Sergeant Dickinson (6 page)

The colonel says, “Mitchell, do you want in on this too?”

Mitch pouts his lips, looks toward the dispensary. “Yeah.”

“What about you, Sergeant Dickinson? What did you see?”

“I was there when they broke open the door.”

“So you're a witness too.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Fine. Lieutenant Kennard will take your statements.”

He is turning as if to leave when we salute. He returns our salute without breaking stride.

“Last year,” Mitch says, “this woman comes in from Pleiku City, has her kid with her. The kid's dying, you can see that the first time you look at her. Doc Fischer says malaria, it's too late. The woman says if the kid dies, she'll bring the VC. The kid dies, the woman takes her and goes back to the city. Says she'll be back. The next night they machine-gunned the shit out of this place. Fifty-one calibers. Shot right through our billets into the mess hall. That's why we got a commo bunker made out of concrete now. It used to be wood.”

“I wasn't here then,” I say.

“It doesn't matter,” says Roy.

It begins that night in the bar with Spencer saying that he is going to beat the shit out of Roy. Roy begins carrying a knife in a wrist sheath. “The motherfucker's too big for me. If he gets his hands on me, he'll kill me. But I'll make him
eat his guts first.”

Dak Pek: “I have a message. Operational Immediate. One thousand groups. Are you ready to copy? Over.”

Pleiku: “Say again Group Count. Over.”

Dak Pek: “One thousand groups. Operational Immediate. Are you ready to copy? Over.”

Pleiku: “Your signal strength is two. Your readability is two. I am ready to copy. Over.”

Dak Pek: “Message follows. Break. Authentication. Sitrep.”

Pleiku: “Break-Break-Break-Break-Break-Break. QSA 1. QRK 1. All After ZUBKF. Over.”

Dak Pek: “I say again All After ZUBKF.”

It is the weather: fog at his end, rain at mine. I do not know how much of my copy is the product of my guesswork and how much I have actually snatched from the air.

Pleiku: “T-T-T-T-T-T. QSA 1. QRK 1. Send Slower. All After RSBLA.”

I try to decipher as I receive. I send him back when the message does not make sense. He grows angry and sends at top speed. His signal fades, comes in again; I hear a couple of dahs, a rush of dits.

If he does not slow it is because of fear. If he does slow it is only anger.

Dak Pek: “I say again All After…”

He has switched from the bug to a key. The characters are sharp and clear. I imagine him smashing the key with his fist in rage.

It is a probing action. The North Vietnamese commander has told local villagers three times since September that he will take the camp within the month. Twice he has probed, twice withdrawn. This, the third time, while appearing not to be an organized attack, may yet turn into one. The North Vietnamese commander, agent sources say, fears that he will be relieved of command if he does not make good on his promise to destroy the camp.

The camp is fogged in, weather has disrupted communication between it and its outposts. There can be no air support before morning, and then only if the fog lifts. But the fog has not lifted for more than a few hours at a time for nearly a month.

The camp is receiving mortar and small arms fire. Casualties so far are light…

The signal fades. I reach up to fiddle with the radio's tuning. A man jumps away. I look at him but my mind is still fixed on apprehending minute patterns of highpitched sound through static scratch. I recognize him now as one of the radio repairmen.

“Get somebody from Operations, I've got an Ops Immediate from Dak Pek.”

His face is red, it is the kind of face that gets the same shade of red from too much sun or too much whiskey. His eyes widen and his mouth stretches into a grin. He's drunk.

“Go get Captain Miller. Tell him Dak Pek is under attack. Do it, damn it.”

“You're just afraid.” His red face is laughing but there is no sound of laughter. He makes a small gesture with his
head as if to say, Don't you see it? I know you see it.

It is an Army .45 that I am supposed to see. He is holding it in his right hand and it is pointed at me. The hammer is pulled back but not all the way, so that it is on safety.

“You're afraid, aren't you?” he says.

Dak Pek is back, a strong signal. All After.., I tap out. To the red-faced drunk with the gun on safety, I shout: “Get the fuck out of here, I'm busy!”

I have startled him; he is backing away toward the door. Dak Pek is fading again.

“I'm going to kill you. You're a racist,” this small man with the border-state accent says.

“Then do it! Asshole! Son of a bitch! Do it!”

Dak Pek is gone. I am not going to get them back. It is the fog, the weather, the ionosphere. I pick up the pocketknife I use to separate the onion-skin sheets on the code pads and walk over to Red. He is saying, “He only wanted to get some pussy. He's a soldier, soldiers are entitled to a little pussy.” He pulls the hammer back.

