Koko (51 page)

Did Lieutenant Beevers know this? You bet your ass the lieutenant knew it.

The woman was running down the hillside as they came out of the trees. The water splashed
out of the pails at the ends of her yoke each time her feet hit the ground, but she
had made a computation—the pails would still be better than half full when she got
to the village. Poole did not know why she was running. Running was a serious error.

“Waste her before she gets to the village,” Beevers said.

“Lieutenant—” Poole said.

“Waste her,” Beevers said.

Spitalny was already aiming, and Poole saw him smile against the stock of his rifle.
Behind them, just coming out of the trees, a few men watched it happen: the woman
racing downhill, Spitalny with his weapon to his shoulder.

“Don’t lead her much, Spit,” someone said. It was a joke. Spitalny was a joke.

He fired, and the girl lifted up and skimmed along for a yard or two before collapsing
and rolling down the hill.

When Poole walked past the girl’s body he remembered the card called “Nine Rule,”
which he had been given along with another called “The Enemy in Your Hands” when he
had been processed into his unit. “Nine Rule” said of the VC:
You can defeat them at every turn by the strength, understanding, and generosity you
display with the people.

The third of the nine rules was:
Treat women with politeness and respect.

And the fourth was:
Make personal friends among the soldiers and the common people.

Oh, it got funnier and funnier. Rule five was:
Always give the Vietnamese the right of way.

Down in that village, he thought, they were going to make some personal friends. Dengler
stumbled along, making a visible effort to look as if he were not exhausted and in
pain. Peters had given him a shot, “a cool one,” he said, enough to keep him moving
since he refused to be left behind. The sniper was still back in the jungle behind
them, and the platoon was strung out, checking both directions, ready to blast at
anything they saw move back in the jungle.

“Peters, are you sure that Dengler is gonna make this?” Poole asked.

“M.O. Dengler could walk from here to Hanoi,” Peters said.

“But could he walk
back
?” Poole asked.

“I’m okay,” Dengler said. “Let’s check out this village. Let’s grab those maps. Let’s
raid that rice. Let’s orient those armaments. Let’s put the whole damn place in an
evidential killing box.”

Beevers’ platoon had successfully taken part in a killing box the week before, when
one of the Tin Man’s reports of North Vietnamese troop movements had turned out to
be accurate. A company-sized detachment was reported to be moving down a trail called
Striker Tiger, and the captain sent out platoons Alpha and Bravo to position themselves
on Striker Tiger in advance of the detachment to eliminate it. They had arranged themselves
above Striker Tiger, which was a trail about a yard wide through thick wooded jungle,
so that all in all they had a mostly unobstructed view of maybe thirty feet of the
trail. They held their weapons sighted down on the open stretch of Striker Tiger and
waited.

For once, a prearranged concept worked the way it was supposed to. One lone NVR soldier,
a lean, worn-looking man who appeared to be in his early thirties, strolled into the
killing box. Poole nearly fell out of the tree. The NVR simply kept mooching along.
Behind him, loosely bunched, followed what looked to Poole like fifty or sixty men.
They too were not boy soldiers—they were real ones. They made about as much noise
as a pack of grazing deer. Poole wanted very much to kill them all. For an instant,
every soldier on the road was visible to Poole. A bird yammered above them in a harsh
feminine voice, and the lead man looked upward with an expression for a moment almost
wistful. Then everybody in the trees and up above the trail on the slope began firing
at once, and the air was obliterated, rent to shreds, destroyed, and the men on Striker
Tiger flopped and jittered and spun and shuddered. Then there was a total silence.
The trail glistened with a bright, brilliant red.

When they had counted the bodies, they learned that they had killed thirty-two men.
By counting separate arms, legs, heads, and weapons, they were able to report a total
body count of one hundred and five.

Lieutenant Harry Beevers loved the killing box.

“What that boy say?” asked Spanky Burrage.

Beevers looked at Dengler as if he expected mockery.
Evidential
, he would have thought, was more his vocabulary than any grunt’s. Beevers was tensed
up, and Poole saw how close to
the edge he was already. Poole saw only trouble in the new Beevers. Triumph had made
him lose his grip—a few days ago he had said something about his days at Harvard,
a college Poole was certain Beevers had never seen, much less attended.

