Part One
SOME PEASANTS WERE blocking the road up ahead. I honked the horn but they chose not to hear. They were standing around under their pointed hats, watching a man and a woman yell at each other. When I got closer I saw two bicycles tangled up, a busted wicker basket, and vegetables all over the road. It looked like an accident.
Sergeant Benet reached over in front of me and sounded the horn again. It made a sheepish bleat, ridiculous coming from this armor-plated truck with its camouflage paint. The peasants turned their heads but they still didn’t get out of the way. I was bearing down on them. Sergeant Benet slid low in the seat so nobody could get a look at him, which was prudent on his part, since he was probably the biggest man in this part of the province and certainly the only black man.
I kept honking the horn as I came on. The peasants held their ground longer than I thought they would, almost long enough to make me lose my nerve, then they jumped out of the way. I could hear them shouting and then I couldn’t hear anything but the clang and grind of metal as the wheels of the truck passed over the bicycles. Awful sound. When I looked in the rear-view most of the peasants were staring after the truck while a few others inspected the wreckage in the road.
Sergeant Benet sat up again. He said, without reproach, “That’s a shame, sir. That’s just a real shame.”
I didn’t say anything. What could I say? I hadn’t done it for fun. Seven months back, at the beginning of my tour, when I was still calling them people instead of peasants, I wouldn’t have run over their bikes. I would have slowed down or even stopped until they decided to move their argument to the side of the road, if it was a real argument and not a setup. But I didn’t stop anymore. Neither did Sergeant Benet. Nobody did, as these peasants—these people—should have known.
We passed through a string of hamlets without further interruption. I drove fast to get an edge on the snipers, but snipers weren’t the problem on this road. Mines were the problem. If I ran over a touch-fused 105 shell it wouldn’t make any difference how fast I was going. I’d seen a two-and-a-half-ton truck blown right off the road by one of those, just a few vehicles ahead of me in a convoy coming back from Saigon. The truck jumped like a bucking horse and landed on its side in the ditch. The rest of us stopped and hit the dirt, waiting for an ambush that never came. When we finally got up and looked in the truck there was nobody there, nothing you could think of as a person. The two Vietnamese soldiers inside had been turned to chowder by the blast coming up through the floor of the cab. After that I always packed sandbags under my seat and on the floorboards of anything I drove. I suspected that even the scant comfort I took from these doleful measures was illusory, but illusions kept me going and I declined to pursue any line of thought that might put them in danger.
We were all living on fantasies. There was some variation among them, but every one of us believed, instinctively if not consciously, that he could help his chances by observing certain rites and protocols. Some of these were obvious. You kept your weapon clean. You paid attention. You didn’t take risks unless you had to. But that got you only so far. Despite the promise implicit in our training—If you do everything right, you’ll make it home—you couldn’t help but notice that the good troops were getting killed right along with the slackers and shitbirds. It was clear that survival wasn’t only a function of Zero Defects and Combat Readiness. There had to be something else to it, something unreachable by practical means.
Why one man died and another lived was, in the end, a mystery, and we who lived paid court to that mystery in every way we could think of. I carried a heavy gold pocket watch given to me by my fiancée. It had belonged to her grandfather, and to her father. She’d had it engraved with a verse from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. It went with me everywhere, rain or shine. That it continued to tick I regarded as an affirmation somehow linked to my own continuance, and when it got stolen toward the end of my tour I suffered through several days of stupefying fatalism.
The ordinary human sensation of occupying a safe place in a coherent scheme allowed me to perform, to help myself as much as I could. But at times I was seized and shaken by the certainty that nothing I did meant anything, and all around me I sensed currents of hatred and malign intent. When I felt it coming on I gave a sudden wrenching shudder as if I’d bitten into something sour, and forced my thoughts elsewhere. To consider the reality of my situation only made it worse.
Not that my situation was all that bad, compared to what it might have been. I was stationed in the Delta at a time when things were much quieter there than up north. Up north they were fighting big North Vietnamese Army units. Tens of thousands of men had died for places that didn’t even have names, just elevation numbers or terms of utility—Firebase Zulu, Landing Zone Oscar—and which were usually evacuated a few days after the battle, when the cameras had gone back to Saigon. The NVA were very hard cases. They didn’t hit and run like the Vietcong; they hit and kept hitting. I kept hearing things: that they had not only mortars but heavy artillery, lugged down mountain trails piece by piece as in the days of Dienbienphu; that before battle they got stoned on some kind of special communist reefer that made them suicidally brave; that their tunnels were like cities and ran right under our bases; that they had tanks and helicopters; that American deserters were fighting on their side.
These were only a few of the rumors. I doubted them, but of course some question always remained, and every so often one would prove to be true. Their tunnels did run under our bases. And later, at Lang Vei, they did use tanks against us. The idea of those people coming at us with even a fraction of the hardware we routinely turned on them seemed outrageous, an atrocity.
The Delta was different. Here the enemy were local guerrillas organized in tight, village-based cadres. Occasionally they combined for an attack on one of our compounds or to ambush a convoy of trucks or boats, or even a large unit isolated in the field and grown sloppy from long periods without contact, but most of the time they worked in small teams and stayed out of sight. They blew us up with homemade mines fashioned from dud howitzer shells, or real American mines bought from our South Vietnamese allies. They dropped mortars on us at night—never very many; just enough, with luck, to kill a man or two, or inflict some wounds, or at least scare us half to death. Then they hightailed it home before our fire-direction people could vector in on them, slipped into bed, and, as I imagined, laughed themselves to sleep. They booby-trapped our trucks and jeeps. They booby-trapped the trails they knew we’d take, because we always took the same trails, the ones that looked easy and kept us dry. They sniped at us. And every so often, when they felt called on to prove that they were sincere guerrillas and not just farmers acting tough, they crowded a road with animals or children and shot the sentimentalists who stopped.