I sweep upward with the knife, in my mind seeing how it will be in a moment when his intestines spew out onto the floor. But he sidesteps, the knife catches his forearm and goes in and slices out. The gun falls, fires when it hits the floor, the slug smashing into an Angry 87 receiver sitting against the far wall; no one ever used it.

“Get out of here before I gut you like a pig.” I wipe my knife on his sleeve. I am so cool.

He doesn't say a word. There is shock at the blood, his eyes signal confusion, but he doesn't speak. He looks at the
gun.

“Leave it.”

“Hey!” I call after him. “You get somebody from Operations in here or in about five minutes I'm going to come looking for you!”

Men spill out of the dark into the light coming through the doorway. “What the fuck's going on?”

“Dak Pek. Ops Immediate. Lost contact. Get the commander or somebody from Operations. I can't leave, I'm alone here.”

They float in the orange shadow-haze where light mixes with dark. Two detach from the others and disappear.

“This is a restricted area. Only radio operators and staff personnel allowed in here,” I say, leaving out the verb in order to sound officious.

They edge back, most of them concealed by the dark now. Supplymen, repairmen, electricians, mechanics, drivers, clerks. What they know are the lies they have been told.

Mitch's shade comes through the darkness behind the others, through the soft bronze glare, solidifies, becomes Mitch.

“Lots of blood,” he says when we are inside. “And an Army forty-five, model ‘ought-eleven A one. Who'd you kill, Dixie?”

I tell him. He is so cool; he says, “I'll take the radio, you brief Miller when he gets here.” He picks up the gun and sticks it in his belt under his shirt. He takes a wad of paper out of the trash can and hands it to me. “You better wipe up that red stuff.”

In a minute there are only dark smears on the polished
concrete floor, they could be anything. There is dried blood on my hands. If anybody asks I will tell him that I have been picking my nose, or playing with my hemorrhoids, or something.

“You'd better kill that motherfucker,” Mitch says.

“Yeah.”

“Maybe you could just scare him bad enough.”

“Yeah.”

“I've got them.” He flips on the speaker, pulls off his headset. The
beep-beep-beep
of dits and
ah-h-h ah-h-h
of dahs bounce around the interior of the bunker. I decode as Mitch receives.

Dak Pek: “Spot report follows. Received incoming mortar and small arms fire beginning twenty hundred hours. Six WIA. Zero KIA. Zero MIA. Zero American casualties. Enemy casualties unknown. Wait one.”

Pleiku: “Roger.”

Dak Pek: “Request permission to come up on voice.”

Pleiku: “Roger. Switch to lower side band. Out.”

Dak Pek: “Have you deciphered my spot report?”

Pleiku: “Roger. We've got it.”

Dak Pek: “Okay. Listen, I think they've packed it up for the night. We haven't received any fire for about forty-five minutes. I want to close down. If anything happens, I'll get on the horn. I'm really beat. Over.”

Pleiku: “Roger. Okay, close it down. Do you want any medevacs if we can get them in in the morning? Over.”

Dak Pek: “Negative. The medics say they can handle it. Listen, here's one for you. One of our WIAs is in shock. A
dud mortar round landed on his M-60, bent the barrel at right angles. We had to carry him out of the bunker. He still hasn't closed his eyes.” Dak Pek laughs. “Over.”

Pleiku: “The round was a dud? Over.”

Dak Pek, laughing again: “Roger that. I guess the poor sucker doesn't know whether to be dead or alive. Okay, I'm going to close down now. I'll send in the rest of my sitrep in the morning. Over.”

Pleiku: “Roger. Out.”

Mitch says, “Cat's got a weird sense of humor.”

“Roger that.”

We wait for Miller to show so we can tell him that there's nothing to fret about after all, that he'll have his copy of the report on his desk in the morning, go back to bed or whatever it was you were doing, go fuck your hand. But neither Miller nor anyone else from Operations or Command shows.

Mitch says, “It's almost midnight. I'll take it.”

I start for the door.

“You ought to hide that eighty-seven somewhere,” Mitch says.

I'll let it go till morning. Outside the mob has gone. Just inside the lip of shadow are two men. The stocky one is an Air Force mechanic who comes up from Holloway to drink. I can't make out the other one. “Dixie,” he says as I walk toward them. It's Greg, one of the cryptographers. “A guy's got a right to get laid.”

