Gods Go Begging (15 page)

Jesse stopped walking when he heard the question. He turned to face the two correspondents, the dog, the orphans, and the line of dusty corpses.

“The one on the end, his name is Hong Trac!” he screamed at them with his arm extended and his finger pointing.

There were bullet holes in his body but they were bloodless and had been put there long after death. They were meant to simulate the effects of a firefight somewhere out in the bush. In Hong’s left ear there was a narrow rectangular slot; an empty mineshaft that plunged downward through soft cartilage into the auditory canal, and from there it sliced and severed the optic nerve and pons, blunting memory after memory like a ravenous disease of the aged.

“His name was Hong Trac!” he said again, quietly this time, but with the same intensity. He then turned to walk away but stopped in midstep. Without turning to face her, he asked the Frenchwoman with the long blond hair,
“Que veut dire lemot ‘tour
nevis’? What does it mean?”

A confused look came over her pretty face, but she shrugged and decided to answer the question, but only in exchange for one of her own. As she spoke the sergeant was already walking away.

“Did you know him, sergeant?” she asked in a raised voice. “Did you know that man?”

“No,” said Jesse to no one. “But he surely knew me.”

“A
tournevis?
Why would you ask such a question in a place like this?” she called out after him in her lovely French accent.
“Qu‘est-ce que c’est que le mot en Anglais
… what is it? Oh, yes, I know. It is what you call a screwdriver.”

The buck sergeant walked for hours. With his head down and his rifle slung uselessly across his back, he walked alone and far into the night, the living and the dead face of Hong flooding his mind. An old woman on the sidewalk preparing
canh chua,
fish soup, looked into his eyes as he approached. She shivered at what she saw and quickly turned away.

“Chào bá
,” he spoke softly as he passed.

The old woman lifted her head at the sound of the greeting.
“Chào em,”
she answered with a smile. Then she shook her head as she watched him disappearing into the dark of Công Húa Street. Between here and China Beach there would be dozens of snipers who would gladly put a bullet through his head. She said a silent prayer for the foreign buck sergeant as she stoked her small cooking fire. He was from the other side, but tonight he was not the enemy. She had been fooled at first, but his voice had told her that the simmering redness in his eyes had not been hatred.

“Chào em,
” she repeated as he disappeared into the darkness.

At daybreak Jesse Pasadoble would lift off on a gunship headed to the DMZ. From there he would fly on a Chinook to a small hill near the Loatian border. Grunts on the Ch-47 noted with derision that he spoke to no one and kept to himself.

Jesse stood staring through a small window as the chopper filled with cigarette smoke and aimless, nervous chatter. Visions of Hong and his wife in Marseille still crowded his mind. Through the dirty glass porthole the huck sergeant who kept to himself saw images of southern France—villages, bicyclettes, and boulevards—and not the endless gray and green of the Central Highlands of Vietnam.

When Jesse finally sat down in the chopper, he felt a strange sense of anticipation. Despite reports of heavy contact near the hill, he felt eager to get there. The thoughts weighing upon his soul were far too much to hear alone. Whether or not he would ever confide in them, there were two friends waiting for him on that hill, a black staff sergeant named A. B. Flyer and a new friend, a man of letters and of sensibilities… an army chaplain.

fFor endless hours the remote and elevated jungle garden had been battered mercilessly by brutal shards of blinding light. A calamitous din had followed closely behind each flash—discordant jumbles of shattering impact and sharp, desperate shouts. Creatures formed in the image of God had staggered backward from the western perimeter in strobe-lit steps, as the powerful slam of a rocket-propelled grenade collapsed a sandbag bunker.

Each trip flare that had flashed in the yellow darkness had drawn the bullets of a dozen riflemen. Shaped mines had been detonated sequentially, sending wide, overlapping arcs of shrapnel into the forest and into squads of bewildered, then suffering men. Red tracer rounds flowed out in lazy, lethal sweeps. Above it all there had been the occasional yellow glare of star shells drifting serenely beneath their tiny silk parachutes. Everywhere, below curling plumes of smoke, there had been countless cries for help in a dozen separate tongues.

