Afterburn (5 page)

"
Nanh len!
" the soldier screamed, yanking him to the left. He pitched forward, the roar on top of him followed by a rush of heat. Then silence. The two men rested before moving on.

Light. Smell of burning kerosene. The rifle touched him if he hesitated. Voices speaking Vietnamese. Something—a stick?—jabbed him in the ribs. Laughter. His hands brushed burlap, grains of rice. The smell of oil, the sound of metal being filed. Then dark. The shuffling of his guard was all he could hear, save his own breathing. Sweating heavily, feeling the dirt work into his hands and hair and flight suit, he crawled on his knees for hours. A mask of filth covered his face. The bailout from the F-4 seemed days prior. Adjusting already, Ellie, I am adjusting already, too fast.

A hand grabbed his foot. The gun indicated he was to climb upward into the chewing drone of insects.

A soldier pulled off his blindfold. He was standing on a dark jungle path. They put a rope around his neck. His back felt hot and weak, but he showed no pain so that they could not use it against him. Now, a few hours after dawn, direct sunlight did not penetrate the thick canopy of vegetation. Lushness out of control. Everywhere, huge leaves dripped. He sucked in the dense, wet air. Flies and mosquitoes swarmed in humming, adhesive clouds. The men bound his arms behind him. It hurt immediately, enough to make him hate them. He could feel the sweat drip through his clothing, a rash creeping across his armpits and groin. He wanted to scratch himself, shake loose his arms. The rope cut into his wrists so deeply that in a matter of minutes his fingers were numb.

A group of soldiers came along the trail, walking nimbly, each dressed in a black pajamalike uniform and carrying an AK-47 rifle. With them, led by a rope around his neck, walked a B-52 pilot, judging from the flight suit. A foot taller than the soldiers. His face seemed vaguely familiar—perhaps they'd shared some training class years ago. B-52s were rarely shot down, but it wasn't impossible; the huge planes were easy targets at low altitude and maneuvered ponderously when under attack. A bloodied bandage circled the man's mouth and jaw. The flier could even have been from one of the planes bombing the previous night. He walked with uncertainty, dragging his feet, bobbling his head as if something in his neck were loose.

"That man needs medical care." He wondered if his captors spoke any English.

"You go," one of the soldiers said, pushing him along the path.

"I need bandages and water. If you untie my arms—"

The Vietcong soldier put his rifle to the ear of the wounded pilot and indicated that he would shoot the man.

AFTER THREE HOURS
the wounded pilot crumpled onto the path. The Vietcong yelled and kicked at him to get up.

"Get him some water," Charlie said.

The Vietcong cut some vines and constructed a crude litter. The pilot made a noise when they rolled him onto it.

The ropes had cut off all feeling in Charlie's hands. The pain began again around his elbows and worked up the arms and circled his shoulders and dug into his chest. He tried to move his fingers, get the blood going. Nothing. If the ropes were removed, it'd be hours before he could use his arms. Even worse was his thirst. In the humid air he had sweated away perhaps seven or eight pounds, none of it replaced. He had no piss in him. His throat was dry, his lips sore. Branches and vegetation brushed against him; a latticework of cuts and scratches bled lightly. Insects flitted against his face. For a time he concentrated on putting one foot before the other. One and two. One and two, just say that. Fucking football practice. One and two. The earth was black and wet. The trail looked heavily used. He was glad the soldiers hadn't taken his leather flight boots, which had steel shanks. He wondered how they could walk in their little black sneakers. He could hear the other American moaning, calling to people not there.

The trail descended for several miles until they approached a wide stream. Shiny black larvae by the thousands hung from branches, so thick the trees were covered by a moist slithering mass that brushed off on him and the others as they walked. He shook his shoulders yet the larvae stayed on, inching purposefully across his chest, probing his skin with their pincer mouths. The larvae landed on the Vietcong as well, but they seemed unconcerned. Across the dirty green water stretched a footbridge suspended by woven vines. The floor of the bridge, only two feet wide, was constructed of heavy steel links in strips of about fifteen feet, old tank treads. When they reached the other side of the stream and had gone up the bank onto drier ground, one of the soldiers broke open a shell casing and removed the gunpowder, which he sifted with some dry powder he also carried. He wrapped the mixture with a large green leaf and lit the leaf with a butane lighter marked with the insignia of the Miami Dolphins. AFL. Don Shula. Acrid smoke billowed. The soldier jabbered in Vietnamese and he understood. The soldier circled the men with the burning leaf, enveloping them in the smoke. The larvae fell off, and they moved on.

