Fatal Light (7 page)

Waiting for sun. Rain coming. The top sergeant who lost six toes to frostbite and three fingers to a grenade at Cochin Reservoir in Korea said, “Go on out there, fellas, make sure there's none of our guys left out there.”

Linderman and I looked out at the hillside from the bunker porthole.

Top said, “We ain't leaving none of our guys out there.”

Linderman glanced at me and said, “Yeah, what if we go out there and end up like some of those dudes laying on the ground? You thought of that, Top? I ain't going out there for no goddam stroll.”

The Top sat down on a sandbag, sighed, said, “That's what's wrong these days. No goddam cooperation. Trying to run a war with assholes like you. I must really be too old for this shit. Times've changed too much on me.”

“Christ,” Linderman said, “here we go.”

“When I joined the army things were different,” the Top said. “Yes sir.”

“Top,” Linderman said. “You're breaking my heart. You know that?”

The Top reflected. “Probably all you guys on dope,” he said. “Can't run a war on dope.”

“Shit,” Linderman said, “give me a break.”

“So we just gonna leave our boys out there? That coulda been you out there, Linderman. Tomorrow it probably will be. So I can just write to your mother, Hey, no sweat, your boy don't care if his body turns to shit out there in no-man's-land.”

Linderman moved to the porthole, not responding, looking at the corpses on the hillside.

“We can just let the rats chew on your worthless bones,” the Top said, standing up. “So give me a fucking break, Linderman. I'll go out there myself. I'll be damned if I'll leave even one of our guys to rot in that slime.” Top turned to me. “Does Linderman give a shit? I ask you.”

Linderman was still studying the hillside and spoke without turning around, speaking gently. “Hey, Top, I guess I see how you feel. We'll get ‘em. We'll get the job done. Don't you worry ‘bout a thing.”

The old sergeant squinted into the dense air. “Really,” Linderman said. “Don't worry about it. Sit back down. We'll bring ‘em home. Every one of ‘em.”

Moonless night on a hill. Faces visible in deep shadow, dreamlight. Night sounds: isolated monkey scream in jungle distance, giant cricket, dragonfly whir.

“Jesus.” Queen sighed softly. “I'd love a cigarette.”

“Yeah,” I whispered.

We sat, silent. After a few minutes Queen whispered, “How the hell long we been up here anyway?”

“Who knows?” I said. “Who cares?”

“Who cares?” Queen laughed under his breath, said, “My momma cares, dude. Don't you know that?”

Our intelligence had reported North Vietnamese army activity in the area, moving in our direction. We were dug in, deep cover, waiting. Riflemen stationed prone on the escarpment lip, 360-degree outposting.

“Christ,” Queen said, “I don't know if I gotta shit or puke.”

“Maybe both,” I said.

“Both what?”

“Shit and puke.”

A low throaty whistle. The signal. One of the sentries had spotted something, heard something. Something moving. I laid
my cheek to the earth, smelling rank wet odor of jungle, each breath roaring, burning in my nose. NVA, I thought. With a rocket launcher they can simply blow us out of our bed. So it occurred to me.

Then I thought: Maybe not NVA. Maybe an animal. Or a lookout so nervous he imagined something. My ear to the earth and a pain in my chest spreading against the moist ground. We lay, and lay, and after a time another whistle like the first. All clear. It was past, whatever it was. Or was not. Or only a wild-eyed point man, another American teenager in the grip of a bad midnight on a hill in a jungle country.

“It's OK man,” Queen was whispering to me. I felt his hand on my arm and I kept my ear pressed to the ground, listening to the sound night makes moving inside the earth, on a low hill, in a jungle country.

Linderman said, “This is all she wrote I guess.”

“Come on.”

“Don't bullshit me,” Linderman said. “Not now. We've come too far together for you to bullshit me now.”

“Take it easy,” I said.

“I'm dead and I know it. Only a goddam matter of time.”

Linderman's chest was a matted heap of bloody meat: shotgun blast. Close-quarters ambush outside a little buffalo ville, a standoff. Linderman killed the man who shot him.

“Very weird,” Linderman said. He was breathless, as if he had run a long distance.

