Dog Soldiers

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CONVERSE WAS, BY PROFESSION, AN AUTHOR. TEN YEARS before he had written a play about the Marine Corps which had been performed and admired. Since the production of his play, the only professional good fortune attending him had been the result of his marriage to the daughter of an editor and publisher.

Elmer Bender, Converse’s father-in-law, edited and published imitations of other magazines. The name of each Bender publication was designed to give its preoccupied and overstimulated purchasers the impression that they were buying the more popular magazine it imitated. If there were, for example, a magazine called Collier’s, Elmer would edit and publish a magazine called Shmollier’s.

“Mine are better,” Elmer would say. He was a veteran of New Masses and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

For seven years of his marriage to Marge, Elmer had employed Converse as principal writer on Nightbeat, which his lawyers described as A Weekly Tabloid With a Heavy Emphasis on Sex. He supervised a staff of two — Douglas Dalton, who was an elderly newspaper alcoholic with beautiful manners, and a Chinese Communist named Mike Woo, who had once attempted an explication of the theory of surplus value in the weekly horoscope. “Don’t be afraid to ask for a raise, Sagittarius. Your boss always pays you less than your work is actually worth!”

Five days each week, Converse peopled the nation with spanking judges and Lesbian motorcyclists.

At the turning of the seventh year, he had written a memory lane story about the late Porfirio Rubirosa entitled “Rubirosa Was a Fizzle in My Bed,” under the byline of Carmen Guittarez. In it, he had assumed the identity of a Sexy Latin Showgirl disappointed in the climax of her assig nation with the World Famed Playboy and Bon Vivant. The story had led Converse to a Schizophrenic Episode.

For several days he had gone about imagining that a band of Bored and Corrupt Socialites might descend on his home in Berkeley, and in the name of their beloved Rubi, Wreak a Bizarre Revenge.

His difficulties with reality increased.

After a night of sinister racked sleep, he had gone to Elmer and enlisted his cooperation in securing press accreditation as a marginal correspondent in Saigon.

Bender had reluctantly agreed. It seemed to him that if Marge and Converse endured a period of separation, their union might regain some of its edge. Marge’s mother had been a left-wing Irish vegetarian, a suicide with her lover during the McCarthy days. It was often observed that Marge was very like her.

Converse suggested that something worthwhile might emerge from such an expedition, that there might be a book or a play. The argument particularly moved Elmer, who was an author in his own right — one of his early stories had earned him a passionate letter of appreciation from Whittaker Chambers. Marge, who loved all that was fateful, had sullenly agreed.

He flew out of Oakland on the morning after their daughter’s second birthday. In Saigon, Converse was able to extend his employment by taking over the positions of departing stringers and hustling a few of his own. And surely enough, the difficulties he had been experiencing with reality were in time obviated. One bright afternoon, near a place called Krek, Converse had watched with astonishment as the world of things transformed itself into a single overwhelming act of murder. In a manner of speaking, he had discovered himself. Himself was a soft shell-less quivering thing encased in a hundred and sixty pounds of pink sweating meat. It was real enough. It tried to burrow into the earth. It wept.

After his exercise in reality, Converse had fallen in with Charmian and the dope people; he became one of the Constantly Stoned. Charmian was utterly without affect, cool and full of plans. She had taken leave of life in a way which he found irresistible.

When, after a little fencing, she had put the plan to him, he had found that between his own desperate emptiness and her fascination for him, he was unable to refuse. She had contacts in the States, a few thousand to invest, and access to Colonel Tho, whose heroin refinery was the fourth largest building in Saigon. He had fifteen thousand dollars in a Berkeley bank, the remnants of a sum he had received for an unproduced film version of his play. Ten thousand dollars, it developed, would buy him a three-quarters share on three kilos of the Colonel’s Own Mixture and his share of the stateside sale would be forty thousand. There would be no risk of misunderstanding because everybody was friends. Marge, as he foresaw, had gone along. The thing had come together.

His own reasons changed, it seemed, by the hour. Money in large amounts had never been particularly important to him. But he had been in the country for eighteen months and for all the discoveries it had become apparent that there would be no book, no play. It seemed necessary that there be something.

Showered, under the ceiling fan in his room at the Coligny, Converse woke to the telephone. Jill Percy was on the line to say that she and her husband would meet him in the Crazy Horse, a girlie bar off Tu Do Street.

