Soldier Doll (13 page)

Chapter 9

Da Nang, Vietnam

1970

“Here you go, Boots.” Mike Stepanek tossed the last cardboard box to the man on his left and sat down next to him, wedging his own box open with his penknife.

“Damn it!” Boots peered inside his C-Ration can and gagged exaggeratedly, turning toward Mike. “Ham and lima beans again! Third day in a row. God hates me, College.” He spat at the ground, accidentally hitting one of his oversized boots. The others watched as the saliva trickled down its side, disappearing in the bottomless mud beneath his enormous feet.

“You knew that already, Boots,” piped up Red. He stuck a fork in his own can of spaghetti. “Otherwise He wouldn't have sent you here. He would have given you a rich daddy or the brains to go to college.” He stole a glance at Mike and blushed, his skin blending with his ginger hair. “Sorry, College.”

“No problem,” said Mike automatically. He was used to it. The other guys in the platoon couldn't understand why he hadn't applied for a deferral. To be fair, his college friends back in Boston never got it either.

“It's not a fair war, Stepanek.” That had been Scott's refrain. He must have repeated it a thousand times, like a responsive reading in church that goes on and on. No matter what Mike said, Scott had only that one answer. “Two weeks ago you're protesting front and center. Now you're going off to war? For what? It's just not
fair,
man.”

Karen, too, had begged him not to go when his number came up. “There are options,” she'd pleaded. “You could go to Canada. You're being foolish, Mike.”

Karen. Mike closed his eyes and tried to picture her, but after months in the jungle her face was fading, somehow, as if he were looking at it through the shallow water that pooled in the rice paddies. Her hair, he could remember that. Long and dark and shiny, the color of coffee when you've added just a bit of cream. It always smelled good: clean and fresh, like Johnson's baby shampoo. Subconsciously, he reached for his own hair. Like the rest of him, it was filthy, caked with a permanent layer of either mud or dust, depending on the season. The filth had been difficult to get used to. When he'd first arrived in the bush, he'd been overwhelmed by the smell, both of the latrines and his comrades.

Now, however, the smell barely registered. A sort of mishmash of feces and unwashed bodies and cigarette smoke was now nothing more than the olfactory equivalent of white noise. No one noticed it, and thus it went unmentioned.

Six months since he'd landed in Da Nang, Vietnam. Not that long, really, but somehow, like Karen's face, life before was becoming more and more difficult to remember. “The World” the troops called it, referring to the States and home. Mike had found that strange when he'd arrived. Wasn't 'Nam part of the world? But after a trek or two into the jungle, he'd understood. The territory was so strange, so foreign to kids from New York or Kentucky or California that it might as well have been an entirely separate planet: the elephant grass that grew taller than a man and was twice as hard to knock down; the tree canopies that grew so dense that day felt like night and night like death; the heat that felt as if you were being roasted on a stick like a marshmallow at a campfire. You couldn't understand 'Nam until you'd lived it, not if you were a regular kid from Boston or Philly or wherever. And yet somehow, he'd done well here. He often said that he'd been made squad leader only because he'd been lucky enough not to get himself killed in his first five months of service, but he knew that wasn't entirely true. The men looked up to him, trusted him. They listened to what he had to say.

“You're leadership material, Stepanek.” Lieutenant Baker was constantly after him to go to officer's school. “You'd do well at Quantico,” he'd said again a night or two ago, referring to the officer training school back in Virginia. He'd taken a long drag on his cigarette and offered it to Mike. “You've got the brains, and you're a good squad leader, College.”

“Thanks, sir,” Mike had replied politely, taking the cigarette. He had no intention of becoming a lifer. As soon as his tour of duty was over, he was going home. Back to Boston College, back to his guitar, back to the World. He'd reached into his pocket and felt for the tiny soldier. Still there. He'd touched its head and felt that familiar sensation wash over him: comfort. It had been passed on to him by his mother; it was the only remnant of her childhood at a Prague orphanage. Her good-luck charm; she'd kept it close during her escape from Czechoslovakia, where it had been a gift from the nuns. The little soldier was the only token Mike had brought with him to Vietnam. He was careful never to let the guys see it. What would they think of him, carrying around a stupid doll?

