Keeping Watch (4 page)

Dogs craned up and gave him a grin, although he didn't stand up or introduce him around. “Hey, man. Didn't know you were coming here.”

“Second Platoon,” Allen informed him. Dogs nodded and turned to stir the pot with a wooden stick.

“How's it goin'?” Allen asked.

“Oh, you know.”

Allen nodded himself, as if he did know, and since Dogs didn't seem interested in pursuing the conversation, he said hello to Pete. The farmboy too was taken up with the contents of the pot; Allen, feeling more like an intruder every moment, just stood back and watched them.

There was, he realized, some subtle difference in the two men he'd met on the bus in Saigon. It wasn't just the grubbiness of their fatigues or the scabbed scratches on both men's arms. It was something in their faces and in the way they held themselves.

“You seen some action?” he blurted out, then flushed with embarrassment.

Dogs shrugged, and glanced sideways at Pete. “Farmboy here killed himself a gook on his first patrol.”

“Way to go, Pete!” Allen responded, although he wasn't at all sure this was the right answer. The blond boy himself looked, if anything, queasy at the memory, but Dogs didn't give his platoon-mate a chance to put his foot in it.

“Yeah, after chow we're gonna take the kid down to the camp, introduce him to one of the boom-boom girls.”

At that, Pete turned bright red.

There was, however, no move to invite Allen's participation, either to the mess in the pot or to the evening's entertainment. After a minute, he said he'd better go find his squad.

“You do that, Carmichael,” Dogs told him, not looking up. “See you 'round.”

The message was clear: A man's platoon is his family, and Allen had better go find his own. So he did.

In spite of the awkward beginning, Allen quickly settled into the life of a grunt. The company's NDP was in a quiet zone, and for the next week the most exciting thing that happened was the VC who wandered through every other night to toss a grenade or two into their midst, making them all turn out and blaze away into the complacent darkness. A black trooper named Cooper broke his trigger finger catching a baseball, two other men were lifted out with high fevers, and a couple of others got so short they were sent to a bigger base to await the end of their year's service. Nobody liked to dangle a man in front of Fate when he only had a few weeks left on his helmet's calendar. Even a combat zone as quiet as this was no place for a soldier with a wakening sense of self-preservation. Short-timer's jitters made everyone in the vicinity nervous.

By week's end, Allen could have done with some jitters: He'd written a hundred letters home to Lisa, and thought he'd go nuts with boredom.

The lieutenant in command of Second Platoon was a Texan named Woolf, called The Wolf by his men. The nickname was appropriate, not only because of the man's oddly large incisors, but because he carried himself with a kind of lupine authority, quiet and with an element of native threat. He had a knack of slipping soundlessly in and among his men, and his commands were well-thought-out and never contested; Second Platoon, which on the day of Allen's arrival numbered twenty-nine men, felt secure under The Wolf's rule. Allen was well satisfied.

The leader of Delta Squad, on the other hand, was something of a washout, the kind of soldier who always managed to be behind a tent when volunteers were sought, who helped himself to the prime C-rations before the carton was dumped in front of the other men, and who was generally a pain in the ass to anyone who was interested in action. His name was Bird, and if they called him Birdman, it was not because he was a hard guy. Birdman was twenty-two, acted like Allen's prissy grandfather, and had sixty-eight days left on his tour.

Delta Squad now numbered eight. Chris Adamson was a blond surfer from San Diego with gold-rimmed granny glasses, facial hair so new he only had to shave every couple of weeks, a string of genuine San Francisco love beads, and an endless stash of high-grade pot. Theo “T-bone” Muller was the son of a German butcher from Pittsburgh whose bad acne vied with a perpetual sunburn for control of his face, and whose time in basic and two months in-country hadn't managed to wear the baby fat from his cheeks. Mouse Tobin was a very large, very black, nearly professional football player from Seattle. The three were roughly Allen's age, and none had more than a dozen weeks in-country, although the fourth man, Streak Rychenkow, was the squad's oldest at twenty-three, with five months in-country. The eponymous white patch in Streak's black hair was the source of a hundred explanatory tales from falling through a skylight during a burglary to an assault with a baseball bat—all good stories, but after the third version, Allen decided the truth had to be either too boring or too embarrassing to be told. Nobody was quite sure where Streak was from or what his family situation was, although his accent was Midwestern and he carried a picture of a woman with two small children with him wherever he went.

