Edge of Eternity (80 page)

The girls were Walli's only problem.

Tammy and Lisa were typical. They came from Dallas, Texas, on a Greyhound bus. Tammy was blond; Lisa was Hispanic; both were eighteen. They had planned just to ask for Walli's autograph and had been amazed to find his door open and him sitting on a giant cushion on the floor playing an acoustic guitar.

After their bus ride they needed a shower, they said, and he told them to go right ahead. They had showered together without closing the bathroom door, as Walli discovered in an absentminded moment, thinking about harmonies, when he went in there to pee. Was it coincidence that at that very moment Tammy was soaping Lisa's olive-skinned little breasts with her white hands?

Walli left and used the other bathroom, but it took all his strength.

The postman brought his mail, including letters forwarded from London by Mark Batchelor, Plum Nellie's manager. One was addressed
in Karolin's handwriting and had an East German stamp. Walli set it aside to read later.

It was a normal day in Haight-Ashbury. A musician friend strolled in and they started writing a song together, but it came to nothing. Dave Williams and Beep Dewar stopped by: Dave was living at her parents' house and looking for a property to buy. A dealer called Jesus dropped off a pound of marijuana and Walli hid most of it in the cabinet of a guitar amplifier. He did not mind sharing; but, if he did not ration it, all of it would be gone by nightfall.

In the evening Walli went to a diner with a few friends, taking Tammy and Lisa. Four years after leaving the Soviet bloc he still marveled at the abundance of food in America: big steaks, juicy hamburgers, piles of French fries, mountainous crisp salads, thick milk shakes, all for next to nothing, and coffee with free refills! Not that such food was expensive in East Germany—it just did not exist there at all. Butchers were always short of the best cuts of meat, and restaurants grumpily served mean portions of unappealing food. Walli had never seen a milk shake there.

Over dinner Walli learned that Lisa's father was a doctor serving the Mexican community in Dallas, and that she hoped to study medicine and follow in his footsteps. Tammy's family ran a profitable gas station, but her brothers would take it over, and she was going to art school to study fashion design with the aim of opening a clothing store. They were ordinary girls, but this was 1967 and they were taking the pill and they wanted to get laid.

It was a warm night. After eating they all went to the park. They sat down with a group of people singing gospel songs. Walli joined in, and no one recognized him in the dark. Tammy was tired after the bus journey, and she lay down with her head in his lap. He stroked her long blond hair and she went to sleep.

A little after midnight, people began to leave. Walli strolled home, not noticing until he got there that Tammy and Lisa were still with him. “Do you to have a place to spend the night?” he said.

Tammy said in her Texas accent: “We could sleep in the park.”

Walli said: “You can crash on my floor if you want.”

Lisa said: “Would you like to sleep with one of us?”

Tammy said: “Or both?”

Walli smiled. “No, I have a girlfriend, Karolin, back in Berlin.”

“Is that true?” said Lisa. “I read it in the paper, but . . .”

“It's true.”

“And you have a baby daughter?”

“She's three years old, now. Her name is Alice.”

“But no one still believes in fidelity, and all that crap, do they? Especially not in San Francisco. All you need is love, right?”

“Good night, girls.”

He went upstairs to the bedroom he normally used and got undressed. He could hear the girls moving around downstairs. It was just after one thirty when he got into bed—an early night for a musician.

This was the time of day when he liked to read and reread Karolin's letters. It soothed him to think about her, and he often fell asleep imagining that she was in his arms. He settled on his mattress, sitting upright with his back to a pillow propped against the wall, and pulled the sheet up under his chin. Then he opened the envelope.

He read:

Dear Walli—

That was strange. She normally wrote “My beloved Walli” or “My love.”

I know this letter will bring you pain and distress, and for that I am so sorry that my heart is almost breaking.

What on earth could have happened? He read on fast.

You left four years ago and there is no hope of us being together in the foreseeable future. I'm weak, and I cannot face a lifetime alone.

She was ending their affair—she was breaking up with him. It was the last thing he expected.

I have met someone, a good man who loves me.

She had a boyfriend! This was even worse. She had betrayed Walli. He began to feel angry. Lisa had been right: no one still believed in fidelity and all that crap.

Odo is the pastor of St. Gertrud's Church in Berlin-Mitte.

Walli said aloud: “A fucking clergyman!”

He will love and care for my baby.

“She calls her ‘my baby'—but Alice is my baby too!”

We are going to get married. Your parents are upset but they have not ceased to be kind to me, as they always are to everyone. Even your sister Lili tries to understand, though she finds it difficult.