Jill was becoming an international social worker and she had conceived a professional interest in girlie bars. She was always trying to get people to take her to them.

Converse dressed, pulled on his plastic anorak and went down to the street. It had started to rain again. As he walked toward Tu Do, he sifted through his pockets to find twenty piasters.

Halfway up the street, midway between the market and Tu Do, there was always a legless man squatting in a door way. Each time Converse passed, he would drop twenty piasters in the man’s upturned pith helmet. He had been doing so for more than a year, so that whenever the man saw Converse approach he would smile. It was as though they were friends. Often, Converse was tormented by an impulse to withhold the twenty piasters to see what sort of a reaction there would be, but he had never had the courage.

Having dropped the twenty P and exchanged smiles with his friend, Converse sauntered down Tu Do to the Crazy Horse. The Crazy Horse was one of the Tu Do bars in which, according to rumor, the knowledgeable patron might be served a bracing measure of heroin with — some even said in — his beer. As a result it was usually off limits, and on this evening Converse was the only customer. Facing him across the bar were fifteen uniformly beautiful Vietnamese girls in heavy makeup. He took a stool, smiled pleasantly, and ordered a Schlitz. The girl opposite him began to deal out a hand of cards.

Beer in the Crazy Horse cost 250 piasters without heroin, and Converse was not in the mood for cards. He glanced down at the poker hand on the chrome before him as though it were a small, conventionally amusing animal, and affected to look over the girls with a worldly expression. In spite of the glacial air conditioning and his recent bath, his face was covered with sweat. The fifteen girls across the bar turned their eyes on him with identical expressions of bland, fathomless contempt.

Converse drank his beer, his sinuses aching. He felt no resentment; he was a humanist and it was their country. They were war widows or refugee country girls or serving officers of the Viet Cong. And there he was, an American with a stupid expression and pockets stuffed with green money, and there was no way they could get it off him short of turning him upside down and shaking him. It must make them want to cry, he thought. He was sympathetic.

He was searching his Vietnamese repertory for an expression of sympathy when Jill and Ian Percy arrived. Jill looked at the girls behind the bar with a wide white smile and sat down beside Converse. Ian came behind her, stooped and weary.

“Well,” Jill Percy said. “This looks like fun.”

A girl down the bar blew her nose and looked into her handkerchief. “That’s what we’re here for,” Converse said. The Percys order bottles of “33” beer; it was pronounced “bami-bam” and supposedly made with formaldehyde. Ian went over to the jukebox and played “Let It Be.”

“Staying through the summer?” Jill asked Converse.

“I guess so. Till the elections. Maybe longer. You?”

“We’ll be around forever. Right, Ian?”

“We’ll be around all right,” Ian said. Some “33” beer trickled from his mouth and into his sparse sandy beard. He wiped his chin with the back of his hand. “We’re waiting around until we get an explanation.”

Ian Percy was an Australian agronomist. He was also an engagé, one of the few — other than Quakers — one saw around. He had been in the country for fifteen years — with UNRRA, with WHO, with everyone who would hire him, ending with the Vietnamese government, which had him on loan from the Australian Ministry of Agriculture. A province chief up north had gotten him fired, and he had taken accreditation with an Australian daily which was actually more of a racing form than a newspaper. As an engage” he hated the Viet Cong. He also hated the South Vietnamese government and its armed forces, Americans and particularly the civilians, Buddhist monks, Catholics, the Cao Dai, the French and particularly Corsicans, the foreign press corps, the Australian government, and his employers past — and, most especially — present. He was said to be fond of children, but the Percys had none of their own. They had met in Vietnam and it was not a place in which people felt encouraged to bear children.

“Bloody lot of people leaving,” Jill said. “We’re getting possessive about our friends.”

“Nobody wants to be the last rat,” Converse said.

Ian ordered another “33” beer. He drank “33” unceasingly from about four in the afternoon until after midnight.

“Poor old last rat,” Ian said. “God help him.”

Jill took her beer along the bar and started a conversation in Vietnamese with a bar girl opposite her. The other girls, softened by curiosity, leaned together to listen.

“What’s she saying?” Converse asked.