Hal Fields and Chuck Tjader were short-timers with less than six weeks to go. Allen watched the two covertly, wondering what he would look like when he had that much time crossed off the back of his helmet; these guys looked like anyone else, just a whole lot older. Hal talked incessantly about his recent R&R in Japan, how he was going to move there after DEROS; he had a small Japanese grammar book he was slowly working his way through; Chuck was too silent to get much out of, other than he missed his wife and sometimes dreamed about the Colorado mountains.

Allen got along with the rest of the squad well enough, considering he was the fucking new guy, the cherry, the fresh meat, so none of them was about to grant him any but the most grudging friendship until he'd proved he wasn't going to get himself—or them—killed by his incompetence. He kept his mouth shut, watched how the more experienced men acted, and couldn't wait for his first patrol out into all that green.

It was Hal who told him the reason for their extended leisure behind the wire: the delayed arrival of the company's new captain. However, like captains through the ages, no sooner had this one hit the ground than he had to establish himself in the eyes of his men and of his superiors. He arrived on a Tuesday afternoon; patrols into the green began again at dawn Wednesday.

Hueys dropped the platoon off on an LZ scarcely larger than the blades, men leaping for the ground the moment the skids touched down, spreading out and making for the safety of the trees. Allen came out of the machine on Streak's heels, moving awkwardly under all the equipment draped across his person—he felt weirdly like a football player who'd barreled through a crowded kitchen and come out with his pads and helmet dangling with cast-iron pots and rattling utensils. The Huey pulled pitch, tipped its tail and lifted off; the
whup whup
of the blades faded, and for the first time Allen heard the breath of the living jungle.

It was big. He hadn't expected that, since he'd spent a lot of hours in the woods as a kid, both in the islands and on the mainland, but this was like no woods he'd ever met. It was a living thing, this jungle, huge and aware and unfriendly, like a grizzly with a toothache. The only place he'd ever felt remotely like this was in the Olympic peninsula rain forest, an ancient place of dripping trees, muted sounds, and vague menace, but this was far, far stronger. It made him feel very small and very vulnerable.

He didn't hear The Wolf's order to move off, but Streak bumped against him in passing and he automatically fell in behind the man, trying to rearrange his grenades and the belt of M60 ammo he carried so they didn't bump or chafe. They pushed into the thick bush, unable to see more than a few feet ahead of them; Allen cradled his M16 to his chest and tried to keep Streak's helmet cover in sight. It had written on it BORN TO DIE, in a sort of Olde English script. Mouse had on his the simple BLACK POWER, and Chris, not the expected Beach Boys, but rather a lopsided skull with GRATEFUL DEAD underneath. T-Bone's held the long-winded statement that Allen had seen on a couple of T-shirts:
Yea though I walk through the Valley of Death, I shall fear no evil, for I am the meanest son of a bitch in the Valley
.
The butcher's boy had written it in a spiral out from the helmet's top, and the spare magazine and cigarettes in the band obscured some of the words, but Allen appreciated the bravado.

He kept his thumb near the safety of the M16, breathing in the reassuring smell of fresh gun oil over the rich organic smells of the jungle. His head kept swiveling around: Did VC ever climb trees to take potshots at passing GIs? How the hell could the man walking point watch for booby traps in this? And if someone started shooting up ahead, should he throw himself on the ground so the guy in back of him didn't blow his head off?

After a couple hours, when they'd covered maybe two klicks and driven off every form of life in the whole area, The Wolf called a halt and they dropped down for a smoke and to suck hot water out of their canteens.

Allen plopped onto a log next to T-bone, who had been the new guy until Allen arrived, and said, “Jesus, we could be ten feet from an NVA battalion marching three abreast down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and we'd never know it until they opened up on us.”

“That's why we've got Intel, man,” T-bone said.

A man needed faith, Allen reflected, and pawed through his pack to see if perhaps he'd overlooked a can of peaches, or if the dread lima-beans-and-ham C-ration that was left behind for the new guy had somehow transformed itself into fruit cocktail. It hadn't, and he raised the warm canteen to his mouth for another pull of plastic- and iodine-flavored water. One swallow went down his throat, and then the world exploded in a huge
bang
and a gush of wet. Allen flew backward off the log, certain he'd been shot through the head. The rest of the platoon dove for anything resembling cover and started firing on full automatic into the surrounding greenery. It took half a minute before the lieutenant's voice penetrated the panic.

“Cease fire, you idiots!” he bellowed. “Who's hit? And where'd it come from?”

“Me,” Allen said, and then took his hand from his soaked face and blinked: There was no red on his fingers, no red at all. “I think.”

“Jesus Christ, are you wounded or not?”

