Sympathy for the Devil Read online

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 1987 by Kent Anderson

  Cover design by Allison Warner

  Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Mulholland Books ebook edition: November 2018

  Originally published in hardcover by Doubleday, July 1987

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  ISBN 978-0-316-48949-2

  E3-20181010-DA-NF

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PART ONE THE LAUNCH SITE

  DA NANG

  FREEDOM BIRD

  THE BLUFFS

  DA NANG

  PART TWO THE BEGINNING — FORT BRAGG

  NIGHT JUMP — PISGAH NATIONAL FOREST

  FORT HOLABIRD

  CAM RANH BAY

  DA NANG AIRPORT

  HON TRE ISLAND

  MONKEY MOUNTAIN

  MAI LOC LAUNCH SITE

  THE ORCHARD

  PART THREE BACK IN ’NAM

  EDGE OF THE AO

  QUANG TRI

  MAI LOC LAUNCH SITE

  HIGHWAY 14 — CUA VIET ROAD

  MAI LOC — RAINY SEASON

  YANKEE DELTA 528917—NVA FIELD HOSPITAL

  MAI LOC LAUNCH SITE

  QUANG TRI

  RED MOON BATTALION

  Permissions

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Discover More Kent Anderson

  About the Author

  Books by Kent Anderson

  This book is for Judith and Jennifer, who saved my life.

  PART ONE

  THE LAUNCH SITE

  A sheet of paper was tacked to the wall over Hanson’s bunk:

  Every day in the world a hundred thousand people die. A human life means nothing.

  General Vo Nguyen Giap, Commander-in-Chief, North Vietnamese Army

  “In order to despise suffering, to be always content and never astonished at anything, one must reach such a state as this”—and Ivan Dmitrich indicated the obese peasant, bloated with fat—“or else one must harden one’s self through sufferings to such a degree as to lose all sensitivity to them: that is, in other words, cease to live.”

  Anton Chekhov

  Hanson stood just inside the heavy-timbered door of his concrete bunker, looking out. There was no moon yet. The only sound was the steady sobbing of the big diesel generators, but Hanson heard nothing. Had the generators ever stopped he would have heard the silence, a silence that would have bolted him wide-awake, armed, and out of his bunk if he were asleep.

  He stepped from the doorway and began walking across the inner perimeter toward the teamhouse, a squat shadow ahead of him in the dark. His web gear, heavy with ammunition and grenades, swung from one shoulder like easy, thoughtful breathing. The folding-stock AK-47 in his right hand was loaded with a gracefully curving thirty-round magazine.

  As he got closer to the teamhouse, he could feel the drums and steel-stringed guitar on the back of his sunburned forearms and against the tender broken hump on his nose. Then he could hear it.

  Hanson smiled. “Stones,” he said softly. He didn’t have enough to pick out the song, but the bass and drums were pure Stones.

  He slid the heavy, light-proof door open and stepped into the bright teamhouse. The song, “Under My Thumb,” was pumping out of Silver’s big Japanese speakers.

  Quinn was pouting and strutting to the music, one hand hooked in his pistol belt, the other hand thrust out, thumbs down, like Caesar at the Roman games sending the pike into another crippled loser. His small blue eyes were close-set, cold and flat as the weekly casualty announcement, as he mouthed the words.

  Hanson shrugged his web gear to the floor, shouted, “Let me guess,” and pressed his hand to his freckled forehead. He pointed at Quinn and shouted into the music, “Mick Jagger, right? Your new Jagger impersonation.” His snub-nosed combat magnum glinted from its shoulder holster.

  Quinn ignored him, pounding the floor like a clog dancer.

  The battered white refrigerator was turned up to high in the damp heat, and gouts of frost dropped to the floor when Hanson opened it to get a Black Label beer. The seams and lip of the black&red cans were rusty from the years they had been stockpiled on the Da Nang docks. Years of raw monsoon and swelling summer heat had turned the American beer bitter. But it was cold; it made his fillings ache when he drank it.

  Hanson took a flesh-colored quart jar from the top of the refrigerator, screwed off the top, and took out two of the green&white amphetamine capsules. He knocked them back with the icy beer.

  Beats coffee for starting the day, he thought, smiling, recalling the double-time marching chant back at Fort Bragg: “Airborne Ranger Green Beret, this is the way we start our day,” running the sandhills before dawn, the rumor that one team had run over a PFC from a supply unit who had been drunkenly crossing the road in front of them. The team had trampled him and left him behind, never getting out of step, chanting each time their left jump boot hit the ground, “Pray for war. Pray for war. Pray for war.”

  He sat down on one of the wooden footlockers and began thumbing through the Time magazine that had come in on the last mail chopper.

  The Stones finished “Under My Thumb,” paused, and began “Mother’s Little Helper.” Quinn turned the volume down and walked over to Hanson. He moved with ominous deliberation, like a man carrying nitroglycerin. People got uncomfortable if Quinn moved too close or too quickly.

  “Keepin’ up with current events, my man?” he asked Hanson. “How’s the war going these days?”