They came upon an old elevated road. The guards hurried across this open space, looking left and right. Five feet to the other side, in the tall reedy grasses, sat the rusting hulk of a bulldozer cannibalized for parts. A remnant from the colonial period, when the French tried in vain to build a highway system. They had lost one hundred years in Vietnam, a century of sunsets.

An hour later, the men untied his hands but still kept the rope around his neck. His arms fell to his sides and flopped uselessly. It was hard to walk that way, and he waited for the feeling to come back. He noticed the trail got wider and flatter, with smaller paths leading off from the main one. Then, as if they had passed an invisible boundary, the trees became twisted and ripped apart, great banks of browned leaves hanging down, odd patches of light streaming through the canopy. The land fell in a valley and opened up.

Before him for hundreds of yards the ground lay blackened and cratered, as if the earth itself had collided with something, leaving a planetary skid mark. Charred tree trunks stood limbless, leafless, dead. Birds winged silently over the earth, and a gray-blue pall lingered in the low places, the smoke of what had been. Here and there, under clods of soil, protruded the remnants of a hootch, broken crockery, spilled rice, the wheel of a bicycle.

The soldiers yanked at the rope around his neck, urged him along. He lifted his eyes, understood why he hadn't seen any people. A creek ran through the bottom of the village. The muddy, disturbed banks were choked with corpses. The bodies lay tumbled and crushed and dismembered over one another, frozen pandemonium. Children, women, old men, stomachs bloated and streaked with rot, flies swarming over the portions above water, caught noisily in the wet black hair, buzzing on genitals, landing on toes, noses, knees. One and two. Farther down the stream lay five dead water buffalo. They looked healthy, well fed. Again, the flies. He knew the reason the villagers were all in one place. The B-52s had walked the bombs, flying slowly to create a thorough carpet effect. The big green lizards flew so high the village could not have been warned. The people had fled an approaching wave of fire and exploding earth, driving the water buffalo across the stream. The bombs had caught up.

A soldier prodded him with a rifle. They walked on.

THE SOLDIERS HIKED
until they reached a high spur of land. He was hungry, exhausted, but finally his hands were working. He figured the soldiers must be headed toward Laos, going nearly due west and toward the spine of mountains that marked the eastern border. They climbed higher along the spur as the light failed. He needed food and sleep. The night was clear; behind him, to the south and east, he saw a wide expanse, dark and undulating. The soldiers dropped the other pilot to the ground and camped. They ate cold sticky rice and took turns sleeping. He was made to sit near a ledge, his arms roped to a tree, his back grinding when he shifted. They gave him one cupful of rice.

Sometime during the night a huge soundless explosion bloomed to the south, maybe thirty miles away. Just a sudden ball of light, followed by lesser explosions, each eerily beautiful, rendered silent by the distance. In the morning he was not sure if he had dreamed them, or even slept.

He missed his children, their mouths and noses and eyes. Daddy, Daddy.

THE NEXT DAY
they came to a village. He was dragged to a livestock pen with a galvanized trough of water. Three huge water buffalo stood to one side, hoof-deep in mud, switching their tails, the earth around them pocked by great flat turds. Using the same small book the first officer had used, an older Vietcong soldier tried to teach him the history of Vietnam through the millennia, fighting aggressors: Genghis Khan and the Mongols, the Chinese, the Japanese Fascists, the French imperialists, and now the Americans. Each foreign country, the soldier said in an up-and-down voice, had some pretext for war—the conquest of spice routes, Catholicism, the French
mission civilisatrice
, the "protection of freedom"—and each time the Vietnamese (the Vietcong saw no difference between the North and South Vietnamese, only that one part was trying to free the other from the Americans and their "puppets") repelled these attempts. "We fight for ten, twenty, fifty year. Your government want war over quickly. No know Ho Chi Minh! We lose ten men for every one of you, we still win."

Reading set phrases, the man insisted that Charlie appear on Hanoi television and renounce the United States. A crowd gathered outside the pen, faces crowded to the slats. More questions. Approach altitudes, fuel requirements. Decoy formations of missions over Hanoi. He shook his head. The man sang on, getting angrier. The villagers outside the pen began to yell, and the men forced his head closer to the trough, where a scum of dead flies, manure, and buffalo hair floated.