Boots was still complaining. “Three days, man. Three days! And I thought this was cherry, and it's grape. Which one of you jerks screwed me on the Kool-Aid?” He waved his canteen wildly, glowering.

“Shut up, will you!” Miles looked up from his can of peaches. His real name was Charles, but his surname was Davis and he was black; so they'd immediately christened him Miles—after the famous jazz musician Miles Davis—when he'd arrived four months ago. “All day long, you complaining. Here.” He tossed his own canteen at Boots. “Choo-choo cherry. All yours, man.”

“Thanks, man. I owe you one.” Boots threw his canteen at Miles, who caught it without looking up, deep in concentration over his peaches.

The five of them were heading out again tonight. They were lucky to have had any reprieve at all—platoons were known to spend weeks in the jungle now—but even during the two days back at camp, they had quickly become comfortable with the relative luxury of proper sleeping hooches and the occasional hot meal. No one was looking forward to moving out.

“The birds'll be in around nineteen hundred hours,” Sarge had informed the troops earlier that day, referring to the helicopters that would drop them off in the wilds of the jungle. They'd known already—Fries, the radio operator, had given them the heads-up the night before—but hearing the details from Sarge forced the men to swallow the reality like the anti-malarial tablets that yellowed their skin and gave them chronic diarrhea. “More instructions to follow. Any questions?”

Red had waved his hand.

“Red?”

“Yeah. What's the point of this damn war again, sir?”

Boots snorted. Sarge frowned. “Shut up, Red, or you're taking point.”

“Yes, sir. No thank you, sir.” Red's emphasis on the word
sir
bled with heavy sarcasm.

Sarge had shot him a warning glance, and they'd all dispersed.

“Fries, you know where we headed tonight?” Miles had finished his peaches. He was smoking now.

“Just the bush, dude.” Fries—whose real name was David McDonald—shrugged. “Zippo mission, maybe. Search and destroy. Find 'em, kill 'em, run like hell.”

“Another snafu in the making, then,” said Red in a bitter voice.

Mike spoke up. As the squad leader, he was saddled with the responsibility of keeping the men in reasonably good spirits and from killing each other. It was difficult when he didn't feel all that gung-ho about a night in the jungle himself. “Take it easy, Red. No one is happy about it.”

Red shook his head, disgusted. “It's this war, man. It's just useless. My old man, he was in France back in '44. They used to
do
stuff, you know? They used to take towns. Hills. We keep walking and walking, and we don't do nothing.”

Mike sighed. They'd all heard the speech a hundred times, maybe more. Red was political: an angry, brooding sort of guy. On the back of his flak jacket, he'd sketched a peace sign underneath which he'd scratched the words
Ship my body to Nixon
. He also liked to quote Tolstoy.

Fries rolled his eyes. “You gonna start with the
Peace and War
again?”

Miles shot him a look. “It's
War and Peace
, man. Come on. Everyone knows
War and Peace
. Even you ain't that stupid.”

Boots grinned. “He might be. He volunteered.”

Ignoring them, Red continued. “You kill one Viet Cong soldier, maybe two, and they call in ten confirmed and the mission's a success. It's messed up, I tell you.”

Fries shrugged. “We here to kill some commies. That's all I know.”

“Commies.” Boots laughed. “Communists, my foot. As if you can tell everybody apart. I wonder how many of the guys we killed were probably on our side? It's a snafu all right, College.”

“Boots, man, shut it. You short. You going home, man. What the hell you always complaining about?” Miles again. He and Boots were tight, but neither Boots, a white southerner, nor Miles, from Chicago's south side, liked to admit their bond. Racial politics ran deep in the corps, even out in the bush.

“How long now, Boots?” asked Fries.

“Ninety-six days and one wake up, dude. Back to the World, back to Becky.”

“I thought she was with another guy now.”

“Shut up, Red. That'll all fix itself when I get out of this living hell.”

