Tree of Smoke

“You mean you’re the only person in hell gets inside the Long Time. You’re their only customer on the planet.”

“No hard feelings.”

“Yes hard feelings, shit hard feelings.”

“Well, then, hard feelings, then. But stay the fuck out of my bar. Are those your orders?” he continued, now addressing the three new ones.

James had collected the papers for all three of them and held them in a tight sweaty grip. “You realize your pay’s gonna be hung up, right?” “Why? What’s wrong with our papers?” “Nothing. They’re all fucked up.” The other one said, “It all gets routed around the world, down your

throat, and up your ass.”

The two hosts rode up front in the cabin and the new ones in the back, in a canvas-covered cavern, as far from the open end as they could manage. They bumped forward as the view of the airfield behind them, the jumble of crates, Quonsets, vehicles, aircraft, then the city, the wildly colored buildings, the streets full of people who didn’t know how strange they looked, gave way to a general vegetation. James had trained for jungle environs in South Carolina and in Louisiana, but only during the fall and winter. His feet steamed in his boots. He took off his helmet. The day was cloudy, but the glare of it behind them through the open tarp made it impossible to keep his eyes open. He nodded forward into a brown stupor and slept until the truck jumped and explosions roared around his head. Fisher and Evans had already flattened themselves on the deck among their duffels. James fell on top of them. The truck had stopped. The doors slammed. The two from up front now both stepped up on the rear bumper and peered in at the tangled grouping. “I told you they were queer,” one said. The other held his cigarette aloft and touched to it what turned out to be the fuse of a string offirecrackers, which he pitched in beside them. Another deafening, rattling burst. The two captors disappeared. The vehicle resumed its motion. The three privates were horrified at the callousness of the joke. James almost wept from fear, and Evans said, “If we had guns we could shoot that guy in the back of his

s

head and leave him laying, doesn’t he know that?” “J esu God!” Fisher shouted. He kicked viciously at the wall of the cabin. The truck stopped again. “Now see what you done!” Houston cried. “These bastards are gonna kill us now!” Only one—Flatt—popped up at the rear. “GI!” he shouted. “GI motherfucker! Incoming!” One at a time he tossed in three cans of Budweiser beer. “That was a stupid gag,” he admitted.

“Goddamn right,” Fisher said. “Well, anyway, those are real-ass stateside cans of Bud with pull tabs. Eat up them beers, and no hard feelings.”

Fisher continued as spokesman: “Yes hard feelings! Jesus God! What are you, a goddamn NVA Vietcong spy?” He popped his beer and foam sprayed everywhere and he cried, “Fuck!”

“We’re taking an R-and-R detour,” the man said. “Have you ever had sideways pussy?” The three had rearranged themselves now on the benches. Nobody

replied. “I repeat: Have you ever had sideways pussy?” They continued pondering the question. “I believe I have your attention now,” Flatt said, and he hopped off

the bumper and they recommenced their travels. “Jesus God!” Fisher said. “Don’t say Jesus God no more,” Evans said. “What am I supposed to say?” “J don’t know. How am J supposed to know?” James held his beer can down by his feet as he popped it. He dropped

the tab into the can and turned it up to his face and guzzled warm Budweiser till the tab hit his tongue, and still he sucked at the opening.

A storm came over, fell like a cataract for five minutes, and subsided. Then it was foggy, hard to breathe. James slid himself along the bench to the end of the carrier and ventured to look out at the Vietnam War— rain dripping from gigantic leaves, deformed vehicles, small people—the truck gearing down, engine bawling, mud boiling under the big tires — barefoot pedestrians stepping away from the road, brown faces passing, rut after rut after rut, the beer lurching in his stomach. He mopped his face with the hem of his shirt, shielded his brow with his hand, and watched the sunset, as it fell below the level of the clouds, turn the colors of the world both somber and powerful. They’d joined a highway. All the roadside vegetation looked dead. The concrete pavement had acquired a reddish tint from all the mud rubbed into it. All kinds of vehicles used this road, bicycles and motor scooters and larger contraptions apparently created out of exactly such two-wheeled conveyances, and oxcarts and pushcarts, as well as half-naked pedestrians in conical hats, bent down by large bundles. The truck pushed east along the road with much honking, much zigging and zagging, braking and gearing. For a while they moved so slowly a cart behind them was able to keep pace, and James stared for a long time into the stupid, deeply sympathetic face of a water buffalo.

The dark came abruptly. For a while the traffic got very sparse, and then it appeared they were slowing, they were in, or near, some kind of town. The carrier stopped before a structure made mostly of bamboo, with a sign out front dimly lit by a red bulb and saying COCA-COLA and LONG BRANCH SALOON. Floating in its red cloud, the place looked hot, damp, mysterious, lonely. Music thudded within. Houston leaned out and peered frontward and could see quite a lot of doings ahead, shadowy structures and the tiny moving lights of bicycles. Between here and there, however, lay a long patch of darkness.

Their hosts, or captors, approached. Flatt said, “Get out of my truck.” “Really?” Houston said. “Give them a break, Flatt. Come on.” “All right,” Flatt agreed. “Fm sorry I been fucking with you. You guys

are the best thing happened all week. Your ride coming in so late means we should really, really in the interest, you know, of the wisest judgment, spend the night here in Bien Hoa. So you and Jolly entertain yourselves, and meanwhile, I gotta go in here to the Long Time and see a couple important enemy spies.”

“We’re coming with you, right?” Evans said.

James said, “Well, ain’t you going in yourself right now?” “I’m on officiai business,” Flatt said. “You guys better just find an

other spot up the street there. Go over to the Floor Show.” “Up the street?” Fisher said. That’s not a street. It’s dark.” “Corporal Jollet will escort you into town.”

“All right—shit. Fine. Shit. I’ll take over,” said Jollet. “All aboard,

let’s go.” “Oh no you don’t. The truck stays here.” “It’s near a klik to anyplace else!” “Men,” Flatt said, “carry on. Move in single file and pray your asses

don’t get ambushed your first night on the ground. You got any money?” “Shit,” Jollet said. “They don’t have any money.” “You keep saying ‘Shit’ like it’s my name,” Flatt said. “Stop saying

‘Shit’ like it’s my name. How much you guys got? Because in this wacky-ass modern world where we’re living,” he explained, “you can’t get laid without no money. You got enough for a beer?”

“How much is a beer?” “I got a couple bucks,” James admitted. “U.S. cash or MPC?” “Regular dollar bills.” “Corporal Jollet, take these new guys to the Floor Show.” Flatt and Jollet, both bumping into each other and getting in each

other’s way, giving off an aura of mutual dependence and resentment, like brothers, placed their M 16s in the carryall’s tool compartment. Jollet said to the privates, “Where’s your weapons?”

“Jesus God!” Fisher cried out. “I TOLD you!” James said, “We don’t have no weapons.” “How bizarre,” Flatt said. “Are we gonna get some?” “Yes, I believe we can furnish you all the weapons you want,” Jollet

assured them. “This is a war.” Flatt went into the Long Branch Saloon, leaving them with Jollet,

who said, “I’m not actually gonna say it, but I feel like saying, ‘Shit.’ ” He turned and headed toward the town. They could only follow. “Where are we?” “Bien Hoa. We don’t go past the edge. It’s all air force in there.” It was dark. This was Vietnam. “Goddamn,” James said, trying to

keep his voice as soft as the darkness. “The point being?” “The point being is, it’s darker’n hell.” “They should show you a picture of how dark it is here before you

sign up at the recruiters,” Evans said.

“I didn’t sign up,” Fisher said. “They drafted my ass. And I qualified

for chopper training.” “Then what are you doing here?” Evans asked. “What are you doing here?” “I volunteered,” Evans said. “Why? Two things: curiosity plus stupid

ity. What about you, Cowboy?” Having mentioned that his mom worked on a ranch, James Houston had become a cowboy. He said, “Just stupidity all by itself, I guess.” Fisher said, “You think they have any mines around here? Mines on

this road? Booby traps or anything?” “Shut up, all of you,” Jollet said, and instantly they shut up. James smelled cook-smoke, greasy vapors. They walked toward the

vague dim lights, not very far off now, their boots creaking and their canteens ticking. He would never top this feeling, he was sure of it: scared, proud, lost, hidden, alive.

Fisher broke the silence. “Can you please just tell us where we’re going?”

Jollet halted to light a cigarette, sending over the region a glow from his lighter. “To this place called the Floor Show. The floor shows used to be very weird, due to a lack of music.” He waved the lighter and the flame went out. “See? No snipers.”

“What do you mean ‘floor shows’?” “They should be improved considerably. I heard they got a jukebox.” “What’s on it?” “Songs, man. Tunes, you know?” “Where’d they get a fucking jukebox?” “Where do you think? Some NCO club someplace. Somebody sold

it out the back door.” “And you don’t know what’s on it?” “How would I know that, Private? I got no fucking idea.” “But, I mean —just a general idea.” Jollet halted, his face toward the sky. “DEAR LORD. I HAVE NOT

BEEN TO SEE THE FUCKING THING YET.”

A broken-off sign out front of the place said FLOOR SHOW. It looked like a barn, only inside instead of goats and chickens there were people, mostly small women. Behind the plywood bar a green neon sign said LITTLE KING’S ALE. There were lava lamps. “Sit here,” Jollet instructed them. They sat at a table. “You, sir. Your name is what?”

“Houston.” Jollet said, “Buy me a beer, Houston.” “I’ll buy you just one, and that’s all.” ‘Tow, daddy! Yer scratchin’ my number.” “What does that mean?” “That means I need two dollars.” One of the women approached. “You want floor show?” She seemed

to guess Jollet was the one to talk to, maybe because he hadn’t sat down.

She smiled at him in her tight, short blue dress. She’d lost a front tooth. “No floor show. Beer now, floor show later.” “I be your waitress,” she said. “Give me two dollars,” he said. “Four beers.” James said, “Lemme have a Lucky Lager.” “No Lucky. Puss Boo Ribbon.” “Pabst? Nothing but Pabst?” “Puss Boo Ribbon or 33.” Jollet said, “Bring us 33.” “I want Pabst,” James said. “You want the cheapest,” Jollet said. “Bring it in the bottle. Don’t

bring me no dirty glass.” She took Houston’s money and departed. Looking terrified, Fisher said, “All righty, then!” “Fellers,” Jollet said, “I’m gonna sky on out of here.” “What?” “Got errands to run. You children stay put.” “What? How long do we stay here?” “Till I get back.” “How long is that, man?” “Corporal Jollet,” said Fisher, “please. We just came from the States.

We don’t know where we are.” “I know where you are. So just stay where you are till I get back.” The woman returned carrying four bottles by their necks, two in each hand. Jollett intercepted her, took one, said, “Thank you very much,” and disappeared.

And here they sat while the woman wiped the sweat off their beers with a bar rag. She was very small and wore a lot of makeup too white for her dark complexion.

“This beer tastes like pimple medicine,” Fisher declared. Evans said, “What was the name of this town again?” James tipped his beer to his mouth and guzzled and tried to think.

He drank half of it down, but no thoughts came. The beer tasted like any other. “We didn’t need them Yankees anyway,” he said. “J needed them. Fm lost” Fisher said. “I’m a Yankee too,” he pointed

out. The woman said, “You want floor show?” “Beer now,” Evans said. “Floor show later. Okay?” She leaned down and said directly to James, “You want bo-jup?” “What did she say?” ” ‘Scuse me,” James said, “did you mean to say, you know, blow job,

are you saying?” “Bullshit.” “That’s what she said.” “Oh, holy Jesus God,” Fisher said. “How much is it?” “One time right now two dollar.” “Can you believe this?” “Somebody loan me two dollars,” James said. “You’re the one with the money.” “I ain’t got it,” James said. “What’s your name?” Evans said. “My name Lowra,” she said. “That means Laura, right?” “I give you good bo-jup.” “Beer now, bo-jup later,” Evans said. He looked pale and amazed. Rapidly James finished his 33 beer, the only thing in this environ

ment he felt qualified to deal with. In a corner at several tables shoved together sat a gang of youngsters in white uniforms, sailors from a foreign land, all holding or wearing berets of a color indeterminate in this dimness, most of them with whores in their laps. Nearby the famous jukebox throbbed redly like a forge. In a central spot three couples slow-danced, hardly moving, to “YouVe Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.” A tall GI kissed his partner in an endless, terrifying kiss, enshrouding her in his arms, hunched over her and devouring her face. The couples continued in exactly the same fashion while the machine stopped its music, while it whirred and deliberated. When the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann” came on, the foreign sailors sang along sloppily. James felt like joining in, but he was too shy. Whatever the rhythm, the dancers stood like zombies grappling in a trance. “I think those sailor-looking guys are French,” Evans said. “Yeah, they’re French.”

The three men of the infantry sat watching the dancers while the jukebox played some woman singing “Makin’ Whoopee” and then another doing “The Girl from Ipanema.”

When Laura came around and asked again about a floor show, Fisher said, “Voulez vous coucher avec moi?” and she said, “Mais oui, monsieur, boo-coo fuck-you,” and the three broke down in hilarious embarrassment, and she left them with a quick, dismissive air.

“Buy me a beer, Houston.” “I done bought you one. Buy me one now.” Evans said to James: “You dildo-sniffer.” “What’s that? What’s a dildo-sniffer?” “I think it’s fairly obvious.” James thought not. “What’s a dildo?” he asked Fisher. “You got any money?” “Where’s my two dollars?” “Ask them.” “Don’t I get no change back?” “Ask them.” “I ain’t asking anybody anything.” “Shut up,” Evans said, “let me count. You know what? In this room

there’s more women than guys. There’s fifteen women.” “Would you fuck one?” “What do you mean? Of course I would. I’d fuck all of them.” “They’re kind of ugly,” Fisher said. “Kind of, yeah,” James said, “but not exactly.” He stared at one across

the room—pug-nosed, sexy-lipped. Her flat, noncommittal gaze provoked him.

“I’ll buy, and then you buy,” Evans told Fisher. “Deal.” “Deal.” “So go get them.” “You go get them.” “You’re buying, so you get them.” “Fine, fucker,” Evans said. “Is everybody twenty-one? Can I check

your ID?” “Are you gonna get them beers or not?” James said. “Yes.” Evans crossed into the smoky gloom as if moving forward out

of the trenches, as if this were finally the war. When he got back he seemed happy with himself. “One more beer

and I’m ready to dance. But really. Houston. Hey. How old are you?” “I don’t know.” “You don’t know? You don’t know? I’m nineteen. There, I told you, so

you tell me.” “Eighteen.” “Eighteen?” “Me too,” Fisher said. The jukebox started playing “Walk on By” by Dionne Warwick. A fat whore who seemed to be dancing all by herself nearby turned

slowly, and in doing so revealed a short man almost dangling in her embrace, his head on her breast. Two-inch heels on his cowboy boots made his rear end jut like a woman’s. Fisher started laughing at the couple and showed no ability to restrain himself.

The man disengaged himself from his partner and came to their table. He was smiling, but when Fisher stood up, the little man said, “Do you want to get knocked down?”

“No.” “Well, don’t stand so tall-up and so bloody fucking close, then. How

tall are you?” “Tall enough.” “Tall enough to get knocked down,” the man said, mainly to the oth

ers. He wore jeans and a madras shirt. He was short, wide, round-headed.

“How tall?” “I don’t know.” “How many feet and inches, Yank?”

“Six feet five inches.”

“Jesus bloody hell.”

“You couldn’t knock me down,” Fisher said.

“He’s just being friendly,” James put in.

“I’m just saying what I think,” Fisher said, “about knocking me down.” “Sounds like you’ve grown your beer muscles now, mate.” “I’m just stating a fact.” “Oh, yeah, he’s got his beer muscles right big all over him!” “Who are you?” “I’m Walsh of the Australian merchant marine. I’m nine stone in

weight and one hundred fifty-two centimeters tall, and I’ll fight all four of you all at once, or one at a time. Let’s start with the toughest. Who’s the toughest? Come on. You the toughest?”

“I don’t think so,” said James.

“You don’t want to be taking me on, if you’re the toughest or not,” the Aussie said. To Fisher he said, “How about you, big fella? Think you can just throw me up on the roof, big fella?”

“You’re a ornery li’l shit, but I’ll throw you up on the roof,” Fisher said, laughing.

Little Walsh was outraged. “You’ll throw me up on the roof? Get out here. Get out here. Come and throw me up on the roof, come on outside.” He wheeled and headed for the door.

Fisher followed him, somewhat baffled. “Oh, shit,” he said, “I’m going to get beat on by a midget wrestler.”

Houston and Evans went too. Outside in the muddy street, where they got no light except what fell through the doorway, Walsh primed himself for battle by working his shoulders, flexing his hands, arching himself backward, bending over forward, touching his palms to the dirt. “Come on.” Fisher stooped with his arms outstretched, as if preparing to lift a child. His opponent weaved left and right, bobbed his head, dropped his left shoulder in a quick feint, shot out his right hand, and apparently threw dirt in Fisher’s eyes. Fisher stood upright, blinking, squinting, openmouthed. The Aussie kicked him in the groin, ran around behind him, and lashed out with the bottom of his foot twice, rapidly, first at the crook of Fisher’s knee and then at his spine, and sent the big boy sprawling on his face with his hands wrapped around his crotch.

The Aussie bent over him and shouted, “Wake up, ya lazy bastid!” By this time the French sailors and their girls had come out to watch, but it was already over.

Walsh helped Fisher to his feet. James and Evans lent a hand. “Come on, get up, get up. Enough of our shenanigans, it’s time for a hefty lager amongst us boys.”

Inside, he joined the youths at their table, pulling his fat whore onto his lap. “Don’t fight the little fella. Never fight the little fella. We’re here amongst you giants because we’ve survived, and we’ve survived because we’re tougher than God. All right, then! Beers for everyone! Christ!” he suddenly shouted. “I smell cherry! Who’s cherry here?” He looked around among their blank faces. “Have none of ya never had a fuck? That’s all right. The beer’s on me, boys. I bullied you, I snookered on ya shamefully, and I’m a bastid of the low degree. But Christ, I only weigh nine stone. And I’m hung like a hummingbird. Right, honey? Tiny-tiny!”

His girl said, “I like tiny-tiny. I don’t like bick dick.”

Girls surrounded them. A girl sat in Fisher’s lap. A girl stood beside James’s chair, playing with his ear. She leaned down and whispered, “Let’s go fuck.” The one in Fisher’s lap said to him, “I like bick dick.” Her zoris dangled from her toes above the floor. She had a funny face. Huge slanted cheekbones. She looked like an elf. He told her, “Get off me. My balls hurt. I don’t love you.”

“I’m fifty-nine and three-quarter inches tall. Survival is my chiefest consideration at this altitude. I’ve got to be aggressive.” Walsh pushed at his woman’s rump and said, “I want beers all around for these brave lads of the American Army. Did you brave lads see the sign out front? In the days of yesteryear this place was called Lou’s, and there was a big Coca-Cola sign that said ‘Lou’s,’ and the small sign out front said ‘Floor Show Any Time.’ But one night a drunken Aussie of the merchant marine karate-chopped the sign and broke it off. Me. Yeah! That was me gave this place the famous name. Where’s your home, big fella?”

“Pittsburgh. And I wish I was there.”

“You’re a game lad, Pittsburgh. Here’s my hand in friendship. Never fight the little man. He’s learnt to bring you down. I’ve been around the world in ships, and I’ve learnt to bring the victory home. I’m one hundred fifty-two centimeters in height, and shall never grow another. And the floor show’s on me.”

James tried dancing with his woman. She came close against him, soft and hot, and her hair was stiff and she smelled like baby powder. When he asked her name she said, “I make my name for you”—her ripe, sassy lips. The rhythm was driving, but they slow-danced together in the ruby light of the jukebox. Walsh paid for the beers. They sang songs with the French sailors, one of whom danced on the table in his underpants while the others shook up their beers and sprayed him with foam. Walsh arm-wrestled the table and beat them, every last one. He paid for the floor show, but they had to pay a man in a striped gangster suit two dollars extra, he said, “for the jukebox.” They went to a bedroom in the back of the establishment and sat on the floor and a woman came in, shut the door, pulled her dress off over her head without taking her cigarette from her mouth, and stood before them naked in red high-heeled shoes, puffing on her smoke. Her body was utterly perfect in every part. “What what WHAT is your name?” Evans cried out, and she said, “My name is Virgin.” Out in the bar the jukebox again struck up “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” and the naked Virgin began to move. “I’m horny tonight, so horny, so horny,” she wailed. James couldn’t feel his hands, feet, lips, or tongue. Standing less than one meter from his face she danced for a minute to the music, then sat on the bed, parted wide her knees, and inserted her cigarette’s filter tip between the lips of her vagina and puffed away, blowing smoke from her crotch while the jukebox in the next room played “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones. Now James felt as if his head had been chopped off and thrown in boiling water. Virgin lay back, the bed supporting only her head and shoulders, her high heels planted on the floor, her torso gyrating to the rhythms of “Barbara Ann,” and they all sang along … God almighty, some part of him prayed, if this is war let peace never come.