“You guys carrying guns? Knives?”

“We don't need them,” the fat one says.

“Yes, you do.”

I am tensed, but he does not come. I turn my back on them and continue walking toward the billets.

“Not for you, Dickinson!”

The mess hall. Minus the four poker players, and the rat nibbling popcorn, the furnishings are the same as they were on the night of the day I returned from Plei Me. All of the fluorescent lights overhead are on, illuminating the same slovenliness as before. At the table where the card players sat there now sits a single soldier writing letters, his attention entirely absorbed in this. Ten or twelve filled envelopes, stamped and addressed, are stacked to one side. Mitch, Doug, Roy, and I sit at the same table Roy and I occupied before. Mitch is in his late twenties, broader in the shoulder than I am, but slenderer. The forefinger of his right hand is askew at the second joint, the result of an accident in a Chicago steel mill before he enlisted. Mitch is the only one of the four of us who is black. Doug is tall, thin, with delicate wrists and tapering fingers. The four of us are dressed similarly in mixed tiger suit and mufti. Mitch and Roy and I share a tenseness, an unspoken anger. A tic below Doug's left eye is strong enough periodically to pull the wing of his nose to the side.

Roy, laughing: “You used my material! I was the one who was going to gut somebody!”

I offer, to general laughter, “Well, I had to say something
tough, and it was the only line I could think of.”

The laughter fades and there is an uncomfortable silence. The sitting together and the coffee—the late-night commensalism—are not bringing out the camaraderie as they should. Finally Roy says to Doug: “Was it you who won the bet on that Jarai woman who burned?”

“Yeah. Her and her kid.”

“Did you really pay for the funeral?” Mitch asks.

“Nah. I gave the money to her family. Her brothers or her uncles, I don't know who they were. Somebody pointed them out to me at the funeral, and I gave it to them.”

“That's pretty good, to do that,” I say.

“How was the funeral?” asks Mitch.

“How can a funeral be?” Roy says.

“It was pretty interesting, actually. It was all right,” Doug says.

Silence again. Doug asks: “Is it true that the Yards at Plei Me were smearing blood on themselves so they could get out on the medevacs? That's what I heard.”

“Yeah. They were doing that,” I say.

“Shit.”

“You can't blame them.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know. We had American journalists doing the same thing. Almost the same thing.”

“Shit. Jesus Christ! What died?”

Mitch: “Sorry ‘bout that. It's the coffee.”

Roy: “That's terrible. Burn a match or something.”

Mitch: “I don't smoke.”

Doug, to general laughter: “You sure as hell do.”

Mitch: “You hear about that guy—what's his name? one of the repairmen, not the one Dixie messed with—big guy, straight hair, falls over one of his eyes—Jensen, that's it, Jensen—he wants the CIB because he got shot at on his last jump.”

Doug: “It wasn't a combat jump?”

Mitch: “Hell no. It was a pay jump; when's he gonna make a combat jump? He wants the CIB because some VC sittin' in a tree sniped at him.”

Doug: “Shit.”

“He ought to go down to Nha Trang. They hand ‘em out like candy there,” I say.

“What?”

“Sure. Last time I was down there one of the Nungs told me that they take the Remington Raiders out on two-hour patrols. They leave at eleven at night and come back at one in the morning. That way they get credit for two days of patrolling. After seven of those they get their CIBs. They go outside the perimeter, sit down and smoke for awhile while the Nungs stand guard, and then they go back. They don't even miss work.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

Roy: “What's a Remington Raider?”

“A clerk-typist,” I say.

Roy: “I hadn't heard that one before.”

Doug: “You know, when I got my Combat Medic's Badge, when I got the orders, I mean, I went in to the Sone and asked what I was supposed to do about them. They had that Major Gibb in there then, he was always bitching to everybody about having to be in Viet Nam when all his classmates from the Point were in the States or Germany and they were all being promoted at the same time, he'd just made major. So he looks at my orders, says ‘Okay, you can have it,' and he opens his desk drawer and there's this shitpotful of CMBs and CIBs just lying in there, and he takes one out and throws it to me. ‘Congratulations,' he says. Fucking ‘congratulations.' I didn't expect a parade or anything but I didn't expect to have the CMB thrown in my face either. I was the only medic at Plei Mrong when we were mortared for seven days, and he throws the motherfucker at me. Then he starts bitching again about not being promoted ahead of his classmates because he's in Viet Nam and they're not.”