The Vets (Stephen Leather Thrillers) (15 page)

“It hurt,” said Tyler.

“Damn right it hurt. I was out here fighting for something I believed in.”

“Something you still believe in?”

Lehman thought for a while. “Now I just believe in myself,” he said eventually. “Myself and the guys I fought with. Guys like Lewis and Horvitz. Everything else is shit.”

The black lenses stared impassively at Lehman for a full ten seconds, and Lehman felt like a laboratory specimen being studied under a microscope.

“Can you still fly?” Tyler asked.

“Sure.”

“When was the last time you flew a helicopter?”

“I worked as a pilot for an air taxi firm up until a few years ago. And I still fly now and then, just to keep my licence up to date, you know. Why? Are you looking for a helicopter pilot?”

“Maybe,” said Tyler softly. “Maybe I am. Come on, let’s catch up with the rest of them.”

They walked by the salesman from Seattle, who was sitting astride the turret of the M48 tank with a big grin on his face as his wife snapped away with a small Japanese camera. The barrel was sticking between his thighs like some huge phallus and he patted it and wiggled his eyebrows suggestively at Lehman.

“How about having this between your legs, Dan?” he laughed.

“Yeah, right,” said Lehman, biting back the retort that one big prick deserves another because, much as he disliked the man’s over-the-top bonhomie, he wasn’t worth picking a fight with.

Lehman and Tyler walked up to Horvitz who was studying a selection of American mines, shells and bullets in glass cases. He was bending down to look at a claymore mine, about the size of a brick that had been bent into a curve. He pointed at the words imprinted on the convex side of the grey metal block. “Front Towards Enemy,” he read out to the two men. “We didn’t exactly send our best and brightest, did we?” he asked, his voice loaded with bitter irony. “I’m always surprised that they didn’t write ‘bullets come out here’ on the barrels of our M16s.”

Lehman laughed. “Or ‘this way up’ on the tops of our Hueys,” he said.

Judy led the group into the museum proper, a series of single-storey buildings where the walls were lined with black and white photographs and exhibits.

She stopped them as they passed over the threshold of the first room and asked them to gather around a small glass-fronted display case which had been mounted on the wall. It contained a small cluster of medals and a small plaque from a US infantry sergeant which read: “To the people of a United Vietnam. I was wrong. I am sorry.”

“This soldier admit that what he did was wrong,” said Judy. “He very brave. He true American hero. Only a brave man can admit that he was wrong.” She looked around the group for signs of agreement, and found it from Henderson, Speed and Cummings, who all nodded. There was a metallic clicking noise from behind Lehman and he turned to see Carmody opening and closing his steel claw. There was a Purple Heart in the case and Lehman knew that Carmody would have received the same decoration, at the very least, for his injury. He smiled in sympathy at Carmody but received no response because Carmody was staring stonily at the tour guide. Tyler, too, had a look of contempt on his face and Lehman wondered how many decorations he had received, and for what. Whereas Carmody looked the type to treat his medals with contempt – though not to the extent of sending them to the Vietnamese – he could tell that Tyler was a man who would wear them on his chest with pride.

Horvitz sighed and shook his head and walked away while Judy rattled off statistics about the war: the number of Americans who fought in Vietnam, the cost to America, the number of civilians killed, the number of Vietnamese civilians who died.

“Do you believe this crap?” Horvitz asked, nodding at a series of photographs on the wall. They detailed a series of amputations which had been carried out on a VC prisoner in a bid to make him talk. First his feet were amputated, then his legs below the knee, then finally above the knee, operations which the museum said were totally unnecessary because the man only had superficial wounds. After each operation he was given time to recover, questioned, and then sent back under the surgeon’s knife. He was a hero, said the sign under the photograph of the man with stumps where his legs should have been. And another sign carried a list of all the operations and the dates.

“Do you believe it?” asked Horvitz, looking at Lehman with his dead eyes.

“Maybe,” said Lehman. “I was just a pilot. I didn’t see much of what went on at ground level.”

