Sergeant Dickinson (14 page)

“Hell, I don't know. They drink.”

“There used to be a bartender here named Sam. A Vietnamese. Do you know what happened to him?”

“I don't know, man. There's a Vietnamese bartender at the Officers Club, but I don't know what his name is.”

“There's an Officer's Club here?”

“Over by their billets. How long since you've been here?”

“Close to a year.”

“Well, you're in the NCO Club, and there's an Officers Club up the street. Which are you?”

“What? Oh. I forgot I was in civvies. I'm an NCO.”

“Good for you. I'm going to have another cold one. How about you?”

“Sure.”

“Hot as a motherfucker today. Speaking of which, they'll be coming in soon.” He begins tearing open the beer cases, putting the individual cans in the cooler.

“Who?”

“The Remington Raiders. They're not allowed to drink until they get off duty. That's about a half-hour from now. You a Remington Raider?”

“No. Are you?”

“Not hardly. I was at Le Loi. Just got out of the hospital. Malaria, hepatitis, dengue fever; I had'em all, all at the same time. Look.” He holds out his hands; they are vibrating as though powered by tiny generators, you can almost hear them hum. “The whiskey drinkers love for me to pour their shots. I've probably converted more men from beer to whiskey than…I don't know what.”

“I thought you weren't supposed to drink if you're recovering
from hepatitis.”

“I'm not supposed to. Fuck ‘em. Another?”

“I haven't finished this one.”

“You just passing through or are you staying in Pleiku?”

“I don't know yet. I'll see what's around.”

“Here comes one of the vultures; excuse me, I mean journalists.”

A tall, angular, yellow-haired man in his middle or late thirties enters the bar. I know him.

“Do you have Ba Muoi Ba?”

“I guess I'm going to have to start stocking it. No, I only have American.”

“Let me have whatever is easiest to reach.”

“Christ, do you two know each other? You must have the same mother.”

“I went through the same routine with him when I came in,” I explain.

“Actually, I think we have met.”

“
New York Times.
”

“Not anymore. But I used to be. Plei Me? A year ago this autumn.”

“Right. You've lost weight.”

“So have you. Have you been in Viet Nam all this time?”

“I just got back from the States. How about you?”

“I've been here straight through, except for a couple of weeks in Hong Kong. That just made it harder to come back. How was the States?”

“It just made it harder to stay there.”

He laughs, says, “Married?”

“No. You?”

“Not anymore.”

“There used to be a government whorehouse down the road. It was pretty good.”

He laughs again. “I've been there. It is pretty good.”

“I'm Dickinson.”

“Charles Macready.”

“So you're not with the
Times
anymore?”

“No. We had what I guess you could call a falling-out. I'm a freelance now. Old-fashioned term. But I don't know what else I'd be called.”

“Do you remember that French photographer who worked for
Match
? Whatever happened to him?”

“He was killed a while back. At Dak To.”

“That's too bad. I liked him.”

“Yes. He was an honest man. I'm on my way up there myself now. To Dak To.”

“Good luck.”

“Yes. What are you doing these days?”

“I'm waiting for the Mike Force to get back from Dak To. I'm hoping to find a slot with them.”

“You don't want an A camp?”

“No. I want to be able to move around. I don't want to be penned up again.”

“I don't blame you. Breckinridge's old outfit has been reconstituted. I don't know who the commander is now.”

“I don't know anybody there now. For that matter, I know only a handful of people here. The war has gotten so
big it's become unrecognizable.”

“It's no fun anymore?”

“Fun. Well, I haven't been out in it for a while. We'll see. But I liked this country better when I could tell myself there was something exotic about it.”

“A disillusioned romantic.”

We both laugh.

The door swings open and two men come in. Before the door can close four or five more come in. They are followed by a stream of men who quickly fill the barstools and tables. They stand at the bar when the stools are taken and hunker down beside the tables where the chairs are filled. Orders for drinks are flung at the bartender. You can hear the slot machines and the men at the craps table. The jukebox comes on with a country-and-western song.