Th e three Kootchy Kooties came around for one of their consultations. They kept to themselves and hogged the shade beside Bunker One this sunny morning, and none of Echo Recon thought of crowding them. The black guy was especially scary. He’d done a tour with a Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol squad who traveled the nights completely jazzed on uppers taking the life of any man, woman, or child they encountered.

His hair grew out in an explosion of savage curlicues and he painted his face like an Indian and went around with the sleeves of his uniform torn off. In comparison, the actual Indian among them, diminutive, wiry, bowlegged, from somewhere in the Southwest, appeared quite sane. The third guy was of Italian or even more foreign extraction, Greek maybe, Armenian. He never talked, not even to his operational superior, the colonel.

Meanwhile, at the moment, Colonel Sands wouldn’t shut up. And he wasn’t a real colonel, he was more like a Southern honorary fat-boy colonel, and the men called him “Colonel Sanders” behind his back and referred to these rare morning assemblies in the encampment on the west side of Good Luck Mountain as the “Hour of Power.”

But the colonel wasn’t a fool. He had an eerie sense for what you were thinking: “You men realize I’m a civilian. I confer with your lieutenant; I don’t pass orders to him. But I do direct our operations in a general sense.” He stood right in the crashing-down light of the tropical morning with his hands on his hips. “Twelve weeks ago, last November nineteenth, my alma mater, Notre Dame, played what should have been the bloodiest game in its history against Michigan State. Both superb teams. Both undefeated. Both raring for a fight.” The colonel wore canvas boots like their own, stiff new Levi’s, a fisherman’s vest with a lot of pockets. White T-shirt. Aviator sunglasses. From his back pocket jutted the blue bill of a baseball cap. “A week before the game the Michigan State students leafleted the Notre Dame campus from an airplane. The leaflets were addressed to the ‘peace-loving villagers of Notre Dame.’ They asked, ‘Why do you struggle against us? Why do you persist in the mistaken belief that you can win, freely and openly, against us? Your leaders have lied to you. They have led you to believe you can win. They have given you false hopes.’ “

What was he rattling on about? The colonel was part joke, part sinister mystery. Sometimes he sounded like a cracker, other times like a Kennedy. He liked to have the Screwy Loot drive him around the mountain in a jeep while he chewed cigars and sipped from a pint of whiskey, clutching an M16 between his knees, hoping to shoot at tigers or leopards or wild pigs.

“Now, this Notre Dame-Michigan State game I’m telling you about is already being called the Game of the Century. It’s important to me not just as a former tackle for the Fighting Irish, but as an enemy of the Vietcong right here and now. I’ve been trying to get hold of the films of this game. I’d like every soldier in this theater to study what happened. I hope I can get some film of the train ride our Fighting Irish took to the Spartan Stadium in East Lansing, Michigan. People standing in the cornfields and dairy farms beside the train rails holding up signs saying ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, Notre Dame’s in second place.’ I’d like to show every one of you what the Irish saw, heading into a stadium full of seventy-six thousand people chanting and rocking and swaying and hollering. I wish we could all sit down together and watch the kickoff.

“The Irish played under a cloud of misfortune. Our main pass receiver—Nick Eddy—slipped on the ice getting off the train and wrecked his shoulder before the game even started. Next setback, after the first play of the game our best center left the field on a stretcher. Then our quarterback Terry Hanratty went down in a pile and he was dragged off with a separated shoulder. Well into the second quarter, Michigan State was tromping us ten to nothing. But this young diabetic second-string quarterback name of Coley O’Brien somehow tossed a thirty-four-yard touchdown pass to a second-string receiver named Bob Gladieux—not even an Irish name —and then the Irish held Michigan State off until our kicker made a field goal right at the start of the fourth quarter.

“And there you are, a tie game, ten to ten. One minute thirty seconds left. Irish have the ball on our own thirty-yard line. There’s the field. There’s the goal. Here are the men.

“But the head coach, Coach Parseghian, elected to run the clock out and take the tie. Elected to leave the field without a victory.

“Now, why was that?

“It was because taking the tie didn’t diminish their chances of winning a national championship. A tie still left them in first place, nationally. And a couple weeks later they did, in fact, take the national championship. They trounced USC fifty-one to zero.

“Now, do you think I’m going to tell you that was wise? Well, maybe it was. Maybe it was wise. But it was wrong. “Because that day in East Lansing, against their bitterest foe, they left the field without a victory.” The sweat poured out of his silver flattop down his face, but he didn’t wipe it away. He removed his hands from his hips and slapped his right

fist into his left palm, a fist as broad across the knuckles as any heavyweight champion’s. “By God,” the colonel said, “I’m going to get the film of this game. We’re going to sit down and watch it together right here in this camp.

“Now, listen to me. I don’t want you to get confused why I’m telling you this. I’m telling you this because it’s exactly what we ourselves, right here, are always up against, invariably. Invariably we are up against a stretch of ground and an enemy. And to give up the stretch of ground in pursuit of some theory about the future is not the way we do things here. Now, your mission is to keep this hill secure for our LZ up there, and to check out tunnel entrances and mark them on the map. You do not have to go down inside those tunnels. We have people for that job.”

Indeed, there were people for that job: the badass Kootchy Kooties. These guys slithered down face-first into dark holes in the earth with a pistol in one hand and their balls in the other and a flashlight in their teeth, anywhere in the Cu Chi region. “Kootchy Kooties” was a fabulous name. As for Echo Recon, they didn’t have a flashy call-name, but owing to their proximity to Cao Phuc they couldn’t avoid being known as the Cowfuckers, a stupid bit of luck. They didn’t even get to paint it on anything because it was dirty language.

“We will win this war.” Was he still talking? “And the efforts of this particular platoon will be instrumental in that. Think of us as infiltrators. This land under our feet is where the Vietcong locate their national heart. This land is their myth. We penetrate this land, we penetrate their heart, their myth, their soul. That’s real infiltration. And that’s our mission: penetrating the myth of the land.

“Questions?”

There came a long pause during which they listened to the birds down here and the whack-whack-whack of a helicopter up on the mountain.

The colonel removed his sunglasses and succeeded in staring the whole platoon in the eye at once. “Here’s what we said about tie games when I played for the Irish: we said a tie game is like kissing your sister. I didn’t come out to Southeast Asia in 1941 to kiss my sister. I came to Southeast Asia to fly missions with the Flying Tigers against the Japanese, and I stayed in Southeast Asia to fight the Communists, and I now tell you something, men, with all the solemnity of the deepest kind of

promise: when I die, I will die in Southeast Asia, and I will die fighting.” He looked to the Screwy Loot, and the Screwy Loot said, “Dismissed!”

They moved to their respective duties. Screwy and Sarge and the Kootchy Kooties congregated over by Bunker One with the colonel. In general the platoon resented this civilian, but they were youngsters, after all, and they acknowledged his experience and had a vague superstition that he brought a blessing on them, for there were some—like Flatt and Jollet, at the moment MIA but probably just AWOL—who’d done a whole tour and upped for seconds and had still never once taken enemy fire.

Around eleven hundred hours—fifteen hours late—they heard the M35 pulling in: Flatt and Jollet bringing three replacements, one short, one medium, one tall.

Sarge was standing there to greet them, Staff Sergeant Harmon, a sunburned man with his sleeves turned up to his biceps, his leggings tucked meticulously, his blond, almost white hair neatly trimmed. He appeared never to sweat. “I consider you to be just coming back from AWOL with a government-property vehicle.”

“No no no no no no no no,” Flatt said, “no, Sarge, it ain’t like that at

all. These guys can explain.” “You two’s the ones going to explain,” Sergeant Harmon said. “Whatever you say, Sarge.” “You men stow yourselves in Number Four,” Harmon told the re

placements, and took Flatt and Jollet into Bunker One.

As soon as they’d gone from sight, Private Getty, who was as usual very upset about something, slapped his helmet down on the wet ground outside the showers and sat on it with his feet apart and his knees together like a little girl, holding his sidearm in his lap.

Somebody yelled, “SARGE …” Getty raised his weapon overhead so they could all see it and promised to kill the first motherfucker who got within six feet of him. Sergeant Harmon came back out to find the three replacements

watching Private Getty undistractedly. “Steer off that man,” the sergeant said. The tallest one was upset, almost tearful. “We don’t even know that

guy. We just got here.”

Getty shouted, “I just want everybody to realize!” The sarge turned on Flatt and Jollet, now squatting by the door of

Bunker One. “Ease up on him some.” “Aaah-” “He was fine till you turned up just now. Quit riding on him.” “Listen, Sarge.” “You already made me say it twice. Fm done telling you.” “Yes, Sarge.” “No response required. Fm gon’ watch how you do.” The sarge was one of those casually shining, exemplary guys, tall,

strong, relaxed, very blond, with blond eyebrows, even, and disconcertingly blue eyes, blue from fifteen feet away. A scarred, seasoned lifer, a survivor of Pork Chop Hill, one of the Korean War’s most heroic battles, later a movie starring Gregory Peck.

“Lost your guns,” he said. The three new men kept silent. “Y’all pacifists?” “Sergeant, we got routed all wrong. We went to Edwards instead of

San Diego and we went to Japan someplace instead of Guam.” “They put us on a cargo plane, Sarge.” “Nobody gave us any weapons. Nobody said a word.” “I’m just fooling with you. We have weapons for you. What I don’t

have is time to sit waiting for my truck. Why did it take you fifteen extra

hours to make your way sixty-eight kliks on good roads?” “We got routed completely wrong.” “And the plane was late, real late.” “We spent hours and hours in Japan.” “I think my watch is stopped. Yeah—see? It’s stopped, Sarge.” “We don’t even know what town we’re in.” “Or which province.” “Or even what a province is.” The platoon waited to see how the three would handle this inquiry. It

appeared they couldn’t remember whatever they’d been coached to say

by Jollet and Flatt. But they continued in this way, making nothing clear. “Listen up.” “Yes, Sergeant.” “This is Cao Phuc where you’re currently at, Echo Reconnaissance Platoon of Delta Company. We’re at the southwest corner of the Cu Chi District of South Vietnam —district, not province. You heard of the Iron Triangle? We are not in the Iron Triangle, we are southwest of there in a friendly zone. We keep this region secure for the LZ established on top of the mountain which we are not allowed to call a base for reasons of military protocol. Echo’s down here, the rest of the company’s up top. They give you that whole ‘don’t be no pin-on-no-map sermon? Well, this here’s a pin on the map. We don’t call it a base but this is a permanent base, and we have two types of permanent reconnaissance patrols. Around the mountain then over, or else over the mountain then around.

“We’re good for shares down here. We got fourteen guys and three share-heads, but no chemical latrines. So you dig your own kaibo over in the bush, and keep your business covered. Don’t want no stink up my nose. We got no mess, it’s all rations down here. Mess is up the mountain, two hot meals daily, you rotate one of those, one hot meal per day, you work that out with the guys as to your rotation, and if I get a lot of whining in my ear about people coming up short on the hot meals and I have to work out a complicated schedule, I’ll be pissed off and looking to make life hell. If you’re easy on me, I’m easy on you, that’s the system here. You keep yourselves sorted out and squared away and I will be just no more than a presence. Questions. None. Good. Now.

“There are outfits all over this theater living in open rebellion against their officers. This ain’t one. I am here to carry out the orders of Lieutenant Perry and see to it that y’all do the same. Do you hear my words?”

“Yes, Sarge.”

“I come in slow and easy, but I mean what I say.”

“Yes, Sarge.”

“Now, Private Evans, Private Houston, Private Fisher. You have just received the speech. Do you have any current questions? No? I am available for all questions at all times.”

“What’s shares?”

“Shares? Shares. Look at my mouth—showers. Do you have any further questions?” “What’s a kaibo?” “That’s your to’let-hole, Private. I think it’s Filipino.” “Sarge, we need shut-eye.” “Good deal. Sack out. I want your bodies on stateside time, because I

want you up nights. You gon’ be pulling guard for a while. Stow yourselves in Bunker Four. If you want to sling yourselves a hammock in the trees, that’s fine. Never no Charlie around here. See Corporal Ames for hammocks and weapons.”

They couldn’t find any Corporal Ames. In their new quarters, a tarp-roofed sandbag bunker smelling of dirty socks and bug repellant, they found four cots, three of them free of clutter. Evans brushed dried mud from one and sat down and said, “Only three hundred and sixty-four more days of this shit.”

As they sorted themselves out, their friend Flatt appeared at the entry. “Welcome to World War Three. Hey, I’m sorry about that fucked-up little thing I did with the firecrackers. Come on over to the Purple Bar and I’ll buy you one.”

“The Purple Bar.”

“If it’s purple, I ain’t going.”

“Are you scared of purple people eaters?” Flatt asked.

“I ain’t scared. Fm tired,” Private Houston said.

“Okay. But I owe you one.” Flatt gave them the middle finger and departed. Elongated Fisher, the high school basketball center, rubbed his head back and forth on the plastic ceiling. “This ain’t bad,” he said.

They lay on their cots, not moving. After a while, Houston and Evans discussed how to get a Coca-Cola. An overwhelming sense of embarrassment and selfconsciousness kept them from moving. But they didn’t sleep—they heard Flatt’s voice outside, and all three rose and followed him to the Purple Bar.

The roadway, roughed out by bulldozers and ruined by jeeps, was so rutted they couldn’t walk on it. They kept to the margin. A jeep from the LZ up top passed them by and honked. “Don’t wave, don’t wave them down,” Flatt said. “They never stop.” He kicked at the bumper as the vehicle blew by in a gust of exhaust.

Many of Cao Phuc’s villagers, considered untrustworthy, had been loaded into trucks one day and moved God knew where. The paddies had gone to hell and herbicides had turned the trails into swaths of desolation. Now the ville was a ramshackle camp for displaced Friendlies dominated by the New Star Temple in the southern hamlet, and in the north by the Purple Bar.

“You wait out here/’ Flatt said when they’d reached the Purple Bar. “Why, goddamn it?” “Just kidding!” The sarge had business up the mountain, and half the platoon was

here. They all sat around two tables shoved together. On paydays there were lots of women, but today just one, with black high heels and red toenails, sitting at a table with a newspaper, wearing pants and a shirt. Flatt said, “Four beers, hon,” and she said, “I not your slave,” and the papasan, who was always there, brought them the beers from a freezer full of cakes of yellow-brown ice. Before popping his beer Flatt poured iodized water from his canteen over the top, and the others copied him, muddying the straw beneath their feet. Skinny dogs watched them through the entry.

The replacements tried to ask Flatt what might be the purpose, the mission, of their outfit, and Flatt tried to tell them it was mainly a kind of wide-perimeter security for the landing zone. And somebody else said, “We work for the CIA.”

“I thought this was a Recon unit.” “This is not a Recon unit. We don’t know what we are.” “If I work for the CIA, then where’s my green beret? Them’s the ass

holes work for the CIA. The Green Berets.” And just that quick—probably not yet sober from the night before — the new guys were drunk in the Purple Bar. “One thing about you, Houston, you’re sort of a cowboy, but one

thing about you: You got class. You got style.” “Thanks, pardner.” “No, I mean it. I mean it. I’m drunk, but—you know what I mean.” “I do. I do. I do. You mean you’re a queer and you want to blow me.” “Shut up. Who farted?” “What do you mean? The whole country stinks.” “He who smelt it, dealt it.” “He who detected it, ejected it.” “He who sensed it, dispensed it.” The guys living up the hill around the helicopter bull’s-eye were al

ways covered with dust; they kept their heads nearly shaved rather than deal with filthy hair. Flatt introduced the replacements to a couple of men from the LZ by saying, “Ask them their name.”

“You mean, both of them?” “Yeah, asshole, both of them, both of them.” The cowboy said, “Hey, now, listen: I am not your asshole.” There was a pause. Then they all burst out laughing, the cowboy too. He said, “Okay. Who are you?” “Bloodgutter.” “Bullshit.” “Nope. Bloodgutter.” “He is. That’s his real name.” “Bloodgutter? What a cool fucking name, man. That is the coolest

name in the world.” “It’s not as cool as this guy’s name.” “What’s his name?” “Firegod.” “Fzregod?” “Yep. Joseph Wilson Firegod.” “Wow.” “And his name is Bloodgutter,” Firegod said. “Wow.” “So we are asshole buddies,” Bloodgutter said, “we hang around to

gether. It just stands to reason.” Private Getty came in and sat by himself. “Gettys-bird, where’s your big old forty-five?” “Sarge took it,” Private Getty said. “Where’d you get a forty-five, Private Getty?” “Traded for it.” “Traded, fuck. You stole it.” Private Getty went into one of his trances where he acted deaf and

talked to himself. “I don’t know why I’m remembering so hard about

home.” “Pay no attention to Gettys-bird. He crazy. He dinky dau.” Everybody, including Getty, stopped talking when the three Kootchy

Kooties came in. The three pulled chairs around the table and sat down, and one belched loudly. It was best not to talk until they talked, but Flatt seemed driven to ask, “Hey, is the sarge back down the hill?” “Sarge still up there,” the black savage said. “You still safe.”

Flatt couldn’t shut up. “You’re a Indian,” he told the Indian tunnel

rat, “and this motherfucker Houston right here is a cowboy.” “You’re a cowboy?” “Not back home I ain’t. Just here.” Off by himself Private Getty was still trancing—”I’m on the wrong

ride. I’m on the wrong ride. The—wrong—ride”—expressing this thought over and over and nothing else.

The other two just drank their beers, but the black Kootchy glowered at Private Getty. “Busting me down with his jive. Busting cracks inside me.”

Flatt said, “Aw, he don’t mean nuthin.” “I know he don’t mean nuthin. I won’t hurt him. Do I look like I’ll

hurt somebody?” “No.” “No? I feel like I’ll hurt somebody.” A second jeep stopped out front. One of the new guys said, “Shit

Lieutenant Perry.” “Sarge ain’t with him, so fuck him.” They insulted the lieutenant wholesale as he breezed through with a

false, wise smile saying, “I suggest you discontinue fucking with me,” and tossing out plastic dosers of talc that turned to sludge all over you in four minutes if you used it, but all of them used it.

He got himself a bottle of Coke and sat by himself, the same way Private Getty did. From time to time he fed rum out of a chromed flask into the mouth of his Coke. At one point he turned to them all, trying to look like a man of the world, and pointed at the cowboy and said, “You. Do you know what reality is?”

“What?” “Wrong answer.” He was like that, that’s all, mostly when he drank, which was most of

the time; otherwise he was just mostly young and mostly stupid, like most of the rest of them. Later he said, looking at no one at all, “I will fuck the Reaper. But I

won’t kiss my sister.” Nobody answered him. Cowboy said, “He’s goofy, ain’t he?” “What is he?” “He’s goofy.”

“What is he?” “I said he’s goofy, he’s all screwed up.” “That’s it! You got it! That’s the Screwy Loot!” When Screwy Loot stood up to leave he looked over at the replace

ments, in particular Fisher, the tall one with a front tooth chipped from playing basketball, and said, “The movie’s not over till everybody’s dead.” He walked out with an uncoordinated, bouncing step.

And then they sat around letting the new ones in on things little by

little: “Do we work for the CIA?” “You’re working for Psy Ops.” “Does Psy Ops work for the CIA?” One of the new ones, Evans, was very plastered, saying over and over

again only, “Let’s face it. Let’s face it. Let’s face it.” “Do you understand what’s happening? The rest of the Third are get

ting chewed up alive. The rest of the whole Twenty-fifth Infantry.” “In fact, when they get chewed up alive, they’re dead.” “Shut up. But that’s right. They’re dead, like I would hate to be.” The Purple Bar was made of bamboo poles and thatch. A layer of

some kind of straw covered the floor. Underneath that, dirt. It didn’t have walls, only bead curtains painted with various faded tropical scenes— palm trees and mountain ranges. A deep ditch on three sides protected the Purple Bar from flooding when the rain poured down on the town. It was really just a large hooch furnished with collapsible tables and chairs, all U.S. government-issue. A loud MASH generator outside ran the juice for the Purple Bar. Three table fans along the west side turned their faces left and right as if following the conversations.

“Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let’s face it.” “Here’s to the Lucky Fucks.” “Who’s the Lucky Fucks?” “We’re all the Lucky Fucks because we pull about five patrols a

month in a totally friendly zone.” “About once a week, yeah, and the rest of the time we just stay out of

everybody’s way.” “That is our sacred duty. Gimme a toke.” “A what?” “A token? A cigarillo? Of the smoking variety? So I can smoke it?”

“Okay. You call them a token?”

“The trouble is, when you don’t pull duty, you spend your pay—that’s actually a horrible drawback.” “Because—I mean—let’s face it.” A table by the freezer served as the bar. On it were a portable record

player, a stack of albums, and a bar toy called a lava lamp, an amber jug in which you could observe the unfathomable almost cyclical but unrepeating lit-up movements of liquid wax in warm oil. The girl with red toenails controlled all the records. No requests allowed. If you asked her name, she said, “What name you like? I make my name for you.”

Blackflies and mosquitoes clouded the air. The papasan chased after them with a swatter and a can of Raid.

The tunnel rats got drunk and bought a few rounds in a friendly manner that made them no less scary. Only one was black, but they all talked like spades. They had eerie stuff to say. Philosophers. All God’s chillun got tunnels. Everybody got a tunnel to be motorvating. They drank and drank, drank until their eyes went completely flat and blind-looking, but they didn’t appear drunk otherwise, except that one of them when he had to piss just unzipped and did so right there at the table, in fact right on his own boots … You didn’t often see blacks and whites hanging around together … People kept to the categories …

Rflinh understood Skip’s disappointment, but life came as a storm, and the colonel, Skip’s uncle, was the landscape’s dominant figure. It made sense to take shelter in him. If the colonel wished his nephew out of the way, well and good. Thanks to the colonel, Minh himself no longer flew jets and had reason to hope he might survive this war. Nowadays he flew only helicopters, and only for the colonel. He went about often in civilian dress and spent many days free in Saigon. He had a girlfriend there, Miss Cam, a Catholic, and he went to Mass with Miss Cam on Sunday mornings and spent Sunday afternoons at her home in the company of her large family.

Flying took concentration, it wore on the mind. He enjoyed this ride as a passenger in the black Chevrolet. Nothing to do but look out at the murdered landscape off Route Twenty-two and wonder about Miss Cam.

Uncle Hao had warned Minh that Mr. Skip spoke Vietnamese. While driving the American to his new quarters in the region of Forgotten Mountain, therefore, he and his uncle didn’t speak much. Minh sat up front, Skip in the back with one of his footlockers. Uncle drove the car, both hands at the wheel, head forward, concentrating deeply, his mouth open like a child’s. The rain clattered on the Chevy’s black roof, a storm out of nowhere, a bit early this year. Uncle Hao tried speaking English, but Mr. Skip didn’t answer much. “Perhaps we shouldn’t talk.”

“Ah, my friend Hao,” Skip said, “the rain is making me sad.”

Minh tried some English himself: “It’s good to learn to be happy in the rain. Then you’ll be happy a lot, because there’s a lot of rain.” In English it didn’t sound very clever.

Uncle braked, and Minh braced himself against the dash—a water buffalo crossing in front of them. A cargo van coming the other way ran into the animal and seemed to carom from its thick hide, stopping sideways in the middle of the broken pavement.

The buffalo put its head down as if trying to remember something, stood still a few seconds, and walked off into the tall grass wagging its horns from side to side, its rump rocking like two fists alternating in a paper sack. Hao maneuvered the Chevy around the stalled van as the beast faded away among the sheets of rain.

Once they’d left Route Twenty-two all the roadways were bad, almost impassable, but as long as Uncle kept the wheels turning they’d avoid getting mired. “When we come to the big dip,” Hao said, “I will go down fast, because we have to get up the other side.”

“The big dip—what is that?”

“A hill down and then a hill up. There’s mud at the bottom.”

“I understand.” They were speaking Vietnamese.

Uncle Hao headed the black Chevrolet into the long drop and they splashed through the mudhole at the bottom and climbed up the other side, steeply, until the top was nearly theirs and only sky was visible in front of them. The tires broke traction and howled like tormented ghosts while the Chevy slowly slid backward. They rested at the bottom in a foot of gumbo. Hao switched off the engine, and Mr. Skip said, “All right. Here we are.”

Minh removed his sandals, rolled his cuffs above his knees, draped himself in his clear plastic poncho, and waded to the house of the nearest farmer, who followed him back to the car, yanking his water buffalo along by the nose ring, and hitched a rope to the front axle and hauled them out of the bog.

Skip peered through the rear window at where they’d been and said in English, “Out of one hole and into another.”

It wasn’t so bad where Skip was going. He would have a gas stove, some form of indoor plumbing, probably a couple of servants. A hot bath when he wanted one. The villa, Minh understood, belonged to the family of a Frenchman, a physician, a specialist in hearing disorders, now deceased. As far as could be ascertained, this Frenchman had been fascinated with one of the area’s tunnels, had gone exploring, had tripped a wire.

The drumming of the rain lightened to a tapping on the roof. Minh opened his eyes. He’d been asleep. Uncle had stopped the car again. The road seemed to end here, to dive into a creek overrunning its banks, and Minh wondered if now they’d wait for some hooded skeletal boatman to ferry the American across this river to his state of exile. But Hao inched them forward. It wasn’t a creek at all, just a wide rivulet escaping from some creek they couldn’t see.

The rain ceased as they wheeled slowly into the village of Forgotten Mountain. The afternoon sun glittered on the wet world, and already the people moved around outdoors as if no storm had ever visited, carrying their bundles along the road, clearing palm fronds from the front of their homes. By the dirt lanes, in the shaded, drier places, children skipped rope using pale plastic chains.

They stopped in the driveway of the villa, and Minh hardly had a minute to take it in before getting involved in a small adventure—a lot of yelling from behind the house, then an old man who appeared to be a houseboy or papasan ran into view waving a rake over his head and yelling about a snake. Minh leapt to follow, Uncle and Skip close behind, and they came on a monstrous constrictor zigzagging across the backyard, a brindle python longer than any of them, longer than all of them together. “Let me, let me,” Minh said. The old man swiped his rake at it one more time uselessly and gave up the weapon to Minh. What now? He didn’t want to mar the valuable skin. The snake headed for the bank behind the house. He ran after and brought the rake down hard, hoping to trap the reptile’s head, but sank the splines rather farther down its spine, and like that, with frightening energy, the snake wrenched the handle free of his hands and swiveled off wildly, still skewered, dragging the rake into the brush. Minh and the houseman gave chase, beat the wet bushes with their hands, both men sopping now, and the houseman yelled, “Here is the monster!” He came up behind a dripping poinsettia holding the tail. “It’s almost dead!” But it was still writhing and got away from his grip. Minh managed to catch hold of the rake, step on the snake’s spine, extract the weapon from their prey, and bring it down several times on its skull—surprisingly fragile, easily pierced.

The old man’s face positively broke open, all smiles. “Come, come, we’ll take it to my family!”

The region’s Catholic priest had turned up to greet them. He spoke in English to Skip: “It’s not necessary to kill such animals. Many people keep them for a pet. But it’s big enough to take the skin. Too bad it’s not more colorful. Some of them are red and sometimes orange.” A young man in nice clothes, probably from the city, wearing the priest’s collar. “You must visit my residence,” he said, and Skip said he would.

Then Minh and the old man paraded their catch down the main street through the ville, Minh at the head and his friend at the tail and fully four meters of snake bridging the distance between them, their free arms outflung to counter its dead weight, and little children running after, yelling and singing.

Mr. Skip had stayed at the house with the priest, or Minh at this moment would have assured him, “Here is a wonderful omen for your arrival.”

Willia m “Skip” Sands of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency arrived at the villa in Cao Quyen, which meant “Forgotten Mountain,” with his duffel and his uncle’s three footlockers at the very moment a hard rain gave way to fine, sunny weather in which he didn’t feel a participant.

Voss had claimed to have something for him, had claimed he’d keep Sands close. It had come to nothing, he’d kept Sands stashed, not at all close, in an air-conditioned Quonset hut in the MAC–V compound at Tan Son Nhut, as part of a short-lived project devoted to collation of a superabundance of trivia called the CORDS/Phoenix file system, which amounted to every note ever jotted by anybody who’d seen or heard anything anywhere in South Vietnam. The project group, roughly eighteen men and two women, all drafted from the personnel pool, spent most of their energies trying to characterize the dimensions of the material delivered onto the site—boxes of pages that would make an eight-and-onehalf-inch-wide path four-point-three times around the earth’s equator, or completely blanket the state of Connecticut, or outweigh the pachyderms in seventeen Barnum & Bailey shows, and so on. Shock and despair. An appreciation for the victims of sea catastrophes as the cataracts thundered into the hold. One day instructions came to put all the boxes on handcarts and push them along a cinder path under the tropical sun to a storage facility in the same complex. End of project. History.

Next, the waiting in Cao Quyen —”Forgotten Mountain,” “Mountain of Forgetting,” or “Forget This Mountain”—which he thought of as “Damulog II,” once again beyond the last reasonable stretch of roadway and past the end of the power lines.

He and Hao and Minh were served a meal of rice and fish by the Phans, the elderly pair who looked after the place and whom he would address as Mr. Tho and Mrs. Diu, and then his companions abandoned him with promises that Hao would return every week or ten days with mail, and books, and commissary items for the pantry.

Skip’s new home had running water from a tank on its roof as well as indoor plumbing, a bathroom downstairs with toilet and sink, and upstairs another with toilet, bath, and bidet, and wallpaper depicting mermaids, burnished by a strange mold. When he opened the shutters in this bathroom, half a dozen moths flew out of the toilet bowl and attached themselves to his scalp.

Nothing electric. He had butane lamps with copper shades, and rooms of rattan furniture shedding its finish in flakes. If rain came, and it would come daily for months now, there were wooden louvers to wind shut. Small leaks came down through the upstairs into several lacquer bowls set around the parlor. But the house was well situated for the breezes and had a homey feel. Things were sensible here. They spooned the salt and pepper out of tiny cups, like sugar, rather than clumping it into shakers; and his bed upstairs took up a screened corner of the house just off the modest master suite, open to every movement of the sultry night atmosphere.

By the day’s last light he toured the villa, a two-story structure mainly of a damp, rough material like concrete or adobe. Small black wasps crawled in and out of bullet holes in the outer walls—during the time of the French, the region had seen battles. A concrete gutter ran around the foundation of the house and carried off the rain into a fat, slow creek in a gulley behind the grounds. He had a look down there: adventurous children sailed past on water wings patched together out of absolutely any buoyant thing—kindling, coconuts, palm fronds—calling out to him.

The villa’s owner, a French physician, had passed away leaving, as Sands understood it, no trace of his physical body other than a film on the walls of a tunnel, but his shoes stood by the front door in a row, three pairs, sandals, slippers, bright green rubber boots. His walking shoes had disappeared with the rest of him. The physician, a Dr. Bouquet, had arrived from Europe early in the 1930s with a wife who had returned, according to the papasan, Mr. Tho, very shortly to Marseilles, and of whom no evidence remained anywhere in the house, unless she’d chosen the wallpaper in the upstairs bath, the innumerable tarnished mermaids. But the absent doctor constituted a pervading presence; since the day of his death nothing had been done with anything, all of it waited. In his high-ceilinged study off the living room the surface of his massive mahogany desk hid under books and journals held down by a porcelain model of the human ear—inner and outer—with detachable parts, an inkwell, an ashtray, and so on, his rack of three meerschaum tobacco pipes turned at a slight angle, shreds of newsprint or coarse, beige toilet paper marking places in several books stacked beside it, one of these pages surely holding the last word he’d read before he’d set his glasses aside, gone out walking, and been vaporized. Except for the clutter of his studies the office was clean and neat, the furniture draped with pages of the Saigon Post and Le Monde and the shutters closed. Skip pried gently under the covers of the books, careful not to shift their places, as if the owner might come checking. The physician had been cruel to the pages—tea stains, inky fingerprints, lengthy passages outlined boldly. Each volume bore inside its front cover the inscription “Bouquet” in an identical hand above

the date of its purchase. He failed to find a single one without it. In addition the doctor had collected seventeen years of Anthropologe, a book-sized periodical, sixty-eight numbered issues with paper covers of heavy stock, all beige. And several scholarly reviews, each bound by year in the same brown paper. A damp, burgundy-cloth-bound Nicholas Nickleby was the only book in English. Skip had read it in college and could remember nothing about it except that somewhere in its pages Dickens called human hope a thing “as universal as death.”

In a week Hao came out again, as promised, delivering many flattened cardboard boxes for Dr. Bouquet’s effects, along with Skip’s mail. He was glad for the boxes—he hadn’t asked for them, Hao had just guessed. There was a crazy, despairing letter from Kathy Jones. Apparently these days she acted as liaison between the ICRE and several orphanages, and her life now, the things she witnessed, had turned her Calvinist fatalism— or, Skip thought, her fatal Calvinism—completely black:

Maybe I shouldn’t read certain things. But I might as well tell you I came to believe in it some time ago, even before I learned for sure that Timothy was dead. Certain people are fated from the foundation of the world to spend eternity in Hell, and I say they never even get a taste of regular life, but just begin their Hell right at birth, we’ve seen that, you’ve seen it at least in Damulog, I know, and if you’ve come to Vietnam, you’re seeing it in technicolor no doubt and I pity you, but I laugh.

Maybe some are in Heaven, some in Hell, some in the Limbo Zone, or maybe the worlds get separated geographically—in fact, did I tell you I found the reference to “different administrations” you asked about when we made love night after night in our own little psychedelic passion pit in Damulog? First letter to the Corinthians, was it Chapter 12?

Right-I’ve checked now, 12:5&6.

But I didn’t recognize the quote because it’s from the King James and I’m used to my Revised Standard which says, “And there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of working, but it is the same God who inspires them all in every one.” So “administrations” is more properly translated as

“service”—it doesn’t refer to some angelic governmental ordering, get it? I wish you were here to talk to, but we didn’t talk much, did we? Every time we got together we ended up quickly “getting together.” hardly know you. But I write to you. Are you even reading this?

As a matter of fact, no. No.

Between downpours a breeze off the creek cowed the bugs and kept the study cool. He spent the evenings in the doctor’s shot-silk robe, inquiring among the doctor’s library of some eight hundred French titles, and, at first, hardly ever ventured beyond the grounds.

He busied himself recovering to the third dimension the flattened cardboard boxes. Also Hao had brought a roll of gummed paper tape, turned by this weather into a solid wheel, all stuck together, completely useless. Since Marco Polo, he thought, this climate has defeated Western civilization.

He sent Mr. Tho to the village shop for string and told Mrs. Diu he was heading to the local priest’s for tea. Pčre Patrice’s small house lay a hundred meters off the main street, down a pathway marked by tattered boards bridging the puddles.

Pčre Patrice traveled around the district a lot, and Sands hadn’t passed much time with him. Sands hadn’t revealed himself as a Catholic. Perhaps he wouldn’t. Maybe, he thought, I’m tired of my faith. Not because it’s been tested and broken, like Kathy’s. Only because it’s gone unexercised. And the small open-air church, a tin roof on wooden poles on a concrete slab, is this where the drama of salvation plays out? Sands found the priest, a tiny man in his tiny garden. Pčre Patrice had a round, simian face. More nostril than nose. Huge reptilian eyes. Beyond exotic, he looked like a man from outer space. He brought his guest hot tea in a water glass. They sat in the garden on damp wooden benches while the recent rain dripped from the tall poinsettias. Sands tried his Vietnamese.

“Your pronunciation is good,” the young man said, and then spoke incomprehensibly for half a minute —Skip had already practiced his Vietnamese with the villa’s two servants and found it hopeless.

“Fm very sorry. I don’t understand. Can you please speak more slowly?” “I will speak more slowly. I’m sorry.” There was a silence between them. “Will you kindly repeat your statement?” ‘Tes, of course. I said I hope your work will go well here.” “I believe it’s going well, thanks.” “You are with the Canadian Ecumenical Council.” “Yes.” “It is a project of Bible translation.” “We have many projects. That is one project.” “Are you one of the translators, Mr. Benęt?” “I’m trying to improve my Vietnamese. It’s possible I’ll help later on

with translation.” “Let’s speak English,” the priest said in English. “Whatever you like.” Pčre Patrice said, “Shall I hear your confession?” “No.” “Thank God! You’re not Catholic?” “Seventh-Day Adventist.” “I don’t know about Seventh-Day people.” “It’s a Protestant faith.” “Of course. God doesn’t care who is Protestant or Catholic. God

himself is not Catholic.” “I hadn’t thought of that.” “What is this universe to God? Is it a drama? Is it a dream? Perhaps a

nightmare?” The priest smiled yet seemed angry. “That’s a big question. I think it qualifies as a mystery.” “I’m reading a most wonderful book.” Skip waited for him to finish, but he didn’t say anything further about

the book. “I have met Mr. Colonel Sands, there at your villa. He’s your friend?

Your colleague?” “He’s my uncle. Also my friend.” “The colonel fascinates me. I don’t understand him. But I don’t think

we should talk about him, do you?” “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“I believe that we should confine ourselves.” Sands decided that the priest was a subtle man unable to complete

his thoughts in English. “Can you help me collect folk tales in the area?” he asked the priest. “Folk tales? Fairy tales, perhaps?” “Yes. Ifs a hobby, a personal interest of mine. Not associated with my

work.” “Not associated with your Bible work?” “Well, of course it helps me as a translator. It helps me to understand

the language of myth.” “But do you say that the Bible is a myth?” “Not at all. I say it’s in the language of myth.” “Of course. Surely. I can help. Do you like songs also, perhaps?” “Songs? Of course.” “I’ll sing you a Vietnamese song,” the priest said. He gazed into Skip’s eyes. His features seemed to clarify. His look be

came earnest. For almost a minute he sang quite beautifully in a clear, strong voice, unabashed, completely unselfconscious. The tune was high and struck a note of yearning.

“Did you understand the song?” Skip was speechless. “No? For three years, he is a soldier at the outpost, far from his vil

lage. He’s very lonely and he works hard to cut bamboo all day. His body hurts. He eats only bamboo shoots and some fruit, and his friends are only the bamboo. And he sees a fish in the cistern, swimming by itself, also with no friends. I think we are like this—Mr. Benęt and Pčre Patrice. Don’t you think so? I’m far from my home in my village, and you are far from Canada.”

He said no more. “Is that the end of the song?” “The ending. He sees the fish swimming alone.” “I think you’ve got a little Irish in you, sir.” “Why?” “The Irish love to sing.” “Sometimes there are singing competitions, and I place very well. It’s

also my hobby, like yours. Here in this district, every man must sing. We must sing to the demons.”

“Really?”

“Mr. Benęt, it’s true, the demons live here.”

1 see.

“If you do something disrespectful, for instance if you relieve yourself in the forest, you will suffer some tricks from them. Trees may fall on you, huge branches may break off and hit your head, or you might fall in a crevasse and get a broken bone. It might be a shocking way to learn there are spirits here in the forest.”

Skip said, “Yes, I’d be shocked if that happened.”

“Certain Chinese doctors in this district practice their medicine here. They know about these spirits. I’ll take you to the shop sometime. Would you like to go? They keep many fascinating things. He keeps practically all parts of a tiger in jars and tiny boxes. If he grinds the bones and feeds to a dog, that dog will become fierce. Did you know that even the wax from a tiger’s ears can cure you of something? And the tough hairs from the elephant’s tail can ease the woman while she gives birth. They also grind the teeth and bones of the elephant to rub on certain kinds of lesions to cure it. They grind the horns of the deer and mix it up with alcoholic beverage to make an evil kind of drink. It makes a man too powerful in sexual matters. Other animals too. Many snakes, many kinds of animals. Perhaps insects, I don’t know. The Chinese doctor knows these things.”

“I’d probably enjoy seeing a collection like that.”

