Fields of Fire (5 page)

Then Isham, that was his son, he was in the militia for that War of 1812, but after it was finished he moved on over into Tennessee. Said they done killed off all the British in Virginia, and maybe there was a few left over in Tennessee. He married him a half-Cherokee gal named Polly Long and they had themselves a brood of kids.

One of them was Welcome, your great-great-grandaddy. He was the fifth man down. When they were hardly teenagers, him and his brother Mibau went up into Kentucky. They say Mibau killed a man down in Tennessee for trying to smooch his sister, and Isham sent Welcome with Mibau up into Kentucky because Mibau was hardly more than a boy and hadn't never been away from kinpeople. Well, they settled in the ridges here and they took up with some local gals. Welcome, he married a Hargrove, as I recall. Had more childrens than they could rightly count.

Then that terrible war come and old Welcome didn't hardly have him a boy left, time it was over. He lost three of 'em just in Pickett's Charge. You know, up to Gettysburg. Oh, he had him some fighting mean boys, ain't no doubt. They come down from the ridges, they were in the Ninth Kentucky, they wore just some old rags and called it a uniform. But they were fighting mean.

When the others finally come back they told old Welcome of it. They talked about a dusty, summer heat, and all of them sweating. Fifteen thousand of them in the field! I can hardly picture it, boy. They said that the dust come up from the ground like wind, blowing from their feet up to their eyes, straight inside their noses. And they walked inside it, couldn't even wipe it or keep from breathing it or even see beyond it. And they said you couldn't hear a thing but people stomping and swearing and horses snorting from the dust, like all fifteen thousand of them were so choked from fear and dust that they couldn't laugh or cry or even talk to the man right next to them.

Oh, but it was glory in them fields! Fields of fire, boy! They walked right into that cannon, all those Yankee guns and the guns ripped at them, all the smoke and fire and cannister and case shot, and they never lost a step! The ones who made it back to Welcome said whole rows of men were felled—whole rows, boy!—and they kept up their walking, stepping over and around mounds of men and horses lying there in that field like they'd stopped to take a nap or set them up a camp.

But then the whole row with those Hodges boys was ripped up and three of Welcome's fighting boys dropped down in that field. The ones that made it back said those Hodges never even got to fire their guns, that they'd walked a mile in all that heat and dust and they'd almost made it up to them damn Yankee cannons, but then the cannons beat them to it. They faced the cannons, though! Died on a day of glory!

And the ones who made it back had to fight up to the Yankee guns and then battle there with them Yankee cannoneers, hand to hand. Can you picture it, boy? But they got beat. There were too many Yankees. So they had to come on back across that wide dusty dead-man field of fire with them Yankee cannonballs a-chasing them, all the way back to the starting place.

Then General Lee himself come out to meet them. They all said he was crying, riding on his white horse from group to group, that white beard of his just soaked with tears. Told them he was sorry. Told them they were God's bravest creatures, that they'd earned a glory spot in heaven. Told them it was himself who lost the battle. That's the kind of man our General Lee was, son. They's why you and your daddy both were named for General Lee. He was a man of honor and he cried the day three Hodges died on the glory field.

And then Alec, Welcome's youngest. They come to get him when he had the fever and he left his sickbed, strapped over a horse. He told them he wasn't afraid. They left Alec hid underneath a low bush along the road to Corinth when the retreat began, sicking up into Shiloh's fresh spring grass, too weak to take another step. But Alec, he was hard. He made it all the way to the prisoner camp at Alton and the records said he didn't die until he caught the smallpox. Alec was a right fine boy. We're stretching it some, but we'll say he died on the fields of glory, too …

IT was a continuum, a litany. Pride. Courage. Fear. An inherited right to violence. And the pride accumulated, even as the reasons themselves grew more amorphous.

Grandpa, who breathed the gas for Pershing, who almost died not for the honor of Old Glory, but for this vestige of lost hope he called the South. Who advised persistently that one had to leave it to understand and truly love it, that one had to sit in isolation and yearn for it, and that once one experienced the yearn he understood it more and loved it with a proper awe. And she (Grandma) accepting vicariously the truthfulness of Grandpa, who left the South for those two years and embraced it upon returning, but never ceased to ruminate on the glory of the two years he spent believing he was defending it by killing off Germans in France.

