Red Flags (20 page)

Half a dozen Vietnamese soldiers lounged in the shade of the fruit trees, helping themselves to bananas they'd cut down and drinking from coconuts they'd appropriated and gouged open. Fifty yards off lay a water buffalo, hobbled by bullet wounds. They'd been amusing themselves taking target practice on the animal, shooting out one leg at a time. Embracing the suffering creature, its six-year-old herdsman wailed over his beloved beast. Roberta was seething. She got out and confronted their sergeant, went off on him in Vietnamese, the vessels in her neck and forehead pulsing as she waved her arms at the injured animal and the large cache of wood: six stacks of long bamboo logs piled chest high in alternating, perpendicular layers. The sergeant smiled benignly, as if everything were swell.

"Shit," she exclaimed, turning away from the impassive clutch of Vietnamese to talk to the old chief and his deputies standing nearby.

"What's going on?" I said.

"The whole village is being disciplined. They have to harvest bamboo."

"What are they being punished for?" I said.

"Their old chief had the temerity to complain to Chinh about their measly rice rations." She stood with hands on hips.

"Where's all this bamboo going?"

"The province warehouse. It'll get sold in a few days or weeks, and the money—lots of it—will go into the province chief's pockets. The village will never see a dime. The bastard's taking a page from the French planters' book. Forced labor. Corvée."

The Vietnamese soldiers continued to peel bananas and chat languidly. Roberta stomped over to the pile of their stuff and pulled a live trussed chicken from an empty sandbag. She untied the bindings and freed the flapping bird the troops had obviously confiscated. The soldiers looked resentful but did nothing to stop her. Roberta continued her rampage through their rucks, yanking out tobacco leaves, yams, marijuana plants, spilling coffee beans all over the ground.

The Montagnards watched their doctor storm. I was glad I had my rifle, in case the ARVN stopped grinning like fools and decided to give us the water-buffalo treatment.

She returned to my side, cheeks pink, breathing hard.

"I know their military doesn't do right by them, but they've got to stop pillaging the Yards at every opportunity."

"I think you've made your point. Are the Yards done with their—their punishment?"

She called out to the dozen Jarai standing silently by the cut bamboo. A toothless old woman answered.

"She says the villagers can do no more today. They're exhausted."

"Right. All done," I said to the sergeant and made a point of waving the soldiers away with my left hand—a huge insult. "
Di di.
Go. Go." The gesture wasn't lost on the Yards. Or the sergeant, whose face went slack. They slowly gathered up their rucksacks and sauntered off toward town.

The chief borrowed my pistol and went over to the wounded water buffalo to console the boy and dispatch the stricken animal. Roberta got out her medical bag and set up a quick sick call, treating the deep cuts and welts inflicted by their harsh labors, while I carted two sacks of rice from her Rover and presented it to the village chief. More patients appeared as word of her presence spread. She had me record their names and illnesses on cards and note the medications she handed out and the dosages. Malaria, dengue fever, vitamin and iodine deficiencies, intestinal parasites, toothache, skin infection...

"Most of them suffer from the same half a dozen illnesses," she said. "A reasonably adequate nurse could handle most of this. I've got to get more of them trained."

After an hour of her impromptu clinic, the line had barely decreased. Montagnards kept appearing to replenish it.

"Appreciate your help, Captain Rider. You'll tell your colonel about this crap of punishing the village, won't you? See if he'll raise some hell with the province chief."

I said I would, though I didn't think for an instant it would do much good. Neither did she.

"You got somebody back in the world?" she said.

"Not since my ex dumped me."

She flashed me her best smile. "You should put some work into that situation."

"Don't smile like that," I said.

"Why not?"

"Makes my head swim."

She looked pleased.

"Everything in the army is hard and coarse," I said. "After a while, what you miss most is a woman's softness. It's like an ache."

"And you don't think women find this place hard-edged or have longings?"

I brushed back sweat and handed her the tube of ointment she pointed to. "You should drop by the compound some evening when we've gotten in all the reels of the same movie. I'll drive you back afterward."

