Time to Hunt

CHAPTER ONE

It was unseasonably hot that spring, and Washington languished under the blazing sun. The grass was brown and lusterless, the traffic thick, the citizens surly and uncivil; even the marble monuments and the white government buildings seemed squalid. It was as though a torpor hung over the place, or a curse. Nobody in official Washington went to parties anymore; it was a time of bitterness and recrimination.

And it was a time of siege. The city was in fact under attack. The process the president called “Vietnamization” wasn’t happening fast enough for the armies of peace demonstrators who regularly assailed the city’s parks and byways, shutting it down or letting it live, pretty much unchecked and pretty much as they saw fit. This month already, the Vietnam Veterans for Peace had commandeered the steps of the Capitol, showering them with a bitter rain of medals; more action was planned for the beginning of May, when the May Tribe of the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice had sworn to close down the city once again, this time for a whole week.

In all the town there was only one section of truly green grass. Some would look upon it and see in the green a last living symbol of American honor, a last best hope. Others would say the green was artificial, like so much of America: it was sustained by the immense labor of exploited workers, who had no choice in the matter. This is what we are changing, they would say.

The green grass was the parade ground, or in the patois of a service which holds fast to the conceit that all land structures are merely extensions of and metaphorical representations of the ships of the fleet, the “parade deck” of the Marine Barracks, at Eighth and I, Southeast. The young enlisted men labored over it as intensely as any cathedral gardeners, for, to the Jesuitical minds of the United States Marine Corps, at any rate, it was holy ground.

The barracks, built in 1801, was the oldest continuously occupied military installation in the United States. Even the British dared not burn it when they put the rest of the city to the torch in 1814. To look across the deck to the officers’ houses on one side, the structures that housed three companies (Alpha, Bravo and Hotel, for headquarters) on the other, and the commandant’s house at the far end of the quadrangle was to see, preserved, a pristine version of what service in the Corps and service to the country theoretically meant.

The ancient bricks were red and the architecture had sprung from an age in which design was pride in order. Conceived as a fort in a ruder and more violent age, it had taken on, with the maturity of its foliage and the replacement of its muddy lanes with cobblestone, the aspect of an old Ivy League campus. An unironic flag flew above it at the end of a high mast; red, white, blue, rippling in the wind, unashamed. It had a passionate nineteenth century feel to it; it was somehow an encomium of manifest destiny, built on a little chunk of land that was almost an independent duchy of the United States Marine Corps, stuck a mile and a half from and on the same hill as the Capitol, where the unruly processes of democracy were currently being strained to the utmost.

Now, on a particularly hot, bright April day, under that beating sun, young men drilled or loafed, as the authorities permitted.

In the shade at the corner of Troop Walk and the South Arcade, seven men — boys, actually — squatted and smoked. They wore the uniform called undressed blues, which consisted of blue trousers, a tan gabardine short-sleeved shirt open at the neck, and white hat — “cover,” as the Corps called hats — pulled low over their eyes. The only oddity in their appearance, which to the casual eye separated them from other Marines, was their oxfords, which were not merely shined but spit-shined, and gleamed dazzlingly. The spit shine was a fetish in their culture. Now the young Marines were on a break and, naturally, PFC Crowe, the team comedian, was explaining the nature of things.

“See,” he explained to his audience, as he sucked on a Marlboro, “it’ll look great on a résumé. I tell ’em, I was in this elite unit. I needed a top-secret security clearance. We trained and rehearsed for our missions, and then when we went on them, in the hot, sweltering weather, men dropped all around me. But I kept going, goddammit. I was a hero, a goddamn hero. Of course what I don’t tell them is, I’m talking about … parades.”

He was rewarded with appropriate blasts of laughter from his cohorts, who regarded him as an amusing and generally harmless character. He had an uncle who was a congressman’s chief fund-raiser, which accounted for his presence in Company B, the body-bearer company, as opposed to more rigorous and dangerous duties in WES PAC, as the orders always called it, or what the young Marines had termed the Land of Bad Things. He had no overwhelming desire to go to the Republic of South Vietnam.

Indeed, in all of Second Casket Team, only one of the seven had seen service in RSVN. This was the noncommissioned officer in charge, Corporal Donny Fenn, twenty-two, of Ajo, Arizona. Donny, a large and almost freakishly handsome blond kid with a year of college behind him, had spent seven months in another B Company, 1/9 Bravo, attached to the III Marine Amphibious Force, in operations near and around An Hoa in I Corps. He had been shot at many times and hit once, in the lungs, for which he was hospitalized for six months. He also had something called, uh, he would mumble, uh, brnzstr, and not look you in the eye.

But now Donny was short. That is, he had just under thirteen months left to serve and by rumor, at any rate, that meant the Corps would not in its infinite wisdom ship him back to the Land of Bad Things. This was not because the Corps loved his young ass. No, it was because the tour of duty in ’Nam was thirteen calendar months, and if you sent anyone over with less than thirteen calendar months, it hopelessly muddied the tidiness of the records, so upsetting to the anal-retentive minds of personnel clerks. So for all intents and purposes, Donny had made it safely through the central conflict of his age.

“All right,” he said, checking his watch as its second hand hurtled toward 1100 to signify the end of break, “put ’em out and strip ’em. Put the filters in your pockets, that is if you’re a faggot who smokes filtered cigarettes. If I see any butts out here, I’ll PT your asses until morning muster.”

The troops grunted, but obeyed. Of course they knew he didn’t mean it; like them, he was no lifer. Like them, he’d go back to the world.

So as would any listless group of young men in so pitiless an institution as the Marine Corps, they got with the program with something less than total enthusiasm. It was another day at Eighth and I, another day of operations on the parade deck when they weren’t on alert or serving cemetery duty: up at 0-dark-30, an hour of PT at 0600, morning muster at 0700, chow at 0800, and by 0930, the beginning of long, sometimes endless hours of drill, either of the funeral variety or of the riot-control variety. Then the duty day was done: those who had assignments did them, and otherwise the boys could secure (the married could live off base with wives; many of the unmarried shared unofficial cheap places available on Capitol Hill) or lounge about, playing pool, drinking 3.2 in the enlisted men’s bar or going to the movies on the Washington PX circuit or even trying their luck with women in the bars of Capitol Hill.

But the luck was always bad, a source of much bitterness. This was only partially because Marines were thought of as baby killers. The real reason was hair: it was, in the outside world, the era of hair. Men wore their locks long and puffed up, usually overwhelming their ears in the process. The poor jarheads — and all the ceremonial troopers of the Military District of Washington — were expected to be acolytes to the temple of military discipline. Thus they offered nearly naked skulls to the world — white sidewalls, it was called — except for a permitted patch no more than three-quarters of an inch up top. Their ears stood out like radar bowls. Some of them looked like Howdy Doody, and no self-respecting hippie chick would deign spit at them, and since all American girls had become hippie chicks, they were, in Crowe’s memorable term, shit out of luck.

“Gloves on,” Donny commanded, and his men, as they rose, pulled on their white gloves.

Donny started them through another long fifty minutes of casket drill. As body bearers, all were on the husky side. As body bearers, none could make a mistake. It seemed meaningless, but a few — Donny, for one — understood that they did in fact have an important job: to anesthetize the pain of death with stultifying ritual. They had to hide the actual fact — there was a boy in the box going into the ground of Arlington National Cemetery forever, years before his time, and to what end? — with pomp and precision. And Donny, though an easygoing guy in most respects, was determined that in this one aspect, they would be the best.

So the team turned to, under his guidance and soft but forcefully uttered commands: they walked through the precisely choreographed steps by which a flag-draped box of boy was smartly removed from the hearse, which in the rehearsal was only a steel rack, aligned by its bearers, carried with utter calm dignity to the grave site, laid upon a bier. Next came the tricky flag folding: the flag was snapped off the box by six pairs of disciplined hands and, beginning with the man at the boot of the casket, broken into a triangle which grew thicker with each rigid fold as it passed from man to man. If the folding went right, what was finally deposited in Corporal Fenn’s hands was a perfect triangle, a tricorn, festooned on either side with stars, with no red stripe showing anywhere. This was not easy, and it took weeks for a good team to get it right and even longer to break in a new guy.

At this point, Corporal Fenn took the triangle of stars, marched with stiff precision to the seated mother or father or whoever, and in his white gloves presented it to her. An odd moment, always: some recipients were too stunned to respond. Some were too shattered to notice. Some were awkward, some even a little starstruck, for a Marine as good-looking as Donny, with a chestful of medals hanging heavily from his dress tunic, his hair gone, his hat as white as his gloves, his dignity impenetrable, his theater craft immaculate, is indeed an awesome sight — almost like a movie star — and that charisma frequently cut through the grief of the moment. One broken mom even took his picture with an Instamatic as he approached.

But on this run-through, the corporal was not pleased with the performance of his squad. Of course it was PFC Crowe, not the best man on the team.

“All right, Crowe,” he said, after the sweat-soaked boys had stood down from the ritual, “I saw you. You were out of step on the walk-to and you were half a beat behind on the left face-out of the wagon.”

“Ah,” said Crowe, searching for a quip to memorialize the moment, “my damn knee. It’s the junk I picked up at Khe Sahn.”

This did bring a chuckle, for as close as Crowe had come to Khe Sahn was reading about it in the New Haven Register.

“I forgot you were such a hero,” Donny said. “So only drop and give me twenty-five, not fifty. Out of commemoration for your great sacrifice.”

Crowe muttered darkly but harmlessly and the other team members drew back to give him room to perform his absolution. He peeled off his gloves, dropped to the prone and banged out twenty-five Marine-regulation push-ups. The last six were somewhat sloppy.

“Excellent,” said Donny. “Maybe you’re not a girl after all. All right, let’s—”

But at this moment, the company commander’s orderly, the bespectacled PFC Welch, suddenly appeared at Donny’s right shoulder.

“Hey, Corporal,” he whispered, “CO wants to see you.”

Shit, thought Donny, what the hell have I done now?

“Ohhh,” somebody sang, “somebody’s in trouble.”

“Hey, Donny, maybe they’re going to give you another medal.”

“It’s his Hollywood contract, it’s finally come.”

“You know what it’s about?” asked Donny of Welch, who was a prime source of scuttlebutt.

“No idea. Some Navy guys, that’s all I know. It’s ASAP, though.”

“I’m on my way. Bascombe, you take over. Another twenty minutes. Focus on the face-out of the hearse that seems to have Crowe so baffled. Then take ’em to chow. I’ll catch up when I can.”

“Yes, Corporal.”

Donny straightened his starched shirt, adjusted the gig line, wondered if he had time to change shirts, decided he didn’t, and took off.

He headed across the parade deck, passing among other drilling Marines. The showboats of Company A, the silent drill rifle team, were going through their elaborate pantomime; the color guard people were mastering the intricacies of flag work; another platoon had moved on to riot control and was stomping furiously down Troop Walk, bent double under combat gear.

Donny reached Center Walk, turned and headed into the barracks proper, only crossing paths with half a dozen officers in the salute-crazed Corps and having to toss up a stiff right hand for their response. He entered the building, turned right and went through the open hatch — Marine for “door” — and down the hall. It was dark and the gleamy swirls of good buffer work on the wax of the linoleum shone up at him. Along the green government bulkheads were photos of various Marine activities supplied by an aggressive Public Information Office for morale purposes, at which they utterly failed. At last, he turned into the door marked COMMANDING OFFICER, and under that CAPTAIN M. C. DOGWOOD, USMC. The outer office was empty, because PFC Welch was still running errands.

“Fenn?” came the call from the inner office. “In here.”

Donny stepped into the office, a kind of ghostly crypt to the joint vanities of Marine machismo and bureaucratic efficiency, to discover the ramrod-stiff Captain Morton Dogwood sitting with a slender young man in the summer tans of a lieutenant commander in the Navy and an even younger man in an ensign’s uniform.

“Sir,” said Donny, going to attention, “Corporal Fenn reporting as ordered, sir.”

As he was unarmed, he did not salute.

“Fenn, this is Commander Bonson and Ensign Weber,” said Dogwood.

“Sirs,” said Donny to the naval officers.

“Commander Bonson and his associate are from the Naval Investigative Service,” said Dogwood.

Oh, shit, thought Donny.

The room was dark, the shades drawn. The captain’s meager assembly of service medals hung in a frame on the wall behind him, as well as an announcement of his degree in International Finance from George Washington University. His desk was shiny and almost clear except for the polished 105mm howitzer shell that had been cut down to a paper clip cup and was everybody’s souvenir from service in RSVN, and pictures of a pretty wife and two baby girls.

“Sit down, Fenn,” said Bonson, not looking up from documents he was studying, which, as Donny saw, were his own jacket, or personnel records.

“Aye, aye, sir,” said Donny. He found a chair and set himself into it stiffly, facing the three men who seemed to hold his destiny in their hands. Outside, the shouts of drill came through the windows; outside it was bright and hot and the day was filled with duty. Donny felt in murky waters here; what the hell was this all about?

“Good record,” said Bonson. “Excellent job in country. Good record here in the barracks. Your hitch is up when, Fenn?”

“Sir, May seventy-two.”

“Hate to see you leave, Fenn. The Corps needs good men like you.”

“Yes, sir,” said Donny, wondering if this was some — no, no, it couldn’t be a recruiting pitch. NIS was the Navy and the Corps’s own, tinny version of the FBI: they investigated, they didn’t recruit. “I’m engaged to be married. I’ve already been accepted back at the University of Arizona.”

“What will you study?” asked the commander.

“Sir, pre-law, I think.”

“You know, Fenn, you’ll probably get out a corporal. Rank is hard to come by in the Corps, because it’s so small and there just aren’t the positions available, no matter the talent and the commitment.”

“Yes, sir,” said Donny.

“Only about eight percent of four-year enlistees come out higher than corporal. That is, as a sergeant or higher.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Fenn, think how it would help your law career if you made sergeant. You’d be one of an incredibly small number of men to do so. You’d truly be in an elite.”

“Ah—” Donny hardly knew what to say.

“The officers have a tremendous opportunity for you, Fenn,” said Captain Dogwood. “You’d do well to hear them out.”

“Yes, sir,” said Donny.

“Corporal Fenn, we have a leak. A bad leak. We want you to plug it.”

“A leak, sir?” said Donny.

“Yes. You know we have sources into most of the major peace groups. And you’ve heard rumors that on May Day, they’re going to try to shut the city down and bring the war to a halt by destroying the head of the machine.”

Rumors like that flew through the air. The Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, SNICC, they were going to close down Washington, levitate the Pentagon or bury it in rose petals, break into the armories and lead armed insurrection. It just meant that Bravo Company was always on alert status and nobody could get any serious liberty time.

“I’ve heard.” His girlfriend was headed in for the May Day weekend. It would be great to see her, if he wasn’t stuck on alert or, worse, sleeping under a desk in some building near the White House.

“Well, it’s true. May Day. The communist holiday. They have the biggest mobilization of the war planned. They really mean to close us down and keep us closed down.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Our job is simple,” said Lieutenant Commander Bonson. “It’s to stop them.”

Such determination in the man’s voice, even a little tremble. His eyes seemed to burn with old-fashioned Iwo Jima-style zeal. At the same time, Donny couldn’t help notice the lack of an RSVN service ribbon on the khaki of his chest.

“Remember November?” asked Bonson.

“Yes, sir,” said Donny, and indeed he did. It stuck in his mind, not the whole thing, really, but one ludicrous moment.

It was late, near 2400, midnight in the American soul, and the Marines of Bravo in full combat gear were filing into the Treasury Building, adjacent to the White House, for protective duties against the possibilities of the next morning in a city where 200,000 angry kids had camped on the mall. A bone-dry moon shone above; the weather was crisp but not yet brutal. The Marines debarked from their trucks, holding their M14s at the high port, bayonets fixed, but still wearing their metal scabbards.

As Donny led his men downward toward the entrance, his eye was caught by light and he looked up. The abutment at the end of the ramp was brick and, being situated between the oh-so-white White House on the left and the oh-so-dark Treasury on the right, yielded a perspective on Pennsylvania Avenue, where the architects of the crusade for peace had organized a silent candlelight vigil.

So one line of young Americans carried rifles into a government building, under tin pots and thirty-five pounds of gear, while twenty-odd feet above them, at a perfect right angle, another line of young Americans filed along the deserted street, cupping candles, the light of which weirdly illuminated and flickered on their tender faces. Donny’s epiphany came at that moment: no matter what the fiery lifers said or the screaming-head peaceniks, both groups of Americans were pretty much the same.

“Yes, sir,” said Donny. “I remember.”

“Were you aware, Corporal, that radical elements anticipated the movements of only one military unit, Company B of Marine Barracks, and that just by the hairiest of coincidences did a Washington policeman discover a bomb that was set to take out the phone junction into the Treasury, thereby effectively cutting off B Company and leaving the White House and the president defenseless? Think of it, Corporal. Defenseless!”

He seemed to get a weird charge out of saying Defenseless!, his nostrils flaring, his eyes lit up.

Donny had no idea what to say. He hadn’t heard a thing about a bomb in a phone junction.

“How did they know you were there? How did they know that’s where you’d be?” demanded the lieutenant commander.

It occurred to Donny: There are two buildings next to the White House. One is the Executive Office Building, one is the Treasury. If you were going to move troops in, wouldn’t you move them into one of the two buildings? Where else could they be?

“I don’t—” he stammered and almost ended his career right there by blowing up in a big laugh.

“That’s when my team began to investigate. That’s when NIS got on the case!” proclaimed the lieutenant commander.

“Yes, sir.”

“We’ve run exhaustive background checks on everyone in the three line companies at the Marine Barracks. And we think we’ve found our man.”

Donny was dumbfounded. Then he began to get pissed.

“Sir, I thought we were already investigated for clearances before we came into the unit.”

“Yes, but it’s a sloppy process. One investigator handles a hundred clearances a week. Things get through. Now, let me ask you something. What would you say if I told you one member of your company had an illegal off-base apartment and was known to room with members of a well-known peace initiative?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“This PFC Edgar M. Crowe.”

Crowe! Of course it would be Crowe.

Ensign Weber spoke up, reading from documents.

