Fields of Fire (29 page)

He had finally despaired of being the “duty moralist” of the platoon. He had personally refrained from setting fire to any of the thatch hootches as they burned the village on their way back, but he no longer spoke to any of the others about their actions. He had decided to maintain his own standards, to preserve a sense of sanity in spite of such events, but it would only have enraged them more deeply to try and stop them. A vote against burning a hootch would have been a vote against the memory of those who had been hit.

He could sense Snake's deep depression. It was obvious that Snake had been closer to Phony and Hodges, with the possible exception of Baby Cakes, than to anyone else in the platoon. To lose them both together, in addition to the other deaths, the continuing frustrations, had scarred the spindly squad leader's normal toughness. Snake had gone immediately to his poncho hootch when the platoon reached Henderson Hill, waving off the Vietnamese children who normally could count on him for several minutes of frolic.

And Cat Man had retreated inside a stolid, uncommunicative wall. For one brief moment, after the helicopter ascended with Hodges and the others in it, Cat Man had cursed himself for noticing the banana clump, blaming his own proficiency for what had happened. But now he spoke with no one. He returned to his fighting hole, broke out a piece of hairy, salted pork his mother had sent him in a food package, and began to make a stew. He studiously contemplated his C-ration stove when others passed him.

Noticing their frailties, Goodrich for the first time thought them human.

THERE was a new platoon sergeant, still in An Hoa. They had received word the day before. And tomorrow, they would leave the relative peace of Henderson Hill for a month of roaming through the killer weeds. Goodrich shivered with new fear. He had only heard the stories. Wide, flat, treeless fields of elephant grass. Acres of desolate cemeteries. Whole villages of stone-sad faces. And chest-deep holes that hugged each trail, where a point man all but stepped on his ambusher before he found him. Tomorrow it would be Go Noi Island.

24
CAT MAN

The fields are wide and flat, filled with dust. In the tractor you feel as if you are alone, lost in the ocean, with the dust as fog. It surrounds you and you cannot see beyond it. You turn the soil before it is irrigated and planted. Later you help harvest. In the afternoon the winds blow, sometimes from the sea and sometimes from the desert, depending on the season. On the tractor you live in dust-filled wind.

On the weekends there are parties. Wine and marijuana. There are girls who mature early and make love young and have children quickly and are old before they are thirty. They grow heavy and they acquire faith. But before they do, there are parties.

You have friends. You like to laugh. You seem shy outside your circle because you are self-conscious. But you will kill a man over an insult. You do not sue a man who insults you. How much is honor worth? You destroy him.

ALL the first days. Add them up. They made him Cat Man.

The first day in the town of dust and fog, in from Mexico with his family, ten of them sharing a three-bedroom house with his uncle's family of five. The first day in the fields, twelve hours, ten dollars, and the glow on his father's face when Tacio handed the money he had earned over to him. When there is a home I will keep the money, Tacio had explained, scowling fiercely as he had imagined a man should.

The first day in school, unable to speak a word of English past Hello and Thank You, smiling warmly as a counselor instructed him to report to Special Education. Not understanding a word the counselor had said but feeling that it was important to show no ill will. Reporting to the classroom, filled with rebels and retard-eds and a nucleus of persons like himself who could neither speak nor read English, but were too old to start at kindergarten. Special Education. No education. The students throwing paper balls at each other, shooting spit wads across the room with rubber bands. The young, unruffled teacher sitting calmly at her desk, reading a novel to herself, so absorbed in her book that she did not even notice Tacio as he stood before her. Shyly addressing her, he a very serious boy who had been told he must leave the fields to learn. Handing her his slip of paper and announcing with sobriety, I have come to learn to read and write English.

And she looking blankly back, with mild curiosity, unable to understand a word of Spanish beyond Hello and Thank You. And Good-bye.

