And what was wrong with me that I wanted to be with him? As I listened to him talk, I tried to pinpoint it, but the best I could come up with was that I wanted to save him. I was convinced that underneath the cocky, self-absorbed exterior there was a man of real merit. The bravado was an act, one many men in the army employed to cover up their more vulnerable selves. Andy, I told myself, was one of them. If I could just reach him, he might become the man he needed to be. What I meant, of course, was that he might become the man that I needed him to be. But it would take me many years to realize that, and in the meantime I was fated to long for something that was just out of reach. A soldier is a natural object of attraction. Strong, confident, and masculine, he's easy fodder for the imagination. The possibility of death only sweetens the deal. Those of us attracted to tragedy (and I believe many gay men are included in this group, as evidenced by our fondness for the likes of Judy, Marilyn, and other stars whose lives ended badly and with whom we are so intimate that we call them by their first names) find in the soldier the romantic ideal. If he finds it difficult to love us in return, we forgive him and ascribe it to his need to protect us from the eventuality of his death. That night of his first kill, Andy committed another first, making love to me in the deserted storeroom housing boxes of ammunition and cartons of oil. He was brutal, quick, and hungry, pumping into me while his dog tags jangled against his chest and his hands gripped my waist. After he emptied himself inside me, he zipped up and left, using as an excuse an early-morning flight time. When he was gone, I jerked off furiously, telling myself that he'd taken one step closer to admitting his love for me. What is it about the unobtainable that we find so irresistible? You might as well ask why we think if we just try hard enough, we can pluck the moon from the sky. We know the effort is futile, yet we put it forth anyway, without the smallest shred of evidence that we have a hope of succeeding. Like religion, we believe in it with absolutely no hard proof.
St. Clare of Assisi, founder of the ascetic order of Poor Clare nuns, refused marriage and, at 18, entered a convent. Devoting herself to the eternal adoration of the Divine, she wrote what can only be considered love poems to God. In one of her four celebrated letters to Blessed Agnes of Prague (the former Princess Agnes of Bohemia, and Clare's patroness) she described her most fervent desire, to be one with Christ:
Draw me after You!
We will run in the fragrance of Your perfumes,
O heavenly Spouse!
I will run and not tire,
until You bring me into the wine-cellar,
until Your left hand is under my head
and Your right hand will embrace me happily
and You will kiss me with the happiest kiss of Your mouth.
Clare's infatuation with what she could never truly have may indeed be purely metaphoric (although her clearly-imagined fantasy rivals that of any letter written by a 14-year-old fan to her favorite pop star), but her passion is unmistakable. And whether God or man is the focus of such fierce faith, nothing is as strong or as torturous. I saw past Andy's faults to the man I believed existed behind them. I projected onto him everything I wanted, but hadn't yet fully articulated to myself. As the days passed and we reached the latter part of the year, the rains ended and the sun returned, drying the mud into rock-hard brick. The temperatures fell, although they remained much higher than anything I was used to experiencing in the fall, and warm enough that we spent many of the afternoons cooling off in Frenchman's Pool. Watching the men jump from the high dive into the water and splash one another in good-natured games, I was reminded of Treasure Island and the three summers Jack and I had spent there. I hadn't had a word from him since his letter in June, which I hadn't responded to, and bit by bit I was coming to accept that our friendship was over. In October, following a week of intense skirmishes with the NVA during which Digger and I spent long hours in the GR, we celebrated Halloween with an impromptu party. The most popular costume, unsurprisingly, was a Viet Cong soldier, complete with actual items taken from the bodies of the downed enemy. These items, taken as souvenirs by men who mostly didn't know any better, lent an unintentionally macabre touch to the night, which was made even more sinister when a grenade, hurled out of the darkness, hit a hootch, sending dirt and metal into the air and causing all of us to fall on our faces, hands over our heads as we'd been taught in basic training. When the rain of earth stopped, we got up to survey the damage. Fortunately, the hootch's occupants had not been inside, and the only casualty was the building itself. But we took the attack personally, and moments later, weapons in hand, we were looking for the perpetrators. We found them—a group of sappers—still making their way through the field of concertina wire on the camp's southeast perimeter. The grenade had been thrown by an antsy scout as a distraction, but he'd thrown too early, and we caught the enemy soldiers with fifteen yards left to go.