“She’s telling them her troubles.” The girls across from Jill had turned toward Ian and Converse and were nodding sympathetically. “Later she’ll come back and want them to tell her their troubles. She’s writing a report on Saigon bar girls.”

“What for?”

“Oh, for the information of the civilized world,” Ian said. “Not that the civilized world gives fuck all.” They drank in silence for a while as Jill told her troubles to the bar girls.

“One thing,” Converse said, “this war is going to be well-documented. There’s more information available than there is shit loose to know about.”

An image came to Converse’s mind of the sheets of paper onto which the computers clacked out useful information for the conduct of the war. The prettiest were the ones which analyzed the loyalties and affiliations of country villages — these were known, with curious Shakespearean undertones, as Hamlet Evaluation Reports. The thought of Hamlet Evaluation Reports made Converse hungry. Each Friday the Vietnamese used them to wrap food in.

“Let’s eat,” he said. “Before it rains again.”

They went outside and walked down Tu Do toward the river. On the first corner they came to, the MPs had a soldier in fatigues up against the wall and were searching his many khaki pockets while a crowd of silent Saigonnais looked on. Converse bought Jill a marigold necklace from a sleepy child flower-seller on the edge of the crowd. The marigolds when they were fresh smelled wonderfully on hot nights; they reminded Converse of Charmian.

“O.K.,” Jill said. “The Guillaume Tell, the Tempura House or the floating restaurant?”

The floating restaurant would be too crowded, and Ian said that the chef at the Guillaume Tell had run away because someone had threatened to chop his hands off. They took the long way to the Tempura House, walking beside the lantern-lit barges on the riverfront. Mosquitoes hurried them on and reminded Converse of his fever. As they walked, they smoked Park Lane cigarettes, factory-packaged joints with glossy filters. “33” beer was supposed to be made with formaldehyde, Park Lane cigarettes were supposed to be rolled by lepers. The grass in them was not very good by Vietnamese standards, but if you smoked a whole one you got high. Little riverfront children ran up to them, fumbling at their arms to see their watches, calling after them — Bao chi, bao chi.

At the Tempura House they entered merrily, wafted on fumes of Park Lane, removed their shoes and settled down among the dapper Honda salesmen. Ian ordered more “33.”

“Ever see Charmian?” he asked Converse. “I just left her. She’s the same.”

“Somebody told me,” Jill Percy said, “that Charmian had a habit.” Converse essayed a smile. “Bullshit,” he said. “Or else that she was dealing. I can’t remember which.”

“You never know what Charmian’s into. But if she had a habit, I’d know about it.”

“You don’t see her so much now, do you?” Jill asked. Converse shook his head. “Charmian,” Ian said, “has a friend named Tho. He’s an Air Force colonel. In the cinnamon business.”

“You ought to look into Tho,” Jill told her husband. “He must be looming large around here if Charmian’s found him.”

“I don’t think Tho is coup material,” Converse said. “He has a very satisfied look.”

The waitress, who was at least partly Japanese, brought them a plate of red peppers. They rinsed their flushed faces with cool towels.

“Ever hear Charmian’s Washington stories?” Jill Percy asked. “She tells super Washington stories.”

“Charmian belongs to a vanished era in American history,” Converse said. “Not many people can claim that condition at the age of twenty-five.”

“Ghosts,” Ian said. “The country’s full of ghosts now.”

Jill Percy whisked a pepper from the dish with her chop sticks and consumed it without flinching. “You can hardly call Charmian a ghost. There are plenty of ghosts out here but they’re real ones.”

“Wherever you have a lot of unhappy people dying young,” Converse said, wiping his hands on the cool towel, “you’ll get a lot of ghosts.”

“We had a right bastard of a ghost down in our village,” Ian Percy said. “One of the sort they call Ma. He lived under a banyan tree and he came out during siesta to frighten the kiddies.”

“After the war,” Converse said, “they should fly over the Ia Drang valley dropping comic books and French dip sandwiches for all the GI Ma. It must be really a drag for them.”

Ian started another beer, ignoring the food before him.

“I’m not sure you’ve been around here long enough,” he told Converse, “to talk like that.” Converse rested his chopsticks on the side of his plate. “The way I see it, I get to say any fucking thing I want. I

had my ass on the line. I been to war.” He turned to Jill, who was frowning at Ian. “Ain’t I, Jill? I appeared on the field of battle.”

