Dispatches (17 page)

Once on a two-day pass to Danang, Mayhew had gone off limits and into the black market looking for grass and an air mattress. He never found the grass, and he had been scared to death when he finally bought the mattress. He told me that
nothing that had ever happened at Khe Sanh had scared him the way he had been scared that day. I don’t know what he had been told the MP’s would do to him if they caught him in the market, but as he told the story it had been the best adventure he’d had since the day two years back when the game warden had used a helicopter to chase him and a friend out of the woods after deer season had closed. We were sitting in the mingy damp of the eight-man bunker where Mayhew and Day Tripper both slept. Mayhew had been trying to make me use his mattress for the night and I’d refused it. He said that if I didn’t sleep on it he was just going to take it and throw it outside into the trench and leave it there until morning. I told him that if I’d wanted an air mattress I could have picked one up anytime in Danang, and that the MP’s wouldn’t have even bothered me about it. I said I liked sleeping on the ground; it was good training. He said that that was all horsecrap (he was right), and he swore to God, the mattress would just lie out there all night with the rest of the rubbish that collects on trench floors. Then he got very mysterious and told me to think about it while he was gone. Day Tripper tried to find out where he was going, but Mayhew wouldn’t tell him.

During those brief moments when the ground all around you was not rumbling, when there were no airstrikes on the hills, no incoming or outgoing or firing from the perimeter, you could sit inside and listen to the rats running across the bunker floor. A lot of them had been poisoned, shot, caught in traps or killed by the lucky toss of a combat boot, and they were here in the bunker too. There was the smell of urine, of old, old sweat, C-ration decay, moldy canvas and private crud, and that mixing up of other smells that were special to combat zones. A lot of us believed that exhaustion and fear could be smelled and that certain dreams gave off an odor.
(We were regular Hemingway gypsies about some things. No matter how much wind a chopper would put out as it landed, you could always tell when there were body bags around an lz, and the tents where the Lurps lived smelled unlike any other tents anywhere in Vietnam.) This bunker was at least as bad as any I’d ever been in, and I gagged in there once, the first time. Because there was almost no light, you had to imagine most of what you smelled, and that became something like a pastime. I hadn’t realized how black Day Tripper was until we walked inside the bunker.

“It
definitely
stinks somethin’ fierce in here,” he said. “I gotta be gettin’ me a mo’—uh—effective deodorant.”

He paused.

“Any kinda shit come up tonight, you jus’ keep with me. You be lucky Mayhew don’ think you a Zip an’ blast your fuckin’ head off. He’ll go pretty crazy sometimes.”

“You think we’ll be hit?”

He shrugged. “He might try an’ do a probe. He did that number ’gainst us three nights ago an’ kill one boy. Kill a Brother.

“But this here’s a real good bunker. We took some shit right on top here. All kindsa dirt come down on top our heads, but we’se all right.”

“Are guys sleeping in their flak jackets?”

“Some do. I don’. Mayhew, crazy fucker, he sleep bare-ass. He so tough, man, li’l fucker, the hawk is out, an’ he’s in here bare-ass.”

“What’s that? About the hawk?”

“That means it’s a co-o-old Mother Fucker.”

Mayhew had been gone for more than an hour now, and when Day Tripper and I stepped out on the ammo-crate planking that made the trench floor we saw him outside talking to some grunts. He started walking toward us, laughing,
looking like a little boy dressed in a man’s combat gear, swimming in his flak jacket, and the grunts sang after him, “Mayhew’s a lifer.… ’Ray for him.”

“Hey, Day Tripper!” he called. “Hey, you hear it, motherfucker?”

“I hear what?”

“I just went over and extended.”

The smile vanished on Day Tripper’s face. He looked like he didn’t understand for a second, and then he looked angry, almost dangerous.

“Say again?”

“Yeah,” Mayhew said. “I just saw the Old Man about it.”

“Uh-huh. How long you extend for?”

“Just four months.”

“Jus’ four months. Tha’s real fine, Jim.”

“Hey, man …”

“Don’ talk to me, Jim.”

“Oh come on, Day Tripper, don’t be a hard-on. It gets me outta the Corps three months early.”

“Whatever. Jim.”