For a second Poole looked out across the plain on the other side of the village. Two
oxen that had bolted when Spitalny shot the water bearer were cropping at the grass,
their noses buried deep in wet, electrified green. Nothing moved. In the village before
them everything was as still as a photograph. Poole hoped that the people who lived
in the scatter of hootches had heard that the round-eyes were coming and fled, leaving
behind trophies of bags of rice and maybe an underground hole full of grenades and
ammunition clips.

Elvis didn’t have a village, Poole thought: Elvis lived in the jungle like a monkey,
and he ate rats and bugs. Elvis wasn’t really human anymore. He could see in the dark
and he levitated in his sleep.

Underhill faded off to the right side of the village with half the men, while Poole
took the other half off to the left.

The only noise was that made by their feet moving through the vibrant grass. A strap
creaked, something rattled in a pot; that was all. Manly was breathing hard: Poole
thought he could just about hear Manly sweat. The men began spacing themselves out.
Spitalny began shadowing after Dengler and Conor as they faded toward the quiet hootches.

A chicken went
buk-buk-buk
, and a sow grunted in a pen.

A wooden stick popped in the fire, and Poole heard sparks and ash hissing down. Make
them be gone, he thought. Make them all be in An Lat, two or three klicks through
the forest.

Off to his right, someone’s hand slapped the plastic stock of an M-16, and the sow,
not yet alarmed, grunted a question.

Poole came up alongside a hootch and had a clear sightline across the center of the
hamlet to Tim Underhill, who was moving silently alongside another hootch. Off to
Poole’s left, twenty or thirty yards beyond the perimeter of the village, the sparsely
wooded forest, a hanger from the wooded slope, took over again, and for a second Poole
had the ghastly fantasy that a hundred North Vietnamese soldiers crouched among the
trees, aiming their weapons at them. He shot a panicky look into the woods and saw
no soldiers, only a tall half-concealed mound. It caught his eye for a moment, looking
almost manmade, of painted concrete and plaster, like a hill at Disneyland.

But it was too ugly for Disneyland, not picturesquely ugly like a haunted castle or
a romantic crag, but naturally ugly, like a wart or a skin eruption.

Across the clearing Tim Underhill held his back against the hootch and looked at him;
between them a big black pot sat on a communal fire. A column of smoke wisped up into
the air. Two hootches down from Underhill, Lieutenant Beevers silently worked his
mouth in a question or command. Poole nodded at Underhill, who immediately shouted
“Come out!”
in Vietnamese.

“Out!”

No one moved, but Poole heard whispers in the hootch beside him, and the other whispers
of bare feet on the hootch’s wooden floor.

Underhill fired a round into the air.

“Now!”

Poole trotted around to the front of the hootch, and nearly knocked down an old woman
with sparse white hair and a toothless smile who was just emerging from the opening.
An old man with a sunken sun-dried face hobbled after her. Poole jabbed his rifle
toward the low fire in the center of the village. From the other hootches came people
with their hands in the air, most of them women in their fifties and sixties. “Hello,
GI,” said an old man scuttling beside his old woman, and bowed with his hands still
in the air.

Spitalny yelled at the man, and clouted him in the hip with the butt of his rifle.

“Stop!”
Underhill yelled. Then, in Vietnamese,
“Drop to your knees!”
and all the old people went down on their knees in the trampled grass around the
cooking fire.

Beevers went up to the pot, peered inside, and with his boot gave it a push that sent
it rolling off the fire.

The sow began to squeal, and Beevers whirled around and shot it in its pen. An old
woman yelled at him. “Poole, get your men to check out these hootches! I want everybody
out of here!”

“They say there are children, Lieutenant,” Underhill said.

Beevers spotted something in the ashes where the big pot had been, and he darted forward
and thrust his hand almost into the fire, jabbing at whatever he had seen, and finally
pulled out a charred piece of paper that looked as if it had been torn from a notebook.
“Ask them what this is!” Instead of waiting for a response, he danced up to one of
the old men who had been watching him and said, “What’s this? What’s this writing
here?”

“No bik
,” said the old man.