They were sitting targets. Trapped beneath the razor-sharp wire, the harsh lights of the guard tower turned on them, they had nowhere to go. All they could do was return fire and hope we missed. The air was filled with the sounds of a hundred M16s firing at once, the angry cries of soldiers wreaking revenge, and the muted sounds of bodies being pierced by bullets. Not one of the sappers screamed; they died silently, just as they'd come.
Beside me, Andy was firing repeatedly. I saw him take aim at a soldier attempting to turn around in the nest of wire. A moment later, the man's head exploded in a spray of blood. "Pink mist, baby!" Andy shouted, pumping his fist. "Pink mist. That's what it's all about." He high-fived the man next to him and looked for another target. It was over quickly. Afterward, a call went out for volunteers to drag the dead out. In general, the handling of North Vietnamese casualties was avoided as much as possible. Although officially we were supposed to collect any recoverable bodies and deliver them to Vietnamese officials, in reality we usually left them where they fell. Exceptions were made when their presence would result in inconvenience to U.S. troops. Faced with the prospect of a yard full of rotting NVA, we had no choice but to retrieve them.
I stepped forward, along with a handful of other men, and we began the tricky process of removing the bodies from their wire coffins. It was difficult work. The wire, designed to trap anything foolish enough to walk into it, was hardly a hindrance to the sappers, who had made an art out of learning how to crawl through it both unheard and uncut, but for us it required patience and care. Even then, we frequently felt the sting of the sharp-edged wire as we parted it with gloved hands. I pulled out two men and went back for a third. Positioned toward the rear of the group, he was lying on his stomach. Blood had pooled around him, suggesting a belly wound, and his gun was a foot or two from his body. Stepping on the concertina wire to flatten it down, I made it to him and knelt down. I didn't want to drag him face-first over the wire, so I grabbed his wrists and flipped him over.
"Chieu hoi,"he said, looking up at me with pleading eyes."Chieu hoi." "I surrender." It was a phrase seldom heard, as the soldiers of the NVA were trained to fight to the death. But American forces had been blanketing the country with leaflets promising amnesty for those who surrendered voluntarily, and occasionally someone took us up on the offer. I looked into the man's face. He was young, just a man, and he was frightened. The bullet he'd taken had opened him up, and the front of his shirt carried a wide, wet stain. Still, I thought there might be a chance for him. We had any number of trained medics in camp, and with a little luck, the soldier might live to see his family again. I turned around and shouted for help getting him out as quickly as possible. Two men answered my call, one a newly-arrived private and one a sergeant on his third tour of duty.
"He's still alive," I said. "Help me get him out."
The younger man knelt and started to help me lift the wounded soldier. The sergeant, however, said, "Put him down, boys."
I looked up at him. "But he's alive," I said.
"Put him down," the sergeant repeated.
I exchanged a glance with the young man,
and we did as we'd been ordered. The sergeant nodded at me. "You found him. He's yours."
I didn't understand what he meant. Then he pointed at the rifle still slung across my back, and I knew. "He surrendered," I said, thinking perhaps the sergeant didn't realize what the situation was. "Chieu hoi, "the man said weakly, reinforcing my statement.
"He's a VC sapper," the sergeant countered. "They don't surrender."
By then a small group of soldiers had gathered around us to see what was going on. Andy was among them, and I saw him watching me as I argued with the sergeant. "But…" I said, trying again.
"They don't surrender," the sergeant repeated. "Now take your kill, soldier." I could feel the eyes of my fellow soldiers on me, their collective desire to bring the moment to an end forging itself into a red-hot fire. I knew I wasn't going to win. Also, I wasn't entirely sure the sergeant was wrong. The man was an enemy. My enemy. Our enemy. He'd come there to kill, and only accident had turned him from hunter to hunted. If our roles were reversed, I told myself, he would show me no mercy.