“Crowe maintains an apartment at 2311 C Street, Southwest. There he cohabits a room with one Jeffrey Goldenberg, a graduate student at the Northwestern University Medill Newsroom in Washington. Crowe is no ordinary grunt, you know, Fenn. He’s a Yale dropout who only came into the Corps because his uncle had connections to a congressman who could make certain he’d never go to Vietnam.”

“Think of that, Fenn,” said Commander Bonson. “You’re over there getting your butt shot off, and he’s back here marching in parades and giving up intelligence to the peace freaks.”

Crowe: of course. Perpetual fuck-up, smart guy, goof-off, his furious intelligence hidden behind a burning ambition to be just good enough not to get rotated out, but not really good in the larger sense.

Still, Crowe: he was a punk, an unformed boy, he seemed no different than any of them. He was a kid just out of his teens, mixed up by the temptations and confusions of a tempting, confusing age.

“We know you, Fenn,” said the lieutenant commander. “You’re the only man in the company who enjoys the universal respect of both the career-track Marines who’ve done Vietnam and the boys who are just here to avoid Vietnam. They all like you. So we have an assignment for you. If you bring it off, and I know in my military mind that there’s no possibility you won’t, you will finish your hitch in twelve days a full E-5 buck sergeant in the United States Marine Corps. That I guarantee you.”

Donny nodded. He didn’t like this a bit.

“I want you to become Crowe’s new best friend. You’re his buddy, his pal, his father confessor. Flatter him with the totality of your attentions. Hang out with him. Go to his peace creep parties, get to know his long-haired friends. Get drunk with him. He’ll tell you things, a little at first, then more as time goes on. He’ll give up all his secrets. He’s probably so proud of himself and his little game he’s dying to brag about it and show you what a smart boy he is. Get us enough material to move against him before he gives up the unit on May Day. We’ll send him to Portsmouth for a very long time. He’ll come out an old man.”

Bonson sat back.

There it was, before Donny. What was most palpable was what had not been said. Suppose he didn’t do it? What would happen to him? Where would they send him?

“I don’t really — sir, I’m not trained in intelligence work. I’m not sure I could bring this off.”

“Fenn is a very straightforward Marine,” said Captain Dogwood. “He’s a hardworking, gung-ho young man. He’s not a spy.”

Donny could see that the captain’s interjection deeply irritated Lieutenant Commander Bonson, but Bonson said nothing, just stared furiously at Donny in the dark office.

“You have two weeks,” he finally said. “We’ll be monitoring you and expect a sitrep every other day. There’s a lot at stake, a lot of people counting on you. There’s the honor of the service and duty to country to consider.”

Donny swallowed and hated himself for it.

“You know, you have it pretty good here yourself,” said Bonson, to Donny’s silence. “You have a room in the barracks, not in the squad bay, a very pleasant duty station, a very pleasant duty day. You’re in Washington, DC. It’s spring. You’re going back to college, a decorated hero with all those veteran’s benefits, plus a Bronze Star and a nice chunk of rank. I’d say few young men in America have it quite as made as you.”

“Yes, sir,” said Donny.

“What the commander is saying,” said Ensign Weber, “is that it can all go away. In a flash. Orders can be cut. You could be back slogging the paddies in Vietnam, the shit flying all around you. It’s been known to happen. A guy so short suddenly finds himself in extremely hazardous duty. Well, you know the stories. He had a day to go and he got zapped. Letters to his mother, stories in the paper, the horror of it all. The worst luck in the world, poor guy. But sometimes, that’s the way it goes.”

More silence in the room.

Donny did not want to go back to Vietnam. He had done his time there, he’d gotten hit. He remembered the fear he felt, the sheer immense, lung-crushing density of it, the first time incoming began exploding the world around him. He hated the squalor, the waste, the sheer murder of it. He hated having his real life so close and then taken from him. He hated the prospect of not seeing Julie ever, ever again. He thought of some peace nerd comforting her after he was gone, and knew how that one would play out.

Almost imperceptibly, he nodded.

“Great,” said Bonson. “You’ve made the right decision.”

CHAPTER TWO

He stood outside, feeling idiotic. Rock music pumped out from inside. Inside it was loud, bright, crowded, festive. He felt so stupid.

He turned. There was Ensign Weber in the Ford, parked across the way on C Street. Weber nodded encouragingly, gave a little whisking motion with his head as if to say, Go on, get going, goddammit.

So now Donny stood outside the Hawk and Dove, a well-known Capitol Hill watering hole, where the young men and women who ran, opposed or chronicled the war tended to gather after six when official Washington closed down, except for the few old men in isolated offices waiting for the latest news on the air strikes or casualty figures.

It was a beautiful night, temperate and soothing. Donny was dressed in cutoffs, Jack Purcells, a madras shirt, just like half the kids who’d entered the place since he’d been standing there, except that unlike them, his ears stood out and his head wore only a little topside platter of hair. It said jarhead all the way.

But it was the Hawk and Dove where PFC Crowe was known to hang, and so it was at the Hawk and Dove he had been deposited.

Christ, Donny thought again, looking back to Weber and getting another of the whisking motions with the head.

He turned and plunged inside.

The place, as expected, was dark and close and jammed. Rock music pummeled against the walls. It sounded like Buffalo Springfield: There’s a man with a gun over there, what it is ain’t exactly clear — something like that, vaguely familiar to Donny.

Everybody was smoking and cruising. There seemed to be a sense of sex in the air as people eyed one another in the darkness, the pretty young girls from the Hill, the slim young men from the Hill. Nearly all the guys had big puffs of hair, but now and then he spied the whitewalls or at least the very short haired look of the military. Yet there wasn’t much tension; it was as if everybody just put it aside, left it outside for a generous helping of tribal bonding, the young not having to show anything at all in here to the murderous, controlling old.

Donny squeezed to the bar, ordered a Bud, forked over a buck and remembered, “Keep all your receipts. You can expense this. Our office will pick it up. But nothing hard. Bonson will fucking freak if you start chugging Pinch.”

“I’ve never even tasted Pinch,” Donny had replied. “Maybe tonight’s the night.”

“That’s a big negative,” said Weber.

Donny sipped his beer. Beside him, a guy was in the middle of a bitter fight with a girl. It was one of those quiet, muttered things, but very intense. The boy kept saying, under his breath, “You idiot. You unbelievable idiot. How could you let him? Him! How could you let him? You idiot.”

The girl merely stared ahead and smoked.

The time passed. His instructions were clear. He was not to approach Crowe. That would be a mistake. Sooner or later Crowe would see him, Crowe would approach him, and then it would go where it would go. If he threw himself at Crowe, the whole damned thing would fall apart.

Donny had another beer, checked his watch. He scoped the action. There were some attractive chicks but none as cool as Julie, the girl to whom he was engaged. Man, he smiled, I still got the best.

It was the football hero-cheerleader thing, but not really. Yes, he was a football hero. Yes, she was a cheerleader. But he didn’t really like football and she didn’t really like cheerleading. They actually were sort of forced together as boyfriend and girlfriend by peer pressure at Pima County High School, found they didn’t really like each other very much, and broke up. Once they broke up and started hanging out with other people, they missed each other. One night they went on a double date, he with Peggy Martin, Julie’s best friend, and she with Mike Willis, his best friend. And that was the night they really connected. Junior year. The war was far away then, happening on TV. Firefights in places like Bien Hoa and I Drang that he had never heard of. The napalm floating off the Phantoms and wobbling downward to blossom in a huge smear of tumbling fire across the jungle canopy. It meant nothing. Donny and Julie went everywhere that year. They were inseparable. It was, he thought, the best summer of his life, but senior year was better, when he’d led the Southwest Counties League in yardage, averaging close to two hundred a game. He was big and fast. Julie was so beautiful but she was nice, somehow. She was so nice. She was … good was the only word he could think of, and it was so lame.

“Jesus Christ!”

Donny felt a hand on his shoulder as the words exploded into his ear. He turned.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

Of course it was Crowe, in jeans and a work shirt looking very proletariat. He had — where the hell did he get that? — a camouflaged boonie cap on to disguise his hairlessness. He held a beer in his hand and was with three other young men who looked exactly like him except their hair was real, and long. They looked like three Jesuses.

“Crowe,” said Donny.

“I didn’t know this was your kind of place,” said Crowe.

“It’s a place. They have beer. What the fuck else would I need?” Donny said.

“This is my corporal,” Crowe said to his pals. “He’s a genuine USMC hero. He’s actually killed guys. But he’s a good guy. He only made me drop for twenty-five today instead of fifty.”

“Crowe, if you’d learn your shit, you wouldn’t have to drop for any.”

“But then I’d be collaborating.”

“Oh, I see. Fucking up funerals is part of your guerrilla war on the grieving mothers of America.”

“No, no, I’m only joking. But the funny thing is, I can’t tell my left from my right. I really can’t.”

“It’s port and starboard in the Marine Corps,” said Donny.

“I don’t know them either. Well, anyway. You want to join us? Tell these guys about ‘Nam?”

“Oh, they don’t want to hear.”

“No, really,” one of the other kids said. “Man, it must be fucking hairy óver there.”

“He won a Bronze Star,” said Crowe with a surprising measure of pride. “He was a hero.”

“I was lucky as shit not to get wasted,” Donny said. “No, no war stories. Sorry.”

“Look, we’re going to a party. We know this guy, he’s having a big party. You want to come, Corporal?”

“Crowe, call me Donny off duty. And you’re Ed.”

“Eddie and Donny!”

“That’s it.”

“Come on, Donny. Chicks everywhere. It’s over on C, right near the Supreme Court. This guy is a clerk. He knew my big brother at Harvard. More pussy in one place than you ever saw.”

“You should come, Donny,” said one of the boys. Donny could tell that the hero thing had cut through politics and somehow impressed these war-haters, who just a few years back had been worshiping John Wayne.

“I’m engaged,” Donny said.

“You can look, can’t you? She’ll let you look, won’t she?”

“I suppose,” said Donny. “But I don’t want any Ho Chi Minh shit. Ho Chi Minh tried to kill my ass. He’s no hero of mine.”

“It won’t be like that,” Crowe promised.

“Trig will like him,” one of the boys said.

“Trig will turn him into a peacenik,” said the other.

“So who’s Trig?” said Donny.

It was a short walk and as soon as they were outside, one of the boys pulled out a joint and lit up. The thing was routinely passed around until it came to Donny, who hesitated for a moment, then took a toke, holding it, fighting the fire. He’d had quite the habit for a few months in ’Nam, but had broken it. Now, the familiar sweetness rushed into his lungs, and his head began to buzz. The world seem to come aglow with possibility. He exhaled his lungful.

Enough, he thought. I don’t need more of that shit.

Capitol Hill had the sense of a small town in Iowa, under leafy trees that rustled in the night breeze. Then, through a break in the trees, he suddenly saw the Capitol, its huge white dome arc-lit and blazing in the night.

“They sacrifice virgins in there,” one of the boys said, “to the gods of war. Every night. You can hear them scream.”

Maybe it was the grass, but Donny had to smile. They did sacrifice virgins, but not in there. They sacrificed them ten thousand miles away in buffalo shit-water rice paddies.

“Donny,” said Crowe. “Can you call in artillery? We have to destroy the place to save it.”

Again, maybe it was the grass.

“ ‘Ah, Shotgun-Zulu-Three,’ ” he improvised, “ ‘I have a fire mission for you, map grid four-niner-six, six-five-four at Alpha seven-oh-two-five, we are hot with beaucoup bad guys, request Hotel Echo, fire for effect, please.’ ”

“Cool,” one of the kids said. “What’s Hotel Echo?”

“High explosive,” said Donny. “As opposed to frags or white phosphorous.”

“Cool as shit!” the boy responded.

Music announced the site of the party far earlier than any visual confirmation. As at the Hawk and Dove, it blasted out into the night, hard, psychedelic rock beating the dark back and the devil away. He’d heard the same stuff over there, though; that was the funny thing. The young Marines loved the rock. It went everywhere with them, and if their tough noncoms hadn’t stayed on their asses, they’d have played it on ambush patrols.

“I wonder if Trig is here,” one of the boys said.

“You never can tell with Trig,” Crowe replied.

“Who’s Trig?” Donny asked again.

The party didn’t seem at all unlike any other party Donny had attended back at the University of Arizona, except that the hair was longer. Milling people of all sorts. The bar scene, though crammed into smaller, hotter rooms. The smell of grass, sickly sweet, heavy in the air. Ho and Che on the walls. In the bathroom, where Donny went to piss, even an NVA flag, though one manufactured in Schenectady, not downtown Haiphong. He had a rogue impulse to burn it, but that would sure blow the gig now. And really: it was only a flag.

The kids were his own age, some younger, with a few middle-aged men hanging around with that intense, long-haired look that the DC crowd so liked. Judging from the hair, only he and Crowe represented the United States Marines, though Crowe was far from an ambassador. He was telling some people a familiar story of how he almost got out of the draft by playing psycho at his physical.

“I’m nude,” he was saying, “except for this cowboy hat. I’m very polite and everybody’s very polite to me at first. I do everything they ask me to do. I bend and spread, I carry my underwear in a little bag, I smile and call everybody sir. I just won’t take off my cowboy hat. ‘Uh, son, would you mind taking off that hat?’ ‘I can’t,’ I explain. ‘I’ll die if I take off my cowboy hat.’ See, the key is to stay polite. If you act nuts they know you’re faking. Pretty soon they got majors and generals and colonels and all screaming at me to take off my cowboy hat. I’m nude in this little room with all these guys, but I will not take off my cowboy hat. What a fuckin’ hero I am! What a John Wayne! They’re screaming and I’m just saying, ‘If I take off my cowboy hat, I’ll die.’ ”

“So you weren’t drafted?”

“Well, they kicked me out. It took weeks for the paperwork to catch up, and by that time, my uncle had cut a deal with the Man to get me into a slot in the Marines that wouldn’t rotate to the ’Nam. You know, when this is over, all those charges will be dropped. Nobody will care. We’ll write the whole thing off. That’s why anybody who lets themselves get wasted is a total moron. Like, for what?”

Good question, Donny wondered. For what? He tried to remember the boys in his platoon in 1/3 Bravo who’d gotten zapped in his seven months with them. It was hard. And who did you count? Did you count the guy who got hit by an Army truck in Saigon? Maybe his number was up. Maybe he would have gotten hit back on the street corner in Sheboygan. Would you count him? Donny didn’t know.

But you definitely had to count the kid — what was his name? what was his name? — who stepped on a Betty and got his chest shredded. That was the first one Donny remembered. He was such a new dick then. The guy just lay back. So much blood. People gathered around him, exactly in the way you weren’t supposed to, and he seemed remarkably calm before he died. But nobody read any letter home to Mom afterward in which he told everybody how great the platoon was and how they were fighting for democracy. They just zipped him up and left him. He remembered the face, not the name. A sort of porky kid. Pancakey face. Small eyes. Didn’t have to shave. What was his name?

Another one got hit by a rifle bullet. He screamed and bucked and yelled and nobody could quiet him. He seemed so indignant. It was so unfair! Well, it was unfair. Why me, he seemed to be asking his friends, why not you? He was thin and rangy, from Spokane. Didn’t talk much. Always kept his rifle clean. Was bowlegged. What was his name? Donny didn’t remember.

There were a few more, but nothing much. Donny hadn’t fought in any big battles or taken part in any big operations with dramatic code names that made the news. Mostly it was walking, scared every day you’d get jumped or you’d trip something off, or you’d just collapse under the weight of it. So much of it was boring, so much of it was dirty, so much of it was debasing. He didn’t want to go back. He knew that. Man, if you let them send you back at this late date, when units were being rotated back to the world all the time during “Vietnamization,” and you got wasted, you were a moron.

Suddenly someone bumped him hard.

“Oh, sorry,” he said, stepping back.

“Yeah, you are,” someone said.

Where had this action come from? There were three of them, but big like he was. Hair pouring from their heads, bright bands around their skulls, dressed in faded jeans and Army fatigue shirts.

“You’re the Marine asshole, right? The lifer?”

“I am a Marine,” he said. “And I’m probably an asshole. But I’m not a lifer.”

The three fixed him with unsteady glares. Their eyes burned with hate. One of them rocked a little, the team leader, with his fist wrapped tightly around the neck of a bottle of gin. He held it like a weapon.

“Yeah, my brother came back in a little sack because of lifer fucks like you,” he said.

“I’m very sorry for your brother,” said Donny.

“Asshole lifer got him greased so he could make lieutenant colonel.”

“Shit like that happens. Some joker wants a stripe so he sends his guys up the hill. He gets the stripe and they get the plastic bag.”

“Yeah, but it happens mainly ’cause assholes like you let it happen, ’cause you don’t have the fuckin’ guts to say no to the Man. If you had the guts to say no, the whole thing stops.”

“Did you say no to the Man?”

“I didn’t have to,” the boy said proudly. “I was 1-Y. I was out of it.”

Donny thought about explaining that it didn’t matter what your classification was, if you obeyed it, you were obeying orders and working for the Man. Some guys just got better orders than others. But then the boy took a step toward Donny, his face drunkenly pugnacious. He gripped the bottle even harder.

“Hey, I didn’t come here to fight,” said Donny. “I just drifted in with some guys.” He looked around to find himself in the center of a circle of staring kids. Even the music had stopped and the smoke had ceased seething in the air. Crowe had, of course, totally disappeared.

“Well, you drifted into the wrong fucking party, man,” said the boy, and made as if to take another step, as Donny tried to figure out whether to pop him or to cut and run to avoid the hassle.

But suddenly another figure dipped between them.

“Whoa,” he said, “my brothers, my brothers, let’s not lose our holy cools.”

“He’s a fucking—” said the aggressor.

“He’s another kid; you can’t blame the whole thing on him any more than you can blame it on anyone. It’s the System, don’t you get that? Jesus, don’t you get anything?”

“Yeah, well, you have to start somewhere.”

“Jerry, you cool out. Go smoke a joint or something, man. I’m not letting any three guys with booze bottles jump any poor grunt who came by looking to get laid.”

“Trig, I—”

But this Trig laid a hand on Jerry’s chest and fixed him with a glare hot enough to melt most things on earth, and Jerry stepped back, swallowed and looked at his pals.

