The warriors moved off, leaving the stewardess at the door to wish each new boy well, saying that she’d see them in a year. So eager were they all to see what lay on the other side of the exit door, not one of them looked past the short skirt and sexy makeup to notice that she did not meet their eyes when she said her cheery good-byes.
At the door, the heat slammed into them as if they had stepped into the world’s largest steam bath, followed closely by the ungodly stench, an oily burning shit-smell that instantly made the eyes stream with disbelief. Allen gagged, swore, and the boy behind him nudged his arm to continue down the flight of steps. At the bottom, the heat beating off the softened tarmac was overwhelming, and as Allen shouldered his duffel and joined the olive-green ant-stream flowing in the direction of the nearest shade, he wondered, for the first time, what the hell he was doing here.
The shadow of the metal-roofed shed made not the slightest difference to the heat; if anything, enclosing the beast made it seem all the more stifling. When Allen’s eyes had adjusted to the dim light, he saw that the shed was already occupied by a crowd of dirty, motionless figures—soldiers, clearly, and all of them headed out, but they had none of the high spirits he would have expected from a load of men about to board a plane bound for soft beds and American hamburgers. Even those without bandages or crutches looked severely wounded, and all the eyes watched the scrubbed newcomers with a wariness beyond cynicism. One man seemed to meet and hold Allen’s gaze, but Allen didn’t think the man knew he was there.
The hot day gave an abrupt shiver, reminding Allen of stepping into the meat locker at the supermarket he’d worked in last summer; he looked away, and made an uneasy joke with the guy next to him.
A reassuringly abusive sergeant finally appeared to scream them onto a series of ancient Army buses with heavy wire screens instead of glass in the windows. Allen dropped to a worn bench beside his seatmate of the flight out, a short, sturdy PFC named Ricardo Flores. They’d been in basic together, where Allen had taken one look at those green eyes in the brown face and remembered him from high school wrestling matches—although they had never gone up against each other, Flores being a bantam and Allen at the time hovering on the edge of heavyweight. As a kid and in basic, Ricardo had been known as Flowers. On the plane, he’d been dubbed Lucy—or rather, “Loo-Si!”—and it looked like it was going to stick.
“You should’ve told them your name was Rick, not Ricardo,” Allen said now, as if they’d been discussing the topic, which they hadn’t.
“Don’t matter none, just so I don’t have to wear the lipstick.”
“Why do you suppose they put wire on the windows?” Allen wondered aloud, when the bus had rumbled into life and driven away from the resultant diesel cloud. “They think we came all this way just to jump out and go AWOL on the way in from the airstrip?”
“Jeez, look at them girls—jumping out’s not such a bad idea.” Flores stood to peer through the mesh at the two slim, swaying figures in long pale dresses and wide-brimmed hats, walking the garbage-strewn roadside in front of a row of shacks made of cardboard and reed.
“Only a midget like you could fit out the window,” Allen retorted, although he too admired the women until they faded in the distance.
“The wire’s to keep the locals from tossing a grenade in on top of us,” contributed the guy behind them. “You know—our friendly allies.”
“Great way to welcome troops who’ve come to fight your war for you,” Allen said, then stuck his hand over the top of the seat. “Allen Carmichael.”
“Tim Barker, they call me Dogs. And this is Nor Petersen. Short for Norvald, but call him Pete.”
Handshakes all around. Dogs was small, dark, and muscular, and spoke with the nasal accent of Bobby Kennedy; Pete was a lanky, buck-toothed kid nearly as blond as an albino, his face studded with acne and freckles. He looked as if his hair should be tousled, with bits of hay in it, and his innocent blue eyes looked out from a face about twelve years old. Allen wondered if he was shaving yet; the others already called him Farmboy.
