The Grand Tour (4 page)

He kicked the tower over. Then he went around the room kicking over the other stacks, and then he kicked the books lying on the floor. He moved to the corner where his laptop was propped on a milk crate, a sock wilted over it. For the last three months, he'd sat in front of it every day, writing his manuscript in a fever dream of possibility. As the page count magically increased, he'd indulged himself in a mounting excitement at the act of creation. And it wasn't just the creation of a narrative—eighty, one hundred fifty, finally two hundred implausible pages—somehow it had seemed like he was creating himself. Now, having seen the pages askew in Richard's wastebasket, the whole thing seemed delusional, the fantasy of a madman or an idiot. He retrieved the file as a coroner might pull out a corpse in its morgue drawer:
Vancenovel/draft18.docx
. He deleted it.

Sweeping some envelopes and clothes off the bed, he lay down in the impression he'd made in the mattress from sleeping in the same spot for so long. At least he'd made an impression somewhere. A book lurked under the knot of blankets at his feet, and he pulled out a bent copy of
Without Leave.
On the cover, a young Richard in his army greens stared back at him, handsome and defiant and stupid, and completely unaware of what would happen to him or who he'd become.

I'd spent most of the flight to Vietnam trying to ignore my neighbor, whose information, ironically, I can still remember today: Lance Corporal Matthew Singleton, from Youngstown, Ohio. Lance Corporal Matthew Singleton from Youngstown, Ohio, had spent what felt like the entire flight, including taxiing on the tarmac in San Francisco, talking about girls he knew back home in intimate and aggressive and slightly nauseating detail—what their cooters, his word, smelled like; what positions they liked best; which ones gave the best head; and so on and so forth. For a while, his monologue had provided a welcome distraction from the flight—the turbulent juddering of the plane and my heart—but it eventually got old. My only defense was craning my head away from him to look out the window. For hours, there had been nothing, just a frayed carpet of clouds on top of the Pacific's hard floor. Now, our Boeing 707 listed leftward in a slow, corkscrew approach over Cam Ranh Bay and the surrounding jungle. The trees and other vegetation below the plane were unbroken and looked impenetrable—you tried to imagine people down there, going about their business, living some kind of life, but it was impossible. A couple of tiny puffs of smoke issued from somewhere, as though scoffing in response to my line of thought: Shows what you know.

“This chick, Teresa Milner,” my seatmate was pointing out the window, “had a carpet on her thick as that shit down there. Had to grab a machete to make any headway, if you follow.”

“I do.”

“Real thick bush, I'm saying.”

“Jesus fucking Christ, I get it.”

Stepping out of the plane, you got hit with a type of heat that was different from any heat you might experience in America. I had gone through boot camp during the summer at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, hellish prairie flats that baked steady in August at around 145 degrees, give or take. But the memory of that was immediately erased by the January jungle heat of Vietnam. It was like sticking your head inside a huge creature's mouth and sucking in the rank exhalations, like crawling into its burning guts.

As we trudged across that tarmac to the staging area to await further transport, the heat descended on us with all the weight of reality. Until now, the whole thing had seemed like a far-fetched joke. Even Basic, with its four-thirty reveille trumpet blast, and its forced runs, and its push-ups and obstacle courses and shitty food, seemed as much like the YMCA camp I attended for two weeks as a kid as anything else. It was just a tedious game you had to get through, and on the other side sat another thin stretch of civilian life before deployment. But this was real. The heat, the distant sliver of sea, the less-distant presence of the jungle on the airstrip's perimeter, not to mention a variety of signage in French and Vietnamese.

“Welcome to Vietnam, motherfuckers,” some rawboned brush-cut to my left kept muttering. It was annoying but still beat hearing any more about Corporal Singleton's girlfriends' pussies. Welcome to Vietnam, over and over—it felt incantatory, an attempt to ward off the evil spirits surely lurking in the jungle we'd just been flying over. It felt like it might work just as well to summon them as ward them off, though.

