Going After Cacciato (25 page)

And later there were war stories.

All along it had been coming to this, and now the war stories started.

The students danced and the music was loud, and Eddie told the story about Pederson, then Oscar told about Big Buff. “You should’ve seen it,” Eddie said when Oscar finished. “Old Buff, we found him just like Oscar says. Hunched up over his helmet like a prayin’ Arab. No offense.”

Fahyi Rhallon smiled and said there was no offense in the least, he was a practicing Christian. And then he told his own war story, one about a battle in the snow and how the snow looked afterward, and there was a respectful silence when the story was over, and then Oscar put his hand on Doc’s shoulder: “Tell him,” he said. “Tell the man the
best
story.”

The music kept getting louder. The drummer was using iron pipes. The room moved under the music. The lights blinked white and yellow and black.

“Tell him,” Oscar said. “Tell him the ultimate war story.”

Paul Berlin was sick.

“Billy Boy. Tell him about Billy Boy Watkins.”

Sick, Paul Berlin thought. A queasy feeling—something moist and slippery at the back of his throat. And so when Doc began to tell the ultimate war story, starting with what a hot day it had been, how it was hot like never before, Paul Berlin got up and managed his way outside.

Cold now, very cold. His legs were weak. Cold and drunk, and his legs were weak, but not so cold and weak and drunk that he would listen to the ultimate war story. Not that drunk.

He buttoned his collar and leaned against a stone wall. The street was dark. He could hear the music inside, the drums and singing, but he did not hear the ultimate war story.

Sarkin Aung Wan came out.

“Yes,” she said, smiling. “You are a very drunk Spec Four.”

“Let’s go.”

“Very drunk. Am I safe with such a drunk?”

“Not that drunk. Not all that dumb drunk.”

She took his hand. They walked up the street until the music was gone. They passed along an arcade, then through an alleyway, then across the deserted brick plaza where the execution platform looked frail and seedy in the moonlight, and where Sarkin Aung Wan’s shoes made sharp clicking sounds that echoed off the banks and government offices. They stopped there for a time. Things were quiet. Then they turned onto a boulevard with statues and iron fences and winter shrubs.

“No,” he said. “Drunk maybe, but not that crazy drunk.”

Sarkin Aung Wan kissed him.

“Perhaps not,” she said. “Anyway, it was such a silly story. So silly.”

F
our o’clock, he thought. Ten minutes to four.

He bet himself twenty bucks on it, then knelt down behind the wall of sandbags to check his watch. Eight minutes to four. Twenty easy bucks—he should’ve joined the circus, a time-teller.

It was colder now. The breeze had become a wind.

An hour till the first glistenings, an hour and a half until dawn.

He could tell time by the way it came. By the cold and the wind, and then later the silver gleaming in the tips of the waves, then a spreading gleaming that would fill the wave troughs and give them shape, wrinkles like the skin of boiled milk, then the birds, then the breaking of the sky. He could tell time by all of this, and by the rhyme of wind and sand, and by the beat of his own heart.

It was a matter of hard observation. Separating illusion from reality. What happened, and what might have happened? Why, out of all that might have happened, did it lead to a beheading in Tehran?
Why not pretty things? Why not a smooth, orderly arc from war to peace? These were the questions, and the answers could come only from hard observation. Doc was right about that. He was right, too, that observation requires inward-looking, a study of the very machinery of observation—the mirrors and filters and wiring and circuits of the observing instrument.

Insight, vision. What you remember is determined by what you see, and what you see depends on what you remember. A cycle, Doc Peret had said. A cycle that has to be broken. And this requires a fierce concentration on the process itself: Focus on the order of things, sort out the flow of events so as to understand how one thing led to another, search for that point at which what happened had been extended into a vision of what might have happened. Where was the fulcrum? Where did it tilt from fact to imagination? How far had Cacciato led them? How far might he lead them still?

Facing the night, he tried.

