The Phantom Blooper (7 page)

I say, "We can't beat these people, D.A. We can kill them, sometimes, but we are never going to beat them."

Daddy D.A. crushes the empty beer can in his hand and throws it away. He looks at me and says, "There it is."

Somewhere a corpsman says, "This one's still alive. Stop the hemorrhaging and clean away the mud."

After the battle I strip naked and curl up inside my Conex box and I have nightmares about the Viet Cong.

All Viet Cong are press-ganged at the point of a gun, brainwashed, shot full of heroin, then taken to the basement of the Kremlin, where evil Communist scientists insert tiny control monitors into the backs of their heads.

Viet Cong farmers are like the land itself and their bodies are made of earth. The Viet Cong have magic powers which allow them to sink into the soil and disappear.

Like yellow sharks the Viet Cong glide through an ocean of brown Asian soil. With cold lidless eyes, with predator's eyes, the Viet Cong swim silently just under our feet, preparing to strike.

The Viet Cong hump away from Khe Sanh carrying their heads and arms and legs. Back in their villages they will sit in shadows while their pretty Viet Cong girlfriends sew the shrapnel-torn extremities back on with oversized needles and heavy black thread, and apply leaf-bandages. During the night the pretty Viet Cong girlfriends will heal the red-edged and black-stitched wounds with herbs and the root of the wild banana tree and hot bowls of rice and lots of kisses.

The Americans fill up the soil with Viet Cong bones, really fill it up, totally, so that the Viet Cong farmers can't find one ounce of earth in which to plant a rice stalk. The Viet Cong refuse to surrender, and choose to starve. The bones of the staring Viet Cong stack up and cover the surface of Viet Nam and pile up higher and higher until they blot out the sun.

Americans fear the dark, so they leave Viet Nam and call in victory.

On a night when there's no moon to shine on their magic, the Viet Cong bones reassemble themselves into people. Finally, talking and laughing, the Viet Cong are free to walk hand in hand across the surface of their own land, the land of their ancestors.

In my nightmare my friend Cowboy is down, shot through both legs, his balls shot off, an ear gone. A bullet through his cheeks has torn out his gums. Cowboy is being shot to pieces by a sniper in the jungle. The sniper has already zapped Alice, the big black point man, and has mutilated two Marines who went out to save Cowboy--Doc J., and Parker, the New Guy. The sniper is shooting Cowboy to pieces so that the rest of the squad will try to save him and then the sniper can kill us all, and Cowboy too.

One more time, in my nightmare, Cowboy stares at me with eyes paralyzed with fear, and his hands open to me like language and I fire a short burst from my grease gun and one round goes into Cowboy's left eye and rips out through the back of his head, knocking out brain-wet clods of hairy meat. And Cowboy is dead, shot through the brain.

Click. Click-click.

What is that sound? I wake up. I grab my piece. It must the Phantom Blooper. The Phantom Blooper has come to gut me.

Click. Click-click.

I track the clicking sound until I find Daddy D.A. inside an empty Conex box a few boxes down from my next. Daddy D.A. is hunkered down in the dark, dry-firing his .45 automatic into his head.

I climb into the four-by-four-foot gray metal air-freight container. I squat down into a shadow. I don't say anything.

I don't look at his face. Daddy D.A. is a recruiting poster Marine, with a square chin, steel-gray hair, and a neatly trimmed mustache. But now his face is oily with sweat and contorted. His eyes are wild. He looks like a drunk who's about to cry. But he won't.

Daddy D.A. is a lifer, a career Marine, but he only just decided to be one, so he's still almost human. And since Donlon rotated back to the World and I lost my last link with reality, Daddy D.A. has been my best friend.

I'm afraid to die alone, but even more afraid to go home.

About a month ago, D.A. and I were riding security for a convoy of Coca-Colas. I was hitching a ride with D.A. and one of his squads in a six-by mounted with a 50.

We were rolling through one of those jampacked cardboard villes that straddle Route 1. The gooks were picking through garbage piles to find something to eat.

We saw this little gook kid trying to eat a piece of Styrofoam, and it made us laugh, because the little gook would take a bite, make a face, spit it out, then take another bite.

The squad was cutting Zs, lying on the double layer of sandbags in the bed of the truck. Daddy D.A. and I were standing by the 50, eyeballing the gooks.