The first day he became a man. Inside the shed behind the house, among old newspapers and tires, his cloister from the crowded house, learning secretly to smoke. He was thirteen. Lighting a cigarette and sitting in the semidarkness and wondering at the changes that becoming a man were causing him. For some time he had been excited by the sight of a woman's flesh. To see a woman like that girded him, with a feeling that was mixed with strength and despair. The strength was from his conviction that to experience such things would be a great and natural pleasure, which he was eminently suited for. To watch the gentle bouncing of a well-rounded breast created deep sensual certainties inside him. The despair came from his inability to realize such pleasures. He saw the invitation with every bouncing breast and curved hip. He understood the invitation. He simply did not know how to accept it. He was thirteen.

But sitting in the shed, dreaming in the darkness, and the partially closed door filling with a rounded figure. She was fifteen. It was nearly summer and there was a cool ocean wind and she was braless, underneath a gray sweatshirt. He watched the roundness stretch the fabric and felt the certainty again.

She asked him for a cigarette. She walked to him and joined him on the floor and leaned back comfortably against the rough board wall. She lit the cigarette he gave her, from the end of his own. “I watch you,” she said. “Why do you always come to the shed?”

“To think,” he answered.

She leaned back and he could feel the softness of her skin as it moved beneath the sweatshirt. He felt an unexplainable surge. “What do you think about that you must come here to do it?” Her voice was low and musical, baiting him. His head was humming slightly. It is the smoke, he thought. No. It is not the smoke.

“I think about becoming a man. I will have many women. I think about that.”

She smiled knowingly then, standing and walking back toward the door. He felt a deep frustration. I do not know how to bring this thing about, he commented to himself. Then she slowly pulled the door until it was tightly shut. I have done it. Don't ask me how.

Thin slivers of daylight pierced through the cracks in the boards that made the door, but otherwise it was black. She returned to him and sat very close, her body firmly touching him in many places.

“Put out your cigarette,” she said. Tacio ground the cigarette into the dust and turned to her. He was not afraid. He was meant to do this. She placed his hand underneath her sweatshirt and he felt the soft warmth of her stomach and needed no further guidance. His hand moved up and experienced the fullness of her breasts. They were round and full and very firm. He felt a surge of warmth inside himself that made it difficult for him to breathe.

“Now you have to kiss me,” she told him. And she leaned to him. In the darkness he learned the pleasures of the deep tongue that asked for more than mouth. He learned as naturally as a baby learns to eat.

In a few moments she drew him to her and he murmured in his quiet voice, “I am still small.”

“You are large enough,” she answered.

And he found he was.

The first day out of school, quitting the day he turned sixteen. As he left the building he felt the elation that a prisoner feels when he has been paroled, and is exiting the prison gate. It did not matter that the fields were also a prison. A prison entered out of choice is not a prison, no matter how small the realm of choice. There was no choice in entering school. And it did not relate to work. Therefore it did not relate to life.

Then, finally, the first day he knew he must go to war. The friends had dwindled from the fields, some drafted quickly because they were not in school and were thus deemed more expendable, but others enlisting readily, excited by the thought of battle. There would always be the fields. They were eternity. Tacio himself becoming incensed, and enlisting in the Marine Corps. I am meant to do these things, he thought warmly, feeling the anticipation lighten his body. It is the machismo. I am meant for this.

As indeed he was. He was the eyes of the platoon, quiet and delicately featured, a prowling cat. His eyes and his natural instincts combined to notice the smallest inconsistency. Old Snoop and Poop. Cat Man and his damn bent grassblades.

25

It took a day to walk the eight miles from Henderson Hill to the near edge of Go Noi Island. The company assembled on the hill's bald crown and left it in a slow column, moving eastward one man at a time, until a half-mile column of burdened men struggled along the valley floor.

They passed through My Loc (3), at the edge of the hill (the children waving) and out to the convoy road, where the clay dirt painted every glistening, sweating part of every man brick-red as they walked along it. A short jag on the road and then they left it, reluctantly, for they would not find another, and crossed wide, moist paddies on the huge dike that would take them to the Phu Lacs. Past the Phu Lacs, dark, tree-filled islands in the rice, portentous, empty of motion, then along a little mud-filled stream that took them to the La Thaps. Quickly through the La Thaps—sparse, severe, hostile. Situated on high mounds, identifiable by nicknames. Over there was Dog Bone, shaped like some cartoonist's depiction of a short femur: two terraced, bulbous hills connected by a narrow shaft of ridge. And here was Christmas ville, where the company had celebrated Christmas with the ghosts of present evil, under a horrendous mortar barrage.