“Fuck it,” he finally said. “We were splitting anyhow.”

And the three of them turned and stormed out.

Suddenly the music started again — Stones, “Satisfaction” — and the party came back to life.

“Hey, thanks,” said Donny. “The last thing I need is a fight.”

“That’s okay,” said his new friend. “I’m Trig Carter, by the way.” He put out a hand.

Trig had one of those long, grave faces, where the bones showed through the tight skin and the eyes seemed to be both moist and hot at the same moment. He really looked a lot like Jesus in a movie. There was something radiant in the way he fixed you with his eyes. He had something rare: immediate likability.

“Howdy,” Donny said, surprised the grip was so strong in a man so thin. “My name’s Fenn, Donny Fenn.”

“I know. You’re Crowe’s secret hero. The Bravo.”

“Oh, Christ. I can’t be a hero to him. I’m in it till my hitch ends, then I’m gone forever back to the land of the cacti and the Navajo.”

“I’ve been there. Mourning doves, right? Little white birds, dart through the arroyos and the brush, really hard to spot, really fast?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Donny. “My dad and I used to hunt them. You’ve got to use a real light shot, you know, an eight or a nine. Even then, it’s a tough shot.”

“Sounds like fun,” said Trig. “But in my case I don’t shoot ’em with a gun but with a camera. Then I paint them.”

“Paint them?” This made no sense to Donny.

“You know,” Trig said. “Pictures. I’m actually an avian painter. Really, I’ve traveled the world painting pictures of birds.”

“Wow!” said Donny. “Does it pay?”

“A little. I illustrated my uncle’s book. He’s Roger Prentiss Fuller, Birds of North America. The Yale zoologist?”

“Er, can’t say I heard of him.”

“He was a hunter once. He went on safari in the early fifties with Elmer Keith.”

This did impress Donny. Keith was a famous Idaho shooter who wrote books like Elmer Keith’s Book of the Sixgun and Elmer Keith on Big Game Rifles.

“Wow,” he said. “Elmer Keith.”

“Roger says Keith was a tiny, bitter little man. He had a terrible burn as a kid and he was always compensating for it. They had a falling out. Elmer just wanted to shoot and shoot. He couldn’t see any sense to a limit. Roger doesn’t shoot anymore.”

“Well, after ’Nam, I don’t think I will either,” Donny said.

“You sound okay for a Marine, Donny. Crowe was right about you. Maybe you’ll join us when you get out.” He smiled, his eyes lighting like a movie star’s.

“Well…” Donny said, provisionally. Himself a peacenik, smoking dope, long hair, carrying those cards, chanting “Hell, no, we won’t go”? He laughed at the notion.

“Trig! When did you get here?” It was Crowe and his crowd, now with girls in tow, all leading what seemed to be a kind of electric ripple toward Trig.

And in seconds, Trig was gone, borne away on currents of some sort of celebrityhood that Donny didn’t understand.

He turned to a girl standing nearby.

“Hey, excuse me,” he said. “Who is this Trig?”

She looked at him in astonishment.

“Man, what planet are you from?” she demanded, then ran after Trig, her eyes beaming love.

CHAPTER THREE

“Trig Carter!” Commander Bonson exclaimed.

“Yeah, that was it, I couldn’t quite remember the last name,” said Donny, who could remember the name very well but couldn’t quite bring himself to say it out loud. “Seemed like a very nice guy.”

Bonson’s office was an undistinguished chamber in a World War II-era tempo still standing in the Washington Navy Yard about a half mile from Eighth and I, where by dim pretext Donny had been sent the next day for his debriefing on his first day as spy hunter.

“You saw Trig Carter and Crowe together. Is that right?”

Why did Donny feel so sleazy about all this? He felt clammy, as if someone were listening. He looked around. President Nixon glowered down at him from the wall, enjoining him to do his duty for God and Country. A degree from the University of New Hampshire added to the solemnity of the occasion. A few ceremonial photos of Lieutenant Commander Bonson with various dignitaries completed the decor; the room was otherwise completely bereft of personality or even much sense of human occupation. It was preternaturally neat; even the paper clips in the little plastic box had been stacked, not dumped.

Lieutenant Commander Bonson bent forward, fixing Donny in his dark glare. He was a thin, dark man with a lot of whiskery shadow on his face and a sense of complete focus. There was something pilgrimlike about him; he should have been in a pulpit denouncing miniskirts and the Beatles.

“Yes, sir,” Donny finally said. “The two of them … and about one hundred other people.”

“Where was this again?”

“A party. Uh, on C Street, on the Hill. I didn’t get the address.”

“Three-forty-five C, Southeast,” said Ensign Weber.

“Did you check it out, Weber?”

“Yes, sir. It’s the home of one James K. Phillips, a clerk to Justice Douglas and a homosexual, according to the FBI.”

“Were most of the people there homosexuals, Fenn? Was it a homo thing?”

Donny didn’t know what to say. It just seemed like a party in Washington, like any party in Washington, with a lot of young people, some grass, some beer, music, and fun and hope in the air.

“I wouldn’t know, sir.”

Bonson sat back, considering. The homosexual thing seemed to hang in his mind, clouding it for a time. But then he was back on the track.

“So you saw them together?”

“Well, sir, not together, really. In the same crowd. They knew each other, that was clear. But it didn’t seem anything out of the ordinary.”

“Could Crowe have given him any deployment intelligence?”

Donny almost laughed, but Bonson was so set in his glare that he knew to release the pressure he felt building in his chest would have been a big mistake.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Not that I saw. I mean, does Crowe have any deployment intelligence? I don’t. How would he?”

But Bonson didn’t answer.

He turned to Weber.

“We’ve got to get closer,” he said. “We’ve got to get him inside the cell. Trig Carter. Imagine that.”

“A wire, sir? Could we wire him?” asked Weber.

Oh, Christ, thought Donny. I’m really not going anywhere with a tape recorder taped to my belly.

“No, not unless we could get time to set it up quickly. He’s got to stay fluid, flexible, quick on his feet. The wire won’t work, not under these circumstances.”

“It was just a suggestion, sir,” said Weber.

“Well, Fenn,” said Bonson, “you’ve made a fine start. But too many times we see fast starters are slow finishers. You’ve got to really press now. You’ve got to make Crowe your pal, your friend, do you see? He’s got to trust you; that’s how you’ll crack this thing. Trig Carter, Weber. Isn’t that the damndest thing you ever heard?”

“Sir, if I may ask, who is Trig Carter?”

“Show him, Weber.”

Weber looked into a file and slid something over to Donny. Donny recognized it at once: he’d seen it a thousand times probably, without really noticing it. It was just part of the living-room imagery of the war, the scenes that were unforgettable.

It was a cover of Time magazine late in the hot summer of 1968: Chicago, the Democratic National Convention, the “police riot” outside on the last night. There was Trig, in shirtsleeves, a gush of blood cascading down from an ugly welt in his short, neat hair. He was bent under the weight of another kid he was carrying out of the fog of tear gas and the blurs that were Chicago policemen pounding anything that could be pounded. Trig looked impossibly noble and heroic, impossibly courageous. His eyes were screwed up in the pain of the CS gas, he was bloody and sweaty, and the veins on his neck stood out from all the effort he had invested in carrying the dazed, bloody, traumatized boy out of the zone of violence. He looked like any of a dozen insanely heroic Corpsmen Donny had seen pull the same thing off amid not cops but tracer fire and grenades and Bettys over in the Land of Bad Things, none of whose pictures had ever ended up on the cover of Time magazine.

THE SPIRIT OF RESISTANCE, said the cover.

“He’s their Lancelot,” said Weber. “Was beaten up in Selma by the Alabama State Police, got his picture on the cover of Time in sixty-eight at the convention. He’s been everywhere in the Movement since then. One of the early peace freaks, a rich kid from an old Maryland family. Just came back from a year in England, studying drawing at Oxford. Harvard grad, some kind of painter, isn’t that it?”

“Avian painter, sir. That’s what he told me.”

“Yes. Birds. Loves birds. Very odd,” said Bonson.

“Very smart boy,” continued Weber. “But then, that seems to be the profile. It was the profile in England, too. The smart ones, they can figure everything out, see through everything. They’ll be the elite after the revolution. Anyhow, he’s big in the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice, a kind of glamorous roving ambassador and organizer. Lives here in DC, but works the campus circuit, goes where the action is. The FBI’s been monitoring him for years. He’d be exactly the kind of man who’d get to Crowe and turn him into a spy. He’d be perfect. He’s exactly who we’re looking for.”

“Fenn, I can’t emphasize this enough. You’ve got less than two weeks until the big raft of May Day demonstrations is set. Crowe will be pressed to uncover deployment intelligence, Carter will be on him for results. You’ve got to monitor them very carefully. If you can’t get tape or photos, you may have to testify in open court against them.”

Donny felt a cold stone drop in his stomach: he saw an image, himself on the stand, putting the collar on poor Crowe. It made him sick.

“I know you’ll make a fine witness,” Bonson was saying. “So begin to discipline your mind: remember details, events, chronologies. You might write a coded journal so you can recall things. Remember exact sentences. Get in the habit of making a time check every few minutes. If you don’t want to take notes, imagine taking notes, because that can fix things in your mind. This is very important work, do you understand?”

“Ah—”

“Doubts? Do I see doubts? You cannot doubt.” Bonson leaned forward until he and he alone filled the world. “Just as you could have no doubters in a rifle platoon, you can have no doubters on a counter intelligence mission. You have to be on the team, committed to the team. The doubts erode your discipline, cloud your judgment, destroy your memory, Fenn. No doubts. That’s the kind of rigor I need from you.”

“Yes, sir,” said Donny, hating himself as the world’s entire melancholy weight settled on his strong young shoulders.

Crowe was particularly derelict that afternoon in riot control drill.

“It’s so hot, Donny. The mask! Can’t we pretend we’re wearing our masks?”

“Crowe, if you have to do it for real, you’ll want to be wearing a mask because otherwise the CS will make you a crybaby in a second. Put the mask on with the other guys.”

Muttering darkly, Crowe slid the mask over his head, then clapped his two-pound camouflaged steel pot over his skull.

“Squad, on my command, form up!” shouted Donny, watching as his casket team, plus assorted others from Bravo Company assigned riot duty in Third Squad, formed a line. They looked like an insect army: their eyes hidden behind the plastic lenses of the masks, their faces made insectoid and ominous by the mandiblelike filter can, all in Marine green, with their 782 gear, their pistols, their M14s held at the high port.

“Squad, fix … bayonets!” and the rifle butts slammed into the ground, the blades were drawn from their scabbards and in a single clanking, machinelike click locked onto the weapon muzzles. Except one.

Crowe’s bayonet skittered away. He had dropped it.

“Crowe, you idiot, give me fifty of the finest!”

Crowe was silenced by his clammy mask, but his body posture radiated sullen anger. He fell from the formation.

“At ease,” said Donny.

The squad relaxed.

“One, Corporal, two, Corporal, three, Corporal,” Crowe narrated through the mask as he banged out the push-ups. Donny let him go to fifteen, then said, “All right, Crowe, back in line ASAP. Let’s try it again.”

Crowe shot him a bitter look as he regathered his gear and rejoined the line.

Donny took them through it again. It was an extremely hot day and the darkness of his mood was such that he worked the men hard, breaking them down into standard line formation, flank marching them into an arrowhead riot element, counting cadence to govern their approach to the imagined riot, wheeling them left and right, getting them to fix and unfix bayonets over and over again.

He worked them straight through a break as great wet patches discolored their utilities until finally the platoon sergeant came over and said, “All right, Corporal, you can give them a break.”

“Yes, Sergeant!” yelled Donny, and even the sergeant, a shit-together but fairly decent lifer named Ray Case, gave him a look.

“Fall out. Smoke ’em if you got ’em. If you don’t got ’em, borrow ’em. If you can’t borrow ’em, then get outta town because your buddies can’t stand you.”

Then, instead of mingling with the silently furious, sweating men, he himself walked over to the shade of the barracks and declared himself off-limits. Let ’em grouse.

But soon Crowe detached himself and came over, cheekily enough, secretly irritating Donny.

“Man, you really put me through it.”

“I put the squad through it, Crowe, not you. We may have to do this shit for real next weekend.”

“Oh, shit, none of those guys is going to march with bayonets into a bunch of kids with flowers in their hair where the girls are showing their tits. We’ll just hang here or go sit in some fucking building like the last time. What, you figure, the Treasury again?”

Donny let the question simmer in his mind a bit. Then he said, “Crowe, I don’t know. I just go where they tell me.”

“Donny, I got it straight from Trig. They’re not even coming into DC. The whole thing’s going to the Pentagon. Let the Army handle it. We won’t even leave the barracks.”

“If you say so.”

“I thought we were—”

“Crowe, I had fun last night. But out here, in the daylight, I’m still the corporal and squad leader, you’re still a PFC, so you still play by my rules. Don’t ever call me Donny in front of the men while we’re on drill, okay?”

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry. Anyhow, some of us were going to Trig’s tonight. I thought you might want to come. You got to admit, he’s an interesting guy.”

“He’s okay for a peacenik.”

“Trig’s not like that. He was beat up in Selma; he was a fucking hero in Chicago. Man, they say he went out twenty-five times and dragged kids in from the pigs. He saved lives.”

“I don’t know,” said Donny.

“It’ll be fun. You need to relax more, Corporal.”

Donny actually wished the invitation hadn’t come; it was his half plan, dimly formed, just to let his secret assignment peter out, go away in vagueness and missed opportunities. But here it was, big and hairy: a chance to do his job.

Trig, as it turned out, lived off upper Wisconsin, just above Georgetown, in a row house that was one in a tatty block of similar dwellings. The house was crowded; it could be no other way. The furniture was threadbare, almost ascetic. Still, the stench of grass almost levitated the house and made Donny’s nostrils flare when he entered. Everything was familiar but unfamiliar: lots of books, a wall full of shelved albums (classical and jazz, though; no Jimi H. or Bob D.). But also, no posters, no NVA flags, no commie posters. Instead: birds.

Jesus, the guy was a freak for birds. Some were his own paintings, and he had a considerable talent for capturing the glory of a bird in flight, all the details perfect, all the feathers precisely laid out, the colors all the hues of miracle. But others were older and darker, muted things that appeared to have been painted in another century.

Somehow he found himself talking to a girl about birds and told her that he, uh, hunted them. It wasn’t the right thing to say but she was one of those snooty Eastern ones, who wore her hair long and straight and had a pinched look to her.

“You kill them?” she said. “Those little things?”

“Well, where I’m from they’re considered good eating.”

“Don’t you have stores?”

This wasn’t going too well. This grouping was smaller and more intimate than last night’s and everybody seemed to know everybody. He felt a little isolated, and looked for Crowe, because even Crowe would have been a welcome ally. But Crowe was nowhere to be seen. And on top of that he felt incorrectly dressed: he was in chinos and Jack Purcells, plus a madras sport shirt. Everyone here wore jeans and work shirts, had long, exotic hair, beards, and seemed somehow in some kind of Indian conspiracy against the ways that he felt it was proper for a young man to dress. It made him uncomfortable.

Some spy, he thought.

“Don’t give Donny a hard time,” said someone — Trig, of course, simply appearing dramatically, an event for which he had a little gift.

Trig was more moderate today, his hair back in a ponytail, which he wore over a blue button-down shirt and, like Donny, a pair of chinos. He also had an expensive pair of decoratively perforated oxfords on, in some exotic, rich color.

“Trig, he shoots little animals.”

“Sweetie, men have been hunting and eating birds for a million years. Both the birds and the men are still here.”

“I think it’s strange.”

Donny almost blurted, No, it’s really fun, but held himself in.

“Well, anyway,” said Trig, drawing Donny away. “I’m glad you could come. I don’t know who half these guys are myself. People just hang out here. They drink my beer, smoke grass, get stoned or laid and move on. I’m hardly here, so I really don’t care. But it’s cool that you came.”

“Thanks, I didn’t have much to do. Well, actually, I wanted to talk to you.”

“Oh? Well, go ahead.”

“It’s Crowe. You know, he’s really borderline in the unit, and he keeps fucking up. I know he’s a smart kid. But if he gets booted from the company, his tour is no longer stabilized, and he could go on levy to the ’Nam. And I don’t think he’d look too good in a body bag.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“As he said, anyone who gets wasted this late in a lost war is a moron.”

“I’ll mention it.”

“Cool.”

Trig was also cool. Donny could see how he’d be a good man in a firefight, and while everybody wept or cowered, he’d be the one to go out and start bringing the people in from the beatings.

“Can I ask you?” he suddenly said to Donny, fixing him in one of those deep Trig looks. “Do you doubt it? Do you ever wonder why, or if it was worth it? Or are you foursquare the whole way, the whole nine yards?”

“Fuck no,” said Donny. “Sure, of course I doubt it. But my father fought in a war and so did his father, and I was raised just to see that as a price for living in a great country. So … so I went. I did it, I came back, for better or worse.”

They had now wandered into the kitchen, where Trig opened his refrigerator and got a beer out for Donny and then took one for himself. It was a foreign beer, Heineken, from a dark, cold green bottle.

“Come on, this way. We’ll get away from these idiots.”

Trig took Donny out on a back porch, toward two deck chairs. Donny was surprised to see they were on a little hill and that before him the elevation fell away; across the falling roofs, in the distance he was surprised to see the huddled buildings of Georgetown University, looking medieval in profile.

“I forget what real people are like,” Trig said, “that’s why it’s cool to talk to you. Nobody’s more hypocritical and swinish than the pretty boys and the fairies of the peace movement. But I know how important soldiers can be. I was in the Congo in sixty-four — I’d gone with my uncle to paint the Upper Congo swallowtail darter. We were in Stanleyville when some guy named Gbenye declared it a people’s republic and took about one thousand of us hostage and set out to ‘purify’ the population of its imperialist vermin. Murder squads were everywhere. Man, I saw some shit. What people do to each other. So anyhow, we’re in this compound, the Congolese Army is fighting its way closer and the rumor is the rebels are going to kill us all. Holy shit, we’re going to die and nobody gives a shit about us. It’s that simple. But when the door is kicked down, it isn’t rebels. It’s tattooed, tough-ass, kick-butt Belgian paratroopers. They were the meanest pricks I ever saw in my life and I loved them like you wouldn’t believe. Nobody would stand against the Belgian Airborne. And they got us out in a convoy, all the white people from the interior. We would have been butchered. So I’m not one of these assholes who says there’s no role for soldiers. Soldiers saved my life.”

