“Remember November?” asked Bonson.
“Yes, sir,” said Donny, and indeed he did. It stuck in his mind, not the whole thing, really, but one ludicrous moment.
It was late, near 2400, midnight in the American soul, and the Marines of Bravo in full combat gear were filing into the Treasury Building, adjacent to the White House, for protective duties against the possibilities of the next morning in a city where 200,000 angry kids had camped on the mall. A bone-dry moon shone above; the weather was crisp but not yet brutal. The Marines debarked from their trucks, holding their M14s at the high port, bayonets fixed, but still wearing their metal scabbards.
As Donny led his men downward toward the entrance, his eye was caught by light and he looked up. The abutment at the end of the ramp was brick and, being situated between the oh-so-white White House on the left and the oh-so-dark Treasury on the right, yielded a perspective on Pennsylvania Avenue, where the architects of the crusade for peace had organized a silent candlelight vigil.
So one line of young Americans carried rifles into a government building, under tin pots and thirty-five pounds of gear, while twenty-odd feet above them, at a perfect right angle, another line of young Americans filed along the deserted street, cupping candles, the light of which weirdly illuminated and flickered on their tender faces. Donny’s epiphany came at that moment: no matter what the fiery lifers said or the screaming-head peaceniks, both groups of Americans were pretty much the same.
“Yes, sir,” said Donny. “I remember.”
“Were you aware, Corporal, that radical elements anticipated the movements of only one military unit, Company B of Marine Barracks, and that just by the hairiest of coincidences did a Washington policeman discover a bomb that was set to take out the phone junction into the Treasury, thereby effectively cutting off B Company and leaving the White House and the president defenseless? Think of it, Corporal. Defenseless!”
He seemed to get a weird charge out of saying Defenseless!, his nostrils flaring, his eyes lit up.
Donny had no idea what to say. He hadn’t heard a thing about a bomb in a phone junction.
“How did they know you were there? How did they know that’s where you’d be?” demanded the lieutenant commander.
It occurred to Donny: There are two buildings next to the White House. One is the Executive Office Building, one is the Treasury. If you were going to move troops in, wouldn’t you move them into one of the two buildings? Where else could they be?
“I don’t—” he stammered and almost ended his career right there by blowing up in a big laugh.
“That’s when my team began to investigate. That’s when NIS got on the case!” proclaimed the lieutenant commander.
“Yes, sir.”
“We’ve run exhaustive background checks on everyone in the three line companies at the Marine Barracks. And we think we’ve found our man.”
Donny was dumbfounded. Then he began to get pissed.
“Sir, I thought we were already investigated for clearances before we came into the unit.”
“Yes, but it’s a sloppy process. One investigator handles a hundred clearances a week. Things get through. Now, let me ask you something. What would you say if I told you one member of your company had an illegal off-base apartment and was known to room with members of a well-known peace initiative?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“This PFC Edgar M. Crowe.”
Crowe! Of course it would be Crowe.
Ensign Weber spoke up, reading from documents.
“Crowe maintains an apartment at 2311 C Street, Southwest. There he cohabits a room with one Jeffrey Goldenberg, a graduate student at the Northwestern University Medill Newsroom in Washington. Crowe is no ordinary grunt, you know, Fenn. He’s a Yale dropout who only came into the Corps because his uncle had connections to a congressman who could make certain he’d never go to Vietnam.”
“Think of that, Fenn,” said Commander Bonson. “You’re over there getting your butt shot off, and he’s back here marching in parades and giving up intelligence to the peace freaks.”
Crowe: of course. Perpetual fuck-up, smart guy, goof-off, his furious intelligence hidden behind a burning ambition to be just good enough not to get rotated out, but not really good in the larger sense.
Still, Crowe: he was a punk, an unformed boy, he seemed no different than any of them. He was a kid just out of his teens, mixed up by the temptations and confusions of a tempting, confusing age.
