This time they probed the hillsides behind the ville, and uncovered a network of tunnels and holes that showed signs of hasty retreat. An entire underground village had lived here, larger by far than the population living over their heads, and it took them the rest of that day and most of the next to strip it of equipment and stores. They even found two wounded NVA, lying feverish in the airless dirt cave that was the settlement’s hospital ward. Brenda was ecstatic at the trophies, although from the looks of them, neither prisoner would live long enough to be of much use to Intel.
Late on the second day, with the farthest reaches of the tunnels emptied out, the platoon returned to open air. They sat among the trees, grateful for air and sky, while the sappers laid their charges. They had to retreat to the other side of the ville remnants, but the men cheered when the C4 went off and the entire hillside shivered and settled into itself. Their reward was a hot meal, a flurry of visits from the colonel, Intel, and press, followed by the luxury of a night’s camp without having to dig new holes.
Chris got it during the night.
They’d been expecting an attack—after all, the men who had lived in those tunnels were out there somewhere, biding their time. They deepened the holes before settling into them, made sure their magazines and grenades were instantly to hand, and dozed with one eye open.
The ghosts came on them later than they’d expected, nearly at dawn, just as everyone was beginning to think they were safe for the time. Clever move was Allen’s waking thought the instant the firing started; men who had been waiting all night were tired before the day began. The ghosts also came, somewhat unusually, all at once, a wave of small-arms fire and mortars from all around the perimeter, giving the platoon a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree line of fire. Within half an hour the sun was lighting the sky, giving shape to the night’s ghosts, turning them into small men moving across the landscape. And then they were gone, leaving Chris bleeding silently from a bullet wound through his belly, a wound that came out nearly on top of his spine. His glasses had disappeared somewhere, leaving his face strangely naked, and he came halfway to consciousness before the medevac arrived, focused on Mouse’s face a foot from his, and smiled sweetly.
“Wipe out, dude,” he drawled.
The black man’s ears had cleared enough to hear him, or maybe he was just reading Chris’s lips. “You be back on that surfboard before any of us DEROS, man.”
“I don’t have any legs, Mouse.”
“Sure you do, man. They there, okay.”
“Funny thing, a surfer without legs . . . Mouse, do me a favor and check my equipment, will you? If my dick’s shot off, I don’t want you to put me on that medevac.”
“Your dick’s fine, man, don’t be stupid.”
“You didn’t look. Mouse, I need to know.”
Without another word, Mouse unfastened the boy’s trousers and peered inside, then rearranged the flap shut again. “Your dick’s there. Ain’t no less of it than there was yesterday. ‘Course, that ain’t sayin’ much.”
“You promise?”
“Look, dickhead, there’s nothing wrong with your fuckin’ equipment. And I ain’t gonna give it no tug to prove it to you.”
“Thanks, Mouse. Look me up sometime, when you get home.”
“Yeah, right,” said Mouse under his voice. “That’s gonna happen.” But he rested his black hand against Chris’s blond hair, and stayed with him until the medic loaded him away.
The medevac took off, and the men heated their C-rations and waited for orders. The platoon was now so light, they would have been justified in returning to base to put themselves together again. However, Brenda had his ideas about what a lieutenant asked of his men, and no one was surprised when the order came to move out.
“Fuckin’ hell,” Mouse said. “We just gonna march to Hanoi, you figure?”
“Why not? Go direct to the source,” Allen told him.
“What?” Mouse asked, and Allen just shook his head to say it was not important.
When the Claymore wires were up and their packs on, Allen looked at the rest of the squad. “Hey, Penroy,” he said. “Where’s deRosa?”
The others shrugged. Allen dug out a scrap of paper and wrote the question, shoving it under Mouse’s nose.
“The hell should I know?” Mouse grumbled. “Ain’t seen him since last night.”
“He’s probably gone to check on his buddy Gonsalves,” Tom said, or maybe it was Tim.
