The Infinite Plan (27 page)

Toward the end of February the company found itself on the crest of a mountain, with orders to defend the position at any cost. In a later investigation, the reason why the men should have resisted as they did was not clear; bureaucracy and time contrived to blanket events in obscurity. We're all going to die here, a trembling young man from Kansas told Gregory Reeves. It was not the boy's baptism of fire, he had been in the forward units for months, but he had an unshakable premonition that he would die and felt he hadn't really had time to taste life—he had turned twenty less than a week before. You're not going to die—Reeves shook him—don't talk like that. They waited, digging trenches and stacking dirt- and rock-filled sandbags to form a barricade, not so much with any thought of protection as to keep busy and take their minds off their fear. Even so, the wait was endless; they were tense, anxious, weapons primed, tormented by cold after sunset and heat during the day. The attack came at night, and from the first moment they knew they were facing an enemy that outnumbered them ten to one and they would not escape. A few hours later the perimeter was reduced to a desperate handful of men, still firing but without hope, encircled by the corpses of more than a hundred comrades scattered on the slopes. In the orange light of an explosion, Gregory Reeves saw the body of the soldier from Kansas lifted in the air and tossed to the far side of the barricade; without knowing what he was doing, or why, he leapt over the stacked bags and crawled toward the boy through an inferno of crossfire, grenades, and choking smoke. He propped him up in his arms, calling him by name: Don't worry, I'm here, it's all right. He felt the youth's hands clutching his jacket and heard the rattle of his dying breath; Reeves's nose was filled with the stench of fear and blood and raw flesh, and in another burst of light he saw death in the boy's eyes and in the color of his skin; he also saw that his legs were missing: where legs should have been there was only a blackish puddle. It's all right; I'll carry you back. The choppers are on the way, and soon we'll be drinking beer and celebrating we're safe. Hang on. Don't leave me alone, please, don't leave me alone, and Reeves felt the darkness closing in around them and wanted to shield the wounded man from terror, but his life was slipping through Reeves's fingers like sand, crumbling, turning to smoke, and when he felt the weight of the boy's head fall against his chest and his hands release their grip, and when a last spasm of warm blood bathed his neck, he knew that inside him something had broken into a million fragments, like an exploded mirror. Carefully, he laid the body on the ground, then he stood up and threw his own weapon as far as he could. He heard the awesome sound of an enormous bell ringing inside him, and a metallic scream rose from his gut to convulse the night and for an instant quell the roar of the explosions; it congealed time and stopped the forward movement of the world. And he kept yelling and yelling until there was no breath and no yell left inside him. The echo of the bell receded, but time did not resume its march, and from that moment until the dawn, everything happened in a single fixed image: a photograph in black and red in which the events of the night were forever captured. Reeves is not in that bloody mural. He looks for himself among the corpses and the wounded, among the sandbags and in the furrows of the trenches, but he cannot find himself. He has disappeared from his own memory. One of the men he rescued told later how he watched him throw away his gun and stand up, arms raised above his head, as if challenging the next round of fire, and when he had emptied his lungs in that long howl, Reeves turned to where the man was lying, two yards away, bleeding painlessly, and picked him up and tossed him over his shoulder and, unmindful of the rounds of fire whizzing around him, carried him in a straight line toward the crest of the hill, where four hands reached out to receive the wounded man. Then Gregory Reeves went back to look for another casualty, and then another, and all through the remainder of that fateful night he transported injured men through dense enemy fire, certain that as long as he continued what he was doing nothing could happen to him: he was invulnerable. In his lifetime, he had never before had and would never have again that sensation of absolute power.