“We know you, Fenn,” said the lieutenant commander. “You’re the only man in the company who enjoys the universal respect of both the career-track Marines who’ve done Vietnam and the boys who are just here to avoid Vietnam. They all like you. So we have an assignment for you. If you bring it off, and I know in my military mind that there’s no possibility you won’t, you will finish your hitch in twelve days a full E-5 buck sergeant in the United States Marine Corps. That I guarantee you.”
Donny nodded. He didn’t like this a bit.
“I want you to become Crowe’s new best friend. You’re his buddy, his pal, his father confessor. Flatter him with the totality of your attentions. Hang out with him. Go to his peace creep parties, get to know his long-haired friends. Get drunk with him. He’ll tell you things, a little at first, then more as time goes on. He’ll give up all his secrets. He’s probably so proud of himself and his little game he’s dying to brag about it and show you what a smart boy he is. Get us enough material to move against him before he gives up the unit on May Day. We’ll send him to Portsmouth for a very long time. He’ll come out an old man.”
Bonson sat back.
There it was, before Donny. What was most palpable was what had not been said. Suppose he didn’t do it? What would happen to him? Where would they send him?
“I don’t really—sir, I’m not trained in intelligence work. I’m not sure I could bring this off.”
“Fenn is a very straightforward Marine,” said Captain Dogwood. “He’s a hardworking, gung-ho young man. He’s not a spy.”
Donny could see that the captain’s interjection deeply irritated Lieutenant Commander Bonson, but Bonson said nothing, just stared furiously at Donny in the dark office.
“You have two weeks,” he finally said. “We’ll be monitoring you and expect a sitrep every other day. There’s a lot at stake, a lot of people counting on you. There’s the honor of the service and duty to country to consider.”
Donny swallowed and hated himself for it.
“You know, you have it pretty good here yourself,” said Bonson, to Donny’s silence. “You have a room in the barracks, not in the squad bay, a very pleasant duty station, a very pleasant duty day. You’re in Washington, DC. It’s spring. You’re going back to college, a decorated hero with all those veteran’s benefits, plus a Bronze Star and a nice chunk of rank. I’d say few young men in America have it quite as made as you.”
“Yes, sir,” said Donny.
“What the commander is saying,” said Ensign Weber, “is that it can all go away. In a flash. Orders can be cut. You could be back slogging the paddies in Vietnam, the shit flying all around you. It’s been known to happen. A guy so short suddenly finds himself in extremely hazardous duty. Well, you know the stories. He had a day to go and he got zapped. Letters to his mother, stories in the paper, the horror of it all. The worst luck in the world, poor guy. But sometimes, that’s the way it goes.”
More silence in the room.
Donny did not want to go back to Vietnam. He had done his time there, he’d gotten hit. He remembered the fear he felt, the sheer immense, lung-crushing density of it, the first time incoming began exploding the world around him. He hated the squalor, the waste, the sheer murder of it. He hated having his real life so close and then taken from him. He hated the prospect of not seeing Julie ever, ever again. He thought of some peace nerd comforting her after he was gone, and knew how that one would play out.
Almost imperceptibly, he nodded.
“Great,” said Bonson. “You’ve made the right decision.”
CHAPTER TWO
He stood outside, feeling idiotic. Rock music pumped out from inside. Inside it was loud, bright, crowded, festive. He felt so stupid.
He turned. There was Ensign Weber in the Ford, parked across the way on C Street. Weber nodded encouragingly, gave a little whisking motion with his head as if to say, Go on, get going, goddammit.
So now Donny stood outside the Hawk and Dove, a well-known Capitol Hill watering hole, where the young men and women who ran, opposed or chronicled the war tended to gather after six when official Washington closed down, except for the few old men in isolated offices waiting for the latest news on the air strikes or casualty figures.
It was a beautiful night, temperate and soothing. Donny was dressed in cutoffs, Jack Purcells, a madras shirt, just like half the kids who’d entered the place since he’d been standing there, except that unlike them, his ears stood out and his head wore only a little topside platter of hair. It said jarhead all the way.
But it was the Hawk and Dove where PFC Crowe was known to hang, and so it was at the Hawk and Dove he had been deposited.