“Well, I thought I was, but—oh yeah.” Allen found blood at last, a faint smear on his fingertips from high on his forehead. “No, it's nothing. I guess it just hit my canteen.”

“Jesus, kid, you're one lucky son of a bitch,” came a voice from behind a tree. Allen felt a wail of panic pushing to get out, although it was a bit late for that.

“Where'd it come from?” The Wolf persisted.

“How the fuck would I know? Sir.”

“Think, damn it. There's not much point in chopping down trees with bullets.”

“Uh, maybe over there? I mean, that hill at one o'clock. I think.”

Not that he could be sure, since all he'd known was an explosion two inches from his nose, but the lieutenant called for a few shells in that direction. In a minute, the hill ahead of them spouted flames, just like a war movie except that the ground shifted and rolled underneath them. The men regrouped in the trees, passing around Allen's shattered canteen and agreeing that Carmichael was one damned lucky bastard. Not one of them had to say what a hole you could push your thumb through would have done had it been two inches lower.

The rest of the day, the world seemed to Allen a place of extraordinarily vivid colors and noises. He kept finding his fingers creeping compulsively back to the tiny nick at his hairline, and each time he would feel shivery in the heat. Some man out there had wanted to kill him, had actually wanted him—
him!
—dead. The anonymity of “them” had dried up faster than the canteen water on his fatigues; some human being out there had aimed his sights at Allen Carmichael as if he'd been a rabbit in the lettuce, aimed, and pulled the trigger. Suddenly the war was no longer an impersonal adventure. It was a scary thing in a big jungle.

But after the bullet, nobody called Allen the fuckin' new guy, not in his hearing.

Chapter 6

The platoon went the rest of that day without seeing sign of any living creature at all apart from bugs, birds, and a handful of mildewing deer droppings. The scattered gray pellets struck Allen as the most bizarre thing he'd seen all day: What the hell was a deer doing walking around in a place where men were trying to murder one another?

They reached the LZ that evening without incident and lifted out cleanly. Hot food waited for them at the company NDP, and a joint from Chris's bottomless stash, and after Streak had given them yet another story about his white patch, this one involving a jealous husband and a crystal vase full of tulips snatched up from a piano, they settled into their sleeping rolls.

Until around midnight. As if the bullet through Allen's canteen had been a shot across the bow of their little ship in the jungle, the cannonade began in earnest. Allen was wakened by a sudden convulsion of movement all around him and the shouts of “Incoming!” He fought his way out of the poncho liner and was reaching for his M16 when the earth roared and debris rained down on their hooch.

He scooped up his helmet, stepped into his boots, and ran to join the others.

“What the hell's happening?” he shouted at the figure beside him in the firing hole.

“They're coming through the wire, probably sent the mortar in to distract us,” answered the voice. Allen hadn't the faintest idea who his neighbor was, just hunkered down behind the sandbags and thumbed his safety to full auto.

Thirty seconds after the first mortar, the bullets started coming, the clatter of AK47s providing background to the
zip zip whizzipzipzip
of incoming bullets, then
WHOMP
! and with a
takatakataka
the squad's M60 was in play, spewing ten rounds a second into the dark. In a minute flat the company was in full battle mode, with grenades and tracer bullets and the roar of what could have been a hundred machine guns, so enormous was the noise. Allen thought his heart would beat itself right out of his mouth—he could feel it even over the jerk of the gun in his arms. His senses were filled with a fury of sound so great, it transformed itself into a huge and echoing silence populated by slow-motion soldiers, incomprehensible flashes of light, and the bucking object against his shoulder, all of which seemed to have less to do with an act of war than with a hallucinogenic experience. Parachute flares transformed the landscape into a lunar expanse of bare ground and confusing motion. Was that black shape down there a VC or a member of the listening post? Was that bouncing shadow a thrown grenade or a panicked rat? Did it matter?

An hour passed like a moment, or like a month, and suddenly someone was pounding Allen on the helmet and shouting that he should cease fire. The shooting died away, and a lesser silence of groans and curses rose up. Allen fumbled to get his gun safety on with strangely unresponsive fingers; he didn't know if he felt like throwing up or standing and whooping. But he did know why it was called a baptism by fire: He'd been scoured inside and out, and was not the same person he'd been when the sun went down.

When Delta Squad reassembled itself, there were two wounds among the eight of them: Chris had a small chunk bitten out of his arm by a piece of flying shrapnel, and T-bone had sliced his foot open racing out of the hooch bootless.

Back in his sleeping roll an hour later, with dawn coming on and his heart still jumping while all his companions snored, Allen decided that the main difference between old-timers and new guys was, they knew how to sleep in a fire zone.

