At night on that second tour down south in the jungle, otherwise a thirteen-month succession of nothing happening at all, choppers flew low over the canopy. He lived in dread of having to use Hog Butcher II on an actual aircraft: if he accidentally fired on a U.S. chopper, they’d kill him for sure. But halfway into his second tour he had yet to see an NVA aircraft of any kind, so this one must be a friendly despite it was speaking Vietnamese. Yes, it was a chopper speaking in the dark. A drone and a cry. A puling noise and then Vietnamese voices real trippy, echoey and crying out, a man’s voice and a reverberant woman’s voice pleading and moaning from evidently a U.S. chopper over the trees.
The first time they heard the crying aircraft, all the men in his unit took cover in a ditch, the panic-struck dopeheads among them spinning out one after another cockamamie theory of what they were hearing. No theory, however, could compete for looniness with the one related as fact a month later by a pilot from the South Vietnamese air force who hitched a ride with them to the base at Pleiku.
They had heard the voices of the wandering souls, he said.
The chopper had been part of a PSYOP deployed all over the jungle to spook the superstitious VC. Somebody had recorded local actors in a studio in Saigon and got the voices mixed with psychedelic noises and horror-movie sound effects. The agonized voices pled with their relations to help them, to avoid the mistakes they had made in venturing away from their home villages to be killed, their bodies abandoned, so that their souls were caught in a no-man’s-land of the dead. The female voice said, “Come home with me!” The male responded, “Who is calling? My daughter? My mother? But my body is gone. Go home, friends. Hurry! If not, you will end up like me.” The project was named for the summer festival when the souls of Buddhist sinners got a day and a night’s furlough from perdition to wander the country, naked, starving, homeless.
Vollie was driving the truck in which the pilot, riding shotgun and twisting to address the men in the rear, explained all this. The cab stank of the foreign delicacies, packed in a basket on the pilot’s lap, that his mother had cooked for him that morning on the coast. The truck climbed into Pleiku Province. Translucent mist subsumed the road, the sort of tranquil mist Vollie had come to dread: it put the wits to sleep.
Over the racket of the diesel engine, the men in back loudly speculated as to which branch of the military was pissing away the government’s money on such a project. It seemed like the navy to have a secret drama club, but the choppers they’d heard were not navy issue.
“It is not likely to be your navy,” the pilot said. The project did not reflect strategic naval priorities. More likely the CIA was running it, or the Military Intelligence Corps, or some sterile outfit paid for by the Defense Intelligence Agency.
It didn’t surprise Vollie that this foreign captain knew the customs of American intelligence agencies better than he did. Officers the world over shared a supernationality. They traded officer knowledge and officer lies using officerspeak, in the present case with a French accent. But he was surprised at the pilot’s response when the grunt riding between them claimed the war was shrinking, a rumor Vollie had believed given their uneventful convoys of late.
“Shrinking?” the pilot sneered. Whatever was said in public, the bombing sorties on NVA supply lines in Laos and Cambodia proceeded apace, if they weren’t in fact expanding. He had seen the results from his cockpit. And those sorties did no good at all. Plenty of supplies were getting to the VC anyway.
The other Americans in the truck, at ease in Marine Corps cynicism, raised invisible glasses and toasted the pointlessness of this expenditure of matériel. Only their gunny sergeant defended it sincerely. “Whatever the Air Force is dropping on whatever side of the border, it’s good for one thing,” he said. “Ain’t no marines on the ground in Cambodia. That’s all I care.” Everybody liked the gunny. He had no loyalties outside the Marine Corps. His contempt for command was perfect. The more desperately command wanted to do something, the more certain he became that that thing was a boondoggle designed to kill marines.
But the pilot had grown impatient with the proud ignorance of this truckload of Americans, enlisted men all. “If marines are sleeping tonight across the border, gunnery sergeant, you would be first to know,” he said with cheerless sarcasm. “Even if such operation should risk drawing Chinese or Soviets to invade these territories for their, let’s say, protection. Surely command would consult you first.”
