Red Flags (19 page)

"I don't know," Ruchevsky said, standing up. "If the VC get the dope raised around here and smuggle it all the way to Saigon, the syndicates wouldn't care whose goods they were moving. Likewise the customs and port officials. The admirals and generals either. War or no war, business is business."

Big John stooped, his hands resting on his knees, and stared at me closely. "Rider," he said.

"Yeah?"

"You don't look right."

I didn't feel right. My head swam and an awful pain blossomed behind my left eye, clouding my vision. The next second I was on my ass, every joint in my body blazing with pain.

Dengue. The recurrence of the fever took me by surprise. One second I was feeling tiptop, the next my body seized up and my joints hurt so bad that my mind went fuzzy and objects turned liquid. Not for nothing was it called breakbone fever. The MACV medic, Doc Wright, popped me full of pills and put cold cloths on my forehead.

A day later I felt light and empty and a little weak in the knees. I was upright, though, and insisted I was functional. Wright didn't buy it. He ordered bed rest and put Mama-san Duc on the case. The old woman was a staunch Viet Minh nationalist who did our laundry and cleaned our quarters. Years earlier she'd portaged supplies into the mountains for the guerrillas fighting the French. The men in the compound had grown fond of her and of the way she'd berate anyone who crossed her, regardless of his status or whether or not he understood her. Mama-san Duc popped in regularly to check on me and dressed me down in rapid Vietnamese if I made any move to get up. I knew when I was beaten and slept the day away.

When Bac-si Wright stopped by early in the evening to take my temperature, I was alert enough to be alarmed.

"Doc!"

"What?"

"You look like hell."

"Yeah? I feel punk."

"Your eyes are yellow, Doc."

"Fuck," he said and glanced in the small shaving mirror on the back of the door. He muttered, "I gotta go," and bolted.

I passed out again. The doc came back a few hours later, or so I thought. But it wasn't Doc Wright or Mama-san. It was Roberta bringing me cold water.

"Sergeant Wright's not doing so well," she said. "I'm making house calls for him."

I thanked her and quaffed a whole glass. It was painfully cold going down. My knees and elbows burned, and a white pain blurred my vision.

"How are you feeling?"

"Broken."

"Here's another blanket," she said, and covered me with it. "I'll check on you later. Oh, a Sergeant Miser came by earlier. He said you should stop malingering."

No matter how hard I tried to keep from slipping away, sleep took me again.

I was woken in the night by a commotion and shuffled outside. First Sergeant Mote, in green skivvies and flip-flops, came out of the medic's room four doors down. To the east a distant flare floated earthward in complete silence, haloed by humidity.

"What's up, Top?"

The first sergeant stopped. "Bac-si's yellow as a gook."

"Hepatitis. Shit."

"Yeah," Top commiserated. "I hate those shots. How are you holding up?"

"Better." I returned to my bunk and slept normally the rest of the night.

The first sergeant and the perimeter guards coming off duty medevaced Doc Wright in the morning, swapping him for a load of gamma globulin. The whole team needed inoculation. Westy climbed the water tower and doused our water supply with an extra load of purifier. I went to the mess hall and mixed salt and sugar into a glass of powdered milk and gulped it down. Outside, enlisted men stood around the top steps of the commo bunker, speculating about the leper colony upriver and what might have gone into the current there. But hell, lots of Montagnard villages were upstream, and bathers and washerwomen from town. No telling where the hepatitis originated: food or drinking water.

In the absence of an Army medic, Roberta stepped in to administer the large doses of gamma globulin. Team members convoyed to her clinic all day, a few at a time. The commo bunker advised all approaching aircraft that, by order of senior adviser Lieutenant Colonel Bennett, anyone who landed at the airstrip and set foot on the ground had to be inoculated as well. American pilots didn't even cut off their engines. They'd land and drop open their back ramps as they taxied, sending aviation-gas blivets bounding along the perforated steel planks toward the petrol dump. After they'd dumped them all out, they gunned their engines and took right off again. I was at the strip enforcing Bennett's order when a twin-propeller Caribou with kangaroo insignia landed with supply pallets. The Aussie pilots taxied over to us at the CONEX to inquire about the day's luncheon menu. I radioed in to the commo bunker to check. Hearing it was meat loaf, the four of them deplaned. We warned them our cooks weren't exactly Paris trained. They didn't care.

