Sergeant Dickinson (4 page)

I tell him, “He led a patrol out to try to rescue a downed chopper. The NVA got there first. Reilly was wounded, Terrell was killed.” The disappointment, and surprise, too, show on his face. It is my turn to feel contempt.

“What about the chopper?” the fourth player asks.

“It burned. The crew was killed on impact, or maybe the NVA killed them. Reilly said their bodies were charred, anyway. The NVA had the machine guns and turned them on the patrol.”

“Ambushed by our own machine guns. Shit!” the first player exclaims. He turns his attention back to his cards. The other players study their own cards. They resume their game.

After a while one of them says, “It isn't the first camp that
got hit.”

Another says, “Only the most recent one.”

One asks me, “You gonna be assigned here again, Dixie?”

I nod. “Yeah.”

One says, “They do that after a camp gets hit. They break up the team. I don't know why.”

“Policy,” says a man beside him.

“Yeah. Policy.”

“They broke up those teams that were involved in the FULRO revolt last year when the Yards wasted their Vietnamese officers. Sent the American officers home and spread the NCOs throughout the country.”

“Yeah. The Yards wasted the Vietnamese NCOs, too. Yards don't discriminate. Say, do you know what Larteguy said about them, the Americans who were with the Yards? He called them defectors.”

“Where'd you hear that?”

“I read it in
Le Monde
.”

“You read French?”

“Yeah.”

“Well. Maybe they are. You never know what you're gonna do until you're there.”

“Who's Larteguy?” the first player asks.

“The guy who wrote
The Centurions
,” says one without looking up from his cards.

“There's nothing worse than fire,” Roy says, then, when I
don't respond: “The helicopter. Were you here when they brought in that Yard woman that the gasoline exploded on?”

“Her underpants were made of nylon and they melted into her skin?”

“God, I'd completely forgotten about that. That was two years ago, and she was a Vietnamese. Stills carried her out of the hut, and he was soaked with gasoline himself. It was in the Delta; I'd forgotten. No, this was a different one. She was trying to light a cooking fire and the gas exploded on her. She was wearing her kid wrapped on her chest.”

“The flesh was charred all the way through,” a card player says. “The bones of her fingers and toes had melted. Everybody was sick, even the doctors.”

“They kept her and the kid on morphine until they died. They were unconscious the whole time,” says another player without looking up from his hand.

“Yeah,” the first says, “but you could still hear them crying through the morphine.”

Roy says, “We made bets on which one would die first, and how long it would take them. The kid lasted six days; mama, eight. One of the medics won the bet.” Roy starts to laugh, then doesn't. He shrugs and looks away.

“Any way you want to look at it, dead is dead,” one of the others says.

“I don't want to burn,” another says “I been shot a couple of times, picked up some shrapnel, but I don't want to burn.”

“I haven't been shot yet,” the first one says. “Picked up
some mortar frag once, but that's about it.”

“You're not missing anything.”

“Hey, Dixie, is it true that some of the troops in your camp were shooting at our aircraft?”

“Some of the pilots said so,” I say.

“Jesus, what for? Didn't they know they were ours?”

“They knew,” says another player.

“How the hell should I know? Maybe they were afraid of the noise. I was. Maybe they resented men who could just fly away from it all. I did.”

Suddenly the light in the mess hall has become too harsh, it rubs across my eyes like a gritty thumb. “I'm going back,” I tell Roy. I walk toward the door. The others pay no attention to me.

I try to remember how it was when I was wounded the first time. But the dream fragments, I cannot hold it together.

I think of the Cambodian but I cannot excite myself.

I light a cigarette.

Here, I know, I will go mad.

The rains arrived. Now the clouds were not red at sunset, but gray and ugly. In the evening they collected and billowed in slate cumulus over the mountains, gaining in mass and space until by dark they took up the entire sky, turning it the color of tarnished metal. They spread ponderously over the valley, so low-drifting it seemed you would bump against them if you stood on the balls of your feet.

