Sympathy for the Devil Page 4

  He finished his Budweiser and looked at Hanson in the big bar mirror. “You’ll be back…” he began.

  “Do me a favor,” Hanson said. “Shoot me in the head when I step off the plane, okay? If I come back. Save me the trouble of humping the hills waiting for Charles to do it.”

  “Yeah, you’ll be back. You know those killer guard dogs the Zoomies use to guard their airplanes, those dogs that are smarter and meaner than any of the people in the Air Force? They don’t let those dogs go back to the States. They just blow ’em away when they’re through with them because they’re too mean and fucked up…”

  “Not bad, Quinn. A nice little analogy there. You have the makings of a poet. Now I don’t read much poetry—it’s mostly written by women and queers, and doesn’t make much sense—but I think you’ve got what it takes.

  “I’m already gone, Quinn. The machinery is in motion. Time is not the dependable phenomenon you think it is. Look up there,” he said, pointing at the ceiling. “There I am. It’s happening right now, even as I speak the words—I’m up there in the Freedom Bird. Just another dumb-ass GI at thirty-two thousand feet. Why, I’m sitting next to a Specialist Four who’s telling me about the year he spent greasing vehicles in the Third Mech motor pool. Look, Quinn, he’s showing me his snapshots of the Bob Hope show. The captain is talking on the PA system: ‘We’ll be cruising at thirty-two thousand feet’—the Spec. 4 looks out the window—yeah, we’re way up there, all right—‘and before the girls show you what to do in the unlikely event of loss of cabin pressure, I’d like to say that we’re real proud of…whatever it was you’ve been doing, real proud of ya. Girls . .

  “See,” Hanson said, grabbing Quinn’s arm and pointing to where the ceiling and wall met in the bar, “the pretty stewardess is holding the plastic oxygen bag over her nose and mouth, turning from side to side. Look, you can see her smiling through the bag. Everybody is smiling and reading Playboy magazine. Hanson is on his way…”

  Quinn jerked his arm away and smiled down at Hanson. “You don’t want to get too froggy and be putting your hands on me like that now, or you’ll spend the first six weeks at home listening to your broken bones knit. Sound just like a big bowl of Rice Krispies.

  “If you were having problems getting along with people before you came over here, like you been telling me, what the fuck do you think is gonna happen now?”

  Quinn laughed, took a drink of beer, and tossed back the shot of Scotch. “Co Dan,” he called to the pretty barmaid. “Two Chivas, two Budwi.

  “You can’t even get a letter from back there without getting pissed off anymore. What makes you think you’ll get along any better now?”

  “I’ll make an effort. I’m through with all the bullshit. I’ll just tell the truth.”

  Quinn laughed and had to spit out a mouthful of beer. “I like that,” he said. “That had to be in some movie. You dumb shit,” he said, grabbing Hanson, pinning his arms. “You know what those fuckers will do if you tell them the truth?

  “You know what they’ll do,” he whispered in Hanson’s ear. “They’ll lock your ass away. Oh, ‘the truth.’ I love it, ‘the truth.’ ” Quinn laughed like someone who’s just broken your legs and is walking toward you with a knife in his hands. “Look,” he said, nodding across the bar, “I see another plane. But nobody’s smiling because it’s going the wrong way. To Vietnam. They all look sad and scared. Wait. One little guy looks almost happy. It’s Hanson, on his way back.

  “You like it here, my man,” he said, releasing Hanson and patting him on the back. “Just like me. You’ve found a home.”

  “They’re gonna kill me if I stay over here,” Hanson said. “You recall that last little exercise we went on out of Mai Loc launch site? You remember that one?”

  Hanson slapped his open hand down on the bar and laughed. “They had us cold. I was back here somewhere,” he said, holding his hand behind his head, “watching myself run in slow motion, looking around at all the plants breathing, listening to the sky like some kind of LSD trip. I just kept running out of habit. My body wanted to fall down and die and get it over with.

  “And I tell myself, ‘You dumb shit, you’re gonna die, and this time it’s all your own fault, and it’s probably gonna hurt a lot. You don’t have to be out here.’

  “I can think of three other times I knew I was gonna die. I can’t even remember how many times I thought I might die. I almost laughed at myself for being there. So I decide, well, maybe I’ll try praying…”

  Quinn began to laugh.