The Montagnards they had on board to handle the heavy lifting were less eager to be dartboarded by our female shaman and elected to remain behind, squatting on the lowered ramp.

"We'll send the little bleeders back some lunch," the aircraft commander said. I radioed the commo bunker and had them summon the doc.

Roberta drove out to the airstrip and injected the big dosages into the Aussies' keisters. The Australians enjoyed themselves thoroughly, taking snapshots of the lady doctor jabbing their bare bums, cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. Afterward they posed for a group picture mooning Viet Nam and then hitched a ride into the compound on the bed of the engineers' truck. They invited me to join their upright luncheon party. They'd brought Worcestershire sauce, a jar of something revolting called Vegemite, and their own Australian beer, chilled at altitude.

"You blokes take this whole dustup too seriously," the copilot said. "You oughta sample the output from those beautiful fields due south of here."

"What do you mean?"

"Gorgeous poppy fields up on a mountain, about twelve miles south. Ruddy fantastic at the moment. Flowers everywhere. Looks like Flanders."

After they finished eating, I made the copilot point out the peak on my map and thanked him. This was my first real lead. The Aussie crew left a gift bottle of Bundaberg rum for the bar and rode back to their plane standing on the engineers' truck, singing four-part harmony:

A short-time girl wore thirty-eight Ds.
Rather much for a Vietnamese.
So they searched her with pleasure. And discovered this treasure.
One grenade, one plastique, two punjis. Oh ...

My name was on the clinic list for the afternoon. I walked into town, not expecting to sit again that day. The clinic's six beds were occupied by sick and injured Montagnards surrounded by their families. Relatives prepared meals in the aisle and slept under the beds, on the floor, even in beds with the patients. I had to step over several napping Jarai to reach the dispensary. Roberta, harried with cases, whipped through the prep for my shot, then stopped, amused that I still had my pants on.

I was sweating profusely. Besides the embarrassment of baring my butt, I hated hypodermics and grew queasy at just the thought of sharp metal driven into my body. Even a dentist's syringe made me anxious. The end of my second tour, my buddy Stolz and I had sat outside the Air Force snack shack in Pleiku forging the mandatory vaccinations on each other's shot cards to process out. The shots for Viet Nam were a bitch: black plague, typhoid, yellow fever ... but the absolute worst was gamma globulin for hepatitis.

"Which is it," she said, "me or the spike?"

"Usually it's the needle. This time I'm sure it's both."

She couldn't resist teasing. "Valiant captain enfeebled by a syringe. Tell you what," she said, lighting up a Salem. "You're going to be sore afterward. It's intramuscular. But I'm very good at this. I can do it with my eyes shut—and I will—if you'll just bring your backside in range."

She took a step closer and shut her eyes, cigarette burning. I bit the bullet, tipped myself over her exam table, and slid my pants down.

"You there?" she said, blowing smoke past me.

"You're not doing this with your eyes closed."

"You want them open?"

"I'd prefer you see your target, yeah."

"Your call." She stubbed out the cigarette.

I tried to block thoughts of the steel sliding into flesh but failed. My body temperature rose with a rush of adrenaline and turned my hands clammy. She impaled my buttock as expertly as promised, but the pain began to spread almost immediately.

"Hey," she said, slowly pushing the plunger on the huge dose. "It's a fair turnaround. It's not like you haven't seen me ... compromised. It
was
you on the parapet that night, wasn't it?"

"Is this some new interrogation technique?"

"You might have turned away."

"You might have stopped."

"That was unlikely at that particular moment," she said. "Besides, I kind of liked being watched. I'm afraid I'm long past being shy."

"Ahhh."

"First one done." She withdrew the hypodermic. "You okay?"

"No. What do you mean
first?
" I exclaimed. "Two?"

"Double-header. You had close exposure. You get two."

"Hey, it wasn't like Doc Wright and I were dating," I argued. "Haven't even shared a meal with the guy."

The second shot jabbed my other cheek unannounced and I groaned.