“Everything is not merely superstitious with these people. Some things are already verified. The tribes make shrines and altars in the forest. A tiny house for the spirits from bamboo, perhaps the coconut shell. The spirits are there, they live there, I must believe it from the evidence. As in the case of a young man who scornfully urinated in front of an altar in the forest, and then he suffered a complete mental breakdown.”

“Shocking.”

“My name is Thong Nhat,” said Pčre Patrice. “I hope I will be your friend.” “I look forward to it,” Skip said. “Please call me Skip.” So it went—tea with the priest, walks when it didn’t rain, a pro

gram of calisthenics. He took to puttering among the dead physician’s French magazines, translating passages the physician had underscored. He tended the colonel’s files. Sometimes he heard distant choppers, fighters, bombers, and felt himself captured in a rainbow bubble of irrelevance.

Next visit, Hao brought a letter from Major Eddie Aguinaldo, forwarded

by the embassy in Manila to the Saigon Embassy’s APO address in San

Francisco.

I’ve decided to marry myself to a certain young and quite beautiful woman. Indeed! I knew you’d be amazed. I can see you before me right now with your mouth dropped opened. Her name is Imogene. She is the daughter of Senator Villanueva. I intend to become some kind of politician of a local sort, not too corrupt, but certainly rich, and you can depend on me to help you make money if you come back to our fair land.

I have had a somewhat curious visit from a “Mr. so-and-so” from your Political Section in Manila. I hesitate to refer to him more specifically. He expressed considerable interest in our friends and relations, that is, my friend and your relation. I hope you’ll understand the reference. Mr. so-and-so’s intensity was very uncharacteristic of people from your crowd. I must say he left me feeling a little shaken. When he was gone I went immediately to the sideboard to pour myself something stiff, and now I’ve sat down to write this letter to you at once. I am feeling some urgency. I can’t be depended on to know everything, but I convey my sense of things to you that our friend and relation should be talked to about this right away. About the violent interest shown in him, about an adversarial tone on the part of someone supposed to be our friend and relation’s colleague. I believe you should immediately warn him to begin casting the occasional glance behind, even when he feels the safest.

Skip, in Mindanao that was a botched thing. An intolerable mistake, and very much regretted. I cannot say anything past that. Yours Quite Sincerely,

— “Eddie,” in a flourishing hand.

Jame s dreamt of firefights: shooting useless bullets from an impotent gun. Dreams send you messages, this he knew. He disliked these particular messages, warnings that in battle he’d have no power. Not that he saw battles anywhere outside his nightmares.

The choppers in and out of LZ Delta carried strictly supplies, no battle teams. Once in a while somebody hurt had to touch down in a shot-up chopper that couldn’t make it farther, but Echo only heard about these things.

James didn’t mind the patrols. A patrol took two days. Your squad went west up the zigzag track, through the LZ, and around to the south—along an old track through the open farms, into a patch of jungle, and out into the craggy wasteland made by herbicides—and back to Echo Camp; or you went around to the north, then east up through the LZ, then down the mountain and back to Echo. On the way you camped one night. Nothing ever happened.

On the west side of Cao Phuc it was still Vietnam, untouched by herbicides and full of jungle and paddies where enemy might easily hide in ambush. The west side should have been scary, but it wasn’t. The farmers strung along the hillside, hacking away at their terraces, always waved. Word was their families had never had trouble with the French or the VC or the GIs.

Nothing happened on the north side either, but it was uninhabited, rocky, plunging, cut by ravines, and often a leaf turned wrong caught the light and looked like a flash of white up above a cliff—like somebody hiding there—and terrified him. Any fallen log looked, at first glance, like a sniper in the undergrowth.

“What’s that there?”

“That’s a elephant turd.”

“You suppose they booby-trap them things?”

“Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. They’ll booby-trap any kind of motherfucker.”

Black Man said, “That’s buffalo shit. No elephants around here.”

“There’s plenty of elephants.”

“Not on this mountain. That’s buffalo shit.”

“It’s big.”

“Buffaloes are big, fool.”

“What’s that growing out of it? Mushrooms?”

“Mushrooms will grow out of any kind of motherfucker. Shoot right up,” Black Man said, “grow so fast you can watch it. Hormonally and such, ifs a trip.”

“Well, anyway, there wasn’t no shockers in that batch.”

“That’s one batch of shit we foxed.”

“We aced that shit pile.”

“Only seventy-six more million to go.”

“Yeah,” Black Man said, “lotta boo-shit coming at you, ratshit, batshit … But you don’t take it, you just deflect that shit with your Maximum Mind.”

Right now Black Man was the only soul brother in Echo Platoon. Black Man did this. Black Man did that. Black Man had a name, but it was secret. “I don’t want nobody calling me nothing but Black Man,” he insisted. “I won’t live by the slave name the white man gave my forefathers.” He’d placed adhesive tape over his name patch, wouldn’t tell anyone what it said.

Black Man told them, “I’m a black man with a black dick. But it ain’t that big. Lotta guys wanna brag on their Big Ten-inch. But if they had ten inches like I have six inches, this sorry-ass world would be blown in two. That’s how much power I got in my Little Six-inch.”

Fisher and Evans were James’s only friends, friends for life. He thought, also, maybe Sarge approved of him. As for the rest of Echo Platoon, they spoke a strange language, and most of the time James felt scared and angry and left out.

He hurt for home. Now he understood what it must have meant to his brother Bill to dial a number in Honolulu and make the phone ring in his mother’s kitchen. He repented his casual gruffness with his brother when he’d called. Fantasies of talking and laughing with his brother, talking with his friends, dominating these assholes of Echo, dreams of not being here, being anywhere but here, being somewhere that was elsewhere, of never having heard of this place.

You could draw leave and hitch a ride over to the Twenty-fifth Infantry’s big base or all the way into Saigon on one of the trucks from the LZ. Trucks went every day.

The sarge, Sergeant Harmon, wasn’t as different from the others as he’d seemed at first. He swore, he drank beer, though only one or two at a sitting, and his only other vice was chewing tobacco, snuff; some of the guys called it snoose, and they did it too, out of admiration for the sarge. He was older and had these war-movie looks—very light blond hair, sky-blue eyes, and a tanned face, and a grin that crawled up on one side like Elvis Presley’s. One of his dog-teeth on that side was chipped, but his teeth were very white, and it didn’t look that bad, and James almost felt he wouldn’t have minded having a tooth chipped like that, like Sarge did. Fisher had a chipped tooth too, but his chip looked like you’d want to get it fixed. And the sarge’s fatigues fit him very neatly. He made it appear as if the tropics weren’t really hot.

Flatt had predicted their pay would never find them way out here in the shadow of Good Luck Mountain, but he’d been wrong, and well into May James sent part of each paycheck to his mother in Phoenix. Once she sent him back a small note in a big envelope, her greeting scrawled on a page of pink stationery she must have stolen somewhere. She thanked him and said, “We’re getting on okay, the Lord is making ends meet.”

The second Friday in June was a little different. James’s birthday had come the day before. He and Fisher and Evans left Echo Camp on a legitimate pass and got as far as the ville. Evans had decided they must all get laid. “Come on,” Evans said, “we’re in a war. We’re men.”

“I don’t see no war.”

“It’s all over the place, or at least somewhere around here, and I don’t want to die in it till I get laid.”

They went to the Purple Bar, and on straw-filled sacks in a row of hooches behind it Evans and Fisher lost their virginity, and James betrayed Stephanie Dale with a girl who at least did not have terrible teeth, or any teeth at all, that he could see, because she didn’t have to smile or talk, and therefore no dishonesty was required to get things started, and no sincerity either, and she moaned like a savage and whirled him upward through a cloud of joyful lust.

The three privates met afterward in the bar. They still had sixteen hours’ leave, but they’d done all there was to do in the world. Evans raised his glass: “Git some!”

Come on.

“What.”

“Don’t say ‘Git some.’ It’s so posed, man.”

“The fuck it’s posed. It isn’t posed. It’s who I am.”

“You are who? You are ‘Git some’?”

“Lemme tell you something, man, lemme tell you something, fucker.” Evans wiped beer from his chin and said, “All right, okay, I was cherry, I hereby admit it. That was my first time ever.”

They stared at him until he was forced to ask, “What about you?” “Yeah, me too,” Fisher said. “Well? Cowboy?” “No. I wasn’t.” “You’re sticking to that lie.” “Yes, I am.” “Fine. You always were a little more advanced.” “But there’s one lie I’m done with. Today’s not my nineteen birthday,

it’s only my number eighteen.” “What?” “What?” “You just turned eighteen?” “Yep.” “You mean you were … seventeen?” “I sure was.” “My God! You’re a child? “Not no more I ain’t.” Evans reached across the wobbly table to shake his hand. “You’re

more advanced than I even suspected.”

In honor of his birthday, James bought several rounds. He was happy and high and laughing. Now that he’d come to where the humidity was awful and the beer cheap and infinite, he really understood beer’s meaning and its purpose.

They drank until night fell. Fisher, a Catholic, came under a black

cloud of penance. “I’ll get VD for sure.” “VD can’t get through a rubber.” “Yeah,” guilty Fisher said, “that’s if you can get the packet open.” “What?” “I didn’t use it! I couldn’t get the little packet open! My fingers were

too goddamn nervous!” “Use your teeth next time, you pitiful fool.” They walked home in the dark. Fisher refused to be consoled. “I’m

gonna get VD from God.” “Are you gonna go to confession about this?”

“I have to.” Evans said, ” ‘Catholic’ sounds very close to ‘cuntlick.’ ” Fisher seemed wounded. “That’s a really evil statement.” “Do you have a religion?” Evans asked James. “Now I do, I sure do. Now I worship the Holy Fuck.” None of them had his flashlight. They couldn’t see. The dry mud was

like concrete and they stumbled in the ruts. Evans shouted, “We did it!” “I know! We did it! It’s like …” Fisher was speechless. “I know" Evans said. “It is\ GodDAMN! I shot my wad so hard I al

most exploded the top of my penis off.” Fisher begged, “Come on, you guys, for real—did you use a rubber?” “Hell, yes, I used a rubber.” “You better use one next time,” James told Fisher. “What next time? I’ll never do it again.” “Bullshit.” “I just hope to God I don’t get VD. It hurts like hell to piss, then the

shot hurts too.” “That shot’s supposed to be like a knife in your butt.” “It’s the next worst shot to rabies.” “At least you can’t get rabies from a whore.” “Can’t you?” “Shit. I don’t know.” “Not unless she bites you!” Coming back into camp they tried to keep it quiet, but as they found

Bunker Four, Evans whispered loudly, “I can’t believe it! If I’m gonna die, at least I’m not gonna die a virgin.” Fisher sat hunched on his cot. He sounded seasick. “I feel so evil. I never should’ve done it. My first time, and I paid for it.” Evans fell back on his cot, fondling himself. “Man, I just want to kiss my own dick cuz I’m so in love with it for being able to FUCK!” Somebody in another bunker shouted, “Well, fuck YOURSELF and SHUT THE FUCK UP.” Fisher went to his knees in the dark. “Please, God, please, Holy Mary and Jesus and the Saints, don’t let me get VD.”

“I don’t know how to describe this,” Evans said, “but after I finished, I was lying on top of her and she kind of put her legs together and kind of… rubbed her legs together. And it felt… real good.”

James said, “I’ve been scared so it don’t let up, like I have a sore stomach all the time, right here.” He touched himself below his breastbone. “But for once in this God-fucked shit-hole I feel like I don’t have to be scared no more. Because I’m so goddamn drunk, and I’m finally eighteen.”

“Oh, man,” Fisher said. “She took my shit. She took my powers. They’re working for Charlie. Those whores are working for Charlie.”

In June, during the rains, a man named Colin Rappaport rendezvoused with Kathy Jones on the highway not far from her nursing station in Sa Dec on the Mekong Delta. He had the use of a Land Rover. Making a tour of things for World Children’s Services, for whom he worked these days. He helped her get her knapsack and her rattling black bicycle in the back of his vehicle, and they headed for the orphanage eight kilometers down the American-made road.

She’d met him several times in Manila long ago. Colin had been skinny then, now he was portly, having lived in the U.S. the last year or more. While he drove he set aside his straw hat and mopped his crown with a sopping hankie. He’d always been bald. You couldn’t get much balder than Colin Rappaport.

“How are you liking your visit?”

“Jesus, Kathy, I thought poverty was bad enough.”

“Isn’t it?”

“I mean, I’ve never wondered about what a war could do.”

“After a while it just gets funny. I’m not kidding. You get so sick in the head you just start laughing.”

When they arrived at the Emperor Bao Dai Orphanage, ragged attendants were cutting up a handful of rotten vegetables into a cauldron of steaming rainwater. “Here’s Van,” she told Rappaport as a young man hurried over wiping his hands on his T-shirt. “Miss Kathy, so good to have a visit, come, I take you,” Van said, shaking hands with Rappaport, guiding them up the dark staircase of this former factory to the building’s third level, where in six chicken-wire pens on the vast open floor lived two hundred children, segregated by age. The place was thick with flies and the smell of piss and offal. Van made the eight-year-olds rise and stand in rows in their frayed and filthy cotton shorts and shirts to sing a song of welcome, throughout which Rappaport stood still with a glazed smile, and then Kathy led him back down the stairs and out to the malaria bay, a tin-roofed shed where a dozen patients lay in darkness and silence. Kathy moved among them propping open eyelids and mouths. “Nobody’s dead,” she told Colin.

When they came out two attendants were hoisting the cauldron between them and heading for the main building, one with a ladle in his free hand.

“Oh, Lord,” Colin said. “It’s their food.” She took him under a tree and they sat in the dirt. He said, “I thought it was garbage. Dishwater.” “We in Purgatory sing fondly of Hell.” “I think I get you.” Van came over with two glasses of tea. “Go ahead, they boil it,” Kathy said. Colin set the glass between his feet. He took a cigar from his left

breast pocket and a lighter from the right. “It’s a mess, isn’t it?” “The whole planet. The days are evil. —I’m sorry, am I talking kind of

crazy?” Obviously he thought yes. “I had no idea how overwhelmed you are.” He said no more while he finished his tea. He smoked most of his ci

gar, carefully shaved away its ember by rubbing it against a tree root, and replaced the rest in his breast pocket.

Soon it rained hard, and they sat in the Land Rover while the downpour splashed on the asphalt drive and turned its surface to a bed of glassy spikes. “I’ll see if we can’t get you supplies here,” he said. “I’d like to divert a whole planeload for you. I think I can do it. I’ll see.”

“Good. Thanks.” “Is there anything else I can do?” “Can I have the rest of your cigar that’s in your pocket?” “Are you kidding?” “No.” “You smoke cigars?” “Once in a while.” “I guess we’d better let you do what you want,” he said. “Jesus Christ,

we’ve got to get you some help.”

She said, “I’ve got Lan and Lee.” “Who?” “You’ll meet Lan. She and Lee mind the shop when I’m gone.” “Oh. Right. Are they trained?” “They’re a great help. Not formally trained. Very competent.” “Kathy, this is why I left ICRE. They just drop you down in the jun

gle with a map and a compass.” “We get help from all over, though. The GIs give us stuff. We do

what we can.” “The GIs help you?” “I got a half liter of Xylocaine last week. I spent yesterday and this

morning pulling teeth. They love the Xylocaine. Otherwise they go to the local yanker, who gets it with a big pliers and the flat of his foot on their chest. And if he’s not around they dig it out by themselves with a nail. Carpenter’s nail. It takes all day to do that. They’re very stoic.”

“Not like the Filipinos, huh?” “The Filipinos have a lot of pride, but they’re not stoic.” “They’re never ashamed of their agonies.” “Believe it or not, I like it better here. In this country there’s nothing

left but the truth.” “Well then,” Colin said, and by his tone she realized she must be talking crazy again. Back at the nursing station that evening she dispatched her assistants to their homes and boiled some rice on the Primus stove.

For the last two days a sick child had been occupying her hammock. She mashed up rice in a bowl with the heel of her hand and fed the patient mush from her finger, cradling the head in her other hand, the head like an empty eggshell. Nothing went down. She tried rice water and Coca-Cola in a baby bottle, but the child, a boy, was five or six and had no sucking reflex. Tomorrow morning or the next the child would likely be dead. And if he lived?—one of the cages at Bao Dai.

She sat in a large rattan chair and smoked the butt of Colin Rappaport’s stogie. The village was dark. Children moaned and dogs barked and the small voices of women called out. A few bicycle headlamps moved here and there far up the road. She puffed the cigar until she felt woozy and green-faced and threw it down, then took her chair back inside, near the mosquito coil, next to the stertorously breathing child in the hammock, and fell asleep. In her dreams people spoke very clearly in Vietnamese and she understood all they said.

Next morning the child held its head up on its own and sipped water and Coke from a cup. Survival was a breeze that touched some and not others. Neither hope nor hopelessness had anything to do with it. She fished the cigar butt from the dirt where she’d tossed it, brushed it clean with her fingers, and smoked it in celebration.

IVI. Bouquet, the brother of the deceased Dr. Bouquet, putting the doctor’s estate in order, came to the villa with a van and a driver to claim the late doctor’s effects.

Sands had arranged to be off visiting the villages with Pčre Patrice, but when he returned at the end of the day the brother was still there, an almost elderly Frenchman, husky, lantern-jawed, dressed as if for a day of angling, in olive short-pants and a matching vest with many pockets, fanning his face with a canvas hat with a chinstrap. Sands and he took tea together. His English was better than passable. He spoke at first not of his brother, but of women. “As I get older, the older females have more attractions. Flesh which used to be ugly, now it can seem charming. The thin purple veins, you know, so frail. It’s a beautiful mystery. The new kind of grace—the grace of a calm woman, it’s even more erotic. Now I come to adore the women of the Renaissance painting. Very full, very soft from the inside. Have you a native concubine?”

Sands had no answer.

“No? I don’t know this country. But I thought it’s customary here to have a concubine. I prefer a widow. A grown woman, as I have been telling you. She has experienced love, and she realizes how to behave in bed.”

“I’ve been curious about your brother,” was all Skip could say.

“Claude was my twin. Fraternal—we didn’t look alike. I got the information that he is dead, and I didn’t cry about it. I suddenly thought, Oh, no no no, I didn’t know him, even not a little. We grew up together, but we never talked about anything, we just lived there. As far as I was concerned, he was like a visitor. But not coming to visit me —coming to visit my parents, my sister, something like that. Now, this morning, seeing everything, this house where he lived, I know more about him than I knew from many years of youth spent side by side. Looking here, I wondered if I would find a certain print of a certain painting we had in our bedroom in those days. Yes, I know, it makes no sense that he would have it after all this time. The Clown in Repose, or some similar name. A clown with his eyes closed —Dead? Unconscious? Why closed? He had it on the wall above his bed for many years. It frightened me as a child. And the fact that the clown didn’t frighten Claude—that was frightening even more. And he stayed here so many years in this place, and he wasn’t frightened. I am frightened.” M. Bouquet sighed. “We’ve loaded the boxes, as you see. Thank you for packing so much for us. I’ll leave the furniture, and those kinds of things. Someone from the family will live here again sometime—when the Communists are finished. When you have defeated them. For now I’ll go on renting the house to your Ecumenical Council and”—He looked at Skip anew. “You’re not with the CIA or something like this, perhaps?”

“No.” “Okay.” He laughed. “I’m not concerned!” “No need to be.” Skip had kept aside a few fragile items—let the brother take responsibility for packing them. M. Bouquet elected to leave the doctor’s delicate representation of the human ear, the porcelain bones. “They came so far to here. It’s pointless to take them back, it’s sad to take them. We must rescue the books and papers for the family library. Our sister makes it her passion. The papers, the papers. For her it’s our only legacy, but I say to her, Why must we have any legacy at all? Things are destroyed over and over, the good things and bad things. So many wars and storms on the earth. Destruction on top of destruction. What happened to Claude? Poof, exploded, nothing left. The same thing for all of us—ashes, dust, poof, that’s our legacy. No. I don’t take this one. It’s too breakable.” With his thick fingers the brother detached and examined each part—the outer ear with its Pavilion and Lobe, then the Conduit and Tympan and then the Labyrinthe Osseux with its Vestibule and Fenętres, its Canaux semi-circulaire and the Nerf auditif, the Limaçon, the long tube of the Trompe d’eustache heading into the skull. Even the minute inner bones had been fashioned and labeled—the Marteau, Enclume, and Etrier— and the spongy-looking Cellules mastoďdiennes. “Ah! So small, so per

feet, an antique —it comes from his school days, perhaps, I think. Claude took his certification in 1920 or 1921.” He said suddenly, “Do you know the tunnel where Claude was blown up? Have you seen it?”