  “So I say, ‘Okay, God, if you really are there, if you get me out of this one time, I’ll—I don’t know what right now, but I promise I’ll do something appropriate if you’ll get me out of this. Okay?’ And I watch myself run some more, and then another RPD starts firing at me, and I think, Yeah, I didn’t think so.

  “I mean, if there is a God, he isn’t making any deals with me. I’m talking about those times when I’ve looked around me and said, ‘Oh, shit, I’m gonna die now. I hope it doesn’t hurt too bad.’

  “I’m already dead, Quinn. And one of these days, if I hang around here, God’s gonna audit the books and come police my ass up when he remembers that I’m dead. I’m one of God’s bookkeeping errors. I’m not fool enough to wait here,” he said, jabbing his finger at the floor, “for him to get me. I’m going to be a lot harder to find back in the States.”

  “You got the Hill Spirits looking out for you here,” Quinn said.

  Prayer hadn’t helped them, but the Hill Spirits had, according to Mr. Minh. He had told them that the NVA had somehow offended the Hill Spirits, who had then chosen to help the recon team. It was Mr. Minh who had taken out the RPD machine gun. The stocky little man in the tiger suit had run straight at the gun and its three-man crew, his glossy black hair lifting from his shoulders as he ran through the sparkle of green tracers, and killed them all.

  Automatic weapons fire is often erratic. What Quinn and Hanson saw Mr. Minh do was possible, but not likely. It was the kind of thing they had seen him do many times. When they tried to persuade him to be more careful, he only smiled his gold and jade smile.

  “You’ll be back…” Quinn began.

  Hanson slowly shook his head.

  “Because Mr. Minh said you’d be back. There it is, little buddy. Mr. Minh is never wrong. You know that. If he isn’t sure, he says he doesn’t know.”

  Hanson took another drink of beer and watched his own eyes in the mirror. Mr. Minh was never wrong.

  Most of the NCO clubs in Vietnam had plywood walls and a sheet-metal roof that kept out the rain but not the heat or the stink of the piss tubes out back.

  The Special Forces NCO club in Da Nang looked like one wing of an exclusive mountain resort. The walls were stone. The bar was stone and hand-carved mahogany, and the massive mirror behind the bar was the deep green of a mountain lake. A huge green beret fashioned of thick glass bricks was set in the flagstone and parquet floor, the Special Forces crest inset in chrome and brass. The club was air-conditioned, the Vietnamese barmaids were pretty, and Chivas was thirty cents a shot.

  The SKS rifle mounted over the bar had been captured by Quinn and Hanson and traded to the club for two pallets of beer for the launch site. The SKS had belonged to a survivor of an ambush, a ragged straggler who hadn’t been in the killing zone when the ambush was sprung.

  Hanson and Quinn had gone after him. Hanson threw himself onto his stomach, braced his weapon, and fired two bursts. One round from the first short burst tore the straggler’s calf, and he stumbled. Hanson walked the second burst diagonally from the straggler’s hip to his shoulder, and he slammed into the ground face-first, bucking like a stunned carp. Hanson ran up to him, ripped another burst across his back to make sure that he was dead, then kicked him over like a rotten log that might have thousands of blind white bugs swarming beneath it. There was an SKS beneath it, an obsolete and rare carbine worth four hundred dollars as a war trophy.

  “Foo
d on the table,” Hanson had yelled.

  “Yeah,” Quinn said, “and you almost fucked it up, too.”

  “What?”

  “That’s right. Shootin’ him up like that. Look.”

  The last burst of grass-jacketed bullets had gone through the body and torn a furrow through bloody gray-green grass and bleeding shards of sun-baked clay.

  “A little lower,” Quinn said, “and you’d have hit the SKS. Should have shot him in the head.”

  “You’re right,” Hanson said. “You’re right. Stragglers like him would be carrying the old weapons. Good to remember. It’s like a piece of Asian woods lore. Go for the head.”

  Hanson put a fresh clip in his weapon, slung the SKS over his shoulder, and started to walk off. Then he stopped, turned, and looked in the dead man’s face. Already he was starting to look like all the others. His eyes were gluey and flat; the tiny wrinkles and lines that had made his face different from any other face were beginning to soften and fade. All you dead people, Hanson thought, look alike. Then he leaned over the body and said softly, “But now you don’t have to worry about being slow anymore, you don’t have to worry about dying.”