“Roger that,” said Donny.

“But,” said Trig, holding it in the air, “even if I admire courage and commitment, I have to make a distinction. Between a moral war and an immoral war. World War II: moral. Kill Hitler before he kills all the Jews. Kill Tōjō before he turns all the Filipino women into whores. Korea? Maybe moral. I don’t know. Stop the Chinese from turning Korea into a province. I guess that’s moral. I would have fought in that one.”

“But Vietnam. Not moral?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

Trig leaned forward. Another of his little, unsung gifts: listening. He really wanted to know what Donny thought and he refused to pigeonhole Donny as a baby killer and Zippo commando.

Donny could not resist this earnest attention. “What I saw was good American kids trying to do a job they didn’t quite understand. What I saw was kids who thought it was like a John Wayne movie and got their guts blown out. I was in a place once, a forest or a former forest. All the leaves were gone, but the trees still stood. Only, they shined. It was like they were covered in ice. It reminded me of Vermont. I’ve never been to Vermont, but it reminded me of it just the same.”

“I think I know where you’re headed. I saw the same thing on the convoy out of Stanleyville.”

“Yeah, well, in this case we called in Hotel Echo, on a stand of trees because we saw movement and thought a unit of gooks was infiltrating through it. We got ’em, but good. Those were their guts. They were just pulverized, turned to shiny liquid, and it plastered the stumps and limbs. Man, I never saw anything like that. Of course it was a platoon of Army engineers. Twenty-two guys, gone, just like that. Hotel Echo. It wasn’t very pretty.”

“Donny, I think you know. Underneath. I can feel you getting there. You’re working on it.”

“My girl is already there. She’s coming in in this Peace Caravan deal they got going.”

“Good for her. Do you talk about it with her?”

“She says she decided she’d do her part to stop the war when she visited me in the San Diego Naval Hospital.”

“Good for her again. But — are you there?”

Donny couldn’t lie. He had no talent for it.

“No. Not yet. Maybe never. It just seems wrong. You have to do what your country tells you. You have to contribute. It’s duty.”

Trig was like a confessor: his eyes burned with empathy and drew Donny forward to reveal more.

“Donny, I know you’d never leave or quit or anything. I wouldn’t ask you to. But consider joining us after you get out. I think you’ll feel much better. And I can’t begin to tell you how much it would mean to us. I hate this idea we’re all a bunch of chickenshits. A guy who’s been there, won a medal, fought, dedicating himself to ending it and bringing his buddies home. That’s powerful stuff. I’d be proud to be a part of that.”

“I don’t know.”

“Just think about it. Talk to me, keep in touch. That’s all. Just think about it.”

“Donny, my God!” a voice called, and he looked up and saw a dream coming onto the porch to him. She was thin, blond, athletic, part tawny cowgirl, part perfect American sweetheart, and he felt helpless as he always did when he saw her.

It was Julie.

CHAPTER FOUR

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“I did. And I wrote you, too.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Can we leave? Can we go someplace? Donny, I haven’t seen you since Christmas.”

“I don’t know. I’m here with this PFC from my squad and I sort of promised I’d, uh, look after him. I can’t leave him.”

“Donny!”

“I can’t explain it! It’s very complicated.”

He kept looking off, back into the house as if he was trying to keep his eye on something.

“Look, let me go tell Crowe I’m leaving. I’ll be right back. We’ll go somewhere.”

He disappeared back inside the house.

Julie stood there in the Washington dark on a street above Georgetown as the traffic veered along Wisconsin. Pretty soon Peter Farris came out. Peter was a tall, bearded graduate student in sociology at the University of Arizona, the head of the Southwest Regional People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice and nominal honcho of the group of kids he and Julie had shepherded out by Peace Caravan from Tucson.

“Where’s your friend?”

“He’ll be back.”

“I knew that’s what he’d be like. Big, handsome, square.”

But then Donny returned, ignoring Peter.

“Hi. It’s stupid, but Crowe wants to go to another party and I think I ought to go with him. I can’t … It’s just … I’ll get in touch with you as soon as…”

But then he turned, troubled, and before she could say a thing, he said, “Oh, shit, they’re leaving. I’ll get in touch” and ran off, leaving the girl he loved behind him.

The next morning, waking early in his room in the barracks, almost an hour before the 0530 alarm, Donny almost went on sick call. It seemed the only sane course, the only escape from his troubles. But his troubles came looking for him.

It was a boneyard day, he knew. His team was up. He had stuff to do. He skipped breakfast in the chow hall, and instead re-pressed his dress tunic and trousers, spent a good thirty minutes spit-shining his oxfords. This was ritual, almost cleansing and purifying.

You put a gob of spit into the black can of polish, and with a scrap of cotton mixed the black paste and the saliva together, forming a dense goo. Then you applied just a little dab to the leather and rubbed and rubbed. You should get a genie for your troubles, you rubbed so hard. You rubbed and rubbed, a dab at a time, covering the whole shoe, and then the other. You let it fry into a dense haze, then went at it again, with another cotton cloth, went at it like war, snappity-snap. It was a lost military art; they said they were going to bring in patent leather next time because the young Marines couldn’t be trusted to put in the hours. But Donny was proud of his spit shine, carefully nursed through the long months, built up over time, until his oxfords gleamed vividly in the sun.

So stupid, he now thought.

So ridiculous. So pointless.

The weather was heavy with the chance of rain and the dogwoods were in full bloom, another brutal Washington spring day. Arlington’s gentle hills and valleys, full of pink trees and dead boys, rolled away from the burial site and beyond, like a movie Rome, the white buildings of the capital of America gleamed even in the gray light. Donny could see the needle and the dome and the big white house and the weeping Lincoln hidden in his portico of marble. Only Jefferson’s cute little gazebo was out of sight, hidden behind an inoffensive, dogwood- and tomb-crazed hill.

The box job was over. It had gone all right, though everybody was grumpy. For some reason even Crowe had tried hard that day, and there’d been no slipup as they took L/Cpl. Michael F. Anderson from the black hearse to the bier to the slow-time march, snapped the flag off the box, folded it crisply. Donny handed the tricorn of stars to the grieving widow, a pimply girl. It was always better not to know a thing about the boy inside. Had L/Cpl. Anderson been a grunt? Had he been a supply clerk, a helicopter crew member, a military journalist, a corpsman, combat engineer? Had he been shot, exploded, crushed, virused or VD’d to death? Nobody knew: he was dead, that was all, and Donny stood at crisp attention, the poster Marine in his dress blue tunic, white trousers and white cover, giving a stiff perfect salute to the wet-nosed, shuddering girl during “Taps.” Grief is so ugly. It is the ugliest thing there is, and he had fucking bathed in it for close to eighteen long months now. His head ached.

Now it was over. The girl had been led away, and the Marines had marched smartly back to their bus and climbed aboard for a discreet smoke. Donny now watched to make certain that if they smoked they took their white gloves off, for the nicotine could stain them yellow otherwise. All complied, even Crowe.

“You want a cigarette, Donny?”

“I don’t smoke.”

“You should. Relaxes you.”

“Well, I’ll pass.” He looked at his watch, a big Seiko on a chain-mail strap he’d bought at the naval exchange in Da Nang for $12, and saw that they had another forty minutes to kill before the next job.

“You ought to hang your coats up,” he told the team. “But don’t go outside unless you’re buttoned and shined. Some asshole major might see you, put you on report and off you go to the ’Nam. You’d be back for the next box job. Only, you’d be the one in the box, right, Crowe?”

“Yes, Corporal, sir,” Crowe barked, ironic and snide, pretending to be the shavetail gung-ho lifer he would never even resemble.

“We love our Corps, don’t we, Crowe?”

“We love our Corps, Corporal.”

“Good man, Crowe,” he said.

“Donny?”

It was the driver, looking back.

“Some Navy guys here.”

Shit, thought Donny.

“Donny, are you joining the Navy?” Crowe asked. “You could make a fortune giving jelly rolls in the showers of a nuclear sub. You could—”

Everybody laughed. Give it to Crowe, he was funny.

“All right, Crowe,” said Donny, “I just may put you on report for the fun of it or kick the shit out of you to save the paperwork. While I talk to these guys, you give every man on the team a blow job. That’s an order, PFC.”

“Yes, Corporal, sir,” said Crowe, taking a puff on his cigarette.

Donny buttoned his tunic, pulled on his cover low over his eyes and stepped outside.

It was Weber, in khakis.

“Good morning, sir,” said Donny, saluting.

“Good morning, Corporal,” said Weber. “Would you come over here, please?”

“Yes, sir,” said Donny.

As they got out of earshot of the men in the bus, Donny said, “Man, what the fuck is this all about? I thought I was supposed to be undercover. This really blows it.”

“All right, Fenn, don’t get excited. Tell them we’re from personnel at the Pentagon, verifying your RSVN service preparatory to separation. Very common occurrence, no big deal.”

Down the way, in the rear of a tan government Ford, Lieutenant Commander Bonson sat behind sunglasses, peering ahead.

Donny got in; the engine was running and air-conditioned chill blasted over him.

“Good morning, Fenn,” said the commander. He was a tight-assed, scrawny lifer in the backseat, sitting ramrod perfect.

“Sir.”

“Fenn, I’m going to arrest Crowe today.”

Donny sucked a gulp of dry, painful air.

“Excuse me, sir?”

“At 1600 hours, I’ll show up at the barracks with a plainclothes detachment of NIS. We’ll incarcerate him at the Navy Yard brig.”

“On what charge?”

“Security violation. Naval Penal Code DOD 69-455. Unauthorized possession of classified information. Also, DOD 77-56B, unauthorized transmission or transference of classified information.”

“Ah — on what basis?”

“Your basis, Fenn.”

“My basis, sir?”

“Your basis.”

“But I haven’t reported anything. He went to a couple of parties where they were flying the NVA flag. Half the apartments in Washington are hanging the NVA flag. I see it everywhere.”

“You can place him in the presence of a known radical organizer.”

“Well, I can place myself in that same guy’s presence. And I have no information to suggest he was compromising Marine security or intelligence. I just saw him talking with a guy, that’s all.”

“You can place him in the presence of Trig Carter. Do you know yet who Trig Carter is?”

“Ah, well, sir, you said—”

“Tell him, Weber.”

“This is straight from this morning’s MDW-Secret Service-FBI briefing, Fenn,” said Weber. “Carter is now suspected of being a member of the Weather Underground. He’s not ‘merely’ a peacenik with a placard and some flowers in his hair, but he’s an extreme radical who may be linked to the Weather Underground’s bombing campaign.”

Donny was dumbstruck.

“Trig?”

“Don’t you see it yet, Corporal?” said Bonson. “These two bright boys are hatching up something good and bloody for May Day. We have to stop them. If I collar Crowe, maybe that’ll be enough to save some lives.”

“Sir, I saw nothing that would—”

“Then get with the fucking program, Corporal!” Bonson bellowed. He leaned forward, fixing Donny with his murderous glare. He seemed to bear a grudge against the known world and was holding Donny responsible for all his disappointments, for all the women who wouldn’t sleep with him, for the fraternities that wouldn’t pledge him, for the schools that wouldn’t accept him.

“You think this is some kind of joke, don’t you, Corporal? It’s beneath you somehow. So you’ll go along to stay out of ’Nam, and just play it cool and cute and rely on your good looks and your charm to drift through? You won’t get your hands dirty, you won’t do the job. Well, that stops today. You have a job. You have a legal order assigned by higher headquarters and passed down through a legal chain of command, vetted by your commanding officer. You will perform. Now, you stop screwing around and pretending like your feelings matter. You get on this thing and you get inside and you get me what I need, or by God, I will see to it that you’re the only U.S. Marine on the DMZ when Uncle Ho sends his tanks south to mop up. We’ll get you a Springfield rifle and a campaign hat and see how well you do. Are you reading me?”

“Loud and clear,” said Donny.

“Go do your fucking job,” said Bonson icily. “I’ll hold off a day, maybe two. But get inside before May Day or I’ll sweep them all up and off to Portsmouth and you to the ’Nam. Do you copy?”

“I copy, sir,” said Donny, blushing at the dressing down.

“Out,” said Bonson, signifying the interview was over.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine,” Donny said.

“You look not-cool.”

“I’m cool.”

“Well, a bunch of us were going over to this party in G-town, Donny. I found out about it from Trig.”

Oh Christ, Donny thought, as the solicitous Crowe loomed over him in the upstairs barracks room where the off-base men kept their huge gray lockers and were now stripping down after a hot afternoon in the boneyard.

“Crowe, you know we may be on alert at any time. Is your riot gear outstanding? What about steaming and pressing your tunic, washing out your dark socks, and spending an hour or two on that spit shine, which has begun to look a little dim. That’s what you ought to be doing.”

“Yeah, well,” said Crowe, “believe me on this one, I know. We’re not going on alert till 2400 tomorrow night.”

Donny almost pointed out that if you said “2400” you didn’t have to say “night,” but Crowe wasn’t stoppable at that point.

“And we’ll just hang around here. We may get on trucks and, probably on Saturday, we’ll deploy to a building near the White House. But it’ll be a short deployment. All the action’s going on across the river. The whole point of this one is to converge on the Pentagon and close it down. Trig told me.”

“Trig told you? He told you about the deployment? Man, that’s classified. Why the hell would he know?”

“Don’t ask me. Trig knows everything. He has entrée everywhere. He probably is having cocktails with J. Edgar himself right as we speak. By the way, did you know Hoover was a fruit? He’s a goddamn fruit! He hangs out in Y’s and shit.”

“Crowe, you’re not telling Trig shit, are you? I mean, it might seem like a joke to you, but you could get into deep, serious green crap that way.”

“Man, what do I know? Little Eddie Crowe’s just a grunt. He knows nothing.”

“Crowe, I’m not kidding.”

“Is someone asking about me?”

“So where’s this party?”

“Shouldn’t you be trying to find your girl? She didn’t look too happy when you bailed out on her last night to hang out with us. And if I know my horny hippie peace freaks, that bearded guy hanging on her shirttails has a serious case of the please-fuck-mes. You may have to call in a fire mission on him. Hotel Echo.”

“Nobody’s asking about you.”

“ ’Cause if they are, here’s my advice: give me up. I ain’t worth shit. Seriously, Donny, roll over on me in a second. If it’s you or me, buddy, choose you. It would be a shame any other way.”

“Eddie, you’re full of shit. Now, where’s this party? I need a fucking keg of beer.”

“Maybe Trig can find your girl.”

“Maybe he can.”

They showered and dressed, and signed out with a warning from the duty NCO to call in every couple of hours to make sure the company hadn’t gone on alert. Sure enough, Crowe’s obedient buddies waited just outside the barracks’ main gate, on Eighth Street. They climbed in the old Corvair.

“Hey, Donny.”

“Cool. Donny, the hero.”

He could hardly remember the names. He had a splitting headache. He had told a lie, direct and flat out. Nobody is asking about you.

But goddammit, how had Crowe known so much? Why had he asked Donny the other day where they’d deploy? Why was all this bad shit happening anyway? And what about Julie? She was camping in some muddy field with what’s his face, and he hadn’t even really talked to her. She hadn’t called and left a number, either. Man, it was all coming down.

But when they got there, Trig came over and greeted them, and when Crowe told him Donny’s situation, he said it would be no problem.

“Sure,” he said. “Let me make a call.” He went off, and Donny sat among a bunch of turned-out Georgetown kids, dressed like young Republicans, while Crowe, in his hair-hiding boonie cap, worked a girl who didn’t work him back. Presently, Trig returned.

“Okay, let’s go,” he said.

“You found her?”

“Well, I found out where the University of Arizona kids are camping. That’s where she’d be, right?”

“Right,” said Donny.

“Okay, I’ll run you over.”

Donny paused. Was he supposed to be looking after Crowe? But now he’d set this thing up, and if he hung with Crowe it would look very strange. And he was supposed to watch Crowe with Trig, right? And if he was with Trig, then Crowe couldn’t be giving up any secrets, could he?

“Great,” said Donny.

“Just let me get my book,” said Trig. He disappeared for a second, then came back with a large, really filthy-looking sketchbook. It had the sense of a treasured relic. “Never go anyplace without this. I might see an eastern swallowtail mudlark!” He laughed at himself, showing white teeth.

Outside, Trig gestured to the inevitable Trigmobile, a TR-6, bright red, its canvas roof down.

“Cool wheels,” said Donny, hopping in.

“I picked it up a little while ago in England,” he said. “I got burned out on peace shit. I took a little sabbatical, went to London, spent some time in Oxford. The Ruskin School of Drawing. Bought this baby.”

“You must be loaded.”

“Oh, I think there’s money in the family. Not my father; he doesn’t make a penny. He’s in State, planning some tiny part of the war, the economic infrastructure of the province of Quang Tri. What does your dad do?” Trig asked.

“My dad was a rancher. He worked like hell and never made a penny. He died poor.”

“But he died clean. In our family, we don’t work. The money works. We play. Working for something you believe in, that’s the best. That’s the maximum charge. And if you can have a good time at it, man, that’s really cool.”

Donny said nothing. But a darkness settled on him: he was here as a Judas, wasn’t he? He’d sell Trig out for thirty pieces of silver, or rather three stripes and no trip back to the Land of Bad Things. He looked over at Trig. The wind was blowing the slightly older man’s hair back lushly, like a cape streaming behind a horseman. Trig wore Ray-Ban sunglasses and had one of those high, beautiful foreheads. He looked like a young god on a good day.

This guy was Weather Underground? This guy would bomb things, blow up people, that sort of stuff? It didn’t seem possible. By no reach of his imagination could he see Trig as conspiratorial. He was too much at the center of things; the world had given itself to him too easily and too eagerly.