“No, I’m sorry, I haven’t.” “Avez-vous Français? Un peu?” They switched to French, and the conversation quickly became triv

ial. Apparently this large, solid man enjoyed his frankest exchanges in a language in which he wasn’t facile enough to camouflage himself.

Sands encouraged M. Bouquet to stay until morning, but he seemed fearful of spending the night here, though the roads would be dangerous. Everything was in the van. He left as the dark fell.

Weeks earlier, M. Bouquet had sent a letter to the phony Ecumenical Council’s mail drop, naming this day of his arrival. In the meantime, Sands had grown attached to certain of the dead man’s texts—a few obscure quarterly magazines and dusty books—and he’d placed these in his footlockers, hidden them from the doctor’s relatives and heirs. The brother left without them.

And weeks later, Sands still worked to translate paragraphs the Doctor had underlined—bits of philosophy by French intellectuals Sands had never heard of, abstract passages that unaccountably inflamed him, one, for instance, from an article called “D’un Voyage au Pays des Tarahumaras” by somebody named Antonin Artaud:

Que la Nature, par un caprice étrange, montre tout ŕ coup un corps d’homme qu’on torture sur un rocher, on peut penser d’abord que ce n’est qu’un caprice et que ce caprice ne signifie rien. Mais quand, pendant des jours et des jours de cheval, le męme charme intelligent se répčte, et que la Nature obstinément manifeste la męme idée; quand les męmes formes pathétiques reviennent; quand des tętes de dieux connus apparaissent sur les rochers, et qu’un thčme de mort se dégage dont c’est l’homme qui fait obstinément les frais —et ŕ la forme écartelée de l’homme répondent celles, devenues moins obscures, plus dégagéls d’une pétrifiante matičre—des dieux qui l’ont depuis toujours torturé; quand tout un pays sur la Terre développe une philosophie parallčle ŕ celle des hommes; quand on sait que les premiers hommes utilisčrent un langage des signes, et qu’on retrouve formidablement agrandie cette langue sur les rochers; certes, on ne peut plus penser que ce soit lŕ un caprice, et que ce caprice ne signifie rien.

With a pen and blank paper and a stack of dictionaries, he waded into battle against its horrific vagueness:

When Nature, by an odd caprice, suddenly portrays in a boulder the body of a man being tortured, one can think at first that this is just a fluke and that this fluke means nothing. But when, during days and days on a horse, he sees the same intelligent charm repeating itself, and when Nature stubbornly manifests the same idea; when the same pathetic forms return; when the heads of known gods appear in the boulders, and when there emerges a theme of death for which man obstinately pays the price; when the dismembered form of a man is answered by those—become less obscure, more separate from a petrifying matter—of the gods who have always tormented him; when a whole region of the earth develops a philosophy parallel to that of its people; when one knows that the first men used a language of signs, and when one discovers this language enlarged formidably in the rocks; then surely one can no longer think that this is just a fluke and that this fluke means nothing.

Yes, the intent of the mysterious M. Artaud was unspecified, as was the location of his Country of the Tarahumaras, whether somewhere in the New World or only in the head of this Artaud; but the doctor’s reasons for selecting the passage were obvious: the pale traveler, the indecipherably alien land.

The doctor, himself, was a cipher. Apparently he’d stopped practicing medicine long before his death, but wouldn’t go home. Sands thought he understood.

And Sands had kept, in addition to the several publications, one of the notebooks, the doctor’s private jottings. Stolen it. The doctor’s notes stood up in a strong, square script which Sands was translating, along with the doctor’s favorite passages, into a notebook of his own.

Dear Professor Georges Bataille:

In March of 1954 I read, in manuscript form, your essay “Prehistoric Painting: Lascaux, or, The Birth of Art” in the offices of the Library of Fine Arts at the Sorbonne, where my brother’s wife is employed. I was visiting my homeland from Indochina, where I have resided for nearly thirty years.

Skip recognized the title—Lascaux, ou, La Naissance de l’art—a big, beautiful volume with color plates of the paintings on the walls of a cavern system in France’s Lascaux region; he cursed himself for letting the book go, but it had seemed too valuable for stealing.

I have recently acquired the book, with the photographs. Of course

it is superb.

May I direct your attention to a book by Jean Gebser, an Austrian “professor of comparative civilizations”—Cave and Labyrinth? I quote:

“To return to the cave, even in thought, is to regress from life into

the state of being unborn.”

“The cave is a maternal, matriarchal aspect of the world.”

“The church of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue of Southern France in which the gypsies worship Sarah, the black Madonna.”

(M. Bataille: In Spain, 3,000 gypsies live in caves near Granada.)

(M. Bataille: Is the mind a labyrinth through which the consciousness gropes its way, or is the mind the boundless void in which certain limited thoughts rise up and disappear?)

(M. Bataille! — We think of things in caves as black, but aren’t they pale, almost translucent, very pale …)

“Theseus by entering the labyrinth is re-entering the womb in order to gain a possible second birth—a guarantee against the second, irremediable and dreadful death.”

(M. Bataille: In the year 1914 Count Bégouën discovered the Trois Frčres cave in the Pyrénées—here a tunnel that can only be wriggled through like a birth-canal ends in a massive chamber covered with Paleolithic 12,000-year-old images of the hunt, including fantastic were-animals. This chamber was used for initiating adolescent boys into the ranks of manhood in a ritual of death and new birth.)

“If the cave represents security, peace, and absence of danger, then the labyrinth is an expression of seeking, movement, and danger.”

(—Seeking an exit, M. Bataille, seeking an escape? Or seeking a secret at the center of things?)

(After longer than sixty years of life, I see myself.)

(Chaos, anarchy, and fear: This drives me: This I desire: to be free.)

Yes!

The body of Bouquet’s unfinished letter to the scholar Bataille — impassioned, intricate, verbose —Skip was still working on.

After a month in his burrow he let Pčre Patrice lure him out into the weather to view the tunnel into which Dr. Bouquet had disappeared. They walked through the village and out the north end and along a trail to the west, hardly half a kilometer. At the base of a rain-eroded hillside lay a scoop in the earth, no more than that. The fatal blast had undermined the entrance, and the rains had caved it in. As with so much else in this country, its depths were denied him.

“This is not a critical area,” the priest announced. “The tunnel was not used.” “Who laid the booby trap?”

“He took his own dynamite, I’m sure. Some dynamite to get past a cave-in, perhaps. Then—he exploded himself.” On the walk back Skip told the priest, “I’m glad I didn’t have to go inside.”

“Inside the tunnel? Why did you want to go in?”

“I didn’t.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’m a coward, Pčre Patrice.”

“Good. You’ll live longer.”

The priest had come many times to the villa for supper. If his duties to the parish hadn’t taken him far and wide he’d have turned up every night. The cuisine was marvelous. Mrs. Diu, it turned out, knew omelets, sauces, dainties, anything you could name in French, and though she didn’t often have exotic ingredients, still she served simple, delectable meals of fresh fish or pork with rice and wild greens, and local fruits for dessert. She baked delicious dinner rolls and golden loaves: here, Sands felt, he could have made it on bread and water.

In these ten rainy weeks, the colonel hadn’t visited. Except for the priest two or three times a month, and Nguyen Hao about as often, Skip stayed friendless and returned to his natural solitude—he knew this about himself, the only child of a working mother, a widowed mother— to the solitude of rainy school-day afternoons. In the smallest of the three upstairs bedrooms he pursued his calling as an arbiter of fragmentary histories in his uncle’s “2242” file. A languid pursuit. He could only stand so much at one sitting. The colonel’s file cards had been alphabetized according to the names of people either questioned or mentioned in interrogations between 1952 and 1963 throughout what was now South Vietnam. He’d passed the cutting and pasting stage and begun making new headings for each of the nineteen thousand duplicate cards and arranging them according to place names mentioned, so that someday— not soon! —it would be possible to look at this information as it related to district, village, or city. Why hadn’t it been kept to these categories to start with? And why should he care? As with CORDS/Phoenix, officers had ventured out, asked questions, made notes, gone on to other posts. He longed to trip on a clue and follow it to some ravaging discovery— Prime Minister Ky spied for the Vietcong, or an emperor’s tomb hid millions in French plunder—but no, nothing here, all worthless; he sensed it with his fingers on these cards. Not only were the data as trivial and jumbled as those of CORDS/Phoenix, but also their time had passed. These three-by-five cards served only as artifacts. In this they held a certain fascination.

At the beginning of August, Hao brought him a bigger French-English dictionary—Skip’s request—and a packet of photocopies from the colonel: a somewhat famous article from Studies in Intelligence called “Observations on the Double Agent,” by John P. Dimmer, Jr.; and a partial draft of the colonel’s own article, the one that had made some trouble for him, seven typed pages with handwritten notes—ideas more inflaming than French texts, more sinister than Eddie Aguinaldo’s cryptic warnings. On the one hand completely reasonable, on the other alarmingly disloyal.

The colonel had clipped a covering note to Dimmer’s “The Double Agent”:

Skipper, refamiliarize yourself with J. P. Dimmer, and have a look at

these pages from my draft. I’ve got more, but it’s a mess. Will drib

ble it out to you. Or you’d go crazy trying to sort it out.

Sands well remembered the afternoon in which he’d last heard mention of “Observations on the Double Agent.” Remembered it not for the mention, but for other remarks the colonel had permitted himself.

Along with Sergeant Storm he’d come to rescue his nephew temporarily from CORDS/Phoenix. Once in a while the colonel took him to lunch, today on the terrace of the New Palace Hotel. At the top of the stairs a sign announced today’s FESTIVAL OF HAMBURGERS. Skip remarked that again it was overcast, and Jimmy Storm said, “Ain’t no sky in the tropics.” Jimmy wore civvies, he was zingy; Skip suspected he took Benzedrine.

The colonel, his chair cocked, his right hand on the railing, sat with the eastern half of Saigon spread out behind him and before him a long buffet, the Festival, apparently, of Hamburgers. His left hand gripped a cocktail. “The Agency is in a state of shock. The Kennedy thing and the Bay of Pigs business have left us quaking. We don’t know how to behave, how to carry out our mission. In Cuba we’re blundering around—we as an agency, and we as a nation. We’re the Russia of the Western hemisphere.”

Sands said, “And how do you see things working out for us here? At the moment?”

“It depends on the Vietnamese, Skip. We’ve been saying ‘It depends on the Vietnamese’ so long it sounds like bull, but it’s the truth. The question is, how do we help them? You, me, us, sitting at this table. I mean the three of us. I think we take a new approach. We’ve got to be more aggressive in handling the data.”

“Aggressive?”

“The three of us.”

“Us?”

“The question about intelligence-gathering is where do you stop taking the initiative? Do we get out there and beat the bushes aggressively, accumulate everything aggressively, and then passively leave it to others to sift? No. A sifting goes on continually, at every level.”

Jimmy: “A selection.”

“And I don’t like the goddamn selection, Skipper. What gets sifted out, among other things, is that one particular piece of information that’s going to make life unpleasant for us by troubling our superiors. And what’s left over is a lie that lands on the desk above, a happy lie, a monstrous lie.”

Jimmy: “A happy monster.”

“The lies go up, and what comes back down is poor policy, mistaken policy. Stupid ideas get generated out along the designated paths, and way out here, in the field, our limbs start jerking in a crazy way. Then when so ordered we file a report that says with care and deliberation we thrashed around causing havoc. You know how it works, Skip: Mindanao. We swing from being tepid and ineffectual to being ardent and silly.”

Jimmy: “Ardent—that’s a good word.” The colonel said, “Why should we wait for the silliness from the center of the hive? Why not generate our own scenarios?”

At this point Jimmy Storm took notice of a patron sitting down to another table, a rather tall young Asian woman, prepossessing, strikingly kempt, sheathed in a glamour of silk, and said, “I’d like to get into her groovy gravy.”

The colonel laughed. “HAH!” His jester picked a bit of meat from its sauce with his fingers and slurped it into his jaws. “Or maybe Skip wants to.”

… The article’s draft began with a handwritten note—the colonel’s block printing—photocopied:

WE DON’T HAVE AN INTRO YET

Want to revitalize the distinction between analysis and intelligence—clarity of thought, purity of language, correctness of speech, etc, clarity of fact—appreciating how a lack of clarity has led to the complete perversion of the intelligence function of our Agency. Its motives and its purpose. And its means. Its methods.

Let’s hit that as the main thing—the distinction between analy

sis and intelligence. Orwell—”Politics and the English Language” As far as intro— BASICALLY TO SAY HERE THAT WE’RE TALKING ABOUT TWO

FUNCTIONS OF THE CLANDESTINE SERVICES-INTELLIGENCE AND ANALYSIS. AND THE BREAKDOWN OF BARRIERS BETWEEN THE TWO ETC

On the next page began the typed material. Skip anticipated an embarrassing mess. By the third sentence he could see the colonel must have had assistance:

Cross-Contamination of the Two Functions

Our figures of speech with regard to the process of communication give us our model for this discussion. We speak of “lines” of communication and “chains” of command, reminding ourselves that data move in a linear and linked fashion through the ranks of those interpreting it. In the case of the functions of our intelligence services, we view this movement as originating in the field and terminating in archives, in plans, or in operations. Hard data collected by the officer in the field slows down as it trickles up the chain, and eventually finds itself stalled by considerations as to its impact—on other operations, on the goals of higher-ups, and even on the career-path of the person passing it along—until related data climbs up parallel structures to corroborate it, or—most unfortunately, perhaps dangerously—until command finds a need for it as justification for political policy, and those in possession of this data sense this need.

This hesitation and doubt is an indication that the intelligence function has been polluted by the analysis function. Data is being interpreted, albeit unconsciously, perhaps, and its effects on command anticipated. We speak of “command influence” on the intelligence function, and the fact that we possess a term for it acknowledges its existence; however, we have thus far failed to grapple with the operations, the mechanics, of command influence.

This paper suggests, in broad outline, that “command influence” operates through the cross-contamination of the two functions of the clandestine services: intelligence and analysis.

Cross-Contamination of the Two Categories

As data hesitates on the chain, awaiting (1) the accumulation of pressures to drive it upward and (2) the corroboration of related materials, the segregation of human intelligence from documentary intelligence is threatened and finally gives way. Simply put, the need to examine the veracity of sources yields to the pressures of process. The result is cross-contamination: data from human sources, notoriously undependable, become the support for doubtful interpretations of documentary sources, and these interpretations come to be seen as shedding light, in turn, on data from human sources.

The cross-contamination of these two categories, human intelligence and documentary intelligence, is a sub-process of the broader breakdown between the two functions of intelligence and analysis.

Cross-Contamination of the Two Waves

Meanwhile, the interpretive process, we remember, is always subject to appropriation and enlistment in the service of policy. Cross-contamination renders data vague, malleable, and eventually useless as anything but an ingredient of internal bureaucratic and political chemistries.

A detailed examination of the processes by which the needs of command are communicated downward along the chain must wait for another occasion. At this point let it be enough to acknowledge that a sense of the needs of command does travel downward through the chain in the same kind of wave action by which data are communicated upward. The result is cross-contamination of the two waves.

It is to be stressed that this process is of an entirely different nature than the intelligence-gathering process of our Agency in its earliest incarnation, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). There the function of Intelligence remained almost untouched by policy, because policy is the game of peace, whereas the OSS served a command structure pursuing the objectives of war. From that era we have allowed to survive the old model of field-to-archive, field-to-plan, field-to-plan-to-operation. However, that model no longer serves us well.

The model of a chain on which two waves of data under pressure cross-contaminate one another is truer to the actual processes of our Agency today. The downward pressure derives from the needs of command, while the upward pressure derives from the need to satisfy command.

At this point in the discussion let us again acknowledge the process’s lack of utility, as we have now illuminated the category of service in which intelligence becomes useful, that is, in the pursuit of the objectives of war.

Cross-Fertilization of the Two Goals

This paper will leave open the question of how we shall apply the lessons of this improved model to our contemporary wartime situation, i.e., in South Vietnam. However, some thoughts assert themselves for consideration:

Groups wage war either with the goal of achieving political aims, as in the case of revolution, or with the goal of ensuring survival, as in the case of counter-revolution. (A long parentheses: We leave aside the instances in which the two goals become blurred, for instance when nation-states engage in empire-building, in market-building, or in defense against these two aggressions. And we deliberately forgo the elaborations and subtleties that would result from bringing Clausewitz and Machiavelli to the table. We reiterate: our focus is on using an improved model to consider the role of intelligence in our contemporary wartime situation, and thus we

simplify.)

Here an arrow in the margin led the reader to a handwritten note at the bottom of the page:

V—So far so good. The end part is just to say we’re inviting further thoughts from all comers. Main thought to end on is that Vietcong-NVA goal is political revolution cross-fertilized by national survival. Inviting thoughts as to where USA stands as far as goals—what are we doing? And what is role of intelligence in that? And how do we get back a sense of wartime objectives and wrestle a whole Agency around to reviving the original role of an intelligence service?

The Necessity of Insulated Activity

The United States, on the other hand, even in this wartime situation, does not enjoy the clarity of warlike goals. Ours is, in effect, a pawn’s game played out with the not-quite-expressed priority that the back ranks, the powerful pieces, the world powers, should never be brought into play. For entities in the intelligence community this circumstance suggests that insularity must be established in order to create an arena of activity in which the true and original purposes of intelligence are recovered and re-engaged. We use the term “arena,” but let us say, instead, that a length of the communications chain must be insulated against the pressures from above and below—the pressures of “subordinate prudence” from below and the pressures of “command influence” from above. Such insulation is hardly likely to result from an order from command itself, and must instead come as a result of the initiative of this Agency or members of it.

In the margins—

V, please fix this to be less uppity, more vague—’He who hath ears to hear, let him hear.’—FXS. But V—time is of the essence. MOBILIZATION-LOSS DICHOTOMY my man.

Who had helped? Who was “V”?—Voss, he had to presume. On the last page, another note in the colonel’s hand:

Tree of Smoke—(pillar of smoke, pillar of fire) the “guiding light” of a sincere goal for the function of intelligence—restoring intelligence-gathering as the main function of intelligence operations, rather than to provide rationalizations for policy. Because if we don’t, the next step is for career-minded power-mad cynical jaded bureaucrats to use intelligence to influence policy. The final step is to create fictions and serve them to our policy-makers in order to control the direction of government. ALSO—”Tree of Smoke”—note similarity to mushroom cloud. HAH!

Then the typewriter again, Voss:

One might hypothesize a step beyond the final one. Consider the possibility that a coterie or insulated group might elect to create fictions independent of the leadership’s intuition of its own needs. And might serve these fictions to the enemy in order to influence choices.

— HAH! He could hear his uncle laughing. As on the terrace of the Continental he’d laughed at Jimmy’s crude insinuations. While Jimmy slurped at his fingers, the colonel said to Skip, “Do you remember J. P. Dimmer’s piece on the double agent?”

“I read it a thousand times.” “Suppose you have a double.” “Have we got a double?” “Suppose.” “Okay.” “And suppose you want to give him some bogus product.” Skip said, “Bogus product? I don’t remember any discussion of it in

the Dimmer.” “Get him a copy, please, Sergeant.” “Get him a copy of what?” “It’s an article called ‘Observations on the Double Agent.’ In my stack

of Studies in Intelligence. Winter issue, ‘62.”

“What a memory.”

“Suppose Hanoi believed that an insubordinate element in the U.S. command had decided to blow up a nuke in Haiphong Harbor.” “Are you kidding?” “Wouldn’t that mess with Ho’s thinking just a little? If he thought a

few lunatic bastards had decided to finish this thing without asking permission?”

“We’re speaking hypothetically, I hope.”

“Skip. Have you got a nuke in your pocket?”

“No.”

“Know where to get one?”

“No.”

“No. This is Psy Ops. We’re talking about unbalancing the enemy’s judgment.” “We have no borders to the thinking process/’ Sergeant Storm announced. “It’s almost like yogic or spiritual work.”

He remembered another of the pronouncements of Sergeant Storm: “We’re on the cutting edge of reality itself. Right where it turns into a dream.”

After his first time at the Purple Bar, James just wanted to go back the next possible minute and drink beer and get laid, and go back again after that, and he couldn’t imagine any higher aim.