La Thaps to the Cu Bans—great, cratered thicks and tangles, rows of trees torn by their roots, hootches demolished and abandoned, whole hectares chewed by years of bombs. There were no people in the Cu Bans, only nightmares. And huge booby traps made from the occasional bomb that failed to detonate: the Villager's Revenge.

Then on to Le Bac, an island surrounded by sand beach and occasional strips of finger lakes that would be streams when the rains came, a fortress, high and ominous, that guarded the edge of Go Noi. A thousand wounds had stained the sand at Le Bac. And its people had the rigidity, the numbed, stolid hate, that existed only in Go Noi and the Arizona Valley.

They straggled tiredly through Le Bac, soaked by then in the steam baths of their own sweat. They had humped for eight hours, in the worst heat of the day. A collective tension seized them as they strolled through Le Bac's desolation.

Goodrich felt himself go tight as he passed the rows of brittle-thatch hootches, the deserts of brick-hard, unkept fields, the villagers with their etched, impassive faces. They're just waiting, he mused fearfully. They want to see me die. The villagers squatted, rocking on their haunches, sucking smoke through ragged twists of tobacco or working betel nut in slow rolls, like cows chewing cud. The flies were busy, deep inside their sores. And they were waiting.

Goodrich disliked moves, any kind of moves. He hated patrols. He hated ambushes. He feared even the relative security of the company moves. The column was long and always awkward if anything happened. Nobody really seemed ever to know where anybody else was. One sniper with his shit together could hold up a whole company for hours.

He felt vulnerable, exposed, on the moves. Worse, he thought. Senselessly exposed. He chided himself. I should have tried for the Army band. At least then, when the recruiter screwed me, I could have ridden on choppers. He snorted. If the Army was going into Go Noi today, they would have loaded up the birds and dropped the troops. Ten minutes, no casualties on the march, ready to fight. We walk all day, waiting for snipers, booby traps, and ambushes, and by the time we get there we're too exhausted to do anything but curl up and go to sleep.

On the other side of Le Bac there were jungles of high elephant grass that walled each man off into his own helpless world. It was Goodrich's first taste of Go Noi's mile-wide killer fields. He felt abandoned. He was afraid he would get lost in the grass and never find the company again. It could happen, he fretted. One wrong turn and I'd never find them again.

The grass ended and the high bank dropped to the waste of sand again. They crossed a murky finger lake, filled with weeds and huge, scurrying leeches. The water crept to their chests and they held their rifles above their heads as they crossed.

On the far bank was another stretch of sand, another sandy hill. Then they formed a hasty perimeter in a field of elephant grass. That mass of grass that reached high above their heads, that held the wind from them and sucked their strength with each drip of sweat, was Go Noi.

They'd come to find the Holy Grail. Goodrich shook his head, feeling hopelessly beyond the others. No one had understood his quip. Actually, they were to search for the Phu Thuan Market. Actually, persisted Goodrich, no reason whatsoever. The word had come down from Regiment that Phu Thuan was operating on Go Noi. Which was roughly the equivalent, mused Goodrich, of saying that a submarine is now cruising, underwater, in the Atlantic.

There was a band of budding capitalists from nearby Dai Loc who marketed goods to the North Vietnamese Army. Some goods were essentials, such as canned fish, and black-market commodities that had been issued to care for refugees who, on paper, had filled the resettlement villes, but who, in reality, remained in their own. Others were luxury items: sheets of plastic for hootches and ponchos, tobacco and peppercorns. The market would surface in a village, or near a convenient trail intersection, at dusk on some evening, sell goods to NVA “supply patrols” through the night, and depart back to Dai Loc at first light. There was no way to predict where the market would surface without good intelligence information. There was no good intelligence.

So, thought Goodrich sagely, it's just another excuse. We'll troll across the fields like bait because no one knows what else to do with us. We won't find any Phu Thuan.

We'll just find trouble.