We did not die by the hundreds in pitched battles. We died a man at a time, at a pace almost casual. You could sometimes begin to feel safe, and then you caught yourself and looked around, and you saw that of the people you’d known at the beginning of your tour a number were dead or in hospitals. And you did some nervous arithmetic. In my case the odds were not an actuary’s dream, but they could have been worse. A lot worse, in fact. Terrible, in fact.
Back in the States I’d belonged to the Special Forces, first as an enlisted man and then as an officer. As part of my training I’d spent a year studying Vietnamese and learned to speak the language like a seven-year-old child with a freakish military vocabulary. This facility of mine, recorded in my file, caught the eye of a personnel officer during my first couple of hours in Vietnam, as I was passing through the reception center at Bien Hoa. He told me that a Vietnamese artillery battalion outside My Tho was in need of an adviser with a command of the language. Later on, when a replacement was available, I could request a transfer back into the Special Forces. He apologized for the assignment. He figured I’d been itching for some action, more than I was likely to get in the Delta, and was sorry to disappoint me.
I saw it as a reprieve. Several men I’d gone through training with had been killed or wounded in recent months, overrun in their isolated outposts, swallowed up while on patrol, betrayed by the mercenary troops they led. My best friend in the army, Hugh Pierce, had been killed a few months before I shipped out, and this gave me a shock I’ve never really gotten over. In those days I was scared stiff. The feeling was hardly unique over there, but I did have good reason for it: I was completely incompetent to lead a Special Forces team. This was adamant fact, not failure of nerve. My failure of nerve took another form. I wanted out, but I lacked the courage to confess my incompetence as the price of getting out. I was ready to be killed, even, perhaps, get others killed, to avoid that humiliation.
So this personnel officer gave me a way out: if not with honor, at least with the appearance of it. But later that day, drinking in the bar at the receiving center, I changed my mind. After all, it was honor itself that I wanted, true honor, not some passable counterfeit but the kind you could live on the rest of your life. I would refuse the Delta post. I would demand to be sent to the Special Forces, to wherever the latest disaster had created an opening, and hope that by some miracle I’d prove a better soldier than I knew myself to be.
I strengthened my resolve with gin and tonic all through the afternoon. In early evening I left the bar and made my way back to the transients’ barracks. It was hot. A few steps out of the air-conditioning and I was faint, wilting, my uniform plastered to my skin. Near my quarters a party of newly arrived enlisted men sat outside one of the in-processing barns, smoking, silent, trying to look like killers. They didn’t. Their greenness was apparent at a glance, as mine must have been. They still had flesh on their cheeks. Their uniforms hung light on them, without the greasy sag of a thousand sweat baths. And their eyes were still lively and curious. But even if I hadn’t noticed these things I would have recognized them as new guys by their look of tense, offended isolation. It came as a surprise to men joining this hard enterprise that instead of being welcomed they were shunned. But that’s what happened. You noticed it as soon as you got off the plane.
That night we had an alert. I found out later it was just a probe on the perimeter, but I didn’t know this while it was going on and neither did anyone else. The airfield had already been hit by sappers. People had been killed, several planes and helicopters blown up. It could happen again. You know that an attack is “just a probe” only after it’s over. I stood outside with other fresh arrivals and watched bellowing, half-dressed men run by in different directions. Trucks raced past, some with spinning lights like police cruisers. Between the high, excited bursts of M-16 fire I could hear heavy machine guns pounding away, deep and methodical. Flares popped overhead. They covered everything in a cold, quivering light.
No one came to tell us what was going on. We hadn’t received our issue of combat gear, so we had no weapons or ammunition, no flak jackets, not even a steel helmet. We were helpless. And nobody knew or cared. They had forgotten about us—more to the point, forgotten about me. In this whole place not one person was thinking of me, thinking, Christ, I better take a run over there and see how Lieutenant Wolff is doing! No. I wasn’t on anybody’s mind. And I understood that this was true not only here but in every square inch of this country. Not one person out there cared whether I lived or died. Maybe some tender hearts cared in the abstract, but it was my fate to be a particular person, and about me as a particular person there was an undeniable, comprehensive lack of concern.
It isn’t true that not one person cared. I cared. It seemed to me I cared too much, cared more than was manly or decent. I could feel my life almost as a thing apart, begging me for protection. It was embarrassing. Truly, my fear shamed me. In the morning I went back to the personnel officer and asked him to change my orders. He told me it was too late, but promised he would note my wish to be transferred to the Special Forces. Later that day I boarded a helicopter for the Delta.
THE VIETNAMESE DIVISION to which my battalion belonged was headquartered in My Tho, on the Mekong River. My Tho was an old province capital. The streets were wide and lined with trees. A reservoir ran through a park in the middle of town. The houses had red tile roofs, flowerpots on their windowsills and doorsteps. There were crumbling stucco mansions along the boulevard that fronted the river, their walls still bearing traces of the turquoise, salmon, and lavender washes ordered from France by their previous owners. Most had been turned into apartment houses, a few others into hotels. They had tall shuttered windows and wrought-iron balconies overlooking the street. As you walked past the open doorways you felt a cool breath from the courtyards within, heard the singing of birds, the trickle of water in stone fountains. Across the street, on the bank of the river, was a line of restaurants and bars and antique stores, also a watch repair shop famous in its own right for stealing the movements from Omegas and Rolexes and replacing them with movements of more neighborly manufacture. You could always recognize a fellow from My Tho by the wildly spinning hands on his Oyster Perpetual.
