After a minute, Mouse did so. The man stumbled rapidly backwards out of reach, his hands nursing his throat, coughing. “You bastards are in real trouble here. I’ll have your heads for this—”
Allen put his gun away and started pulling Mouse and Chris back. At the tent flap he gave the two men a firm push, then turned back to say, “Before you go reporting us, maybe you should have a conversation with your friend the gunner, find out what this was all about. Tell him the guys he met crossing the river the other morning want to have a word with him.”
The three invaders walked away with dignity, certain the card players would come after them, but they made it without incident through the camp and to the gate. At Mouse’s insistence, they ripped through the Vietnamese encampment, from one end to the other, ignoring the cries of outrage and the offers of “Boom-boom, GI?” and “Good fucky-sucky, okay here.” Their target was not to be found in any noodle shop or boom-boom girl’s bed, and none of the vendors or customers would admit to having seen him. It was frustrating, particularly for Mouse, who ached to beat up an enemy, any enemy. Allen and Chris had to haul him away from two confrontations; the third time, when he stood in a bar full of First Cav men and called them cowards, even Chris had to admit they were getting nowhere but into the promise of full-body casts, and they made their exit. It took them most of the night to hitch their way home, trudging through the company wires to the smell of breakfast cooking. Allen was famished. As they walked back toward their hooches, they passed one of their platoon going in the other direction. He raised an eyebrow at their condition, but said merely, “There’s somebody looking for you, Carmichael. I think he’s in your hooch.”
“Who is it?”
“Don’t know. Kid in a First Cav uniform, looks like the mascot.”
The grunt walked on, leaving Allen staring at Mouse and Chris. They marched across the camp to Allen’s hooch, jostled to get into the small space, and woke their visitor.
He was just a kid—as full of fresh-faced innocence as Farmboy had been, small enough to have given his recruiting officer pause. The gunner stumbled up from where he had been sitting against the wall, blinking at their entrance, all but rubbing the sleep from his eyes like a child. Even Mouse, who had come to the hooch with his fists clenched in readiness, hesitated.
The boy straightened his jacket and his shoulders, and stepped forward with his hand out. “My name is Greg Perry. I’m the guy who shot at your squad Tuesday morning. It was a terrible mistake. I have no excuse for my actions. I’ve admitted full responsibility, but my CO gave me permission to come here and tell you myself how sorry I am before I’m taken into custody.”
He stood before them, hand out but clearly braced for their rejection. He was practically on the edge of tears.
What else could they do? Allen stared at the outstretched hand, let out a deep breath, and shook it. After a minute, Chris followed. Mouse looked at it, but in the end screwed up his face and muttered, “I can’t, man. Friend of mine died in that river. I can’t tell you that’s okay.”
“I understand. If you want to hit me, go ahead. I won’t report you.”
In the face of that, even Mouse had to retreat.
“Nah, man. You gonna have problems enough, don’t need a broken jaw on top of ’em.”
They watched the boy put on his hat and set it straight. When he saluted them, it was all Allen could do not to return it. Greg Perry walked past them out of the hooch. His hat came to Mouse’s chin.
“Ah, fuck it,” Mouse said when the kid had left them. “Just fuck this whole fucking war, anyway.”
Three days later, at a quarter after nine on the first sunny morning in some time, Second Platoon’s new lieutenant arrived. The jeep passed through the gates and climbed the hill, and the man in the razor-creased uniform dismounted from the vehicle to plant two shiny boots on the worn soil. The sergeant was nowhere in sight, and the officer surveyed his new command from behind a pair of impenetrable black lenses. The men were sprawled around the compound, soaking in the warmth like so many large, grubby lizards. The Beach Boys extolled the virtues of California from several speakers, courtesy of the Armed Forces radio, with a Hendrix guitar solo beating their harmony back from the corner where the black troopers congregated and Frank Zappa doing his thing from inside the next bunker. The newly arrived officer seemed to expect his platoon to leap instantly to its collective feet, but after the last week, the platoon would take its revenge where it could, and it ignored him. One corner of the newcomer’s mouth pulled up briefly, then relaxed.