ROUNDS again. Steady bursts. Cracks of AK-47s, maybe three of them. Up high. Boom. Grenade went off. Boom. Boom. Two more. M-16s rattled back. A moment of anticipatory silence. Boom boom boom. More cracks, short bursts.

Point platoon was dying up the trail.

They lay and sat on the trail, facing high grass walls, listening to the personal battle, someone else's war, at the head of the column. The trail was like a narrow alleyway running through tall buildings: it was almost impossible to leave it. The company followed it. Thus, its meanderings became predictable. And ambushable.

Bagger lit a cigarette, his wide face troubled. More M-16s cut loose up the trail. He winced, then smoked sulkily, staring at the mass of jutting green grassblades. More cracks, lower, lost in the grass.

“Hope they don't bring us up there. We'll never make it. We'll get lost in the grass. They'll hear us coming and do the hell outa us.”

Wild Man drank from a canteen, then stared inside it, absently measuring his last drops of water. “They won't. First platoon'll handle it.”

“First platoon's fucked up and you know it. They couldn't fight their way out of a thick fog.”

Wild Man shrugged, apparently unconcerned. “Even if they bring us up, the gooks are in those holes.” There were neck-deep holes along the trail, just next to it on both sides, spaced all along it. They were narrow and held only one or two men. “They'll be watching on the trail, not in the grass.”

Bagger's eyes were becoming haunted, hollow. His lips were rigid. “Yeah, but where are their buddies?” A cacophony of cracks, a half-dozen booms. “Oh-h-h this shit is bad. We got point next.” Point was methodically rotated among platoons, squads, fire teams, even individuals, on Go Noi's killer trails. Share The Risk. “I feel like somebody playing Russian roulette.”

Wild Man quietly studied Bagger, watching him fiddle with his cigarette. “Bagger, you getting flaky?”

Bagger stared at the high grass. One AK cracked over their heads. More booms. “Oh, you bet your sweet ass I'm getting flaky. Who ain't flaky about getting set up to be blown away?”

The spider holes were silent. First platoon had won the Battle of Latest Trailbend. The company inched forward to secure both ends of the battleground so the medevac helicopter would land. The point man had been killed. Three others shot. Three NVA were dead.

Bagger and Wild Man stood, deploying a few feet into the grass as security. Wild Man grinned under a droopy, red-flecked moustache. It was a resigned grin. “Don't do no good to get flaky about it, Bagger. Won't change a goddamn thing.”

TWO hours later, three hundred meters down the trail, Wild Man got his. Same thing. That unceremonious, instantaneous crack that startles you, jets the adrenaline, totally surprises you no matter how many times you repeat to yourself that it will happen around this turn, right here it will happen, it's got to happen just around here, I'll get the bastard first—

An unseen burst and Wild Man was down, curled in a little ball, holding his stomach. He thought to shoot, knew he should respond, but could not let go of his gut. Behind him Bagger flopped to the ground, his eyes protruding in terror, his face taut. He hugged the dirt, frozen by fear. Gook popped out of spider hole, took a shot at Bagger's supine frame, and missed. Waterbull rushed to the trailbend and tossed a grenade uptrail to keep the ambushers’ heads inside their holes, not knowing where they were. Boom.

Snake had them figured. He grabbed Baby Cakes’ team and pulled them through the grass just off the trail. There were old cemetery mounds near the ambushers. He bunched the team behind the first mound, five of them huddled in a tight knot—Baby Cakes, Ogre, Senator, and Cornbread, plus himself. He schooled them. “Next time they open up, listen for where they are. When I say so, toss a grenade. Everybody. Keep it away from Wild Man. Soon as the grenades go off, we jump out of here and grease 'em. Got it?”

All nodded in response. Goodrich crouched low, petrified. They'll kill us all this is crazy they'll be waiting for us as soon as we step out they'll mow us down like—

Crack just on the other side, maybe five meters away. Waterbull had tried to reach Wild Man. Wild Man was now the bait, the lure that would draw more targets near the spider holes. Crack just on the other side of the trail. Two holes.

Snake nodded, his lips set into a firm line, eyes clear, analyzing. “Now!”