In the morning, one body lay in the wire, although there were signs that three or four more had been dragged, or dragged themselves, away. Of Bravo Company, there were two body bags, four wounded medevacked out, and half a dozen more treated for minor wounds. The raid had begun with the shell, but the real attack had been carried out by men crawling through the wire and tossing grenades into the foxholes nearest the wire. They had then faded away into the darkness, but for the man left behind.

Allen stood with his rifle tucked under his arm and tried not to look at the two anonymous shapes swaddled in green plastic at the LZ. Instead, he watched the captain and sergeant going through the pockets of the black-clad man. Or rather, boy: The enemy soldier looked about the age of Allen's kid brother Jerry.

Streak, standing next to him, pointed out that the kid wore the tire-soled sandals and buzz cut of the NVA.

“Not just VC, huh?”

“Nope. There's been rumors that an NVA battalion is moving in. Guess it's here. We'll see a lot more action than we've been doing.”

Twenty-four hours earlier, Allen's response to that would have been one of uncomplicated approval, but now? After having his canteen shot away from his lips, then spending the night firing madly at ghosts, with a pair of anonymous green bags haunting the edges of his vision? Now he wasn't so sure.

They dragged the boy's body to a shell hole outside the perimeter and shoveled some dirt in on top of it. No one suggested that they put up a grave marker.

The platoon went out again, part of a sweep in the direction of a suspected VC stronghold. Allen stuck close to Streak, emulating the older man's movements and trying to figure out why he did things one way and not the other, looking wherever Streak's attention went, even though most of the time he couldn't see anything there. They walked without attracting fire, but when they got to the ville there was no one home; the cook-fires were smoking and a bowl of warm food sat on the packed-earth floor of one of the hooches, but they were greeted only by dogs and ducks. They searched the hooches for bunkers, finding two or three with small quantities of rice and a handful of U.S. Army C-rations, but the stores were not sufficient for a group of soldiers, and did not justify torching the village. The Wolf ordered them to blow the largest bunker, and while the troops sat having a smoke, the sappers laid a C4 charge and turned the hooch into a cloud of sticks and straw.

As a military response to the previous night's barrage, it left something to be desired.

The terrain opened up somewhat as they went on, through harvested paddies bristling with stubble, and small villages with duck ponds and banana trees. They spent the night in the bush—calling in marking rounds to form a perimeter, digging in through the sandy soil, setting up trip flares and Claymores. (These bore the helpful label
This side toward enemy,
a reminder that trip wires worked both ways, which nonetheless always struck Allen as comical.) Allen crouched in the black night, twitching at every jungle sound, feeling like a very small and timid rabbit cowering in his burrow, all ears and nerves.

In the bush, at night, Charlie was the predator.

The long hours crept past. Dawn edged into the sky, birds sang, cramped men stood up, pissed, and packed away their Claymores. A resupply chopper racketed in to drop them food and water, then the platoons split and continued on. Late in the afternoon they came to a ville of twenty hooches, one of which concealed a bunker stacked with big earthenware jars. The rice jars were hauled to the center of the ville, smashed, and set afire, the villagers looking on in silence. Allen wondered if the farmers hadn't just lost their year's entire crop, but The Wolf seemed to think there was too much rice for this small a ville, and he should know. They did some spot interrogations, had a few of the villagers lifted out for further questioning, and three hours later reached the appointed LZ to be taken out themselves. The patrol was judged a success.

After eating a well-earned hot meal, Allen carried his ration of beer to where Chris and Mouse sat with their backs against a small mountain of C-ration cartons. The sweet smell of Chris's joint joined the perpetual odors of urine and dust, frying onions from the cook house, and Vietnamese food from the other side of the wire, with the primal whiff of the jungle beyond. Allen opened the first can and took a mouthful of the soapy brew, feeling the tightness of his shoulders relax a fraction. The other men talked desultorily about the inferior weed in the States and the chicks in San Diego, until Allen sat up abruptly and asked, “Who was that?”

Chris was too stoned to bother opening his eyes, but Mouse had noticed the peculiar figure pass.

“That's the Snakeman,” he answered. “Dude's a Lurp with the First Cav, least they say he started out that way, but now he just kinda runs his own war, 'ports in when he has something to say, otherwise you don't see him for weeks, months even. I don't know if the Snakeman's even officially here anymore. That dude's gone bush in a major way.”