"Thanks. I could use some American company. But if you're asking me on a date, that might be inadvisable."

An old man stepped forward to present an elbow with a festering sore.

"So it's not just a wartime fling?"

"I was hoping it was." She winced. "I outsmarted myself."

"How so?"

"I fell in love."

Roberta drained the sore and wiped it with antiseptic, and swabbed again with a dark salve before applying a dressing.

"Not exactly the guy I expected to fall for," she said. "I mean, he's a professional soldier in the business of inflicting harm. Here I am, repairing the sick and damaged." She laughed. "We're kind of a ridiculous pair."

"How do you explain it then?"

"He's just the kindest, smartest, most sincere man I've ever known. The Montagnards think he's favored by the gods."

"Does he know how you feel? How much you care for him?"

"Not from my lips, but maybe. Probably." She thought a moment. "It would be hard to miss."

"What are you going to do?"

"Suffer. Eventually I'll suffer more. For now, I cherish every minute we can steal from this damn war."

"You don't mince words," I said.

A mischievous grin crept onto her face. "Life's too fucking short, an insolent young officer informed me recently."

I grimaced. "Yeah. Captain Badass."

She finished wrapping the wound and tied off the white bandage. "You remember when you asked if I'd like to be a Montagnard?"

"You said no but wouldn't say why."

"Because I'd have to stand in the river with my lover and eat shit off a stick, that's why. That's their punishment for adultery. It's sort of smart, if you think about it."

"There are worse things than guilt, Doc."

"Yeah? What beats it?"

"Regret."

She took me in with a sidelong glance. "I'm not sure I want to know how you came by that piece of insight." She turned to the next patient. "I appreciate your not judging me."

A bullet buzzed by, the report echoing through the hills a fraction of a second later.

"What the hell?" she blurted out, her head swiveling as the line of patients scattered. I pulled her behind the Land Rover. "What was that?" She started to stick her nose up over the door.

"Keep down. Listen to me. He's a ways off. He'll need time to sight between shots. We have to move after the next one."

"Oh my God. We're being shot at."

"Yes, and we need to move."

"Can't we stay here, behind the Rover, where we're safe?"

"Only works in the movies, Doc. He's using an assault rifle, a Kalashnikov. It'll bang right through."

I pulled her behind the engine. She cried out as a round punched straight through both front-seat doors, leaving a gaping hole. Trying to be clever, I peered into it, lining up both punctures to see where the shot might have come from. All I could make out was a tangle of scrub. No landmarks. Still, it gave me the hillside he was on. Roberta shrieked again as I popped up to spray a burst at the slope: eighteen rounds in a blink.

Nobody hearing intermittent gunshots would pay attention. Maybe more sustained fire might be noticed, an alarm raised. I was about to do it again when a third shot struck the ground near my feet.

I fired off another magazine fast and said, "Move!" Grabbed her by the elbow and hauled her across open space into the banana leaves. When all lines of sight were blocked, we moved laterally. I pushed her into a crouch. We inched forward.

"VC?" she said, gasping, as she wrestled with the idea of an indifferent stranger intending her harm. A shot hit the fronds where we'd entered the foliage. I pulled her farther back.

"Yeah, VC or our southern allies expressing their feelings about being humiliated earlier." Sweat dripped from my chin. "Vietnamese either way. Though probably not NVA."

"What makes you say that?"

"They're better shots."

"God, Rider. Anything can happen to anybody in this place and who would know."

I pulled her deeper into the leaves and had her squat next to me again. We waited. The afternoon was hot and peaceful. Everything normal, except somebody was out there looking to kill us. My inoculated backside felt like it'd been shot again. Luckily the locals weren't great riflemen. Ammunition was scarce. The VC didn't expend much of it practicing. Neither did the South Vietnamese, who got plenty of ammo from us but were lackadaisical about training.

I peered through the large leaves, praying there weren't enough gunmen out there to maneuver around our side. Nothing. Minutes passed. No more shots. The guy was gone, or very patient.

"A lone sniper, most likely."

"You sure?" she said.

"I'd bet my life on it," I quipped.

"Don't kid."

