched. It had no right name. It had no self to find.
He sat on the bed in the dark of the foreign room, elbows on knees. He got up, toes gripping the carpet. His lungs pulled in tobacco smoke; his eyes watched the screen. Hope flew like breath inside him. A rapture hope. That his self might pass away and leave his body to go on living.
The earnest gentleman on TV, grave in twisty-mouthed Australian English, told the viewer the decisive elements of the battle of Khe Sanh had been Operations Niagara and Rolling Thunder, a coordinated bombing effort of U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force planes that had carried out the largest aerial bombardment on a single place in the history of warfare. General Westmoreland had made a great success. He had not resorted to nuclear weapons, as some had urged. A clip played from earlier in the year of a Thai colonel saying the strategic value of Khe Sanh could not be underestimated. President Johnson had had a model of the place constructed in the Situation Room at the White House.
Vollie longed for the piano in the parlor at home. The old instrument three generations in that house. When he played the piano it was his body that played, at one with its senses, its limbs, with the bodies of his mother and father and the parlor and the house. No other fictitious entities such as his self intervened. Lately only to shoot his gun felt this way. And he longed for the farm, for the taste of the water from the spigots on the farm. All the home water had long since passed out of him. If a body was mostly composed of its water, he was mostly some foreigner now.
The man in the tweed jacket described how the Americans had won the battle of Khe Sanh. The NVA had massed between twenty and forty thousand troops around this one little combat base obstructing their route into South Vietnam, a base where six thousand marines were holding an airstrip. It was a battle, had been a battle, for an airstrip. America had won at what the man referred to as unspeakable loss of blood and treasure. He said Khe Sanh was the front gate of the free world.
He said now summer had come to Vietnam—except here in Australia that meant winter. The siege was just a few months behind us all, and yet Khe Sanh was in the news this way at this time because command, having performed a review and revision of strategic priorities, had just ordered the base at Khe Sanh to be dismantled and abandoned.
* * *
• • •
VOLLIE TOOK A SHOWER, and the boys all went out for steaks. One of them asked for a kangaroo porterhouse. The waitress said they were out but she could bring them some emu kebabs.
The emu meat was lean, sinuous, and red, though an emu was a bird if Vollie had rightly understood. The waitress’s mother used to render emu fat and comb it into her hair. “Welcome to Oz,” she said. “Please don’t kill us.”
They changed into civvies and bought lambskin shoes, light as slippers, and prowled the clubs, hunting girls. White girls, in pearl earrings and skirts hemmed nearer to the waist than the knees, who expected in exchange for their attention not payment but discourse, preferably while you smiled like an innocent and not a killer who already, at eighteen, had paid for trim, a killer who both pitied and worshipped these girls for giving it away when they might have sold it dear. All you had to do was talk and smile, so it appeared from the limited success of his comrades whom he watched from the periphery of his vision as he faced the Wurlitzer, reading every word of the label of every record, often near enough a girl to smell her, wishing it were permissible to walk up to one of them and not speak but sing. He knew the lyrics to most of the Wurlitzer songs. He did not sing but listened. His lambskin toe cap, free of thought, rose and tapped the floor as it would have done were he playing this lick on the piano in Calamus and not smelling this girl, drunk from the rose and dancing-sweat odor of this laughing girl he never turned his face to see.
Then they went back to Vietnam and ran convoys again. And at the end of his thirteen months, in February 1969, Vollie Frade shipped to North Carolina, where a spit-and-polish captain who had never left North America but still outranked him by the infinite moat that separates officer from enlisted, this joker not two years out of Canoe U. and already a captain so he surely sucked cock real good, dressed Vollie down because one of the four campaign stars on his ribbon was not pointing directly upward. For this infraction the captain called him a miserable shit and an embarrassment to his uniform. He did not of course laugh at the captain, he loved him in one of the not-queer ways in which you let another man believe whatever he liked, or you let somebody lie without calling him on it, or some kid in short pants threw a rock at you and missed and turned and ran and you had the back of his head in your sights and did not fire. It was the love born of mercy.
When he had liberty, he walked around loving the captain as you can love only somebody you thought of killing, this motherfucking nun in a captain’s uniform who during a junk-on-the-bunk inspection found the score of the songs by Schumann among Vollie’s things and asked where he’d got it. In the mail, Vollie said, but left off the “sir” at the end. The captain burned the score right in front of him. For this and other abuses Vollie loved the captain. And to his mother and father he wrote not a word.