“I was there,” she said. “I saw you, sport.”

“We went to war, Jill and me,” Converse announced to Ian. “And what did we do, Jill?”

“We cried,” Jill said. “We cried,” Converse said, “that’s what we did. We wept tears of outraged human sensibility and we get to say any fucking thing we want.”

Both Jill and Converse had gone to see the invasion of Cambodia, and both had had experiences which had made them cry. But Converse’s tears had not been those of out raged human sensibility.

“You’re an entertaining fella,” Ian said. “But in general I object to your being around.”

Secure behind her porcelain smile, the waitress placed bowls of fish and rice before them. A party of American reporters came in, followed by four Filipino rock musicians with pachuco haircuts. The Honda salesmen and their Japanese girlfriends grew merrier as the sake flowed.

“I mean,” Ian said, “I love this country. It’s not the ass hole of the world to me. I grew old here, man. Now when I leave, all I’ll be able to think back on is bastards like you in places like this.”

“Sometimes,” Jill said, “you act like you invented the country.”

“They’re a pack of perves,” Ian said. “You’re a pack of perves. Why don’t you go watch some other place die? They’ve got corpses by the river-full in Bangla Desh. Why not go there?”

“It’s dry,” Converse said.

A Vietnamese soldier with dark glasses and a white cane had been led in from the street by a little boy of about eight; they moved from table to table selling copies of the Saigon Herald. The American reporters reclining at the table behind Converse were watching them.

“Listen,” one of the reporters was saying, “he can see as well as you can. The guy uses about six different kids. He rents them in the market.”

“Yeah?” another reporter said. “I think he’s blind.”

“He’s got fresh Arvin fatigues on every day,” the first reporter insisted. “You know why he’s got fresh Arvin fatigues? ‘Cause he’s in the Arvin. And even the Arvin don’t take blind people.”

When the Arvin and his boy came around, Converse and Ian bought Saigon Heralds and set them aside without looking at them.

“I met a lady today,” Converse said, “who told me that Satan was very powerful here.”

“Check it out,” Ian said. “Don’t dismiss anything you hear out of hand.” Jill was trying to watch the American reporters unobserved. “They’d know,” she said, nodding toward their table. “We could ask them.”

Converse turned to look at the reporters; they were sun burned, they had impressive Mexican mustaches, they used their chopsticks well.

“They wouldn’t go for it,” he said. “Satan might be hot stuff to the montagnards, but he’s just another coconut monk to those guys.”

They finished off the beef and rice and called for more “33.” The waitress brought them some peanuts which were inhabited by tiny spiderlike insects.

“Satan?” Jill said. “What do you think she meant?”

“She was a missionary,” Converse said.

The Percys ate their peanuts one by one, patiently dislodging the insects. Converse did without.

“I wonder who Tho is,” Jill said after a while. “I wonder what’s in it for Charmian.”

“Fancy fucking,” Ian said.

Converse said nothing.

“An Arvin colonel.” Jill thoughtfully sucked on a peanut. “What can that be like, I wonder?”

“Exquisite,” Ian said. “Do you really think so?”

“Best fucking east of Suez,” Ian assured her. “I have it on good authority.”

“I have it on good authority,” Jill said, “that Kuwait has the best fucking east of Suez.”

“If you like Arabs. Some do, some don’t.”

“There’s an Arab blessing,” Converse informed them, “‘May the poetry of your love never turn to prose.’ “

“There you are,” Jill said, “Kuwait for me.”

“I know a Parsee in Karachi,” Converse said, “who knows the Sultan of Kuwait very well. He’s a caterer. When the Sultan goes falconing my friend the Parsee supplies his every need. He could fix you up.”

“Crikey,” Jill said. “We’d falcon under the merciless sky. And at night while I’m asleep — into my tent he’ll creep.”

“Exactly,” Converse said, “and you’ll tickle his prostate with an ostrich feather.”

Jill affected to sigh. “With a peacock’s wing.”

Ian had turned to watch the waitress bend over her hibachi. “This is sheer racism,” he said. “Well,” Converse said, “that’s fucking. East of Suez.” The shock came up at them from under the floor; Converse experienced a moment of dreadful recognition. When the noise ended, they looked, not at each other, but toward the street and saw that the glass window was gone and that they were looking directly on the metal grill that had stood in front of it. There was food in everyone’s lap.