Christ, Donny thought again, looking back to Weber and getting another of the whisking motions with the head.
He turned and plunged inside.
The place, as expected, was dark and close and jammed. Rock music pummeled against the walls. It sounded like Buffalo Springfield: There’s a man with a gun over there, what it is ain’t exactly clear—something like that, vaguely familiar to Donny.
Everybody was smoking and cruising. There seemed to be a sense of sex in the air as people eyed one another in the darkness, the pretty young girls from the Hill, the slim young men from the Hill. Nearly all the guys had big puffs of hair, but now and then he spied the whitewalls or at least the very short haired look of the military. Yet there wasn’t much tension; it was as if everybody just put it aside, left it outside for a generous helping of tribal bonding, the young not having to show anything at all in here to the murderous, controlling old.
Donny squeezed to the bar, ordered a Bud, forked over a buck and remembered, “Keep all your receipts. You can expense this. Our office will pick it up. But nothing hard. Bonson will fucking freak if you start chugging Pinch.”
“I’ve never even tasted Pinch,” Donny had replied. “Maybe tonight’s the night.”
“That’s a big negative,” said Weber.
Donny sipped his beer. Beside him, a guy was in the middle of a bitter fight with a girl. It was one of those quiet, muttered things, but very intense. The boy kept saying, under his breath, “You idiot. You unbelievable idiot. How could you let him? Him! How could you let him? You idiot.”
The girl merely stared ahead and smoked.
The time passed. His instructions were clear. He was not to approach Crowe. That would be a mistake. Sooner or later Crowe would see him, Crowe would approach him, and then it would go where it would go. If he threw himself at Crowe, the whole damned thing would fall apart.
Donny had another beer, checked his watch. He scoped the action. There were some attractive chicks but none as cool as Julie, the girl to whom he was engaged. Man, he smiled, I still got the best.
It was the football hero-cheerleader thing, but not really. Yes, he was a football hero. Yes, she was a cheerleader. But he didn’t really like football and she didn’t really like cheerleading. They actually were sort of forced together as boyfriend and girlfriend by peer pressure at Pima County High School, found they didn’t really like each other very much, and broke up. Once they broke up and started hanging out with other people, they missed each other. One night they went on a double date, he with Peggy Martin, Julie’s best friend, and she with Mike Willis, his best friend. And that was the night they really connected. Junior year. The war was far away then, happening on TV. Firefights in places like Bien Hoa and I Drang that he had never heard of. The napalm floating off the Phantoms and wobbling downward to blossom in a huge smear of tumbling fire across the jungle canopy. It meant nothing. Donny and Julie went everywhere that year. They were inseparable. It was, he thought, the best summer of his life, but senior year was better, when he’d led the Southwest Counties League in yardage, averaging close to two hundred a game. He was big and fast. Julie was so beautiful but she was nice, somehow. She was so nice. She was … good was the only word he could think of, and it was so lame.
“Jesus Christ!”
Donny felt a hand on his shoulder as the words exploded into his ear. He turned.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
Of course it was Crowe, in jeans and a work shirt looking very proletariat. He had—where the hell did he get that?—a camouflaged boonie cap on to disguise his hairlessness. He held a beer in his hand and was with three other young men who looked exactly like him except their hair was real, and long. They looked like three Jesuses.
“Crowe,” said Donny.
“I didn’t know this was your kind of place,” said Crowe.
“It’s a place. They have beer. What the fuck else would I need?” Donny said.
“This is my corporal,” Crowe said to his pals. “He’s a genuine USMC hero. He’s actually killed guys. But he’s a good guy. He only made me drop for twenty-five today instead of fifty.”
“Crowe, if you’d learn your shit, you wouldn’t have to drop for any.”
“But then I’d be collaborating.”
“Oh, I see. Fucking up funerals is part of your guerrilla war on the grieving mothers of America.”
“No, no, I’m only joking. But the funny thing is, I can’t tell my left from my right. I really can’t.”