In the darkness, ephemeral flowers of concussive flame like red trumpet vines had flashed into bloom, then had receded, to quickly wither shut in accelerated time, in savage salvos of impossible time. In the air, callous leaden spores had burst forth from their casings, seeking out the perfect bodies of young foot soldiers. The fruits of physics had been harvested here.

In the first light of day and far into the descending heat of evening, the small hill remained stunned, shivering, and confused. Somehow the age-old laws of geological time had been reversed in an unnatural, confounding instant. Molten magma had poured from the sky and splashed down onto a perplexed earth, fiery calderas had cracked open everywhere, cinder cones and vents had erupted with no pressure from below. Above its ruptured topsoils, the hill was spiteful and suffering beneath its freshly wounded crust. The crest was smoke-enshrouded, and down below, in its deepest bedrock, the hill had been rudely torn away from the ancient comfort of tectonic, subterranean rhythms.

Two groups of men had met on one face of this hill, and their savage intentions had left every tree limb and twig disfigured. Un watered since the last monsoon rains, the small hill of dry and cracked earth had been sickened to nausea by this forced feeding of burned sulfur and human fluids. Here and there intrepid flowers persisted between fissures and foxholes, their soft petals and thin stems choked shut by the savage spray, the crimson effluence of exit wounds. Against their will, the living poppies masqueraded as roses.

In one place, a ragged patch of hair follicles and skin soiled the stigma and stamens of a weeping blue blossom, repelling bee after bee. In another, scores of red seeds had erupted from human bodies, bursting violently through the drabness of cloth and skin—seed of stomach, seed of lung, hopeless grains set onto the wind. Everywhere, shell casings littered the garden like brazen chaff.

Among the wide spray of innards was a slice of cerebellum, a single sliver of mind, thrown yards from its previous owner. On a stem of wild lemon grass hung a taste for grape soda and shepherd’s pie, the memory of her goodbye, even the newborn baby’s impulse to cry when the world was upside down. On a leaf of wild lemon grass specks of sense were stranded and fading—three digits of a phone number, a single syllable from the second verse of a cherished song, and half a glimpse of a woman’s entire face.

At the top of the hill, drying in the sunlight, was an array of green pods: plastic bags snapped shut and steaming from within. A chaplain crawled among them, calling out to God and screaming the names of the newly dead at the top of his lungs. His body shook with palsy as he went from bag to bag retrieving a dog tag and their personal effects and marking soiled paperwork with their names and the date of their death.

A sergeant by his side was helping him with the grisly duty. Below them, grunts were laying out more concertina wire, setting new trip flares, and replanting the hill with claymore mines. Behind the landing pad, the bunkers that protected the radio emplacement were being rebuilt by a gaggle of shirtless, wordless men.

“Try to calm down, padre,” said the black sergeant. “Tonight’s gonna be our last night in this place. I’m sure of that.” He had a smooth and soothing Southern accent. His voice was a round baritone with a burnish of gentleness that belied his muscular build and serious eyes. A hint of both French and of Dixieland seasoned every sentence he spoke.

“I just talked to battalion. I gave them a sit-rep from hell and they won’t dare leave us hanging like last night. You have my word on that. Now, take some deep breaths, padre. Otherwise you’re gonna bust your heart wide open. I’ve seen it happen. Like the boys always say, keep your shit wired tight.”

The sergeant’s words were slurred. He had almost bitten his tongue in two during the last mortar barrage. It was a terrible habit that, perversely, the sergeant had grown to love. The feel of bloat ing and the taste of blood in his mouth meant that he had survived once again.

“After tonight we can blow all this equipment and di-di back to Dong Ha. I can get me a cold beer and a
Playboy
magazine and you can go on down to Da Nang and rip off some of that sacramental wine and talk philosophy with that captain friend of yours. Da Nang will calm you down. It’s surrounded by beaucoup marines, Special Forces, and the Ameri-Cal. As for me, I don’t mind Dong Ha. Sure, it’s a damn toilet, but there ain’t nothing to worry about in Dong Ha except them eight-foot rockets and them nightly probes by Victor Charlie.”