He tried again to order the known facts. Billy Boy was first. And then … then who? Then a long blank time along the Song Tra Bong, yes, and then Rudy Chassler, who broke the quiet. And then later Frenchie Tucker, followed in minutes by Bernie Lynn. Then Lake Country. World’s Greatest Lake Country, where Ready Mix died on a charge toward the mountains. And then Buff. Then Sidney Martin. Then Pederson.

Yes, then Cacciato led them away in slow motion. But how far and why? Mandalay, Delhi, Tehran, and beyond? Order was the hard part. The facts, even when beaded on a chain, still did not have real order. Events did not flow. The facts were separate and haphazard and random, even as they happened, episodic, broken, no smooth transitions, no sense of events unfolding from prior events.

Moving to the south wall, he found the starlight scope under Eddie’s poncho. He unscrewed the lens cap and placed the heavy instrument up on the sandbagged wall.

Observe, that was the trick: He put his eye to the scope’s peephole and flicked on the battery switch.

The night was moving.

A bright green shimmering dazzle, and it was all moving. The countryside moved. The beach, the sea, everything. But he did not look away. He pressed his eye against the peephole and watched the moving night, turning the big plastic dial to full focus, high resolution, and he watched Quang Ngai move.

It was a trick of the machine, he knew this. So he concentrated.

He concentrated on the order of things, going back to the beginning. His first day at the war. How hot the day had been, and how on his very first day he had witnessed the ultimate war story.

T
he platoon of thirty-two soldiers moved slowly in the dark, single file, not talking. One by one, like sheep in a dream, they passed through the hedgerow, crossed quietly over a meadow and came down to the paddy. There they stopped. Lieutenant Sidney Martin knelt down, motioning with his hand, and one by one the others squatted or knelt or sat in the shadows. For a long time they did not move. Except for the sounds of their breathing, and, once, a soft fluid trickle as one of them urinated, the thirty-two men were silent: some of them excited by the adventure, some afraid, some exhausted by the long march, some of them looking forward to reaching the sea where they would be safe. There was no talking now. No more jokes. At the rear of the column, Private First Class Paul Berlin lay quietly with his forehead resting on the black plastic stock of his rifle. His eyes were closed. He was pretending he was not in the war. Pretending he had not watched Billy Boy Watkins die of fright on the field of battle. He was pretending he was a boy again, camping with his father in the
midnight summer along the Des Moines River. “Be calm,” his father said. “Ignore the bad stuff, look for the good.” In the dark, eyes closed, he pretended. He pretended that when he opened his eyes his father would be there by the campfire and, father and son, they would begin to talk softly about whatever came to mind, minor things, trivial things, and then roll into their sleeping bags. And later, he pretended, it would be morning and there would not be a war.

In the morning, when they reached the sea, it would be better. He would bathe in the sea. He would shave. Clean his nails, work out the scum. In the morning he would forget the first day, and the second day would not be so bad. He would learn.

There was a sound beside him, a movement then, “Hey,” then louder, “Hey!”

He opened his eyes.

“Hey, we’re movin’. Get up.”

“Okay.”

“You sleeping?”

“No, just resting. Thinking.” He could see only part of the soldier’s face. It was a plump, round, child’s face. The child was smiling.

“No problem,” the soldier whispered. “Up an’ at ’em.”

And he followed the boy’s shadow into the paddy, stumbling once, almost dropping his rifle, cutting his knee, but he followed the shadow and did not stop. The night was clear. Before him, strung out across the paddy, he could make out the black forms of the other soldiers, their silhouettes hard against the sky. Already the Southern Cross was out. And other stars he could not yet name. Soon, he thought, he would learn the names. And puffy night clouds. And a peculiar glow to the west. There was not yet a moon.

Wading through the paddy, listening to the lullaby sounds of his boots, and many other boots, he tried hard not to think. Dead of a heart attack, that was what Doc Peret had said. Except he did not know Doc Peret’s name. All he knew was what Doc said, dead of a heart attack, but he tried hard not to think of this, and instead he thought about not thinking. The fear wasn’t so bad now. Now, as he
stepped out of the paddy and onto a narrow dirt path, now the fear was mostly the fear of being so dumbly afraid ever again.

So he tried not to think.