I’d never been to Europe, but in My Tho I could almost imagine myself there. And that was the whole point. The French had made the town like this so they could imagine themselves in France. The illusion was just about perfect, except for all the Vietnamese.
It was a quiet, dreamy town, and a lucky town. For a couple of years now there’d been no car bombs, no bombs in restaurants, no kidnappings, no assassinations. Not in the city limits, anyway. That was very unusual, maybe even unique among province capitals in Vietnam. It didn’t seem possible that luck alone could explain it; there had to be a reason. One theory you heard was that the province chief had been paying tribute to the local Vietcong: not only dollars stolen from the American aid program but American arms and medicine, which he then reported as lost to enemy activity. It was also said that My Tho was an R and R spot for exhausted and wounded guerrillas, their own little Hawaii, and that over time an arrangement had evolved: Don’t bother us and we won’t bother you. Either of these explanations might have been true, or both, but there was definitely some kind of agreement in effect. The town had a druidical circle around it. Inside, take it easy. Outside, watch your ass. My battalion was outside the circle, and I could feel the unseen but absolute gate slam shut behind me every time I left.
My Tho was lucky in another way. Almost no Americans were allowed in town, only a few AID people and those of us who were assigned to the Vietnamese military. By some stratagem My Tho had managed to get itself declared off-limits to regular American troops, and that was its deliverance, because there were several thousand of them up the road at Dong Tam just dying to come in and trash the place.
I was glad the American troops were kept out. Without even meaning to they would have turned the people into prostitutes, pimps, pedicab drivers, and thieves, and the town itself into a nest of burger stands and laundries. Within months it would have been unrecognizable; such was the power of American dollars and American appetites. Besides, I didn’t want my stock watered down. I took pleasure in being one of a very few white men among all these dark folk, big among the small, rich among the poor. My special position did not make me arrogant, not at first. It made me feel benevolent, generous, protective, as if I were surrounded by children, as I often was—crowds of them, shy but curious, taking turns stroking my hairy arms and, as a special treat, my mustache. In My Tho I had a sense of myself as father, even as lord, the very sensation that, even more than all their holdings here, must have made the thought of losing this place unbearable to the French.
So the American grunts had to keep to their base in Dong Tam, but even in that miserable shithole they had some advantages over those of us who lived with the Vietnamese. They were more secure, as long as they stayed inside the wire. Outside the wire was another story. But inside they were fairly safe, protected by their numbers and by a vast circle of minefields, heavily manned bunkers with interlocking fields of fire, tanks, mobile artillery, and any kind of air support they wanted, in any quantity, at any hour of the day or night. The situation at my battalion was very different. We were stuck by ourselves—one hundred fifty or so men and six howitzers—in a field surrounded by rice paddies. A canal ran along one leg of our perimeter. The water was deep, the muddy banks sheer and slick; it would be hard to attack us from that side. But the canal was the only help we got from topography. Otherwise the land around us was flat and open and laced with dikes, enough of them to move an army over while another army marched up the road to our front gate. It was a terrible site, chosen for reasons incomprehensible to me.
The troops at Dong Tam were better protected than we were, and better supplied. We were expected to live like our Vietnamese counterparts, which sounded like a noble project, democratic, right-minded, the perfect show of partnership with our hosts and allies—a terrific idea, really, until you actually tried it. Not many did, only a few advisers in the way outback who went the whole nine yards, sleeping in hammocks, eating rats, and padding around on rubber sandals that they swore up and down were better than boots. I admired them, but my own intention was to live not as a Vietnamese among Vietnamese but as an American among Vietnamese.
Living like an American wasn’t easy. Outside the big bases it was a full-time job. When Sergeant Benet and I first arrived at the battalion, the advisers we were supposed to replace were living very close to the bone, or so it seemed to us. They ate C rations. They slept in sleeping bags, on field cots. For light they used oil lamps borrowed from the Vietnamese quartermaster. Sergeant Benet and I agreed that we owed ourselves something better.
We started to scrounge. There wasn’t much else to do. We were advisers, but we didn’t know exactly what advice we were supposed to be giving, or to whom. We rarely saw Major Chau, the battalion commander, and when we did he seemed embarrassed, at a loss as to why we were there. At first he seemed suspicious of us. Maybe he thought we were supposed to be keeping tabs on him. He had good reason to fear scrutiny, but then so did every officer of rank in that unhappy army. All of them were political intriguers; they had to be in order to receive promotion and command. Their wages were too low to live on because it was assumed they’d be stealing, so they stole. They were punished for losing men in battle, therefore they avoided battle. When their men deserted they kept them on the roster and continued to draw their pay, with the result that the losses were never made up and the units turned into scarecrow remnants hardly able to defend themselves, let alone carry the war to the enemy. Our own battalion was seriously understrength.
I was a pretty good scrounge. Not of the same champion breed as Sergeant Benet, but pretty good. We became partners in horse trading. I was lonely and callow enough to have let friendship happen too, even across the forbidden distance of our ranks, but he knew better and protected me from myself. He never forgot that I was an officer. Even in anger, and I sometimes brought him to anger, he called me sir. This was partly out of habit, the old soldier respectful always of the commission if not the uncertain, hopelessly compromised man who held it. But it was also his way of staying out of reach so he could have a life apart. Still, I could make him laugh, and I knew that he liked me, probably more than he wanted to.