And she having to voice Grandpa's insistence for him because he had died short months after learning of his own son's death, giving up (Bob Hodges was to later surmise) under the crushing realization that, somehow, losing a son to the Germans in France was his own payback for having helped do away with a legion of Germans there in his youth. And, both times, the landscape of the South escaped unmarked, while its cemeteries burgeoned.

And finally his father. He was like his father. Hard and stubborn, Grandma would say fondly. And he looked like him, she would recall, smoothing down his topknot and remembering. She filled him with all his father's boyhood exploits, trying to make a dead man come alive in his son's mind. And, she would remind him, he died in glory. He fought with them across the whole of France, to save them Frenchmen from the Germans. And it was the Battle of the Bulge—you go read about it, boy. You find you some books in the library and look it up. We'll talk about it next Sunday. Your daddy died right there in the front lines, a combat soldier, staring cold into them Nazi eyes, knee-deep in the snow at the Battle of the Bulge.

In a town in France he could not pronounce, much less spell. With a vague, propagandized knowledge of who Hitler was, but without ever having heard of Munich or Chamberlain. After having joined the army with the rest of his contemporaries as if the whole backlands had been challenged to a pickup softball game.

Oh, but he faced them Germans. He had a nerve of steel, your daddy. And he could shoot. Once I seen him drop a squirrel that just peeked one eye around a tree trunk. Your daddy shot him right in the eye. And he was only twelve. Oh, you got to be proud of your daddy. He died standing up and fighting back.

AFTER fifteen years of it, it was ingrained. It was the fight that mattered, not the cause. It was the endurance that was important, the will to face certain loss, unknown dangers, unpredictable fates. And if one did it long enough and hard enough, he might happen upon a rewarding nugget. But, in any event, he was serving, offering himself on the altar of his culture.

A litany, an inheritance of coursing, unreasoned pride. It pulsed through his own dark veins. That one continuous linking that had bound father to son from the first wild resolute angry beaten Celt who tromped into the hills rather than bend a knee to Rome two thousand years ago, who would hold out in an icy marsh by standing for days with only his head above water, and who would chew the bark off a tree, fill his belly with wood rather than surrender from starvation and admit defeat to an advancing civilization.

That same emotion passing with the blood: a fierce resoluteness that found itself always in a pitch against death, that somehow, over the centuries, came to accept the fight as birthright, even as some kind of proof of life. Even there on the ridges, two thousand years and a continent removed, transplaced from mountains to mountains as if it were as natural for them to live in rural poverty as it was for a bird to nest in a tree. Glorying in the fight like unmuzzled sentry dogs, bred to it, for the benefit of the ravishers who owned and determined the reasons.

It became a religion to him. He believed in God but most of all he believed in his father and the other Ghosts. God was all the way in heaven, but the Ghosts were with him everywhere he walked. He could cross a field and come up with a handful of arrowheads. He would go to bed and know he slept above Shawnee bones.

And he could scoop out history in a spadeful of mud. Through his childhood summers and later on his off days and vacations he and his friends would dig around the creek beds where the Yankees and Rebels had alternately made their camps. He would bring back a metal button or a spent bullet or an old spoon or a belt buckle and he would keep it in his bedroom for a week or month, contemplating unremembered agonies and glories that had left the item buried in the creek's mud. Then he would take it into Salt Lick or Hillsville and sell it to a gunsmith or an antique dealer for enough money to buy a soda, or a ticket to the movies.

And the movies. They were their own communion. If John Wayne wasn't God then he was at least a prophet. Hodges and a half-dozen friends would walk the five miles into Hillsville on Saturday afternoons and sit in awe through The Sands of Iwo Jima, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, The Guns of Navarone, Anzio, The Battle of the Bulge, and dozens of others. It was all there on the screen. Standing up and fighting back.