The bus came to a cluster of smoke-belching trucks in a sea of bicycles ridden by everyone from children to old women, half of whom had some enormous and precarious load strapped on as well. Buildings pressed in on them, signs and tacked-on extensions brushing the bus’s mirrors, women in wide conical hats or precarious turbans squeezing matter-of-factly to the side, uniformed men with automatic weapons seemingly oblivious to anything but a potential threat, street merchants hawking everything from peanuts to plastic bowls. This seemed to be the Saigon equivalent of rush hour, and the buses slowed to a crawl, surrounded by cling-clinging bicycles, rattling Lambretta scooters, hooting trucks and cars, brightly painted buses with passengers perched on the roofs and hanging out the windows, and a pair of huge, black water buffalos prodded into movement by two diminutive girls. It was like going on a school field trip to another planet: the bus, the high spirits of the guys, the day-off feeling.
Allen gazed down at the entrancing cacophony, unaware of the sweat stinging his eyes, caught up in the sheer romance of the place. Pedestrians crowded the sides of the now-stationary bus; but for the wires, he could’ve reached out and touched their heads. One of the things they’d had drilled into them in basic was how you couldn’t tell a civilian from a Viet Cong by looks, or even an NVA from the north. He hadn’t really believed it until now. Watching a man push a bicycle heavily laden with unidentifiable boxes of goods into a narrow alleyway, a thought occurred to him.
“I suppose the bottom of the bus must be armored,” he said to Flores. “I mean, a grenade under the floor could do as much damage as one tossed in a window.”
Flores shook his head, no more well informed than anyone else within hearing, and looked apprehensively down on the crowds at their flanks.
The air stank, not the rank and cloying stink of the airport, but of diesel and excrement, punctuated from time to time by the most exotic cooking odors his nose had ever encountered, rich whiffs of hot peppers and exotic spices. Noise beat at him and the colors here seemed brighter; ancient and modern, peace and war jostled each other’s elbows: elegant brick colonial buildings next to ramshackle constructions glued together of tin and scrap wood; banana trees waved lush wide plumes over concrete-block walls topped with vicious broken bottles; an old woman rode demurely in a rickshaw, aloof to the crowds pressing near her knees, while an identical old woman bent down beneath a bamboo pole with a basket of rice at each end, her feet doing quick small steps under the heavy load. A thousand-year-old man made of wrinkles and a rag, his few teeth black from betel, sat against a wall trying to sell three bananas; a bucketful of water flew from an upper window and splashed across the back of a foraging pig; a scooter putted by with a toddler perched on the front and a cage of chickens on the back; birds had built a nest on a bottle-shaped sign advertising Coca-Cola, making it look like the Coke was foaming over. A feast of the senses, a confusion to the mind. Allen wanted to stretch wide his arms and gather in every ounce of it. This was LIFE.
However, the Army decided to place LIFE on the shelf for a while. They were issued their jungle fatigues, but it was ten days before the last of them were processed and shipped out. They cooled their heels at the base in Bien Hoa, getting up basketball games or playing poker, submitting to lectures and inoculations, sitting around with beers at night to watch the fireworks display of distant battle over the horizon, champing at the bit. They even picked up garbage for a while, since the sergeant couldn’t think of anything else to do with them.
Flores went first because, despite his stature, he’d trained to hump a radio and there was a platoon that badly needed an operator. Dogs and Pete went next, together to a platoon way up north near the DMZ. Finally, four days later, Allen was handed his orders; he was surprised to see it was the same company, just a different platoon.
“Why didn’t they send me there three days ago when Dogs and Farmboy went?” he complained, although he knew enough about t
he Army now to figure it was just the usual inefficiency.
“Maybe they didn’t need reinforcement three days ago,” the bored sergeant said.
Allen opened his mouth to object, then closed it again before he could say something monumentally naive. Of course he was going to replace someone who’d been killed—or maybe just wounded. This was a war, stupid.
Sounded like there’d be action there, he told himself, and felt a peculiar flutter down in his gut where glee and apprehension mixed.
The Chinook flew north along the coast, Allen’s face pressed to the small, cloudy window to stare at the countryside, intensely foreign and green, to which he would give the next year of his life. (Or even the life itself—but he wouldn’t think about that.) They flew so long, it began to seem that they’d soon run out of country, then abruptly dropped out of the sky to land with a jolt that rattled Allen’s bones. He hauled his duffel out into a land that was still hot as hell, still stank of burning shit barrels and jet fuel, but at least wasn’t quite such a madhouse of men and machines. In fact, once Allen got away from the HQ, loaded down at last with weapons and gear, he thought the country really wasn’t bad at all.