I bet she does, thought Walli. Lili would hold out longest.

You made me happy for a short while, and you gave me my precious Alice, and for that I will always love you.

Walli felt hot tears on his cheeks.

I hope that in years to come you will find it in your heart to forgive me and Odo, and that one day we may meet as friends, perhaps when we are old and gray.

“In hell, maybe,” said Walli.

With love,

Karolin

The door opened and Tammy and Lisa came in.

Walli's vision was blurred with tears, but it seemed to him that they were both naked.

Lisa said: “What's the matter?”

Tammy said: “Why are you crying?”

Walli said: “Karolin broke up with me. She's going to marry the pastor.”

Tammy said: “I'm so sorry,” and Lisa said: “Poor you.”

Walli was ashamed of his tears but he could not stop them. He threw the letter down, rolled sideways, and pulled the sheet over his head.

They got into bed either side of him. He opened his eyes. Tammy, facing him, touched the tears on his face with a gentle finger. Behind him, Lisa pressed her warm body against his back.

He managed to say: “I don't want this.”

Tammy said: “You shouldn't be alone, feeling so sad. We'll just cuddle you. Close your eyes.”

He yielded, and shut his eyes. Slowly his anguish turned to numbness. His mind emptied and he drifted into a doze.

When he woke up, Tammy was kissing his mouth and Lisa was sucking his penis.

He made love to each of them in turn. Tammy was gentle and sweet; Lisa was energetic and passionate. He was grateful to them for consoling him in his grief.

But, for all that, no matter how he tried, he could not come.

T
he mine dog was getting tired.

He was a thin Vietnamese boy wearing nothing but cotton shorts. He had to be about thirteen years old, Jasper Murray guessed. The boy had been so foolish as to go into the jungle to gather nuts this morning just when a platoon of D Company—“Desperadoes”—were setting out on their mission.

His hands were tied behind his back and attached by a string, thirty yards long, to a corporal's web belt. The boy walked along the path ahead of the company. But it had been a long morning, and he was still a kid, and now his steps were faltering, causing the men to catch up with him inadvertently. When that happened, Sergeant Smithy threw a bullet at him, hitting him on the head or back, and the kid would cry out and go faster.

The jungle trails were mined and booby-trapped by the resistance, the Vietcong insurgents, usually called Charlie. The mines were all improvised: reloaded American artillery shells; old U.S. Army Bouncing Betties; dud bombs turned into real ones; even French army pressure mines left over from the fifties.

Using a Vietnamese peasant as a mine dog was not very unusual, although no one would admit it back in the States. Sometimes the slants knew which stretches of the trail had been mined. Other times they were somehow able to see warning signs invisible to the grunts. And if the mine dog failed to spot the trap he would get killed instead of them. No downside.

Jasper was disgusted, but he had seen worse things in the six months he had so far spent in Vietnam. In Jasper's opinion, men of all nations were capable of savage cruelty, especially when they were scared. He
knew that the British army had committed gruesome atrocities in Kenya: his father had been there, and now, whenever Kenya was mentioned, Dad looked pale and muttered something feeble about brutality on both sides.

However, D Company was special.

It was part of Tiger Force, the Special Forces unit of the 101st Airborne Division. Supreme commander General William Westmoreland proudly called them “my fire brigade.” Instead of regular uniforms they wore tiger-striped battle dress without insignia. They were allowed to grow beards and carry handguns openly. Their specialty was pacification.

Jasper had joined D Company a week ago. The assignment was probably a bureaucratic error: he did not particularly belong here, but Tiger Force mixed men from many different units and divisions. This was his first mission with them. In this platoon there were twenty-five men, about half black and half white.

They did not know Jasper was British. Most GIs had never met a Brit, and he had got bored with being an object of curiosity. He had changed his accent, and to them he sounded Canadian, or something. Never again did he want to explain that he did not actually know the Beatles.

Their mission today was to “cleanse” a village.

They were in Quang Ngai Province, in the northern part of South Vietnam known to the army as I Corps Tactical Zone, or just “the northern region.” Like about half of South Vietnam, it was ruled not by the regime in Saigon but by the Vietcong guerillas, who organized village government and even collected taxes.

“The Vietnamese people just don't understand the American way,” said the man walking alongside Jasper. He was Neville, a tall Texan with an ironic sense of humor. “When the Vietcong took over this region there was a lot of uncultivated land, owned by rich people in Saigon who couldn't be bothered to farm it, so Charlie gave it to the peasants. Then, when we started to win territory back, the Saigon government returned the land to the original owners. Now the peasants are mad at us, can you believe that? They don't get the concept of private property. That tells you how dumb they are.”