Within the space of five minutes, clouds coalesced overhead and the sky dumped rain. As we huddled tight under the overhang of a piece of tin roofing, our company's CO, Lieutenant Endicott, and two of his staff sergeants took a headcount making sure no one had deserted before even getting to base. He cleared his throat, and as he spoke, the rain behind him intensified to biblical proportions, a solid sheet of water that looked prearranged as a theatrical backdrop to our arrival in-country.

“Gentlemen,” he said.

“Hooah,” we said.

“At ease. Here's the deal. At some point today, the USAF will see fit to send over the choppers we requisitioned a week ago. They will take us to your new home in Bao Loc. The road to Bao Loc is pretty good, and normally we'd just drive you in, but there've been heavy mortar exchanges lately, and command feels ground transport is too risky. So until then, sit tight with your thumb about halfway up your ass, but not all the way, and most certainly not up your neighbor's. That's an order.”

“Hooah.”

We slumped against the tin siding of terminal number 4, Cam Ranh air base, for minutes, then hours, but the choppers did not materialize. The rain slacked off, and the sky cleared, but no choppers. A big kid sitting next to me pulled a piece of wood out of his pack and began whittling it with a penknife. He shook his head, and said, “No choppers coming, bullshit bullshit bullshit.”

“Why's that?”

“Because every goddamn thing in this piece-of-shit war—excuse me, military intervention—is ass up and clusterfucked. You're new, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I'm a transfer, just spent four months up near Binh Dinh. Four months is long enough to figure a few things out. No choppers, you'll see.”

“I'm Richard Lazar.”

“Mitch Berlinger.” He stuck his hand out without smiling, and we shook. “No choppers,” he said again, with a downward musical lilt, addressing himself back to his woodworking.

Berlinger was right. Three hours later, a convoy of olive-drab trucks with camouflage canvas tarps pulled up on the tarmac. The staff sergeant split us up, sixteen men a truck, safeties off and barrels out. I can't speak for anyone else in that truck, but even before we left the air base, passed the guard towers, and began rumbling down that bumpy road into the jungle, I thought I might pass out from fear. It was all happening too fast: sixteen hours earlier, I'd been at SFO, looking at college girls and eating a churro and watching Hare Krishnas sing
“Krishna Krishna Hare Hare”
and ping their little finger cymbals together. Now I was being driven down a road into enemy territory, a road our CO had just told us was too dangerous to drive down. I shut my eyes and, despite already being an avowed and often annoyingly vocal atheist, I whispered the Lord's Prayer to myself. Just to have something to concentrate on, I told myself, though I knew differently. I was praying as hard as the devoutest Muslim on the road to Mecca.

I guess my prayers were heard and answered, because nothing happened. We drove down a shitty, cratered road for three hours, then hung a left onto an even-shittier, even-more-cratered road for another thirty minutes, until that road petered out into a faint trail of dust, which led us to the front gate of the base. “Gate” is probably a bit grand—the threshold was marked by two large wooden poles on either side of the trail. With the chicken wire and the lazy hills rising up behind the compound, it felt like we'd been shipped in to work on a ranch in California. But this feeling quickly vanished as we drove farther in, past several mortar positions surrounded by sandbags, past an enormous canvas tent with the Stars and Stripes fluttering nervously overhead, and stopped in front of a row of aluminum Quonset huts.

We got out and stretched our legs—mine were severely cramped from maintaining a squatting position and a full rectal pucker for most of the afternoon. One of the staff sergeants escorted us to our quarters. It was the last hut, butted up against a dense tree line that ran maybe half a football field to the base of a small mountain or very large hill. Looking up at the hill, I felt my shoulders relax a little with the thought that it would be very near impossible to creep up on us from behind and, further, that we were buffered from the surrounding forest by everything else in the base. It was a little like the feeling you get as a kid, all nice and tucked in, with yards of blanket and pillow keeping the monsters at bay.

“Nowhere to run,” someone said, and I turned to see Berlinger shaking his head at the hut.

“What?”

