Spearfield's Daughter (3 page)

Then a mud-drenched sergeant appeared outside the shattered bubble, his wild-eyed thin face like
a
skull under the bowl of his helmet. “What the fuck are you doing here? Get the fuck outa here!”

Puzio shook his head, dumb with shock, and pointed weakly at the dead pilot. Cleo could hear the harsh bursts of automatic rifle fire behind the crackling roar of the flaming huts; the whole village was now on fire, dark clouds of smoke wreathing up to merge with the low rain-clouds. She saw bodies lying in the mud of the long streets, all of them villagers: men, women and children. And she heard the screams behind the rifle fire and then she was sick. She tore off her seat-belt, dived across the lap of the dead pilot and vomited into the mud beside the boots of the sergeant as he came round to her side.

He waited till she had finished, then he put his M-16 into her white face. “Don't move outa this fucking chopper, you hear me? That goes for you jerks, too.” He swung round on the crewmen who were about to jump out of the side door of the Chinook. “This ain't none of your fucking business, you unnerstand? Don't move or I tell you, I'll blow your fucking heads off! Alla you!” He looked back at Cleo, then he swung away and went running down the street, slipping and sliding in the mud as he dodged corpses, yelling back without turning round, “It ain't none of your fucking business!”

Cleo fumbled for a handkerchief, wiped her mouth. She eased herself back from Lieutenant Hurd, not wanting to look at him, but everywhere she looked, there were dead. She saw a woman run out from between two burning huts, hands held over her smoking hair; a soldier came out from between the huts and put her out of her pain and misery and her life with a short burst from his carbine. Then he looked across at the helicopter, grinned and waved and ran back between the huts.

“Oh Jesus!” said one of the crewmen in the open door of the Chinook. “Someone tell me this ain't happening!”

“They're stoned outa their fucking heads,” said the man beside him. “They gotta be.” Then he looked back inside the helicopter at Cleo. “You gonna write a story about this?”

She found her voice, which she had begun to fear had left her forever. “Where are we?” But she knew, as if she could see signposts all down the long, corpse-strewn street; they were in An Bai, where Brigadier-General Brisson had wanted no correspondents. “How do we get out of here?”

“How's everything up front?” They were still standing in the doorway of the Chinook, like workers waiting in some loading dock for a truck to arrive.

“Lieutenant Hurd is dead, I think.” She didn't look at him as she turned back to Puzio. “Are you
all
right?”

He had put his hand inside his shirt, taken it out and was staring at the blood on it. He looked across at her as if he had been insulted by what had happened to him. “I got a hole in my side—” Then he winced and fell forward.

Cleo grabbed him, pulling him upright, screaming for one of the crewmen to come forward. She could feel herself panicking: the war was stifling her with its dead, packing them in around her.

One of the crewmen suddenly appeared behind her. He was short and fat and looked like a middle-aged cab driver; but he was twenty-four years old and a rich man's son from Cleveland, Ohio. She leaned away while he squeezed his bulk over her to look at Lieutenant Puzio. Then he sat back and looked as if he were about to cry.

“He's dead, too. Christ, what a day!” He looked out past her as if he were commenting on the weather. Just shit, that's all.”

“Can you fly this thing?”

He looked at her in surprise, as if she had asked him if he himself could fly. “I can fly it if it'll go. But I dunno if it will—that ground-fire hit us pretty hard. They spattered us with real shit then.”

“I think it's worth a try.” She could hear herself talking, like listening to someone else in another room. “I think they might come back and kill us, too.”

“Jesus, why would they wanna do that?” The other three men were crammed in behind the fat man. The youngest had spoken, nineteen and more afraid of something he didn't understand than all the other deaths he had seen. “We're Americans, like them—we're on the same side, for crissake!”

“I dunno I want to be on their side,” said the fat one. “I saw a coupla guys like this once before, not a whole goddam company, but a coupla grunts, they went around shooting every slopehead in sight. I got outa there so quick . . .”

“You don't look like no slopehead.” But no one laughed, not even the young man who said it, thin-faced behind his gold-rimmed glasses, looking young enough to be arrested for trespassing in a pornographic adult area.

