Sympathy for the Devil Read online

Mr. Minh walked into the teamhouse, smiling with teeth that had been filed to points, then capped in gold with jade inlays in the shapes of stars and crescent moons. It was part of his magic as a Rhade Montagnard shaman. He had high cheekbones, quick black eyes, and shoulder-length black hair that was tied back with a piece of green parachute nylon. He wore striped tiger fatigues and web gear heavy with grenades and ammo pouches. The little leather katha dangled from a cord around his neck. It, too, was part of his magic and could keep enemy bullets from piercing his body.

  “I saw a bird fly across the moon,” he said. “It is a good time for us to go. We are ready,” he said, tapping the pouch at his chest.

  “Mr. Minh,” Hanson said, “how can it be…I have wanted to ask you this—I have seen Rhade shot and killed when they were wearing katha to protect them.” Hanson called up the images of body after body like slides projected on a screen, little men sprawled in the dirt or curled up, hugging themselves, the leather pouches stuffed in their mouths. “How could that happen?” he asked.

  “Yes,” the Montagnard said, nodding his head. “Was bad katha. Not like mine. Too bad.” He went out the door, and Hanson saw the shadows of the three other stocky “Yards.” Their eyes and weapons flickered in the starlight. Mr. Minh knew that he would die someday, and he had no fear of death. As long as he lived well and fought bravely, he would be reborn as a hawk, or a hill spirit. Death was only a change of direction.

  Hanson began a last-minute equipment check, more a confidence ritual than anything else. He’d gone through his AK-47 the day before, checking for worn or broken parts while cleaning it, then test-fired one clip. He carried the Communist weapon instead of the standard-issue M-16 because the sound of the AK-47 would not give away his position in a firefight, while the M-16 would announce his position to Communists firing AKs. The M-16 used red tracer rounds while the AK-47 used green, and if they made contact at night, the tracer rounds would pinpoint him. On the illegal cross-border operations all equipment was “sanitized.” No insignia were worn and all weapons and equipment were of foreign manufacture, most of it acquired from the big CIA warehouse in Da Nang. If they were killed on the wrong side of the border, the North Vietnamese could not “prove” that they were Americans.

  Their web gear looked much like a parachute harness. Wide suspenders hooked into a brass-grommeted pistol belt. Two pieces of nylon webbing ran from the front of the pistol belt through the inside of the thighs to the back of the pistol belt. Thirty pounds of weapons and equipment were hung and taped to the web gear. The ammo clips were jammed into the pouches with the bullets facing away from the body in case an enemy bullet detonated them.

  Snap links were attached to the suspenders at the shoulders. It was called a Stabo rig. A helicopter could hover 120 feet in the air, drop nylon lines to attach to the snap links, and pull you out, leaving your hands free to fire or drop grenades. They could pull you out even if you were wounded and unconscious. Even if you were dead.

  Hanson wore a small survival compass around his neck like a crucifix. In one thigh pocket, wrapped in plastic, having curved to the shape of his thigh, was a stained and dog-eared copy of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats.

  Hanson heard a rhythmic hissing, and he shouted, “Hey! Hose, come on in here.”

  An odd-looking black dog waddled through the door. His skull was warped so that both his eyes appeared to be on the same side of his head, like a flounder. The hissing was the sound of his breathing through a crushed nose.

  The dog walked toward Quinn until he collided with his legs, then stood there waiting to be petted. Quinn bent and scratched the dog’s ears, then said, “No time now, Hose. We’ve got to go,” and patted him on the rump. The dog waddled back toward the door in a sideways, almost crablike way, then stopped and looked over at Quinn and Hanson.

  “See you in a few days, bud,” Hanson said.

  “Later, Hose,” Quinn said.

  The dog made a gurgling sound and went out the door.

  As a puppy, Hose had been run over by a Vietnamese driving a two-and-a-half-ton truck. It had been rainy season, and the deep mud had saved his life. His flexible puppy-skull bent enough so that it wasn’t fractured. Two of his legs had been broken, giving him his odd walk. The sound of his breathing was like a high-pressure air hose, and that’s where his name came from. Though he acted normal most of the time, he occasionally had fits of terror or rage and would race across the camp with wild flounder-eyes.

