The Snowfly (9 page)

Camp Jolly sat within sight of the Lost Mountains, a name bestowed by Americans, not the Viets: The story was that if you wandered into the mountains, you were doomed to get lost. Most troops called the place Camp MagNo (for Magnetic North), because any iron shot in the air by either side's artillery seemed to be drawn directly to the camp. Black humor kept more soldiers alive than prayers, never mind what the God pilots claimed. In two years, much of the time with troops, I never heard a soldier praying in a foxhole. Or a bunker. Or an APC. Or a chopper. They were too busy and scared to pray.

I had been at the camp four days. My Marine hosts were polite, efficient, and aloof. Some of them spent time showing me how to rig night warning systems with snare wire, tin cans, and stones. And how to use camouflage. I knew they taught me these things so that I wouldn't stand out and become a target. If I became a target, they might also get it. In war personal survival drives a lot of what goes on. I had a bunker to sleep in, complete with a python the marines kept to hold the rat population down. I had shelter, clothing, and food and not much to do while I waited for the brass to decide if risking a reporter's life was worth the theoretically beneficial publicity.

The troops at Camp MagNo were businesslike and on alert at all times. There was no dope that I saw and no booze. I could feel the continuous pressure of anticipation.

There were rice paddies along the eastern perimeter of the camp. At times a wind would blow out of the north and, when it did, chubby yellow-and-green birds would dive into the water, carrying away small, silvery fish. As bored as I was, it was too much to resist.

I scrounged a long piece of green bamboo, unraveled some parachute cord to make line, got a hook from a survival pack a jet jock had given me several months before, got some bread, made them into gluey little balls, walked down to the water's edge, and waded in. It felt great to fish, but impulse can feel good and be all wrong.

The fish were small, shaped vaguely like stunted bluegills. They turned their noses up at the bread. I tried bits of Vienna sausages from K-rats and they ignored these as well. I looked around to see if there was some sort of insect hatch. The wind, I figured, had pushed the fish into groups, which brought the birds. But what pushed the fish together? Wind, fear of predators? I loved trying to figure out the puzzle and I was in deep cogitation when a voice sounded behind me.

“Hey, pal.”

Two heavily muscled, shirtless Marines were squatting on dry land. One was black, the other white, and they were both huge. They had sawed-off shotguns across their thighs and reminded me of my old man and how he could hunker like that for hours. They wore helmets with camouflage-cloth covers and matching sunglasses with electric pink rims and yellow mirrored lenses.

“Me?” I asked. They were about thirty yards away.

“Catchin' anything?” the white Marine asked.

“Not yet.” Ever the optimist.

“That's 'cause there's nothin' to catch,” he said.

He was probably toying with me, I decided, yanking my chain. Good-natured verbal and mental jousting were common fare between reporters and soldiers.

“I saw birds catching fish out here.”

“They can fly,” the man said.

“The point is, there's fish here,” I insisted with a nod toward the water, which extended above my knees.

“Not for you.”

I turned around to face my hecklers, lost my balance on the soft bottom, stumbled forward, and landed facedown, bracing the fall with a hand on the soft, mucky bottom. My two watchers threw themselves flat on the ground and covered their heads.

This was not a good sign, I thought. “
What?
” I asked, spitting foul-­tasting water.

“You're in a minefield,” the black soldier said.

My heart started backfiring. “It's not marked.”

“This is fucking I Corps, man. What the fuck good's a minefield, you put a sign up for, Charlie?” This from the black marine.

He had a point.

“How do I get out?”

“Follow your tracks,” the black soldier said. He looked at his partner and they both smiled and nodded.

I was in water the color of dry straw. There were no tracks. “That's a problem,” I said.

“That would be a rog,” the white guy said.

“Seriously, is there a trick to getting out?”

“Jes' luck,” the black soldier said.

Great. My options were all bad and my legs were shaking. I couldn't believe I had been so stupid.