He didn’t forget his mother. His first few paychecks, he sent her half. After that he had nothing to send. He’d spent it all on riot.

April wasn’t springlike, just hot. All summer came a torrent of rain. October and November felt cooler and drier. James couldn’t eat the Thanksgiving turkey they served up at the LZ base. Other messes had real turkey, but this stuff came bleached and waterlogged out of a can. “Christmas,” Fisher said, “is gonna break everybody’s heart.”

At first James sent Stevie numerous short, tortured messages, mailed her trinkets he picked up in Saigon, cherished her letters to him, tried to imagine her face and voice when he read her words. Then one day he couldn’t seem to remember her. For the other guys this wasn’t true. As their tours stretched out they only grew more obsessed with their girls back home, and as their time grew short they counted the days and rhapsodized about getting white meat, white meat, white meat. But James only wanted more of what he got at the Purple Bar, whatever color of meat it was.

Communications from Stevie came relentlessly, usually brief notes she jotted in typing class, exactly the kind she might pass surreptitiously to anybody else in school, as if James were sitting two aisles over from her, dozing, and not opening his pants in a bunker, shining a flashlight onto his bared crotch and staring at a horrendous purple-red region of jock rot—in the quivering beam a volatile, almost green color. “You don’t get it from whores, you don’t get it from whores,” said the other men, the men he asked over and over, “it’s just a thing, a sweaty jungle horrible thing, and the shit they give you makes it go away eventually. And you don’t have to shave your balls. So don’t worry. And don’t shave your balls.” Stevie’s letters, their fs dotted with little circles, terrified him as much as jock rot. He hardly ever answered.

I could only lead you halfway to love, he wrote her once, quoting one of Evans’s poems to his own girlfriend.

I will wait for you always, she wrote in return, I am loyal to the end.

He wanted to write back saying, Don’t be loyal, because I’m not loyal. Instead he simply didn’t answer.

At Christmas he got a card from his mother and felt sick about opening it—suppose she sobbed about money? But she’d only written, “Love, Mom” at the end of a Hallmark verse about the Savior and the manger and the shepherds and the wondrous star-filled first Christmas Eve.

Th e Screwy Loot took a squad on patrol, and the first thing his bad luck did for them was to run them across a spider-hole with two dead VC down in it. Screwy found it all by himself when, leaving the trail to get around a fallen tree, he plunged his foot through the thatch and onto the head of a corpse. Several of Echo pushed the tree trunk aside and pried up the broken lid of bamboo and grass to find the dead men, one on top of the other, waterlogged and stinking, their eye sockets swarming with ants. The tree had toppled over to trap them inside and the groundwater had come up during the night, had risen so fast, apparently, they’d hardly begun digging their way out before they were drowned. Screwy Loot wanted to question everybody in the area. The first man they approached, coming back from the field with a bundle of kindling on his shoulder, threw down his load and took off running with two of Echo on his heels. The others squatted on their own heels and waited. “This mountain is taking a shit on us,” Screwy Loot said. Most of them hadn’t been around long enough to appreciate the changes in the air. With Flatt and Jollet gone and people transferring in and out, the platoon’s oldest were Specialist Fourth Class Houston, known as Cowboy, and Black Man, the nameless sergeant. By now there was another black guy too, Everett, a PFC, who answered to his name, but who spoke only to Black Man, and very softly, so nobody else could hear. “Speaking of taking a shit,” said Screwy Loot, and headed off behind a bush and was coming out buckling up when the two runners returned, without the local.

“No luck?”

He s gone.

“He’s underground, sir.”

“We think he is.”

“There’s a tunnel, sir.”

“Fuck. Don’t tell the colonel,” the Loot said.

“It’s right over here.”

The whole squad stood around what certainly looked like a two-bytwo-foot opening to the world beneath. Screwy Loot got on his knees and poked his flashlight down into it and got up quickly. “Yeah, that’s how they are. They go three feet, four feet down and take a header. Back off,” he told them, and unpinned a grenade, rolled it into the hole, and ran like hell. The bang sounded small and muffled. Dirt erupted and rained down. “Fuck if I know,” he said. He put two men on the hole, and he and the others returned to the corpses.

Here on the mountain’s south side they patrolled what amounted to a roadway. For five kilometers a D6 bulldozer had been able to widen the trail out of Echo Base. After that it was cliff and ravine, impassable by vehicle. Screwy Loot radioed for Sergeant Harmon, who drove out in a jeep. “I don’t want these dead fuckers here,” he told Harmon. “Drag them away. If there’s Charlie on my mountain, I want him to wonder did we take these guys alive. See,” he told the others, “that’s Psy Ops: fuck with Charlie’s brain.”

He and the sergeant sat in the jeep eating Crations until the others hit on the notion of blowing the local man out of the tunnel —if he was in there—with gasoline.

Three men hoisted a fifty-five-gallon drum, half full, from the rear of the vehicle and rolled it off the trail and over to the tunnel’s entrance, the barrel zigging and zagging, the men swearing and hacking at vegetation. All the others came to observe. Two men tipped the container over the hole and the third rapped on the bung with the butt of his M16 to loosen it.

Screwy Loot marched over quickly as soon as he saw this. Let his

mouth drop open slightly and jutted his head, chastising without speaking. “We are in a process of elimination,” the man explained. “Wayne, your weapon is not a sledgehammer.” “Sorry, sir. But I just mean we’re gonna blow that Gook fucker out of

there.”

They unscrewed the bung and emptied the acrid contents into the hole, and PFC Wayne, a big, empty-headed boy from Iowa, straddled the darkness, struck a match, and dropped it in. The force of the blast shot him into the air, over their heads, and down through the treetops, howling like artillery.

“Who’s next?” Sergeant Harmon said. PFC Wayne’s two partners rushed to find him. He came limping

back between them. “You forgot to say, Tire in the hole!’ ” He didn’t seem seriously hurt. “I’m famous now,” was all he said. “The colonel won’t like it you fucked up his tunnel,” Black Man said

to Screwy Loot. Screwy Loot put his arm around Black Man’s shoulders, while the

sarge came around facing his front. “Somebody should check on the status of that hole.” “Why don’t you go down, Black Man?” “Me?” “Yeah. Nip down there, take a look-see.” “See is it the one you don’t come out of.” “Ain’t no tunnel left, Lieutenant, sir.” Screwy Loot drew Black Man close by his shoulders and said, “All

god’s chillun got tunnels.”

Cowboy spoke up: “I guess I’ll go on down.” The squad looked at him—all heads turning. Then all looked else

where. Up, down, over there somewhere. “Got us a volunteer,” the sergeant said. Screwy Loot told Cowboy, “We’ll make the colonel happy.” These days Echo didn’t see much of the colonel. The new ones had

only glimpsed him from a distance. Cowboy asked Harmon, “Is he a real

colonel?” “Well, he ain’t just a figment of my mind.” “What’s that supposed to mean?” “I guess that means he’s real, sojer. I guess if he stepped on your fin

gers, you’d yell out.”

“I don’t know about that,” Cowboy said. “I’ve sat on Santa Claus’s lap more times than I’ve laid eyes on that colonel. So to me he ain’t as real as Santa Claus, now, is he?”

“Here.” Harmon handed him his own flashlight. “Take an extra along.” Cowboy turned on the light and went down headfirst, the way some of them had seen the Kootchie Kooties do it.

When he’d gone all the way in, when there was nothing left of him to see, the others stood around and waited. Going down into that worldwide mystery had to produce some respect, if not for his prudence, at least for the level of his insanity.

There were stories that the tunnels went for miles. There were monsters down there, blind reptiles and insects that had never seen the light, there were hospitals and brothels, and horrible things, piles of the offal from VC atrocities, dead babies, assassinated priests.

“Get my feet,” he shouted from down in the mouth. They pulled him out by the ankles. He hadn’t been able to turn

around. “It’s caved in about twenty yards along,” he told the Loot. “Nobody in there?” “Not since I came out,” Cowboy said.

Sh e woke about five in her room in the back of the house. The windows were closed but she heard coyotes yipping and weeping in the distance, to the east, toward the Superstitions. No work today. She lay in bed and prayed. May Burris start the New Year with better intentions toward school, and may he find the Lord in his heart. May Bill find joy in his duties, and may he find the Lord in his heart. May James be kept safe in war, and may he find the Lord in his heart. The coyotes sounded like hurt dogs. They agitated plainly for Christ’s return. May they not be heard. May Christ stay his feet till the last soul on earth be saved. The last soul saved might be one of her boys. Of that there was every indication.

She put her feet on the floor and put on a flannel shirt over her nightgown. Still well dark. She lay back down and a bit later realized she’d slept again. No extra dreams. The clock ticked. Its radium dials said not quite six. She rose and found her slippers.

In the kitchen she put down a few drops of Carnation milk in a saucer for the cat. May the coyotes not get her. Or the toms. They didn’t need kittens around here … Still dark. Burris had been up half the night watching fright shows on the television. There was nothing she could do to keep him from the snares.

She lit a Salem off the burner on the stove. She boiled water for powdered coffee and sat at the kitchen table, a collapsible card table, set the cigarette in the ashtray, and pulled her shirt neck closed with one hand while she brought the cup to her lips with the other. Greenish streaks of light to the east. The window was dirty. Prayer was all she had. Prayer and Nescafe and Salems. This was the one time of day she didn’t feel crazy.

She spilled some coffee when the phone rang on the wall. God be with us all. She went to the wall and lifted the receiver wanting words to plead for mercy from whatever was coming. Before the terrors of possibility she only knew how to say, “Hello?”

“Hi, Ma. It’s James.”

“What?”

“Ma, it’s James, Ma. I’m calling to say Merry Christmas. Guess I’m a little late.”

“James?”

“It’s James, Ma. Merry Christmas.”

“James? James? Where are you?”

“I’m in Vietnam, like before. Like always.”

“Are you all right, James?”

“Fm fine. Fm perfect. How was Christmas for y all?” “Are you all right? Are you hurt?” “No, no. Fm fine.” “Fm scared to hear you calling me.” “I don’t mean to be scary. I just thought I’d say hi.” “But you’re all right.” “I’m just fine, Mom. Don’t be scared or nothing. Hey, I just sent you

another money order.” “I’m very grateful.” “Sorry I slacked off there a little while.” “I know it’s hard. I don’t count on it, I just say it sure helps us along.” “I’ll try to do a little better. I truly will. How was your Christmas?” “It went all right, James. It went just fine. I’ve got to sit now. Let me

get a chair. You scared me.” “Nothing to scare you about, Ma. I’m doing pretty good here.” “Well, I’m glad to know it. Did you call Stephanie?” “Stevie?” “Stevie. Did you call her yet?” “I mean to ring her right up. She’s next on my list tonight.” “What time is it there?” “Just about eight p.m. We call that twenty hundred hours in the mili

tary.” “It’s six-oh-eight in the morning here in Phoenix.” “There you go.” “Get off, sweetie,” she said. “Not you—I got this old cat here.” “You still got that cat?” “No. Another one.” “What happened to that other one?” “Run off.” “Coyotes got it.” “I expect.” “Well, you got you another one.” “James—” she said, and her voice broke. “Now, Ma.” James. “Ma. Ain’t nothing to worry about.” “I got to worry.”

“Its not like you’re thinking it is. We’re very safe where we’re at. I

haven’t seen one bit offighting. It’s just patrols. The people are all friendly.” “Are they friendly?” “Yes. They sure are, Ma. Everybody’s nice.” “What about the Communists?” “I’ve never seen a one. They don’t get around our part. They’re

scared to.” “If it’s a lie, I appreciate it.” “It’s no lie.” “And I expect you’ll be home soon. How long will it be?” “Ma, I’m calling to say I’m signed up for one more go here.” “One more?” “Yes, ma’am.” “One more year?” “Yes, ma’am.” She didn’t know what to say, and so she said, “Do you want to talk to

your little brother?” “Burris? Okay. Right quick, though.” “He’s in trouble at school. The teachers have told me he wanders.

One minute he’s there, next thing he’s gone.” “What does Burris say?” “He says he doesn’t like it at school. I told him to go anyhow. Nobody

likes it, or they wouldn’t give it away free.” “Put him on.” “He’s sleeping. Just a minute.” “Never mind, then. Just tell him I said he better get his tail in gear.” “Thank you, James. I’ll tell him what his brother says.” “Well, I’m talking on a radio unit, so I better let you go.” “A radio unit?” “Yes, ma’am. Up at the base camp.” “You’re on the radio? And I’m on the phone!” “Happy New Year’s, Ma.” “Same to you.” “Have a happy New Year’s, Ma.” “I will. You do the same.” “I sure will. All right, then, so long.” “So long, James,” she said. “I pray for you day and night. Don’t listen to what they say. You’re doing the Lord’s work to keep his faith alive in a world going dark. It’s one of them Old Testament times.”

“I know. I hear you, Ma.”

“Communists are atheists. They deny the Lord.”

“That’s what they tell me.”

“Look at the Old Testament. Look how many slain in the name of the Lord. Look at First Samuel, look at Judges. Be the Lord’s smiting hand if you have to be.”

She heard him sigh.

“I just mean to take your arm and buck you up. Read your Bible daily. There’s doubters and demonstrators and God knows what. Traitors is what they are. If you hear about those people, shut your ears. Thank God they don’t come around Phoenix. If I saw a demonstration I’d get in a truck and come through that pack like a boulder down a mountain.”

“They’re telling me my time’s up, Ma, so I better say ‘bye, so —’bye.” There had been a washing sound coming over the phone. It stopped when her son rang off. “Well,” she said to nobody. She rose and put the phone back on the hook.

A rare, brilliant morning. Nguyen Hao stayed in bed late, watching feathers of mist turn in the light outside the bedroom window, thinking what it meant to do battle with —no, not to fight against, but simply to face unwaveringly—the dragons of the Five Hindrances: lust, aversion, doubt, sloth, restlessness.

Sloth kept him in bed awhile. Restlessness drove him downstairs to the tiny court behind his kitchen, where the sun made more mist. Under its warmth everything gave off ghosts. They woke from the bricks, rose with a deep reluctance, disappeared.

Hao spread his white handkerchief on the stone bench, seated himself carefully, and tried to find some quiet in his mind.

At nine-thirty, Trung rattled the back gate. Hao got up and found the key and opened the padlock. The Monk possessed forged papers now. He walked around Saigon with impunity. He looked healthy, even happy. They sat together on the marble bench as they’d done many times, never, in

Hao’s opinion, making any progress. Anywhere ahead lay the turning point. “Are you all right?” “Kim is sick. Worse than before.”

1 m sorry. “I’ve been thinking about the Five Hindrances.” “Sometimes I do too. Do you remember a poem? —’I’m caught up in

the world like smoke blown everywhere.’ ” “The dragons have defeated me,” Hao said. “They’ve driven me so far into the world I can’t get back to the silence.”

The Monk appeared to be thinking about it all. Hao was too weary to prod him. After a while the Monk said, “I try to get back too. I want to find the silence again. But I can’t get back.”

“Will you stop trying?” “I think I have to finish the life I’ve lived. I’ve been very confused.” “I’ll be honest. You’ve confused me too.” “Do you criticize me for taking so long?” “I’ve spoken to the colonel about you many times. He suspects you

might be taking our money falsely. But you keep turning up. I’ve told him you’re worth supporting because you keep coming back.”

Trung said, “I remember when the cadres came to my village in 1945 and read Ho’s speech to us. A young woman got up and read in a voice like a song. The world rang with Ho’s words. In the girl’s beautiful voice he talked about freedom, equality. He cited America’s Declaration of Independence. He won my heart. I gave everything. I left my home behind. I spilled blood. I suffered in prison. Can you criticize me for taking so long to betray all of that?”

Hao was shocked. “Your language is strong.” “The truth is strong. Put it this way: the people’s thirst for freedom has driven us to drink bad water.” Whether or not he lied, here was a story the colonel would under

stand. “I’ll put it in exactly those words.” “The negotiation is over. I’ve come to ask, and to give.” “What do you ask?” “I want to be done with this life. I want to go to the United States.” Hao couldn’t believe it. “The U.S.?” “Can it be done?” “Of course. They can manage anything.”

“Then let them take me there.” “What do you offer?” “Whatever they want.” “But now. Immediately. What?” “I can tell you the rumors are true. There’s going to be a big push at

the New Year. Everywhere in the South. It’s a major offensive.” “Can you give specific information? Places, times, and so on?” “I can’t give you much, because it’s mostly NVA. But in Saigon it’s us.

Our cell has been contacted. We’ll be working with a sapper team. They’re planting charges in the city. We’ll probably have to guide them to two or three locations. As soon as I have the locations, I’ll pass them to you right here.”

Hao could hardly respond. “The colonel will value information like that.” “I’m almost certain they’re laying these charges for the big push. I believe it’s coming exactly on the day of Tet.”

Four years dancing on the doorstep, and now all this in less than twenty minutes. Hao couldn’t keep his hands in his lap. He offered Trung another cigarette, took one himself, held the lighter for them both. “I respect your courage. You deserve the truth from me. And so I tell you this: The colonel is interested in the possibility that you’ll double. That you’ll go back north.”

“I could probably go back. There’s a program to take tribesmen north for education and indoctrination. The idea is to send them back home afterward, to organize. I’ve had some involvement with the program.”

“You’d really go back north? Why?” “I despair of explaining.” “What about going to the States?” “Afterward.” After going north as a double agent? Hao doubted the existence of

any afterward. Something gripped his heart. “We’ve been friends,” he

told Trung. “When peace arrives, we’ll still be friends.” The two men sat together on the smooth marble bench, and smoked. “There—all right?” Trung said. “We’ve crossed over.”

From Dr. Bouquet’s notes:

Night again, the insects are loud, the moths are killing themselves on the lamp. Two hours ago I sat on the veranda looking out at the dusk, filled with envy for each living entity—bird, bug, blossom, reptile, tree, and vine—that doesn’t bear the burden of the knowledge of good and evil.

Sands sat on the veranda himself in the heat of the afternoon with the doctor’s notebook in his lap, while behind him moldered and loomed the house full of codes and files and words and referents and cross-referents, examining an illegible line in the doctor’s jottings, the notebook hastily closed on wet ink, the line blotted out. No matter which way he turned the page—

And the strange thing is that those who travel through this region, as if seized by a sleepy paralysis, shut down their senses in order to remain ignorant of everything.

When Nature, by an odd caprice, suddenly portrays in a boulder the body of a man being tortured, one can think at first that this is just a fluke and that this fluke means nothing. But when, during days and days on a horse, he sees the same intelligent charm repeating itself, and when Nature stubbornly manifests the same idea; when the same pathetic forms return; when the heads of known gods appear in the boulders, and when there emerges a theme of death for which man obstinately pays the price; when the dismembered form of a man is answered by those—become less obscure, more separate from a petrifying matter—of the gods who have always tormented him; when a whole region of the earth develops a philosophy parallel to that of its people; when one knows that the first men used a language of signs, and when one discovers this language enlarged formidably in the rocks; then surely one can no longer think that this is just a fluke and that this fluke means nothing.

8961

Thre e weeks short of his scheduled release from the navy, Bill Houston had a fight with a black man in the Yokosuka enlisted mess, in the kitchen, where he’d been detailed with three other sailors to paint the walls. Houston’s unvaried style of attack was to come in low and fast, get his left shoulder into the other man’s midriff while hooking his left arm behind the man’s knee, and upend them both so that Houston came down on top, driving his shoulder into the solar plexus with his full weight behind it. He practiced other moves as well, because he considered fighting important, but this opening generally worked with the tough opponents, the ones who stood their ground and raised their dukes. This black man he was having it out with caught Houston a blow to the forehead as he rushed for the man’s legs, and Houston watched stars and rainbows fly as they both fell onto a five-gallon bucket of paint and spilled it all over the place. He’d never gotten into it with a black guy before. The man’s middle was as hard as a helmet, and he was already squirming away as they slid across the tiled floor on a widening pool of institutional-green enamel. Houston tried to right himself as the man hopped up as lightly as a puppet and aimed a sideways kick from which Houston’s skull was saved only because the guy slipped and went down in the goop, his left hand stuck out to catch the fall. But his hand slipped too, and he made the mistake of going onto his back in the effort to get himself up again, and by that time Houston had his bearings and jumped on his stomach as hard as he could with both feet. This maneuver was called the “bronco stomp” and was reputed to result in death, but Houston didn’t know what else to do, and, in any case, while it ended the altercation and gave Houston the victory, it didn’t do much more than knock the wind out of the guy. Six men from the Shore Patrol arrested the combatants, two green bipeds now racially indistinguishable. As the SPs wiped them down, laid tarps across the seats of the jeeps, and led them away in handcuffs, Houston determined that if they did a stretch in the brig together he would avoid a rematch. Officially he’d put the guy away, but Houston was the one with the great big bruised knot between his eyes, somewhere under all this paint. “What was the fight about?” a patrolman demanded, and Houston said, “He called me a dumb-ass cracker.” “You called me a nigger,” the guy said. “That was during the fight,” Houston said, “so that don’t count.” Still excited from the battle, proud, happy, they felt friendly toward one another. “Don’t call me that no more,” the black man said, and Houston said, “I wasn’t going to anyway.”