The gunny was too alarmed to take offense. “Do you have scuttlebutt, sir?” he asked.
A sickened hush came from the rear—the men listening through the diesel clamor for how the pilot would answer. If command had sent two men into Cambodia, a division was sure to follow.
The pilot seemed to choose his words so as to hide his meaning. “Perhaps not every outfit in American defense complex regards public avowals vis-à-vis integrity of international boundaries with the same degree of, let’s say, intimidation.”
“Are we on the ground over there or not?” one of the men snapped.
Vollie aimed his eyes through the lurid mist, trusting the eyes, trying to deafen himself to the dispute, disregard all memory and expectation, willing himself to become a single eye that penetrated the mud of the road ahead and saw only what traps were hidden there.
Perhaps he had not made himself clear, the Vietnamese pilot said. It was in the interest of both sides to deploy in Laos and Cambodia but of neither to say so. Therefore, insofar as the answer to the question might be yes, it must also, at the same time and with equal urgency, be no.
* * *
• • •
LETTERS FROM HIS MOTHER reached him in the jungle—disjointed letters about the autumn weather; and marmalade; and the Lord coming to her in her sleep saying, “Be not afraid, I am with you”; and asparagus; and she didn’t know what to do with the barn, it had so many holes in the roof; and he wouldn’t mind, would he, if she found a tenant to farm the meadow?; and the Lord loves us every one, even in our sin; and she hoped he would understand if she had no spare to send in her card at Christmas. Each letter screwier than the last—applesauce giving way to Jesus, giving way to, Please forgive her if she sold the disc harrow since she’d already sold the tractor.
I wear this white shirt because I am the angel of your death hunting you. Or such was his understanding of his message in wearing it. In any case he was never fired on again, not once, in that attire, in that position on the gun mount. He must have looked like Caesar on triumph day. A cherry on base asked him, “What do you wear that shirt for, sir?” Vollie thought a second, cocked his head to look at the kid sidewise, and said, “Keeps the sun off. I burn easy.”
* * *
• • •
HE FINISHED HIS SECOND TOUR and went back to Camp Lejeune an honorary southern boy with that tattoo and played piano alone weeknights at the same church and drove as far as Norfolk one weekend in civilian clothes to drink and look at the big ships in summertime, roaming, and after a few weeks of such drives the laggard mind told him roaming so far from base meant the body was looking for somewhere to live and not finding it. His right place was the farm, but to be from a place was to drink the water there, and now he was full of this foreign water, Vietnam and Carolina water—he had introduced discord into the body at peace, and it was lost. His three-year enlistment was almost up.
Bobby Heflin, now at home on his three years of inactive duty, wrote from New Mexico seeming a new man. He had inherited his parents’ ranch, and some interesting people lived there with him now, sweet people female and male living close to the bone but trying to be gentle with each other and with their dogs and horses, and they kept no cattle except some Jersey dairy cows because the spirit of meat was death and the spirit of milk was life, and Vollie should join them when his time was up in the service. No mention of Anne Marie, the eternal bride. Heflin for the first time had typed his letter because he was trying to
be deliberate with his words and concluded it with a passage from a book one of his companions was reading:
Know the measure, know the times, study that. When you are left alone, pray. Love to throw yourself on the earth and kiss it. Kiss the earth and love it with an unceasing, consuming love. Love all men, love everything. Seek that rapture and ecstasy. Water the earth with the tears of your joy and love those tears. Don’t be ashamed of that ecstasy, prize it, for it is a gift of God and a great one; it is not given to many but only to the elect.
