365 Days (23 page)

“I get all the blood I need.”

The ward master was walking toward them.

“I’ve got to go,” Brock said, taking Ade’s limp hand in both of his. “I’ll keep in touch. Good luck.”

Ade looked up at him and smiled wanly. “That’s past, man. Gone. Take care.”

Brock was walking away even before the ward master reached him.

After lunch, the Major called the Far East Personnel Center for the Lieutenant’s records. There weren’t any. An hour later, a colonel from G-4 headquarters, United States Army, Japan, called and asked, why the inquiry. The Colonel listened politely, told the Major to forget about it, and hung up.

That evening Brock threw away his tiger stripes. Before dark, he came to the hospital officers’ club wearing class-A khakis and carrying a small flight bag. His jungle boots were gone, and in their place he was wearing gleaming jump boots. His short-sleeve shirt was ironed; his pants, spotless and creased, were bloused perfectly into his boots. Under his combat infantry badge and jump wings, he wore his ribbons, three rows of them—the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, the deep purple of the Purple Heart, and the Vietnamese Ranger Ribbon. The others—the National Defense Ribbon, the Vietnam Campaign Ribbon, and the Vietnam Service Ribbon—the foolish little everyman medals—had been left off.

He put his case in the coat room and walked into the lounge. It wasn’t much of a place—a bar, linoleum flooring, a few tables and chairs, and a juke box. It had been opened as a place for hospital patients and on-duty personnel, and being removed from the main Army base, without any colonels or colonels’ wives to be concerned, it had all the aspects of a sleazy southern bar. But after Nam it was enough, and as early as it was, the lounge was already fairly crowded.

Brock took off his cap and walked quietly past the soldiers at the bar. Some of them, catching sight of his ribbons, stopped talking as he came by. An infantry captain, who had been standing near the bar when he walked in, approached his table at the back of the room.

“How about a drink?”

Brock looked up. “No, thanks,” he said.

“Come on, I’m buying—anything you like.”

“Nothing, really.”

“Gin and tonic!” the Captain said, snapping his fingers, and without waiting for Brock to protest, he walked with a slight limp back to the bar. In a few minutes he was back, carrying two glasses. “Here you are, Lieutenant.”

“Thanks.” Brock put his glass down beside his cap.

The Captain sat down and looked at his ribbons. “Winning the war yourself, Lieutenant?” he said, taking a sip of his drink.

“Part,” Brock said. He summoned the waiter.

“Which part is that?”

“A glass of milk, please,” Brock said to the waiter. He turned back to the Captain. “My part.”

“From the looks of it, everyone else’s too.”

“No, just mine.”

“You know,” the Captain said, pointing to the untouched glass, “that’s pretty good gin.”

“I’m sure it is,” Brock said, paying the waiter, “but I had hepatitis.”

“Delta?”

“No.”

“North?”

“Yeah,” Brock said whimsically, “way north.”

“What unit were you with?”

“None.”

“Rangers, eh?” the Captain persisted.

“Sort of.” The juke box started blaring. Annoyed, Brock looked over his shoulder.

“Were you an LRRP?”

“No,” Brock said. “We worked too far north for that.” He reached into his shirt pocket for a cigarette, and the Captain leaned over the table to light it for him.

“Yes, that’s quite an array of ribbons,” the Captain said.

“Let’s talk about you,” Brock said.

“I was an FO for the 25th.”

“Tracks?”

“Yeah.”

“Fat. That’s real fat.”

“Sometimes,” the Captain said.

“At least you always have enough water. How many gallons does each one of those damn things carry?”

“Thirty...sometimes fifty,” the Captain said, grabbing his leg to help straighten it.

“You know,” Brock said, “I can remember once, getting back below the DMZ—you get real freaky after you’ve been out a while—and the first Americans we ran into coming out of the DMZ were a track squadron, a couple of APC’s, and a track. I just couldn’t believe how much water they had. I mean, I just stood there and couldn’t believe it. We’d been chewing bamboo shoots for almost a week, and before that, for two weeks, we’d been drinking anything—rain water, river shit, stuff right out of the paddies. And then we came out, and the first thing I saw was these guys standing by their damn tracks spilling water all over. I could have killed them,” he said solemnly; “I swear to God I would have, too, if my men hadn’t...”

“I didn’t know we had units up there in North Vietnam.”

“We do,” Brock said.

“Hmmm....” The Captain looked unconvinced.

“You think the whole fucken war is fought with APC’s and tanks?”