"You say!"

He shook his head.

They shoved him deep into the trough. He counted to fifteen.

He was yanked out of the water. "Say! What formation!"

They forced him under again. He held his breath, a matter of concentration, conserve, relax, do not use oxygen . . . surely they would bring him up . . . his lungs burned . . . purple darkness crowded his mind . . . They pulled him up from the trough. His breath burst.

"Say!"

They gave him no chance to respond. This time his lungs began to burn almost immediately. He could feel water trickling between his lips, his knees sagged, his head was expanding . . .

They forced him underwater dozens of times, then suddenly stopped and dragged him to a small pit caged over with bamboo near the buffalo paddock. He could walk at a stoop. Here they left him alone, though some of the villagers approached the cage to stare. He forced his head against the bars on the high side of the pit, where he could see the village and surrounding area. In a marshy field below, young women winnowed rice by tossing it on flat baskets. Soldiers with machine guns over their shoulders stood idly by, talking, smoking small pipes. Farther up the hill, a group of villagers dug into the mountain with hand tools. The entrance to the shelter was reinforced with wooden beams laid across one another; women pushing wheelbarrows emerged from the hole. Other villagers poured rice into burlap bags, which they then sewed shut. The soldiers kept a watchful eye over all of this activity. Chickens strutted about the packed earth. An old man smoothed long lengths of green bamboo with a double-handled drawknife. The food-gathering and fortification activity may have meant the Vietcong feared American ground forces were closing in. They had positioned Soviet M-46 130-millimeter field guns on the perimeter of the village. Two Chinese trucks sat axle-deep in dry mud near the edge of the forest. Perhaps the village lay along a spur line of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, within ten or fifteen miles of the Laos border, one way or the other. If American forces were near, and if the rough-cut jungle roads remained difficult, air recon would pick up the trucks.

A DAY LATER
they took him out of the cage and sat him down in a hootch. The B-52 pilot was lying on a mat, breathing faintly, his exhalations not moving the flies about his mouth and eyes.

"You have to help that man."

The B-52 pilot was dragged outside into the sun.

Then they started on him again. The older man with the slim book.

"You say what is F-4 approach altitude."

He shook his head.

"What is approach speed? How much fuel fly from Ubon to Hanoi? You must say."

When he refused again, they tied his arms tighter behind his back, so tight his elbows touched. They bound his feet and connected a rope from his ankles to the ropes around his wrists. Then they tied another rope to his wrists and ran this up his back and around his Adam's apple. Any movement tightened one rope or another, causing him to feel the connections of bones and cartilage and muscle. Something in his back, he knew now, was broken.

He didn't say anything for the first hour. He was trying to think about it. He was trying to understand the pain so that he could find a way not to feel it. He believed that he was using his best thinking, but it was not working. When he tried to sleep, they poured hot water on his head. Not boiling but very hot. His thinking was no good now. The soldiers put a stick through the ropes and carried him back to his hole in the ground.

It rained. He licked the slats of his cage. Every minute that I live, I can live another. Soldiers stood next to the cage and laughed.

A DAY
, a night, a day, a night, perhaps another day, followed by another night, or was that day a night previous, or was that night a day ago the same one from which he'd just awoken? He tried to count sunrises and sunsets, but his systems of remembrance collapsed into their own complexity, and he was left muttering a number, forgetting what it signified and why he cared. His limbs had stiffened so that he could not quite stand. Even after the ropes were removed, he couldn't bring his arms forward of his ribs. The ropes had rubbed through his flight suit into his skin. Each time the soldiers untied him, they hit him. The tied position became easier. He hated it but he also waited for it. His lips were crusted. He was caked with mud, not the silty brown mud of his youth (not the mud near the river where they played on the tire-swing, arcing high over the water, plunging into the dirty warm current, scrambling up the slick banks to the swing again), but lumpy ooze in which red worms twitched. The villagers trudged by in their conical hats, and the children no longer found him interesting. His shit went from soft to hard. The pain in his stomach started and he would follow it as it dropped through his bowels, and when the ropes came off, he would pray that he could shit the pain out. When he was dragged from his cage, they rinsed him with a bucket of water and put a wooden bowl near his face. Bamboo gruel, rice, dead flies. He was expected to eat it like a dog, and he did.