We couldn’t mooch off the Vietnamese, because they didn’t have anything. We had to do our business with the Americans at Dong Tam. At first we simply begged, presenting ourselves as orphans at the gate, hungry, unsheltered, defenseless. This didn’t get us very far. As more than one supply sergeant said, they weren’t running a charity. If we wanted to play we had to bring something to the party. What we ended up bringing were souvenirs. Most of the men at Dong Tam were support troops who rarely left the base. They never saw any action, nor for that matter did most of the soldiers who did go into the field. The letters they wrote home didn’t always make this clear. In their boredom they sometimes allowed themselves to say things that weren’t strictly true, and in time, as they approached the end of their tours, a fever came upon them to find some enemy artifacts to back up the stories they’d been telling their friends and girlfriends and little brothers.
This stuff was easy enough for us to come by. Sergeant Benet mentioned our needs to some of the battalion officers, and for a consideration in the form of Courvoisier, Marlboros, Seiko watches, and other such goods, cheap in the PX and dear on the street, they set up a pipeline for us: Vietcong flags and battle standards, all convincingly worn and shredded, with unit designations and inspiring communist slogans in Vietnamese; bloodstained VC identity cards; brass belt buckles embossed with hammer and sickle; bayonets similarly decorated; pith helmets of the kind worn by the enemy; and Chicom rifles. Major Chau himself never demanded anything in so many words, and he always accepted what we gave him with a gracious show of surprise. He seemed relieved to find us willing to forgo the steel-jawed American rectitude practiced on him by our predecessors and get down to the business of business. This wasn’t just cynicism and greed. One of our transactions at Dong Tam netted us a haul of claymore mines, each packing hundreds of ball bearings. If we got attacked they would help fill the holes left by our missing men. We also brought home sandbags, cement, and barbed wire to beef up our perimeter, beehive rounds for the howitzers, and more mines—you could never have too many mines. Fifty thousand wouldn’t have been too many for me. Given the chance, I’d have lived smack in the middle of a minefield twenty miles wide. Anyway, in Major Chau’s situation, which was now our situation, making deals was how you got by.
Chicom rifles were our most valuable stock-in-trade. The other stuff could be faked, and probably was. Why not? What can be faked will be faked. If the locals could put together movements for watches, even ones that ran funny, they wouldn’t have any trouble turning out Vietcong flags and identity cards. In fact some of them must have been producing these things for the VC all along, which put the whole question of authenticity in a new light: if made by the same hands, would enemy equipment be any less real because it was ordered by us instead of them?
We never accused our suppliers of dealing in counterfeits, nor did our agents at Dong Tam accuse us. But they employed a certain tilt of the head when handling fakable items, and allowed their pursed lips the faintest quiver of suppressed mirth. They took what we offered, but at a discount. Only the Chicoms commanded their respect.
The Chicom was a heavy, bolt-action rifle with a long bayonet that folded down along the barrel when not in use. It was manufactured in communist China—hence its nickname. Vietminh soldiers had carried it against the French, and the Vietcong had carried it against us when this war began. They didn’t use it much anymore, not when they could get their hands on AK-47S or M-16s, but the Chicom was a very mean-looking weapon, and indisputably a communist weapon. The perfect trophy. Some of the guys at Dong Tam even had them chromed, like baby shoes and the engine blocks of their cars.
By the end of the year Sergeant Benet and I were living in a wooden hooch with screens on the windows. We had bunks with mattresses. We had electric lights, a TV, a stereo, a stove, a refrigerator, and a generator to keep it all running. But the TV was a black-and-white portable. It was okay for the news, but we really felt the pinch when Bonanza came on. We were Bonanza freaks, Sergeant Benet and I. They were broadcasting a two-hour Bonanza special on Thanksgiving night, and we meant to watch this properly, on a color TV with a big screen. Sergeant Benet had arranged a deal that would significantly upgrade our viewing pleasure, a Chicom for a 21-inch set. Everything was set. That was why he and I were on the road to Dong Tam the day I ran over the bikes, Thanksgiving Day, 1967.
I DROVE fast. We’d started late, after trying all morning to find a convoy we could attach ourselves to. There weren’t any. Driving there alone would be dangerous, stupid, we both knew that, and we agreed to call the trip off until we had some other people around us, some padding, but I couldn’t get my mind off that Thanksgiving special. I fooled around with paperwork for a couple of hours after lunch, then gave up and said the hell with it, I was going.
Sergeant Benet said he’d go too, and though I could see he didn’t like the idea I made no effort to talk him out of it.
He held hard to the handle on the dash while I slithered in the ruts and splashed through muddy holes and found impossible paths between the people on the road. As I drove I indulged a morbid habit I couldn’t seem to break, picking places in the distance ahead and thinking, There—that’s where I’m going to get it … seeing the mine erupt through the mud, through the floorboard, the whole picture going red. Then I was on the place and past the place, and everything that was clenched and cowering opened in a rush. A few minutes later, not even thinking about it, or pretending not to think about it, I chose another place and thought, There—
Sergeant Benet fiddled with the radio, which wasn’t working right. No radio in Vietnam ever worked right.
The VC had blown the bridge a few months back, so we had to take the old ferry across the river. Then up past another hamlet, and another, and the blackened ruins of a militia outpost, and on, and on.