As chance would have it, Allen was among the soldiers nearest to him. He’d been trying to figure out why Chris’s rifle kept jamming whenever it heated up, and was so closely involved with the project—prodding delicately with the cleaning rod, searching for rust—that he was unaware of the arrival of Authority until its polished boots intruded themselves into his line of vision. He blinked, looked up into his own reflection in the dark glasses, and was struck by an irrational crawling sensation up the nape of his neck—what his grandmother would call someone walking on his grave.
“Soldier, do you know where your sergeant is?” The man’s voice was light, educated, and quiet, which might have made for a pleasing combination but for the indefinable quality of scorn that it carried, as if the person he was addressing had all the intelligence and self-awareness of an ape. Allen got to his feet, more from wariness than from the respect due an officer, and held on to the gun with his right hand.
“Yes, sir. I think he went to see about our shipment of LAWs.”
“Well, you go find him. Tell him I want him in my quarters at ten hundred hours.”
Allen looked over at the other men, who were doing nothing more strenuous than writing letters, and mentally shrugged. “Okay, sir. Ten hundred hours.”
“Did no one teach you how to salute, soldier?” the quiet voice asked. It sounded as if he was asking, Did no one teach you to wipe your ass, moron?
Allen stiffened. He was already in an irritable mood, even more so than usual, a combination of frustration at the damned gun, the underlying suspicion that in the hands of a more enthusiastic owner the thing wouldn’t be jamming, and the fact that Chris himself was just sitting there watching and crunching his way through the M&Ms from about ten sundry packs, to say nothing of the dose of malaria prophylaxis they’d swallowed that morning, singing through his teeth and skull like feedback. And now to find they’d sent as The Wolf’s replacement a man like this—for one brief fraction of an instant, his hand felt the urge to raise Chris’s gun and try out its firing mechanism on the man, but he squelched the feeling before it started, smoothly and obediently transferring both cleaning rod and M16 to his left hand so he could snap out a salute. If the guy wanted his rank pointed out for a nearby sniper, who was Allen to argue?
The new lieutenant studied Allen. He surely couldn’t have been aware of Allen’s brief flare of animosity—Allen himself had hardly known it was there—but still, he stood for a moment, smiling oddly at Allen, before he turned on his heel and walked back to the jeep.
Allen let out a breath, glanced at his watch, then squatted down to show Chris the suspect point in the feed; halfway through his demonstration, he felt a cool tickle up the back of his neck. He looked around. The officer was sitting motionless in the jeep, watching him—waiting, it seemed, for his order to be carried out. It was oh-nine-twenty; it would take Allen five minutes to hunt down the sergeant and thirty seconds to deliver the order, which left him more than half an hour of leeway before ten hundred hours. But the lieutenant sat waiting and so Allen pushed the gun into Chris’s hands, telling him that he’d be back to finish it in a minute. As he walked off up the hill, he heard the jeep start up and move away.
He found the Sarge gassing in the cook tent, and told him their new loot wanted to see him at ten hundred hours. Allen hesitated; he got along fine with Sergeant Keys, but he couldn’t exactly tell him that their new loot had made the hair on the back
of his neck stand up. The Sarge’d think he was nuts. In the end, he just added weakly, “The guy’s got real pretty polished boots.”
“Figures.”
“You know him?”
“Of him. Name of Brennan.”
“What do you know about him?”
“Not a thing. Has your squad got itself sorted yet?”
“Not really. Lieutenant Woolf was going to reorganize when we got back. Garrison’s off on leave.”
“Who’s squad leader ’til he gets back?”
“Well, Chris is.”
The sergeant’s look said it all. “Who’s next? Mouse?”
“Yeah.”
“How would he feel about being leader?”
Mouse would be fine as a squad leader if he made up his mind to get along with the others instead of growling at them, but it would be up to him. Allen said something of the sort to the sergeant, who nodded.
“Okay, I’ll think about it, have a word with Lieutenant Brennan.”
