Keeping Watch (6 page)

“Sure. Lima's my fav'rite. Reminds me of my mama's cooking.”

So worn down were they, not one of them reacted to the outrageous concept of any human female producing the slop in that can.

The lieutenant had spent the night studying his maps, and plot-ted out a change of course that led them away from the mined trails and into terrain that grew clear and flatter as they went on. They picked up speed, outrunning the mine setters, although the snipers soon found them again. Just after noon they swept into a ville that clearly hadn't heard they were coming. A pair of armed figures burst from a hooch and sprinted for the trees—too far away for the rifles, although several grunts opened fire anyway. One of those was Allen, who was so pissed off at the ghosts that he'd happily waste some bullets just for the sake of the noise.

The Wolf called them into line and sent them to searching the ville. They ordered the weeping women and half-naked children out into the village square, and the nervy platoon took out its frustrations on the huts, merrily smashing pots, gouging the floors in an ostensible search for bunkers, and tossing grenades into any minor depression they came upon. One of the other squads was headed toward the thatch with a torch when The Wolf caught them and sent them to round up the livestock.

Even here, however, he had problems controlling the men: One soldier gunned down a young male water buffalo that was placidly chewing its cud in the river. And then the villagers were wailing about the buffalo as well, and one of the GIs made an obscene comment about the animal's equipment, and suddenly out of a clear sky rose a cloud of sexuality, encompassing the entire platoon. An electrical current crackled back and forth across the clearing as the platoon of young and severely frustrated males realized that they had several presentable women in their hands, and no one to object. One man reached out and dragged a villager to her feet, and had his hand inside the woman's shirt before the lieutenant noticed what was happening.

“What are you doing, Malone?” The Wolf's cold voice cut through the hectic glee like a whip. Malone's hand dropped away from the woman's breast, but his other hand kept hold of her arm as he turned to stare insolently at the platoon leader.

“Thought I'd question her.”

“You speak Vietnamese now?”

“I didn't reckon we'd do all that much talking, Loot.” A couple of the new guys laughed nervously at the joke, but no one else; this was The Wolf they were dealing with.

“You didn't.”

After a long minute, Malone's hand let go of the captive arm, and the air's electricity flickered, and guttered out.

Lieutenant Woolf held the gaze of each of his men until he was certain that the urge to atrocity was dead. “Save it for the whores, boys,” he said in the end. “These women don't deserve that.”

“They've been sheltering VC, Loot,” someone groused.

“And they'll probably lose their land because of it,” Woolf answered evenly. “We're supposed to be the good guys here. Never forget it.”

That night, twenty-year-old Allen Carmichael lay bundled inside his poncho liner, unable to take his mind off the picture of his countryman's hand inside the woman's blouse. His eyes replayed the motion, his hand felt the warm shape as if it had ridden there itself. He told himself that he would never have raped the woman, assured his self-respect that he would have stopped Malone if The Wolf hadn't. But although he was dead certain about the first declaration, he could be none too sure about the second. He too had felt the electricity, he'd been aware of the lust for savagery.

When battle couldn't be joined against the enemy, sometimes the definition of enemy had to expand.

Chapter 9

By the time Allen had been in-country three months, his mind held a lifetime of savage images. A three-year-old child burned to raw meat, burned beyond pain, stumbling blind and bewildered through the napalmed ville; a stack of what had once been human beings, now half a ton of squirming rat food; the belt buckle of a fellow GI, still fastened to the stubs of its belt on both sides, sitting in the middle of a path where it had been blown free of its wearer; a weirdly flattened NVA who had fallen from the sky onto rocky ground, a quick means of encouraging his fellow prisoners on the chopper to talk. Men bled impossible amounts; men were impossibly violated by various kinds of metal; men died in silence from tiny wounds while others screamed and screamed and refused to die. Allen had seen so many weeping women that their tears had no power to move him; weeping men were harder to take, when they were his own, but even those had become more of an irritation than something that wrung the guts. He had seen so many Vietnamese smacked around and beaten that the sounds did not even make him look around.

For a while, the everyday horror had festered inside Allen's mind. For a few days after Christmas, he had felt as if he would burst with the memories, swollen as a corpse about to spill itself out onto the earth. For a time, he had almost wished for the release of pressure, looking for ways to cause his mind to break up, thought about just pulling a grenade pin and hugging the thing to his heart.

In the end, the buildup had simply leaked out of him, leaving him a functioning shell. The vivid dreams of raining belt buckles and his foot coming down onto the trigger of a Bouncing Betty ceased to torment him, and during the day he grew accustomed to seeing men he knew were dead walking or sitting with the others: blink hard enough, they went away. As for fear, it was a tool, adrenaline cranking up the perceptions. It could even be a thrill—like the sheer, heart-pounding helplessness of coming down into a red-hot LZ, when the zip and clang of bullets made your balls shrivel up behind your navel, until you set down in an orgasm of terror, finding release in a stream of heavy-laden men pouring out the back of the chopper. Exhaustion, pain, filth, it all got converted into
bau,
pronounced as if it were a Vietnamese word, a joke-adaptation of
business as usual
. Tedium? Turn off the brain and hump the pack. Horror? Let the eyes glaze over. The bright and shining terror of an FNG make you want to just bash him on the head and put him out of his misery? Don't sit near him, don't ask his name.