How far was it to Dong Tam? Hard to say, all these years later. But it would have been hard to say then too, because distance had become a psychological condition rather than a measurable issue of meters and kilometers. A journey down these roads was endless until you arrived at the end. No “seems” about it: it was endless until it was over. That was the truth of distance. The same with time. Our tour of duty was a year, but neither I nor anyone else ever used the word. You never heard it at all. The most we dared speak of were days, and even a day could lose you in its vast expanse, its limits stretching outward beyond the grasp of imagination.
Indeed, just about everything in our world had become relative, subjective. We were lied to, and knew it. Misinformed, innocently and by design. Confused. We couldn’t trust our own intelligence, in any sense of that word. Rumors festered in our uncertainty. Rumors, lies, apprehension, distant report, wishful thinking, such were the lenses through which we regarded this terra infirma and its maddeningly self-possessed, ungrateful people, whom we necessarily feared and therefore hated and could never understand. Where were we, really? Who was who, what was what? The truth was not forthcoming, you had to put it together for yourself, and in this way your most fantastic nightmares and suspicions became as real to you as the sometimes unbelievable fact of being in this place at all. Your version of reality might not tally with the stats or the map or the after-action report, but it was the reality you lived in, that would live on in you through the years ahead, and become the story by which you remembered all that you had seen, and done, and been.
So, once again, how far was it to Dong Tam? Far enough. And how long did it take? Forever, until you got there.
We turned a corner and were on the final approach. The road was lined with beer shanties and black market stands. Red-mouthed girls in fishnet stockings and miniskirts squawked from the doorways, wobbling on high heels. Out beyond the line of hovels I could see farmers in watery fields, some astride buffalo, most on foot, bent down like cranes, pant legs gathered above their knees, working right up to the edge of the minefield.
Sergeant Benet unloaded our rifles as we pulled up to the gate. The sentries usually waved us through when they saw we were American, but this time we got stopped. A big MP captain came out of the guard shack and stuck his head inside the window. He was one of those pink-skinned people who disintegrate in daylight. His nose was peeling, his lips were blistered, his eyes bloodshot. Without due ceremony, he asked me what our business was.
I said, “Just visiting.”
“Sir,” he said.
“You didn’t say ‘lieutenant’ to me.”
Sergeant Benet leaned over and looked at his name tag. “Afternoon, Captain Cox. Happy Thanksgiving, sir.”
The captain didn’t answer him. “Get out,” he said.
“Get out, Lieutenant,” I said. “Get out, Sergeant.” But I got out, and so did Sergeant Benet, who came around the front of the truck and walked over to the captain. “Is there a problem, sir?”
The captain looked him up and down and said, “What’ve you got in there, Bennet?”
“Benet,” Sergeant Benet said. “Like the writer, sir.”
“What writer? What are you talking about?”
“Stephen Vincent Benet, sir.”
“What did he write? Spirituals?”
The other MP, a private, shook his head: Don’t blame me. The captain went to the back of the truck and lifted the canvas flap. Then he dropped it and walked up to the cab, where we had the Chicom jammed behind the seat. He found it right away. “Well, well, well,” he said, “what have we here?” He turned the rifle over in his hands. “Very nice. Very nice indeed. Where’d you get it?”
“It’s mine,” I said, and reached out for it.
He pulled it back and showed me his teeth.
“Come on,” I said. “Give it here.”
“You’re not allowed to bring enemy weapons onto this base. I’m taking this into custody pending a full investigation.”
“In answer to your question, sir,” Sergeant Benet said, “that rifle is a gift from our division commander, General Ngoc, to General Avery on the occasion of the American national holiday. General Avery is expecting it at this very moment. If you like, sir, I’ll be more than happy to give him a call from the guard shack and let him explain the situation to you.”
The captain looked at Sergeant Benet. I could see him trying to figure all this out, and I could see him give up. “Take the goddamn thing,” he said, and pushed the rifle toward me. “Let this be a warning,” he said.
“Sir, I apologize for the confusion,” Sergeant Benet said.
After we drove away I asked Sergeant Benet just what he thought he was doing, taking a chance like that. Say the captain had actually gotten General Avery on the phone. Then what?
“That outstanding officer isn’t going to bother a busy man like General Avery. Not on Thanksgiving, no sir. Never happen.”
“But what if he did?”
“Well, sir, what do you think? You think the general’s going to insult our Vietnamese hosts by turning down the offer of a number one gift like this?”
“As simple as that.”
“Yes sir. I believe so, sir.”
I followed the muddy track through the base. The base was nothing but mud and muddy tents and muddy men looking totally pissed off and brutal and demoralized. In their anger at being in this place and their refusal to come to terms with it they had created a profound, intractable bog. Something was wrong with the latrine system; the place always stank. They hadn’t even bothered to plant any grass. At Dong Tam I saw something that wasn’t allowed for in the national myth—our capacity for collective despair. People here seemed in the grip of unshakable petulance. It was in the slump of their shoulders and the plodding way they moved. A sourness had settled over the base, spoiling and coarsening the men. The resolute imperial will was all played out here at empire’s fringe, lost in rancor and mud. Here were pharaoh’s chariots engulfed; his horsemen confused; and all his magnificence dismayed.
A shithole.
Sergeant Benet and I stopped at the PX to buy a few things for Major Chau before going on to pick up the television. We sat down for some burgers and fries, then had seconds, then got lost in the merchandise, acres of stuff: cameras and watches and clothes, sound systems and perfume, liquor, jewelry, food, sporting equipment, bras, negligees. You could buy books. You could buy a trombone. You could buy insurance. You could buy a Hula-Hoop. They had a new car on display in the back of the store, a maroon GTO, with a salesman standing by to stroke the leather seats and explain its groundbreaking features, and to accept cut-rate, tax-free orders for this car or any other you might want—ready at your local dealer’s on the scheduled date of your return home, with no obligation to anyone if, heaven forbid, some misfortune should prevent your return home.