Then, after the movies, they would stand shyly at the outer fringe of the gathered farmers who had come to spend their Saturdays in the courthouse square. The men would sit in gaggles, chewing slowly on cuds of tobacco or rolling their own cigarettes, talking of their wars and scratching fading scars. There were monuments in the square: a stolid Confederate soldier peering south toward Tennessee, one of the few in a Kentucky town. A large stone marker commemorating those who served in World War I. A similar one for those who went to World War II. Hodges used to stare at the new stone marker: there was an asterisk by his father's name:
^*
Robert E. Lee Hodges.

If there had been no Vietnam, he would have had to invent one. He often wondered if that hadn't been what old Mibau had done: finding an issue of honor in the war-less mountains of Tennessee, because if there had not been an issue involving honor, then there would have been no honor. Killing a man in defense of his sister's purity and having to flee to Kentucky, so that, for the rest of his life, he could feel vindicated by his very isolation.

But there was Vietnam, and so there would be honor. It was the fight, not the cause that mattered. He would have his place in the town square and his name on a large stone monument. Perhaps he would have a scar somewhere to scratch as he chewed a tobacco cud on Saturday while young boys watched in awe. And he would be one with the Ghosts.

He had done well in Marine officer training. He was quiet, but his shyness masked an unrelenting stubbornness, and when he spoke his words were spare, but authoritative. He had spent his life preparing for the Marines, although he had never comprehended that until he viewed some of the others. He knew the woods and he could shoot and he did not mind hot weather. He did not quit on the long runs or the terrible conditioning hikes because endurance involved pride and pride was honor and he was nothing if he did not retain his honor. And he knew tactics. Tactics were personal to him, much as the achings of a sick man would be to a doctor's son.

Bob Hodges stood in the chilled winterdust of the road, preparing to say good-bye to his grandmother, and could not avoid remarking to himself that this moment was completing a lifetime of preparations. There was no thought in his life that spanned beyond what he was about to do in Vietnam. He would fight his war, force his body through the lightless conduit, and worry about what was on the other side when he returned. He was not anxious to save Vietnam from itself and he did not relish facing North Vietnamese guns for a year, but he reasoned that, after all, a man cannot choose his country's enemy. Had Grandpa really hated the Hun in 1917, until told he should? And besides, Vietnam was something to be done with, a duty. Not for Vietnam. For honor (and a whisper saying, “for the South”). And mostly for the bench seat in the town square.

He walked into the house and greeted his grandmother with a big squeeze and a warm kiss. She fussed over his uniform, obviously proud, her old eyes filled with memories. She had fried him more chicken than he could possibly eat, and had made him an apple pie. She waited on him, doted over him as never before. She would not even allow him to help her clear the dishes.

Slowly, he realized she was afraid. He had not expected it. When the outside shadows deepened and he finally rose to leave she moved slowly to him and gave him an aching, too-long hug. Her eyes were wet. He hadn't noticed it until then.

“Sometimes I wish I'd never told you those stories, Bobby. I just wanted you to remember your daddy. Now, you be careful. Hodges never had a lick of luck at this.”

Ghosts and glory. It stunned him to hear her say it. He hugged her back. “Now, don't you worry, Grandma. I'm coming back, if that's what you mean.”

“Don't take no chances. That's what I mean.” She gathered herself. “We're proud of you boy. All of us.”

All of us. He did not know how she meant the statement, but it scared him. He suddenly felt pulled along, out of control. Afraid. The reality of what he was about to do shook him for the first time, as if all the years of considering it had somehow made the prospect of actually doing it a novel one. He managed a smile and kissed her, the old-skin of her cheek like a brush of velvet. Then he joined his ghosts in the cold black night. Every dead rock mocked him as he trudged along the railroad tracks to home.

II

It did not seem right that he be transported in such style to the desolation that awaited him. He watched a first-run movie as the jet streaked west and he mentally screwed each stylish stewardess a dozen times, as did the other two hundred khaki-clad fellow prisoners on the flight. He ate TV-dinner meals and slept. It was his first jet ride.