  Hose got along with the Americans and the Montagnards, though the Yards would have eaten him if Mr. Minh had not declared that he was a powerful spirit and should be respected. But Hose hated Vietnamese and acted as a watchdog after dark when the inner perimeter was closed off to even the Vietnamese who lived in the camp.

  “What an ugly fucking dog,” Quinn said, his voice full of admiration.

  Hanson pulled a small tin whistle from his pack and tooted a few notes out of it. He put the whistle to his eye and sighted down it, aiming at Quinn.

  “Do you know,” he said, “that they have whole tin whistle bands in Ireland, whole grade schools all playing tin whistles. Maybe I’ll go to Ireland when they decide we’ve won the war.”

  Quinn threw on his pack. “I’m going back to Iowa,” he said. “One fucked-up foreign country is enough for me. Shit, we’re all probably gonna die over here anyway.”

  Quinn carried a crude-looking weapon that seemed to be made of sheet metal and steel tubing. In his huge hand it looked like a cheap child’s toy. It was a Swedish submachine gun with a built-in silencer. Quinn had glued felt to the face of the bolt to muffle the clicking of the firing mechanism. It could kill at a hundred yards, the bursts of fire sounding like someone absently thumbing a deck of cards.

  Hanson shouldered his forty-pound pack, picked up the AK, and tromped to the refrigerator. He dropped another cap of speed into his breast pocket and stuck a Coke in his pack.

  As they went out the door, Jagger was singing “Paint It Black.”

  The five dark forms crossed through the outer perimeter and headed west. Another heavy machine gun opened up in the distance, and the big red tracers floated gracefully, like glowing golf balls, across the sky. Scores of them hit a hillside and rebounded in random patterns.

  Artillery rounds blinked silver and yellow and bluish white against the mountains.

  Hanson watched them, his eyes slightly dilated. “Goddamn, Quinn,” he said. “It’s always springtime in Vietnam.”

  Before dawn, they would be across the border.

  Seven miles up, the pilot of the lead bomber was tired and bored and worried. It had been a ten-hour flight from Guam, and it would be a ten-hour turnaround, refueling over the South China Sea, always a tricky little operation when they were bucking head winds. He swiveled his chair and looked out the thick window. The light coming through had the dead glare of an overexposed photograph.

  Cindy wasn’t doing well in school, his wife had written him. She needed a real father, she’d written, which of course meant that it was all his fault. She had also mentioned that she was having trouble with the car. It was hard to start now that the weather was turning cold.

  Fine, that’s fine, the pilot thought. Take it to the dealer, don’t tell me about it. Even if it’s only the battery terminals. Take it to the dealer and let them fuck you out of a hundred and fifty bucks. We’ve got the money. No, you want me to diagnose the goddamn thing by mail.

  Jesus Christ. I’m seven miles in the air and twelve thousand miles away. I’m flying a fifty-million-dollar aircraft and you want me to worry about the Buick. Everything goes to hell if I’m not right there on everybody’s ass.

  He’d been thinking of extending his tour if they would let him fly fighters. He didn’t need that domestic shit back in Omaha. He decided to talk to the CO when they got back. That made him feel better.

  The radar navigator folded back a page in the paperback book he was reading and closed it. The cover showed a cowboy standing just insi
de a saloon door, right hand poised above his six-gun, a cigarillo in his mouth sending up a thin plume of smoke, looking hard at something. A saloon girl with big breasts had her arm draped over his shoulder and was pressing against him. He stuck the book into the leg pocket of his flight suit, made a slight adjustment on the green radar screen, and said, “Comin’ up.”

  “Good,” the pilot said. “Let’s unload and turn this bus around.”

  The hydraulics groaned, and four thumps shook the plane.

  “All doors open,” the navigator said, watching his scope. Two green lines began bending parallel to a central red line; three sets of numbers stuttered along the left side of the screen. He counted aloud: “Ten seconds to release, nine seconds to release…”

  One hundred and ten iron bombs began to tumble from the belly of the ship. The only signs of their departure were a slight shuddering, a tendency of the plane to gain altitude, and over the radar navigator’s head, a small amber light blinking urgently, flashing once for each bomb released.