In a war it doesn't pay to agonize or delay decisions. I sucked in a deep breath, let it out, and started wading awkwardly through the muck-­bottomed water toward the Marines, who got up and fled, clasping their helmets to their heads.

There were no explosions except in my chest.

I caught up with the Marines a hundred yards from the paddy. They were hunkered under a small tree, crowding each other for shade.

“You guys were joking, right?”

“We don't joke about mines,” the black man said. “Who are you, man?”

“Rhodes, UPI.”

“A pencil?” he asked.

I nodded.

“It's your job to ask questions, right? They pay you to ask questions, am I right?” He didn't wait for my response. “You'd better get better at your job, man.”

I took out a drenched pack of smokes and tossed it on the ground in disgust. The white soldier offered me one of his and lit me up.

“Where are you guys from?” I asked.

“Michigan,” the black man said. “Both of us. Different families.”

I laughed out loud and I told them I was from the same state and we began the game called Small World.

Over the next two days I got to know the two sergeants. The white one was Grady Service, who had been raised in the Upper Peninsula, his dad a game warden. The black man was Luticious Treebone, a Detroiter with a perpetual and infectious smile. Grady and Tree. They were friendly and wired, their eyes never still, as if they expected to be assaulted at any moment.

“Why're you hangin' around MagNo?” Service asked one afternoon.

“I want to go out on an op with you guys. I made a formal request through channels, but you know how that goes.”

They both nodded. “Why you wanna go?” Treebone asked.

“It's my job to go and see.”

“You'll never get approval,” Service said. “No way, Jose. What we do is in the black.”

Treebone chimed in. “And black in this context definitely ain't beautiful.”

“You want a story?” Service asked.

Of course I did.

“This is righteous, okay? Up north on the En-Vee-Lao border there are animals that few people have ever seen and most scientists in the world have never heard of.”

I probably grinned. “Like some kind of Shangri-la.”

Service gave me a harsh glance. “No, man. This is for real.” His tone was earnest.

“You've seen this place?”

“Once,” Service said, staring off into the distance.

“Where is it?” I asked. “Exactly.”

I followed them to a bunker with thick walls of iron sheeting and sandbags. Service got a map out of a musty leather case. The area he pointed to was at least one hundred miles north of the Demilitarized Zone, that belt of land that separated the two Vietnams and, contrary to its title, was more militarized than just about any locale in either country.

“You were all the way up there? On foot?”

Service smiled and said, “I can neither confirm nor deny.”

“Doing what?”

“Peepin', lookin' around, shit like that. The details are classified.”

I couldn't read him. He could have been yanking my chain. I still had my doubts about the minefield. “How would I get up there?”

Treebone smiled. “You wouldn't, man. After the war, maybe. But now, no way.”

“That's not much of a story.”

“Suit yourself,” Service said.

That night the two men came to my bunker just after dark, their faces streaked with vertical lines of black and green camo paint, their eyes blazing, nerves taut.

“That place we told you about,” Service said. “It's real. Tree and I were both there. There's a lot of stuff on this planet still to be discovered.”

“Why tell me?”

“I thought you might write about the unexpected costs of war. Here's a place that may have things that exist nowhere else on earth and we're bombin' the shit out of it and the NVA are using it to hide the shit they're haulin' down from Hanoi.”

“Do I quote you?”

“You do and our young asses will be cooked. Only Tree and me ever been in this place and if you say we told you, they will royally fuck us both over.”

“Why?”

“Because of what we were doin' up there.”

“Peeping.”

He shrugged. “It wasn't a Boy Scout camporee.”

I thought about what he had to say. “I appreciate this, but it's still hard to believe. Put yourself in my place.”

Treebone laughed bitterly. “We'd love to, man! But we gotta split.” Service placed a crinkled snapshot on the cable spool that served as a table. It was some kind of antelope and not anything I recognized.