Going by like a Technicolor movie was a parade of skinny gooks in white conical hats and squares of rice-paddy water and half-ton water buffaloes with brass rings in their noses and Arvin Rangers in red berets and firetearms of teenaged whores who flashed bee-sting tits at us, and we watched farmers hunched over, knee deep in paddy water, pulling at rice stalks.

I was eating fruit cocktail out of a gallon can with my fingers, pawing through the sticky fruit, picking out the cherries.

The convoy slowed down in the ville, and this ugly gook kid with a cleft palate comes running up, selling pineapple slices on toothpicks. "You give me one cigarette! You give me one cigarette!"

Suddenly the ugly good kid swung his cardboard box full of pineapple slices up into the truck bed.

Daddy D.A. was the gunner in the 50 mount. He swings the 50 around and his whole body shakes
boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom
and the kid exploded and was splattered all over the side of the road like a butchered chicken.

Then the six-by came apart and D.A. and I floated up and squad was sucked into a vortex of translucent black fire and then as suddenly as that it was all over and Daddy D.A. was trying to help me up out of the road.

My head had hit the road hard. Daddy D.A. lifted me p and I spat out grit and on the deck all around us were pieces of men. Some pieces were moving, some not. All of the pieces were on fire. The six-by was on its side and on fire and every one of Daddy D.A.'s people was a legless ball-less wonder.

"You're plain fucking crazy," I say to D.A., trying not to think about the painful past.

Daddy D.A. looks at me, then looks at the gun in his hand. "There it is."

I shrug. I say, "Sorry 'bout that."

Daddy D.A. says, "I'm a lifer, Joker. Hell, I love this damned Marine Corps an' shit. But Khe Sanh was never a battle: it's been a publicity stunt. And green Marines are not elite troops; we're movie stars. The Marines at Khe Sanh were just show business for
Time
magazine. We're straight men, feeding lines to the gooks. The brass has demoted us to being live bait for supporting arms. We're nothing more than glorified forward observers, recon for an avalanche of bombs and shells. Guns have made war less than a gentleman's sport. Modern weapons are taking all of the fun out of killing. We might as well just prop up some wooden Marines like duck decoys and
dee-dee
back to the World and get pogue jobs and make lots of money."

I don't say anything.

"Hunker down, they say. Dig in. But Marines are not construction workers. We don't dig. We get wired.
Dee-Dee Mao
is not part of our creed. We are stone-hard kickers of enemy ass."

I say, "I heard that."

"Last week there must have been two platoons of civilian pukes in spit-shined safari jackets strutting around Khe Sanh, making exciting TV shows, telling the civilian pukes back in the World that we'd won another big victory and that the siege of Khe Sanh had been broken and how the American Marines had held Khe Sanh, blah-blah-blah, but how it sounded was that somehow the TV viewers at home deserved to take a bow for what Marines did alone."

I say, "That's affirmative."

Daddy D.A. looks up at me. "So now we're sneaking out the back door like hippies who can't pay the rent. The evacuation of Khe Sanh is a secret back home but it's not a secret from Victor Charlie."

"There it is."

"So whose side are we on?"

I say, "We're trying to be the good guys, D.A., but we're trying too hard."

Daddy D.A. says, "Before we came to Khe Sanh, the VC slept in the old French bunker. Tomorrow night they'll be sleeping in it again. What goes around comes around. But what about the twenty-six hundred good grunts that got hit here? Do you think those guys will ever forget the price we paid to hold Khe Sanh? And what about the guys who died here? What about Cowboy?"

"Well," I say, "if I felt that bad, I wouldn't kill myself. I'd kill somebody else."

"Get out of my face, Joker. Asshole."

"You're short again, D.A. Don't extend this time. You're short. Rotate back to the World. Cut yourself a piece of slack. You owe it to yourself."

"Hell, Joker, I wouldn't know what to do with myself back in the World. The only people I've ever understood and the only people who ever understood me are these hard-headed raggedy-assed grunts."

"So stand on the block and count the women."

He looks at me, almost laughing. "Shit."

I grunt. "Shit."

Daddy D.A. says, "Remember back when Cowboy was our squad leader in Hue City? Remember the baby-san?"

I look at my boots. "Yeah, I remember. That damned Hue City."

"She came right up to us in the middle of a firefight," says Daddy D.A. "Inside the Citadel. She pushed that little cart up and was selling Cokes with ice, under fire."