“No. I just didn’t think we had ground units working up there. I figured the photograph planes took care of that.”

“We’re there,” Brock said coldly, signaling the waiter again.

“How long were you up there?” the Captain asked.

“A long time.”

“A year?”

“We’d go up on missions.”

The Captain waited for him to go on, but Brock just sat there thoughtfully, pushing the ashtray around. The room was filling up. Despite the crowd, it was not a very loud place. Most of the men were just standing around talking or drinking quietly by themselves. A few were leaning awkwardly on their crutches. Three or four were still in shoulder casts and arm braces, while others were wearing surgical packs.

“How did you get into it?”

“Happened. I majored in Chinese in college, and somebody found out. They’re very good at that—must have a line on everybody. Anyway, they called me at the beginning of my senior year. I said no, but a year later my brother was killed in Nam and I said yes.”

“And they sent you to Nam?” the Captain asked, pointing to the Airborne cap on the table.

“No.” Brock was about to go on when a tray of dishes crashed behind him. He jumped in his chair and turned sharply, tensed, his face hard in the dim light. He was almost on his feet before he caught himself. Disgusted, he settled back in his seat. His hand shook as he reached for another cigarette.

The captain slid his lighter across the table. “You were saying you didn’t go to Nam.”

“Do you know anything about the Special Forces?” Brock asked. “I was with an SMT group—Special Mission Team. After jump school and Ranger training, my team was sent to Malaysia—the Royal British Jungle Tracking School there. They’d send us out in that jungle and then capture us and beat us up and then send us out again. I thought we were tough, too—Airborne, Ranger training, Special Forces school—but they knew how to live in the jungle, how to use it. For Christ’s sake, they even liked it.” He picked up the captain’s lighter and turned it over and over in his hand. “That’s what we learned, all six of us—how to live there, like it was home.”

“Can I sit down?”

The Captain looked up over his shoulder at the trooper. “Sure,” he said, motioning to the chair beside him.

It took the soldier a little while to lower himself into the seat. “Sorry,” he said. “I can’t bend too well yet. Round sort of bounced off my backbone. At least that’s what the surgeon said.”

“You’re lucky,” Brock said. “Since the bombing halt, the VC and NVA have been moving tons of new weapons into the South. They’re all carrying brand new chicon Soviet block weapons now, AK’s, Simonov carbines, RP-46’s, RPD light machine guns. You were really lucky. You must have got hit with an old FN or carbine. A round from one of their new weapons would’ve broken you in two. Sure it wasn’t a frag?”

“I don’t know,” the trooper said. “It was almost dark. Nearly everyone in my platoon was killed.” Brock, about to interrupt, stopped himself. “It could have been a frag; hell, it could have been a piece of an A-bomb for all I know. God knows there was enough shit going off.”

“How come you all got killed?” Brock asked quickly.

“We got caught.”

“Nobody gets caught.”

“
We
did.”

“You don’t get caught,” Brock repeated. “You just fuck up.”

“We didn’t fuck up,” the trooper said stubbornly, shifting his weight in the chair, “we got caught.”

“It’s all the same.”

“Look!” He stared angrily at Brock, then turned to the Captain, “We were coming back through an area the ARVN’s had just swept. We were almost home. They let the point and the slack through and got the rest of us boxed in. Then they popped their claymores. It didn’t matter where we moved, they had us. Everybody was hit or dead in the first thirty seconds.” He turned back to Brock. “You know, we didn’t try to get ambushed.”

“Nobody does,” Brock said, looking at his watch.

“Wait a minute,” the Captain said, “that’s not really fair.”

“Fair?” Brock looked amused. “No,” he said, “I guess it’s not. How were you moving, soldier?”

“What do you mean?”

“Were you in a traveling overwatch, in column, squads flanking? Were you coming back through one of the ways you had gone out?”

“Column.”

“And you were almost home?”

The trooper nodded. A few fellows from the nearby tables had gathered around to listen.

“We weren’t cherries, man,” the trooper said drily. “They’d have had anyone. There was no way out. It was an X ambush. Once you’re in it—you’re in it.” He looked at Brock’s ribbons. “You must know that.”