The black sergeant was smiling and softening his language for the chaplain’s sake. There was nothing to smile about. The only words appropriate to this place were obscenities. He deeply regretted talking his friend Jesse into joining him on this mission. The air support last night had been gravely inadequate: two Huey gunships and a single pass by a pair of fast movers. The jets had shot their wads, then had streaked home for a pizza and some Korean beer. Because of the distance from here to their home base, they had no loiter time over the target. Someone in Da Nang thought this hill had a low priority.

“I can’t stay another night,” moaned the chaplain. “I just can’t stay another night on this hill. I can’t hold it together. I hate the holes on this hill. We’re digging our own graves. I hate living in this grass. I hate living in holes, and I hate hills and I hate all the insects in this godforsaken country.”

The look of profound anguish that had settled into his eyes during the night hovered on his entire face like a permanent shadow. Inhaling deeply, then holding his breath, he snapped open the last body bag and began to sob uncontrollably once again. It was the Russian boy from New Jersey, the one that had “John Wayne” written in large script on his helmet and tattooed on his right arm.

“Someone ought to shoot John Wayne,” whispered the chaplain, his voice breaking and a small trickle of blood moving downward from his left nostril to the notch of his upper lip, where it mixed with the smelling salts he had smeared on earlier.

“Yeah,” sighed the sergeant, “for someone who never picked up a real gun, he’s sure gotten a lot of American boys killed.”

They both stared downward at the muddy white face of the handsome Russian boy. His face had once been beautiful. Now there were swatches of torn skin spread from shoulder to shoulder like leaves on a pillow. There was insect predation already visible. He was a naturalized citizen with an unpronounceable name. His buddies had simply called him Roosky. Neither dared open the snaps any farther. There was little left below the chest. His tattoos and his birthmarks had been liquefied by a mortar round, a direct hit. The contents of the bottom half of the bag would never be shown in any war movie. No actor would ever suffer these wounds.

Last night had been a heartless flurry of extremes; straight lines of inexorable energy had moved oblivious to topologies, ignoring the palm of a hand or the curve of a tree. Vectors had burst randomly as planned. War had happened last night: the sensate had been placed in the same space as the senseless.

The chaplain checked the boy’s dog tag for a religious preference. His fingers shook as he lifted the small neck chain, then pulled at it to view the tag. The words No Preference were engraved into the burned metal. Using his thumb, the chaplain made a cross on the boy’s forehead. Behind the boy’s body bag his helmet was perched atop his M- 16, its muzzle pushed down into the dirt. An hour ago his platoon had stood down to honor him and the others.

Hours ago the padre had become heart-sickened at the ticklish rubbing of his own selfish and cowardly lips against the earlobes of the dying. Despite all his best efforts, he had puked at the sight of open chest and stomach wounds, at the fragile plumbing, the crimson jellies and brackish rivulets just beneath the skin. He had never been able to stare at God’s secret baggage without revulsion, and that revulsion had degraded his prayers until they were little more than feckless mumblings. His sickened face had, itself, become a profound betrayal, a ruthless mirror that showed pleading, desperate boys that there was no prayer in heaven or on earth that could keep them or their image alive.

“I have to close his eyes,” whimpered the padre. “I’ve got to close his eyes.”

“Why?” asked the sergeant. “He slid out of his mother’s sack face up with his eyes open. Now he’s slid back into a sack. Let the poor bastard see where he’s going.”

It had occurred to the young chaplain this morning that a man’s intestines and kidneys looked remarkably like wet plastic bags filled with ocher and purplish fluids. Fibrous plastic bags filled with putrid juices seemed so carelessly jammed into the tightest spots beneath the ribs. He chuckled painfully at the thought of people dressed up and out on dates carrying those bags inside of them; they spoke of classic beauty and sighed at the depth of love while those hideous bags gushed and gurgled inside of them.

“All we love is skin!” he screamed.

The sergeant beside him said nothing. Trench madness was something he had seen before. He had experienced it himself. Some folks still called it the thousand-yard stare or combat fatigue, stupid euphemisms for the effects of unrelenting terror. The sergeant hated euphemisms. In a place where battles were seldom won by anyone, the number crunchers and accountants in Saigon had gone crazy with them. Casualties had evolved into “acceptable losses” and from there to “limited breakage” or projected “spillage.” There was even a set of words for civilian deaths caused by military operations: “overspray” and “overkill.”