Wild Thing: A Novel (19 page)

This is the mellow part of the mission, the five-boat flotilla moving along easily, but the whole operation should be pretty
simple: they’re supposed to go up the river a little ways farther, park, and wait for the Ruff-Puffs to flush the VC toward them. Then use the deck-mounted .30s and .50s to chew the VC up. Reggie has yet to see an op like this go perfectly smoothly, but he’s got a good feeling about this one.

Lieutenant Torrent drops down into the wheelhouse, followed by
Dai-uy
Nang.

Reggie has rarely seen them apart. He’s even heard they double-teamed the lady reporter from
Life
magazine who went on a sortie with the RAG before Reggie got here, and physically they’re close to identical—both barely over five feet tall and weighing nothing, even though the lieutenant is blond and blue eyed and from Oregon, and the
dai-uy
is from the Rung Sat region southeast of Saigon. They both wear Australian bush hats and smoke pipes: the CPO gets them Borkum Riff from somewhere.

“Hot as hell in here,” the lieutenant says. “You drinking enough water?”

“Yes sir,” Reggie says.

“Good to hear, Sailor. Don’t die on me. Get me everybody on the horn. We’re doing some recon.”

“Yes sir,” Reggie says. Thinking
Oh, shit
.

“Recon,” to the lieutenant and the
dai-uy
, means going into obscure villages and talking to the people who live there in order to learn the local waterways and seed loyalty. As if either of those things is possible. Reggie’s been along on several of these trips, all of them memorable for the sense that the villagers would rather be killing them than talking to them, and were trying hard to figure out how to make the switch.

And none of those earlier trips was this far up the Sang Do. Reggie has no idea how the lieutenant and the
dai-uy
would even have heard about a village around here.

But they’re talking to each other in Vietnamese, and smiling, in a way that Reggie, who doesn’t understand Vietnamese at all, knows he should worry about. The Vietnamese coxswain joins the conversation. Soon the lieutenant is speaking Vietnamese into Reggie’s handset, and the coxswain’s turning the wheel into a bend of the river where the shore is only an intermittent mud bank with a marsh on the other side.

The shitcan ahead of them scrambles to reverse course. As it pulls up alongside, Reggie sees the CPO’s head appear in the trap above its wheelhouse.

The lieutenant gives Reggie back the handset and jumps to chin himself out of their own trap. Reggie hears him shout above the engines: “We’re stopping for recon. We’re gonna bank the flotilla and take
your
boat into the jungle.”

It’s a sensible decision for which Reggie is extremely grateful. The CPO’s shitcan has an extra deck gun instead of a radar housing, and radar barely works in the bamboo. It barely works on open water.

Partly out of guilt about not having to go, and partly to misrepresent how healthy he is, Reggie climbs up through the trap to see them off.

He watches the lieutenant and the
dai-uy
pop like monkeys from the deck of the
commandement
to the deck of the CPO’s boat. Sees the lieutenant turn around and look right at him and say “Sailor—you coming?”

The CPO says “Lieutenant, I don’t think the kid’s up to it.” He’s been watching Reggie from the hatch.

Reggie loves the CPO already—outside of the lieutenant giving him orders, the CPO’s the only person in the flotilla who ever speaks to Reggie—but right now Reggie’s rapt with admiration. Crouched down on top of the wheelhouse he’s got goose
bumps again, and the sway of the boat makes him want to throw up.

“Can’t get your dick wet without getting your feet wet,” the lieutenant says. “What do you say, Sailor?”

The lieutenant’s choice of words makes Reggie want to throw up even more. “Sir, I can’t leave my equipment behind,” he says.

Which is true. Nor can he take it with him. The two VHF radios and the AN/PPS-5B radar set are each categorized as “man portable,” but only by some asshole who sells radio equipment. Reggie couldn’t haul that shit if he were well.

“So secure it, and let’s get moving,” the lieutenant says. “You know what I say: ‘Know the river, know the locals, know what the fuck you’re doing.’ ”

The lieutenant does say that, fairly often. Reggie, who still feels nauseated but now also strangely weightless and cheery from the attention, says “Yes sir!” and slides back into the wheelhouse.

The vertigo almost knocks him off his feet. Reggie takes his field jacket off its hook and points to the coxswain and then the trap, miming turning a key in a lock. The coxswain has to resent the shit out of an American teenager telling him to leave his own wheelhouse because he can’t be trusted not to loot it, but he just shrugs and climbs out.

Reggie looks around. All of the wheelhouse’s windows are open about six inches or so, but they’ve been that way for at least the last ten coats of paint. Anyone who gets Reggie’s equipment out through them is welcome to it.