Vollie crammed the letter into its envelope and crammed the envelope into his pocket and walked to the battalion headquarters under low strange clouds borne on ocean winds. He went to the office of the CMFWIC, aka the chief motherfucker what’s in charge, a lieutenant colonel he had come to admire from the required distance for the man’s talent at standing upright and looking hard and giving the impression that no part of him touched or was touched by his surroundings, even as he governed them down to their atoms by telepathy. Vollie had never seen the man speak. He sat at a steel desk with a rubberized top, writing something. Vollie asked permission to address him which was granted with a nod and then asked, if he signed up for another three years, whether he could be promised a posting not stateside but in Vietnam.
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No, he could not, the lieutenant colonel said.
Vollie asked permission to be excused, which was granted.
The next morning, he reenlisted anyway. Soon he was indeed back in Vietnam but still farther south this time, in a place with zero signs of civilization except a trail and vast swaths of ravine and mountainside denuded by Agent Orange. In a jeep amid a convoy headed west. He had made staff sergeant by now.
The convoy went off trail and tottered over ruts other expeditionary vehicles had made. He was riding with a big lieutenant new to the country, and Vollie disliked sharing the jeep with him because if anybody ever had the look of, I see it coming, the lieutenant did: every piece of jungle rock that plinked against the chassis drew his face to the jeep floor as though land mines ever gave forewarnings or as though he had something inside him that his body wanted to wretch out the mouth.
In their line of vehicles, they carried supplies for three months; a few other NCOs; a dozen infantry, mostly cherries, for the NCOs to abuse and scare; and two civilians thick as thieves, a reporter and a botanist, both of them plainly covert intelligence.
Earlier that day at the Bien Hoa Air Base, during the send-off barbecue for the current mission, the two cagey civilians had eaten their spare ribs with knife and fork. Thus it was understood they wished the enlisted men to despise them. The lieutenant joined them at their small table, looking in this first impression the erect picture of Naval Academy confidence. He had in fact played linebacker on the Annapolis football team. As he settled into conference with the two civilians, the men he was to lead took bets on how he would attack his lunch. Nobody could hear what the three were saying. The lieutenant raised a rib to his mouth, hesitated, seemed to notice the way the other two were eating, put down the bone, and went for his silverware. Everybody at the long table saw the lieutenant waffle; nobody laughed.
Shortly, a fourth man joined the other three. He carried a plate that threatened to overflow with ribs and cornbread. He wore a freshly ironed linen suit, loose in his long limbs, the straw-colored hair neatly piled over the ears. He ate with his hands. Immediately, the others at that table began to do likewise. Snatches of an aristocratic southern accent were heard, but what he had to say, on which the other three were hanging, did not reach the long table.
Scuttlebutt said this fourth man was supposed to be a civilian importer of cleaning supplies who happened to find himself on base today at chow time. The pretense that such a figure—the dubious man of commerce, of whom there seemed to be several afoot on every base at any time—had come all the way out to Bien Hoa in the service of private industry was a charade no one needed to believe. Its audience was theoretical. It allowed such a man to follow rules of engagement other than those he would have had to follow if he were wearing the uniform of the government he obviously served. Under whatever pretextual blankets and jackets of security clearance and subtleties and misdirection and outright lies, he was free. The enlisted men did not resent this freedom, they envied it. Before the convoy left the base, the fourth man had disappeared.
Once in the sweltering jeep, the lieutenant’s confidence evaporated. He did not speak. He wore no shirt. As he braced against the irregular tottering of the vehicle, his shoulder blades threatened to slice through the sweating flesh of his pale back.
The convoy continued across the wilds, sunward through the afternoon and evening. Vollie hadn’t realized Vietnam stretched so wide across down here. The men were going to defend an ammunition dump. He knew nothing more of the mission except, now, that the dump was located suspiciously distant from base.
When they arrived after nightfall, another NCO in the unit they were relieving asked him, “Are we still nowhere?”
This man had misjudged Vollie’s security clearance in the operation.
“Guess so,” Vollie said. “It doesn’t look like much.”
“But all this is still not happening, right? And we were never here? Or can I tell the boys they’ve been abroad the last two months? They know it anyway.”