It rained always in the early morning, and increasingly at night and in the afternoon. Sometimes it rained softly, coming in as a thick cold mist, but sometimes the wind caught it and hurled it, and it worked the steady racket of machine guns against the wood and tin billets. On some mornings there were ice puddles in the drainage canals.

Now the clouds became flat and dark and ceased all motion, they were not really clouds at all but an omnipresent opaque ceiling, dismal and menacing; there was no relief from the knowledge of your own mortality, and the sun, when it broke through, broke through only at the hollow places in the sky, cold and white. The sun had no brilliance but shone in a diffuse luster. It drew no colors but dusky hues of brown and orange, so that the world appeared as
through a section of oil paper held to the eye. The mountains lost their purples and blues, the valleys held no secrets, the hills were only dead hills.

But sometimes the wind blew a hole in the clouds, and through it the sun poured in such pure draughts you could almost drink it. Across the valley to the south, the mountains etched themselves sharp and brittle against the shining turmoil of the sky. The air itself was so brilliant from rain-mist and sun you were drawn into it as into a Chinese water-color; colors were clearly and evenly defined, the purple of a shaded valley ended finally and distinctly against the crest of a wooded ridge, and the buff of the sun began with the same clarity at the dead grass on that crest.

Mitch, Lambert, and I are in the Bamboo Bar, which doubles as both Officers and NCO Club. We sit at a table across the room from the jukebox which is blasting out Joan Baez's version of “Old Blue.” A wet bar takes up almost the entire rear from wall to wall. Ten stools line it, fewer than half of these are occupied. In front of the wet bar are a number of unfinished wooden tables. Each, if you tried, will seat four. One table besides ours is occupied. It is nearer the wet bar, and two men playing chess, a can of beer at each of their right elbows, are seated at it. Occasionally one or the other drinks from his beer. Against the left wall is the jukebox. Next to it are two slot machines, neither at present employed. The Joan Baez song goes off; nobody gets up to play another. Finally Sam, the Vietnamese bartender, comes around the bar and
puts in a coin. Joan Baez sings “Old Blue.”

Lambert says, “Beautiful day. I could use more like this.”

“Perfect day for an airstrike,” Mitch agrees.

Lambert nods, takes a swig of his beer. His eyes roll, then settle on me: “Just got back off a recon in the la Drang.”

“I was at Khe Sanh last year when the VC almost overran it,” Mitch says. “You two can have your Plei Mes and la Drangs. I'm going to sit here and get fat.” He puffs out his stomach to show how fat he is getting. He laughs.

Lambert: “We took a prisoner. A supply officer. A major.”

“American operation?” I ask.

“Americans ran it. Two Americans, two Vietnamese, two Yards. Patrol was too big, they ought to cut those down to four men. But I guess politics won't let them. So we took this prisoner. This major.”

“Yes.”

“Guy sang like a parakeet. That the kind of bird that sings? Parakeet?”

“Canary. Canaries sing,” Mitch says.

“Canary. Yeah. Those yellow ones. Guy sang like a canary. I forgot why I started talking about this. I know I had something in my mind, feeble as it is. Anyway, the guy told us everything. Unit locations, arms caches, food stores, hospital location. Everything. We couldn't have asked for a better canary. Cav commander gave us credit for saving sixteen hundred American lives.”

Mitch says, “You were lucky you got a supply officer.”

“Yeah. Fucker died. After twelve hours. Fuckin' Vietnamese got carried away. The other American, this young E-five,
gets upset, wants to take him back with us, this is before the guy is dead but he's already pretty near dead, the fuckin' Vietnamese still workin' on him. This E-five wants to take him back with us. Jesus. How? We're walkin' out. We gonna carry him? The guy's got to die, we can't leave him alive or we'll never get our own asses out. Okay, this young buck sergeant says, then let's kill him now, put him out of his misery. Listen, I says, you interfere with those guys and they're liable to kill you too. I mean, they're having
fun
! They're
laughing
! Jesus. Fuckin' Ia Drang. Fuckin' Vietnamese. You can have it, man. I'm goin' home. Six more days. Gonna forget this shit.”