“It’s port and starboard in the Marine Corps,” said Donny.
“I don’t know them either. Well, anyway. You want to join us? Tell these guys about ‘Nam?”
“Oh, they don’t want to hear.”
“No, really,” one of the other kids said. “Man, it must be fucking hairy óver there.”
“He won a Bronze Star,” said Crowe with a surprising measure of pride. “He was a hero.”
“I was lucky as shit not to get wasted,” Donny said. “No, no war stories. Sorry.”
“Look, we’re going to a party. We know this guy, he’s having a big party. You want to come, Corporal?”
“Crowe, call me Donny off duty. And you’re Ed.”
“Eddie and Donny!”
“That’s it.”
“Come on, Donny. Chicks everywhere. It’s over on C, right near the Supreme Court. This guy is a clerk. He knew my big brother at Harvard. More pussy in one place than you ever saw.”
“You should come, Donny,” said one of the boys. Donny could tell that the hero thing had cut through politics and somehow impressed these war-haters, who just a few years back had been worshiping John Wayne.
“I’m engaged,” Donny said.
“You can look, can’t you? She’ll let you look, won’t she?”
“I suppose,” said Donny. “But I don’t want any Ho Chi Minh shit. Ho Chi Minh tried to kill my ass. He’s no hero of mine.”
“It won’t be like that,” Crowe promised.
“Trig will like him,” one of the boys said.
“Trig will turn him into a peacenik,” said the other.
“So who’s Trig?” said Donny.
It was a short walk and as soon as they were outside, one of the boys pulled out a joint and lit up. The thing was routinely passed around until it came to Donny, who hesitated for a moment, then took a toke, holding it, fighting the fire. He’d had quite the habit for a few months in ’Nam, but had broken it. Now, the familiar sweetness rushed into his lungs, and his head began to buzz. The world seem to come aglow with possibility. He exhaled his lungful.
Enough, he thought. I don’t need more of that shit.
Capitol Hill had the sense of a small town in Iowa, under leafy trees that rustled in the night breeze. Then, through a break in the trees, he suddenly saw th
e Capitol, its huge white dome arc-lit and blazing in the night.
“They sacrifice virgins in there,” one of the boys said, “to the gods of war. Every night. You can hear them scream.”
Maybe it was the grass, but Donny had to smile. They did sacrifice virgins, but not in there. They sacrificed them ten thousand miles away in buffalo shit-water rice paddies.
“Donny,” said Crowe. “Can you call in artillery? We have to destroy the place to save it.”
Again, maybe it was the grass.
“ ‘Ah, Shotgun-Zulu-Three,’ ” he improvised, “ ‘I have a fire mission for you, map grid four-niner-six, six-five-four at Alpha seven-oh-two-five, we are hot with beaucoup bad guys, request Hotel Echo, fire for effect, please.’ ”
“Cool,” one of the kids said. “What’s Hotel Echo?”
“High explosive,” said Donny. “As opposed to frags or white phosphorous.”
“Cool as shit!” the boy responded.
Music announced the site of the party far earlier than any visual confirmation. As at the Hawk and Dove, it blasted out into the night, hard, psychedelic rock beating the dark back and the devil away. He’d heard the same stuff over there, though; that was the funny thing. The young Marines loved the rock. It went everywhere with them, and if their tough noncoms hadn’t stayed on their asses, they’d have played it on ambush patrols.
“I wonder if Trig is here,” one of the boys said.
“You never can tell with Trig,” Crowe replied.
“Who’s Trig?” Donny asked again.
The party didn’t seem at all unlike any other party Donny had attended back at the University of Arizona, except that the hair was longer. Milling people of all sorts. The bar scene, though crammed into smaller, hotter rooms. The smell of grass, sickly sweet, heavy in the air. Ho and Che on the walls. In the bathroom, where Donny went to piss, even an NVA flag, though one manufactured in Schenectady, not downtown Haiphong. He had a rogue impulse to burn it, but that would sure blow the gig now. And really: it was only a flag.