Corporal John Donellan, a black soldier known as Donny, overheard and said: “You're just a fucking Communist, Neville.”

“I am not—I voted for Goldwater,” Neville said mildly. “He promised to keep uppity Negroes in their place.”

The others within earshot laughed: this kind of banter was enjoyed by soldiers. It helped them deal with their fear.

Jasper, too, liked Neville's subversive sarcasm. But during their first rest stop this morning he had noticed Neville rolling a joint, and sprinkling into the marijuana some of the unrefined heroin they called brown sugar. If Neville was not a junkie, he soon would be.

Guerrilla fighters moved among the people as fish swam in the sea, according to the Chinese Communist leader Chairman Mao. General Westmoreland's strategy for defeating the Vietcong fish was to take away their sea. Three hundred thousand peasants in Quang Ngai were being rounded up and moved to sixty-eight fortified concentration camps, to leave the landscape deserted but for the Vietcong.

Except that it was not working. As Neville said: “These people! They act as if we have no right to come to their country and order them to leave their homes and their fields and go live in a prison camp. What is wrong with them?” Many peasants evaded the roundup and stayed close to their land. Others went, then escaped from the crowded, unsanitary camps and came home. Either way, they were now legitimate targets in the eyes of the army. “If there are people who are out there—and not in the camps—they're pink as far as we're concerned,” General Westmoreland said. “They're Communist sympathizers.” The lieutenant briefing the platoon had put it even more clearly. “There are no friendlies,” he had said. “Do you hear me? There are no friendlies. No one is supposed to be here. Shoot anything that moves.”

The target this morning was a village that had been evacuated and then reoccupied. Their job was to clean it out and level it.

First they had to find it. Navigation was difficult in the jungle. Landmarks were few and visibility was restricted.

And Charlie could be anywhere, maybe a yard away. The knowledge kept them all on edge. Jasper had learned to look
through
the foliage, from one layer to the next, scanning for a color, a shape, or a texture that did not fit. It was difficult to stay vigilant when you were tired,
dripping with sweat, and pestered by bugs, but men who let their guard down at the wrong moment got killed.

There were different kinds of jungle, too. Bamboo thickets and elephant grass were impassable in practice, though the army high command refused to admit it. Canopy forests were easier, for the dim light restricted the undergrowth. Rubber plantations were best: the trees in neat rows, the undergrowth kept down, usable roads. Today Jasper was in a mixed forest, with banyan, mangrove, and jackfruit trees, the green backdrop splashed with the bright colors of tropical forest flowers, orchids and arums and chrysanthemums. Hell has never looked so pretty, Jasper was thinking when the bomb went off.

He was deafened by a bang and thrown to the ground. His shock did not last long. He rolled away from the trail, stopped in the flimsy shelter of a bush, deployed his M16 rifle, and looked around.

At the head of the line of men, five bodies lay on the ground. None was moving. Jasper had seen death in combat several times since arriving in Vietnam, but he would never get used to it. A moment ago there had been five walking, talking human beings, men who had told him a joke or bought him a drink or given him a hand scrambling over a deadfall; and now there was just a mess of mangled bloody chunks of meat on the ground.

He could guess what had happened. Someone had stepped on a hidden pressure mine. Why had the mine dog not set it off? The boy must have spotted it and had the presence of mind to keep quiet and walk around it. Now he was nowhere to be seen. He had got the better of his captors in the end.

Another of the men came to the same conclusion. He was Mad Jack Baxter, a tall Midwesterner with a black beard. Screaming, “That fucking slant led us into it!” he ran forward, firing his rifle, sending rounds uselessly into the greenery, wasting ammunition. “I'll kill the motherfucker!” he screamed. Then his twenty-round magazine was empty and he stopped.

They were all angry, but others were more sensible. Sergeant Smithy was already on the radio, calling in medevac. Corporal Donny was kneeling down, optimistically looking for a pulse in one of the prone bodies. Jasper saw that a chopper could not possibly land on this
narrow trail. He jumped up and yelled to Smithy: “I'll look for a clearing!”

Smithy nodded. “McCain and Frazer, go with Murray,” he shouted.

Jasper checked that he had a couple of Willie Petes, white phosphorus grenades, then struck out from the path, followed by the other two.

He looked for signs that the terrain might be turning rocky or sandy so that the vegetation might thin out and form a clearing. He was careful to note what landmarks he could, so as not to get lost. After a couple of minutes they emerged from the jungle onto the banked edge of a rice paddy.