“He’s prob’ly off gassin’ with that cousin of his, Gonzo I think his name is,” Mouse said, not having heard the first suggestion.
But deRosa was not with Gonsalves, and in fact, deRosa did not seem to be inside the perimeter. They found his pack, and they found a rifle that could have been his, but they did not find him. He’d either dropped his things and fled in a panic, or he’d been taken. Penroy took the news to Brennan, who came over with Sergeant Keys to examine the abandoned gear.
“He was getting pretty flaky out there in the elephant grass the other day,” Allen said to the sergeant. The lieutenant heard, and turned the reflective glasses on Allen.
“You sure seem to have a lot of problems with that elephant grass.”
“Not me, but it sure made deRosa nervous.”
“DeRosa. He’s the pretty one, isn’t he, Carmichael? Special friend of yours, maybe?”
“Special . . . sir!” Allen felt himself go red. “He’s a member of my squad, sir.”
“And you had to hold his hand out in the grass.”
“No, sir. I only—”
“Well, there’s no elephant grass around here, soldier.”
“No sir, I just meant—”
“You think the man deserted under fire,” Brenda stated.
Allen stared at him. Who the hell would desert out here? You’d have to be insane. “Sir, no, I don’t believe deRosa deserted. I never saw any sign of cowardice in him, not even under fire, just in the grass. I think he was claustrophobic. He was okay once we got moving again, just needed his mind taken off it. So no, I don’t think he ran.”
“Well, we beat the bushes all around, if he was wounded and crawled away we’d have found him. We can’t wait around hoping your boyfriend—that is, your squad-mate—comes home. Prepare to move out.”
They beat the bushes for another half hour, found no more sign of this missing member than they had of Dixon in the grass, and finally, looking over their shoulders like a herd of herbivores with a lion on their trail, they moved out.
Unknown to them, deRosa followed. Or more accurately, deRosa was brought along in their wake, across the jungle floor, through the tunnels that wove among the hills, silently flitting through the green gloom in the platoon’s wake. They did not know he was there until nearly midnight, and even then they could not be certain it was he. All they knew was that at 23:40, a man started to scream somewhere off in the green, an endless and impossibly high-pitched sound of ultimate agony and hopelessness.
The twenty-nine remaining members of the Second Platoon shot bolt upright, primeval hackles rising along the backs of their necks, fingers nervously working the firing mechanisms of their guns, bracing for the eerie soprano wail to repeat itself. When seven minutes later it did, they instantly wished it had not. There was no telling where it was coming from, no rushing out into the darkness to rescue a comrade.
“Fuck me,” Mouse said, slapping his head. “That’s worse than the ringing.”
Allen leaned into him and said directly into his ear, “It’s not your ears, man. There’s some poor bastard out there.”
“DeRosa?” Allen could only shrug, which Mouse felt even though it was too dark to see the movement. “Shit, what the hell happened to him?”
Long before the noise stopped, it was all too clear what was happening. What kind of injuries could you inflict on a man, to make him scream like that but not die?
Most of the platoon was thinking the same thing; thought, too, when the noise finally ceased to come at dawn, that the
relief for that poor bastard out there was as great as their own. They traveled eighteen miles that day, losing three more wounded to a freshly set mine. All the while they pretended that they were doing a sweep; in truth they were interested only in fleeing the night noises. They dug in, setting up their trip-flares and Claymores, only to find that the man and his torturers had dogged their steps. From midnight until dawn the shrill sounds of torment rose and fell and echoed off the hills, until many of the men were whimpering themselves, or screaming curses into the night. All of them not actively standing guard stuffed wads of cloth into their ears and wrapped their heads in whatever they had. At three in the morning, Allen gave up all attempt at sleeping, and went to talk to Keys.
“Sarge, the loot’s got to get us lifted out tomorrow. We’ll go nuts if he doesn’t.”