“Incoming,” Jill Percy said. Someone in the kitchen cursed shrilly, scalded.

They knelt on the tea-stained mat, trying to find their shoes. The proprietor, who was a man of mild and scholarly appearance, was forcing his way toward the door in grim fury; people had begun to leave without paying. Through the space where the window had been, Converse could see a fine layer of dry white dust settling on the wet pavement.

The street outside was strangely quiet, as though the explosion had blown a pocket of silence in the din of the city, which was now only slowly drawing in the stricken cries and the police whistles.

Converse and the Percys walked toward the river; they could see the four American reporters at the corner ahead of them. Everyone seemed to know better than to run. Halfway to the corner they passed the Arvin newspaper seller and his rented little boy; the pair of them stood motionless on the sidewalk facing the street. The Arvin still had his glasses on; the boy watched them pass without expression, still holding the Arvin’s hand. On the corner itself was an old woman who held her hands pressed to her ears in the position of hearing no evil.

“The tax office,” Ian said. And when they turned the next corner they saw that it had indeed been the tax office. The street before it was in ruins; a whole section of the concrete pavement was blown away to show the black earth on which the city was built. Night-lights in the nearby buildings had been blown so it was a while before they could see anything clearly. By now there were plenty of sirens.

The tax office had been a Third Republic drollery, Babar the Elephant Colonial, and the bomb had made toothpicks of its wrought-iron fence.

One of the balconies was lying smashed in the forecourt, surrounded by shredded personifications of Rectitude and Civic Virtue and the Mission Civilatrice. As they stood watching, a jeep with four Arvin MPs shot past them and pulled up on the sidewalk.

In the light of the MPs’ torches, they could see that there were people sitting down in the street, trying to pick the concrete chips out of their flesh. It had been very crowded in the street because of the stalls. Families of refugees sold morsels of fish and noodles to the petitioners who stood all day outside the building, and at night they settled down to sleep among their wares. Since the building had been empty when the charge went, the street people had taken the casualties.

Converse and the Percys moved back against the metal shutters of a building across the way, as Arvin paratroopers arrived in canvas-covered trucks to seal off the street to traffic. The Arvins came picking their way through rubble, nervous as rats, poking people aside with the barrels of their M-16s.

After a few minutes, the barbed wire arrived. The emergency services in Vietnam always carried immense quantities of barbed wire for use in every conceivable situation. There was still no sign of an ambulance. They rolled the coils along the street to spread at each end of the block. Policemen were poking among the ruins by the fence, shining hurricane lamps. Now and then Converse could see marvelously bright gouts of blood.

When the ambulances came, fastidious men in white smocks got out and walked carefully toward the pile; when the wire caught their clothing they swatted at it with quick delicate gestures. Jill Percy followed them across the street and peered over their shoulders and over the shoulders of the National Policemen making a short patrol the length of their line. Converse tried to see her face in their lights.

From the way she recrossed the street, Converse and Ian could tell what she had seen. Her steps were slow and deliberate and she appeared confused. If one stayed in the country long enough one saw a great many people moving about in that manner.

“Crikey,” she said. She made a small fluttering gesture with her hands. “Kids and… all.”

Ian Percy had brought his beer bottle from the Tempura House; he let it fall from his hand to shatter on the street. The Vietnamese nearby turned quickly at the sound and stared at him without expression.

“Somebody ought to set a plastique at the London School of Economics,” he said. “Or in Greenwich Village. All those bastards who think the Front are such sweet thunder — let them have their kids’ guts blown out.”

“It could be anybody,” Converse said. “It could be an irate taxpayer. Anybody can make a plastique.”

“Are you going to say it’s the Front?” Jill asked her husband. “Because it probably wasn’t, you know.”

“No,” Ian said. “I’ll say it probably wasn’t. It could have been anybody.” He began to curse in Vietnamese. People moved away from him.

Converse went across the street and watched the ambulance people lug body bags over the rubble. Dead people and people who appeared to be dead had been laid out on the exposed earth where the cement had been blown away, and the blood and tissue were draining into the black soil. There were chopsticks, shards of pottery and ladles lying about and on close inspection Converse saw that at least some of what had appeared to be human fragments might be chicken or fish. Some of the bodies had boiled noodles all over them.