Cleo leaned over Lieutenant Hurd, touching him carefully as if afraid she might hurt him, looked down the street and saw half a dozen men coming up towards the helicopter, walking slowly with their
carbines
swinging back and forth in front of them, looking for game they had missed in the first beating. The huts blazed on either side of them, the flames too bright in the grey day, like botched technicolor; the smoke was a thick black cloud lying like a dark, heaving roof over their heads. They picked their way carefully amongst the bodies clad in black pyjamas lying in the mud, but more as if they thought the corpses might be booby-trapped than out of respect for the dead. She would remember the scene for the rest of her life, the Inferno in which the good had suddenly become the devils.

The fat crewman abruptly pushed into the bubble and began fumbling with the seat-belts. Cleo, all at once feeling useless and female, her physical strength not enough to cope with what had to be done, crept back, pushing her way through the other crewmen into the hold of the chopper. The crewmen were struggling and swearing; then Lieutenant Hurd's body was dragged from the cockpit. A few moments later Lieutenant Puzio's body followed it; the corpses were stacked in beside the supplies of rations, ammunition, clothing. The youngest crewman blessed himself and lowered his head for a quick prayer; then he came and stood beside Cleo in the doorway of the hold. He was blinking rapidly and she thought he was going to jump out of the helicopter and run down towards the soldiers coming up the street.

There was a moan from the motor, then the clattering sound that Cleo was still not comfortable with: she was always waiting for the rotor blades to break off and fly away. The rotors began to whirl slowly, spinning the rain away like a giant agricultural spray. Looking down the street she saw the soldiers break into a run as the helicopter began to lift off.

The rotors were spinning swiftly now, but the Chinook rose as if it were climbing through invisible mud.

The helicopter lurched and Cleo grabbed at a strap and hung on. She saw one of the soldiers stop running, raise his M-16 and aim it at the Chinook. She shrank back, turning her head away, not wanting to die with a bullet in her face. The young crewman stood in front of her, holding on to the side of the doorway for dear life, and screamed obscenities at the soldiers. Then the Chinook swung away, suddenly gaining speed, and carved its way up through the rain. Cleo made herself look back and down, saw An Bai disappearing like a nightmare into the mist of rain and smoke, saw the soldiers standing in the middle of the street amongst the corpses, waving to her like the decent, friendly kids they once must have been.

“Jesus,” said the young crewman; his shout was a whisper of despair in her ear; there was no
obscenity
now but that of the scene below. “Whatever happened to us?”

III

“There was no incident today at An Bai,” said the briefing officer. “It was just a routine change-over. Turning to the Bu Dop area, the body count for today was—”

“Excuse me, Major.” Cleo could feel all the other correspondents looking at her, bored and irritated that she was going to stretch out the baloney. Most of the correspondents in Saigon no longer came to the daily briefing, the Five O'Clock Follies; it was accepted that JUSPAO and MACV (some day she would write an ABC of the American forces) were fighting a different war from that out in the field. She saw two of the women correspondents, the French girl whose name she could never remember and the Italian woman who saw the war only in terms of politics; both of them nodded encouragingly to her, taking her side in the other war between the sexes. She looked back at the briefing officer.

“Major, I was there in An Bai today—it was no routine change-over—”

“General Brisson himself was there supervising the change-over. There was no incident of any kind, Miss Spearfield. There is enough happening in the war without the press manufacturing stories—”

Even the male correspondents laughed at that. Cleo, suddenly losing control, shouted, “Why don't you listen to the bloody truth for once? I tell you, I saw—”

“Who's that?” said an American voice. “I've just landed here.”

“Her name's Spearfield,” said an Australian voice. “Her old man's a big-shot politician back home, he's dead against the war. She trades on his name.”

She turned round ready to kill the correspondent from the Melbourne newspaper. He was fat and bearded and always wore dark glasses, even at night; it was rumoured he had once worn them down a coal mine. He grinned at her and gave her a mock thumbs-up sign.