“Is this a list?” Beevers shouted. “This looks like a list!”

“No bik.”

Poole also thought it looked like a list. He signaled Dengler, Blevins, Burrage, and
Pumo into the hootches nearest them.

A wave of noisy protest came up from the old people kneeling near the guttering fire
and the toppled pot.

Poole heard a child begin to scream in one of the other hootches, and jumped into
the one the old couple had left. The interior was murky, and he gritted his teeth
with tension.

“He says it’s a list of names,” he heard Underhill explain to the lieutenant.

Poole stepped into the center of the hootch. He tested the floor for a trap door,
jabbed the mats with the barrel of his rifle, and stepped outside to go on to the
next hootch.

“Ask them about the sniper!” Beevers was shouting. “Let’s get it out of them.” He
saw Poole. “Get everything!” he shouted.

“Yes, sir,” Poole said.

Pumo was hauling a screaming child of five or six toward the center of the village,
and an old woman leaped up and took the little boy from him. Dengler stood slumped
in the sun, listlessly watching.

A feeling of utter waste and emptiness went through Michael Poole, and he turned to
enter the hootch on his left. He heard crying from the meadow side of the village
and saw Beevers send Spitalny and Spanky Burrage in that direction with an impatient
gesture. He stepped into the hootch, and something moved in the gloom at its far end.
A furtive shape came toward him.

There was a burst of machine-gun fire from outside the village, and Poole instinctively
fired on the figure advancing toward him, knowing that it was too late. He was already
dead.

Loud terrible moans came from just outside the hootch’s entrance. Miraculously not
dead but knowing that the hootch was seconds from blowing up along with the grenade
in the enemy’s hand, Poole threw himself outside and saw Thomas Rowley on the ground,
most of his stomach blown away and his purple and silver guts looped all over the
grass. Rowley’s face was very white and his mouth was opening and closing. No sounds
came out. Poole crawled over the ground. People were firing everywhere. At first
Poole thought that all the old people had been killed, but as he crawled away from
the hootch he saw that they were huddling together, trying to stay under the fire.

The hootch behind him did not blow up.

Beevers ordered Dengler to check out the woods to the left of the village. Dengler
began to trot toward the narrow trees. Another burst of fire came from the woods,
and Dengler flopped into the grass and signaled that he was unhurt. He began firing
into the woods.

“Elvis!” Beevers yelled, but Poole knew this was nonsense because Elvis did not use
a machine gun. Then Beevers saw Poole and yelled, “Air support! Heavy contact!” He
turned to the other soldiers and yelled, “Get them all out of the hootches! This is
it! This is it!”

After a time there was no more firing. Rowley lay dead before the hootch where Poole
had killed the VC. Poole wondered what Beevers had meant by “This is it,” and stood
up to see what was going on. He caught Pumo’s eye as Pumo came out of another hootch.
Pumo looked like a man who simply did not know what to do, and Poole could not tell
him because he did not know either.

The Vietnamese were crying, screaming, shouting.

“Heavy contact!” Beevers was still yelling, and Poole called it in.

“Burn the village!” Beevers yelled at Underhill, and Underhill shrugged.

Spitalny shot a blast of flame into a ditch and burst out laughing when the ditch
began to shriek.

Beevers yelled something and ran over to see what was in the ditch. All around Poole
men were running between the hootches, setting them on fire. It was hell now, Poole
thought. Beevers was reaching down into the ditch. He pulled out a naked pink girl.
They hid the children, Poole thought, that’s why it was so quiet, they heard us coming
and sent the children into hiding. All around Poole, rising up like the screeches
and yells of protest from the old people, were the fireplace smells of burning wood
and the choking smells of burning grass and the flat dead odor of burned earth. Poole
could hear fire snapping at the dry hootches. Beevers held up the pink squirming girl
like a fisherman holding up a particularly good catch. He was screaming something,
but Poole could not hear the words. Beevers began to move toward the village, now
holding the girl out in front of him with both hands. Her skin was beginning to shrivel.
When Beevers came to a tree with a vast fleshy head and a winding mazy trunk made
of many
trunks combined, he swung the girl by her heels and struck her head against the tree.