“Yeah, well I was on the ground, and I never saw stuff like this. I saw killings and I saw firefights but I never saw no torture. Not like this. Not from Americans. I know the South Vietnamese did it to the VC, and the Koreans were a mad bunch, but we never did stuff like this.”

“My Lai happened,” said Lehman. “You can’t deny that. We killed more than 500 people there, most of them women and children and old folks.”

“It was a war,” said Horvitz. “I’m not trying to excuse it, but it was a war.”

Horvitz continued to stare at the photograph of the man with no legs, running his hand through his unkempt beard. The facial hair made it difficult for Lehman to assess his companion’s age; it could have been anywhere between thirty-five and fifty, though the well-muscled body suggested he was still in his thirties.

“I had a friend once, in Nam,” said Horvitz, his voice almost a whisper. “Name of Wills. Billy Wills. His dad had named him William Wills, can you believe that? He was nineteen, a couple of years younger than me. We were in the Lurps, the Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols. He was a mad bastard. Totally without fear, you know? Always wanted to go point, always fretting when we were laid up at base camp, always first off the helicopter and last one back on. He’d volunteer for anything, just so long as it got him out in the field. He was so gung-ho. Good guy to be out with, though, because he was careful, too. And he had a gift for spotting booby-traps, ambushes, stuff like that. We were together for about six months, part of a five-man team, long range recon, nothing too heavy. Had a few close calls but we knew what we were doing, clean in and clean out, hardly any kills to speak of. Just doing our job, you know? We weren’t sent out to cause trouble, just to draw maps, identify VC trails, spot NVA activity, and get back to base without anyone knowing we were there.” Horvitz didn’t look at Lehman as he spoke, and Lehman felt for all the world like a priest hearing confession from a Catholic who’d stayed away from the confessional box for too long.

“They sent us into the Iron Triangle. Dropped us by Huey thirty klicks from where they wanted us so that no one would know we were there and the deal was that we walked in and walked out, no Dustoff unless we were in deep, deep shit. Total radio silence. We moved by night, holed up during the day. The whole mission should have taken us eight days, and that’s a hell of a time in the jungle. A hell of a time.”

He shook himself suddenly as if waking from a dream and, without looking at Lehman, began slowly to walk along the display of pictures. Lehman wasn’t sure if he’d finished talking so he walked with him. Judy, followed by the rest of the group, left the case of unwanted medals and began to relate the story of the amputee in a shrill voice.

“There was hardly any moon, but the starlight was all that we needed. We were three days out when the weather changed, low cloud cover and the air so wet that we got soaked just sitting still. The clouds blocked out all light, everything, couldn’t even see the luminous dials on the compass. We kept close, so close we could touch the man in front of us, stopping whenever we wanted to take a bearing and using a flashlight inside a rucksack so that we could read the compass. Out in the jungle, they can come from anywhere, and it’s full of sounds, sounds that could be insects or small animals or a squad of NVA ready to blow you to kingdom come. You can’t see where you’re stepping, whether there’s going to be a foot trap or a wire stretched across the trail to a hand-grenade or a mine that’s going to take your foot off, not nice and clean like the surgeons did to that VC but jagged and ripped and the pain so bad you want to die. Have you seen a guy step on a mine, Dan? Not the big ones, not the anti-tank jobs that blow a man to pieces so small that there’s nothing to put in the body bag afterwards, I mean the ones that are aimed at grunts. They just blow off a foot, maybe a whole leg. You still die, unless a Dustoff gets you to a field hospital within a few minutes. And it’s not a good way to die.”

“There’s no good way to die,” said Lehman, quietly.

Horvitz turned to look at him. He smiled at Lehman, a cruel, ironic baring of the teeth.

“There’s good ways, Dan, and there’s bad ways. I’ve seen both. And I’ve been responsible for both. You don’t want …” He shook his head and fell silent. It wasn’t as if he were overcome with emotion – there was no sadness or regret in his voice. It was as if he couldn’t be bothered explaining himself to Lehman. The two men stood side by side and looked at a series of photographs of B-52 bombers dropping swarms of bombs on Hanoi. BUFFs, they’d called them during the war, Lehman remembered with a smile. Big Ugly Fat Fuckers. They usually carried more than one hundred 500 pound bombs packed with high explosive. The VC and NVA called them “the Whispering Death” because the first they knew of a B-52 raid was the whistle of the bombs.

