Dog Soldiers (7 page)

In his own despite, he took another swallow of whiskey, lit a Park Lane, and began to walk up and down the length of the room. In the next room, the Dutch flower-lover was playing
“
Highway 61
”
on his tape recorder. After a few tokes, he decided that he was experiencing no more than a vague dissatisfaction.

Nothing serious. See them all the time. Side effect of low-grade fever.

After a while, he stopped pacing and went across the air shaft to the bathroom to squat over the hole. The hole had treaded foot grips beside it to
put your feet on; it was a ves
tige of the Mission Civilatrice. Unlike some American guests, Converse did not object to using the hole. Often, especially if he was high, using it made him feel as though he were entering into communion with the tight-lipped dun of vanished France
Ultra-Mer
— the pilots of Saint-Exupery, General Salan, Malraux. Sometimes he whistled
“
Non, J
’
ne regret rien
”
as he left the toilet.

Straining, trembling with
the fever stirred in his intes
tines, Converse took his wife
’
s letter from his trouser pocket and began to reread it.

“
Re Cosa Nostra — why the hell not? I
’
m prepared to take chances at this point and I don
’
t respond to the moral objections. The way things are set up the people concerned have nothing good coming to them and we
’
ll just be occupy
ing a place that someone else will fill fast enough if they get the chance. I can
’
t think of a way of us getting money where the money would be harder earned and I think that makes us entitled.
”

Perhaps, Converse thought, as he managed the business of the banknote-sized toilet paper and washed his hands, perhaps the vague dissatisfaction was a moral objection.

Back across the air shaft, he secured the rusty double locks and took another swallow of Scotch. When Converse wrote thoughtful pieces for the small European publications which employed him, he was always careful to assume a standpoint from which moral objections could be inferred. He knew the sort of people he was addressing and he knew the sort of moral objections they found most satisfying. Since his journey to Cam
bodia, he had experienced a cer
tain difficulty in responding to moral objections but it seemed to him that he knew a good deal about them.

There were moral objections to children being blown out of sleep to death on a filthy street. And to their being burned to death by jellied petroleum. There were moral objections to house lizards being senselessly butchered by madmen. And moral objections to people spending their lives shooting scag.

He stood facing the wall where the lizard stains were, rubbing the back of his neck.

Everyone felt these things. Everyone must, or the value of human life would decline. It was important that the value of human life not decline.

Converse had once accompanied Ian Percy to a color film made by the U.N. soil cons
ervation people about the eradi
cation of termites. In a country that looked something like Nam, where there was elephant grass and red earth and palm trees, the local soldiery drove over the grasslands with bulldozers, destroying immense conical termite colonies. There was a reason, as he remembered; the mounds caused erosion or the termites ate crops or people
’
s houses. The termites were doing something bad. When the colonial mounds were overturned, termites came burrowing up from the ruins in frantic tens of thousands, flourishing their pincers in futile motions of defense. Soldiers with flame throwers came behind the bulldozers scorching the earth and burning the termites and their eggs to black cinders.

Watching the film, one felt
something very like a moral ob
jection. But the moral objection was overridden. People
were more important than termites.

So moral objections were sometimes overridden by larger and more profound concerns. One had to take the long view. It was also true that at a certain point the view might become too long and moral objections appear irrelevant. To view things at such length was an error. The human reference point must be maintained.

Really, Converse thought, I know all about this. He pressed his thumb against
the wall and removed a dry par
ticle of reptile spine from its cool surface. It was an error to take the long view in the face of moral objections. And it was an error to insist on moral objections when they were overridden. If one is well grounded in youth, the object of love and sound toilet training, these things become second nature.

In the red field, when the fragmentation bomb
s were fall
ing out of what appeared to be a perfectly empty blue sky, he had experienced no moral objections at all.

The last moral objection that Converse experienced in the traditional manner had been his reaction to the Great Elephant Zap of the previ
ous year. That winter, the Mili
tary Advisory Command
, Vietnam, had decided that ele
phants were enemy agents because the NVA used them to carry things, and there had ensued a scene worthy of the
Ramayana
. Many-armed, hundred-headed MACV had sent forth steel-bodied flying insects to destroy his enemies, the elephants. All over the
country, whooping sweating gun
ners descended from the cloud cover to stampede the herds and mow them down with 7.62-millimeter machine guns.

The Great Elephant Zap had been too much and had disgusted everyone. E
ven the chopper crews who remem
bered the day as one of in
sane exhilaration had been some
what appalled. There was a feeling that there were limits.

And as for dope, Converse thought, and addicts — if the world is going to contain elephants pursued by flying men, people are just naturally going to want to get high.

So there, Converse thought, that
’
s the way it
’
s done. He had confronted a moral objection and overridden it. He could deal with these matters as well as anyone.

But the vague dissatisfaction remained and it was not loneliness or a moral objection; it was, of course, fear. Fear was extremely important to Converse; morally speaking it was the basis of his life. It was the medium through which he perceived his own soul, the formula through which he could confirm his own existence. I am afraid, Converse reasoned, therefore I am.