“Could you kill anyone?” Donny asked.

Trig laughed, showing white teeth.

“What a question! Wow, I’ve never been asked that one!”

“I killed seven men,” Donny said.

“Well, if you hadn’t have killed them, would they have killed you?”

“They were trying to!”

“So, there you have it. You made your decision. But no, no, I couldn’t. I just can’t see it. For me, too much would die. I’d be better off dead myself than having killed anything. That’s just what I believe. I’ve believed it ever since I looked in a house in Stanleyville and saw twenty-five kids cut to pieces. I can’t even remember if it’s because they were rebels or government. They probably didn’t know. Right then: no more killing. Stop the killing. Just like the man says, all we are saying is give peace a chance.”

“Well, it’s hard to give it a chance when a guy is whacking away at you with an AK-47.”

Trig laughed.

“You have me there, partner,” he said merrily.

But then he said, “Sure, anybody gets that kind of slack. But you wouldn’t have shot into that ditch in My Lai like those other guys did. You would have walked away. Hot blood, cold blood. Hell, you’re a cowboy. You were trained to shoot in self-defense. You shot morally.”

Donny didn’t know what to say. He just stared ahead glumly until in the falling light they sped through downtown, past the big government buildings still shiny in the fading sun, along the park-lined river and at last reached West Potomac Park, just beyond Jefferson’s classy monument.

Welcome to the May Tribe.

On one side of the street, eight or nine cop cars were parked, and DC cops in riot gear watched in sullen knots. Across the street, equally sullen, knots of hippie kids in jeans and oversized fatigue coats and long flowing hair watched back. It was a stare-down; nobody was winning.

Trig’s presence registered immediately and the kids parted, suddenly grinning, and Trig drove the Triumph through them and down an asphalt road that led toward the river, some playing fields, some trees. But it was more like Sherwood Forest than any college campus. The meadows streamed with kids in tents, kids at campfires, kids stoned, playing Frisbee, singing, smoking, eating, necking, bathing topless in the river. Port-a-pots had been put up everywhere, bright blue and smelly.

“It’s the gathering of the tribes,” said Donny.

“It’s the gathering of our generation,” said Trig.

Being with Trig was like being with Mick Jagger. He knew everybody, and at least three or four times he had to stop the Triumph and clamber out as protégés came upon him for hugs or advice, for gossip or news, or just to be with him. Astonishing thing: he remembered everybody’s name. Everybody’s. He never fumbled, he never forgot, he never made a mistake. He seemed to inflate in the love that was thrust upon him, by boy and girl, man and woman, even some old bearded, be-sandaled radicals who looked as if they’d probably protested World War I, too.

“Boy, they love you,” Donny said.

“I’ve just been riding this circuit for seven long years. You get to know folks. I am tired, though. After this weekend, I’m going to crash at a friend’s farm out in Germantown. Paint some birds, blow some grass, just chill. You ought to bring Julie, if she’s still here, and come out. Route thirty-five, north of Germantown. Wilson, the mailbox says. Here, here, I think this is it.”

Donny saw her almost immediately. She had camouflaged herself in some kind of Indian full-length dress and wore her hair up, pinned with a Navajo silver brooch. He had given it to her. It cost him $75.

The asshole kid Farris was near her, though he wasn’t talking to her. He was just watching her from a ways away, utterly mesmerized.

“Hi,” Donny called.

“I brought Young Lochinvar from out of the West,” Trig said.

“Oh, Donny.”

“Enjoy,” said Trig. “Let me know when you want to get out of here. I’ll go listen to Peter Farris whine for a while.”

But Donny wasn’t listening. He looked full into the person that was Julie, and his heart broke all over again. Every time he saw her was like a first time. His breath came in little spurts. He felt himself lighting up inside. He gave her a hug.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t making much sense last night. I couldn’t put it together fast enough. You know how slow I am.”

“Donny. I called the barracks.”

“Sometimes those messages get through, sometimes they don’t. I was just all out of joint yesterday.”

“What’s going on?”

“Ah, it’s too complicated to explain. It’s nothing I can’t handle. How are you? God, sweetie, it’s so good to see you.”

“Oh, I’m fine. This camping stuff I could do without. I need a shower. Where’s the nearest Holiday Inn?”

“When this is all over, don’t go back,” he suddenly blurted, as if finally seeing a path that made some sense. “Stay here with me. We’ll get married!”

“Donny! What about the big church wedding? What about all my mother’s friends? What about the country club?”

“I—” and then he saw she was joking, and she saw he was not.

“I want us to get married,” he said. “Right now.”

“Donny, I want to marry you so much I think I’ll die from it.”

“We’ll do it after this weekend thing.”

“Yes. I’ll marry you as soon as it’s over. I’ll move into an apartment. I’ll find work. I’ll—”

“No, then I want you to go home and finish your degree. I’ll go for the early out and I’ll move back home. There’ll be G.I. Bill money. I can work part-time. We’ll get some kind of married-student housing. It’ll be great fun! And you can tell your mother we’ll have all the parties then, so we’ll keep her happy too.”

“What brought this on?”

“Nothing. I just realized how important you are to me. I didn’t want this getting away from me. I was an asshole last night. I wanted to put us back together as the first priority. When I get out, I’ll even help you in this peace stuff. We’ll stop the war. You and me. It’ll be great.”

They walked a bit, amid kids their own ages, but stoned and wild, just celebrating the youthfulness of their lives in a great merry adventure in Washington, DC, stopping the war and getting stoned and laid in the same impulse. Donny felt isolated from it terribly: he wasn’t a part of it. And he didn’t feel as if he were a part of the Marine Corps anymore.

“Okay,” he finally said, “I ought to be getting back. We may be on alert. If not, can I come by tomorrow?”

“I’ll try and break off tomorrow if nothing’s happening here. We don’t even know ourselves what’s going on. They say we’re going to march to the Pentagon over the weekend. More theater.”

“Please be careful.”

“I will.”

“I’ll figure out what we have to do to get married legally. It might be better to hide it from the Corps. They’re all assholes. Then after it’s done, the paperwork will catch up to us.”

“Donny, I love you. Ever since that date when you were with Peggy Martin and I realized I hated her for being with you. Ever since then.”

“We will have a wonderful life. I promise.”

Then he saw someone approaching him swiftly. It was Trig, with Peter Farris and several other acolytes following in his wake.

“Hey,” he called, “it just came over the radio. The Military District of Washington has just declared a full alert and all personnel are supposed to report to their duty stations.”

“Oh, shit,” said Donny.

“It’s beginning,” said Julie.

CHAPTER FIVE

A flare floated in the night. Lights throbbed and swept. The gas was not so bad now, and the mood was generous, even adventurous. It had the air of a huge camp-out, a jamboree of some sort. Who was in charge? Nobody. Who made these decisions? Nobody. The thing just happened, almost miraculously, by the sheer osmosis of the May Tribe.

At the Pentagon almost nothing had happened. It was all theater. By the time Julie and Peter and their knot of Arizona crusaders actually got onto government property, the word had come back that the Army and the police weren’t arresting anybody and they could stand on the grass in front of the huge ministry of war forever and nothing would happen. It was determined by someone that the Pentagon itself wasn’t a choke point, and it made more sense, therefore, to occupy the bridges before the morning rush hour and in that way close down the city and the government. Others would besiege the Justice Department, another favorite target of opportunity.

So now they marched along, past the big Marriott Hotel on the right, toward the Fourteenth Street Bridge just ahead. Julie had never seen anything like this: it was a movie, a battle of joy, a stage show, every pep rally and football game she had ever been to. Excitement thrummed in the moist air; overhead, police and Army helicopters buzzed.

“God, have you ever seen anything like this?” she said to Peter.

He replied, “You can’t marry him.”

“Oh, Peter.”

“You can’t. You just can’t.”

“I’m going to marry him next week.”

“You probably won’t be out of jail next week.”

“Then I’ll marry him the week after.”

“They won’t let him.”

“We’ll do it secretly.”

“There’s too much important work to be done.”

They passed the Marriott, maybe fifty abreast and a half-mile long, a mass of kids. Who led them? A small knot at the front with bullhorns of the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice; but more realistically, their own instincts led them. The professional organizers merely harnessed and marginally directed the generational energy. Meanwhile, the smell of grass rose in the air, and the sound of laughter; now and then a news helicopter would float down from the sky, hover and plaster them with bright light. They’d wave and dance and chant.

ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR

WE DON’T WANT YOUR FUCKING WAR

or

HO, HO, HO CHI MINH

N-L-F IS GONNA WIN

or

END THE WAR NOW

END THE WAR NOW.

That’s when the first tear gas hit.

It was acrid and biting and its overwhelming power to disorient could not be denied. Julie felt her eyes knit in pain, and the world suddenly began to whirl about. The air itself became the enemy. Screams rose, and the sound of panic and confusion spread. Julie dropped to her knees, coughing hard. Nothing existed for a second but the pain searing her lungs and the immense crushing power of the gas.

But she stayed there with a few others, though Peter had disappeared somehow. The evil stuff curled around them, their eyes now gushing tears. But she thought: I will not move. They cannot make me move.

Suddenly someone arrived with a bucket full of white washcloths soaked in water.

“Breathe through this,” he screamed, an old vet of this drill, “and it won’t be so hard. If we don’t break, they’ll fall back. Come on, be strong, keep the faith.”

Some kids fell back, but most just stood there, trying to deal with it. Someone — no one could ever say who or why — took a step forward, then another one, and in a second or so those that remained had joined. The mass moved forward, not on the assault and certainly not to charge, but just out of the conviction that as young people nothing could deter them because they were so powerful.

As Julie moved she saw ahead a barricade of DC police cars, their lights flashing, and behind them Army soldiers, presumably a contingent of the 7,500 National Guardsmen called up to much hoo-hah in the newspapers. They had an insect look, their eyes giant, their snouts long and descending, like powerful mandibles, their flesh black. The masks, she realized. They were wearing gas masks, all of them. This infuriated her.

“You are warned to disperse!” came an amplified voice. “You are hereby warned to disperse. We will arrest those who do not disperse. You do not have a parade permit.”

“Oh, like that’s really crucial,” said someone with a laugh. “Shit, if I’d realized that I never would have come!”

A helicopter floated overhead. To the right, over the Potomac, the sun began to rise. It was about six, Julie saw, looking at her watch.

“Keep moving!” came a cry. “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war!”

Julie hated to curse; she hated it when Donny cursed, but standing there in the astringent aftermath of the gas, her eyes bawling, her heart knotted in anger, she picked it up and was not alone.

ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR

WE DON’T WANT YOUR FUCKING WAR

It was like an anthem, a battle cry. The kids that were left took their strength from it and began to move more quickly. They came together in the strobing lights of the police cars and the running lights of the circling copters. Those who’d fled regained their heroism, stopped and, moved by the strength of the few who remained, turned and themselves began to march.

Pop! Pop! Pop!

More CS gas canisters came at them from the barricade, evil little grenades spurting viscous clouds of the stuff as they bounced. But the kids now knew it wouldn’t kill them and that the wind would come to thin it out and take its sting away.

ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR

WE DON’T WANT YOUR FUCKING WAR

Julie screamed with all her strength. She cried for pale, poor Donny in his hospital bed, a sack of plasma over him, his face drawn, his eyes vacant because of the death that had passed through him. She screamed for the other boys in that awful place, without legs or hopes, faces gone, feet gone, penises gone; she cried for the girls she knew would be bitter forever because their fiancés or brothers or husbands had come home in plastic bags dumped in wooden boxes; she cried for her father who preached of “duty” but himself had sold insurance through World War II; she cried for all the beaten kids in all the demonstrations in the past seven years; she cried for the little girl running from the napalm cloud, naked and afraid; she cried for the little man with his hands tied behind him who was shot in the head and fell to the ground, squirting blood.

ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR

WE DON’T WANT YOUR FUCKING WAR

They were all moving forward now, hundreds, thousands. They were at the police cars, they were beyond the police cars, the police were fleeing, the National Guard was fleeing.

“Hold it! Hold it, goddammit!” someone was shouting as the melee halted. Before them was clear bridge, all the way to the Jefferson Memorial. In the rising light, the Capitol stood before them, and over some trees the spire of the Washington Monument and off to the right the Alphaville Blocks of the new HEW complex. But there were no cars anywhere, and no cops.

“We did it,” somebody said. “We did it!”

Yes, they had. They had taken the bridge, won a great victory. They had driven the state away. They had claimed the Fourteenth Street Bridge for the Coalition for Peace and Justice.

They had won.

“We did it,” someone was saying next to her; it was Peter.

“NCOs and squad leaders up front ASAP. NCOs and squad leaders up front ASAP!”

The men milled loosely on the broad esplanade of closed-down Route 95 about a half mile on the DC side of the Fourteenth Street Bridge, behind a barricade of jeeps, police cars, deuce-and-a-halfs. Jefferson watched in marble splendor from the portside, amid a canopy of dogwoods and from behind a cage of marble columns. A pale lemon sky oversaw the scene, and helicopters fluttered through it, making far more noise than their importance seemed to warrant. It looked like a fifties movie, the one where the monster has attacked the city and the police and military set up barricades to impede its progress while in some lab, white-coated men labor to invent a secret weapon to bring it down.

“Napalm,” said Crowe helpfully. “I’d use napalm. Kill about two thousand kids. Roast ’em nice and tasty-chewie. Make Kent State look like a picnic. Boy, the war’d be over tomorrow.”

“Don’t think the lifers haven’t thought of it,” said Donny, as he left to head for the command conference.

He slipped away from Third Squad, slid through other squads and platoons of young men festooned comically for war, exactly as he was, who seemed to feel equally foolish with the huge pots banging on their heads. That was the odd thing about a helmet: when it’s not necessary, it feels completely ludicrous; when it is necessary, it feels like a gift from God. This was one of the former occasions.

Donny reached the informal conclave where the barracks commander stood with three men in jumpsuits that said JUSTICE DEPT on the back, some other officials, cops, firemen and some confused DC Guard officers, of whom it was said their panic had led to the rout on the bridge.

“All right, all right, people,” the colonel said. “Sergeant Major, all of ’em here?”

The sergeant major made a quick head count of his NCOs and from each man received a nod to signify that the men under him had arrived; it was done professionally in about thirty seconds.

“All present, sir.”

“Good,” said the colonel, climbing into a jeep to give him elevation over his subordinates, and speaking in the loud, clear voice of command.

“All right, men. As you know, at 0400 hours a large mass of demonstrators commandeered the right-hand span of the Fourteenth Street Bridge, effectively closing it down. The traffic is tied up back beyond Alexandria. The other bridges have been cleared by this time, but we’ve got a choke point. The Department of Justice has requested the Marine Corps to assist in clearing the bridge, and we’ve been authorized by our command structure for that mission. So let me tell you what that means: we will clear the bridge, we will do it quickly and professionally and with a minimum of force and damage. Understood?”

“Aye, aye, sir,” came the cry.

“I want A Company and B Company formed up line abreast, with Headquarters Company in reserve to go by squads to the line as needed. We do not have arrest powers and I do not want any arrests made. We will advance under cover of moderate CS gas with bayonets fixed but sheathed. Under no circumstances will those bayonets be used to draw blood. We will prevail not by force but by good order and solid professionalism. A DC Police mass-arrest unit will follow behind, detaining and shipping those demonstrators who do not disperse. Our limit of advance will be the far end of the bridge.”

“Live ammo, sir?”

“Negative, negative, I say again, negative. No live ammo. Nobody will be shot today. These are American kids, not VC. We will move out at 0900. Company commanders and senior NCOs, I want you to hold a quick meeting and get your best squads into the line at the point of contact. This is a standard DOD anti-riot drill. All right, people, let’s be professional.”

“Dismissed!”

Donny made it back to his squad, as around him other squad leaders were reaching their people. With the weird sensation of a large herbivore awakening, the unit was picking itself up, beginning to form up as each smaller element got instructions. There was some cheering, moderated by ambiguity, but nevertheless a simple expression of the soldier or Marine’s preference for doing anything rather than nothing.

“We’ll be in that arrow-formation, platoons-abreast thing,” Donny explained. “The sergeant major will be counting cadence.”

“Bayonets?”

“On but sheathed. Minimum force. We’re moving these people out of here by our presence. No ammo, no clubbing, just solid Marine professionalism, got it?”

“Masks?”

“I said masks, Crowe, weren’t you listening? Some CS will be fired.” He looked about. The sergeant major had set up a hundred yards beyond the trucks and now the Marines were streaming to him to form up at the line of departure. Donny looked at his watch. It was 0850.

“All right, let’s assemble and march to position. Form up on me, now!” His men rose to him and found their places. He marched them at the double time to a formation that was putting itself together on the broad white band of empty highway.

Peter held her hand. He was pale but determined, his face still teary from the gas.

“It’ll be okay,” he kept saying, almost more to himself than to her. There was something so sad about him, she had a tender impulse to draw him toward her and comfort him.

“All right,” came the amplified voice, “WTOP has a camera in the sky and we’ve just heard that the Marines are forming up to come and move us.”

“Oh, this is going to be merry,” said Peter. “The Marines.”

“I want to counsel everybody; you don’t want to resist or you may get clubbed or beaten. Don’t yell at them, don’t taunt them. Just go limp. Remember, this is your bridge, it’s not theirs. We’ve liberated it. We own it. Hell, no, we won’t go.”

“Hell, no, we won’t go,” repeated Peter.

“That’s the evil part,” Julie said bitterly. “They don’t come themselves, the guys in the offices who make it happen. They send in Donny, who’s just trying to do his job. He gets the shitty end of the stick.”

But Peter wasn’t listening.

“Here they come,” he said, for ahead, out of the blur, they could now see them drawing ever closer in a phalanx of rectitude and camouflage: the United States Marine Corps advancing at the half-trot, rifles at the high port, helmets even, gas masks turning them to insects or robots.

Hell, no, we won’t go! came the chant, guttural, from the heart. Marines, go home! Then again, Hell, no, we won’t go!

The unit advanced at the half-trot, to the sergeant major’s urgent cadence, Hup-two-THREE-four, Hup-two-THREE-four, and Donny’s squad stayed tight in the crowd-control formation, a little to the left of the point of the arrow.