Mike thought of Karen and felt awash with sympathy for Boots. He wondered if Karen was seeing someone else. Probably. She was a real catch, Karen. She'd have moved on. She never responded to his letters, anyway, other than to send newspaper clippings deriding the war.

“Screw her, Boots.” Mike tossed some crackers at him. “Here. I got spaghetti; I don't need 'em.”

“Thanks, College.” Boots gave him a grateful smile.

Mike nodded. “No problem.” He settled with his back against a tree and tried again to remember what color Karen's eyes were and found he couldn't.

. . .

It had been less than a year ago that they'd started the draft.

“Man, French!” Muttering to himself in frustration, Mike tossed his textbook aside with a groan and flopped back on his bed. Closing his eyes, he tried to remember what his professor had said about conjugating verbs, but couldn't. With a sigh, he leaned over toward his bedside table and flipped on his radio. Music blared loudly—the Rolling Stones. Mike hastily turned down the volume. He was a huge Stones fan, of course, but if his mom heard the music, she'd flip. She insisted he study in silence for two hours every day. He had tried to reason with her—“Ma, I'm a music major, the book-learning stuff isn't that important”—but he had been cut off with a look that would have caused a Rottweiler to pause in its tracks.

“Music,” his mother sniffed. “You call what you do music? Mozart; that's music. Your music is more like noise. You will study your English and your math, Michael, because you are going to be a high school teacher!” And this was, of course, followed up with the usual “as long as you live under our roof” speech. He got that one so often, he knew it by heart.

Mike rolled his eyes just thinking about it. His mother had no understanding or appreciation of rock and roll. She wouldn't even listen to music if it had lyrics. His father was the same way. They would have never let him major in music if it had been up to them. Luckily, Boston College had come through with a full-tuition musical scholarship. His parents had then latched onto the idea that with a music degree he could teach and that, naturally, he would be a high school teacher. They were happy with this—teaching was a noble profession, in their opinion. His father, who had left Czechoslovakia shortly after the war, had never had the opportunity to attend college. He worked at a small grocery near the Common and swelled with pride at the idea of his son as a teacher.

“A teacher is a professional,” he would say, patting Mike on the back. “It's a good, steady living. And important. Worthy of great respect.”

And Mike would bite his lip in frustration, because he had no intention of ever setting foot in a classroom. Well, not as a teacher, anyway. It was a respectable job, fine, but it wasn't what he wanted to do. In fact, the thought filled him with dread. He could remember all too well how he and his friends had treated their high-school teachers: he recalled Miss Webb, who had fled the room in tears after Eddie O'Hara had put a scantily clad Miss November inside her history textbook, and Mrs. Andrew, who'd fainted in terror at the cockroaches Billy Gallagher had slipped into her lunchbox. But what could he say, really? He didn't want to hurt his parents, and he couldn't afford to move out and live on campus.

It seemed like everyone at BC had money but him. His family wasn't poor, not exactly, but they weren't rich, either. Certainly there was no money to spare for Mike to move only a few city blocks away. He sighed. Too bad it hadn't been a scholarship to a California school. Then he would have had no choice but to leave.

Mike grabbed a pillow and covered his face with it. It was depressing, really, living with your parents at eighteen. Besides the rules, there were other issues. Girls, for instance. The girls at college weren't like the girls he'd grown up with. What would he do—ask one back to watch TV at his parents' house and eat cabbage rolls? Just thinking about it made him cringe. Rolling over, he looked longingly at his guitar leaning against the bookcase. He was only allowed to practice once the two hours he was supposedly devoting to French were up.

“Michael?” His mother's voice called from downstairs. Panicked, Mike reached over and shut the radio off. How could she have heard it on such a low volume? The woman must have supersonic hearing! As a kid, he had believed it when she said she had eyes in the back of her head. For years, he hadn't wanted to touch her hair, convinced he'd find a watchful pair of eyeballs underneath, green and knowing.

“Michael.” It was his mother again, this time just outside the door. She rapped on it lightly. Mike sat up hastily and pretended to be busy reading his French text. “Come in, Ma.” He gave her a bright smile. “Just practicing my French.”