“Billy had been on point for three hours and in the dark that’s a hell of a long time,” Horvitz continued. “He was starting to slow so we gave him the drag and I went point. A minute out there feels like a year. An hour is like a lifetime. Everything just stops, stops dead. You don’t know if your next step is going to be your last, if a bullet is going to slam into your chest or if you’re going to hear the little click that means you’ve trodden on a mine and that you’ve got half a second before you see the yellow flash and about a second before the pain rips through you. You want to just stop and curl up under a bush but you have to keep on going, you have to keep on taking the next step, the one that could be your last. I’ve never felt so close to death, Dan. Never. And you know something?” He turned to look at Lehman again. “I’ve never felt so alive.”

Lehman nodded, not sure what he should say. He tried to hold Horvitz’s gaze but he couldn’t, the man’s eyes seemed to bore right through into his soul and their intensity was almost painful. Lehman looked away. Horvitz snorted quietly as if acknowledging Lehman’s weakness.

“The clouds kept opening and closing. Sometimes we could see strips of sky like ripped material, and then there would be enough starlight for us to move at normal speed, but then just as quickly the clouds would close and we’d be back to feeling our way through the jungle. When there was starlight we’d open up our formation, and then we’d bunch together in the darkness, keeping close enough to touch. I don’t know if it was my fault for moving too quickly or if it was Billy’s for not moving quickly enough, but the sky clouded over and we lost him. He couldn’t have been more than twenty steps from me and we lost him. Maybe the VC crept up on him, maybe they were lying in wait and I just walked right by them, I still don’t know. I mean, if I walked by them, why didn’t they just open up and kill us all?” The question was rhetorical because he didn’t give Lehman a chance to answer, he just kept right on talking in his dull monotone voice. “Maybe there were only a couple of them and they knew they’d be outgunned. Maybe if he’d have been point and I’d have been covering the rear then I’d be dead and he’d be here now telling it to you.”

Judy and the group came closer and Horvitz moved away as if they were magnets of the same polarity. They stood in front of more photographs, a record of the My Lai massacre.

“I don’t know how long it was before we realised he was missing. Could have been just a few yards, could have been a hundred. First we knew about it was when he screamed. Screamed like I’d never heard a man scream before. They kept him screaming for hours, moving him around so that we could never catch up with them. They must have gagged him while they moved him because his screams would come from one direction, then nothing for fifteen minutes or so, and then the screaming would start again somewhere else. We went out of our minds, Dan. He was my best friend and they killed him by inches. We found him the following day. Not because we were particularly good at tracking, but because they wanted us to find him. They’d laid him out in a clearing. You want to know what they did to him, Dan? Do you want to know?”

Lehman said nothing. He didn’t want to know what had happened to Billy Wills, he didn’t want to share any of the hellish secrets that had resulted in Eric Horvitz having the eyes of a corpse. But he felt that if he listened to Horvitz, then maybe it would help him, and he was clearly a man who needed help.

“His body was covered in cuts, some of them small, some of them deep, none of them lethal. Hundreds of them. That’s not what killed him, though. They were what had made him scream. They’d disembowelled him. And they’d cut off his prick. Either would have killed him, but it would have taken some time. Lots of blood. Lots of pain. You’d have thought that that would have been enough, wouldn’t you? They’d tortured him, and they’d killed him. But it wasn’t enough, they wanted to teach us a lesson. They wanted to scare us. They spread his intestines all around his body, yards and yards of it. You’d never believe how long your guts are, not until you’ve seen them laid out. They shoved his prick in his mouth. We didn’t look too closely in case we found that he’d still been alive when they did that. Then they cut off his head. Not one clean cut, but lots of small cuts, like they’d sawn it off. Then they put the head in the body cavity. They went to all that trouble, Dan. It takes a particularly perverse sort of mind to do that. A particularly nasty mind. So why don’t I see any indication of that on the walls here? Why do we just have all this anti-American crap?”