I lifted my rifle and pressed the tip of the barrel to the injured man's forehead. As I looked into his face, I saw his eyelids flutter. At first I thought it was his reaction to what he must know was imminent death. Then I realized that he truly was dying at that moment. His lips parted and his chest fell one final time as his wound took its toll.
Focused on me, nobody else noticed that he was gone. I hesitated for an instant, then pulled the trigger, firing a bullet into the man's brain. His body jumped and then was still. The sergeant clapped me on the back.
"Now get him out of here," he said.
I searched for Andy and found him. He was looking at me with an expression of approval and respect. I nodded once at him, then bent to pick up the soldier's body, my heart a bird in flight.
CHAPTER 28
After the death of the Vietnamese soldier, Andy treated me differently, as if the man had been a sacrifice I made to the gods in exchange for his attentions. I was now included in conversations about his missions, which increased as his prowess with the gun was proven time and again. His friends became my friends, and soon soldiers who'd barely spoken to me before that October night were calling me by name. I'd become a member of their fraternity, a society of brothers united not simply because we were soldiers, but because we'd seen combat.
That it was all based on a lie bothered me, mostly at night, when the soldier's face came to me and I heard his voice, soft and begging in my ear. Then I couldn't hide from the fact that I had shot a dead man. Would I have pulled the trigger if he had still been alive? I told myself I would have, but that was hardly better. I'd killed, twice, a man with no means of defending himself. The fact that he was an enemy changed nothing.
But the mind has a way of saving us from our devils, and mine rescued me by slowly changing the story, until after repeated tellings I convinced myself that I'd done my duty as a U.S. Army soldier and nothing more. When I reached a point where I could believe that without effort, I stopped thinking about it at all and simply enjoyed the status the incident earned me with Andy. We were spending more and more time together, much of it in bed when we could manage it and in any available spot when we couldn't. We made love inside bunkers, behind sandbags, and, once, in the belly of Andy's chopper while the rest of the crew slept off the weariness of a retrieval mission that had ended in five casualties. The holidays came and went. We had a turkey dinner at Thanksgiving, and at Christmas we decorated a palm tree with shell casings painted red and green. On Christmas morning, before the slicks took off on their assignments, one of the sergeants dressed up as Santa and handed out presents. Andy and I each received a week of R&R in Vung Tau, which we took three weeks later. Located on the southeast coast of Vietnam, Vung Tau is a beautiful seaside resort, a crooked finger of land dipping into the warm waters of the South China Sea. Once the base for Malay pirates who roamed the coastline in search of prey, it was given to the soldiers who liberated it from the bandits and became a destination for the wealthy families of Saigon. In 1971, at the time of our visit, it was the base of operations for both the U.S. and the Royal Australian Army support units, and as such was a popular location for in-country R&R.
Anything you wanted could be had in Vung Tau. A thriving industry had sprung up to service the troops, and the many shops and bars that lined the streets served up everything from hash to pho, whiskey to women. As we walked downtown on our first day, one little boy after another came up to us with an offer, mostly for drugs or sex with a sister, each one of whom was described as a "number-one cherry girl." We declined, until finally one young fellow, not more than nine years old, was so persistent in his offers of assistance that we agreed to hire him as a guide for the day at the exorbitant rate of two dollars. His name, he told us in surprisingly good English, was Duc, and Andy immediately decided to call him Donny, which the boy accepted with good humor. "Mickey Mouse's friend," he said. "Quack-quack."
Duc proved to be a fine guide. He suggested we rent a scooter, even haggling over the price for us. With Andy driving, me seated behind him, and Duc standing on the running board, we took the grand tour. Duc provided running commentary all the way, pointing out the various temples and shrines for which Vung Tau was known, and throwing in a bit of history while he was at it.