As he went back to where the Percys were, four men wearing rubber gauntlets came carrying large aluminum cans. When they reached the wreckage, they upturned the cans and scattered white powder over it.

“What is it?” Converse asked Ian.

“Chloride of lime.”

Jill Percy stood with her shoulders hunched, arms folded.

“If you get run over in the street,” she said, “they’ll come and string barbed wire around you. If you don’t get up fast enough they’ll sprinkle you with chloride of lime.”

They walked down the street a few yards until they stood before the glassless windows of a Toyota agency. In the glare of the lights, they could see the office inside with its charts and wall calendars and tiny electric fans on each desk. Reams of paper were scattered over the floor; because of the angle of the windows, the office had absorbed a great deal of the concussion. One of the interior walls was dappled with blood that looked as though it had been flung from a brush. Converse stopped for a moment to look at it.

“What?” Jill Percy asked.

“Nothing. I was trying to think of a moral.”

He could not think of a moral. It reminded him of the lizards smashed on his hotel wall.

In his office just off the tiny lobby of the Hotel Coligny, Monsieur Colletti was watching “Bonanza” on the Armed Forces Television Network. Monsieur Colletti had taken eight pipes of opium during the afternoon; he had taken eight pipes of opium every afternoon for forty years. When Converse entered, he turned from the set with a welcoming smile. He was the most courteous of men. Con verse and Monsieur Colletti watched “Bonanza” for a while.

On the screen, two cowboys were exchanging rifle fire at a distance of thirty meters or so. They were fighting among enormous rounded boulders, and as far as one could tell each was trying to move as close to the other as possible. One cowboy was handsome, the other ugly. There was music. At length, the handsome cowboy surprised the ugly one loading his weapon. The ugly cowboy threw his rifle down and attempted to draw a sidearm. The handsome one blew him away.

Monsieur Colletti, who spoke no English, brought his palms together silently. “Hoopla,” he said.

“It’s the same in Saigon,” Converse ventured. Monsieur Colletti always seemed to understand his French.

Monsieur Colletti shrugged.

“Here, sure. Everywhere it’s the same now.” Monsieur Colletti had been everywhere. “Everywhere it’s Chicago.”

He said it Sheeka-go.

“There was a bomb tonight,” Converse said. “At the office of taxes. It’s all ruined there.”

Monsieur Colletti made his eyes grow larger in an expression of surprise that was purely formal. It was not easy to bring him news of Saigon.

“But no,” he protested mildly. “Any dead?”

“Some, certainly. Outside.”

“Ah,” the patron said, “it’s cruel. They’re bastards.”

“You think it was the Front?”

“These days,” Colletti said, “it could be anybody.”

When “Bonanza” was over, they shook hands and Con

verse went upstairs. Back inside his room, he turned on the overhead fan and the air conditioner. The air conditioner did not work very well but it provided a busy and, to the American ear, vaguely reassuring noise which drowned out the sounds from the street. The sounds from the street were not reassuring to anyone’s ear.

He switched on the lamp on his writing desk to provide his room with the most agreeable cast of light. Small tricks, picked up all over. He took a bottle of PX Johnnie Walker Black Label from a locked suitcase and drank two large swallows.

There it is, he said to himself. That was what everyone said — GIs, reporters, even Arvins and bar girls. There it is. It would have been good not to have had a bomb that night. To get stoned with the Percys and then sleep. Because of the bomb he felt numb and stupid, and although there were situations in which stupidity would do almost as well as anything else, he was not in one of them.

And getting drunk wouldn’t do. Nor would smoking more grass. Better to have stayed downstairs and watched more Westerns with Monsieur Colletti.

In his own despite, he took another swallow of whiskey, lit a Park Lane, and began to walk up and down the length of the room. In the next room, the Dutch flower-lover was playing “Highway 61” on his tape recorder. After a few tokes, he decided that he was experiencing no more than a vague dissatisfaction.

Nothing serious. See them all the time. Side effect of low-grade fever.