We must have spent over an hour in there. We had the place almost to ourselves, and later, as we drove to the signal company where our TV was waiting, I noticed that the base itself seemed strangely empty, almost as if it had been abandoned. I smelled turkey baking. There must have been a bird in every oven in Dong Tam. The aroma contended with the stench of the latrines, and made me feel very far from home. That was always the effect of official attempts to make home seem closer.
We found Specialist Four Lyons playing chess with another man in the company mess hall. They were both unshaven and wrecked-looking. Lyons took a pint bottle of Cutty Sark from under the table and offered it to us. Sergeant Benet waved it off and so did I. The argument against drinking and driving carried, on these roads, a persuasive new force.
“Where is everybody?” Sergeant Benet asked.
“Big show. Raquel Welch.”
“Raquel Welch is here?”
“I think it’s Raquel Welch.” Lyons took a drink and gave the bottle to the other man. “Raquel Welch, right?”
“I thought it was Jill St. John.”
“Hey, maybe it’s both of them, I don’t know. Big difference. What with all the officers sitting up front you’re lucky if you can even see the fucking stage. Seriously, man. They could have Liberace up there and you wouldn’t know the difference, plus all the yahoos screaming their heads off.”
“So,” I said. “We’ve got the Chicom.”
“Yeah, right. Oh boy. Problem time.”
“Don’t tell me about problems,” Sergeant Benet said. “I didn’t drive down here for any problems.”
“I hear you, man. Really. The thing is, I couldn’t swing it. Not for one Chicom.”
“We agreed on one,” I said. “That was the understanding.”
“I know, I know. I’m with you, totally. It’s just this guy, you know, my guy over there, he suddenly decides he wants two.”
“He must be a crazy person,” Sergeant Benet said. “Two Chicoms for a TV? He’s crazy.”
“I can get you some steaks. Fifty pounds.”
“I don’t believe this,” I said. “We could’ve gotten killed coming down here.”
“T-bone. Aged. This is not your average slice of meat,” Lyons said.
The other man looked up from the chessboard. “I can vouch for that,” he said. He kissed his fingertips.
“Or two Chicoms and I can get the TV,” Lyons said. “I can have it for you in, like, an hour?”
“Who is this asshole?” I said. “Get him over here. We’ll settle this right now.”
“No can do. Sorry.”
“We shook hands on this,” Sergeant Benet said. “Don’t you be jacking us around with this we-got-problems bullshit. Where’s the TV?”
“I don’t have it.”
“Get it.”
“Hey man, lighten up. It’s not my fault, okay?”
Sergeant Benet turned and left the tent. I followed him.
“This is fucked,” I said.
“We had a deal,” Sergeant Benet said. “We shook hands.”
We got in the truck and just sat there. “I can’t accept this,” I said.
“What I don’t understand, that sorry-ass pecker-wood wanted two Chicoms, why didn’t he say he wanted two Chicoms?”
“I refuse to accept this.”
“Jack us around like that. Shoot.”
I told Sergeant Benet to drive up the road to an officers’ lounge where I sometimes stopped for a drink. It was empty except for a Vietnamese woman washing glasses behind the bar. The TV was even bigger than I remembered, 25 inches, one of the custom Zeniths the army special-ordered for clubs and rec rooms. I motioned Sergeant Benet inside. The cleaning woman looked up as Sergeant Benet unplugged the TV and began disconnecting the aerial wire. “The picture is bad,” I told her in Vietnamese. “We have to get it fixed.”
She held the door open for us as we wrestled the TV outside.
On the way to the gate Sergeant Benet said, “What if Captain Cox is still moping around? What you going to do then?”
“He won’t be.”
“You better hope not, sir.”
“Come on. You think he’d miss out on Raquel Welch?”
Captain Cox stepped outside the guard shack and waved us down.
“My God,” I said.
“What you going to tell him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then you best let me do the talking.”
I didn’t argue.
Captain Cox came up to the window and asked where we were headed now.
“Home, sir,” Sergeant Benet said.
“Where’s that?”
“Outside My Tho.”
“Ah yes, you’re with our noble allies.”
“Yes sir.”
“So what’ve you got in here?”
“Begging your pardon, sir, you already looked.”
“Well, why don’t I just take another look. Just for the heck of it.”
“It’s getting pretty late, sir. We don’t want to be on the road come dark.” Sergeant Benet nudged the accelerator.
“Turn off that engine,” Captain Cox said. “Now you just damn well sit there until I say otherwise.” He went around to the back of the truck, then came up to Sergeant Benet’s window. “My,” he said. “My, my, my, my, my.”
“Listen,” I said. But I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Sergeant Benet opened the door and got down from the cab. “If I could have a word with you, sir.”
They walked off somewhere behind the truck. I heard Sergeant Benet talking but couldn’t make out his words. Before long he came back and opened the door and pulled the Chicom from behind the seat. When he returned Captain Cox was with him. Captain Cox held the door as Sergeant Benet climbed inside, then closed it. “You boys have yourselves a good Thanksgiving now, hear?”
“Yes sir,” Sergeant Benet said. “We’ll do just that.” And he drove out the gate.
“What a prick,” I said.