Jogging actually helped Donny feel a little better; he settled into a steady rhythm, and the constellation of equipment bounded sloppily on his body. His helmet banged, riding the spongy straps of the helmet liner with a kind of liquid mushiness. He felt the sweat run down inside his mask, catch irritatingly at his eyelashes, then flood into his eyes. But it didn’t matter.

Through the lens of his mask the world seemed slightly tarnished, slightly dirty. Ahead, he could see the mass of demonstrators sitting on the bridge as if it were theirs, looking fiercely at them.

Hell, no, we won’t go! alternating with Marines, go home! Marines, go home! rose to fill the air, but it sounded tinny and idiotic. They closed on the crowd until but fifty yards away, then the sergeant major’s yell reached out to stop them.

“Ready, Halt!”

The two young Americas faced each other on the bridge. On the one side, about two thousand young people, ages fourteen through possibly thirty, most around twenty, college America, the nonconformism of complete conformism: all wore jeans and T-shirts, all had long, flowing, beautiful hair, all were pale, intense, high on grass or sanctimony, standing and drawing strength from one another under a bristle of placards that proclaimed PEOPLE’S COALITION FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE and other, ruder signs, like GIS, JOIN US! or STOP THE WAR! or FUCK THE WAR! or RMN MUST GO!

The other America, 650 strong, wore the green twill of duty, three companies of Marines, average age twenty also, armed with unloaded rifles and sheathed bayonets. They were earnest and, behind the rubber and plastic of their masks, clean-shaven and short-haired, yet in their way just as conflicted and just as frightened as the kids they faced. They were essentially the same kids, but nobody noticed. Behind them were cop cars, ambulances, fire engines, deuce-and-a-halfs, their own Corpsmen, news reporters, Justice Department officials. But they were the ones out front.

A man in the blue jumpsuit of the Justice Department stepped beyond the Marine formation. He had a bullhorn.

“This is an illegal parade. You do not have a parade permit. You are hereby ordered to disperse. If you do not disperse, we will clear the bridge. You are hereby ordered to disperse.”

“Hell, no, we won’t go!” came the response.

When it had died down after a sweaty bit, the Justice official reiterated his position, adding, “We will commence with CS gas operations in two minutes and the Marine Corps will move you out. You are hereby ordered to disperse!”

A moment of quiet followed and then a young man stepped forward, screamed, “Here’s your fucking parade permit!” then pivoted smartly, bent, and peeled down his jeans to reveal two white half moons of ass.

“God, he’s beautiful,” said Crowe through his mask, but loudly enough for the squad to hear. “I want him!”

“Crowe, shut up,” said Donny.

The man from the Justice Department departed. The sun was high, the weather sticky and heavy. Overhead, helicopters hovered, their rotors kicking up the only turbulence.

Another amplified voice, this from the demonstrators as the older people warned the kids.

“Do not attempt to pick up tear gas canisters as they will be very hot. Do not panic. The gas is not contained and it will disappear very quickly.”

“Gas!” came a command.

Six soft plops marked the firing of six DC Police gas guns, and the missiles skittered across the pavement leaking white fumes, spun, rolled and slid raggedly along. The point of firing them into the ground was to bounce them into the crowd at low velocity rather than firing them into people at high, possibly killing velocity.

“Gas!” the command came again, and six more CS shells were fired.

The sergeant major’s scream carried through the air: “Assault arms!” and with that the rifles left the cross-chest position of carry and were brought around the right side of the body, stocks wedged under right arms and locked in, muzzles with sheathed bayonets angled outward at forty-five degrees to the ground.

“Prepare to ad-vance!” came the command.

Only Crowe’s rifle wavered, probably out of excitement, but otherwise the muzzles lanced outward from the formation. Donny could sense the crowd of demonstrators drawing back, gathering somehow, then reinflating with purpose. Tear gas drifted loosely amid their ranks. It was just a crowd, identities lost in the blur and the gas. Was Julie over there?

“Ad-vance!” came the final command, and the Marines began to stomp ahead.

Here we go, thought Donny.

They looked like Cossacks. The rank was green, slanted in two angles away from the point, an arrowhead of boys, remorseless and helmeted, their facial features vanished behind their masks.

Julie looked through her tears for Donny, but it was useless. The Marines all looked the same, staunch defenders of whatever, in their sharp uniforms with their helmets and now their guns, which jutted out like threats. A cloud of tear gas washed over her, crunching her eyes in pain; she coughed, felt the tears run hot and fluid down her face, and rubbed at them, then dipped for her wet washcloth and wiped the chemical from them.

“Assholes!” said Peter bitterly, enraged at the troops advancing on him. He was trembling so hard he was locked in place, his knees wobbling desperately. But he wasn’t going to move.

“Assholes!” he repeated as the Marines closed in at a steady pace.

Donny was in the lead, solid as a rock; next to him, on the left, Crowe seemed strong. They clomped forward to a steady beat of cadence from the sergeant major, and through the jiggling stain of his dirty lenses, Donny watched as the crowd grew closer. The sergeant major’s cadence drove them on; tear gas wafted through the chaos; overhead a helicopter swept low and its turbulence drove the gas more quickly, into whirlwinds and spirals, until it rushed like water across the bridge.

“Steady on the advance!” screamed the sergeant major.

Details suddenly swam at Donny: the faces of the scared kids before him, their scrawniness, their physical weakness and paleness, how many of them were girls, the cool way the leader exhorted them with his bullhorn and that shocking moment when at last the two groups clashed.

“Steady on the advance!” screamed the sergeant major.

Maybe it was like some ancient battle, legionnaires against Visigoths, Sumerians against Assyrians, but Donny sensed a great issue of physical strength, of pure force of will as expressed through bodies, when the two came together. There was no striking; no Marine lifted his rifle and drove through for a butt stroke; no blade came unsheathed and leapt forward into flesh. Rather, there was just a crush as the two masses crunched together; it felt more like football than war, that moment when the lines collide and there are a dozen contests of strength all around you and you lay what you’ve got against someone else and hope you get full-body weight against him and can lift him from his feet.

Donny found himself hard against not an enemy lineman or a Visigoth but a girl of about fourteen, with freckles and red, frizzy hair and braces, headband, tie-dyed T-shirt, breastless and innocent. But she had more hate on her face than any Visigoth ever, and she whacked him hard on the helmet with her placard, which, he read as it descended, stated MAKE WAR NO MORE!

The placard smacked him, its thin wood broke and it slipped away. He felt his body ramming the girl’s and then she was gone, either knocked back or pushed down and stepped over. He hoped she wasn’t hurt; why hadn’t she just fled?

More tear gas drifted in. Screams arose. Melees had broken out everywhere as demonstrators leaned against Marines, who leaned back. One could feel strain as the two leaned and leaned and tried to press the other into panic.

It only lasted a second, really; then the demonstrators broke and fled and Donny watched as they emptied the bridge, leaving behind port-a-pots and sandals and squashed Tab cans and water buckets, the battlefield detritus of a vanquished enemy. There seemed no point in pursuing.

“Marines, stand easy,” the sergeant major yelled. “Masks off.”

The masks came off and the boys sucked hard at the air.

“Good job, good job. Anybody hurt?” yelled the colonel.

But before anybody could answer, a considerable ruckus arose to the left. Policemen were clustered around the railing of the bridge and the word soon reached the Marines that someone had panicked as they had approached, and jumped off. A police helicopter hovered low, an ambulance arrived and paramedics got out urgently. Police boats were called, but it took only a few minutes to make it clear that someone was dead.

CHAPTER SIX

The scandal played out pretty much as expected, depending on the perspective of the account. GIRL, 17, KILLED IN DEMONSTRATION, the Post headlined. The more conservative Star said, DEMONSTRATOR DIES IN BRIDGE MIX-UP. MARINES MURDER GIRL, 17, argued the Washington City Paper.

No matter; for the Marine Corps the news was very bad indeed. Seven liberal House members demanded an investigation into the matter of Amy Rosenzweig, seventeen, of Glencoe, Illinois, who had evidently panicked in the tear gas and the approach of the Marines and climbed over the railing. Before anybody could reach her, though several young Marines tried, she was gone. Walter Cronkite appeared to generate a small tear in his left eye. Gordon Petersen, of WTOP, developed a catch in his voice as he discussed the incident with his co-anchor, Max Robinson.

WHY MARINES? wondered the Post two days later on its editorial page.

U.S. Marines are among the world’s most feared fighting forces, an elite who have honored their country and their service in hostile environments since 1776. But what were they doing on the 14th Street Bridge May 1?

Surely, with their esprit de corps and constant immersion in the theory and practice of land warfare at its most savage, they were a poor choice for the Justice Department to deploy against peaceful demonstrators who had taken up a harmless “occupation” of the bridge as an expression of the long-precious tradition of civil disobedience. The D.C. police force, the Park Police, or even Guardsmen from the District’s own unit, all riot-trained and all experienced in dealing with demonstrations, would have been preferable to combat infantrymen, who tend to perceive all confrontations as us against them.

The place for the Marines is on the battlefields of the world, and the parade ground of the Eighth and I barracks, not on American streets. If the tragedy of Amy Rosenzweig teaches us anything, it teaches us that.

As for the Eighth and I Marines, in the immediate aftermath they were trucked back to the barracks, where they remained on alert and in isolation for two days. Teams from the FBI and the District Police and the U.S. Park Police worked over the members of Alpha Company, Second Platoon, Second Squad, who’d been on the extreme left wing of the crowd control formation, and who had seen the girl hanging on for dear life. Three of them had actually dropped their rifles, thrown away their masks and helmets and rushed to her, but in the instant before they reached her, she closed her eyes and gave her soul to God, relaxing backward into space. They got to the railing in time to see her hit the water thirty-five feet below; they got DC Police there within seconds, and within minutes a DC rescue boat was on the scene. If they’d had a rope, they would have rappelled down to the water themselves, but a quickly arriving platoon sergeant had forbidden any of them to jump off the bridge in attempts to rescue. It was just too high. And it wouldn’t have mattered. When she was located thirteen minutes later, it became quickly apparent that Amy’s neck had been broken by the impact of striking the water at an extreme angle. A report later exonerated the Marines and made it clear that no actual force had been applied to Amy. The Marines said she chose to martyr herself; the media said the Marines killed her. Who knew the truth?

On the third day, they arrested Crowe.

Rather, under small arms and under the supervision of two officers from the Naval Investigation Service, Lieutenant Commander Bonson and Ensign Weber, four Marine military policemen marched into the barracks where he and the rest of B company were relaxing while maintaining ready-alert status, and put him in handcuffs. Captain Dogwood and the battalion colonel watched it happen.

Then Lieutenant Commander Bonson came up to Donny and said in a loud voice, “Good job, Corporal Fenn. Damn fine work.”

“Good work, Fenn,” said Weber. “You got our man.”

In the aftermath, a space seemed to spread around Donny. He felt it open up, as if oceans of atmosphere had been vacuumed out of the area between himself and his squad and others in the platoon. Nobody would meet his eyes. Some looked at him in horror. Others merely left the vicinity, went into other squad bays or outside to lounge near the trucks.

“What the hell did he mean?” asked Platoon Sergeant Case.

“Uh, I don’t know, Sergeant,” Donny said. “Uh, I don’t know what the hell they were talking about.”

“You had contact with NIS?”

“They talked to me.”

“About what?”

“Ah. Well,” and Donny swallowed, “they had some security concerns and somehow I got—”

“Let me tell you something, goddammit, Fenn. If it happens in my platoon, you come tell me about it! You got that? This ain’t a one-man goddamn motherfucking operation. You come tell me, Fenn, or by God I will make your young sorry ass sorry you didn’t!”

The man’s blazing spit flew into Donny’s face and his eyes lit up like flares. A vein throbbed on his forehead.

“Sergeant, they told me—”

“I don’t give a monkey’s fuck what they told you, Fenn. If it happens in my platoon, I have to know about it, or you ain’t worth pig shit to me. Copy that, Corporal?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“You and me, boy, we got some serious talk ahead.”

Donny swallowed.

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Now, get these men off their asses. I’m not going to have them sitting around all goddamn day like they just won the fucking war all by themselves. Get ’em on work detail, drill ‘em, do something with them.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“And you and I will talk later.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

Donny turned in the wake of Sergeant Case’s departure, which was more like an ejection from a jet fighter than a normal retrograde adjustment.

“Okay,” he said to the squad. “Okay, let’s get outside and run through some riot control drills. There’s no point just sitting in here.”

But nobody moved.

“All right, come on, guys. I’m not shitting around here. You heard the man. We have an order.”

They just stared at him. Some looked hurt, the rest disgusted.

“I didn’t do anything,” Donny said. “I talked to some Navy lifers and that’s all.”

“Donny, if I flash the peace sign in a bar, will you turn me in to NIS?” someone asked.

“All right, fuck that shit!” Donny bellowed. “I don’t have to explain anything to anybody! But if I did, I’d point out I didn’t rat anybody out. Now, get into your gear and let’s get the fuck outside or Case’ll have us on a barracks party until 0400 next Tuesday!”

The men got up, but their slow heaviness expressed their bitterness.

“Who’ll take Crowe’s place?” someone asked.

There was no answer.

Julie was released from the lockup at the Washington Coliseum at 4 P.M. that same day, after forty-eight hours of incarceration with several hundred of the more recalcitrant demonstrators. At least physically, it was almost pleasant being arrested; the cops were old hands by this time and as long as everybody cooperated, the process was all right. She spent two nights on a cot in a field where the Washington Redskins practiced when it was their season. The seats of the junky old place rose above like a Pentecostal cathedral from the twenties, and in the pen, all the kids had a good time and nobody watched them too carefully. Grass was abundant; the portable toilets were cleaner than the ones at Potomac Park. The showers were never crowded and she got a good wash for the first time since leaving Arizona in the Peace Caravan. Some of the boys caught fantasy touchdown passes in what had to have been an end zone.

But no word at all from Donny. Had he been there on the bridge? She didn’t know. She’d looked for him, but then it’d all dissolved in confusion and tears as more of the gas flooded in. She remembered crumpling, rubbing her eyes desperately as the gas drifted by, and then there was the shock of the Marines and she found herself looking into the eyes of a boy, a child, really, big and booming behind his lenses; she saw fear in them, or at least as much confusion as she herself felt, and then he was by her and the Marine line moved on, and as she watched, teams of policemen pounced on the demonstrators behind the lines and led them away to buses. It was handled very simply, no big deal at all to anybody concerned.

Only later, in the lockup, did the word come that a girl had somehow died. Julie tried to work it out but could make no sense of it; the Marines had seemed quite restrained, really; it wasn’t anything like Kent State. Still, it was an appalling weight. A girl was dead, and for what? Why was it necessary? In the lockup, they had a television, and Amy Rosenzweig’s young and tender face, freckled, under sprigs of reddish hair, was everywhere. She looked to Julie like a girl she’d grown up with, though she could not remember seeing Amy amid the crowd, but that wasn’t surprising, for there had been thousands, and much confusion on the ground.

They let her out and she went back to the campground in Potomac Park. It was like a Civil War encampment after Gettysburg: mostly empty now that the big week was over and the kids in their multitudes had returned to their campuses and the professional revolutionaries to their secret cabals to plot the next move in the war against the war. Litter was everywhere and the cops no longer bothered. A few tents still stood, but the sense of a new youth culture had vanished. There was no music and no campfires and the Peace Caravan had departed. All, that is, except for Peter.

“Oh, hi.”

“Hi, how are you?”

“Fine. I stayed behind. Jeff and Susie are driving the Micro back. Everybody is with them. They’ll be all right. I wanted to stay here, see if you needed anything.”

“I’m okay, Peter, really I am. Have you seen Donny at all?”

“Him? Jesus, you know what they did to that girl and you want to know where he is?”

“Donny didn’t do anything. Besides, I read the Marines tried to save her.”

“If there hadn’t been any Marines, Amy would still be here,” Peter said obstinately, and then the two just looked at each other. He drew her close and hugged her and she hugged back.

“Thanks for hanging around, Peter.”

“Ah, it’s okay. How was the Coliseum?”

“Okay. Not so bad. They finally reduced charges, parading without a permit. They let us all go today.”

“Well,” he said. “If you want me to drive you to the Marine Barracks or something, I will. Whatever you want. I have a VW from a guy. It’s no problem.”

“I’m supposed to get married this week.”

“That’s fine. That’s cool. Good luck and God bless. Let me see if I can help you in any way.”

“I think I ought to hang here until I hear from Donny. I don’t know what happened to him.”

“Sure,” said Peter. “That’s a good idea.”

The alert was finally cancelled at 1600 that afternoon, to the cheers and relief of the companies. It took an hour or so to actually stand down — that is, to return the rifles to the armory, to shed and repack the combat gear in its appropriate place in the lockers, to shed the utilities, bag them for the laundry, shower and shave. But by 1700, when the work was done, the captain at last released his men — the married to go home, the rest to relax in town or on base as they preferred, with only a few left on skeleton duty, such as duty NCO or armory watch.

That is, except for Donny.

He was done, and still in his cone of isolation, finally changing into civvies — jeans and a white Izod shirt — when a runner came from headquarters and said he was wanted ASAP. No, he didn’t have to dress in the uniform of the day.

Donny returned to Captain Dogwood’s office, where Bonson and Weber waited.

“Captain, we could take him to our offices. Or would you allow us to use yours?”

“Yes, sir, go ahead,” said Dogwood, who wanted to get home to see his own wife and kids too. “Stay here. Duty NCO will lock up when you’re finished.”

“Thank you, Captain,” said Bonson.

So Donny was alone with them at last. They were in civilian clothes this time, Weber looking like the Sigma Nu he’d undoubtedly been at Nebraska, and the dour Bonson in slacks and a black sport shirt, buttoned to the top. He looked almost like a priest of some sort.

“Coffee?”

“No, sir.”

“Oh, sit down, Fenn. You don’t have to stand.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

Donny sat.