They stopped at Hawaii for an hour and he marveled at the Polynesian and Oriental mixes of people at the airport. They stopped again at Wake Island in the dead of night and he remembered Deveraux and the other madly brave Marines who had taken on a world of Japanese to defend that tiny crumb of island in the middle of nothing. He sent postcards of the island to his mother and grandmother and a girl he had dated in college.

They arrived in Okinawa, at the huge airstrip of Kadena Air Force Base, and were whisked away in shuttle buses to the Marine transient facility at Camp Hansen. He sat silently on the bus, chuckling occasionally at the humorous remarks of some of his friends from Basic School, absorbing the packed streets and the closely built stores and steambaths and bars, the swarms of smallish golden people. That's it, he thought amazed. Golden. They are the color of gold.

He was given a room in a transient BOQ, which he shared with two friends from Basic School. They were all told that it would be a week before they would process into Vietnam. In spite of his growing fears, it had frustrated him. He felt uneasy walking around the camp in the presence of hundreds of red-booted dirty long-haired deeptanned men who were finally free of Vietnam and were on the way home. They stared at him derisively. They kidded him that he would be sorry.

He took to drinking, along with his other friends. It seemed that the only proper way to deal with his transitory state was to be so alcoholically obliterated that he could not recognize it. The Officers’ Club bar opened at ten in the morning, and for the first two days he and his friends had been waiting on their stools. Once inebriated, they would shoot pool in the game room, or take taxi tours in the nearby villages.

He tried a steambath once. He paid his two dollars and walked the stark hall to the designated room. The walls were painted government green, compliments of a bucket of stolen paint. The girl was stocky, and dressed in high-waisted cotton underwear. She seemed bored. She worked on his muscles like a mechanic tuning a car: perfunctorily, without interest. She offered him a hand job and he hurriedly declined.

He and two friends went to one of the many bars. It was dark and close inside, smelling of musted alcohol and people sweating. The girls marched over to their table and one of them sat on his lap and dug her rump meaningfully into his crotch and he screamed in agony: for all her practice, she had sat on him wrong. When he howled she marched away in a huff. He left the bar, feeling embarrassed and naive.

By his third day on Okinawa, Hodges took to staying in his BOQ room for hours, pensively studying his Combat Leader's Notebook. He put off drunkenness until a more decent hour: after lunch.

ONE thing about the Officers’ Club manager, mused Hodges through his drunkenness, the son of a bitch may be skating Nam, but he sure as hell knows how to hire some nice-looking women.

Their costumes were kind of stupid, really. Full dresses, bobby socks and tennis shoes. But they were cute. Somehow innocent after the terrors in the village. He liked the way they walked. They seemed conscious of every step they were taking, every muscle movement, as they went about their tasks.

She put his plate down in front of him. He thought he felt her breast against his shoulder. Vague, velvet pressing. Hard to tell. She smiled self-consciously and he squinted, focusing on her name tag. Yup. Same as a minute ago. Mitsuko.

“Hey, thanks, Mitsoooko.”

“MITS-ko.” It was the third time she had corrected him.

“Whatever. Hey. Did anybody ever tell you you're nice-looking?”

“Oh, yes.”

“That's what I thought.”

She smiled patiently, as if she were waiting for the next predictable line. He noticed then how young she was. He had been watching her for three days, sitting at tables under her care, throwing inane comments at her along with the others. Like pennies in a well, he mused. How many half-drunk officers have made a pass at her today? Hey. That's a damn good line.

“How many Marines have bothered you today?”

“Oh, no date Marines!” She smiled shyly, almost innocently.

“Well, that's not what I meant.” He shook his head, laughing at himself in frustration. Great line, Hodges. You went and called the girl a whore. “Do you like to dance?”

She smiled tentatively, too unsure of her English to interpret his question at face value. She cocked her head, waiting for a punch line. He decided he liked the way she looked. Her small-boned, oval face, with its turban of black hair, looked regal. Well, cute, anyway.

“No, I just mean dance. You know—” Hodges bounced in his chair—“dance.”

“It's awright.” She walked away, over to the next table to take an order.