There were tricks to keep from thinking. Counting. He counted his steps along the dirt path, concentrating on the numbers, pretending that the steps were dollar bills and that each step through the night made him richer and richer, so that soon he would become a wealthy man, and he kept counting, considering the ways he might spend the wealth, what he would buy and do and acquire and own. He would look his father in the eye and shrug and say, “It was pretty bad at first, sure, but I learned a lot and I got used to it. I never joined them—not them—but I learned their names and I got along, I got used to it.” Then he would tell his father the story of Billy Boy Watkins, only a story, just a story, and he would never let on about the fear. “Not so bad,” he would say instead, making his father proud.

And songs, another trick to stop the thinking—
Where have you gone, Billy Boy, Billy Boy, oh, where have you gone, charming Billy
? and other songs,
I got a girl, her name is Jill, she won’t do it but her sister will
, and
Sound Off!
and other songs that he sang in his head as he marched toward the sea. And when he reached the sea he would dig a hole in the sand and he would sleep like the high clouds, he would swim and dive into the breakers and hunt crayfish and smell the salt, and he would laugh when the others made jokes about Billy Boy, and he would not be afraid ever again.

He walked, and counted, and later the moon came out. Pale, shrunken to the size of a dime.

The helmet was heavy on his head. In the morning he would adjust the leather binding. In the morning, at the end of the long march, his boots would have lost their shiny black stiffness, turning red and clay-colored like all the other boots, and he would have a start on a beard, his clothes would begin to smell of the country, the mud and algae and manure and chlorophyll and decay and mildew. He would begin to smell like the others, even look like them, but, by God, he would not join them. He would adjust. He would play the
part. But he would not join them. He would shave, he would wash himself, he would clean his weapon and keep it clean. He would scrub the breech and trigger assembly and muzzle and magazines, and later, next time, he would not be afraid to use it. In the morning, when he reached the sea, he would learn the soldiers’ names and maybe laugh at their jokes. When they joked about Billy Boy, he would laugh, pretending it was funny, and he would not let on.

Walking, counting in his walking, and pretending, he felt better. He watched the moon come higher.

The trick was not to take it personally. Stay aloof. Follow the herd but don’t join it. That would be the real trick. The trick would be to keep himself separate. To watch things. “Keep an eye out for the good stuff,” his father had said by the river. “Keep your eyes open and your ass low, that’s my only advice.” And he would do it. A low profile. Look for the beauties: the moon sliding higher now, the feeling of the march, all the ironies and truths, and don’t take any of it seriously. That would be the trick.

Once, very late in the night, they skirted a sleeping village. The smells again—straw, cattle, mildew. The men were quiet. On the far side of the village, coming like light from the dark, a dog barked. Then, nearby, another dog took up the bark. The column stopped. They waited there until the barking died out, then, fast, they marched away from the village, through a graveyard with conical burial mounds and miniature stone altars. The place had a perfumy smell. His mother’s dresser, rows of expensive lotions and colognes,
eau de bain:
She used to hide booze in the larger bottles, but his father found out and carried the whole load out back, started a fire, and, one by one, threw the bottles into the incinerator, where they made sharp exploding sounds like gunfire; a perfumy smell, yes; a nice spot to spend the night, to sleep in the perfumery, the burial mounds making fine strong battlements, the great quiet of the place.

But they went on, passing through a hedgerow and across another paddy and east toward the sea.

He walked carefully. He remembered what he’d been taught. Billy Boy hadn’t remembered. And so Billy died of fright, his face
going pale and the veins in his arms and neck popping out, the crazy look in his eyes.

He walked carefully.

Stretching ahead of him in the night was the string of shadow-soldiers whose names he did not yet know. He knew some of the faces. And he knew their shapes, their heights and weights and builds, the way they carried themselves on the march. But he could not yet tell them apart. All alike in the night, a piece, all of them moving with the same sturdy silence and calm and steadiness.

So he walked carefully, counting his steps. And when he had counted to eight thousand and six hundred, the column suddenly stopped. One by one the soldiers knelt or squatted down.