Soldier at the bar: “I hate that son of a bitch. Somebody oughta put a contract out on him.”

Soldier beside him: “Where do you think you are, New York?”

“You can do it here, too. I know guys. I mean, I was all set to go to OCS, I had my paperwork done and everything, and that motherfucker disapproves it at the last minute. That cocksucker.”

“You want a TS slip? Take it to the chaplain.”

“TS, what's that?”

“No wonder you weren't approved for OCS, you're not even an enlisted man. TS: tough shit.”

Soldier at a table on the right: “I still say Goldwater was right, we oughta turn the whole fuckin' country into a parking
lot.”

An E-5 squatting beside him: “Did Goldwater say that?”

“Yeah. I don't know. Somebody said it. Whoever said it was right.”

A soldier on the left: “I was in here last Saturday and this guy comes in, I haven't seen him before, he's in civilian clothes, and he sits down with me and tells me I look like an educated man. I figure whoa! this guy is either queer or CIA, one way or another he wants something from me, right? You know what he's doing? He's selling mutual funds. Yeah. He says the XO bought in, and he starts talking about these different programs his company has. Can you dig it? He's in Viet Nam selling mutual funds!”

Soldier at another table: “I had her in my room and I had her pants down and I was kissing her belly and this lieutenant, Jacobsen his name is, just comes right in and pulls her away from me and tells me he's gonna give me an Article Fifteen. Christ, I already had her pants down and was just getting ready to put my finger in it when he walks right in. Officers aren't even supposed to be in the Enlisted Men's billets.”

The soldier sitting across from him: “Maybe she's his gash.”

“I hope not. God, she's sweet. You know who she is? That little girl who works in the mess hall, the one who wears the white dresses all the time. The other girls call her
cô
.”

“No shit? You had her? And you let her get away from you? You asshole, why didn't you lock your door?”

Another soldier: “Viet Nam, man. Fucking and killing,
killing and fucking.”

Soldier beside him: “Yeah, but the guys doing the killing ain't the ones doing the fucking.”

“Hey! People got choices, you know? I figure any guy who's out there playing shoot-'em-up when he could be back here balling his brains out is sick, you know? I mean, he made his choice. You don't see the colonel going out to the field, do you? I just do what the colonel does. You can call it suck if you want to, but I ain't going home in no box. I'm going home on my own two legs.”

Soldier at another table: “You have to hate them. If you're going to kill them, you have to hate them.”

“I'm going outside,” I say to Charles Macready.

“Right.”

Out across the concertina wire the dry paddies are brown and shadowed. To the north the mountains are beginning to purple.

“How many Americans do you think are stationed at Pleiku now?” I ask.

“I don't know.”

“Eighteen months ago there weren't more than a few hundred. There were only forty of us in the Special Forces compound.”

“There must be that many in the Club now.”

“Yeah. Your friend from
Match
. He'd been in other wars, hadn't he?”

“Yes. He was in Algeria and in the Congo.”

“I guess he knew what he was doing.”

“Some say so. What about you? Do you know what you're
doing? I seem to recall that you once tempted a sniper for what appeared to be just the fun of it. How many times did he fire at you, nine?”

“Eleven. Yeah, I did that. I've been puzzling over it ever since. I still don't know why I did it. Maybe I was just trying to see how close to the sun I could get before my wings melted.” After a moment, I say, “After Plei Me I came back here. I thought then it was a mistake, I should have stayed in the field. I thought I would go crazy here. But I didn't. I went crazy in the States instead. That in there, in the Club, that's like being in the States. Worse, in some ways. You've heard the expression ‘feather merchants?' It refers to those who profit from war but take no risks. Profiteers. That's what they are, in there. Compiling lists, drawing up plans, deciding who was brave enough to merit a decoration and who was cowardly or just stupid. They're parasites living on other men's blood, making their careers from our deaths.”