  That’s the nice thing about war, he thought. If you win, the other guy’s dead. Period. And you’re alive. If you lose, you’re dead, and your problems are over.

  Hanson and Quinn sometimes went after war trophies for trading purposes when they weren’t on regular operations. They usually took Sergeant Major’s Nung bodyguards on ambushes and sweeps. The sweeps through enemy-controlled areas—which were, in truth, everything outside the camp wire—were the kind of operations officially called “Search and Destroy,” in the beginning. But when the American public began seeing nightly TV film footage of dead Asians and Americans on the six-thirty news, when they started seeing bodies while eating their pork chops and mashed potatoes, they began to make unpleasant associations and considered the implications of words like “destroy.”

  The Army changed the name of the operations to “search and clear.” Most search-and-clear operations took place in free-fire zones, large areas of the countryside where everything was considered an enemy (enemy soldier), enemy supporter (farmer), or enemy asset (buffalo, rice, hootch). It was all right to kill or destroy anything in a free-fire zone. Not even Quinn liked to kill the water buffalo, though. It took them so long to die, brain shots were difficult, and they moaned so. But the Nungs liked to kill them, and it was good to keep the Nungs mean and happy. Everyone was afraid of the Nungs, mercenaries of Chinese descent who, like the Montagnards, hated all Vietnamese, North or South.

  In a free-fire zone you didn’t have to wait a fatal second deciding if it was a farmer, a buffalo, or an armed enemy breaking through the brush to kill you. If it moved, you shot it.

  As TV coverage of the war increased, the Army changed the name of free-fire zones to “safe zones.”

  One day while stripping ambush victims of trophies on what they’d taken to calling “kill and supply” operations, Hanson had remembered his Asian woods lore, the SKS rule. He fired a single shot to be certain that one of their ambush victims was dead, and Quinn felt a chubby hand pat his foot. He looked down at the flap of brain stuck to his boot, then thrust his foot out and studied it like the ugliest girl in Iowa coyly looking at her new party shoe. With a scholarly frown, he said, “Hmm, I wonder what he’s thinking about right now.”

  “That’s a nine-zero, nine-oh. At least. Very nice. Performance and degree of difficulty,” Hanson said, laughing.

  Quinn beamed.

  While the Nungs set up a defensive perimeter, Hanson, Quinn, and sometimes Silver would go among the dead, rolling the bodies over, cursing some and praising others for their clothes and equipment.

  An officer’s pith helmet with an enameled red star was a fifty-dollar item. An officer’s belt buckle, recycled aluminum from American napalm canisters, with an enameled red star, would go for seventy-five dollars. A buckle without the star was worth half that. They had to fill in with Montagnard crossbows, plain pith helmets and jungle hats, and the NVA “battle flags” that Co Ba and her daughter made back in camp with their Chinese-made Singer sewing machine.

  There were occasional novelty items. Hanson once found a Red Chinese copy of a Scripto fountain pen on a dead lieutenant. It had the word SCRIPTO on the nib. The engraving on the side, Mr. Minh told him, urged the dead second lieutenant to STEADFASTLY ATTACK AND DESTROY ALL AMERICAN IMPERIALISTS.

  Hanson studied the engraving and imagined the engraver working on the pen, worried that he would not have room to get the last word on the gift to the young officer from his parents, and thinking how wrong and terribly important even little things often seemed.

  Cheaper items like plain pith helmets brought much more money if you shot a hole in them and sprinkled them with some chicken blood. But it wasn’t wise to do that too often. Not that it mattered so much that the buyer might suspect that it wasn’t human blood, an authentic result of a soldier having the back of his head blown open. When the buyer showed it off to his wife and friends back in the States, grim or swaggering as he recounted the moment that he blew the enemy’s brains out, no one would know. It was simply a matter of economics. Too many of them on the market would lower the price.

  Unlike Quinn, Hanson smiled a lot. When he was alone he often seemed to be debating things with himself, nodding his head, narrowing his eyes, smiling. At a glance his eyes seemed full of humor, and they were. They were calm eyes if you were to look his way carelessly. As calm as eighty feet of dead air in a dry well that you don’t see until you are about to step into it, a depth of humor that went on and on and got darker and blacker. Most people looked quickly away if they happened to make eye contact with him.