“There is only one way to move through the jungle,” Brock said. “The point takes everything out in front of him, the whole 180 degrees, not the overhead, just eye level, and below. The slack takes the left overhead and the 90 degrees to his right. The third man takes the left overhead and the 90 degrees to his left. The fourth man takes the area to his side and the overhead to his right. The fifth, the area to his side and the overheads. The last man covers the rear and, if he has to, cleans the track. And,” he went on slowly, almost pedantically, “you walk carefully, at a British slow march, putting your foot down slowly, stopping every five or ten meters. I know,” he said, stopping the interruption. “But that’s the way it has to be done or you get caught. Even...” he went on slowly, looking across at the trooper, “even if you don’t want to. You get a feeling then, when you move like that—a rhythm. You know when there’s something up there, when something is wrong. Little sounds, mostly.”

“Did you rotate points?” asked a patient who was wearing Airborne and Ranger patches on his uniform.

Brock looked up but seemed reluctant to go on.

“Did you rotate points?” the Ranger asked again, a bit louder. The conversation at the surrounding tables stopped.

“No,” Brock said.

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant,” the soldier said, “you’ll have to speak louder, I got my ears fucked up, too.”

“No,” Brock said louder. “But we never left him alone out there, either. When our point saw something and knew he’d been seen, he’d fall backwards, firing off single rounds. The slack, even if he didn’t see anybody, would step forward and spray the same area with automatic fire. By the time he was out of ammunition, the point had his weapon reloaded and was firing again. Most of the time, though, we saw ’em first and just moved away.”

“But companies aren’t six men,” someone volunteered. He was wearing a shoulder cast, with his fingers in steel traction.

“The New Zealanders do fine,” Brock said, “and so do the Australians.”

“They’re all volunteers.”

Brock looked coldly at the soldier who had just spoken. “Tell that to the draftees who get killed,” he said. “I’m sure they’d love to know.”

“How the hell did that happen, then?” a soldier asked, pointing at Brock’s Purple Heart ribbon. “I mean, if you know how to live in the jungle so well.”

Brock, acting as if he hadn’t heard, slowly, in a very stylized way, picked up the Captain’s lighter in front of him and lit another cigarette. The trooper was just beginning to look triumphant when the captain asked, “Where were you when it happened?”

“Haiphong,” Brock said, putting the lighter back exactly where it had been before.

The soldier looked surprised. “Haiphong? Did you jump in?”

“No. We walked.”

“What did you do for supplies?” asked a soldier with a surgical patch over one eye.

Brock shrugged. “Mercenaries—agents, traitors, whatever you want to call them. They put out caches for us.”

“Can you trust ’em?”

“No, you can’t trust anybody. They put out two or three for every one we needed. When you get to the one you’ll use, you’re just careful. You stake it out for half a day, and if anything looks foolish, you just pass it up.” He crushed out his half-smoked cigarette. “On one mission, we had to pass up three and just keep going with what we had. We ended up living on rats and chocolate bars and stealing ammunition from the gooks. Anyway, we fucked up. We didn’t get caught. We were on a mission, when an Air Force colonel got shot down. Some fool in Washington decided that my team should go get him. We had to break our routine and travel during the day to get there.”

“Did you get him?”

“No, we got there a little after the NVA. I wasn’t going to lose my team. They had him, they could keep him.” Brock looked at his watch again. “I’ve got to go,” he said, reaching for his cap.

“Just one thing,” the Ranger said. “Why do you think you learned so much more in Malaysia than we did in Ranger training and Special Forces school? I mean, maybe you got better at what you knew, but as for learning more...”

“It’s not what you know,” Brock said. “It’s a feeling you get. Like tracking. You need it when you’re alone and on your own in the jungle. There’s no one to help you out there. When you get good, you can find a track and tell not only how many they are, but their morale, how far they’re going to go, whether they’re near their camp, the weapons they’re carrying. We found a Viet Cong hospital complex the Special Forces had been walking over for days...”

“How can you tell their weapons,” a soldier asked, “and how far they’re going?”

“From the imprints when they put them down to rest. Their morale from the way they drag their feet, or the joints that may be lying around. If they’re near a base camp, they wouldn’t be conserving their food; they’ll be throwing it away half-eaten. If the branches are broken along the track at shoulder height, they’re carrying their weapons at port arms. They’re waiting then, expecting. If the branches aren’t broken, their weapons are slung. But,” he went on quickly, “all this is just technique. There is a feeling that you get after a while—that’s what’s important,” Brock said, picking up his hat and playing with it. “We were going through a village once. We were looking for a certain party. We took off our boots and walked into each hut. It was midnight. I went into three like that and suddenly realized I’d gone into each hut the same way—standing up—so the next one I went in on my belly. An RPD burst took out the door a bit above my head.” He stopped and shrugged, “Things like that.... Well,” he said, pushing back his chair, “got to go home.”