“What's that?”

“Well, you know, sitting here talking like this waiting to die.”

“You just might make it through this, you know.”

Linderman grinned. “Fucking liar,” he said.

I tried to grin back.

“This sucker's starting to hurt. That's strange. It's just starting to hurt.”

“Take it easy.”

“Hey, fuck you,” Linderman said. And grinned again.

I took a breath.

“You hit anywhere?”

“Don't think so,” I said. “Don't worry about it.”

Linderman grimaced, grabbed at my shirt, opened his mouth wide: blood smeared on his teeth. He choked, gagged; I pushed his head to the side as he vomited blood. He tried to speak. When he did, a whisper. “God, man. Don't let me go.”

I cradled his head.

“Strange,” Linderman whispered. “I'm young.”

“Yeah. We all are.”

“I wish I was just gone and didn't have to think about nothing,” he said.

I reached behind him, lifting his body off the ground, embracing him. He looked at me, his eyes clear and troubled, and he said, “Now I'm gonna cry. What a goddam thing.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “I've got you. I'm with you.” A call for help from a few yards away, a call for water.

“Hey,” Linderman said, “see what you can do over there. Get that man some water.”

“Howard can get him,” I said.

Linderman said, “It's OK, man. I'll be all right.”

“I'll be right back.”

“Sure.”

I lowered him to the ground; he groaned as I pulled my arms free. The man who wanted water had been hit in the legs, fragmentation spray, Howard working on him when I got there. I let the wounded man sip from my canteen. When I tried to pull away he pushed forward for more, so I left the canteen with him and moved back to Linderman.

And Linderman was dead.

An old story. A simple story. The story of a boy lost on a weekend furlough in a small town in the middle of America. I was sitting in the apartment of a woman I met in a bar, lithe woman with blond hair and tortoise-shell glasses, smoking her cigarettes and beginning to understand just what a stranger I really was. She asked questions, trying to spark conversation.
Why are you doing this?
I was drafted.
You could have gone to Canada. You can still go to Canada.
No. I cannot go to Canada. That was never an option.

Bullshit, she said quietly. Don't give me that.

I'm not giving you anything. It's not a simple situation.

Do you believe in what you're doing?

Not particularly.

Well, then?

Well then what?

Why don't you just...not go back? What're you doing out there anyway?

Training.

For war?

Most definitely.

So that's what they're doing out there.

I laughed, and said, It's no secret what they're doing out there. They've been doing it out there for years.

I guess so. It's just that nobody talks about it. And I've never met anyone in the...military.

We're your basic silent types. We don't mingle.

Oh, right. A legion of Gary Coopers?

High noon. High noon in the rice paddies.

God.

Listen...

You're different from what I would have expected. I just can't believe it's not driving you crazy.

I can't change anything. And there are...certain pressures... family, ideas I've been carrying around. I don't know. It's not simple.

You can come and see me.

Well. We'd better not get into that.

Why not?

I'll be gone in short order. Shipped out.

So?

It just doesn't seem wise. I don't know...

Doesn't it...I mean the training...I mean, how do you do it?

I just do it. I'm there, and I do it.

Doesn't it...get to you?

I'm scared to death.

 

Two doctors at my bedside. The light around them haloed, burned, shimmered. They wore olive-drab combat utilities under their white coats and one said, talking too loud, How's it going, guy? My mouth moved but I had to try a second time to speak before the words came, and I asked:
Malaria?

The doctors laughed as if I said something funny. Well, said the one that talked too loud, that's no surprise, is it?

The other one said, We're trying to keep that fever under control. You've been out of it here.

I said, I've been
remembering
...stuff from...before. This girl I met. Strange.

The doctors nodded knowingly at each other. The one who wanted to keep my fever under control was writing on my chart, and said, Malaria'll do that to you. Funny how we always think of women.

The other doctor grinned and said, Condition of war.

The two of them stood beside the bed, faces discolored in the sear of light, hallucinated, phantasmagorical. The one with my chart clapped it closed and said, We're coming right along here. We'll have you back in action in no time.

The one who talked too loud gripped my ankle through the bedsheet. You'll be fine, he said. Just give it a few more days.