He lit a cigarette, stumped. Why the hell her, anyway? Half the waitresses seemed eager to date Marines. He tapped his ashes into the ashtray. She's too young. Can't be more than eighteen. But damn it. She walked by, carrying two platters.

“Hey, Mitsooko. Dance with me tonight, O.K.?”

“MITS-ko. No can do, bobaloo.”

Another penny in the well. But she left him with a taste of pretty smile. She passed him again on the way back to the kitchen. “Your food is cold. You better eat!”

Unsolicited comment. Motherly. Major score. He ate slowly, and finally was the only one left at any of her tables. She seemed aware of him as she cleared the other places, much as a cat remains intent while seemingly ignoring a possible attacker. He lit another cigarette, watching her. Finally she came to his table.

“You finished?”

“Dance with me. Tonight.” She pondered him, frustrated and innocent. She looked around for help. “Come on, Mit-sko, please. I go to Vietnam in a couple days.” The line failed: everybody in the room went to Vietnam in a couple days. “Don't you like me?”

“I'm engaged.” Her response was obviously rehearsed. “Okinawa boy.”

“Whooppee-doo.”

“What?” She smiled quizzically.

“American word for ‘so what?’ Come on.” He rose to his feet, his face eager. “Let's go dancing, all right?” He grasped her shoulder. “You'll love it.”

She seemed embarrassed. She glanced around to see if anyone else was watching. She turned to walk away. “No-o-o-o.”

“I won't bother you any more.”

“What?”

“Go dancing tonight and I won't bother you any more. Not tomorrow. Not the next day. Not ever. O.K.?”

She smiled humorously, then shrugged. “O.K.”

Well, whatta you know, mused Hodges. The perfect line. Promise to leave 'em the hell alone and they'll do anything, even go out with you.

He waited for her in front of the club, smoking cigarettes and pondering his days of drunkenness. What the hell has all this got to do with Vietnam? He decided that it was a Marine Corps plot to make everyone frustrated enough that they would want to get into Vietnam. Must be it. And damn it, it sure as hell works.

Gliding shadow on the sidewalk. She had shed the absurd bobby socks and was dressed in Western clothes, a skirt and blouse. The first thing he noticed as she approached was her legs. They were well shaped, slim, an apparent rarity among Okinawan women. Hodges grinned, dismounting the fence he had been sitting on. Dig it.

She walked up to him, obviously uneasy. She did not smile or even look at him as he called a taxi and opened the door for her. She moved to the other side of the seat. He scooted over next to her. Her perplexity was fresh and innocent. He was not terribly experienced in such matters, but she was making him look like a regular cavalier.

Hodges called to the taxi driver. “Koza.” He remembered a dance hall from a few days before.

The taxi left the Camp gate, and wound down a crowded road, through the lighted, sign-drunk village. Kin village, mused Hodges, was nothing but a gate ghetto. He tried a few questions about sights on the streets, Japanese signs, pawnshops, steambaths, all the Conqueror's amenities. He found her incredibly shy. She attempted gamely to answer, but it was convoluted and intense, a mix of Japanese and English and American slang. He caught something about how Camp Hansen had once been “a tousan’ farms,” but could not decipher the rest.

They left the city and struggled southward down small hills, fighting a myriad of winding curves, and soon were driving along the beach road, which ran at the edge of the long, thin island. He watched the white sand in the gloomy light. She pointed to the silent surf from the taxi's dark.

“Good swim. Officer beach. No Okinawan.”

IT wasn't any louder or dirtier or cruder than it had been two nights before. It only seemed that way. Hodges ushered her in past scores of groping couples, Okinawan girls and American men, to a table in back of a large, packed dance floor. An Oriental band imitated the Rolling Stones, too loudly and obnoxiously, on an elevated stage.

She had tightened up the moment she had realized where Hodges was taking her. She insisted on moving all the way to the rear of the room, to a virtually hidden table. Hodges bought them each a soft drink. The music was beginning to sober him up. He studied her under the flashes of a strobe light. Her eyes were low and she was so refreshing. He felt a deep, protective affection for her, and began to comprehend his mistake in taking her to the club. He sensed that, somehow, he had insulted her.