“We can’t do anything until morning, I’ll talk to him them. He’s not sleeping either, Carmichael.”
It was true, the sound from the darkness would wreak havoc on the nerves of a coddled REMF, Allen had to agree. By morning, Brenda would be soft enough to agree to anything.
Again the noises died away at dawn; this time, no man fooled himself that their platoon-mate had been granted death, that night’s fall would not find them again assaulted by a soul in torment. They bent over their C-rats, watching their lieutenant out of the corner of their eyes. Brennan ate his breakfast with a solid appetite, he shaved without nicking himself, and if he was aware of their collective gaze, he showed no sign of it.
“Prepare the men to move out, Sergeant,” he said. The men just stared at him in growing disbelief, before he relented. “We’ve got an LZ twelve miles from here, one small ville to check on the way, then it’s hot food and clean uniforms.”
And no more sounds of deRosa dying, they all finished in their minds.
They moved out.
This was the state of the twenty-six members of Bravo Company, Second Platoon, that April morning when they entered the ville the maps called Truc Tho—twenty-one teenagers who should have been bagging groceries and wondering about their chance of scoring at the drive-in Friday night, plus five men who (if they survived) would be old enough to choose between McGovern and Nixon in November. Aside from its leader and a handful of FNGs, the platoon had been under fire more or less continually since before Christmas, four solid months of harassment by invisible ghosts with neither planes nor equipment, who lived in dark tunnels like vermin, and like vermin were proving maddeningly difficult to eradicate. Twenty-six filthy young men, their muscles aching with exhaustion and frustration, who had been in the woods for the last eleven days straight, cut off from the rest of their company, battling an unseen enemy who refused to stand and fight, yet who had sent nearly a third of their brothers off into the blue on stretchers or in bags. They had been the target of daily ambushes, been nearly overrun twice, been continually besieged by mosquitoes and leeches, had not eaten a truly hot meal or shaved or even had their boots off in longer than they could remember. They had spent their days being picked off among the bush and the high grass and their nights cowering inside their feeble perimeters, the last two of them spent in raging impotence while one of their own was slowly peeled apart by animals. Their commanding officer, a man who had narrowly escaped one court-martial two years before, was riding their lunatic energy like a kite in a high wind, pulling them on in his wake.
Twenty-six components of a bomb, primed, loaded, and about to be dropped on the unsuspecting village of Truc Tho.
The ville was firmly inside the free-fire zone, which meant: If it moves, shoot it. These niceties of definition had little impact on the women and old men trying to scrape a living on the lands their families had worked for generations; the grunts had seen this often enough to know that just because a ville was in enemy territory didn’t necessarily mean it was entirely VC. Still, they moved in with an even greater expectation of problems than they normally did. The artillery laid its line of fire on the far side of the village, but unusually enough, the residents did not immediately begin to stream out in terror. There were definitely people there—smoking cook-fires, laundry draped on the bushes to dry, and a recently butchered animal hanging from a sturdy tree branch told them that—but either the inhabitants had fled before the bombs hit, or they were staying put. The platoon thumbed their M16s to rock-and-roll, and crept through the fields toward the hooches.
The point man in Alpha Squad, a phlegmatic dairy farmer named Kowalski who’d been in Vietnam for nine months, saw it first; his incredible reaction made half the platoon think he’d been hit by some silent weapon. He whimpered—whimpered—and dropped his gun before staggering back to retch violently. In a rapid wave out from the center, the rest of the platoon threw themselves flat and brought their guns up. They stretched their senses and waited: They saw nothing but the hushed village with a few curls of smoke, heard only the usual farm animals, Kowalski’s vomiting, and the steady hum of a beehive.
And then the man next to Kowalski gave a shocked curse, and Allen craned to find what had triggered the reaction. It took him a minute to see it; when he did, he felt himself go cold with shock: What he had taken for a slaughtered pig hanging from a tree for butchering was no pig; nor was the insect hum from bees.