Thus Seaman Houston received an early general discharge, and spent his last ten days in the navy not as a sailor but as a prisoner in the brig of the Yokosuka Naval Base.

On his release he was issued a voucher for a commercial jet flight to Phoenix. Traveling by air made him miserable. His ears popped like a hammer on his skull, he felt dizzy, the air tasted dead. The first and last plane ride of his life, this he swore. In the LA airport he balled up the Phoenix portion of his ticket and tossed it in an ashtray, changed into his uniform in the men’s room, and, impersonating a sailor, hitchhiked home with his duffel on his shoulder through the clarity of the Mojave Desert in January. He encountered the outskirts of Phoenix sooner than he’d expected. It was much more of a city now, tires wailing on Interstate Ten and loud jet airliners coming in overhead, their lights shimmering in the blue desert twilight. What time was it? He didn’t have a watch. In fact, what day? Houston stood at Seventeenth and Thomas under a broken street-lamp. He had thirty-seven dollars. He was twenty-two years old. He hadn’t tasted beer in almost a month. Lacking a plan, he phoned his mother.

A week later, sitting in his mother’s kitchen drinking instant coffee, Bill answered the phone: his younger brother James. “Who’s that?” James said.

“Who dat who say who dat?” Bill said.

“Well-I’ll be.”

“How’s that Saigon pussy?”

“I guess Mom ain’t sitting right there.”

“Done left for work, I think.”

“Ain’t it six a.m. there?”

“Here? No. Closer to eight.”

“It ain’t six a.m.?”

“It used to be. Now it’s eight.” “What are you doing there at eight a.m.?” “Sitting here in my Jockeys, drinking Nescafe.” “You done with the navy?” “Done with them, and them with me.” “You living at Mom’s?” “Just visiting. Where are you at?” “Right this minute? Da Nang.” “Where’s that?” “Down deep somewhere in a bucket of shit.” “I haven’t seen you since Yokohama one year ago.” “Yeah, that’d be about right.” “That’s funny to say.” “Yeah, kind of.” ” ‘Haven’t seen you since Yokohama.’ ” James said, “Well …” and there was a silence. Bill asked, “You getting any pussy?” “Oh, yeah.” “How is it?” ” ‘Bout like you’d think.” Bill said, “Did you know your gal came by?” “Who?” “Stephanie. Your little gal that you dated. Yeah. She paid a visit.” “So what?” “Bothering the old woman about you.” “About what?” “Says you don’t answer her letters no more. Wants to know how

you’re going along.” “Are you living there now, or what?” “I just thought you should know. So now you know.” “So now I know. Don’t mean I care.” “You’re a funny feller. Yeah, she’s all upset about you doing another

tour.” “Are you living there for sure?” “I’m just visiting a few days till I get squared up with a job.” “Good luck.” “I appreciate it.”

“Where’s Mom? She at work?” “Yeah. What time is it there?” “I couldn’t care less,” James said. “I’m on leave. Three days.” “It must be seventeen or eighteen hundred.” “I couldn’t care less. Not for three days.” “And it’s already tomorrow, ain’t it.” “It ain’t never tomorrow, not in this fucking movie. Never ain’t noth

ing but today.” “You seen any actual combat yet?” “I been in them tunnels down there.” “What’d you see?” His brother didn’t answer. “What about the fighting? Have you been in battles?” “Not so’s you’d notice.” “Really?” “It’s sort of off over there somewhere, never right around where

you’re at. I mean, I seen dead guys, hurt guys, guys all tore up, over at the

LZ, the landing zone.” “No shit.” “Yeah. So, yeah, there’s shit going on all over. But it never gets to

right here.” “You’re probably lucky.” “That’s about it.” “What else? Come on.” “What else? I don’t know.” “Come on, brother. Tell me about that pussy.” His young brother’s voice came small and echoing over the wire,

seven, eight thousand miles. Anybody’s voice. Talking about the one thing. “It’s all over hell, brother Bill. It’s falling out of the trees. I got one I keep in a hooch over at the ville. I never seen anything like her, I mean never. Her ass never once touches the bed while I’m on her. She couldn’t weigh more’n eighty-two pounds, and she keeps me lifted up halfway to the roof. She must eat atomic fuel for breakfast. Listen: I don’t think I could take her in a fight.”

“Goddamn. Goddamn, little James. I don’t know how I’m gonna get laid now I’m back at home. I don’t know how to talk to a natural white woman!”

“You better get back with the navy.” “I don’t believe they’ll have me.” “No? They won’t?” “They got a little tired of me, seems like.” “Well …” said James. “Yeah …” During the silences came a faint wash of static, in which you could

almost hear other voices. “How’s old Burris?” “He’s all right. He’s a funny feller too, just like you.” “Mom doing okay?” “Just fine.” “Runnin’ with Jesus.” “Sure enough. Did you get my postcard that she sent?” “Yeah, that postcard? Yeah.” “I was in the brig when I sent that.” “Uh-oh.” “Yeah …” “Listen, don’t tell that Stevie gal I called.” “Stephanie?” “Yeah. Don’t tell her you talked to me.” “She said you don’t answer back when she writes you.” “Everybody else just thinks about their girl back home, that’s all they

think about.” “What do you think about?” “Sideways pussy.” “Whorehouse pussy. Paid-for pussy.” “Nothin’s free on Planet E, brother Bill.” Dead guys, guys all torn up. In this James could have been lying. He

might have felt pressured, in an overseas long-distance phone call, to produce experiences worth telling. Bill Houston had heard there wasn’t much fighting over there. Not like Iwo Jima, anyhow, not like the Battle of the Bulge. Bill Houston saw no point in calling him on his bull. James wasn’t his little punk brother anymore. You didn’t want to kid him and keep him in his place.

“I got to go, brother Bill. Tell Mom I love her.” “I’ll pass the word along. What about your Stevie gal?”

“I done told you,” James said, “just don’t mention me.”

“All right.”

“All right.”

“Keep your head down, James.”

“It’s down and staying down,” James said, and the phone clicked dead.

January came and nearly went before Bill Houston found work in the rural environs outside Tempe, near Phoenix. He took a room on South Central Street he could pay for by the day, week, or month, and bused back and forth. At 10:00 p.m. each Tuesday through Saturday he arrived in darkness at the gates of TriCity Redimix, a sand-and-gravel outfit, for his duties as night cleanup man. By ten-thirty the last of the second shift had left and he tossed aside his mandatory hard hat and presided over fifteen acres of desert—mountains of crushed rocks sorted by size, so that each mountain was made bewilderingly of the same-sized thing, from fist-sized stones down to sand. From one hopper leaked a thread of fine dust that made a pile at the end of a tunnel some twenty feet long; for each shovelful he crept down its tight length toward a distant lightbulb burning in a hemisphere of wire mesh, holding his breath and approaching, a mist of dust exploding in slow motion when he jabbed the blade into the pile, backing out step by step carrying the one shovelful and tossing it to the chilly currents circling the earth. He washed the concrete troughs under the crushers’ conveyor belts with a violent fire hose and scraped each one clean with a flat-nose shovel. The nights were wild with stars, otherwise empty and cold. For warmth he kept fifty-five-gallon drums full of diesel-soaked sand burning around the place. He made a circuit among the maze of conveyor belts under gargantuan crushers and was never done. The next evening the same belts, the same motions, even some of the same pebbles and rocks, it stood to reason, and the same cold take-out burger for lunch at the dusty table in the manager’s trailer at 2:00 a.m.; washing his hands and face first in the narrow John, his thick neck brown as a bear’s, sucking water up his nostrils and expelling the dust in liverish clumps. Not long after his lunch the roosters alone on neighboring small farms began to scream like humans, and just before six the sun arrived and turned the surrounding aluminum rooftops to torches, and then at six-thirty, while Houston punched out, the drivers came, and they lined their trucks nose-to-ass and one after another drove beneath the largest hopper of all to wait, shaken by their machines, while wet concrete cascaded down the chute into each tanker before they went out to pour the foundations of a city. Houston walked a mile to the bus stop and there he waited, covered with dirt and made sentimental by the vision of high school punks and their happy, whorish girlfriends walking to class, heading for their own daily torment, sharing cigarettes back and forth. Houston remembered doing that, and later in the boy’s bathroom … nothing ever as sweet as those mouthfuls from rushed, overhot smokes … stolen from the whole world… In his heart—as with high school—he’d quit this job on the first day but saw nowhere else to go.

Screwy Loot stopped his jeep, signaled to one of the new guys. New guy ran over to the jeep, came back humping two clanking double basic loads of magazines and threw them at James’s feet and ran back toward the jeep, saying, “He’s calling me.”

“What’s all this ammo for?”

“Fuck if I know! He’s calling me!” The new guy returned to Screwy Loot’s jeep, listened, came back humping two jerry cans. “Burn ‘em, burn ‘em, burn ‘em!” “What?” “Burn the hooches! He says we gotta burn ‘em.” “Why?” “I don’t know. Something very fucked-up is going on.” “What do you mean?” “He says there’s an attack!”

“Where?”

“I don’t know!”

James gripped a handle and as panic rode over the back of his skull down his spine and up his ass they both flicked the cans at the nearest hooch and dabbed it with fuel. From somewhere over the hill came deep, repetitive explosions.

The new private pulled a Zippo and the spark blew the vapors and the explosion sent them backward, but it wasn’t as loud as the booming from over the hill. He said, “It’s all a thing, man, it’s all a desperate, fucking thing”

James circled one hooch and then a second, sloshing gas until the can was empty. He tossed the can into a burning dwelling and the flames found it and ignited the vapors inside and it whooshed loudly and whirled and took a hop. “Did you see that?” James shouted, but the roof’s thatch fried so loudly as it burned he couldn’t hear himself talk.

He shouted, “What are we doing this for again?” “Fuck if I know!” “What’s your name again?” “Fuck if I know!” James said, “That’s kind of fucked-up,” but couldn’t make himself

heard. He heard gunfire nearby. A noisy chopper floated past overhead and laid a pair of rockets down on the other side of the draw, out of sight, where James was sure there’d never been any people or structures. Black smoke and orange light leapt out of the earth. Had he ever seen any people there? Maybe somebody was dug in. Tough titty, they were on fire now.

The private yelled, “Psycho-delick!”

The structures collapsed quickly. James looked inside a hut as it burned. It was empty. Not even a piece of trash or an old cigarette pack remained. The roof began falling in, and he drew back.

“This is the shits, man,” he explained to the private, “because we knew them. I mean, I’ve seen those people before. We pass by here a lot.”

“I’ve still got gas.” “Let’s pull back to them hooches over there.” Keeping low, they ran to a copse of huts in a small basin. It was empty of life. “Where’s our guys, goddamn it?” The private said, “Fuck if I know.” “Go tell Sarge.” “I ain’t going over that hill—there’s people shooting over there!” “That where it’s coming from?” “Yeah. They’d just as soon shoot me as Charlie.” “I thought it was coming from around to the east.” “Damn. They’re shooting all over.”

Sergeant Harmon came ducking and running over the lip of the

basin. He stood upright as he came down their side. “I want you two dug in over here.” “What happened? Seems like we were just about in a firefight.” Sarge said, “Did you fire your weapon?” “No.” “Then you weren’t in no firefight.” “Who was it?” “Could have been our own fucking guys!” Sarge said, “This whole mountain’s under attack.” Huge booms from straight up the hill. “What is that?” “Mortars?” From the east boomed something bigger. “What is that?” And from behind them, too close, came more. “Where are they?” “Right around us. Them’s mortars,” Sarge said. “Listen up. I want

you dug in here. You hear me?” “Yes,” the new guy said. “We’re in a mess here. If we do this right we can fall back, we can cut

around west and skedaddle around them up the hill. I want both ends holding while we fall back from the center real quiet and they don’t know. If they flank us on the west, we’re fried. Or east. Either way. You’ve got cover on your west. And you are the cover for the east, you hear me? Charlie comes around that hill, don’t cut and run. You hear me?”

“Yes, yes.” Sarge threw down a bindle of twenty-shot magazines. “Keep your

switch on semi-auto. You hear me?” “Yes. Roger.” “There’ll be more strikes coming. Stay put. Do not move or you’ll get

our own rockets up your ass.” “Roger. Roger.” “If we do this right, we’ll come around from their backside and you’ll

be fine going up the hill. On my flare. When you see my flare from the west, you head up the hill to the LZ. Only on my flare.” He put his hand on James’s shoulder and shook him until James said, “Roger. On your flare.”

The sarge headed back west, over and down into the draw.

On a hooch’s south side, in its shadow, they enlarged a rain ditch with their trenchers, cringing at every boom of mortar and artillery. As big as the biggest thunder James had ever heard.

“I’m doing this a lot faster than I did in training,” the private said. They flopped into the hole, and he said, “Fuck if I know … Gimme an M&M.”

In his web belt, in the place of one of his ammo clips, James carried

a bag of M&M’s candy. “Gimme a handful,” the private said. “I will if you quit saying ‘Fuck if I know’ all the time.” “It’s a habit. I don’t say it that much.” “Say ‘For all I know’ or say ‘Jesus God’ or ‘Kiss my ass.’ Just mix it up

some.” “Roger, Corporal.” “What’s your name?” “Nash.” “Goddamn!” James cried. Rounds tore through the huts, knocking

bits of thatch everywhere.

He’d had basic training, weapons training, jungle training, night training, survival training, evasion and escape; but he now appreciated that no one could train for this in any way that counted, and that he was dead.

He lowered his voice. “Them aren’t 16s,” he said. “Them are AKs for sure.” Zip, zip, zip, the bullets overhead like poisonous insects, zip, zip. Dust and shreds of thatch whirling in the air. Fronds fell from palm bushes only meters away.

“They’re killing everything!” Nash said. “They don’t know we’re here,” James said, “so shut up, okay?” Neither man fired back. A racket of automatic fire erupted from the west. A voice screamed,

“COVER ME, COVER ME, COVER ME, COVER ME!” James rose up and saw Black Man coming down the basin’s west side, now screaming, “SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT,” and James began laying down fire to the east. Black Man carried on his shoulder an M60 machine gun and dragged behind him a fifty-kilo box to feed it from. He dove into their trench right on top of them and blew their eardrums out letting loose with it and yelling, “Nobody gets past this motherfucker!” He raised up on his knees firing, and the dirt splashed off the higher ground ahead of him. He was leveling the basin’s lip like a bulldozer. “Gennemuns, I got ammo enough to kill the human race.”

I will never call nobody no nigger again, James promised in his heart. He thumbed his selector and fired off a full magazine on auto. The

mortars began again up the hill. “Do you believe this shit?” “What the fuck? WHAT THE FUCK?” “Sarge said this whole mountain’s under attack!” “Folks misbehaving,” Black Man said. “They usually don’t attack in

daylight.” “Goddamn it,” James said. “What is it?” “I don’t know. You’re making me laugh.” “You’re making me laugh.” “Why are we laughing?” They couldn’t stop. The whole thing. It just made you feel so happy

you couldn’t stop laughing. James said, “Fuck if I know!” and reloaded and the three of them laughed and fired until James had gone through two more clips, and Black Man shouted, “STOP STOP STOP CEASE YO FUCKING FIRE.”

The immediate area was quiet, though they still heard artillery or

mortars from up the hill somewhere. “Gimme a M&M,” Black Man said. “Hell, yes.” James gave him the whole pack. Black Man upended it

into his mouth and chewed fast. A chittering came from vegetation that only minutes before had

jerked and flown apart under gunfire. “What’s that? A Vietcong squirrel?” “A monkey.” “A gibbon,” James said. Black Man smiled with chocolate-smeared teeth and said, “There’s

the flare. Here we go.” “Where we go?” “We’re moving up.” “Moving ‘up’? Ain’t no ‘up.’ ” “We moving soon as my gun cools off. Can’t touch it now.”

“What’s happening around here?”

“Touch it. Fry your finger right off your hand.”

“I ain’t touching shit.”

“Put you another clip in, both of you,” Black Man said. “We got to go up that hill.” “Those were mortars, man.” “Got to go. Let’s get our feet under us.” Black Man headed uphill with his gigantic machine gun balanced

on his shoulder like a miner’s pickaxe, cushioned by an olive towel and gripped by its bipod. Houston followed Black Man, and Nash followed Houston.

Above them paddies terraced the hillside. They moved along the dikes and trudged generally upward. From nowhere came the racket of gunfire, bullets jerking the small shoots and chirping in the water.

They raced without speaking over the dikes and flopped on the dry side and crawled along until they found a gulley and dropped into it and scrambled away from whoever was trying to kill them.

“You don’t understand,” Nash said. “I’m not ready for this at all. I only been here three days!” “I just took a second tour,” James said. “I don’t know which one of us is the stupider shit.”

They passed burning hooches and empty hamlets and never saw any people. By their complete absence they seemed to suggest themselves vividly. But there was activity ahead. They heard shooting. At one point they heard a voice crying in a foreign language. They came on a hamlet whose dwellers had just cleared out minutes ago. They’d even left an animal picketed in a garden, a goat with his neck stuck out as if offering it to the axe, but he was only shitting. Right in the middle of a war.

The three soldiers climbed on toward the peak.

By sundown they’d traversed seven kilometers of mountain full of people trying to murder them. To James the ascent seemed to have taken no time at all. The sky was pink and purple as they climbed the last half kilometer to the LZ. Coming into the perimeter they saw a prone figure in a U.S. uniform, half of it torn away down the side, and hardly any head left. James wasn’t sure it was a body, because no one was even looking at it.

By the bull’s-eye some medical corpsmen waited for the return of a chopper, which they said had turned around and left due to reported missile fire. “It might’ve been just flares,” a corporal explained to Black Man. “One got in through the port and had to be kicked out.” Still no one mentioned the corpse. James stayed with Black Man and Nash. They sat on a sandbag wall and looked down the mountain they’d just spent five hours climbing in a crazy zigzag. The east valley lay in a cool shadow.

“What was that all about?” “I have no idea.” “They attacked us. We are their enemy.” “I’m not anybody’s enemy.” “I don’t want to be friends, or enemies, or anything.” “Where’s the sarge?” “Where’s Echo?” A captain James couldn’t remember having seen before came up to

them, red from head to toe with rotor dust, chewing on a cigar stub, and blinking at the sweat in his eyes. “This is an established base camp.” A bug flew into his forehead —”I want this whole area secure.”—swooped around, recovered, was gone.

“Captain, we’re looking for Sergeant Harmon.” “Where’s Echo Platoon?” The captain pointed at Black Man and his big gun. “Find a place

ment for that 60.” He left. The three didn’t move.

A hippie-looking corpsman with a long mustache and a blue bandanna tied around his head brought them three hot meals stacked on top of one another, and they thanked him sincerely, though Nash said, “You got one of them crawly-caterpillar mustaches.”

Toward all these men around him James felt goodwill at an unprecedented depth. The corpsman said they’d had one KIA in a mortar attack. James said, “I seen that guy! I seen a dead corpse. But I thought it was something else.”

“Something else? What else could it be, man?” “Right, yeah,” Black Man said, “we seen him.” “I’m not figuring this out,” James said. He still couldn’t determine

whether he’d just fought a battle. “Was this whole mountain under attack or not?”

He ordered his memory to produce some sort of history of the afternoon. It was all very vivid and disordered. He knew one thing. He’d never moved so fast or felt so certain of what he was doing. All the bullshit had been burned away.

It seemed to be over. There was no explanation. No guerrilla activity had ever troubled this mountain. Suddenly the west-side people had dematerialized, and then these VC, and now the VC too had gone up in smoke. James hunkered down and ate his franks and beans. His fatigues still dripped with sweat. Nash, he noticed, was also completely sopped. James said, “How you doing?”