I
t was still dark at tansonhut when Converse
arrived. Transport was an old Caribou with brown and green camouflage paint. As it fueled, he waited beside the strip with his briefcase in his hand, his anorak folded into a neat square and secured to his belt

Waiting with him were three young men in madras shirts. They were Harvard law
yers from the Military Legal De
fense Committee and from their conversation he surmised that they were on their way to My Lat to try the fragging court-martial of a black Marine. They were Movement people; they had Movement sideburns and Movement voices. Converse kept away from them although they did not seem at all unlucky.

The Caribou took off at first light. When it was airborne, Converse strapped his briefcase to the steel seat beside him and, through the hatch, watched the batteries deliver their morning rounds to the gre
ening horizon. As the sky light
ened, dark formations of
bloated Dragon gunships spread
out between the shells
’
illuminated arc and the morning star, coming home from Snuol and the Line.

There was too much noise for anyone to speak and be heard. Converse went to sleep.

When he awoke, the sun was hot in his eyes and he looked down through the after cargo door to see the plane
’
s shadow running over pale green ocean. They were about two hundred yards offshore. There was a white sand beach lined with coconut palms and behind the beach tin roofs ablaze with the sky
’
s reflected light.

My Lat was a cluster of warped metal; the scarlet flame trees rose among its rooftops like bright weeds among tin cans. Beside the harbor were the tiled buildings of the old French fort which served as the base headquarters. At the town center were two low church spires of oxidized copper surmounted by twin crosses.

On the port side, Converse could see the ships lying in the roadways — slate gray AKAs and AKs spiky with A-frames and winches. In the center of the line, guarded from amphibious sappers by two patrol boats, was the
Kora Sea
. The Skyhawks on its
flight deck were fast under tar
paulin.

The Caribou came in abruptly, clanking down a runway of perforated steel and halting among sandbags in a storm of white dust. Converse stepped out into a hot wind laced with stinging sand. There was no one to meet them. He and the lawyers made th
eir way past the unmanned empla
cements in the direction
of some colorless plywood build
ings with numbers stenciled on them.

The section of the base where they had landed was like a city of the dead; there was not a soul to be seen. The ground under their feet was gravel and crushed seashell, barren as if it had been sown with salt. Converse had brought no hat with him and by the time he found the public affairs office his hair felt like hot wire.

Inside he found a sleepy yeoman and a cooler dispensing Stateside water. He drank a good deal of it. The yeoman informed him that the public information officer was also the base first lieutenant
and had important business else
where. He had not been
seen for a week. The duty jour
nalist was at luncheon.

Converse sat down on a runner
’
s bench to read
Time
mag
azine. The office smelled of floor wax and stamp pads, odors of the American presence.

Within half an hour Jou
rnalist First Class Mac Lean ar
rived and introduced himself. Journalist First Class Mac Lean was a small round-bellied man wearing parts of a Sea-bee uniform with a forty-five holstered on his guard belt. His arms were freckled and thickly tattooed; he had a pink boozer
’
s face adorned
with a sinister goatee and wrap-
around sunglasses. It seemed to Converse that they had met before, in a bar near Santa Monica Beach. But then Mac Lean had been wearing sandals and carrying bongo drums.

“
You wanna see the beach?
”
Mac Lean asked.
“
You gotta see the beach. It
’
s the best in the country.
”

Converse had come to associate Vietnamese beaches with leprosy because of the be
ggars at Cap St. Jacques; he de
clined with grace. Instead of going to the beach, they went to sick bay, where Converse obtained his malaria pills and had his temperature taken. It was just over a hundred.

As the afternoon progressed, it became apparent to Con verse that the PIO was utterly uninterested in his existence so that there would be no necessity for the tiresome busi ness of pursuing a non-story for appearance
’
s sake. How
ever, it was difficult to detach from Mac Lean, who hungered for news of the Great World.

For what seemed to Converse a very lo
ng time, they chat
ted of Music, Literature, Fil
m, and the pleasures of Califor
nia. Mac Lean showed Converse current copies of the Gulf
Gazette
, of which he was the editor.

“
I try to keep it hip,
”
he explained.

He also showed Converse the file cabinet in which he kept his pornography collection and the movie film can that was loaded with Laotian Red. Converse promised to come back the next day and smoke it with him. As he went out, Mac Lean gave him the peace sign.

Heat lightning was breaking outside and there was a breeze from the ocean that was good for the soul. He walked past the helicopter pad and along a sandy road that led toward the church spires. Far off to his right were the low gray buildings of the wharf area, to his left thick stands of trees beyond the wire fencing. The ground within the compound was the color of ashes and looked as barren.

He walked wearily, shifting the briefcase from hand to hand. After a few minutes a jeep with two Marine MPs pulled up beside him.

“
Come along, cousin.
”

Converse placed his bag inside the runner and climbed aboard. The driver asked him where he was from in the world. Converse said California and that made them laugh.

He asked them about the sappers.

“
Oh wow,
”
one of the marines said.
“
Fantastic. Unbelievable.
”