Help arrived at dawn. The helicopters carried off first the wounded, then the nine survivors, and finally they unloaded the plastic bags to bundle up the dead. Of the men who emerged without a mark, eight were weak from the strain and terror, trembling so hard in their soaked clothes that they could not hold the flask in their hand to take a swig of whiskey, but when hours later they were set down at the beach for three days of R and R, they recovered and were able to talk in some detail about what had happened. Filthy, adrenaline flowing, as one man, a family of desperadoes, they threw themselves like animals on the ice-cold beer and sizzling hamburgers, which they hadn't seen in months, and when someone tried to remind them of canteen regulations, they raised a storm that nearly degenerated into another slaughter. When the military police arrived and saw their faces and heard what they'd been through, they relieved the men of their weapons and released them, to see whether a little salt water and sand could bring them back to the land of the living. The ninth survivor, Gregory Reeves, was the last into a helicopter after helping all the others aboard. He sat mute and rigid in his seat, eyes straight ahead, deep furrows of fatigue creasing his face, without a scratch but completely bathed in the blood of his comrades. His nerves were gone. They could not send him to the beach; they gave him a shot, and he awakened two days later in the camp hospital, in restraints, to prevent him from harming himself in the torment of his nightmares. They told him he had saved the lives of eleven infantrymen and for acts of extreme valor he would receive one of the nation's highest decorations. In line with the superstitious codes of war, the nine who had not been wounded knew they had cheated death and that they were marked men. If they stayed together they would not have a second chance to escape, but separately they might be able to hoodwink fate a little longer. They were sent to different companies, with the tacit agreement that they would not get in touch with one another for a while. They had no desire to meet, anyway, because the euphoria of having been rescued was followed by the terror of not being able to explain why they were the lucky ones among more than a hundred men. Of the wounded, two recuperated within a couple of weeks, and once or twice Gregory Reeves crossed paths with them. They did not speak to him but pretended not to recognize him; their debt was too great, they could not repay him, and they were shamed by that knowledge.

After Reeves had been several months in Vietnam, his superiors remembered that he spoke the language, and he was sent by the intelligence service to a village in the mountains as liaison with friendly guerrillas. His official mission was to teach English, but no villager had the least doubt about the true nature of his assignment, and not even Reeves bothered to pretend. The first day of classes, he reported to the school with a machine gun in one hand and a satchel of books in the other; he walked through the room without glancing to the right or left, set his briefcase on the table, and turned toward his students. Twenty men of various ages, bent double in a deep bow, greeted him. From ancestral respect for knowledge, they were bowing not to him but to the figure of the teacher. He felt the blood rush to his face; at no time in the war had he felt a responsibility as grave as at that moment. Slowly he removed his weapon from his shoulder and walked to the wall and hung it on a peg, then he returned to the blackboard and in turn bowed to salute his students, silently thanking his stars for twelve years in public school and seven at the university. From that day, the English course, which in principle was a screen for gathering information, became an urgent obligation, the only way to repay the villagers in some small measure for all he received from them.

He lived in a modest but cool and comfortable house that had belonged to a French official, one of the few for several miles around that had its own privy at the back. The cats and mice scurrying around in the roof became so familiar that when occasionally they were still during the night he awakened with a start. He spent much of his time preparing his classes. In truth he had very little to do; the military mission was a joke: the friendly guerrillas were unpredictable shadows. His sporadic contacts were surreal, and his reports were exercises in divination. He communicated daily by radio with his battalion but only rarely could offer any information. He was in the middle of the combat zone, but at times the war seemed to be a story he had heard about another place and another time. He strolled among the thatched houses, walking through clay and pigshit, greeting everyone by name, helping farmers ready the rice paddies with heavy, buffalo-drawn wooden plows, helping women with their packs of children fetch water in large pitchers, helping small children fly kites and make rag dolls. In the evenings he heard mothers singing as they rocked their babies and men conversing in their language of trills and whispers. Those sounds marked the rhythm of the hours, they were the people's music. He also listened to his own music for the first time in an eternity; playing his tapes of concerts for hours, he could imagine the war was a bad dream. It seemed he had been born among these tolerant, gentle people who were nonetheless capable of picking up a weapon and giving their life to defend their land. He soon was speaking the language fluently, although with a harsh accent that provoked happy giggles—but never in the classroom. Men who treated him as a friend when he was invited to eat greeted him with salaams in the school. At night he played cards with a group whose custom it was to trade quips in true verbal duels of sarcastic humor, most of which he lost, because while he paused to translate the joke the others had gone on to something new. He had to tread a difficult line because there was a tenuous boundary between the traditional jokes and a strict protocol imposed by respect and good manners. Superficially the Vietnamese behaved as equals, but they were ruled by a complex and subtle system of hierarchies within which each man was zealous in guarding his honor. They were a hospitable and friendly people, and the doors of their houses were always open to Reeves; in turn, visitors arrived at his house without notice and stayed for hours and hours in amiable chatter. What they most esteemed was the ability to tell a story. There was among them an aged storyteller who could transport his listeners to heaven or hell; he could soften the heart of the bravest men with his love stories, his complex tales of maidens in danger and sons in disgrace. When the story ended, everyone would sit suspended in silence, and then the old man himself would laugh, mocking his audience, who had listened like children spellbound by his words. Reeves would sit among his friends like one member more of a huge family. Soon he stopped seeing himself as a white giant, he forgot differences in size, culture, race, language, and goals, and allowed himself the pleasure of being like everybody else. One night he stood staring at the black dome of the sky and had to smile at the realization that in almost thirty years of life, this remote village in Asia was the only place where he had felt accepted as a part of a community.