More and more rarely did he stand back, reflecting on how strange it was that he didn't find the war intolerable, or even particularly awful. He wasn't even afraid of death any longer, looked unmoved on horror, and only the rare pulse of his body's fear told him he was still alive. Life was a long stretch of tedium broken by the fierce joy of battle.

And joy there was, now that he was learning the language of the jungle. In the bush, as the thud of rotors faded, the men would stand motionless until sounds returned: the buzz of insects, the cry of birds, the hiss of the radio. Then slowly they would move out, hunting the enemy, seeking out his hiding places, offering themselves to him as a snake hunter might offer his hand to coax a rattler from his den. And the smaller the group, the more Allen liked it—being stripped down to a night ambush party of three men carrying nothing but M16, canteens, and a Claymore was an experience so intense, it was like being drunk, or in love. Saigon was far away then.

Allen learned the bush, his senses screwed tight to the brink of madness: the chill back-of-the-neck sensation that meant Charlie was watching; a sure conviction that the path ahead held a booby trap; the sixth sense that kicked in when you could feel—
smell
—the enemy with a kind of internal radar. Nights were the best, keeping watch, when only your alertness stood between your brothers and death—he loved them then, his brother soldiers, loved them like he'd never loved Lisa, or his parents, or even Jerry. He discovered that he had a knack for ambushes, working with Streak and Mouse to triangulate a suspected hole in the ground and wait for Charlie to stick his head out, and he developed rituals the night before a patrol—laying out his boots just so, repacking his field pack, covering two sheets of paper with a dutiful set of entertaining lies to Lisa; they became a kind of meditation. He ate less meat, used mud on his exposed skin instead of the Army's insect repellent, he eyed everyone other than his platoon-mates with close suspicion.

He didn't grow braids, although he did toy with the idea of transferring to recon, so he could spend more time in the green. Away from all the crap. And he didn't rape women or collect ears himself, but once he'd sighted down on an old man plowing a paddy with his water buffalo, just to see what it was like to play God. And sometimes, after particularly brutal days, he even began to understand those twin urges of domination, the fierce desire to cap mere killing with calculated savagery against the enemy, assaulting his women or hacking off parts of his corpse. Rape and mutilation were extreme versions of pissing on the enemy: If nothing else, they made crystal clear just which one had survived the battle.

Three months in-country, and Allen's eyes gazed on the world from the other side of a chasm. Whenever he shaved in his murky steel mirror, he concentrated on the cheeks and chin, because he knew that if he looked farther up, he would see that look the journalists liked to call the “thousand yard stare,” the expressionless face of an old, old man who no longer dares focus on anything close by. Allen concentrated on the face below the cheekbones, because a part of him did not want to acknowledge what he in fact was.

A twenty-year-old cold-blooded killer.

The calendar changed to 1968, and paradoxically, while Allen's own tensions simplified and leveled out, the pressures on the country around him grew. While Allen learned to move quietly in the land he was coming to know, Charlie was growing more and more blatant. It was almost as if he could smell blood in the water, as the growing drag of antiwar sentiment at home made even the rawest recruit suspect that the U.S. wasn't going to be in the country long enough to win. The Wolf took on a haunted look, and his determination that the men under his command would fight an honest war was grim now instead of dignified. Things happened even in Second Platoon that wouldn't have earlier, blind eyes were turned on the unjustly dead. Someone told Allen that life would calm down once Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, started. He replied that he'd be more than ready for it.

During a day inside the NDP, Allen was mending a ripped cargo pocket on his fatigues when he looked up to see Ricardo Flores, the whip of an antenna snapping back and forth over his head, bright green eyes sparkling in a grinning face. Allen dropped his clumsy needle to throw his arms around this figure from a past life and pound on the little guy's tightly muscled back.

“Hey Flowers! Or do they still call you Lucy?”

“Don't know what I'm going to do when I go home and my mother calls me Ricky,” he admitted. “How you doin', man?”

“Counting the days, Lucy, just countin' the days. What're you doing here, anyway?”

“They had to do some shuffling at the regiment I was in, putting some platoons together, that kinda shit. We had two romeos, you guys were one down, so here I am.”

In other words, his company had had such heavy losses, they shipped in an entire new platoon to fill their numbers.

“It's great to see you. You with the Second Platoon, then?”

“First.”

“Second's better, Lieutenant Woolf's better'n most of the generals.”

“Hell, Carmichael,
you're
better'n most of the generals.”

“True. Hey, I should tell you, Farmboy's in your platoon. Remember him and Dogs? Dogs shipped out last month, lucky bastard, some kind of liver thing.”

“Yeah, I remember them, from the bus. So the farmboy made it this far—I'da thought he'd get hisself stomped by a water buffalo or something.”

“Not yet. So where you been?”

“All over.” The green eyes took on a haunted look and shifted away, which meant that he didn't want to talk about it. Fair enough.

“Well,” said Allen, “anyway, welcome to Bravo Company. You need me to show you where your platoon is?”