Bright green bamboo forms a curtain taller than the wheelhouse all the way around the boat, endlessly parting at the prow to
clatter along the bottom as they motor into the marsh, but revealing nothing ahead but more green bamboo. Even the surface of the water is green, with some kind of algae.

Reggie stands on deck, insects hitting his face like tiny meteorites, landing in his eyes, ears, and mouth, making a noise like a million distant chainsaws. Maybe they’re panicked to be suddenly out in the open above the deck. Reggie knows that breathing only through his nose like this, harder out than in to try to keep the bugs out of his nostrils, is making him dizzier, but he can’t stop doing it. There wasn’t room for him in the wheelhouse.

He has no idea what direction they’re pointed, or how deep the water is. Last time he looked through the wheelhouse window, no one even seemed to have a map out, though the lieutenant and the
dai-uy
were laughing. He doesn’t even know what time it is. For some reason he forgot to wear his watch.

An amount of time Reggie can’t begin to judge passes by. Then the bamboo wall ahead of them sizzles with light and parts into sunshine. They’ve come into a clearing. It feels like they’ve exited hell.

One end of the clearing has a prehistoric-looking stone building built down into the water. A wooden platform in front of it extends as walkways around two of the clearing’s sides. And on the platform itself, half a dozen Vietnamese men in loincloths and T-shirts, thin as storks, stand facing them with poles and machetes.

Here we go again
, thinks Reggie.

The engines reverse and then shudder off. Into the weird, sunny-day quiet of no engine noise, the lieutenant and
dai-uy
drop down from the wheelhouse.

One of the men on the platform opposite shouts something at them and waves his pole. The lieutenant and
dai-uy
confer among themselves. Then the
dai-uy
shouts over a response.

The man on the platform yells back. This time, after the
dai-uy
answers, the lieutenant says something. Half the guys on the platform angrily shout back at him, and an argument breaks out that Reggie can’t believe is coherent in any language.

Finally one of the guys on the platform starts saying the same thing over and over, and pointing to the side, and everyone else quiets down and looks in that direction. At one end of the walkway around the clearing there’s a single aluminum canoe floating, “FOM” stenciled on its hull.
^*

Apparently that’s the only place where it’s even mildly acceptable to tie up a foreign boat. The lieutenant raps on the front window of the wheelhouse, and the engines start up again.

Reggie, squatting on his heels in the dark hut, tries not to nod off and lose his balance again.

The hut is on pilings. Except for the stone temple near where they landed, every building in the village seems to be on pilings, as do the walkways that connect them through the bamboo. Reggie doesn’t know how big the village is, but it has to be bigger than what he’s seen, because he has yet to see a woman or child.

The lieutenant, the
dai-uy
, and several of the loincloth guys are crouched around a map with a GI lantern on it, arguing in Vietnamese. The body of one of the loincloth guys is keeping the light from illuminating Reggie’s corner.

There’s a shooting pain in one of his knees. His other leg is asleep.

He drifts off.

The lieutenant shakes him awake, and Reggie gets uncertainly to his feet. Everyone else in the hut is already standing.

The mood seems just as hostile and suspicious as before. As they walk back toward the shitcan, Reggie knows that no one will ever explain to him, or even to the CPO, why this is so. Or what, if anything, was accomplished by this particular round of creepiness and boredom.

The trip back to the river’s easier, though. The CPO, looking concerned, insists that Reggie ride in the wheelhouse, despite the fact that it’s packed and smells like armpit even without him. And the river itself, when they reach it, with its wide sky and relatively empty air, feels like a reprieve. The CPO helps Reggie up onto the rail, and the coxswain helps him down onto the
commandement
.

Reggie takes the opportunity of the lieutenant and the
dai-uy
conversing in the prow to rest for a few moments before he climbs back up the ladder.

He has to lean forward to use the key on the lanyard around his neck, because he’s too weak to take it off, but he gets the trap unlocked. Takes a few breaths, heaves it open, and slides inside.

Something punches him hard above one eye and then, with a stabbing pain, in the chest.

Sang Do River, South Vietnam

Still Monday, 24 July 1967

Reggie bellows in fear.
That
part isn’t like a nightmare, at least: his voice still works. But when he looks down, there’s a bright green three-foot-long cobra hanging by one fang from the front of his field jacket. Heavy as an arm.

Reggie’s frozen. The snake twists and thrashes like a whip, fanning its hood in and out, but can’t disengage its mouth from Reggie’s chest. As Reggie stares down in horror, its free fang bubbles with opaque white fluid.

Thirty-one of thirty-three. That’s how many of the species of snake indigenous to this region Reggie has heard are poisonous.