  The three planes in the formation banked and pulled away like sweep hands on a stopwatch, never actually passing over the target, the bombs covering the last twelve miles as they fell.

  The radar navigator was still hung over from the night before. He walked to the rear of the plane to get an auxiliary oxygen tank, hoping that the pure oxygen would help his headache. He waved, then held his head and made a face at the tail gunner, a nineteen-year-old boy from San Jose. The tail gunner smiled and nodded his head.

  The B-52s cannot be seen or heard through the jungle canopy. The enemy has no warning. They know nothing of the Arclight mission until the bombs begin to detonate and the jungle explodes around them. Though perhaps a split-second before detonation there is a roar of the bombs rushing down like a terrible wind.

  It was noon. The heat droned through the jungle like the sound of high tension wires. When Hanson reached up to pull a handful of razor grass down for shade, his canteens and grenades shifted and tugged at him. He had been thinking about time, about how the half-life of radioactive carbon was used to determine the age of prehistoric tools. He glanced at his watch and saw a green fly licking blood from a cut on the back of his hand. The sun whined and chirped in his ears. His crotch and armpits were wet, and the grass cuts on his hands stung. He killed the fly and recalled reading about monks in medieval Europe. It was important, they had felt, to pray to God at very specific times each day. That concern for timely prayer had been important in the development of the clock.

  He squinted into the sun again, and the earth began to shudder against his chest and thighs. In the valley beyond the first ridge line, shock waves arced like brutal rainbows, and greasy thunderheads of smoke began to rise.

  Far above and to the west, three B-52s winked in the pale sky, but Hanson couldn’t see them. He stood and watched the rest of the team rise from the tall brown grass: Quinn, Troc, Rau, and Mr. Minh. The five of them were there on a BDA, a bomb damage assessment. Their job was to move through the bomb impact area and get a body count for the Air Force.

  It was quiet in the valley. Sound did not carry in the damp heat but seemed to fall dead to the ground. They moved slowly. Any piece of equipment that might rattle had been taped down or removed. The only sounds were their boots on the baked earth and the rustle of canvas web gear. Dressed for speed and firepower, they carried only water, ammunition, freeze-dried food, and explosives.

  Hanson kept losing sight of the rest of the team in the acrid fog—dust, smoke, and the ammonia stink of high explosive. He could taste it in the back of his throat. The jungle floor was torn into steaming furrows. Lengths of vine and tiger thorns were tangled like concertina wire. The craters were as big as bedrooms, smelling of sulfur and freshly turned earth, smoke clinging to their sides like dirty snow. Scorched bamboo groves hissed; patches of brush and grass burned noiselessly.

  Hanson watched a fired-mud clinker roll slowly down the side of a crater and disappear in the smoke. His eyes burned, but he didn’t rub them. The yellow dust had turned to paste on his face and hands.

  Anybody who isn’t dead, he thought, is going to be pissed off. He inhaled the smoke and dust, and suddenly had to bite his lip to keep from laughing. He thought about the simple pain in his lip that kept him silent and safe, and he considered the importance of pain in human activities.

  Hanson stepped around an uprooted tree and saw the soldier, an NVA regular with a carbine who had been caught in the concussion. He was caked with the same yellow paste that covered Hanson’s face and arms. Only his eyes were alive. He seemed to be staring at something far away, or thinking about something puzzling and important. A fine web of bright blood ran from his ears and nose, collected on his chin, and fell to his chest and shoulders with soft pops. The blood puddled and ran in red rivulets down his arm through the yellow dust to his elbow, then to his hand, where it dropped from his fingers to the ground, pocking the dust.

  His eyes moved slowly until they met Hanson’s. Then his feet got tangled up and he sat down hard. His eyes had a look of total surprise. His head dropped between his knees, and he toppled to one side.

  Rau kicked him twice, once in the ribs and once in the head. When they left him behind, his eyes were dead, and his broken jaw sagged with astonishment.