  Hanson was average height. He wasn’t exceptionally strong, or fast with his hands, but he had adapted quickly and learned fast, as some animals do while others die out, in a world where there are people who will hurt you and kill you for no reason at all.

  One night in Fayetteville a good ole boy had thrown Hanson into a jukebox. He had sixty pounds on Hanson and threw him into the jukebox. Hanson was wedged into the chrome, plastic, and shattered glass, and for just a moment he almost laughed, thinking that it was like having been in a traffic accident with Dolly Parton, that had silenced Dolly mid-song. Then he pulled himself out of the wreckage, stacks of C&W .45s clattering behind him, wheeling and wobbling away across the dance floor, and he started for the good ole boy, trailing shards of red and blue plastic like a special-effects nimbus.

  The good ole boy lost the fight right then. Not when Hanson, head down, was pumping quick lefts and rights into his belly and kidneys, leftrightleft like a machine. Not when he hit the floor like a bag of sand. It wasn’t even when Hanson started putting the boots to him. It was when he saw Hanson pry himself out of the jukebox, when he realized that the only way he could stop Hanson from kicking his ass was to kill him. It was then that his guts went flabby, and he just gave up and waited for it to happen and get over with.

  The way Hanson walked, a cross between a bounce and a swagger, made him look cocky. He wasn’t able to change the way he walked, and he discovered in basic training that he couldn’t march.

  His drill sergeant would scream, “Hanson quit bouncin’ an’ march. You fuckin’ up my military formation!”

  Then he’d come up close to Hanson, who continued to march and stare straight ahead, and ask him in a gentle, fatherly voice, “Don’t you like me, Hanson? Is that it? Is that why you messin’ up my military formation? Sergeant Collins told me that my formation looks ragged and poor. It hurts my feelings when he says that. Is that why, Hanson? Don’t you like me?

  “I asked you a question, Hanson. Do you like me?”

  “Yes, Drill Sergeant. I’m very fond of you. I like everything about the army.”

  “You like me! You sure you don’t love me? Is that it? You some kind of faggot try in’ to pass in this man’s army? You want to smoke my pole?”
>
  “No, Drill Sergeant.”

  “No?” the drill sergeant would scream, double-timing in place next to Hanson, his face close to his. “No? I don’t like you, Hanson. I don’t like college boys. They so smart, they can’t do anything. What can you do, Hanson?”

  Hanson smiled. “Push-ups, Drill Sergeant.”

  “That’s right. That’s exactly right. Get your ass out of my formation and drop for fifty an’ I wanta hear you sound off like you got a pair.”

  Hanson would drop out of the formation and do fifty push-ups, sounding off like he had a pair with each one. “One thousand, two thousand, three thousand…”

  If Hanson smiled when the drill sergeant screamed at him, he’d be accused of thinking it was funny to fuck up the formation, and be told to do fifty push-ups. If he tried not to bounce, he looked worse, and the drill sergeant would say that he looked like a monkey trying to fuck a football, or that he was marching like he had a Baby Ruth bar up his ass, and he’d have to do fifty push-ups.

  For eight weeks he did at least two hundred pushups a day. At the end of basic, he had powerful shoulders and he was the only man in the company who was given PFC stripes. When he was getting on the bus for infantry training, the drill sergeant told him, “You do all right for a college boy. Don’t go and get your ass blown away, Hanson.”

  Hanson smiled. “Okay, Drill Sergeant.”

  After infantry training, airborne training, and Special Forces school, he’d spent eighteen months in Northern I-Corps on long-range and cross-border recon missions without getting his ass blown away. He still smiled a lot, at things that didn’t seem funny to most people. He was still alive. In two days he would be home.

  Sergeant Major ignored the air policeman on guard duty at the hurricane fence. The AP’s job was to demand that you produce ID, that you state your business and write it down in his log book before he motioned you through the gate with his M-16. He was supposed to challenge everyone who entered the air base, even people who worked there, people he knew, even generals. Especially generals, who would demote him and probably put him in the stockade for not challenging the shiny Cadillac with the red stars on the bumper.