I remembered my first action, Mamasan yelling huge consumptive sobs, lieutenant holding his arm screaming, Mamasan rocking. Lieutenant shouts he's bleeding. Still holding his pistol, waving it in the air. I begin dressing wounds. The widow's son: certain blindness. Both eyes riddled by shrapnel spray. Lieutenant shouting to stop. You asshole he yells, you never work on
them
. I look into the widow's face. She's staring into mine. Thump of chopper blades in the long sky. Pulled aboard by the door gunner. Then the hit. Then the dead.

At my grandfather's house my brother and I would climb into the cellar through the side trap after running hard in the alleys and train yards and along the river, creaking open the wood-slat door into a cool dark of mint and rotting apples. My brother told me a child had drowned in the river and was buried there, and I dreamed about the tiny skeleton going hard and white in packed earth in the silence under my grandfather's house. It was playing hide-and-seek through one August dusk that my brother hid in the rafters of the cellar, burlap hood over his head. When I finally pulled the side trap open it was full nightfall, a voice wavering from nowhere, muffled, in pain,
I'm buried in the ground you stand on.
I wanted to cry out, looking around to catch the glimmer of my brother's white T-shirt floating in a corner of the ceiling. The burlap hood made the T-shirt headless; the voice groaned. The ground under me leaned, my ankles oozed, cobalt sparks stung my eyes. My breath ached as sight failed and my brother was suddenly beside me, holding me up, his open farm boy voice in my ear,
Easy now, come on, it was only me,
his arms around my chest, and I woke in the hospital bed, soaked in the fever's glare, the sound of rain roaring at the windows.

Hot and wet and the night alive with insects, lowland bereavements, the taste of night on the tongue like an essence, and I lay in the middle of a vast heat, adrift in a cathedral of fever. Malaria dreams: candles flickering in a vestry as the ghosts filed past, gone but not forgotten, back to claim their visions of a time gone by, back for one more taste of the promises that failed them in life. Moving among them I presume I have died and the grainy shadows are the light of death itself. The best you can see in a dark place, a ragged edge of dreaming where blazes of glory might still ream the sodden air if you don't drown in the mud first. Or shoot yourself in the mouth out behind the latrine. Or simply go insane, running straight up paradise lane into the face of that mysterious enemy that lives in the air, riding in from nowhere, churning a wake in the dark scan of gravity's backslide, waiting for you, waiting for you.

It is that living, while it goes on, can seem like light itself, a perpetual slide of morning out of dawn's rare edge of perfect watery blue, light that leans and spills from a space in the sky between mountains and a roof of storm cloud, light escaping a doomed past to live again above our heads in passing glory. Standing in the hootch doorway, looking out at the morning rising before it begins to steam, and the girl who came to do the laundry said, “What your name?”

I turned, surprised to hear her speak. She was the typical Vietnamese child, looking ten years old but probably closer to fifteen. Not pretty, but a gentle face, a welcoming face, a wondrous smile coming easier than most. I told her my name. She offered her smile and said, “Captain?”

“No captain,” I told her. “Just a soldier.”

“My brother is soldier,” the girl said. I nodded, afraid to ask what kind of soldier, where, with what loyalties, and I turned away, ashamed to be standing in her world, one more uninvited cowboy in town to kill her brother, and his brothers, and their brothers. Cowboys yelling like a drunken Saturday night, house of cards in free fall, breaking down and turned
loose. I did not know how much the girl knew about these things. I was not going to ask.

 

Sleep ceased to be rest, was never an escape. Dreams careened, haunted, collided, and I was always forced to look: the double amputees, incinerated faces with lips burned off and teeth locked in satanic grins, bodies in decay and distended with gas, fingers and noses and ears rat-gnawed, the ones floating face down in paddies pulled out after days with tongues and eyeballs protruding from macerated skulls and their gunshot wounds looking so innocent, so simple. On the road out of a northern ville I saw a dog eating the body of a man. The man had been shot in the head, eviscerated, tossed aside. The dog pulled at a dirty loop of intestine, one paw braced against the opened belly. The passing scene on any ordinary day.