He walked on the sunbaked humdrum streets of Jacksonville or borrowed a car from a squid steelworker stationed there and drove as far as Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, but mostly stayed around Camp Lejeune and played piano in the Sunday-school room of a Methodist church near the base. It was all right about the score. He was working on the short pieces called Kinderszenen, which he had been made to play in high school and had not cared for, but which he had mostly memorized now by reading the score in Dong Ha. What he couldn’t remember he put together from listening to an LP he bought of Vladimir Horowitz playing them. They had sad and beautiful names: “Pleading Child,” “Great Adventure,” “Perfect Happiness,” “Of Foreign Lands and People,” “By the Fireside,” “Almost Too Serious,” “Hobgoblin,” “In Slumberland,” “The Poet Speaks”; but the one he played most was the seventh, called “Träumerei,” or “Dreaming,�
� the one he used to play after supper while nearby his father petted the cat with his twisted hands, faintly humming in tune.
In Wilmington, Vollie went to a jazz joint and drank alone and listened to the Negro horn players. Listened and watched. Tried to let the music in. But before he could hear it all the way, the music turned to warfare in his mind. The trombonist, with only the slide and nothing to measure it by, hit note after uncannily perfect note, calculations precise as mortar fire: the powder charge, the tube, the parabolic shot that struck its distant mark.
He kept up a correspondence with the former ranch hand Bobby Heflin, who had spent a few nights in the Okinawa brig drying out but eventually was deployed to Da Nang with the rest of them and spent his thirteen months in an infantry unit around Phu Bai and had even learned to surf there and had come to Sydney with the other boys on that trip and fallen in love. He wrote it was really love for real, he was going to marry this Australian girl. Her name was Anne Marie. He compared her in his letters to horses of whom he had been especially fond in his youth: her spirit and hair and look. Vollie had been sitting on the next barstool in the Sydney night club when Heflin and the girl first started talking. Aware that Heflin was down to pocket change, Vollie waited for the girl to turn her head and order them another round before he slipped Heflin a pink, Aussie five-dollar note and pretended jet lag and said he’d better get back to the rooming house but in fact walked alone late through the night touching the cars, the trees, watching the illegible antipodean stars. Bobby would later call the money a loan, but it had been a gift. He wrote he was now on base in California teaching the cherries at the survival school how to live by foraging when trapped behind the enemy and he described with a diagram at the end of the letter how you could make a pair of moccasins out of a jackrabbit you caught in a snare.
Then Vollie opened the second piece of mail he had received that day, a telegram from Washington, and read that his father had died.
Your father has experienced a cerebral embolism, read the document.
He knew what that was. A bubble pops in the brain, smaller than a soap bubble, but it must feel like an RPG in your skull for the effect it has, a shock wave that turns a building to rubble, only it was microscopic, too small to make any sound, it would only feel like sound, a megaton burst that shattered the fortress of the mind.
He wore his dress blues that night and his high-gloss Corfam shoes, for the first time in more than a year, to a cotillion in Wilmington. The girls were like cakes in their outfits with frosting for hair, spun and spiraling high.
He danced with a girl named Shirley. The heavy makeup made her look older than she was and barely concealed her acne. He wanted to tell her she was all right, she’d outgrow it. Instead he said, “I knew a gun by your name.”
She curtsied and smiled with vacant eyes. They kept on dancing awkwardly. The music was pretty loud, canned music blown from public address speakers, and when he leaned to her ear there was a reek of hair spray such that, given the dispersal of the tall hair and the oxygen separating the strands, she could have caught fire from the merest flicker. Cigarettes burned like jungle threats wherever he looked. She’d go right up.
He said, “It was a Browning fifty-caliber machine gun.”
Again with the empty-eyed face smiling in plaster fixity. When the song ended she curtsied again and gave him her white-gloved hand, smiling. He took it with his own white-gloved hand and made a little bow and said, “Pleasure.” She uttered in response finally a single smiling word and floated away in her confectionary dress, which hid her feet. She said the word without adjusting the smile in any way. The word was “animal.”
Kinderszenen meant “Scenes from Childhood.” There were ritardandos all over the one called “Träumerei.” According to his father, Vollie never grasped what they really meant, the ritardandos, which was funny since Potter Frade couldn’t read and couldn’t play. But he had ears. And he didn’t figure Vollie knew what “slowly” really meant. Real slowness. Gradually slower. A long slowing walk that ended in repose. A long easeful stride that came someplace to a finish. “You figure if you go too slow you won’t get there. Vollie, that ain’t so. Unless you slow down you’ll get to the end and blow right past it.”