Reeves wrote to Timothy Duane with a list of materials for his classes—the texts he was using were infantile and antiquated—and he also contacted a high school in San Francisco to arrange an exchange of letters with his students. In their painstaking English his pupils wrote a page or two about their lives and some weeks later received a return packet from the United States, an event that was celebrated the same evening. Among other trifles, as an illustration of the Halloween tradition, Timothy Duane sent a rubber mask with gorilla features, green hair, shark teeth, and pointed ears that wiggled like gelatin. Reeves draped himself in a sheet, put on the mask, and went leaping through the streets with a lighted torch in each hand, never imagining the terror his prank would evoke. An air raid would not have produced greater panic: women and children ran toward the jungle, screaming at the top of their lungs, and those men who were able to overcome their fright organized to beat back the monster with sticks. The gorilla had to run for its life, tangled in the sheet, while trying to tear off the mask. Reeves identified himself just in time, although not before being struck by several stones. The mask became a prized trophy; the curious paraded by to admire it and poke at it with a hesitant finger. Reeves intended to offer it as a prize to the best student in his course, but so many were inspired to earn top marks that he decided to contribute the treasure to the community. The face of King Kong took its place in the council hall beside a bloody flag, a first-aid kit, a radio transmitter, and other war relics. In return, the villagers gave their English teacher a small wooden dragon, a symbol of prosperity and good luck, whose visage was angelic in comparison to the rubber mask.

The illusory tranquillity of those months in the village ended sooner than Reeves had anticipated. First he began to suffer a kind of dysentery; he blamed his symptoms on contaminated water and unfamiliar food and by radio requested medication. He was sent a box containing various vials and a sheet of instructions. He began to boil his water, tried to refuse invitations without causing offense, and religiously took the prescribed medicines. For a few days he felt better, but then the symptoms returned and he felt worse than before. He thought he was experiencing a recurrence of his earlier problem and was not overly concerned. He planned to kill the virus with indifference; he wasn't going to cry about it like an old woman—men don't complain,
mano
—but he grew perceptibly worse: he lost weight, he could scarcely drag himself around, and it took an extraordinary effort to get out of bed and focus on preparing his classes or correcting his students' work. He would stand, chalk in hand, without the energy to move his arm, staring at the blackboard with a dazed expression, not knowing what the chicken tracks he himself had written meant or what the white-hot coals burning a hole in his gut might be.
Is this pencil red? No, this pencil is blue,
and he could not remember which pencil was which or what the hell difference it made what color it was. In less than two months he lost forty pounds, and when someone mentioned that he was getting thin and turning the color of a squash, he replied with a weak smile that a good spy was supposed to blend into the landscape. By then no one in the village made any mystery about his coded messages, and he allowed himself the liberty of joking about it. Everyone took his presence as an inevitable consequence of the war; it was nothing personal: if it weren't Reeves it would be someone else, no two ways about it. Of the numberless foreigners who had passed through the village, enemies or friends, this was the one they felt comfortable with—they had real affection for him. At times some little boy would come and whisper in his ear that it was going to be a stormy night and it would be a good idea to turn out his lights, lock the door tight, and not go outside for any reason. Nothing seemed very different; Reeves would glimpse the pale crescent of the moon through a slit in his window, listen to the cries of night birds, and turn a deaf ear to movement through the alleyways of the village. He made no report about those episodes; his superiors would not understand that if the people were to survive, they had no choice but to yield to those who were stronger—from either side. One word from him about those strange nights of silent activities, and a search-and-destroy party would wipe out his friends and reduce the village to a pile of burned-out huts, a tragedy that would not change the plans of the guerrillas in any way. Because of the dearth of information, suspicions were raised at battalion headquarters, and someone was sent to bring Reeves back to base to make a personal report. On the way there, Reeves fainted, and when they reached the base two men had to lift him from the jeep and carry him to a chair in the shade. They handed him a bottle of water, which he drank without taking a breath and then immediately vomited up. Blood tests eliminated the usual maladies, and the doctor, fearing a contagious disease, sent him by plane directly to a hospital in Hawaii.