“Oh man, don’t call me that.” He looked at me. “Every time he gets pissed off he calls me that. Listen, motherfucker, I get outta the
Marine Corps
early. And I get a home leave. The Old Man says I can go next month.”

“You
can’t
be talkin’ to
me
. I jus’ don’ hear nonna that. I don’ hear one word you sayin’, Jim.”

“Aw …”

“You jus’ another dumb grunt. What I gotta talk to you for? It’s like you never hear one word I say to you, ever. Not one word. An’ I
know
 … oh man, I jus’
know
you already sign that paper.”

Mayhew didn’t say anything. It was hard to believe that the two were around the same age.

“What I gonna do with you, poor fucker? Why … why
you jus’ don’ go runnin’ out over th’ wire there? Let ’em gun you down an’ get it over with. Here, man, here’s a grenade. Why you jus’ don’ go up backa the shithouse an’ pull the pin an’ lie down on it?”

“You’re fuckin’ unbelievable. Man, it’s just four months!”

“Four months? Baby, four
seconds
in this whorehouse’ll get you greased. An’ after your poppa an’ all that. An’ you jus’ ain’
learned
. You’re the sorriest,
sorriest
grunt mother I ever seen. No, man, but the
sorriest!
Fuckin’ Mayhew, man. I feel sorry for you.”

“Day Tripper? Hey, it’ll be okay. Y’know?”

“Sure, baby. Jus’ don’ talk to me right away. Clean your rifle. Write your momma. Do
somethin
. Talk to me later.”

“We can smoke some bullshit.”

“Okay, baby. Say later.” He walked back into the bunker and lay down. Mayhew took off his helmet and scratched out something written on the side. It had read
20 April and
OUTTA SIGHT
!

Sometimes you’d step from the bunker, all sense of time passing having left you, and find it dark out. The far side of the hills around the bowl of the base was glimmering, but you could never see the source of the light, and it had the look of a city at night approached from a great distance. Flares were dropping everywhere around the fringes of the perimeter, laying a dead white light on the high ground rising from the piedmont. There would be dozens of them at once sometimes, trailing an intense smoke, dropping white-hot sparks, and it seemed as though anything caught in their range would be made still, like figures in a game of living statues. There would be the muted rush of illumination rounds, fired from 60-mm. mortars inside the wire, dropping magnesium-brilliant above the NVA trenches for a few seconds, outlining
the gaunt, flat spread of the mahogany trees, giving the landscape a ghastly clarity and dying out. You could watch mortar bursts, orange and gray-smoking, over the tops of trees three and four kilometers away, and the heavier shelling from support bases farther east along the DMZ, from Camp Carrol and the Rockpile, directed against suspected troop movements or NVA rocket and mortar positions. Once in a while—I guess I saw it happen three or four times in all—there would be a secondary explosion, a direct hit on a supply of NVA ammunition. And at night it was beautiful. Even the incoming was beautiful at night, beautiful and deeply dreadful.

I remembered the way a Phantom pilot had talked about how beautiful the surface-to-air missiles looked as they drifted up toward his plane to kill him, and remembered myself how lovely .50-caliber tracers could be, coming at you as you flew at night in a helicopter, how slow and graceful, arching up easily, a dream, so remote from anything that could harm you. It could make you feel a total serenity, an elevation that put you above death, but that never lasted very long. One hit anywhere in the chopper would bring you back, bitten lips, white knuckles and all, and then you knew where you were. It was different with the incoming at Khe Sanh. You didn’t get to watch the shells very often. You knew if you heard one, the first one, that you were safe, or at least saved. If you were still standing up and looking after that, you deserved anything that happened to you.

Nights were when the air and artillery strikes were heaviest, because that was when we knew that the NVA was above ground and moving. At night you could lie out on some sandbags and watch the C-47’s mounted with Vulcans doing their work. The C-47 was a standard prop flareship, but many of them carried .20- and .762-mm. guns on their doors,
Mike-Mikes that could fire out 300 rounds per second, Gatling style, “a round in every square inch of a football field in less than a minute,” as the handouts said. They used to call it Puff the Magic Dragon, but the Marines knew better: they named it Spooky. Every fifth round fired was a tracer, and when Spooky was working, everything stopped while that solid stream of violent red poured down out of the black sky. If you watched from a great distance, the stream would seem to dry up between bursts, vanishing slowly from air to ground like a comet tail, the sound of the guns disappearing too, a few seconds later. If you watched at a close range, you couldn’t believe that anyone would have the courage to deal with that night after night, week after week, and you cultivated a respect for the Viet Cong and NVA who had crouched under it every night now for months. It was awesome, worse than anything the Lord had ever put down on Egypt, and at night, you’d hear the Marines talking, watching it, yelling, “Get some!” until they grew quiet and someone would say, “Spooky understands.” The nights were very beautiful. Night was when you really had the least to fear and feared the most. You could go through some very bad numbers at night.