“Show that around and if you can find anybody who can ID it, I'll make sure Tree kisses your civilian ass.”

The next day the two Marines were gone and word came down that my request to go out with the Lurps had been officially rejected due to the area's “tactical instablity.”

I figured the two sergeants had been toying with me, that they'd been bored and I had been the handiest entertainment. A secret place in North Vietnam with undiscovered animals? I doubted it, but I also remembered what Red Ennis had once said about the snowfly, that there was usually some kind of fire where there was smoke. Okay, the photo was more than smoke, but I wasn't ready to buy the story. This was one bait I wasn't going to take. While I waited for my chopper, I saw a water buffalo wade into my fishing paddy. I paid no attention until I heard shrill voices and a sharp thump followed by a geyser of pink-and-green water. A mine had exploded, leaving chunks of buffalo floating in the discolored water.

The Marines had been serious about everything.

When I got back to my office in Saigon, I sent a letter and the photograph to Lloyd Nash. I told him about the claim but not my sources and asked him to show the photo to some of his colleagues to find out if the animal was known.

Then I forgot about the episode. I had wasted days with the Marines and all I had to show for the effort was one stupid move on my part, because of some fish of all things. Even if the secret place existed, I decided it was not my job to pursue it.

For years after, I would wonder if the two Marines got out of the war alive. In my two years immersed in violence I often wondered this about the many people I encountered. I knew that not all of them would get home alive, and that this possibility also applied to me. Not that the odds against a reporter were as high as those against a grunt, but there was always a chance.

There were many reporters, some of them quite famous, who rarely left the areas where they felt the safest and I couldn't blame them. Queen Anna and my old man had always warned me to not go up the creek, but they also had instilled in my sister and me an almost religious fervor for not buckling to fear.

Queen Anna would say, “Bowie, God gave us imaginations in order to test our courage. Adam and Eve were afraid when they were cast out of Eden because they could imagine all sorts of horrible things. We're all like that, but you can't let your fears hold you back from doing what you think you need to do.” I never forgot her words. I felt fear many, many times in Vietnam and usually I could push through the veil of terror. Beating fear became a great part of what my life was all about.

 

•••

 

Soldiers on a yearlong tour in the combat zone got a two-week R&R break during their year. Two weeks out of thirteen months. I was more fortunate.

For escapes I went to Bangkok, a city where you could walk faster than you could drive and everything and everyone was for sale. The Thai were devoted to their king and to literacy, but neither devotion seemed to move the country in any discernible direction. Spicy Thai food was created by ingenious sadists for insatiable masochists. Buddhist monks in saffron robes roamed the city begging alms. Prostitutes cost less than a gallon of gas in Detroit. The sprawling city's ubiquitous canals, called
klongs,
were clogged with wooden speedboats and fecal matter. I was fascinated and repulsed by all of it.

The Florida Hotel was ocher colored, seven stories, a U built around a small, long pool an even twenty feet deep. There was a bar in the basement. Reinforced windows in the bar allowed patrons to watch live underwater sex shows. After midnight it was amateur hour. You could sit and watch GIs and pilots on R&R screw fourteen-year-old hookers who took Americanized names like Wendy Sue and Zoe, which means “life.” As in the war itself, there were no rules on its periphery.

There was no point in searching for a different kind of establishment. Every hotel and establishment in the city had its own version of the Florida's erotic entertainment. I sometimes amused myself topside at the pool. Three very drunk F-105 pilots stumbled in one night and began stripping, staring down at unclad women in the pool. I was the veteran in this environment. “First time here, guys?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Stay away from the black-haired one, she has the clap.”

“Hey, thanks.” They dove in.

There was a couple at the table beside me.

“You're a naughty one, aren't you, Yank?” said a gent in a double-breasted blue blazer festooned with brilliant gold buttons. He had a wide flat face, blond hair, and a ruddy complexion.

“You're not military,” the man continued. “Journo?”

“It shows?”