The next morning, he dressed and did not eat. He left in his footlocker the jar of change he might have used for a pay phone. He walked off base, mouthing but not yet willing to breathe the words of a telegram. He arrived at the Western Union office and tried the door, but it was locked. He walked the perimeter of the little town and went into a bar and dumped a noontime shot of whiskey in his mouth and paid for it and went outside and spat the whiskey on the street and continued to the Western Union office again and opened the door and waited in line behind other marines, behind women black and white, young and old, behind a woman bent as a tree with age, her purse dangling from the crook of her elbow—the innocent, honey-yellow, lacquered purse with a shining clasp like a target he might have shot because it was shining and moved, because it was innocent and the woman was innocent. When his turn came before the mesh-reinforced glass of the counter, he pretended he had misplaced his money clip, digging in his pockets, and let another marine go ahead of him.
His turn came again. He addressed not the clerk waiting there but the mesh inside the glass between them.
“Speak up, son,” the clerk said, a freckle-spattered boy his same age.
Then Vollie dictated the telegram to his mother, saying he could not get liberty to go home for his father’s funeral.
He had never lied to her before. While the clerk read the message back to him, he nearly convinced himself the lie didn’t count because he had spoken it not to her but to an intermediary. Then he took from his breast pocket the little silver money clip and gave the clerk two dollars, and the clerk made change, and the thing became a lie inflicted in cold blood, and Vollie knew it.
He hitched back to base and went to the fussbudget captain’s office and volunteered for a second tour of duty. Within the month he was back in Vietnam. They gave him blood stripes for his dress blues because he was a corporal now.
* * *
• • •
YOU’D SEE A GUY was scared. Oiling his pistol by the TV light in the hooch, he’d get up and peer through the mosquito netting at the door. Nobody else heard that noise? Then he’d sit back down. Get up and check the door again and sit down. Get up and sit down.
A few days later, that guy would be dead. It was the ghost of his death he had heard. But just because your wraith is hunting you doesn’t mean you have to run from it.
So on his second tour Corporal Vollie Frade, now an old hand at nineteen, developed a new kind of meditation. It was still in keeping with telling the wraith, You don’t mean nothing, except he did it with his body instead of his mind. Every convoy ride when he manned the .50 caliber, a position that already made him a conspicuous target, he wore a brand-new Hanes T-shirt, snug fitting, high and bright and white and plain to see for a mile around. You weren’t supposed to ride atop the cab the way he did, but the design of the turret left you rib-deep in the vehicle; you weren’t high enough to see properly and felt as if you were shooting up, not down; so he sat on the gun mount instead. He was shooting the new .50 caliber named Hog Butcher II. Upright and shining in the jungle, like You get one shot at me. Go ahead, fire; but if you miss, you got to know I’ll take you out.
This behavior was a little crazy but kept the spirit of the first rule of a firefight as articulated in boot camp: establish fire superiority immediately. Blanket your surroundings in fire; let the enemy know the equipment you have, your eagerness to use it. In the likely event he doesn’t get hit in your harum-scarum barrage, he’ll run away. The aim was less to strike the enemy himself than to throw a wave of panic around your perimeter. At some point Vollie heard himself calling Hog Butcher II a “he” not a “she” and realized he had been doing that since he’d got back here a
nd wondered why. He hated questions but still he wondered why. Then it was obvious he didn’t want a girl close to him at this particular time. The body was by nature at peace with itself, but a girl touching it made the body unruly and ungovernable, and he didn’t like it. None of this prevented him from going to see mama-san when he had liberty, however, because fucking was a separate thing.
The shirt when he wore it high on the gun mount made him no less fearful but did make him a wraith himself, a clean beacon of your impending end, with a tattoo on one arm of the Marine Corps insignia—the eagle, globe, and anchor—and a second on the other arm of the words ESSE QUAM VIDERI in black block type.
He had got the tattoos in Jacksonville, CATFUed drunk, aka completely and totally fucked up drunk, and awoke not remembering anything past losing a bet with some local boys in a bar. His wallet was still full in the morning so maybe he had won the bet. If he thought hard, he also remembered looking through the binder of options in the tattoo parlor, a binder like a family photo album, only it didn’t appear to include any of his relations until he saw the insignia—aka the bird, ball, and chain—like the face of a progenitor whose ghost you wanted never to leave you. For a month he didn’t know what the second tattoo meant. Then he ran into one of the local boys again. The boy and his Tar Heel buddies had got the same tattoo that night as they had paid to stick on Vollie. Esse quam videri. The motto of their home state. “To be rather than to seem.”
The Volunteer Page 7