“Like journalists.”

“Yes.”

“But we don't judge you. We just watch. We're only voyeurs.”

“That still makes us whores.”

“I suppose it does. Yes.”

“Maybe we really are whores. Maybe that's all we are. You know, if we'd had to break out at Plei Me we might have left you behind. The journalists and the clergy.”

“Seriously?”

“There was talk about doing that. You would have been deadweight on a breakout.”

“If you had left us we would literally have been dead weight.”

“Breckinridge said no, if we break out we take all Americans with us. If it had been up to me we wouldn't have considered a breakout, not if we had to desert the Yards. There were a couple of us who talked about that, about staying with the Yards to the end. Only a couple of us. Some of the French stayed, you know. Some of the GCMA, the Commando Group, stayed when the French pulled out. They wouldn't leave the Yards who had depended on them. They lasted for a couple of years, some of them, before the Viet Minh finally finished them off. But at Plei Me we would have left the Yards and taken the Americans. If push had come to shove we would have taken you with us. Breckinridge would have seen to that, although he had his own doubts, from a tactical standpoint.”

“That's pretty scary, that you considered leaving us. We trusted you. Still, if one wants to play the game, one must accept the risks.”

“Holy shit, Charles, you've gone that far! No wonder you left the
Times
.”

Charles shrugs. “I stopped filing my stories. It seemed to me that by putting it down on paper I was betraying the experience, and the people whom the stories were about. Words are only representations, after all, and perhaps not even the best by which to capture war, at least this war. I wasn't capturing it, of course, I was only distorting it. And then there was what the newspaper would do to the story. So I stopped filing, thinking that someday I would make a book
out of the ones I wasn't filing, the true ones, or at least the truer ones. Then I stopped writing.” Charles shrugs again. “I'm still accredited though, so I don't have to go home until I want to.”

“What are you going to do at Dak To, then?”

“Look around. I was really very fond of Marcel. I liked him very much. I'll look around, try to get some idea of what he saw that wouldn't let him leave. I'll try to figure out why I'm staying.”

“I wonder why we always assume that the dead know more than we know.”

“We do, don't we.”

“And that Death gives a damn.”

“Yes?”

“At Plei Me I learned that Death does not care who dies and who doesn't, as long as someone dies when He calls. There were so many dead, you see, if Death was not entirely indiscriminate He was worse—He was simply negligent. He could miss one man and hit another and still be satisfied. There were so many dead, living became only an incidental circumstance one was burdened with before dying.”

“When you baited the sniper you were trying to die?”

“No. I was trying to attract Death's attention. I was using my life to draw Him close enough to me that I could spit in His face. I was challenging His authority.”

We stand looking over the wire toward the city of Pleiku. The air is still warm but there is a quality in it now that makes the sweat cold in my armpits. I pick up a small sharp rock and toss it over the wire.

The village was a cluster of three longhouses with a fourth set back from the others. The Yards watched us as we came in and then pretended to ignore us.

“This is a bad place,” I said. “Look. There are no young men here.”

“I've been here before, Sergeant. There are no young men here not because they're with the VC, but because they're all dead.”

You could see almost immediately where they had to be firing from, a copse of scrub about thirty meters forward of the tree line. I started firing and running toward it, it seemed to take forever, I felt as though I were running in slow motion, I could almost see the bullets as they went past me. When we got there, of course, all we found were used cartridges. They were already setting up inside the tree line.

Settled back against the seat in the chopper I saw on the faces of the gunners a softness and a distance and felt coming
from them a coldness so that in flight I searched out places on the ground that I would not mind dying in so much as in other places. I did not want to die in a city, I hoped that we would not fly over many roads or bridges; a brown place on a hill would be better than a town; but I would have preferred a green place, somewhere green and not too far from water, I could have lived with dying with that, but any place but on a city's asphalt would have been all right.