Five deuce-and-a-half transports left the command post in convoy, with Allen and all his equipment in the third along with two dozen or so other replacements. The guy next to him was completely stoned, oblivious to the billows of red dust pouring in the sides and back of the truck. Allen pulled his T-shirt over his face and coughed into its dusty dampness. The stoned guy didn’t bother, and soon had what looked like red frost rimed on his eyelashes and tracks of blood-colored sweat dribbling down his face. Finally Allen had to speak.
“Why don’t they take turns riding first?” he complained.
“’Cause they got the lunatics up front,” the other guy said.
“No, I mean, couldn’t we at least take turns having a breath of air?”
The stoned grunt reared back his head and struggled to focus on Allen’s face. “You an FNG, ain’t ya?” he asked, and began to giggle as if Red Skelton was standing in front of him.
“Yeah I’m new, what of it?”
“You belong up front, then, sweetie.”
Finally, the soldier on the other side of the pothead leaned forward to put Allen out of his misery. “Lost fourteen men in one day last week. VC mines the road.”
And the first truck in line . . . Allen felt like an idiot. “Right,” he mumbled, and pulled the stifling T-shirt back up across his face.
The other guys had a good laugh.
Bravo Company was at home today, all three rifle platoons and their weapons teams occupying the company’s Night Defensive Post instead of out on patrol. In the half-light of early evening the NDP was a sunbaked, half-bald hillock covered with sandbags and canvas, set off from the rice fields, noodle shops, and refugee shacks by a perimeter of concertina wire and guard posts: home for a hundred twenty-some frustrated, crazy-ass, armed-to-the-teeth teenagers and their not-much-older officers. Children wandered around on both sides of the wire, along with the dogs, pigs, and chickens. The place smelled like a urinal and sounded like an open-air rock and roll concert, but the company had been there for long enough that most of the men’s hooches had some kind of scrounged material reinforcing their canvas roofs. The hooch someone pointed Allen to was not one of those, but at least its canvas was taut and whole. It was, however, empty. He let his rucksack slide to the ground between two empty “beds” made of C-ration cardboard with deflated air mattresses on top, took out his felt-tip pen to write his DEROS date ceremonially on the cover of his helmet, and went to see if he could find Dogs and Farmboy.
He tracked them down on the other side of the hillock, in a cluster of men bent over a borrowed mess pot filled with some kind of meal they were debating over. He walked up behind Dogs and said, “Hey.”
Dogs craned up and gave him a grin, although he didn’t stand up or introduce him around. “Hey, man. Didn’t know you were coming here.”
“Second Platoon,” Allen informed him. Dogs nodded and turned to stir the pot with a wooden stick.
“How’s it goin’?” Allen asked.
“Oh, you know.”
Allen nodded himself, as if he did know, and since Dogs didn’t seem interested in pursuing the conversation, he said hello to Pete. The farmboy too was taken up with the contents of the pot; Allen, feeling more like an intruder every moment, just stood back and watched them.
There was, he realized, some subtle difference in the two men he’d met on the bus in Saigon. It wasn’t just the grubbiness of their fatigues or the scabbed scratches on both men’s arms. It was something in their faces and in the way they held themselves.
“You seen some action?” he blurted out, then flushed with embarrassment.
Dogs shrugged, and glanced sideways at Pete. “Farmboy here killed himself a gook on his first patrol.”
“Way to go, Pete!” Allen responded, although he wasn’t at all sure this was the right answer. The blond boy himself looked, if anything, queasy at the memory, but Dogs didn’t give his platoon-mate a chance to put his foot in it.
“Yeah, after chow we’re gonna take the kid down to the camp, introduce him to one of the boom-boom girls.”
At that, Pete turned bright red.
There was, however, no move to invite Allen’s participation, either to the mess in the pot or to the evening’s entertainment. After a minute, he said he’d better go find his squad.