"They would have tried to flank us by now if there were more of them. It's just the one guy."

A hot and empty day in the tropics: a hundred and twenty in the shade. We shared my canteen. I was dying for a cigarette but thought better of risking the smoke giving us away. A large spider ambled down the trunk of the banana tree behind her.

"You ever married?" I said.

"No. Never had the time to think about it when I was studying and one day it was too late."

She tried to peer out around the broad leaves but I shook my head no.

She said, "You know the colonel well?"

"Not very. Company-grade officers aren't exactly chummy with field-grade officers."

"So you wouldn't know why he's disappointed with his career?"

"I don't know that he is." Did she really think captains did career counseling for colonels?

"Trust me," she said. "He doubts he's going to make full colonel. He says two MACV assignments and no troop command means his career is permanently stalled."

"That could be. But so what?"

"He says he never got the combat command he'd been promised. The one he's been dreaming of since he was a cadet. He captained a company in Korea, but he doesn't think he'll ever get a battalion here."

"I'm sure he'd do okay commanding troops again, but there are a couple of thousand amped-up lieutenant colonels hot to strut their stuff, desperate for a battalion command. Personally, I don't know why anybody would want responsibility for a bunch of heavily armed teenagers, having to harass them to produce higher counts of enemy dead and worry about them crapping themselves to death from dysentery in jungles buzzing with flies and bullets. I mean, he could switch to intelligence or logistics and do great. You wouldn't really want to see him go off to a combat unit, would you?"

Her head tipped back against an elephant-ear frond. "He says he won't shovel paper in the Pentagon. Says if he can't have the infantry, he's going back to teaching at West Point or the War College. If he accepts a permanent teaching position, he says he'll never make higher rank but at least won't lose his commission when this conflict winds down and the government cuts back. He just won't ever make general."

"That's true," I said, "he won't see another promotion if he commits to teaching. So what? You ready to be a faculty wife at West Point?"

"I told you. He's already got a wife. He just saw her not a month ago. All I can do is hope this war never ends."

"I know people who'll give you odds it might not."

"I must sound crazy," she said.

"Not really. A lot of old hands don't want to think about it ever being over. Or how it might end."

"Badly," she said. "How else?"

"Don't you think we're going to pull it off?"

She pinned me with a look. "Do you? From what you've seen so far? This could be the Hundred Years' War if we play our cards right."

"Look at the bright side. Eighty years to go."

She wasn't amused.

"Listen up, Doc. I'm going to jump in your Land Rover, crank it, screech over here, collect you as I roll by, and hightail it. I'm not going to stop. You'll have to hop in as I go. You with me?"

"Roger, dodger."

"If I don't get there—"

"Don't say that."

"We gotta be real. If I don't make it, don't think. Go." I pointed my rifle barrel. "Head for the thickest growth and go to ground. Hide. Wait for someone to come find you. Don't show yourself. Stay put."

I didn't give her time to object. I crept back to the British Rover, opened the passenger's door on the left side, and crawled in. I hit the ignition. Half in the cab, I used my hands to depress the clutch and shift into first, and let out the clutch. The high idle rolled the vehicle forward. I sat up in the driver's seat and called her. She rushed out of the fronds and into the passenger seat. In seconds we were on the road, the hemorrhoid cushion around my neck, Roberta whooping as we drove like hell for Cheo Reo, light as angels.

W
HAT A ROACH
coach," Miser said as we sat down on the long wooden bench at the counter of an open-air food stand just off the marketplace in town. Miser passed me a curt teletype message from our boss:
Another Hong Kong deposit 100
K
.

"Any ideas?" Miser said.

"I need to get a look at that poppy field the Aussie flier pointed out."

"Your hard work makes me hungry," he said, raising his chin toward the cook.

The stand was skanky wood with a corrugated roof, sided with metal sheeting covered with row after row of identical beer logos. We ordered
pho
for ourselves and for Checkman and Rowdy, who had tagged along and were cruising a small pile of black-market items. A man lay back in an empty handcart, hat held to his face, while a friend picked lice from his hair. Miser remembered something and giggled.