Nash said, “I’m doing fine, man. Why? Don’t you believe me?”

James was nonplussed and could only say, “Yeah. I believe you. Sure. Yeah.”

Nash said, “My balls are sweating, that’s all. It ain’t piss.”

In the dusk the medic took them along a zigzag path to a glen where shirtless youngsters bathed themselves above the waist. Somebody squatted on the bank, squeezing out his socks over the muddy creek. They were all pumped up, laughing, whooping. Boots off, shirts off—a legitimate swim call meant it had to be over, they were definitely safe. In the dying light James felt jazzed and happy and every blurred young face he looked at gave him back a message of brotherly love.

“You boys from Recon travel light.”

The speaker was new, perhaps; he didn’t realize Echo was a joke. They did travel light. James himself no longer carried a rucksack, just a Boy Scout knapsack holding a poncho and entrenching tool, seven twenty-round magazines, a few sentimental talismans —rubbers, poker chips, and candy—and dosers of insect repellent and bandannas soaked with the stuff. He’d concluded that wanting something was generally less painful than hauling it.

Somebody said, “Well, the war’s over. I’m going down to the ville and get laid. The whores give it away free on Tet.”

“WhatYTet?”

“It’s the Hooky-Gooky new year, asshole. Today is Tet.”

“Tomorrow is Tet. It’s January the thirtieth, man.”

“When?”

“To-c/czy. Jesus.”

One of the grunts from the LZ came into the clearing and said, “Goddamn! Goddamn!” James realized he himself probably looked like that—sweaty, dirty, wild in the eyes. “Shit! Shit!” the boy said. He ran to the clearing’s edge and faced the purple distance, the shadows of other mountains. “SHIT.”

One of his friends said, “Shit what?”

The boy came back and sat down shaking his head. He took both his friend’s hands in his own as if in some foreign style of heartfelt greeting. “Shit. I killed a guy.”

“I guess. Shit.” The boy said, “It ain’t no different than shooting a deer.” “When did you ever shoot a deer?” “I guess I had it mixed up with the movies. But this was just—bing.

And now it’s over.” “It don’t sound like it’s over, Tommy.” “Hey. Half his skull flew up in the air. Is that over enough for you?” “Lay it down. You’re losing control of yourself.” “Yeah, okay,” Tommy said. “I gotta lay it down.” “Hey, let go of my hands, you fruit.” James had killed someone too. He’d seen a muzzle flash, tossed a

grenade into a small garden, and after the bang two VC had dragged a man out of the place and into the bush, and he hadn’t looked too alive. James had been so shocked he hadn’t fired at the two rescuers. Who may or may not have been VC.

He’d been in possession of five twenty-round magazines and the lieutenant had brought twenty-eight more. He’d fired over three hundred rounds and thrown two grenades and traveled ten kilometers and killed one possible VC.

The others watched while Tommy took a cigarette and a Zippo from his breast pocket. He lit up and blew smoke with a certain authoritative air and said to his friend, “Did you kill any of them?”

“I think I did.” “Which one?” “I don’t know which one. How the fuck would I know that?” James had done a whole tour without injuring a single person, and

here he’d just said yes to his second trip around and already people were dead—and this guy, Tommy, singing a happy song about it. The medic went into the trees with a couple guys and pretty soon the

smell of green reefer came wafting over, but that was all right, let them wreck their minds, this was war.

The sun, falling farther to the west, came from behind a mountain and shone down the valley. Beyond the paddies the jungle boiled with soft colors. From far below came the squeals of a pig being slaughtered in preparation for Tet. One boy sang new words to a Beatles melody:

Close your eyes, spread your legs, And I’ll fertilize your eggs —

Another boy said, “Shit, you guys were fighting? We patrolled halfway down the mountain and back up again and never saw fuck-all, never pulled the trigger. We heard rockets, man, jets, choppers, bombs—never saw shit. We heard mortars, man. Never saw shit.”

A youngster came among them saying, “Hanson enters the area bringing good cheer to all,” and breaking up a six-pack of Budweiser among the nearest, who came at him like wild dogs.

“Who’s Hanson?” James asked.

“Me! I’m Hanson!”

He pictured Hanson’s head blowing apart. In basic he’d heard about people just dropping dead of a random bullet or hidden enemy sniper: thinking a thought, saying a word, dropping dead. Bending to tie your shoe, your head flying apart. He didn’t want to drop dead and he didn’t want to be around anyone else who dropped dead.

Black Man addressed them all. “You got to watch your karma in a time of war. You don’t rape the women or kill any of the animals, lest you get fucked around by the karma. Karma is like a wheel. You turn a wheel below you, it turns a wheel above you. And I’m beside you. Your karma touches mine. You must not, no never, disturb any of the karma.”

“What is that, a Black Muslim thing?”

“I am not a Muslim. I just been around and seen.”

He was talking complete shit that he would never have applied to himself. But it made James’s skin crawl all over to hear these warnings.

As soon as dark came to hide them from their superiors, the three from Echo found unoccupied hammocks in some trees on the perimeter’s east side, as far as they could get from where the enemy had come that afternoon, and fell out still wearing their boots and web belts. Until the owners came to turn them out, this was home. The night came down. If he lay on his side and looked at ground level, James made out bits of phosphorescence in the foliage; otherwise he’d have thought he’d gone blind. Mosquitoes whined at the netting. He positioned his repellent-soaked bandannas wherever his arms or cheek might touch it as he slept. Things crawled in the underbrush. Night was always like this. He’d killed someone today. Less than eight hours ago. During basic he hadn’t thought about killing anyone, only about getting killed, about cars he wouldn’t race and women he wouldn’t conquer, because he was dead. He heard a couple of guys talking over there. Too jazzed to sleep. When death was around, you got right down to your soul. These others had felt it too. He could hear it in their voices.

In the night James unzipped the netting and rolled out thinking it was because he had to pee, but then realized the mortars had started somewhere down the mountain again. He heard voices saying Fuck, Shit, saying, Go, go, go. Flares dangled in the night to the east, and in their dim amber illumination down the hill he saw the nude crags made by herbicides dancing with their own shadows. He saw muzzle-flash and heard the pop-pop-pop of AKs and the racket of M 16s. He heard jets. He heard choppers. He heard rockets. He froze beside his hammock with his weapon in his hands, scared and weepy, stupid and alone. Now he saw what a mortar explosion looked like—a red-orange splash as big as a house, and one second later the boom so loud it hurt his sinuses. And another hit him, and another, and one more, coming closer. Weapons fired all around him. A round ricocheted off his helmet and rifle.

“HEY HEY HEY!” Something had him by the belt and yanked him backward. It was Black Man. “What you doing?”

“Oh, no. Goddamm, goddamn, goddamn.”

“You running right at them! Get down, get down!”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

“Oh, shit! He’s signaling.”

James said, “What?”

“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.”

Black Man moved, and James tried to grab him by the back of his shirt, but he was gone, moving back. The whole perimeter was moving back. Nash was beside him, a ghost in the light of flares. “Stop shooting! That’s us! That’s us!” Was I shooting? James asked, but heard nothing. It was all mental telepathy. He moved without touching the ground. To where? To here, right here. Still with Nash and Black Man. Nash said, “Who are these people?”

“They’s a spotter on that other peak,” Black Man said. “They stairstepping those mortars on us.”

Voices: “Where’s my RTO! RADIO RADIO RADIO!”

“Here here here!”

“Tell them up there we’re hot. Nobody comes down!”

“Say again say again!”

“Stay off that bull’s-eye! We’re hot! We’re hot!”

James lay on his belly clutching at dirt. The earth bounced beneath him. He couldn’t stay on it. He could hardly breathe. “What do these motherfuckers want!” James asked, am I moving? The dark was thick enough to drink and

streaked with the afterimages of tracers and muzzle-flash. Now it was quiet. Not even a bug droning. In such unprecedented silence James could tell just from the tiny sound his clip made as the sling ticked against it that the clip was empty, whereas only two minutes ago the surrounding noise had been so magnificent he couldn’t hear his own screaming. In this new silence he didn’t want to replace the clip for fear all the senses of the enemy would lock on to the sound and he’d be shredded, shredded, shredded.

Two kilometers east across the darkness lay another mountain, he didn’t know its name, he’d never thought about it, but now there was gunfire over there, a rippling, insignificant sound. More on a hillside below, still not in his world, but closer, crisp and distinct. His hearing was clear as long as he didn’t have to fire himself.

From the west came jets. “These fuckers are dead fuckers now,” somebody said. Rockets lit up the whole mountainside beneath them and the ceiling of foliage above their heads.

“Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!” somebody yelled, thumping over the ground. “It’s just Hanson!” This person flopped out next to James and said, “Hanson says fuck this shit.”

As far as James could tell there were six of them, counting this Hanson, laid out on their bellies in the bush, just above a drop. In the silence between air strikes below on the mountain he spoke

quietly, like a golf-game announcer during a tense moment on the putting green: “Hanson keeps low. Hanson feels the sweat running down his backbone. Hanson’s thumb is on the safe, his finger’s on the trigger. If it comes, the enemy will feel sincerely fucked with. Hanson will explode their faces. Hanson’s finger licks the trigger like a clit. Hanson loves his weapon like a pussy. Hanson wants to go home. Hanson wants to smell clean sheets. Clean sheets in Alabama. Not them stinky sour ones in Vietnam.”

Nobody bothered Hanson about it. They realized the enemy were killers, they themselves were just boys, and they were dead. They were glad to hear Hanson’s voice talking about this very moment as if it could be understood and maybe even survived.

“Where’s my Echo people at?”

Sergeant Harmon came up behind them, walking upright in the sudden glory of another rocketing down below, and they knew they were saved. “How many of us here?”

Black Man’s voice came: “Five Echo and one loose screw.”

Sarge said, “We have activity right down this slope about two hundred meters. We gonna close that to fifty meters and lay down fire. Come behind me. When it’s bright you flop down and look, and when it’s dark you move where you looked.” He bent and touched James’s shoulder. “You’re breathing too deep. Make it quick breaths through your nose, and that’s all you need. Just don’t start hyperventilating in these situations, or you’ll cramp up in your hands and fingers.”

“Okay,” James said, although he wasn’t sure what they were talking about.

” ‘S’go!” Sarge said, and moved out. Over the valley flares hung by their flickering tails of smoke, detached from them, and drifted down, and as James moved forward he could see his feet in a smoky half-light. As long as he moved forward nothing could kill him. Each moment came like the panel of a comic book, and he fit perfectly inside each panel. Air strikes lighting up the night, flares swaying in the heavens, and black shadows dodging all around him. “Black Man!” James yelled. “Black Man!” He heard the big gun ahead and scrambled on elbows and knees toward it. Rounds ticked through the leaves on all sides of him. Somebody was hurt, bawling, howling without letup. Just ahead, a guy kneeling with his helmet shot off, scalped by a head wound—no, it was the hippie doc with his kerchief tied around his head, a couple morphine syrettes clamped between his lips like cigarettes while he knelt over the screamer, who was the sarge. “Sarge, Sarge, Sarge!” James said. “Good, good, talk to him, don’t let him go,” the doc said, and bit a syrette and drove the point right into Sarge’s neck. But the sarge kept bawling like an infant, emptying and filling his lungs over and over. “Lay some down, will you?” the doc said. James crouched and duckwalked toward Black Man’s position, firing down the hill at muzzle-flash. He knew he was killing people. Moving, that was the trick. Moving and killing he felt wonderful.

Sinc e three that afternoon Kathy had attended a difficult birth. By five, only the crown had breached. Atop the crown, a face, eyeless, earless. The tiny mother had labored since then to bring forth her deformed child, but nothing yet. The family couldn’t afford a midwife. A British doctor was on the way from the Biomedical Centre, where he studied monkeys. Kathy would assist him, perhaps in a Caesarian. She had morphine and she had Xylocaine. She hoped the doctor had something better.

The French doctors were saying the defoliants caused these monstrous births. The people themselves explained it otherwise, called on gods offended by misconduct to stop punishing the innocent babes. What misconduct? Thoughts of the heart. A woman bearing young like this must have succumbed to horrible images inside. Dreams or yearnings or unclean thoughts. On her pallet in the low hooch the youngster appeared free of any thoughts at all, legs akimbo, her hands white and cramped. The effort, the breathing, the body—was it in Colossians? — something about the body knit together and having nourishment ministered by joints and bands. This one seemed nothing more than that. The war had stricken many of the children she worked with, one or both legs amputated, one or both arms—faces burned, sightless. And orphaned. But now this big-headed, half-faced tragic miracle stuck in the breach, coming out already ravaged by the strife.

By ten or so it was clear the doctor wouldn’t get there. Soon the infant’s heart stopped. She sent the family out and dismembered the stillbirth and delivered it in bloody pieces, cleaned up as best she could, and shortly after midnight called the family back in. She lay down among them, beside the girl. Out in the night firecrackers banged for Tet, and the hands of celebrants waved gunpowder sparklers. She fell asleep.

Then much, much larger blasts. A storm, she thought. God with his big white thoughts. But it was fighting, some to the east and some to the south, like nothing she’d heard before in her time here, explosions like firecrackers in a trash can, only of a size to rival natural thunder, at a bone-ringing depth. She counted the seconds between flash and boom and judged some of them to be falling about a kilometer away. The household was awake, but no one lit a lamp. Far out over the paddies a helicopter sent out its white search beam amid a rising swarm of orange tracers and loosed a terrible downpour from its glittering port guns. The battles went on for hours, the torn spirits flailing in the storm. It stopped. Occasional eruptions followed. By dawn things had settled down. The cicadas started, and a slow sweet light saturated the atmosphere. A gibbon called over the treetops. You’d think there wasn’t a gun in the world. A small rooster came and stood in the doorway, raised its beak, and crowed with its eyes closed. You’d think it was Peace on Earth.

Next she was called to a nearby village struck by incendiaries, whether from South Vietnamese fliers or American wasn’t clear, but in either case by mistake. Kathy had seen burns, but never a place of burning. She arrived in late afternoon. A black splash the size of a tennis court took in, at one edge, about half of the ville. Ashes where a few huts had been, and a paddy with its marsh boiled away, its shoots dematerialized. The smell of burnt straw, everything tainted with an odor of sulfur. It likely hadn’t been napalm, she saw, but rather a white-phosphorous bomb. At the sound of low aircraft the villagers had raced for the cover of the jungle. Several had been killed. One, a young girl, still survived, deep in shock, extensively charred, naked. Nothing could be done. Kathy didn’t touch her. The villagers sat surrounding her in the dusk. The pallid green shimmering of her burns competed with the last light. She looked magical, and in Kathy’s exhaustion and in this atmosphere of aftermath and silence the scene felt dreamed. The girl was like some idol powered by moonlight. After all signs of life had ceased, her flesh went on glowing in the dark.

She stayed in the ville until morning and then headed on her bicycle for the Biomedical Centre. Word had come last night that the facilities there had been struck. Destroyed, came the word. The boy who’d brought the news, who couldn’t have been more than ten and yet traveled by dark shouldering a machete like a lumberman’s axe, led her in the dawn light to a shortcut through paddies and fields, and Kathy drove her pedals hard along the path, in a hurry to get to the monkey couple right away. The shortcut led her alongside a narrow channel lined with homes and along the dikes through a wide flatland of delta paddies. In the distance a U.S. helicopter, lit up pink on one side by the sunrise, hunted over the river. Here and there peasants worked the paddies even at this hour, even on such a day, bent over with their hands among the shoots, straight-legged, straight-backed, hinged at the hips, while around them loitered ducks and chickens, huge water buffalo, fawn-colored, starved-looking Brahman cattle, bag-of-bones ponies, all behaving as if war were impossible.

Not long before noon she climbed a low rise and found desolation on the other side. She stopped at the top of the burned hill with smoke still stringing from its soil and looked down at the Biomedical Centre. The wing housing the monkeys had been razed, but not the living quarters. She walked her bike over the black ground and down to the building. Shrapnel had gouged at its walls but had missed the windowpanes. A boy squatted flat-footed by the doorway with one hand around an upright rifle, spitting between his feet. He looked up at her and smiled brilliantly as she passed inside.

In the front room she found Mrs. Bingham, a thin, almost elderly woman in a khaki outfit stained with blood, her hair cut like a boy’s, cigarette jutting from her lips while she knelt diapering one of many elfin, simian creatures laid out on an army blanket on the low coffee table. Bloody rags and bandages surrounded her. She paused and took her cigarette from her mouth and gave Kathy a kind of smile or grimace, very simian in itself, while tears welled in her eyes. “What do I say now? Come in.” She waved her cigarette around helplessly. “Be alive.”

Viewing the destruction, Kathy had feared for the medicine. But she saw two refrigerators in the kitchen.

Kathy sat down and said, “It’s terrible.”

“These were all that survived, as far as we know. We had all four subspecies of langur. Now we have two.” Inexplicably she laughed, finishing

the outburst with a wet smoker’s cough. Kathy said, “It’s horrible.” “We’re in a horrible place.” “It’s a fallen world.” “I can’t contradict you. That would be stupid.” There seemed to be ten or so monkeys recuperating on the blanket.

All wore cloth diapers. Mrs. Bingham said, “Sorry we didn’t make it last night. Did things

turn out? Better not answer.” “The mother’s fine.” “The baby perished.” “Correct.” “Sorry. We’ve had our hands full. There’s been a little flu epidemic

here. But it doesn’t matter now, does it?”

Kathy placed her knapsack on the table and opened it. She carried a plastic baggie full of loose GI cigarettes to give as gifts, and she passed them all to Mrs. Bingham. “Some of them look broken, eh?” she said.

Mrs. Bingham held the tiny monkey on her knee and both she and the big-browed creature looked at the baggie without comprehension. “We had eleven bassinets,” she said, “but they all burned.”

They’re only monkeys, it was all she could do to keep from shouting, monkeys, monkeys.

In the kitchen was a maidservant—young, in high-heeled sandals and a short skirt—who stopped washing tiny diapers at the sink in order to see to Kathy. “What can I get?” she said.

Mrs. Bingham said, “Get out of my sight,” and the girl returned to

the kitchen. “Is the doctor around?” “We’re waiting. Some may have escaped. He’s looking for survivors.” “Can he find them? Can he catch them?” “If they’re hurt. This is a golden-head.” She replaced the wounded

langur on the blanket. It lay back looking upward with its black eyes and seemed to be furiously thinking. “The others are probably dead. It could have been all of us. The bastards. They’re psychotic. Oh, well,” she said, “we’ve all been driven mad, haven’t we, whether we realize or not.”

Soon the doctor came in and gestured at the assemblage of battered

animals. “Behold the Vietcong.” “Anything?” He shook his head. Kathy asked, “Was it mortars?” “Rockets,” Dr. Bingham said. “Planes. And not just rockets.” “Napalm?” “Probably.” “It must have been.” His wife broke down weeping. “The screams are

still in my head—just now as I’m talking. You’ve no idea. You’ve no idea.” “You just don’t know,” the doctor explained to Kathy. “I’m sorry, but you can’t possibly.” “Mimi,” his wife said to the servant, “bring Miss Nurse a Coca-Cola, please.”

The servant gave her a Coca-Cola in a glass with ice and they sat in the living room under generator-powered lights while Dr. Bingham spoke of monkeys. The four subspecies of langur had come to be regarded as two separate species, one of which was divided into three subspecies. Of these, the golden-headed Trachypithecus poliocephalus had grown, in his words, “excruciatingly rare,” with an estimated five hundred individuals remaining. And now so many less. They allowed Kathy to put the nipple of a baby bottle into the mouth of one of the langurs and hold it while it guzzled formula. The creature was appealing, but blue snot bubbled from its nose, and she wondered if she’d catch her death.

The couple behaved most hospitably, but when the doctor, a large, bearded man in early middle age, a most prepossessing figure, a real jungle bwana, Kathy had always thought, noticed her open knapsack sitting on the coffee table, he said, “What is that,” very coldly, very hatefully. Most strangely.

“It’s a blood pressure device.” “It’s a tape recorder.” “It’s a blood pressure gauge.” “You’re recording this,” he said. “Dear, it doesn’t look anything like a tape recorder.”

The doctor’s lips were pursed and bloodless. He breathed hard

through his nose. Kathy said, “I’ve turned it off now.” “See that it doesn’t go back on.” “He thinks it’s a tape recorder,” Mrs. Bingham said. Kathy reached for the glass of Coke resting on the floor by her chair.