"'Where are the VC?'

"And the girl said, 'You VC.'

"We said, 'You baby-san VC.'

"And she said, 'No VC. VC number ten thousand.'

We said, "'Baby-san, you boom-boom?' And she giggled, remember? She said, 'You give me beaucoup money.'"

I say, "Let it go, D.A. That's ancient history."

But D.A. is already running the Hue City movie in his head: "Some dumb grunt was crying. I don't know his name. Just some dumb grunt with a personal problem.

"The baby-san squatted down in front of the grunt. She was so cute. She picked up his helmet--she could hardly lift it--and put it on. The helmet completely covered her head. She looked funny. The grunt laughed. He stopped crying and lifted the helmet off of her. She giggled.

"The little bitch ran over to her cart and got the grunt a cold bottle of Coke and opened it an' shit and ran back and gave it to him. 'I souvenir you,' she said, 'Marine number one!'

"The grunt laughed again, leaned back, and was chugging the Coke. The baby-san pulled a Chi-Com frag out of her ice bucket, jerked out the pin, shoved it under the open flap of the grunt's flak jacket and held it on his bare chest as he finished chugging the Coke.

"Then the grunt looked down, remember? Remember that look on his face? He looked down and then the grunt and the baby-san melted into a ball of smoke and then noise turned them into shit."

"I know," I say. "I remember."

D.A. says, "Joker, when babies blow themselves up to kill a grunt, something is definitely wrong with the program. I came here to Viet Nam to kill gooks, not little kids. Little kids don't become gooks until they grow up. But even zip babies come out of the womb armed to the teeth and hating Marines, Joker, and I don't know why. How can we wean them from the propaganda printed in their mother's milk? I'm supposed to be a professional fighting man. How is it going to look on my service record if I get killed by a little kid? It's not dignified. Who are we, Joker? We're grunts. We're supposed to be the best. What's wrong with us?"

I stand up. "I got to go police up some dead gooks."

Daddy D.A. looks up, surprised. "But you can't just go off somewhere and police up dead gooks. Now now. I'm going to kill myself."

I say, "Without any bullets?"

"I was just practicing. I got bullets."

I say, "Okay, so what am I supposed to do?"

"Well, you know, you're supposed to talk me out of it, an' shit."

"Oh yeah? Like what?"

Daddy D.A. thinks about it. "Well, you know, you say, 'life is good.'"

"Life is good."

D.A. says, "No, it's not."

I say, "You're right. It sucks. Life is crummy."

Daddy D.A. is not sure what to say next. Then: "Why don't you tell me how much I'd be missed?"

I nod, thinking about it. "Yeah, okay. Well, I'd miss you, D.A. And Thunder. Maybe. I mean, Thunder never liked you, but he'd probably miss you. The New Guys won't miss you because they're too dumb to know who you are. Black John Wayne would miss you, but he's off on a one-way tour with the KIA travel bureau. And even if Black John Wayne was alive he'd probably just say
Sin Loi
, tough shit, sorry about that."

"There it is." Daddy D.A. nods. "There it is. Sorry 'bout that." He laughs.

I say, "Want a cold beer?"

"That's affirmative on your last," says Daddy D.A., looking up, brightening. "I sure could use one."

I say, "Well, when you find some slack, D.A., you be sure to souvenir a big piece for me."

I leave Daddy D.A.'s Conex box and march back to my own. The sky on the horizon is turning pink and pale blue.

Dawn at Khe Sanh. As the day suddenly turns real, dew glistens on a shantytown of tents built with shelter halves and muddy ponchos. From the last of the decaying bunkers still standing and from the mouths of manmade caves, hard reptile men poke steel-helmeted heads out into the cold morning air, squinting, their faces stubble-bearded, bulky in their flak jackets and baggy jungle utilities, with weapons growing out of their hands like black metal deformities. They walk hunched over and fast in the Khe Sanh quick-step, humping ankle-deep in red mud, grunts, skuzzy field Marines, slouching half-awake toward burlap-wrapped piss tubes that no longer exist, scratching their balls.

A sky train helicopter lifts a howitzer off the deck and
whack-whacks
into a sky the color of lead. The howitzer dangles like a big toy on the end of a steel cable.

I crawl up into my gray metal hole and I try to sleep.

Outside, an engineer yells, loud and bored, "FIRE IN THE HOLE! FIRE IN THE HOLE!"