That was how Vollie figured out for sure he was in Cambodia, where, officially speaking, for geopolitical reasons above his pay grade, he was not, and neither were his men.
They slept that first night in their trucks. At sunup, the trucks and the jeep were refueled from tanks within the camp, which had no vehicles of its own. The men of the two units all shook hands. The old unit drove off, taking all the vehicles with it, leaving Vollie’s unit immobilized and exposed in unfamiliar territory.
The men went inside the rude enclosures, roofed with fiberglass sheeting, and picked their bunks. The lieutenant then called them back outside. He ordered them to strip and burn their uniforms. He pried open a crate among the supplies they had brought and gave them black pajamas to wear such as the locals used. They were to be a sterile unit now.
None of the men knew quite what a sterile unit was supposed to be, but it was clear from that first morning that the status of the camp had been revised. The previous unit had not been relieved but, at least on paper, withdrawn. Someone had found out about the camp and ordered it dismantled. Someone else was claiming to comply with the order while in reality flouting it. And to have it both ways, their own unit had been removed from the chain of command. This last conclusion was unmistakable. Anybody could see the lieutenant was taking his orders from the two civilians.
They had radios but did not use them. They had food and water purification tablets and plenty of cigarettes. They had oceanic depths of such quiet as a living jungle permits and they had long sleep and the tedium of a mission easy and peaceful as holding your tongue. No one came to draw from their stores of matériel. They had Bayer aspirin, mouthwash, shampoo. And they had what seemed a cloak of perfect invisibility until the morning the two civilians took half the men on a survey eastward down the trail.
In their absence, a single shot was heard.
Then, an enfilade.
The ill-defended camp was attacked by NVA regulars from the east and west at once. Vollie saw their uniforms and AK-47s. Here and there he saw their eyes, and later he would remember impossibly having seen the very bullet that tagged him in the back and lodged there, on the left side, between his spine and kidney. A lance corporal requested the lieutenant’s permission to radio for air support. The lieutenant said yes. Then, doubting his authority to disclose their location over the air, said no. Within minutes, the lance corporal and four more men had been shot dead.
The camp that was not there was overrun. Vollie, the lieutenant, and a surviving cherry were tied up in ropes that were not there. And they were transported over many hours in vehicles t
hat were not there, blindfolded and bleeding from the injuries they had not sustained, and they only knew the vehicles had entered some kind of cavern when the motors cut off and there were no jungle sounds that did not exist around them, of wild boars not running through the pine and mangrove trees, of ducks not flapping, of the classified drizzle that did not become static in the mind.
He was dragged, still blindfolded, from the vehicle and put on his feet. The invisible world in which he was impelled to walk narrowed immediately to a dirt tunnel through which his shoulders scarcely fit. For miles he shuffled in a crouch while a jailer he never saw prodded his back. At last they reached a vestibule within the tunnel where he and the cherry were tied up again and left. A space like an earthen pot, wet and cold. The two men listened for jungle noises, city noises, anything from the surface.
Only nothing sounds reached them. The double-nothing sounds of a tunnel that did not exist and men who were not there for an expanse of time that never took place and could not be measured anyway since they saw neither sunlight nor starlight, and what is time without its measure? Know the measure, know the times, study that. When you are left alone, pray.
Here, his long work began. The work toward which he had been groping since the moment in childhood he was plunged through the surface of the ice bath. The work of becoming no one. In the total dark, he closed his eyes. He studied the difference: the one dark with him, the other without.
* * *
• • •
“STAFF SERGEANT FRADE?” rasped the cherry, Wakefield, chained in the dark to what they had decided was the junked remnant of a Soviet-manufactured field artillery carriage lacking its barrel, “what was the name of your high school football team?”
“We didn’t have enough boys for football.” Vollie sat upright, exposing the suppurating hole in his back to the air—better dank air than wet dirt.
The Volunteer Page 8