The band relented from its wailing fuzztones and played a slow song. He put his hand on her shoulder. “Dance.”

She stared at the couples on the floor. “No.”

“Come on. That's what we came for.”

They moved slowly along the edge of the dance floor, not really a part of it. He felt comfortable in her arms. She was deceptively curved underneath the loose clothes she wore, and strong. He felt like smothering her to him, poring over her body as some of the other dancers were doing, but he thought that it might make her cry. She was deeply upset. He chided himself. Way to go, Casanova. You really scored.

The song ended and he felt alone, adrift with her in a world that was hostile to them both. He put an arm around her and pulled her to him, she not resisting, and kissed her. She merely allowed herself to be kissed, not responding. Then she demanded that they leave.

THEY caught another taxi back to Camp Hansen. He was depressingly sober now, sobriety assuring him of the true distance between him and her, but also convincing him of his deep attraction to her. As they pulled away from the nightclub he smiled apologetically across the seat to her.

“Terrible, O.K.? Sorry.”

He watched her in the taxi's dark, she looking straight ahead out at the narrow road, and he felt the ache of losing her. He kissed her again but still she did not respond one way or the other. She merely allowed herself to be kissed.

She had a long conversation with the driver. Her face became lit and she appeared amazed, incredulous. She translated bits and pieces to Hodges in apparent politeness, lest he feel excluded. A murder. Boy killed two shopkeepers with an ax. American boy. No. Okinawan mother, American father. No father.

Hodges mentally shrugged it off. He could not understand their excitement. She noticed that he seemed unmoved and touched his knee, intense. He shrugged to her, smiling ironically. “One murder?”

“No no no. You no understand. Okinawan never kill. This is terrible!”

“Must have been the American in him.” It was supposed to be a joke. She withdrew her hand and ignored him, continuing to converse with the driver.

The taxi turned off the beach road and groaned up the short steep hill and entered the island road. In a few moments they were driving through Kin village again. They rode along the lighted street, the sign-drunk buildings depressing him now. Mitsuko spouted another command to the driver and he nodded once and pulled over to the Camp gate.

She smiled with effort, warm yet distant. “Taxi take me home. I pay. Good night.”

Her face was only inches from his and he stared beyond the careful smile into eyes that were confused and innocent, and somehow hurt. What a bummer, mused Hodges. How the hell can I understand? Three days and it's Vietnam. How the hell can I try to understand? It can't be like this.

He touched her shoulder. “I can't leave you here.” He gestured out into the streets. “Too many crazy Marines. Let me take you home.”

She said nothing but her unchanged expression told him no. They sat close, staring at each other, each waiting for the other to capitulate. The driver stared courteously out the front window. Marines passing by the car on the way in from liberty elbowed each other and smiled at the figures in the car.

The nudging Marines finally tipped the scales. Mitsuko turned to the driver and spoke a low command and he nodded once again and drove off into the village. They bounced a few blocks and turned onto a dirt road, following it behind the street. The car stopped beside a stairway which led to a group of second-floor apartments that fronted on the street.

Hodges checked the fare and started to pay the driver. She protested again. “No. You take taxi back.”

He ignored her, paying the driver. The taxi departed. He turned to her, smiling uncertainly. “I'll walk back. It isn't far.” They stood under the stairs, looking at each other's image in the dark. Finally she gave him a small, confused smile and turned away. She began to walk up the stairs.

“Sorry. Good-bye.”

He followed quickly, astounding himself with uncharacteristic boldness. He took her shoulder and stopped her and she turned around, angry, somehow insulted, but he needed her too much to worry about her insult. He pulled her to him, first gently and then tightly, kissing her and pushing her into the guardrail. Finally she responded, ever so slightly, not even wanting to.

He squeezed her and spoke soft words that she did not understand and then kissed her again, less clumsily than before. She kissed him back, a portion of her innocence crumbling with great remorse, admitting his attractiveness. Then she stared at him with a curious, examining look.