After a while, he stopped pacing and went across the air shaft to the bathroom to squat over the hole. The hole had treaded foot grips beside it to put your feet on; it was a vestige of the Mission Civilatrice. Unlike some American guests, Converse did not object to using the hole. Often, especially if he was high, using it made him feel as though he were entering into communion with the tight-lipped dun of vanished France Ultra-Mer — the pilots of Saint-Exupery, General Salan, Malraux. Sometimes he whistled “Non, J’ne regret rien” as he left the toilet.

Straining, trembling with the fever stirred in his intestines, Converse took his wife’s letter from his trouser pocket and began to reread it.

“Re Cosa Nostra — why the hell not? I’m prepared to take chances at this point and I don’t respond to the moral objections. The way things are set up the people concerned have nothing good coming to them and we’ll just be occupying a place that someone else will fill fast enough if they get the chance. I can’t think of a way of us getting money where the money would be harder earned and I think that makes us entitled.”

Perhaps, Converse thought, as he managed the business of the banknote-sized toilet paper and washed his hands, perhaps the vague dissatisfaction was a moral objection.

Back across the air shaft, he secured the rusty double locks and took another swallow of Scotch. When Converse wrote thoughtful pieces for the small European publications which employed him, he was always careful to assume a standpoint from which moral objections could be inferred. He knew the sort of people he was addressing and he knew the sort of moral objections they found most satisfying. Since his journey to Cambodia, he had experienced a certain difficulty in responding to moral objections but it seemed to him that he knew a good deal about them.

There were moral objections to children being blown out of sleep to death on a filthy street. And to their being burned to death by jellied petroleum. There were moral objections to house lizards being senselessly butchered by madmen. And moral objections to people spending their lives shooting scag.

He stood facing the wall where the lizard stains were, rubbing the back of his neck.

Everyone felt these things. Everyone must, or the value of human life would decline. It was important that the value of human life not decline.

Converse had once accompanied Ian Percy to a color film made by the U.N. soil conservation people about the eradication of termites. In a country that looked something like Nam, where there was elephant grass and red earth and palm trees, the local soldiery drove over the grasslands with bulldozers, destroying immense conical termite colonies. There was a reason, as he remembered; the mounds caused erosion or the termites ate crops or people’s houses. The termites were doing something bad. When the colonial mounds were overturned, termites came burrowing up from the ruins in frantic tens of thousands, flourishing their pincers in futile motions of defense. Soldiers with flame throwers came behind the bulldozers scorching the earth and burning the termites and their eggs to black cinders.

Watching the film, one felt something very like a moral objection. But the moral objection was overridden. People were more important than termites.

So moral objections were sometimes overridden by larger and more profound concerns. One had to take the long view. It was also true that at a certain point the view might become too long and moral objections appear irrelevant. To view things at such length was an error. The human reference point must be maintained.

Really, Converse thought, I know all about this. He pressed his thumb against the wall and removed a dry particle of reptile spine from its cool surface. It was an error to take the long view in the face of moral objections. And it was an error to insist on moral objections when they were overridden. If one is well grounded in youth, the object of love and sound toilet training, these things become second nature.

In the red field, when the fragmentation bombs were falling out of what appeared to be a perfectly empty blue sky, he had experienced no moral objections at all.

The last moral objection that Converse experienced in the traditional manner had been his reaction to the Great Elephant Zap of the previous year. That winter, the Military Advisory Command, Vietnam, had decided that elephants were enemy agents because the NVA used them to carry things, and there had ensued a scene worthy of the Ramayana. Many-armed, hundred-headed MACV had sent forth steel-bodied flying insects to destroy his enemies, the elephants. All over the country, whooping sweating gunners descended from the cloud cover to stampede the herds and mow them down with 7.62-millimeter machine guns.

The Great Elephant Zap had been too much and had disgusted everyone. Even the chopper crews who remembered the day as one of insane exhilaration had been somewhat appalled. There was a feeling that there were limits.

And as for dope, Converse thought, and addicts — if the world is going to contain elephants pursued by flying men, people are just naturally going to want to get high.

So there, Converse thought, that’s the way it’s done. He had confronted a moral objection and overridden it. He could deal with these matters as well as anyone.

But the vague dissatisfaction remained and it was not loneliness or a moral objection; it was, of course, fear. Fear was extremely important to Converse; morally speaking it was the basis of his life. It was the medium through which he perceived his own soul, the formula through which he could confirm his own existence. I am afraid, Converse reasoned, therefore I am.