“Attagirl, Cleo. Daddy would be proud of you.”

She measured the distance, worked her mouth, then spat. The spittle landed on one of the dark lenses. Then she turned back to the major.

“I repeat, Major, why don't you tell the truth for a change? Let's see General Brisson so I can ask him face to face—”

Then
a strong hand pulled her down into her seat. She turned angrily to see who had done it: Tom Border sat beside her. “I just came in, Cleo old girl. Take it easy, you're not going to get anywhere with that guy up there. They say there was no incident at An Bai, there was no incident at An Bai. It's not the first time. This is the most incident-free war you're ever likely to cover. Come and I'll buy you dinner.”

She wanted to struggle with him to stay where she was; but all at once she realized it was useless. As she went out of the big press room the major was once more giving the body count for the day. She closed her eyes, saw the pyjama-clad bodies in the mud of the village; she stumbled and Tom straightened her with a firm grip on her elbow. She opened her eyes and one of the male correspondents, sitting on the end of a row, smiled and shook his head at her.

“Write the story, honey, then see if they'll print it back home. It's a waste of time, I tell you from experience.”

She was still angry and upset when she and Tom reached L'Amiral restaurant. The Indian money-sellers were going past on their way to their temple; the Catholics were heading for evening Mass at the cathedral. Prayers would be offered for another day of survival, another day of profit. She felt herself surrounded by corruption, caked with it as if with mud.

“You know, I'd never tasted wine till I came out here, even during the year I spent in Europe. I was just a beer and bourbon man.” Tom ordered a bottle of Meursault with the same careless confidence as he might have ordered a Schlitz or a Jack Daniels. “'Nam has been quite an education for me.”

“Meaning it should be for me?”

She had recovered enough to put on a new face and comb her hair. She remembered that her mother had always frowned on women who did their hair or repaired their make-up at the dinner table or in restaurants; but Brigid Spearfield was dead now, her world of small conventions dead with her. Maybe mine, too, thought Cleo: at least
something
she had believed in had died today.

“Cleo, every guy who has been here a year, two years, whatever, has got a story like yours. I've got my own. I saw four dinks, villagers, no one knew for certain if they were VCs, taken up in a chopper with their hands tied behind their backs and pushed out, maybe from a thousand feet, I don't know. All I know is they seemed to take forever to fall. I was on the ground and I couldn't believe what I was seeing.”

“But that was probably some local commander, a captain or a lieutenant, someone who'd gone
round
the bend or was stoned. But today—it was
planned
, it must have been. If General Brisson was there, then he'd okayed the massacre. Why did they suddenly cancel all transport for us?”

“It's not the first time. We're only Priority 3 when it comes to transport. Look—” he leaned forward across the table, all at once tense and concerned, “I can guess what happened—I
believe
you. But it's like Jack Martin said to you back there in the press room—no editor is ever going to print the truth. They prefer to believe the mullarkey they get from their bureaux in Washington—they think we're all junkies out here or alcoholics—”

“My paper will print it. It doesn't always believe what Washington says—”

He sat back, relaxed and cynical again. “Well, good luck. But didn't your late Prime Minister, the one who was drowned, say ‘All the way with LBJ?' I just hope for your sake that your editor doesn't subscribe to that. Now eat up your
croustade de langonstes.”
His accent was terrible, Missouri Provençal. “I'm going to take you to bed tonight and comfort you. I don't think you should be left alone.”

Before she could answer that, Pierre Cain came into the restaurant with his wife. She was small and beautiful, an Annamese, with a look of sad dignity about her, as if she had lost everything that had meant anything to her but would never let her grief be public. Cain seated his wife at a table, told a waiter to attend to her, then came across to Cleo and Tom. As ever, he stood waiting as if he dare not sit down until invited. But this time, when Tom reached for a chair, he shook his head.

“This will only take a moment—I don't like to desert my wife for too long. She is afraid of being alone—” Cleo looked at Tom, but Cain missed her glance. “Miss Spearfield, I heard what happened out at An Bai today, that you were there. Are you going to write the story?”