“You do that, Carmichael,” Dogs told him, not looking up. “See you ’round.”
The message was clear: A man’s platoon is his family, and Allen had better go find his own. So he did.
In spite of the awkward beginning, Allen quickly settled into the life of a grunt. The company’s NDP was in a quiet zone, and for the next week the most exciting thing that happened was the VC who wandered through every other night to toss a grenade or two into their midst, making them all turn out and blaze away into the complacent darkness. A black trooper named Cooper broke his trigger finger catching a baseball, two other men were lifted out with high fevers, and a couple of others got so short they were sent to a bigger base to await the end of their year’s service. Nobody liked to dangle a man in front of Fate when he only had a few weeks left on his helmet’s calendar. Even a combat zone as quiet as this was no place for a soldier with a wakening sense of self-preservation. Short-timer’s jitters made everyone in the vicinity nervous.
By week’s end, Allen could have done with some jitters: He’d written a hundred letters home to Lisa, and thought he’d go nuts with boredom.
The lieutenant in command of Second Platoon was a Texan named Woolf, called The Wolf by his men. The nickname was appropriate, not only because of the man’s oddly large incisors, but because he carried himself with a kind of lupine authority, quiet and with an element of native threat. He had a knack of slipping soundlessly in and among his men, and his commands were well-thought-out and never contested; Second Platoon, which on the day of Allen’s arrival numbered twenty-nine men, felt secure under The Wolf’s rule. Allen was well satisfied.
The leader of Delta Squad, on the other hand, was something of a washout, the kind of soldier who always managed to be behind a tent when volunteers were sought, who helped himself to the prime C-rations before the carton was dumped in front of the other men, and who was generally a pain in the ass to anyone who was interested in action. His name was Bird, and if they called him Birdman, it was not because he was a hard guy. Birdman was twenty-two, acted like Allen’s prissy grandfather, and had sixty-eight days left on his tour.
Delta Squad now numbered eight. Chris Adamson was a blond surfer from San Diego with gold-rimmed granny glasses, facial hair so new he only had to shave every couple of weeks, a string of genuine San Francisco love beads, and an endless stash of high-grade pot. Theo “T-bone” Muller was the son of a German butcher from Pittsburgh whose bad acne vied with a perpetual sunburn for control of his face, and whose time in basic and
two months in-country hadn’t managed to wear the baby fat from his cheeks. Mouse Tobin was a very large, very black, nearly professional football player from Seattle. The three were roughly Allen’s age, and none had more than a dozen weeks in-country, although the fourth man, Streak Rychenkow, was the squad’s oldest at twenty-three, with five months in-country. The eponymous white patch in Streak’s black hair was the source of a hundred explanatory tales from falling through a skylight during a burglary to an assault with a baseball bat—all good stories, but after the third version, Allen decided the truth had to be either too boring or too embarrassing to be told. Nobody was quite sure where Streak was from or what his family situation was, although his accent was Midwestern and he carried a picture of a woman with two small children with him wherever he went.
Hal Fields and Chuck Tjader were short-timers with less than six weeks to go. Allen watched the two covertly, wondering what he would look like when he had that much time crossed off the back of his helmet; these guys looked like anyone else, just a whole lot older. Hal talked incessantly about his recent R&R in Japan, how he was going to move there after DEROS; he had a small Japanese grammar book he was slowly working his way through; Chuck was too silent to get much out of, other than he missed his wife and sometimes dreamed about the Colorado mountains.
Allen got along with the rest of the squad well enough, considering he was the fucking new guy, the cherry, the fresh meat, so none of them was about to grant him any but the most grudging friendship until he’d proved he wasn’t going to get himself—or them—killed by his incompetence. He kept his mouth shut, watched how the more experienced men acted, and couldn’t wait for his first patrol out into all that green.
It was Hal who told him the reason for their extended leisure behind the wire: the delayed arrival of the company’s new captain. However, like captains through the ages, no sooner had this one hit the ground than he had to establish himself in the eyes of his men and of his superiors. He arrived on a Tuesday afternoon; patrols into the green began again at dawn Wednesday.