Fifteen minutes after he’d gone in to see the new loot, the sergeant was rounding up all the squad leaders—including Chris, until decisions were made—to inform them that a new regime had begun. It would start with haircuts, clean shaves, no sideburns, and regulation Ts instead of the rock and roll T-shirts half of them wore. The squad leaders looked at each other with apprehension, and went to do as they were told.
When the sergeant came past, Allen called out to him, “Hey Sarge, has this guy ever been in the woods before?” He was voicing the concern of them all: If Brennan was new to jungle warfare, the platoon would be teaching a green officer the nitty-gritty about his job. Not an ideal way to begin.
“He’s been sitting a desk for a while, but he’s been here since sixty-five, and yeah, he’s spent time in the woods.”
“But he still wants haircuts.”
“He wants the haircuts, he wants the men and the grounds cleaned up. And that volleyball net down. Now.”
“Shit,” someone muttered.
“And Lieutenant Brennan’s not too keen on obscenity,” the sergeant added.
“Well, fuck me Brenda,” someone else said aloud.
Allen stifled a laugh, but it wasn’t very amusing. The men felt bad enough at losing The Wolf, and to have the man replaced by an REMF was going to prove hard to swallow. The others were thinking the same, because after they were dismissed, Mouse, walking in front of Allen, said very clearly, “Boys, we got us a rear echelon motherfucker.”
But they scraped off their whiskers, stuffed the more offensive T-shirts back into their duffels, and at one time or another, most of them managed to pass by the platoon’s canvas HQ in order to lay eyes on their new lieutenant. Strangely enough, considering Allen’s first gut reaction, most of the guys thought he’d work out great.
It was funny, Allen reflected that night as he stared up into the darkness. You’d think men as hard-pressed as these would be so glad to rest in the relative safety of the company NDP that they’d drag their feet at anything threatening to push them outside the perimeter. Still, even if he didn’t like the man, he’d give him a chance. He had to admit, life in camp was so boring it made his skin jump. If surface tidiness for an REMF was the price to pay for getting back out into the bush, then shave he would. Hell, he’d spit-polish his jungle boots if the bastard wanted him to.
Out in the bush, that was where he belonged.
Lieutenant Brennan—now permanently known as Brenda—had his platoon assembled on the clearing used by the supply choppers. Most of the men hadn’t been at full attention in many weeks, and their bodies had forgotten how. The sergeant howled at them until they were more or less rigid—cheeks smooth, hair cropped, pants bloused into clean boots—then gave them permission to stand at ease.
The lieutenant stood before them, hands clasped behind his back, eyes invisible behind his black glasses, waiting for their attention to settle. Allen prepared himself for the standard lecture taken from an officer’s handbook, under the heading “Speeches for a Company in Need of Discipline.” All around him he could feel his mates arranging looks of attentive receptivity on their faces, locking their eyes on the man while their ears shut down and their minds were free to wander. They might have granted him their conditional approval, but no loot new to the bush was going to command anything but the most surface obedience, not until he had proven himself.
The trim figure stood waiting. The platoon went quiet, and still he stood. The speech on Discipline and Pride did not begin, and one by one the eyes of the men came back to him, wondering what was going on.
For the first time, Allen noticed how small the man was, a good head shorter than Sergeant Keys. His features were delicate, with high cheekbones and narrow nose, but for his mouth, which was surprisingly wide and full. Dropped into a prison yard, Allen thought, the guy wouldn’t stand a chance. Maybe that was why Brenda spent so much time on his physique: His upper body looked like it could do a hundred one-armed push-ups without breaking a sweat.
Only later did it occur to Allen to wonder why he had equated that proper military figure with a prison yard.
The black lenses hiding Brennan’s eyes never wavered in the sunlight. The lieutenant stood like a statue while his men examined him, as they all began to wonder why he wasn’t speaking, as their restlessness shifted into uneasiness. And only then, the instant before the first head turned to consult the man at its side, did Brennan move.