“Any kind of assault on base, we're pinned in here. Retreat would be impossible.”

“I was looking at it the other way.”

“Glass half full, huh? That'll last about another forty-eight hours here.”

We both stared silently up at the mountain for a moment or two, then Berlinger slapped my back, and said, “Well, come on, sweet cheeks. Let's pick our coffins, I mean cots.” I followed him into the hut, same on the inside as you would imagine it would be from the outside. Spartan and hot as ever-loving fuck. Twelve cots were laid out, six a side, and I saw that the ones in the corners had already been claimed. I put my pack down next to a cot under a window, and Berlinger sat on the one adjacent. The sergeant told us to get situated, that chow would be at nineteen-hundred, then disappeared. Propped up against two starchy pillows, I pulled out whatever book I was reading, or trying to read, at the time. Probably Hemingway, predictably enough, and, even more predictably, probably
A Farewell to Arms
.
I wasn't big on subtlety at nineteen. I'm still not.

A few other men straggled in and picked a cot, among them the country-faced brush-cut. He looked around at everyone, sitting there in a puddle of their own sweat, and said, “I'm Lester Hawkins.”

A few guys grunted their names. I might have. Hawkins grinned broadly. “Welcome to Vietnam, fellas.”

“Hey, Lester Hawkins,” said Berlinger. “Put a fucking sock in it.”

“Hey man,” said Hawkins. He put his sack down and sat on a cot near the opposite wall, looking deflated. He had been expecting something else, an experience of instant camaraderie that wasn't transpiring. He pouted like a little kid in time-out. There was something about his face that made me want to punch it, so I tried not looking at him as best I could.

Some other soldier, a dark-haired kid with the deep-set yet bulging eyes of a deepwater fish, said, “Well, I'm Carbone. Tony Carbone.” Another chorus of grunts. Carbone sat on his helmet and slouched forward, elbows on knees. “Anybody else from New York?”

“I'm from Manhattan,” said Berlinger.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, Kansas.”

Carbone looked confused. “Whatever, man. Anybody here from a real place?”

“K-State's in Manhattan, boy. That's as real as it gets. Wildcat Pride.”

There were some laughs. Carbone said, “Real country bumpkin, huh?”

“That's right. You got a problem with good country folk?” I glanced over at Berlinger. His face was stone-serious, but his eyes twinkled with comic ire. He was enjoying himself.

“I've got a problem with anywhere you can't get a good slice or an egg cream. That includes this shithole and Manhattan, wherever. Tennessee.”

I said, “Let's leave Tennessee out of this.”

Berlinger said, “It's Kansas, you ignorant wop.”

Carbone made like he was going to get up, but Berlinger had eight inches and a hundred pounds on him, and there was no way anything would happen. “Nothing against Italians, of course,” Berlinger added.

“Hayseed. New York City would chew you up and spit you out. We eat punks like you for breakfast.”

“You eat your sister's pussy for breakfast!” bellowed Berlinger. This time Carbone did get up and walk across the hut, but a couple of other guys stopped him. Berlinger was cracking up, rolled back on his cot, his feet pedaling in the air like a dog getting his stomach scratched.

“Why don't both of you shut up,” a big black dude in the far corner intoned, and everyone did. The silence filled the hut, seeming to fight for space with the choking humidity. It was worse than the arguing; it allowed in all the thoughts you didn't want to be thinking. I got up and went back outside, where the barest trace of a breeze cooled the sweat on my arms. I could hear them inside, going at it again, the rise and fall of voices talking over each other. I walked to the side of the hut, then behind, where the tree line began. The base's chicken-wire fencing, topped with a reassuring whorl of barbed wire, laced around the back of the hut and the adjacent buildings.

A rustling in the trees set my heart jackhammering. I looked up and out, and it stopped. I waited, and it started up again. I looked at the hut, thought of the men inside, and hated them for not running outside to help. The rustling grew louder and I tried to yell, but nothing came out. My God, I thought, it's happening already. I half put my hands up in front of me in a posture of uncertain, preemptive surrender.