Five grenades over the mound. Short pause. Incredible, interlocking booms, a pulsing explosion. The booms still rang. Snake jumped up. “Now!”

He sprang quickly around the mound. Baby Cakes jumped from the other side of it. Ogre and Cornbread followed. Goodrich clung to his grassy haven, waiting to hear the shots that would mow the others down. A rifle. Another. Outgoing. M-16s. He felt suddenly abandoned, was terrified to be alone in the high grass, and ran after the others.

The ambushers were dead. One sagged inside his spider hole, his head blown apart. The other was draped outside, across the trail. They had watched Wild Man, certain that the grenade barrage was preparatory to an attempt to drag him to safety. Snake and Baby Cakes had caught them from the side, just in back of where they were watching.

Wild Man groveled in the dirt, still clutching his stomach. Bagger stood up and peered at the ball of agony that was Wild Man, and could not control his anger. He walked to the trailbend and gazed at the dead ambushers. With a violent grunt he kicked one sprawling body back into its spider hole. Then he stood over the hole and fired a magazine into the body, eighteen rounds of automatic fire that sprayed all parts of the carcass.

Bagger's face was drained. “You gook motherfucker!”

Snake approached Bagger, putting an arm around his shoulder. “Save your ammo, Bagger. I think we're gonna need it.”

Staff Sergeant Sadler, the new platoon sergeant, strode up to the point. He was tall, mahoganied black, thick-set, with bulging buttocks. Like so many other staff NCOs, he was an infantry veteran, on his second Vietnam tour.

Sadler congratulated Snake. “That was a hell of a job, Snake.”

“Thanks, Sarge.” Snake tentatively liked Sadler. The Sergeant seemed to have his shit together. Snake shook his head, showing hints of frazzles that wore on his lips and eyebrows. “When's this shit gonna let up, huh?”

Sadler squinted ironically. “Well, they keep this up, they goan’ run outa ammo before too long.”

“Don't hold your breath, Sarge. We might run outa people first.”

THE perimeter, this latest one-night home, sat hopelessly adrift in a sea of sawgrass. The sawgrass had many advantages over the miles of elephant grass that the company had struggled through to reach it. In fact, if one stood he could even see over the top of it.

The resupply chopper had brought mail. Inside the mailbags, someone had thoughtfully inserted newspapers. Baby Cakes leafed through a two-day-old issue of Stars and Stripes, his craggy face intent.

“It says here,” he noted, “that folks are pleased with the progress of the last few weeks.”

Ogre nodded, forcing himself to appear ruminative. “No-o-o-o shit?”

Baby Cakes continued, holding the newspaper in front of him. “Yup. Says things are going re-e-al good. Says there weren't any, you know, ‘big battles’ all last week. Says old Charlie's done run outa gas.”

“Somebody better go tell Wild Man before he tries to claim a Purple Heart. Know what I mean, Cakes?”

“Yeah. Well, that was what they call an ‘isolated incident.’ Says right here there was a bunch of them ‘isolated incidents.’ ”

Ogre grinned ironically, lying back on his poncho liner. “Yeah, uh huh. That's the way we been ever since I came to this company. Isolated, waiting for incidents.”

“Funny man. We gotta get you on ‘Laugh In.’ ”

“Well, I'd settle for Goldie Hawn in a plain brown wrapper, if they'd mail it to me.” Ogre considered it. “Hell. I'd take that little old lady about now.”

“You done worse than her in Da Nang. And here's a flick of the moon. Hey, Ogre! You know they put a man on the moon?”

“I already heard about it on the radio.” Ogre seemed uninterested.

Baby Cakes squinted at the picture, examining it closely. “I be damned. Hey. Don't you want to see what it looks like?”

“I know what it looks like. It looks just like the Cu Bans.”

Baby Cakes studied the picture again. “No. There ain't any trails.”

THE night was wholly black, very low, just above the grass. Rain fell steadily, big drops like explosions on the ponchos. Fog rose from the ground, which was still hot from the penetrating sun of hours before. Each huge drop of rain sent a part of itself, as steam, back into the dead night air.