  “This magazine says we’re kicking shit out of ’em. But now,” Hanson said, tapping the open magazine, “what about the home front? They’ve got problems too. Take this young guy, a ‘Cornell Senior’ it says here, ‘I’m nervous as hell. I finally decide on a field—economics—and then I find out I’m number fifty-nine in the draft lottery.’ Rough, huh? Just when he decided on economics.”

  Hanson thumbed through the magazine, singing softly, “. . . My candy man, he’s come an’ gone. Mah candy man, he’s come an’ gone. An’ I love ever’thing in this godomighty world, God knows I do…”

  To the west a heavy machine gun was firing, the distant pounding as monotonous as an assembly-line machine. Artillery was going in up north. Three guns working out. They were good, the rounds going in one on top of the other, each explosion like a quick violent w
ind, the sound your firestarter makes when you touch off the backyard charcoal grill. Normal night sounds.

  Hanson read the ads out loud. “ ‘There’s a Ford in your future.’ ‘Tired of diet plans that don’t work?…’ ”

  “Then come to Vietnam, fat boy,” Quinn shouted, “and get twenty pounds blown off your ass.”

  A short, wiry man came into the teamhouse. He wore round wire-rim glasses and had a thin white scar running from his lip up to the side of his nose like a harelip.

  “Silver,” Hanson yelled to him, then almost said, how much weight did you lose on the Vietnam high-explosive diet plan, but changed his mind. Silver had lost half his team, and his partner was in Japan with no legs.

  “How’s that hole in your ass?” Hanson asked him.

  Silver couldn’t talk without moving, gesturing, ducking, and jabbing like a boxer. He talked fast, and when he laughed it was a grunt, like he’d just taken a punch in the chest. “I like it a lot,” he said. “Thinking about getting one on the other side. For symmetry, you know? Dimples. A more coordinated limp,” he said, walking quickly forward then backward like a broken mechanical man. Then he stopped and stared at the reel-to-reel tape deck.

  “Listen to that,” he said, cocking his head slightly. “Background hiss. And that tape’s almost new.”

  “How much longer you gonna be on stand-down, you skinny little gimp?” Quinn asked him.

  “Couple weeks. I’ll fake it a little longer if I have to. Captain says he’s gonna try and get Hanadon up here from the C team for my partner. I don’t want to go out with some new guy.”

  “. . . Candy man,” Hanson sang to himself as he leafed through the magazine, “he been and gone, oh my candy man, he been and gone. Well I wish I was down in New Or-leens…”

  “And look here,” he said, holding up the magazine. “President visiting the troops over at the Third Mech fire base.”

  Silver had a slight limp as he walked over. He looked at the two-page color spread. “Shit,” he said, then laughed. “I was there. After they fixed me up, but before they said I could come back here. The troops down there? They spent three weeks building wooden cat-walks around the guns so the Prez wouldn’t get his feet muddy. Of course, huh, they weren’t able to use the guns for fire missions for three weeks, but they looked good. Issued all the troops brand-new starched fatigues an hour before The Man was supposed to get there, and made ’em stand around at parade rest so they wouldn’t get wrinkled.

  “So our main man, the Prez, gets there…”

  Silver went over to the icebox and got a Coke, then put a mark next to his name on the beer&pop tab on the wall with a red grease pencil. He pulled the pop-top off, put it on his little finger like a ring, and took a long drink.

  “The Prez gets there, and they start moving the troops, processing the troops past him, and he, like, asks ’em, ‘Hi, son, and where are you from?’

  “The troop says, ‘Uh, Waseca. Minnesota, sir.’

  “ ‘Yes,’ the Prez says to him, ‘beautiful state, Minnesota. They’ve got a fine football team at the university there too.’

  “Now, I’m hearing all this over the PA system they got. They’d, you know, put me and some of the other people from the hospital out of sight. I wasn’t looking too good. Didn’t look like I had enough, uh, enthusiasm for the mission.”

  Silver looked down at his baggy fatigues. “At best I don’t look like soldier-of-the-month. Anyway, the Prez gives the guy a big handshake and says, ‘I just wanted to personally let you know, Private, uh…’

  “ ‘Private Thorgaard, sir,’ this boxhead from Minnesota, this cannon loader, says, and turns so the Prez can see his name tag, but there ain’t no name tag, ’cause somebody forgot to put out the word that name tags had to be sewn on the new fatigues. So now, some supply officer’s military career is over. Poor attention to detail.

  “But the Prez says, ‘I’m here, Private Thorgaard, because I wanted to let you boys know…’ ”

  Silver pulled himself up tight and began strutting and jabbing his finger at the floor, talking angrily to himself in a black street accent. “Boy? You boys? Fool up there best not be talkin’ ’bout boys, one of the brothers up there.

  “That’s the motherfuckin’ truth,” he went on in a slightly higher voice, “that ain’t no boool-shit. Say, gimme some of that power now.”

  Silver took a sip of Coke and went on in his own voice. “The brothers started doing the power handshake and all the white boys moved away.