The Lurps—Long Range Patrol—walked with impunity through countryside where Victor Charlie ruled supreme. They had their own way of doing things, as deep-ranging scouts always have done, but the stories Allen had heard about them always seemed to him apocryphal. Seeing the figure gliding across the compound toward the captain's tent, he wondered.

He shifted his seat so as to watch the place where the stranger had disappeared, and an hour or so later saw him emerge, making in the direction of the mess tent. The stoves were long since shut down for the night, but somehow Allen was not surprised to see activity, when he wandered up casually a couple minutes later. No cold C-rations for the Snakeman.

The man was wearing an ARVN tiger suit permeated by the red earth of the country, a brass Montagnard bracelet on his right wrist, and elaborate tattoos spiraling around both upper arms (a pair of dragons, Allen decided, although their legs were so vestigial they looked more like snakes). The stranger had shed his pack somewhere, but he still wore two bandoliers, various kinds of grenades and flares, a Bowie knife strapped to his leg, with an enemy's folding-stock AK47 on the table near his hand. His ancient bush hat was the color of the soil, his face had worn camouflage paint (or maybe just dirt) so long it had seeped into his pores, and he smelled like something dug up from the ground, strong but not unpleasant. The twin plaits of his hair were longer than most hippies wore back home, but no proponent of peace and free love had ever gazed on the world out of eyes like those. The Snakeman sat with his back to the sandbag-reinforced wall, watching Allen's approach from beneath half-lowered lids.

“Evenin',” Allen said, trying for cool.

“What do you want?”

“I'm Allen Carmichael,” he said, holding out his hand. The Snakeman looked at it, then picked up his fork for the plate the cook put down in front of him. It was piled high with beans, rice, and some green vegetable that looked like spinach and had not been on the camp's menu that evening; a second plate held an entire loaf of sliced bread with pots of butter and jam. No meat, which struck Allen as strange; surely if the man was important enough to have the kitchen open for him, he ought to qualify for better than beans.

Allen retracted his unshaken hand and thrust it into the cargo pocket of his fatigues. The man's fist tightened around his fork as he watched Allen's hand; when it came out with nothing more lethal than the second half of Allen's beer ration, he resumed eating. Allen placed the can and an opener on the table, then retreated a step.

“Thought you might like a beer to wash that down,” he told the man.

“Why, you underage?” The Snakeman's voice sounded rough, either from an injury or through disuse.

“Not here. You a vegetarian?”

To his surprise, Allen got an answer. “When I'm heading back out, yeah. Meat comes out the skin, they smell you coming.”

“
Smell
you? Jeez, we had a dead NVA on our wire the other night, he stank like hell. How can they smell it when you eat a little meat?”

“People smell like what they eat. The Cong eat different from us—spices and shit. You don't want them to smell you, 'a course you don't slop insect repellent all over and you don't smoke American cigarettes. And you either eat their shit to smell like they do, or you eat vegetables to smell like the woods. Their food gives me gas.” He went back to the food that would make him smell like the woods.

“How long have you been here?”

The fork stopped in mid-air. “Look, you want to talk, or can I eat first?”

The “first” was encouraging. Allen sat down at the next table, to give the Snakeman some distance, and looked out into the night. The cook brought the pan of beans over to slop out a second helping, the bread and butter disappeared with the better part of a pot of jam going onto the later slices as dessert, and finally the plate was pushed away, the last of the warm beer savored as if it were a fine Bordeaux. The Snakeman belched delicately.

“Got any smokes?” he asked.

Allen moved to sit across from the man, placing a pack on the table, along with the silver Zippo lighter Jerry had given him for his birthday before he shipped out. The man fitted a cigarette to his lips and lit it, then tucked the rest of the pack into his shirt pocket. The man's black-grimed thumb ran across the lettering on the side of the lighter:
TO ALLEN FROM HIS BROTHER JERRY
; Allen braced himself, half expecting to see the Zippo follow the cigarettes, but the stranger kindly laid it back on the table for its owner to retrieve.

“You wanted something?” the braided Lurp asked.

“You been here a long time, I'd guess. I've been in the bush about two days. I just thought I could learn something from you.”

“Like what?”

“Like anything. I look at the jungle and I don't know . . .”

“You don't know shit,” Snakeman finished for him.

“I was going to say, ‘I don't know enough to know what it is I'm ignorant of,' or maybe, ‘I don't even know what I'm seeing,' but yeah, I guess what it boils down to is, I don't know shit.”

“Well hell, at least you admit it.”

“So,” said Allen, feeling monumentally stupid and definitely uncool, “you have any words of wisdom for a fuckin' new guy?”