He reached up to pull off his dark glasses, revealing a pair of icy blue eyes, the irises so pale they seemed alien, or artificial. In the sunlight, the pupils were invisible, exaggerating the weird brightness of the blue. The eyes touched down onto each man in turn with a psychic tingle, as if they were some kind of a weapon with an electrical charge. It took a long time for him to make a reading of the thirty men now under his command.
Finally, he spoke, his light voice so low those in the back had to strain to hear. It may have been a deliberate technique, to get his troops to pay close attention in spite of themselves, but it certainly invoked a feeling of intimacy. It felt as if he were murmuring directly into each ear. What he said came as a surprise.
“You men have had an eventful few weeks. I trust that each of you is now fully committed to paying Charlie back. From here on out, this platoon will go hunting the enemy. From this time forward, I am your mama and your papa and your grade school teacher rolled into one, and when I say ‘Shoot,’ you don’t even say ‘Where?’ Each confirmed kill earns a man an extra ration of beer and a free day back at base. I trust we understand each other, gentlemen. We will leave at oh six hundred hours. Dismissed.”
The glasses went back on, and the man was gone before anyone else could move. As Allen watched the trim lieutenant stride off, he was aware of the hum of talk around him. The others seemed eager to begin, pumped up by the promise of revenge.
So why did he feel as if a sleazy man in a bar had just muttered a proposition in his ear?
That night the Sarge came through, carrying a paper with the new squad assignments and leading two new faces who’d arrived on the night chopper. Bravo Squad was being re-formed, so the men who had been with Delta since the debacle at the river picked up their bags and split. The new faces were an FNG named deRosa, a swarthy boy with delicate hands and the eyelashes of a fashion model, and an Oregon logger named Penroy who was halfway through his second tour of duty. No one argued with Penroy’s assignment as leader. The squad now consisted of Chris, Mouse, and Allen, de Rosa and Penroy, and Tim Balsam and Joey Thomas (who’d been with them for less than two weeks, and were known collectively as Tim-and-Tom). They’d also be getting another newby in a day or two.
Later that evening, Allen went to welcome Penroy and offer to show him around. Penroy had been in Saigon, and he thought Walter Cronkite was right, the war was lost. Then Allen asked him, “You hear we got a brand-new lieutenant?”
“Heard we had one, haven’t met him yet.”
“Little guy named Brennan, weird ey
es and polished—”
“Brennan?” Penroy swiveled to look at him, the shirt he was stowing forgotten in his hand. “Cal Brennan?”
“Don’t know his first name. Sarge said he’d been in-country since sixty-five, but he’s been sitting a desk for a while. Why? You know him?”
“Of him.” The new guy turned away.
“What have you heard?”
“Nothing. Just . . . Nothing.”
“Is there a problem with the guy? I mean, everybody else seems to think he’s okay, but I’ve got to say he gave me the creeps.”
Penroy muttered something that Allen didn’t catch, and he wouldn’t repeat it when Allen asked, but it had sounded like “Sensible man.”
“Hey Penroy, look,” Allen persisted. “Tell me what you know.”
“Well, the man lost his platoon.”
“Lost it? What do you mean, like, misplaced it out in the bush?”
“I mean they walked into an ambush. Three men and Brennan came out. And when they went to get the bodies, they only found one—parts of one, and two mismatched boots. That’s the story, anyway. Twenty-six men and their equipment got swallowed by the green, not so much as a dog tag left behind. Nobody could prove it was Brennan’s fault, and the three guys with him swore he was a great leader, but they put him on a desk anyway. Guess he talked them into letting him back into the woods.”
Allen thought about the possibility that desk duty had taught some caution to the man with the strange eyes, thought about warning the others, and reluctantly decided that starting off with the entire platoon braced against the lieutenant would only make matters worse for everyone. “Might be better if the rest of the guys don’t know.”
“They’ll find out, soon enough.” Allen thought that the newcomer sounded grim.
Bright and early the next morning, the platoon assembled at the landing site, waiting for the Hueys. A heartbeat before the first vibration of the air heralded the choppers, Brenda walked up. He waited until the men were looking at him, and he raised his voice to give them his own version of an inspirational talk.