  “So the Prez shakes some more hands, gives out a few medals, and says what a fine job we’re doing, and that he, your president, was doing everything he could to get us boys home. Then he climbs in his chopper and flies away, all the officers on the ground up there kind of crouching at attention, kind of like ducks at attention, trying to hold their hats on in the rotor blast.”

  “And you sat through the whole thing?” Quinn asked, “you enjoy the show that much?”

  “I was afraid to leave. I was afraid to move. I’m glad I didn’t have to shake hands with that fucker. I didn’t want to get within a hundred feet of him. That was Mr. Death standing up there shaking hands. They had gunships flying patterns around there I couldn’t fuckin’ believe. Then you got MPs all over, trying to look sharp, nervous and trigger-happy as hell. And then there were these guys. Secret Service, I guess. All around the Prez. Skinhead haircuts, mirror shades so you can’t see their eyes. They didn’t look—rational, you know. And they were all packing Uzi’s on assault slings under their coats. Anything move too fast or the wrong way, it would’ve got shot a thousand times. Half the camp would’ve got wiped out. Would have been like a bunch of Vietnamese in a firefight, shooting at everything.”

  Silver looked at the wristwatch hanging through the buttonhole of his breast pocket. “Better get down and take the radio watch,” he said, “end of the month. Gonna be clearing artillery grids all night. They gotta blow up what’s left of the old monthly allotment or next month’s allotment will be smaller. That’s logical, right? The U.S. Army is logical. It’s a logical war.

  “Hey,” he said, “you want anything blown up? Third Mech’s set up a new fire base. ‘Fire Base Flora,’ in honor of the commander’s wife. Got everything on it—one five-fives, one seven-fives, eight inch. Want me to have them plow the ground for you?”

  “How about that ridge?” Hanson said.

  Quinn nodded.

  “You know the one,” Hanson said, “about eight klicks north.”

  “The one where Charles ate up that company of dumbass Third Mech?” Silver asked, “just this side of the border?”

  “That’s it. Might as well put a little shit on it. South side, kind of walk it from the valley halfway up the side. We’ll probably be over that way in the morning.”

  “Okay,” Silver said, “you people watch your ass over there. Charles has got you by the balls when he gets you in Laos. I fuckin’ know.”

  He walked to the screen door, stopped, and turned around. “Listen,” he said, pointing his finger at Hanson, “listen,” he demanded. Then he smiled and sang, “You must remember this…’ ” spinning around on one foot and slamming out the door, “ ‘a kiss is still a kiss…’ ” and tap-danced out into the dark, “ ‘a sigh is just a sigh…’ ”

  Silver went down into the underground concrete-reinforced radio bunker and relieved Dawson. He sat at a small desk surrounded on three sides by banks of radios, some of them as big as filing cabinets. They all hummed slightly, each at a different pitch, radiating static and heat like little ovens.

  He spent his first few minutes studying “call signs,” code names for fire bases and infantry units. The call signs were composed by computer and changed each month in an attempt to confuse the enemy as to what name the units went by. Each call sign was composed of two words, such as “broken days,” or “violent meals,” and at times the random combinations sounded ominous. Superstitious soldiers were glad when they were changed.

  His gl
asses flashing in the dim yellow and blue dial lights, Silver looked demonic, his face the color of someone dead, as he bobbed his head and shoulders to the rhythm of some stray phrase of code only he could hear.

  Up in the teamhouse Hanson was standing next to the bar. “You know,” he said, holding a bullet in each hand between thumb and forefinger, “you can get an idea of a country’s national character by the bullets their armies use.”

  “Oh yeah,” Quinn said, turning on the bar stool to look at Hanson. “I guess you’re gonna tell me about it.” He got up and took a beer from the refrigerator, pulled the top off like it was a thumbnail, and drank it all, foam running down his cheeks and neck.

  “Now you see,” Hanson said, “here’s the standard American small-arms round,” and held out the bright bullet toward Quinn. “It’s slim, lightweight, and fast, but unstable. Look at it,” he said, shaking the pencil-thin round. “It’s the bullet equivalent of a fashion model—sexy-looking, thin, glittering. But if it gets dirty or damp or overheated, it’s liable to jam on you. Temperamental, a prima donna.

  “Now here’s the Russian bullet,” he said, holding out the dull AK-47 round. “Short, thick around the middle. The peasant woman of bullets. Sturdy and slow, not easily deflected by brush, dependable at long range. You can stick it in the mud, put it in the gun, and shoot it.

  “We’re shooting our fashion models at them and they’re firing back with peasant women,” he said, holding the bullets out, grinning.

  “You know,” Quinn said, “I’m used to hearing that kind of shit from you. It doesn’t surprise me. It even makes a weird kind of sense, sometimes. But,” he said, walking over to Hanson and wrapping his big arm around his shoulders, squeezing, whispering now, “let’s just keep it between ourselves. You don’t want to be telling that to anybody else, ’cause they’ll lock you up. And we’d all miss you.”

  They looked at each other, smiled, and burst into laughter.