“The captain? He’s not so bad. He’s a reasonable man. There’s plenty that aren’t.”
Sergeant Benet pushed the truck hard, but he didn’t look worried. He leaned into the corner and drove with one hand, his eyes hooded and vaguely yellow in the weak light slanting across the paddies. He smoked a Pall Mall without taking it from his lips, just letting it smolder and hang. He looked like a jazz pianist.
He was a hard one to figure out, Sergeant Benet. He thought it was amazing that I could get along in Vietnamese, but he spoke about ten different kinds of English, as occasion demanded—Cornerboy, Step’n-fetchit, Hallelujah Baptist, Professor of Cool, Swamp Runner, Earnest Oreo Professional, Badass Sergeant. The trouble I had understanding him arose from my assumption that his ability to run different numbers on other people meant that he would run numbers on me, but this hadn’t proved out. With me he was always the same, a kind, dignified, forbearing man. He read the Bible every night before he went to bed. For wisdom he quoted his grandmother. Unlike me, he suffered no sense of corruption from his role as scrounge or from the extreme caution he normally practiced. He had survived Korea and a previous tour in Vietnam and he intended to survive this tour as well, without any romantic flourishes. He avoided personal talk, but I knew he was married and had several children, one of them a little girl with cerebral palsy. His wife was a cook in New Orleans.
He was solitary. His solitude was mostly of his own choosing, but not entirely. The Vietnamese had added our bigotries to their own, and now looked down on blacks along with Chinese, Montagnards, Lao, Cambodians, and other Vietnamese. If they had to have advisers they wanted white advisers, and they generally got what they wanted. Sergeant Benet was the only black adviser in the division. The Vietnamese didn’t know what to make of him, because he gave no sign at all of being anybody’s inferior. Even Major Chau deferred to him. Sergeant Benet sometimes got together in My Tho with a couple of sergeants from one of the other battalions. I had the idea they were out raising hell, until I saw them once in a bar downtown. Sergeant Benet was just sitting there, smoking, sipping his beer, looking into the distance while the other two talked and laughed.
The ferry had been almost empty on the way over, but when we got to the landing there was a long line for the crossing back. Two buses, two trucks full of vegetables, some scooters and mopeds, a whole bunch of people with bicycles. We were looking at three trips’ worth, maybe more. Sergeant Benet went around the line and angled the truck in front of a bus. The driver didn’t say anything. He was used to it. They were all used to it.
After we boarded the ferry Sergeant Benet settled back for a quick nap. He could do that, fall asleep at will. I got out and leaned against the rail and watched the ferryman wave the two buses into position, shouting, carving the air with his long, bony hands. The deck was packed with people. Old women with red teeth worked the crowd, selling rice balls, bread, fruit wrapped in wet leaves. Ducks paddled along the length of the hull, begging for crumbs. I could see their bills open and close but their calls were lost in the voices around me, the bark of the ferryman, the cries of the vendors, the blare of a tinny radio. The engine throbbed under the weathered planking.
A woman just down the rail was staring across the river, lost in thought. I recognized her immediately. A little boy, maybe five or six, stood between us, watching the ducks. I said hello to him in Vietnamese. He drew back against her, gave me a sober look, and did not answer. But I got what I wanted; she turned and saw me there. I greeted her in formal terms, and she had no choice but to return my greeting.
Her name was Anh. When I first got to My Tho she’d been working at division headquarters as a secretary and interpreter. One afternoon I stopped by her desk and tried to spark a conversation with her, but she had hardly lifted her eyes from the papers she was working on. She made me feel like a fool. Finally I gave up and went away without a word, knowing she wouldn’t answer or even look up except to confirm that I really was leaving.
Then she lost her job, or quit. I hadn’t seen her since, but sometimes her face came to mind—not very accurately, as it turned out.
Her face was covered with faint pale scars, subtle as the hairline veins under the glaze of old porcelain. They didn’t spoil her looks, not as I saw her, and perhaps this is why I’d forgotten them. Their effect on me was to make me feel, in spite of the deliberate coldness of her gaze, that she was exposed and reachable. She had one small livid scar at the corner of her mouth. It curved slightly upward, giving her a lopsided, disbelieving smile. Her lips were full and vividly painted. I thought she might be Chinese; there were a lot of them in My Tho, traders and restaurateurs. She was paler and taller and heavier than most Vietnamese women, who in their floating ao dais seemed more spirit than flesh. Anh’s neck swelled slightly above the high collar of her tunic. Her hands were white and plump. You could see the roundness of her arms under her taut sleeves.
Again in Vietnamese I asked the boy if he had been on the bus. He looked at Anh. She told him to answer me. “Yes,” he said, and looked back down at the ducks.
“Do you like riding the bus?”
“Answer him,” Anh said.
He shook his head.
“You don’t like the bus? Why not?”
He said something I didn’t understand.
“He gets carsick,” Anh said in English. “The roads are so bad now.”
I wanted to keep the conversation in Vietnamese. In English I was accountable for what I said, but in Vietnamese I could be goofy or banal without having it held against me. In fact I had the idea that I was charming in Vietnamese.
To the boy I said, “Listen—this is true. Four times I took the bus across my own country. That’s five thousand kilometers each way. Twenty thousand kilometers.”
“Look,” he said to Anh. “We’re going.”
So we were, slowly. The ducks didn’t have any trouble keeping up.
“He’s shy,” Anh said in English.
Speaking English myself now, I said, “Is he shy with everyone? Or just me?”
“Just Americans.”
“How come?”