At the far side of the field Jasper saw three or four figures wearing the thin cotton pajamas that were the everyday clothing of peasants. Before he could count them they had spotted him and melted into the jungle.

He wondered whether they were from the target village. If so, he had inadvertently warned them of the company's approach. Well, that was too bad: saving the injured took priority.

McCain and Frazer ran around the edge of the paddy, securing the perimeter. Jasper exploded a Willie Pete. It set fire to the rice, but the shoots were green and the flames soon went out. However, a column of thick white phosphorus smoke rose into the air, signaling his location.

Jasper looked around. Charlie knew that when the Americans were preoccupied with their dead and wounded it was a good time to attack them. Jasper held his M16 in two hands and scanned the jungle, ready to drop to the ground and shoot back if they were fired on. McCain and Frazer were doing the same, he saw. In all probability none of them would get the chance to duck. A sniper in the trees would have all the time in the world to draw a bead and fire an accurate deadly shot. It was always like that in this fucking war, Jasper thought. Charlie sees us but we don't see him. He hits and runs. Next day the sniper is pulling up weeds in a rice paddy and pretending to be a simple farmer who wouldn't know one end of a Kalashnikov from the other.

While he waited he thought of home. I could be working for the
Western Mail
now, he mused; sitting in a comfortable council chamber, dozing while an alderman drones on about the dangers of inadequate street lighting, instead of sweating in a rice paddy wondering if I'll take a bullet in the next few seconds.

He thought of his family and friends. His sister, Anna, had become a big shot in the book world after discovering a brilliant Russian dissident writer who went under the pseudonym of Ivan Kuznetsov. Evie Williams, who had once had an adolescent crush on Jasper, was now a movie star living in Los Angeles. Dave and Walli were millionaire rock stars. But Jasper was a foot soldier on the losing side in a cruel, stupid war a thousand miles from nowhere.

He wondered about the antiwar movement in the States. Were they making headway? Or were people still fooled by the propaganda that protesters were all Communists and drug addicts who wanted to undermine America? There would be a presidential election next year, 1968. Would Johnson be defeated? Would the winner stop the war?

The chopper landed and Jasper led the stretcher team through the jungle to the site of the explosion. He remembered his landmarks and found the platoon without difficulty. As soon as he arrived he could see, from the attitudes of the men standing around, that all the casualties were dead. The medevac team would be taking back five body bags.

The survivors were fuming. “That slant led us right into a goddamn trap,” said Corporal Donny. “Ain't that some kind of fuckin' us around?”

“Fuckin'-A,” said Mad Jack.

As always, Neville pretended to agree while implying the contrary. “Fool kid probably thought we might kill him when we had no more use for him,” he said. “Too dumb to realize that Sergeant Smithy was planning to take him home to Philadelphia and put him through college.” No one laughed.

Jasper told Smithy about the peasants he had seen in the rice paddy. “Our village must be in that direction,” Smithy said.

The company went with the bodies back to the chopper. After it took off, Donny deployed an M2 flamethrower to napalm the rice field, burning the entire crop in a few minutes. “Good work,” said Smithy. “Now they know that if they come back they won't have anything to eat.”

Jasper said to him: “I guess the chopper will have warned the villagers. We'll probably find the place empty.” Or, Jasper thought, there could be an ambush; but he did not say that.

“Empty is okay,” said Smithy. “We'll flatten the place anyway. And intelligence says there are tunnels. We have to find those and destroy them.”

The Vietnamese had been digging tunnels since the start of their war against the French colonists in 1946. Beneath the jungle were literally hundreds of miles of passageways, ammunition dumps, dormitories, kitchens, workshops, and even hospitals. They were difficult to destroy. Water traps at regular intervals protected the inhabitants from being smoked out. Aerial bombing usually missed the target. The only way to damage them was from the inside.

But first the tunnel had to be found.

Sergeant Smithy led the platoon along a trail from the rice field into a small plantation of coconut palms. When they emerged from the palms they could see the village, about a hundred houses overlooking cultivated fields. There was no sign of life, but all the same they entered cautiously.

The place appeared deserted.

The men went from house to house yelling:
“Didi mau!”
which was Vietnamese for “Get out!” Jasper looked into a house and saw the shrine that was the center of most Vietnamese homes: a display of candles, scrolls, incense pots, and tapestries dedicated to the family's ancestors. Then Corporal Donny deployed the flamethrower. The building had walls of woven bamboo daubed with mud, and a roof of palm leaves, and the napalm quickly set the whole place blazing.