A small man hung by his heels from the tree branch, flayed down to muscle and bone. His skin lay in a heap on the ground beneath him, crumpled like a pair of multicolored tights. Delicate red fingers, drips still collecting at their tips, seemed to reach down for the skin; the gesture and the diminished size of the body made it look like a young adolescent, embarrassed by nakedness, hurrying to clothe himself properly again. His muscles looked startlingly like the illustrations in an anatomy book, except for the thick, shifting coat of flies.
One man after another looked, and either froze where he stood or turned to heave the contents of his stomach into the bushes. Had the ville wanted to wipe them out, it would have been easy, for shock reduced the entire platoon into immobility.
Only much later—far too late to do any good—did Allen realize that the ville hadn’t wanted to do anything to them, that the people were cowering in their hooches, trapped between the VC who had done this in their ville and the Americans who were sure to revenge it. Right then, in that place, with the blood still dripping off deRosa’s fingers and the buzz of ten thousand flies rising loud in their ears, no man stopped to think it through. Six months of rage and shame flooded up through Allen Carmichael’s gut and seized his heart and his mind; six months of confusion and hatred and humiliation, long weeks of gut-shrinking terror and soul-withering frustration slammed together in the cleansing red emotion of savagery given a clear target. When Lieutenant Brennan stumbled to his feet and lifted his gun, as one his platoon rose with him, to smash and destroy, to avenge their fallen and restore their lost honor. The mad paroxysm took them all, although none saw that Brennan himself was the first to stop, to stand back and watch his men kill.
The chain reaction did not end until it had burned itself out and there was nothing left to kill. Until every old man had ceased to twitch, each woman had ceased her crying, every child and infant lay still. Until the ville was as lifeless as deRosa.
BOOK TWO
Home Coming
Chapter 12
This is what Allen Carmichael saw on the third of the illegal surveillance tapes made of the O’Connell residence that May:
The man has been sitting for at least an hour on the black leather sofa, watching a baseball game on the television, staring nearly straight at the pinhole camera that Allen planted in the corner of the high window four days earlier. The man on Allen’s screen is of average height, the chest under his loose silk shirt testifying to regular workouts, his face good-looking but nothing memorable. The features of that face are capable of considerable charm—Allen has seen this in earlier tapes—but when at rest, a slight twist of the mouth imparts a look of boredom, or petulance, perhaps even a hint of cruelty. Particularly, as now, when he is drinking.
He seems to be paying little attention to the game in front of him, for the occasional crowd roars that Allen’s bug picks up have no corresponding effect on the man’s expression. He frowns occasionally, and once glances at his wristwatch, but for the past forty-seven minutes his only change of position has been to walk over to the wet bar and refill his glass. He has done this three times.
Now a sound snags his attention, and his light blue eyes flick to the doorway at his side. After a moment, the lower half of a heavily built man appears, and the man on the sofa lifts the empty glass in his left hand. The figure enters the side of Allen’s screen, his head cut off by the upper border—when planting the camera, Allen had to sacrifice a broad picture of the room for the invisibility of his lens—and a meaty hand reaches out to take the glass.
The figure that now crosses the room is called “Howard” by Jamie and his father, “Mr. Howard” by the housekeeper; Allen thinks he is probably the George Howard listed as an employee of O’Connell’s company. He looks like a professional bodybuilder, cropped blond hair and muscles that strain his polo shirt and the thighs of his tan pants. He does not live here, although he spends most of his time with O’Connell, doing pretty much whatever needs doing, from picking up the boy at school to hauling the garbage and recycling bins from garage to street. And now, filling his boss’s glass with expensive whiskey and carrying it back to him. The big man then turns, taking three steps toward the television before a movement from the sitting man’s mouth brings him to a halt. Allen can’t tell what has been said, since the noise from the game drowns out the words, but it makes the bodybuilder stop, then turn to go out the door again.