She pushed out her lips and shrugged. It was something an actress would do in a French movie. She said, “He doesn’t trust them.”
“Why not?”
She shrugged again. “You’re an American. Can he trust you?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
She didn’t say anything, but the other side of her mouth, the one without the scar, lifted slightly.
“What’s his name?”
“Van.”
“Your son?”
There was a change in her, and then she was looking at me without any friendliness at all. “My sister’s,” she said. “I take care of him. Sometimes.” She turned away and leaned forward, elbows on the rail. She cocked one knee, then lifted the other foot and rubbed it up and down the back of her leg. I was supposed to think that I was no longer any part of her thoughts, but her movements were so calculated, so falsely spontaneous, that instead of discouraging me they gave me hope.
A wooden crate floated past with a bird perched on top. From out here on the river I could see how thick the trees grew on the banks, bristling right up to the edge and reaching out, trailing their branches in the water. Far above us a pair of jets flew silently. They were shining bright, brighter than anything down here, where the light was going out of the day.
“Hey, Van,” I said.
He looked at me.
“Do you like TV?”
“Yes.”
“What do you like to watch?”
He said something I didn’t understand. I asked Anh for a translation. She took her time. Finally she turned and said, “It’s a puppet show.”
“How about Bonanza? You like Bonanza!”
“Little Joe,” he said in English.
But he was already looking away.
“He doesn’t see those shows,” Anh said. “He hears about them from the other kids.”
“Doesn’t your sister let him?”
“No television,” she said, and picked up the wicker bag at her feet. The drivers cranked their engines; people began to board the buses as we approached the landing. The trees cast long shadows out over the water, and when they fell over us the air turned cool, and Anh’s face and hands took on the luminous quality of white things at dusk. I knew I had somehow made a fool of myself again. It vexed me, that and the way she’d smiled when I said I could be trusted. I made up my mind to show her I was a really good guy, not just another American blowhard.
“We have an extra TV,” I said. “It’s in the truck.”
“We don’t need television.”
In Vietnamese, I said, “Van, do you want a television?”
“Yes,” he said.
She hefted her bag. “What kind?”
“Zenith.”
“Color?”
I nodded.
“How big?”
“Big enough.”
“Nineteen inches?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Twenty-five inches? How much?”
“It’s not for sale.”
“What for, then—Chicom?”
I couldn’t help laughing.
“What for, then?”
“Nothing.”
She watched me.
“It’s a gift.”
“A gift,” she said. She went on watching me. She looked away and then looked at me again. “Okay,” she said unhappily, as if agreeing to some exorbitant price.
I was going to tell her to forget about it if that was how she felt, but I said, “I can drop it off tonight.”
She considered this. In a tone of surrender, she said, “Okay. Tonight.” She told me where she lived. I knew the street—a line of cement-block bungalows along the reservoir, just inside town.
WE LET the buses go well ahead of us, figuring they’d pick up any mines that might have found their way into the road since we drove out. I didn’t say anything to Sergeant Benet about my plans for the television until we approached the crossroads. A short distance to the west lay our battalion; a bit farther and to the east, My Tho. I asked him to make the turn east. “Let’s get a drink,” I said.
He wasn’t interested. The drive back had done him in, and I knew how he felt because I wasn’t exactly in the pink myself. We’d lost radio contact again after we left the landing. All we could get was static broken occasionally by urgent, indistinct voices that vanished when I tried to tune them in. The road was empty and getting dark. Stretches of it were already dark where trees overhung the road, scratching the top of the truck as we went by. Sergeant Benet had continued in his solitude, mute, pensive, not even smoking anymore. I’d been left with nothing for company but the consciousness of my own stupidity in making this trip, which I was now trying to talk Sergeant Benet into prolonging. Finally I had no choice but to tell him the truth, or a version of the truth in which I appeared as benefactor to a deprived child.
“What’s his mother look like?”
“I don’t know. I talked to his aunt.”
“This aunt, she pretty?”
“I suppose you could say so.”
“Well, sir, you didn’t give away any TV.”
“I’m afraid I did.”
“No sir. It’s still in the back there.”
“But I promised.” When he didn’t say anything, I added, “I gave my word.”
He turned west toward the battalion.
I could have made him drive the other direction, but I didn’t. In this moment on the darkening road, Anh seemed a lot farther away than My Tho—an impossible distance. I was glad to be off the hook, and heading home to a good show.
We made it with time to spare. Sergeant Benet set up the television while I fried a couple of pork chops. He had trouble getting the color right; all the faces were yellow. I had a try at it and lost the picture completely, then gave him advice while he labored to get the picture back.
By the time Bonanza came on we were ready. We turned off the lights and settled in front of the screen, which looked like Cinerama after the dinky Magnavox we’d been watching. It was, as always, a story of redemption—man’s innate goodness brought to flower by a strong dose of opportunity, hard work, and majestic landscape. During the scene when the wounded drifter whom Hoss has taken in (over Little Joe’s objections) and nursed back to health nobly refuses, even under threat of death, to help his sociopath brother ambush the good brothers, the Cartwrights, and run off with their cattle, Sergeant Benet rocked in his seat and said, “Amen. Amen.” He said it again during the big turkey-carving scene at the end, when the camera panned the happy faces at the Ponderosa feast table. And I was moved myself, as in some way I had planned to be. Why else would I have put myself on the road that afternoon except for the certain reward of this emotion, unattainable from a 12-inch black-and-white?—this swelling of pride in the beauty of my own land, and the good hearts and high purposes of her people, of whom, after all, I was one.