Because, really, what a choice there was; what a prodigy of things to be afraid of! The moment that you understood this, really understood it, you lost your anxiety instantly. Anxiety was a luxury, a joke you had no room for once you knew the variety of deaths and mutilations the war offered. Some feared head wounds, some dreaded chest wounds or stomach wounds, everyone feared the wound of wounds, the Wound. Guys would pray and pray—Just you and me, God. Right?—offer anything, if only they could be spared that: Take my legs, take my hands, take my eyes, take my fucking
life
, You Bastard, but please, please, please, don’t take
those.
Whenever a shell landed in a group, everyone forgot about the next rounds and skipped back to rip their pants away, to check, laughing hysterically with relief even though their legs might be shattered, their kneecaps torn away, kept upright by their relief and shock, gratitude and adrenaline.

There were choices everywhere, but they were never choices that you could hope to make. There was even some small chance for personal style in your recognition of the one thing you feared more than any other. You could die in a sudden bloodburning crunch as your chopper hit the ground like dead weight, you could fly apart so that your pieces would never be gathered, you could take one neat round in the lung and go out hearing only the bubble of the last few breaths, you could die in the last stage of malaria with that faint tapping in your ears, and that could happen to you after months of firefights and rockets and machine guns. Enough, too many, were saved for that, and you always hoped that no irony would attend your passing. You could end in a pit somewhere with a spike through you, everything stopped forever except for the one or two motions, purely involuntary, as though you could kick it all away and come back. You could fall down dead so that the medics would have to spend half an hour looking for the hole that killed you, getting more and more spooked as the search went on. You could be shot, mined, grenaded, rocketed, mortared, sniped at, blown up and away so that your leavings had to be dropped into a sagging poncho and carried to Graves Registration, that’s all she wrote. It was almost marvelous.

And at night, all of it seemed more possible. At night in Khe Sanh, waiting there, thinking about all of them (40,000, some said), thinking that they might really try it, could keep you up. If they did, when they did, it might not matter that you were in the best bunker in the DMZ, wouldn’t matter
that you were young and had plans, that you were loved, that you were a noncombatant, an observer. Because if it came, it would be in a bloodswarm of killing, and credentials would not be examined. (The only Vietnamese many of us knew was the words “Bao Chi! Bao Chi!”—Journalist! Journalist! or even “Bao Chi Fap!”—French journalist!, which was the same as crying, Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!) You came to love your life, to love and respect the mere fact of it, but often you became heedless of it in the way that somnambulists are heedless. Being “good” meant staying alive, and sometimes that was only a matter of caring enough at any given moment. No wonder everyone became a luck freak, no wonder you could wake at four in the morning some mornings and
know
that tomorrow it would finally happen, you could stop worrying about it now and just lie there, sweating in the dampest chill you ever felt.

But once it was actually going on, things were different. You were just like everyone else, you could no more blink than spit. It came back the same way every time, dreaded and welcome, balls and bowels turning over together, your senses working like strobes, free-falling all the way down to the essences and then flying out again in a rush to focus, like the first strong twinge of tripping after an infusion of psilocybin, reaching in at the point of calm and springing all the joy and all the dread ever known,
ever
known by
everyone
who
ever
lived, unutterable in its speeding brilliance, touching all the edges and then passing, as though it had all been controlled from outside, by a god or by the moon. And every time, you were so weary afterward, so empty of everything but being alive that you couldn’t recall any of it, except to know that it was like something else you had felt once before. It remained obscure for a long time, but after enough times the memory took shape and substance and finally revealed
itself one afternoon during the breaking off of a firefight. It was the feeling you’d had when you were much, much younger and undressing a girl for the first time.