"That is Bach Dinh, the White Mansion," he informed us as we drove by an imposing house. "Than Thai, the crazy emperor, he locked up there by the French long time ago. And there is Lighthouse Mountain. An American lives there. Two kids my age. Sometimes we play in the tunnels under the mountain and sit on the big guns on top."
We drove the long, winding road around the peninsula, coming to stop at one of the city's famous beaches, where we bought bate gan from a roadside stall. As we ate the pork-filled dumplings, Duc pointed to the mountain rising behind us.
"Nui Long," he said, his mouth full of pork. "Large Mountain. After we eat we go up and see Thich Ca Phat Dai pagoda."
"What's that, Donny?" asked Andy. "And why do we want to see it?"
"Shrine to Buddha," Duc explained. "Very famous statue of Buddha sitting on lotus. And over there," he said, pointing in the opposite direction, "Nui Nho. Small Mountain." "What's that on top?" I asked, looking at a peculiar shape rising from the mountain's summit. It looked like the lower half of a standing figure.
"Jesus," Duc said, his voice harsh. "The Catholics build big statue, bigger than Buddha. It not done yet. Going to be thirty meters high. Buddha only seven meters."
"Sounds like religious persecution to me," Andy said, winking at me over Duc's head. "Maybe you should use those guns up on Lighthouse Mountain to take old Christ there out." Duc looked thoughtfully in the direction of the old cannons, which probably hadn't worked since the end of World War II, and then at the feet and legs of Jesus. "Maybe you right," he said. "I look into it. Now we finish tour."
We continued on the road, which looped around the tip of the peninsula and ended back in town. By the time we arrived, it was late afternoon. Being winter, it was growing dark, and Vung Tau was coming to life as lights were turned on. The windows of the bars flashed with neon advertising beer and cigarettes, while the girls walking down the street were decked out in short skirts and high heels. A group of them eyed us brazenly, speaking to each other and laughing.
"You looking for boom boom?" Duc asked, noticing the exchange.
"No," I said. "No boom boom."
"Why not?" he said. "You want boy instead? I can get for you if you want."
"No, Donny, no boys," Andy said quickly. "What other kind of boom boom you got?" Duc grinned. "Number-one cherry," he said. "You come with me."
He started to walk away, and Andy began to follow him. I grabbed his arm. "What are you doing?" I said. "Let's just go back to the hotel."
"Come on," Andy answered. "How many times are you going to get a chance at a Vietnamese whore?"
"I don't want a Vietnamese whore," I said.
"You've got to learn to
live a little," said Andy. "You can go back to the hotel if you want, but I'm going. It's up to you." Behind him, Duc called out, "Come on. This way."
"You heard the man," Andy said. "You can't keep Donny waiting all night."
"All right," I said. "All right. Let's go."
As we followed Duc through the streets, I kept telling myself nothing would happen. Probably we'd end up at some bar, Andy would have too much to drink, and I'd have to carry him back to the hotel. Maybe I would even make sure he drank too much.
"In here," Duc said after we'd been walking for five minutes. "This good place." We were standing in front of what looked like a small hotel. I looked up at the sign above the entrance.
"Cherry Blossom House," I read.
"What I tell you?" said Duc. "Number-one cherry girls. You go in."
Andy fished some coins out of his pocket and handed them to Duc.
"Here you go, Donald Duck. Don't wait up for us. Maybe we'll see you tomorrow." "Okay," Duc said, counting his money. "Tomorrow."
We pushed aside the strings of pink and red beads that covered the doorway and went inside. True to its name, the Cherry Blossom House was painted all in pink. The big main room was set up as a bar with tables and, in one corner, a jukebox that was currently playing Frank Sinatra. The tables were filled with soldiers, and girls moved from man to man, offering drinks or stopping to talk. Some sat on the men's laps, rubbing their heads and whispering in their ears.
We found seats at an empty table and were immediately descended upon by a girl wearing a pink negligee. "You want some beers?" she asked. "Pabst Blue Ribbon?"
"Sure thing," said Andy.
She disappeared, returning a moment later with two cans, which she set on the table. "How much?" Andy asked her, taking out his wallet.