“We want to go over your testimony with you. Tomorrow there’ll be an arraignment, at the Judge Advocate General’s Offices at the Navy Yard, nothing elaborate. It’s simply a preliminary to an indictment and trial. Ten hundred. We’ll send a car. Your undress blues will be fine; I’ve arranged with Captain Dogwood for you to be off the duty roster. Then I think we’ll give you a nice bit of leave. Two weeks? By that time, we should be able to cut orders for your new stripes. Sergeant Fenn. How does that sound?”

“Well, I—”

“Tomorrow won’t be hard, Fenn, I assure you. You’ll be sworn in and then you’ll recount how at my instruction you befriended Crowe and traveled with him into a number of peace movement functions. You’ll tell how you saw him in the presence of peace movement strategists such as Trig Carter. You saw them in serious conversation, intense conversation. You needn’t testify that you overheard him giving away deployment intelligence. Just tell what you saw, and let the JAG prosecutor do the rest. It’s enough for an indictment. He’ll have a lawyer, a JAG JG, who’ll ask you some rote questions. Then it’s over and done and off you go.”

Bonson smiled.

“Clean and simple,” said Weber.

“Sir, I just … I don’t know what I can tell them. There were hundreds of people at those parties. I saw no evidence of conspiracy or deployment intelligence or—”

“Now, Donny,” said Bonson, leaning forward and trying a smile. “I know this is confusing for you. But trust me. You’re doing your country a great service. You’re doing the Marines a great service.”

“But I—”

“Donny,” said Weber, “they knew. They knew.”

“Knew?”

“They knew we had Third Infantry committed in Virginia, that the DC National Guard was a complete fuckup, the 101st Airborne was stuck at Justice and the 82nd down at the Key Bridge and that the cops were frazzled beyond endurance after eighty straight duty hours. It was an elaborate game of chess — they move here, we countermove; they move there, we countermove — all set up to get them to that bridge where they’d be faced by United States Marines where the chances of a big-time screwup on television were huge. And that’s just what they got: another martyr. Another catastrophe. The Justice Department humiliated. A propaganda victory of immense proportions. They’re parading with Amy’s name in London and Paris already. Give them credit, it was as skillful a campaign as there was.”

“Yes, sir, but we tried to save her. The girl panicked. It had nothing to do with us.”

“Oh, it had everything to do with you,” said Bonson. “They wanted her going off the bridge and the Marines to take the fall. See how much better that is than the Washington Metro Police or some third-rate National Guard unit, most of whom’d be demonstrating themselves if they had the chance? No, they wanted a big scandal to be laid right at the Marines’ feet and that’s what they got! And Crowe gave it to them. Now, it is mandatory to get this fact before the public, to show that we were betrayed from within and to move swiftly to restore confidence in the system by eliminating the treason. And I can’t think of a more edifying contrast for the American public than between Crowe, an Ivy League dropout with his fancy connections, and you, a decorated combat veteran from a small Western town doing his duty. It’ll be very educational!”

“Yes, sir,” said Donny.

“Good, good. Ten hundred. Look sharp, Corporal. You will impress the JAG officers, I know you will. You will inherit your own future, the future you and I have been working on, I know it.”

“Yes, sir,” said Donny.

They rose.

“All right, Weber, we’re finished here. You relax, Fenn. Tomorrow is your big day, the beginning of the rest of your life.”

“I’ll get the car, sir,” said Weber.

“No, I’ll get it. You — you know; tell him what’s cooking.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bonson left the two younger men alone.

“Look, Fenn, I’m the bad cop. I’m here to give you the bad news. I’ve got photos of you smoking grass with Crowe, okay? Man, they can really nail you with them. I mean big time. I told you this guy Bonson was cold. He is beaucoup cold, you know? So give him what he wants, which is another bad boy’s scalp to hang up on his lodge pole. He’s sent a bunch to the ’Nam, and he wants to send more. I don’t know why, what he is driving at, but I know this: he will rotate your ass back to the Land of Bad Things and not ever even think about it again. He’s got you cold. It’s you or it’s Crowe. Man, don’t throw your life away for nothing, dig?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good man, Fenn. Knew you’d see it our way.”

At 2300, Donny just walked out the front door of the barracks. Who was there to stop him? Some corporal in first platoon had duty NCO that night and he was scribbling in the duty logs in the first sergeant’s office as Donny passed.

Donny walked to the main gate and waved at the sentry there, who waved him past. Technically, the boy was to look for liberty papers, but in the aftermath of an alert, such niceties of the Marine way had fallen aside. Donny just walked, crossed I Street, headed down the way, took a left, and there found, unbothered, his 1963 Impala. He climbed in, turned the key and drove away.

It didn’t take him long to reach Potomac Park, site of the recently abandoned May Tribe. A few tents still stood, a few fires still burned. He left his car along the side of the road and walked into the encampment, asked a few questions and soon found the tent.

“Julie?” he called.

But it was Peter who came out.

“She’s sleeping,” he said.

“Well, I need to see her.”

“It would be better if she slept. I’m watching out for her.”

The two faced each other; both wore jeans and tennis shoes, Jack Purcells. But Donny’s were white, as he washed them every week. Peter’s didn’t look as though he had washed them since the fifties. Donny wore a madras short-sleeved button-down shirt; Peter had some kind of tie-dyed T-shirt on, baggy as a parachute, going almost to his knees. Donny’s hair was short to the point of neuroticism, with a little pie up top; Peter’s was long to the point of neuroticism, a mass of curly sprigs and tendrils. Donny’s face was lean and pure; Peter’s wore a bristle of scraggly red beard and a headband.

“That’s very cool,” said Donny. “But I have to see her. I need her.”

“I need her too.”

“Well, she hasn’t given you anything. She’s given me her love.”

“I want her to give me her love.”

“Well, you’ll have to wait awhile.”

“I’m tired of waiting.”

“Look, this is ridiculous. Go away or something.”

“I won’t leave her unguarded.”

“Who do you think I am, some kind of rapist or killer? I’m her fiancé. I’m going to marry her.”

“Peter,” said Julie, coming out of the tent, “it’s all right. Really, it’s all right.”

“Are you sure?”

Julie looked tired; still, she was a beautiful young woman, with hair the color of straw and a body as lean and straight as an arrow, and brilliance showing behind her bright blue eyes. Both boys looked at her and recommitted to her love again.

“Are you okay?” Donny asked.

“I was in the lockup at the Coliseum.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“It was fine; it wasn’t anything bad.”

“You killed a girl,” said Peter.

“We didn’t kill anyone. You killed her, by telling her being on that bridge mattered and that we were rapists and murderers. You made her panic; you made her jump. We tried to save her.”

“You fucking asshole, you killed her. Now, you’re a big tough guy and you can kick the shit out of me, but you killed her!”

“Stop screaming. I never killed anyone who didn’t have a rifle and wasn’t trying to kill me or a buddy.”

“Peter, it’s okay. You have to leave us alone.”

“Christ, Julie.”

“You have to leave us.”

“Ahhh … all right. But don’t say — anyhow, you’re a lucky guy, Fenn. You really are.”

He stormed away in the darkness.

“I never saw him so brave,” said Julie.

“He loves you. So much.”

“He’s just a friend.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t get here earlier. We were on alert. There was a lot of shit because of Amy. I’m very sorry about Amy, but we didn’t have a thing to do with it.”

“Oh, Donny.”

“I want to marry you. I love you. I miss you.”

“Then let’s get married.”

“There’s this thing,” Donny said.

“This thing?”

“Yeah. By the way, I’ve technically deserted. I’m UA. Unauthorized absence. I’ll be reported tomorrow at morning muster. They’ll do something to me probably. But I had to see you.”

“Donny?”

“Let me tell you about this thing.”

And so he told it: from his recruitment to his attempts to enter into a duplicitous friendship with Crowe to his arrival at the party to his strange behavior that night until, finally, the action on the bridge, Crowe’s arrest and tomorrow’s responsibilities.

“Oh, God, Donny, I’m so sorry. It’s so awful.” She went to him and in her warmth for just a second he lost all his problems and was Donny Fenn of Pima County all over again, the football hero, the big guy that everybody thought so highly of, who could do a 40 in four-seven, and bench press 250, yet take pride in his high SATs and the fact that he was decent to his high school’s lowliest creeps and toads and never was mean to anybody, because that wasn’t his way. But then he blinked, and he was back in the dark in the park, and it was only Julie, her warmth, her smell, her sweetness, and when he left her embrace, it was all back again.

“Donny, haven’t you done enough for them? I mean, you got shot, you lay in that horrible hospital for six months, you came back and did exactly what they said. When does it end?”

“It ends when you get out. I don’t hate the Corps. It’s not a Corps thing. It’s these Navy guys, these super-patriots, who have it all figured out.”

“Oh, Donny. It’s so awful.”

“I don’t work that way. I don’t like that stuff at all. That’s not me. Not any of it.”

“Can’t you talk to somebody? Can’t you talk to a chaplain or a lawyer or something? Do they even have the right to put you through that?”

“Well, as I understand it, it’s not an illegal order. It’s a legitimate order. It’s not like being asked to do something that’s technically wrong, like shoot kids in a ditch. I don’t know who I could talk to who wouldn’t say, Just do your duty.”

“And they’ll send you back to Vietnam if you don’t testify.”

“That’s the gist of it, yeah.”

“Oh, God,” she said.

She turned from him and walked a step or two away. Across the way, she could see the Potomac and the dark far shore that was Virginia. Above it, a tapestry of stars unscrolled, dense and deep.

“Donny,” she finally said, “there’s only one answer.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Go back. Do it. That’s what you have to do to save yourself.”

“But it’s not like I know he’s guilty. Maybe he doesn’t deserve to get his life ruined just because—”

“Donny. Just do it. You said yourself, this Crowe is not worth a single thing.”

“You’re right,” Donny finally said. “I’ll go back, I’ll do it, I’ll get it over. I’m eleven and days, I’ll get out inside a year with an early out, and we can have our life. That’s all there is to it. That’s fine, that’s cool. I’ve made up my mind.”

“No, you haven’t,” she said. “I can tell when you’re lying. You’re not lying to me; you never have. But you’re lying to yourself.”

“I should talk to someone. I need help on this one.”

“And I’m not good enough?”

“If you love me, and I hope and pray you do, then your judgment is clouded.”

“All right, who, then?”

Who, indeed?

There was only one answer, really. Not the chaplain or a JAG lawyer, not Platoon Sergeant Case or the first sergeant or the sergeant major or the colonel or even the Commandant, USMC.

“Trig. Trig will know. We’ll go see Trig.”

Bitterly, from afar, Peter watched them. They embraced, they talked, they appeared to fight. She broke away. He went after her. It killed him to sense the intimacy they shared. It was everything he hated in the world — the strong, the handsome, the blond, the confident, just taking what was theirs and leaving nothing behind.

He watched them, finally, go toward Donny’s old car and climb in, his mind raging with anger and counterplots, his energy unbearably high.

Without willing it, he raced to the VW Larry Frankel had lent him. He turned the key, jacked the car into gear and sped after them. He didn’t know why, he didn’t think it would matter, but he also knew he could not help but follow them.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Peter almost missed them. He had just cleared a crest when he saw the lights of the other car illuminate a hill and a dirt road beyond a gate, then flash off. His own lights were off, but there was enough moonlight to make out the road ahead. He pulled up to the gate and saw nothing that bore any signal of meaning, except a mailbox, painted white with the name WILSON scribbled on it in black. He was on Route 35, about five miles north of Germantown.

What the hell were they up to? What did they know? What was going on?

He decided to pull back a hundred yards, and just wait for a while. Suppose they ran in there, and turned around and collided with him on the road? That would be a total humiliation.

Instead, he decided just to watch and wait.

At the top of the hill, they turned the engine off. Below lay a farm of no particular distinction, a nondescript house, a yard, a barn. Propane tanks and old tractors, rusted out, lay in the yard; there was no sound of animals. The farm, in fact, looked like a Dust Bowl relic.

Yet something was going on.

Twin beams illuminated the yard, and Donny, with his unusually good eyesight, could make out a van with its lights on, a shroud of dust, and two men who were in the process of moving heavy packages of some sort out from the barn into the van by the light of the headlamps.

“I think that’s Trig,” Donny said. “I don’t know who the other guy is.”

“Shall we go down?”

Donny was suddenly unsure.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t figure out what the hell is going on.”

“He’s helping his friend load up.”

“At this hour?”

“Well, he’s an irregular guy. The clock doesn’t mean much to him.”

That was true; Trig wasn’t your nine-to-fiver by any interpretation.

“All right,” said Donny. “We’ll walk down there. But you hang back. Let me check this out. Don’t let them see you until we figure what’s happening. I’ll call you in, okay? I’m just not feeling good about this, okay?”

“You sound a little paranoid.”

He did. Some hint of danger filled the air, but he wasn’t sure what it was, what it meant, where it came from. Possibly, it was the mere strangeness of everything, the way nothing really made any sense. Possibly it was his own fatigue, raw after the many hours on alert.

They headed down the hill, and Donny detoured them around the house, until at last they came upon the two men from the rear. Donny could see them better now, both working in jeans and denim shirts. They were loading by wheelbarrow immensely awkward sacks of fertilizer into the van, packing it very full, AMMONIUM NITRATE, the sacks said. Dust that the wheelbarrow tires ripped up from the ground filled the air, floating in large, shimmering clouds, which shifted through the beams of the truck lights and in the yellower light that blazed from the barn door. It lit wherever it could, coating the truck, the men, everything. Both Trig and the other man wore red bandannas around their faces.

Pushing Julie back into the dark, Donny stepped out and approached, coughing at the stuff in the air as it filled his mouth and throat with grit. He stepped farther; nobody noticed him.

“Trig?” he called.

Trig turned instantly at his name, but it was the other man who reacted much faster, turning exactly to Donny, his dark eyes devouring him. He had a full, tangled web of blond hair, much thicker than Trig’s, and was large and powerful next to Trig’s delicacy. They looked like a poet and a stevedore standing next to each other.

“Trig, it’s me, Donny. Donny Fenn.” He stepped forward a little hesitantly.

“Donny, Jesus Christ, I didn’t expect you.”

“Well, you said to come on out.”

“I did, yeah. Come on in. Donny, meet Robert Fitzpatrick, my old friend at Oxford.”

“Halloo,” said Robert, pulling off his own bandanna to show a smile that itself showed a mouthful of porcelain spades, a movie star’s gleam of a smile. “So you’re the war hero, eh? We’ve hopes for you, that we do! Need boyos like you for the movement. We’ll stop this bloody thing and get the west field covered in horseshit and ammonium nitrate, if I’m a judge of things. Roll up your sleeves, boy, and get to work. We could use some back. Me goddamned pickup broke down and I’m stuck with this piece of shit to git the stuff out to the spreader. We’re doing it at night to beat the heat.”

“Robert, he’s been on some kind of alert for seventy-two hours. He can’t do manual labor,” Trig said.

“No, I—”

“No, we’re almost done. It doesn’t matter.”

“You left so suddenly.”

“Ah, one more demonstration. I was worn out. What did it prove? I’ve lost my will for the movement.”

“You’ll get your will back, boyo,” said the giant Fitzpatrick heartily. “I’ll go get us a beer for the recharge. You wait here, Donny Fenn.”

“No, no, I just had a thing I wanted to talk over with Trig.”

“Oh, Trig’ll steer you right, no doubt about it,” he said, his voice light with laughter. “It’s a drink I’ll be gittin’, Trig. You lads talk.”

With that he turned to the house and headed in.

“So what is it, Donny?”

“It’s Crowe … they arrested him. Violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. I’m supposed to testify against him in” — he looked at his watch — “about seven hours.”

“I see.”

“Maybe you don’t. I was asked to spy on him. That was my job. That’s why I got close to him. I was supposed to report to them on his off-base activities and try and put him with known members of the peace groups. That’s why I was with him at the party that night; that’s why I came to your party. I was ordered to spy.”

Trig stared at him for a while, then his face broke into the oddest thing: a smile.

“Oh, that’s your big secret? Man, that’s it?” He laughed now, really hard. “Donny, wise up. You work for them. They can ask you to do that. If they say so, that’s your duty. That’s the game in Washington these days. Everybody’s watching everybody. Everybody’s got an agenda, a plan, an idea they’re trying to push or sell. I don’t give a damn.”

“It’s worse. They have some idea you were Weather Underground and you planned the whole thing. I mean, can you imagine anything so stupid? He was feeding you deployment intelligence so the May Tribe could humiliate the Corps.”

“Boy, their imagination never fails to amaze me!”

“So what should I do, Trig? That’s what I’m here to ask. About Crowe. Should I testify?”

“What happens if you don’t?”

“They’ve got some pictures of me smoking dope. Funny, I don’t smoke dope anymore, but I did to get in with him. They could send me to Portsmouth. Or, more likely, the ’Nam. They could ship me back for a last go-round, even though I’m short.”

“They’re really assholes, aren’t they?”

“Yeah.”

“But that’s neither here nor there, is it? This isn’t about them. We know who they are. This is about you. Well, then it’s easy.”

“Easy?”

“Easy. Testify. For one reason, you can’t let them get you killed. What would that prove? Who benefits from the death of Lochinvar? Who wins when Lancelot is slain?”

“I’m just a guy, Trig.”

“You can’t give yourself up to it. Somebody’s got to come out on the other side and say how it was.”

“I’m just … I’m just a guy.”

People were always insisting to Donny that he was somehow more than he really was, that he represented something. He’d never gotten it. It was just because he happened to be good-looking, but underneath he was just as scared, just as ineffective, just as simple as anyone else, no matter what Trig said.

“I don’t know,” said Donny. “Is he guilty? That would matter.”

“It doesn’t matter. What matters is: you or him? That’s the world you have to deal with. You or him? I vote him. Any day of the week, I vote him.”

“But is he guilty?”

“I’m no longer in the inner circle. I’m sort of a roaming ambassador. So I really don’t know.”

“Oh, you’d know. You’d know. Is he guilty?”

Trig paused.

Finally he said, “Well, I wish I could lie to you. But, goddammit, no, no, he’s not guilty. There is some weird kind of intelligence they have at the top; I just get glimmerings of it. But I don’t think it’s Crowe. But I’m telling you the truth: that doesn’t matter. You should dump him and get on with your life. If he’s not guilty of that, he’s guilty of lots of other stuff.”