"You jungle warriors are such wimps." The plunger took forever and the serum was growing larger in my backside. "Done." She swabbed the site. "Cute ass, Captain. Aha, what's this? Nice stitching job. Not much scarring."

"Doc!"

"Okay, okay. I was just admiring the handiwork. Glad they missed your ... vitals."

She paused, and then said, "I did want to thank you."

"For what?"

"For not saying anything. For being discreet. I worry for the colonel if it gets around. He's married. Loves his wife. Loves his Army. I'm just ... here."

"Thanks." I pulled up my fatigue pants and wobbled away, aware for the first time that an audience of curious Montagnard patients and their visitors crowded in the doorway, probably discussing the strangeness of my body hair and whatever else they'd seen.

I didn't care. Roberta had installed doorknobs in my hindquarters and had eyes only for the colonel.

She reminded her Bahnar nurses to make up some permanganate solution and have the staff wash their hands with it immediately. The young patient they'd been handling was suffering from bacillary dysentery. Her attention swung back to me.

"Rider," she said, filling in my shot card. "Can you spare half an hour? There's a problem at a village and I need some backup."

She handed me a hemorrhoid cushion and pointed me toward her Land Rover. I got in gingerly and tried to find a comfortable position on the doughnut, but it only felt like somebody was twisting the new doorknobs in my ass. Roberta came over and got in, flashed me a sympathetic glance, and pulled away, trying to keep the vehicle from bouncing.

"Tell me about the wound," she said.

"Professional curiosity?"

"I wouldn't have said anything if it was just a dimple."

"Got wounded two months into my second tour."

"They ship you home to recover?"

"No such luck. I rehabbed at the field hospital in Pleiku. There were a bunch of us shot—ah—similarly injured and recovering on our stomachs. A friend of mine brought me my Purple Heart. Read out the citation and pinned it to the seat of my pajamas."

"Did it scare you, getting wounded?"

"Yeah. But afterward it was like being initiated. I'd made the fraternity."

"How long were you laid up?"

"About four weeks. Never felt more like a soldier."

"You make it sound almost enjoyable."

"Getting hit wasn't, but the hospital stay was a lark."

"What do you mean?"

"On either side of me were a private and a sergeant. One steamy evening the Sarge and I stole half a gallon of ice cream from the hospital mess. A nurse let us hide it in a refrigerated medicine cabinet for a share and got us spoons. We waited for lights-out. Instead, sirens went off and they blacked out the hospital. The staff rushed everyone to the bunkers. Except the Sarge and me. I retrieved the container and we slipped under his bed. While a mortar barrage rained down somewhere close, we were in hysterics, joking. Then, in the dark, I felt this odd wet warmth creeping along my body."

"Snake?"

"No. We were feasting on this beautiful cold ice cream, lying in a warm puddle of his blood."

"He had popped his stitches."

"Yeah. I thought, Wow. We're really here."

The Rover hit a pothole and bounced.

"Christ," I moaned.

"Sorry."

"We shouldn't go anywhere too remote," I said. "I'm in no shape to run."

"It's about a kilometer and a half. Right off Road Two."

Yeah, right. She had no idea how far out we were. She was just making it up, little realizing the odds were excellent that I would have gone to hell and back if she had asked me to.

"Okay," I said. "So what's happening there?"

"Fuck, it's just so discouraging. ARVN keep uprooting Montagnards from their villages in the mountains and shoving them into government hamlets close to the main roads and the district seats. ‘For their protection,' Chinh says. The Vietnamese are screwing the Yards out of their land, forcibly relocating them and pretending it's for their own good. The tribespeople hate it and sneak away first chance they get."

"You think they'll go off the reservation again and revolt?" I said.

"I wouldn't blame them if they did, but I don't think they'll ever overcome their tribal feuds and wars. The clans hate each other as much as they hate Vietnamese." She looked over. "The Jarai really botched the uprising last December." Roberta braced against the dash. "We're here."

 

The old Jarai village was flanked by fruit trees and surrounded by small steep hills covered with brush and grasses twice the height of a man. Outside the village fence, the whole community—men, women, grandparents, and little kids—were stacking long, freshly cut bamboo logs. Tough as they were, the Montagnards looked worn and badly bruised by the hard labor.