  They found five more in the first collapsed bunker. It looked like a mining disaster, the bodies and sandbags shapeless and caked with dirt, as if they were being reclaimed by the earth. Gouts of cooked rice were stuck to timbers, and there was a heavy smell of fish sauce.

  A can of mackerel the size of a smoke grenade jutted from the dirt. The label was bright red with large white letters that spelled EATWELL above a green and white fish that was flailing its tail as if in flight, its green and yellow eye wide with terror. Blue lines and circles arced back from the fish’s head to indicate movement. Beneath the fish were the words, “Product of Alaska.”

  Another body was a few meters from the bunker. He must have been running while the bombs fell. One gray foot was twisted up against the ankle. His toenails were yellow and torn. The face beneath the stiff black bangs was a patchwork of black and purple and shading blues, like farmland seen from an airliner. Fat green blowflies rose and settled nervously, slapping at the face like a veil. Some of his features were still there, like those puzzles in children’s picture books, clouds and gnarled trees that suddenly take focus and reveal a hidden face.

  The team continued silently on, finding several more broken bunkers. The only really funny thing that happened was when Quinn spun and threw his submachine gun to his shoulder, having glanced up and seen a body hanging from the crotch of a tree. The rest of the team grinned. Troc whispered, “Fly like bird,” and smiled, pleased at his English.

  At the edge of the impact area they turned north. The heat seemed like part of the terrain, as solid as the earth beneath their boots. The air was so humid that breathing was difficult. It was like drowning. Hanson touched the compass hanging at his chest and smiled. Alaska, he thought. Good old north. He imagined going north, and north, until the jungle changed to tundra, and mountains, and solid ice.

  A tiny deer broke from the underbrush, barking like a dog. Hanson and the team dropped into a crouch. The barking deer wheeled and went back the way it had come, vanishing in the grass.

  The sun was below the hills when they started across the sluggish brown river. The water was warm and oily, and, they found out, full of leeches. They crawled into a peninsula of brush and bamboo to wait for darkness before sprinting across the valley to the first of the foothills, where they would wait out the night.

  Hanson pulled down his fatigue pants. Three gray worms with pointed tails hung from the inside of his thigh. He squirted insect repellent on them and they dropped off, leaving bright little dots of blood. He found a bigger one on his ankle, the size of his little finger, gray as the slime in a sink drain. He flicked it off, hissing, “Shitshitshit.”

  He soaked the leech with repellent and
set it afire. The leech rose and writhed like a cobra in the colorless flame, a faint saffron nimbus around its body. Hanson could feel the flame’s heat on his cheek and smell the sweetness in the flame and in his own sweat. The leech suddenly turned black and fell into the patch of charred grass around it. Hanson realized that he had been holding his breath.

  Just before dusk became darkness they doubled back and set up a night location near a bombed-out family temple on a small clearing awash in the jungle.

  Hanson pulled a plug of C-4 explosive from the end of a two-pound brick and pressed it into a ball. He set his canteen cup of water over a chink in the temple floor and rolled the C-4 beneath the cup. He touched a match to it and it began to burn with an orange flame. Patches of gold and bright blue glowed on the flaking temple walls as the C-4 burned like a marshmallow held in a campfire. He poured in a packet of instant coffee that floated on the water like dust.

  Out beyond the ornate and shattered temple gate, the jungle and sky were turning gray. Hanson stirred his coffee with a plastic spoon and considered the idea that color was only reflected sunlight, but it seemed just as reasonable that at a given time every day, a part of the world simply turned black.

  The countryside had begun to tremble with artillery and heavy machine-gun fire. Hanson sipped his coffee and smiled, thinking how the fire bases cough and grumble at night. They pull their men back inside the perimeter and flail the jungle with ordnance. Finally though, they controlled only the land they occupied. At night their control went only to the last roll of concertina wire. They blundered out in noisy convoys every day, but at night they rolled back in like the tide.

  Hanson and Quinn slung their hammocks near an artillery crater down the slope from the temple. Quinn’s hammock swung gently as he whispered the chant, “Airborne Ranger, Green Beret, this is the way we end the day.” Then he laughed, so softly that it sounded evil.