Donny looked at Trig for a bit. Trig was leaning against the fender of the van. He lifted a milk carton and poured it over his head, and water gushed out, scraping rivulets in the dust that adhered to his handsome face. Trig shook his wet hair, and the droplets flew away. Then he turned back.

“Donny, for Christ’s sake. Save your own life!”

Peter was no good at waiting. He got out of the car and walked along the shoulder of the road. It was completely dark and silent, unfamiliar sensations to a young man who’d spent so much time OCS — on city streets. Now and then he heard the chirp of a cricket; up above, the stars towered and pinwheeled, but he was not into stars or insects, so he noticed neither of these realities. Instead, he reached the gate, paused a moment, and climbed over. He saw before him a faint rise in the land, almost a small hill, and the dirt road that climbed it. He knew if a car came over the hill and he were standing on that road, he’d be dead-cold caught in the lights. So he walked a distance from the road, then turned to head up the hill, figuring he could then drop to the ground if Donny and Julie returned.

Gently, he walked up the hill, feeling as alone as that guy who had walked on the surface of the moon. He reached the top of the hill and saw the farmhouse below him. No sight of Julie but he saw Trig and Donny slouched on the fender of a van in the yard between the house and the barn, and they were chatting animatedly, relaxed and intimate. There was no sign of danger, no sign of weirdness: just two new friends bullshiting in the night.

But then small things began to seem off. What was Trig doing way out here? What was this place? What was going on? It connected with nothing in Peter’s memory of Trig.

Puzzled, he stepped forward and almost tripped as he bumbled into something.

Two figures rose before him.

Oh, shit, he thought, for they wore suits and one of them carried a camera with a long lens.

Clearly they were feds, spying on Trig.

They had the pug look of FBI agents, with blunt faces and crew cuts; one wore a hat. They did not look happy to be discovered.

“W-who are you?” Peter asked in a quavering voice. “What are you doing?”

“I don’t think I can sell him out,” said Donny.

“Donny, this isn’t a Western. There are no good guys. Do you hear me? This is real life, hardball style. If it’s you or Crowe, do not give yourself up for Crowe.”

“I suppose that’s the smart move,” said Donny.

“So, there,” said Trig. “I made your decision easy for you. All you have to do is cooperate with them. Come on, when the war is over, they’ll reduce his sentence. He may never even serve a day. They’ll work some deal, he’ll get out and go on with the rest of his life. He won’t even be upset.”

Donny remembered that once upon a time, even Crowe had given him the same advice. Roll over on me in a second, Donny, if it ever comes to that. Somehow Crowe had known it would.

“Okay,” he finally said.

“Do your duty, Donny. But think about what it costs you. Okay. Think about how you feel now. Then when you get out, do me one favor, okay? No matter what happens to me, promise me one thing.”

Trig winced as if in pain in the hot light of the headlights, though perhaps something had just gotten in his eye. There was an immense familiarity to that look, the strain on his face, the set of it, the clearness of vision. And … And what?

“Sure,” Donny said.

“Open your mind. Open your mind to the possibility that the power to define duty is the power of life and death. And if people impose duty on you, maybe they’re not doing it for your best interests or the country’s best interests but for their own best interests. Okay, Donny? Force yourself to think about a world in which each man got to set his own duty and no one could tell anyone what to do, what was right, what was wrong; the only rules were the Ten Commandments.”

“I—” stammered Donny.

“Here,” said Trig. “I have something for you. I was going to mail it to you from Baltimore, but this’ll save me the postage and the fuss. It’s no big deal.”

He went over to some kind of knapsack on the ground, fished around, and came out with a folder, which he opened to reveal a piece of heavy paper.

“Sometimes,” he said, “when the spirit moves me, I’m even pretty good. I’m much better at birds, but I did okay on this one. It’s nothing.”

Donny looked: it was a drawing on a creamy page trimmed from that sketchbook Trig was always carrying, incredibly delicate and in a spiderweb of ink, that depicted himself and Julie as they stood and talked in the trees at West Potomac Park.

There was something special about it: he got them both, maybe not exactly as a photograph, but somehow their love too, the way they looked at each other, the faith they had in each other.

“Wow,” said Donny.

“Wow, yourself. I dashed it off that night in my book. It was neat, the two of you. Gives me hope for the world. Now, go on, get the hell out of here, go back to your duty.”

Trig drew him close, and Donny felt the warmth, the musculature, and maybe something else, too: passion, somehow, oddly misplaced but genuine and impressive. Trig was actually crying.

Over the shoulders of the two FBI agents, Peter saw Donny and Trig embrace, and then Donny stepped out of the light and was gone. He’d head to his car, which Peter now saw was but fifty or so yards away. He was screwed. Donny would see him here with the two feds, who showed no sign at all of moving, and he would have made an ass out of himself.

He felt despair rising in his gorge.

“I have to go,” he said to the larger of the two plainclothes officers.

“No,” the man said back, and the other moved to embrace Peter, as if to wrestle him to the ground. Peter squirmed out of the man’s grip, but he was grabbed and thrust to the ground.

The two men loomed over him.

“This is ridiculous,” he said.

They seemed to agree. They looked at each other foolishly, not quite sure what to do, but suddenly one of them pointed.

Then the engine of Donny’s car came to life and its lights flashed on.

The man with the camera pulled away from Peter, leaving the other, the bigger, to lean on him, and ran toward the gate.

“Well, did he help?” said Julie as they walked through the dark.

“Yeah,” said Donny. “Yes, he did. He really did. I’ve got it figured out now.”

“Should I go meet him?”

“No, he’s in a very strange mood. I’m not sure what’s going on. Let’s just get out of here. I’ve got some things to do.”

“What did he give you?”

“It’s a picture. It’s very nice. I’ll show you later.”

They walked through the dark, up the hill. Donny could see the car ahead. He had an odd tremor suddenly, a sense of not being alone. It was a freakish thing, sometimes useful in Indian country: that sensation of being watched. He scanned the darkness for sign of threat but saw nothing, only farmland under moon, no movement or anything.

“Who was that blond guy?” she asked.

“His pal Fitzpatrick. Big Irish guy. They were loading up to spread fertilizer.”

“That’s strange.”

“He said they decided to do the hard part of the job in the cool of the night. Hell, it was only fertilizer. Who knows?”

“What was going on with Trig?”

“I don’t know. He was, uh, strange is all I can call it. He had the same look on his face that the Time photographer got, when he was carrying that bleeding kid in from the cops in Chicago and his own head was bleeding too. He was very set, very determined, but somehow, underneath it all, very emotional. He seemed like he was facing death or something. I don’t know why or what. It spooked me a little.”

“Poor Trig. Maybe even the rich boys have demons.”

“He wanted to hug. He was crying. Maybe there was something weirdo in it or something. I felt his fingers in my muscles and I felt how happy he was to be hugging me. I don’t know. Very weird stuff. I don’t know.”

They reached the car, and Donny started it, turning on the lights. He backed into the grass, turned around and headed down the road to the gate.

“Jesus,” he said. “Duck!” For at that moment a figure suddenly rose from a gulch. A man in a suit, but too far away to do anything. A camera came up. Donny winced at the bright beam of flash as it exploded his night vision. Fireballs danced in his head, reminding him of nighttime incoming Hotel Echo, but he stepped on the gas, gunned up the road and turned right, then really floored it.

“Jesus, they got our picture,” he said. “A fed. That guy had to be FBI! Holy Christ!”

“My face was turned,” said Julie.

“Then you’re okay. I don’t think he got a license number, because my rear plate illumination bulb is broken. He just got my picture. A lot of good that’ll do them. A fed! Man, this whole thing is strange.”

“I wonder what’s going on?” she said.

“What’s going on is that Trig’s about to get busted. Trig and that Fitzpatrick guy. We were lucky we weren’t rounded up. I’d be on my way to the brig.”

“Poor Trig,” said Julie.

“Yes,” said Donny. “Poor Trig.”

The man let him up. He brushed himself off.

“I haven’t done anything,” Peter explained. “I’ve come to see my friends. You have no right to detain me, do you understand? I haven’t done anything.”

The man stared at him sullenly.

“I’m going now. This is none of your business,” he said.

He turned and walked away. The agent had seemed genuinely cowed. He stepped away, awaiting a call, but none came. Another step filled him with confidence, but he didn’t see or hardly feel the judo chop that broke his spine and, in the fullness of his tender youth and in the ardor of his love for his generation and its pure idea of peace, killed him before he hit the ground.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Donny reached DC around four in the morning, and he and Julie checked into a motel on New York Avenue, in the tourist strip approaching downtown. They were too tired for sex or love or talk.

He set the cheap alarm for 0800, and slept deeply until its ungentle signal pulled him awake.

“Donny?” she said, stirring herself.

“Sweetie, I’ve got some things to do now. You just stay here, get some more sleep. I paid for two nights. I’ll call you sometime today and we’ll decide what to do next.”

“Oh, Donny.” She blinked awake. Even out of sleep, with a slightly puffy face and her hair a rat’s nest, she seemed to him quite uniquely beautiful. He leaned over and kissed her.

“Don’t do anything stupid and noble,” she said. “They’ll kill you.”

“Don’t you worry about me,” he said. “I’ll be all right.”

He dressed and drove the mile or so through the section of city called SE, passing Union Station, then left up the hill until he was in the shadow of the great Capitol dome, turning down Pennsylvania, then down Eighth. He arrived, found parking on a street just off the shops across from the barracks, locked the car and headed to the main gate.

From across Eighth Street, the little outpost of Marine elegance seemed serene. The officers’ houses along the street were stately and magnificent; between them, Donny could see men on the parade deck in their modified blues, at parade practice, endlessly trying to master the arcane requirements of duty and ritual. The imprecations of the NCOs rose in the air, harsh, precise, demanding. The grass on which the young men toiled was deep green, intense and pure, like no other green in Washington in that hot, bleak spring.

Finally, he walked across the street to the main gate, where a PFC watched him come.

“Corporal Fenn, you’ve been reported UA,” the PFC said.

“I know. I’ll take care of it.”

“I’ve been ordered to notify your company commander of your arrival.”

“Do your duty, then, Private. Do you call Shore Patrol?”

“They didn’t say anything about that. But I have to call Captain Dogwood.”

“Go ahead, then. I’m changing into my duty uniform.”

“Yes, Corporal.”

Donny walked through the main gate, across the cobblestone parking lot and turned left down Troop Walk to the barracks.

As he went, he was aware of a strange phenomenon: the world seemed to stop, or at least the Marine Corps world. It seemed that whole marching platoons halted to follow his progress. He felt hundreds of eyes on him, and the air suddenly emptied of its usual fill of barked commands.

Donny went in, climbed the ladder well as he had done so many hundreds of times, turned left on the second deck landing and into the squad bay, at the end of which was his little room.

He unlocked his locker, stripped, slipped into flipflops and a towel and marched to the showers, where he scalded himself in water and disinfectant soap. He washed, dried, and headed back to his room, where he slipped on a new pair of boxers and pulled out his oxfords.

They could be better. For the next ten minutes he applied the full weight of his attention to the shoes, in regulation old Marine Corps fashion, until he had burnished the leather to a high gleam. As he finished the shoes, the tough professional figure of Platoon Sergeant Case came to hover in the door.

“I had to put you on UA, Fenn,” he said, in that old Corps voice that sounded like sandpaper on brass. “Do you want me to Article Fifteen your young ass?”

“I was late. I had personal business. I apologize.”

“You’re not on the duty roster. They say you’ve got some legal obligations at ten hundred.”

“Yes, Sergeant. In the Navy Yard.”

“Well, I’ll get you off report. You do the right thing today, Marine. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

Case left him alone after that.

Though he hadn’t been so ordered, and in fact didn’t even know the uniform of the day, he decided to put on his blue dress A uniform. He pulled on socks and taped them to his shins so that they’d never fall, selected a pair of blue dress trousers from the hanger and pulled them on. He tied his shiny oxfords. He pulled on a T-shirt, and over it, finally, the blue dress tunic with its bright brass buttons and red piping. He pulled tight the immaculately tailored tunic, and buttoned up to that little cleric’s collar, where the eagle, globe and anchor stood out in brass bas-relief. He pulled on a white summer belt, drawing it tight, giving him the torso of a young Achilles on a stroll outside Troy. His white summer gloves and white summer cover completed the transformation into total Marine.

The medals, reduced to ribbons, stood out on his chest — nothing spectacular, for the Marines are a dour bunch, not into show: only a smear of red denoting the very hot day when he’d slithered through rice water and buffalo shit with half the world shooting at him to pull a wounded PFC back into the world, to life, to possibility. The blur of purple was for the bullet that had passed through his chest a few weeks later. The rest was basically crap: a National Defense Ribbon, the in-service RSVN award, the Presidential Unit Citation for the overall III Marine Amphibious Force presence in the Land of Bad Things, the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry and expert marksman in rifle and pistol with second awards. It was no chest of fruit salad, but it did say, This man is a Marine, who’s been in the field, who was shot at, who tried to do his duty.

He adjusted the white summer cover until it came low over his blue eyes, then turned and went to face Commander Bonson.

He left the barracks and headed toward the captain’s office, where he was to be picked up. The XO wandered by and he snapped off a quick salute.

“Fenn, is that the uniform of the day?”

“For what I have to do, sir, yes, sir.”

“Fenn— Never mind. Go ahead.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Two NCOs, including Case, watched him go. By the time he reached Troop Walk, by some strange vibration in the air, everyone knew he was in his full dress blues. The men, in their modifieds, watched him with suspicion, maybe a little hostility, but above all, curiosity. The uniform, of course, was not the uniform of the day, and for a Marine to strut out in so flagrant a gesture of rebellion was extremely odd; he could have been naked and caused less of a ruckus.

Donny strode down Troop Walk, aware of the growing number of eyes upon him. He had a fleeting impression of men running to catch a glimpse of him going; even, across the way, when he passed by Center House, the base’s BOQ, a couple of off-duty first lieutenants came out onto the porch in Bermudas and T’s to watch him pass by.

He turned into the parking lot, where a tan government Ford, with a squid driving, waited by the steps; he then turned left, climbed and walked across the porch and into the first sergeant’s office, which led to Captain Dogwood’s office. The first sergeant, holding a cup of coffee with Semper Fi emblazoned on the porcelain, nodded at him, as orderlies and clerks scurried to make way.

“They’re waiting on you, Fenn.”

“Yes, First Sergeant,” said Donny.

He stepped into the office.

Captain Dogwood sat behind his desk, and Bonson and Weber, in their summer khakis, sat across from him.

“Sir, Corporal Fenn, reporting as ordered, sir,” Donny said.

“Ah, very good, Fenn,” said Dogwood. “Did you misunderstand the uniform of the day? I—”

“Sir, no, sir!” Donny said. “Sir, permission to speak, sir?”

Another moment of silence.

“Fenn,” said the captain, “I’d consider carefully before—”

“Let him speak,” said Bonson, eyeing Donny without love.

Donny turned to face the man fully.

“Sir, the corporal wishes to state categorically that he will not testify against a fellow Marine on charges of which he has no personal knowledge. He will not perjure himself; he will not take part in any proceedings involving the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Sir!”

“Fenn, what are you pulling?” asked Weber. “We had an agreement.”

“Sir, we never had an agreement. You gave me orders to investigate, which I did, against my better instincts and in contravention to every moral belief I have. I did my duty. My investigation was negative. Sir, that is all I have to say, sir!”

“Fenn,” said Bonson, fixing him with a mean glare, “you have no idea what forces you’re playing with and what can happen to you. This is no game; this is the serious business of defending the security of our nation.”

“Sir, I have fought for our nation and I have bled for our nation. No man who hasn’t has the right to tell me about defending our nation, whatever his rank, sir! Finally, sir, may I sincerely say, sir, you are an asshole and a creep and you haven’t done one thing for the United States of America, and if you want to meet me out back, let’s go. Bring Weber. I’ll kick his ass too!”

“Fenn!” said Dogwood.

“All right, Captain Dogwood,” said Bonson. “I see this is the kind of Marine you have here at Eighth and I. I’m very disappointed. This reflects on you, Captain, and my report will so state. Fenn, if I were you, I’d start packing. Don’t forget your jungle boots.”

He turned and walked out.

“That was stupid, Fenn,” said Weber.

“Fuck you, Weber, you ass-kissing creep.”

Weber swallowed and turned to Dogwood.

“Restrict him to quarters. His orders will be cut by four.”

Then he turned and walked out.

Dogwood went to the phone and talked in an intimate voice with someone. Then he hung up.

“Sit down, Fenn,” said Dogwood, turning back to Donny. “Do you smoke?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, I do.” Shaking a little, he lit up a Marlboro and went to the door.

“Welch, get in here!”

Welch scurried in.

“Yes, sir.”

“You have until four, Welch, to get liberty papers cut for Corporal Fenn; get ’em back here for my signature. Seventy-two hours. If you have to run over to personnel at Henderson Hall, you take my car and driver. Don’t stop for traffic. Do you understand?”

“Uh, well, sir, I, it’s highly irregular, I’m not—”

“You heard me, Welch,” said the captain. “Now get going.”

He turned back to Donny.

“Okay, Fenn, I can’t save you from Vietnam, but I can get you some time off before you have to go if I can get your orders cut before Bonson’s paperwork catches up with you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You go change into civvies now. You be ready to take off as soon as possible.”

“Yes, sir. I— Thank you, sir.”

“Oh, just a moment. Yes, here she is.”

A woman walked into the room, pleasant, in her late twenties. Donny recognized her from the picture on the desk as Dogwood’s wife.

“Here, Mort,” she said, handing an envelope over. She turned to Donny. “You must be very foolish, young man. Or very brave.”

“I don’t know, ma’am.”

“Fenn, here. It’s six hundred dollars, cash. It’s all we had in our quarters. It’ll take you and your girlfriend someplace for a few days.”

“Sir, I—”

“No, no, go ahead, son. Take it. Enjoy yourself. Pay it back when you can. And when you get to the ’Nam, keep your ass down. That shithole isn’t worth another Marine. Not a single one. Now go. Go, go, son. And good luck.”