“Nah, I got it. See you around, okay?” And Flores left Allen to his mending.

Two days later, Tet began.

But instead of the breathing space of peace that past experience led everyone to expect, the celebrations set off a paroxysm of violence that ran from the delta to the demilitarized zone. VC and NVA alike rose up from one end of the country to the other, even in areas assumed to be secure. Saigon in the south came within a hair's breadth of falling, the Marines in Hue to the east were awash in blood, battalions near the DMZ came close to being overrun. The grunts hunkered down and met the enemy, and it was a close thing, but by the end of February, it was apparent that the Tet offensive had stalled. Westmoreland claimed a victory on his way out the door, but when Walter Cronkite came to see for himself, he declared to the American people that the war was lost. The men on the ground figured both authorities were right; at the same time, they knew it would be a long time before anyone recognized it.

In early March, Allen's platoon lifted out for five days of turnaround time near the coast, hot food, cold beer, real bunks, and above all, someone else to stand guard. The five days passed in a welter of fistfights and fucking and they returned to their part of the jungle more tired than when they'd left.

Still, it had been a change, and had let them take a small step away from the craziness.

And then there was what was called “friendly fire”: Artillery was given wrong coordinates, overheated guns misfired by one or two degrees, gunships laying down white phosphorus were given incomplete information or failed to see the smoke markers. Whoever came up with the phrase no doubt did not intend its flavor of bitter irony—that came from the victims.

Late March; raining. First and Second Platoons had been out for the better part of a week, slopping through the deluge, trying to keep their M16s dry, looking like mud men, the noise of the rain on their steel hats deafening them. The point man in the next squad up had his bush hat on, no protection from flying steel but it kept the rain out of his eyes and gave him a chance to hear something other than pounding rain. Still, not even he heard the gunship coming up the turgid, red-brown stream. Allen's squad was picking its way through the waist-deep water, rifles over their heads, when the Slick came upon them. The gunship had taken ground fire in this same place three times the previous day and its crew was antsy; when it swooped around a curve in the stream and saw heavily draped men carrying burdens, the gunner opened fire.

The Huey had turned and was taking a return pass before one of the men in Alpha Squad managed to free a smoke canister and set it going. Fortunately it was one of the yellow ones, visible even in the half-light of the rain and the streambed, because the helicopter bearing down on them abruptly pulled up and sailed past; the gunner stared down appalled at his handiwork, like a god who has mistakenly summoned lightning against his own priests.

Of the twelve men caught crossing the stream, four were down, two trapped underwater by sixty pounds of equipment. Allen flung his rifle in the direction of the bank and splashed after the nearest spread-eagled figure. He grabbed the man's foot, then his own boot went out from under him and he went down, bouncing along the stream bottom until he fought clear of pack, grenades, bandoliers, and flak jacket, staggering upright, gagging and coughing as he tried to shout for help, but when he dashed the water out of his eyes, all he saw was the downed man in the fast-moving center of the stream, gaining momentum. He waded after the figure, slow as a bad dream, then flung his helmet aside and dove in unencumbered. Ten, fifteen strokes, and he had hold of the boot again. He clawed at belt, equipment, anything. The body seemed determined to head for the distant China Sea but, cursing and choking, Allen managed to get the senseless weight turned faceup.

Streak.

Allen hawked the mud from his throat and roared, “For Christ sake somebody help me—Streak's hit!”

Then Chris was there, lifting Streak's head out of the swirl while Allen took the feet; using the water itself as a stretcher, they struggled against the current, back to where the bank ran with blood. Hands reached for Streak, dragging him onto the rocks, fumbling to release his web gear while Allen ripped at Streak's flak jacket and yelled, “Medic! We need you here, right now!”

The medic appeared at his shoulder, kneeling beside the still body, resting his fingers on the skin under Streak's jawbone. Then, inexplicably, he was straightening up and moving away, back to the man he'd abandoned. Allen grabbed his arm, hard.

“What the hell you think you're doing? This man needs you.”

“What this man needs, I can't give. He's dead, Carmichael.”

“He's not dead, he's just stopped breathing. Give him some artificial respiration or something, get the water out of his lungs.”

“Carmichael. Look at him. He's dead.”

The medic's patience forced the meaning through.

Streak? Their shortest guy, their platoon leader, nerves-of-ice Streak? No. Not possible.

But without the muddy water, with the wide bandoliers stripped from his chest, Allen could see that the words were true. The blood oozed, without the pressure of a heart to pump it: For eleven months, Streak Rychenkow had survived all Charlie had to throw at him, only to fall to a bullet made in the USofA.

That was not the whole of it, either. Allen looked up from Streak's slack features to another face startling in its contrast, a face so contorted in pain and fear that he failed for a moment to recognize it. Farmboy Pete, helmet tipped back from that blond and tousled head, legs in the water, freckles stark against skin gone monstrously pale. He was trying to get his hands onto his belly where the medic was working; two men were struggling to hold his wrists while Pete writhed and gulped for air, his eyes locking on to Allen as if to a life ring. Allen splashed over to his side, and one of the bloody hands shot away from its keeper to grab Allen's arm.