Mitch: “I was on a convoy once, through the Mang Yang, and we came on this Vietnamese column that had been ambushed, dead and wounded lying all over the road. We had oranges with us, so we gave out oranges to the Arvins. It was all we could do. That, and our medic started doing what he could. One of the Arvins had half his jaw shot away, and both balls. It was just jelly there.”

I start to laugh. I am thinking how at Plei Me one of the officers, a lieutenant, got groin-shot, his left nut was hanging by the threads, and while he's lying there a medic crawls up to him, picks up the nut, dusts it off with a brush like a shaving brush he carries in his kit, places the ball back in the scrotum, clamps it shut, and says to the lieutenant, “That's all right, sir, it'll be as good as new.” But I do not tell this now to Mitch and Lambert, and I am laughing and they are looking at me and starting to laugh too, and Mitch goes on with his story.

“So these other two Arvins who are standing around take their oranges and put them between the guy's legs. And they're laughing. And shit if the guy lying there doesn't start laughing. He's got half his face blown away and he's going ‘uh-uh-uh' and pointing to those goddamn oranges, and laughing.”

And now Mitch and Lambert are wearing that wide toothy lip-curled-back grin that you do when you mean just the opposite but can't say it. And I feel the grin on my face too. And on Lambert's face the vertical misery lines are not broken in the least. And finally we stop grinning and Lambert shakes his head and says “Jesus,” and then there is no talk for a while. Finally Mitch says to Lambert: “This your first tour?”

Lambert laughs: “My third, man. One in Laos, two here. I know, I know. I'll be back. But I'm not gonna think about that now. Six more days.”

First chess player, putting his beer down on the table: “We'll all be back.”

Second chess player: “I killed my first man yesterday. Blew him away with a shotgun. He was coming out of his hooch.”

Mitch: “All in a day's work, m' man.”

Second chess player: “What do you mean?”

Mitch: “Nothing.”

Second chess player: “I guess I'm not callous about it yet.”

Lambert: “Get this, man. I met this guy at Holloway—that young buck sergeant, he got dinged on the way out, maybe it was the Arvins that hit him, maybe it was the NVA,
I dropped him at the Eighth Field at Holloway—so I met this guy, he's the lone survivor of a Cav platoon that got ambushed, he hid under their bodies while the NVA made sure. You should have seen this guy's eyes, man, like there was no back to them, there was nothing behind ‘em, they just didn't end.”

Mitch: “Did they change color?”

Lambert: “What?”

Mitch: “Did they change color. Sometimes people's eyes change color.”

Lambert: “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Second chess player: “He don't know.”

Mitch: “Everybody's crazy in this war.”

First guy at the bar: “Amen to that.”

Lambert: “It ain't craziness, man. It's reality. Like he sees something that nobody else sees. But it's real.”

Second chess player: “I can dig that.”

Mitch: “If nobody else sees it, it ain't real.”

Lambert: “That's a very limited view, man.”

Mitch: “I'm a very limited cat.”

Second chess player “He's just lookin' for somethin'. You lookin' for somethin', man?”

Mitch: “No. You got somethin'?”

Second chess player: “Yeah, I do.”

Lambert: “Cool it, man. I got six days left, let me talk. Christ, I don't know why I'm runnin' off at the mouth like this. There's this guy at the Eighth Field got shot through both hands. He's wandering around in the jungle looking for friendlies. He comes up on this NVA, and the NVA levels on
him. The American holds up his hands to show he's wounded, and instead of shooting him the NVA points him in the direction of a Cav aid station. Okay, next day the kid's at the aid station and it's overrun. There's a Chinese officer with the NVA—the kid swears the guy was Chinese, on account of his size—and he's going from one guy to the next, shooting them in the head, the
coup de grace
, you know? The doctors and medics have already
di di mau
'd, right? So this Chinese gets to this kid and the kid holds up his hands in front of his face, protecting himself with his bulletproof bandages, right? And the Chinese passes him by, shoots the man next to him. Weird shit. When I saw him this kid was out of his skull. He was the only one left alive out of everyone who was at that aid station. Fuckin' Ia Drang.”

First guy at the bar: “The Cav, man. They've lost a battalion and a half in a week and a half. Some shit.”