Keeping Watch Page 5

  “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?”

  The Snakeman studied him for a long minute, either putting together a response or, more likely, trying to decide if the FNG before him had sufficient potential as a student, and consequently as a survivor, for him to bother answering. Allen felt like he was having his fortune read.

  Finally, the man spoke. “Okay, here it is: Never go through an open gate. In the wet, it’s better to do without socks. Keep your eyes on the ground and your ears in the air. And remember, never trust a kid. Even the babies’ll kill you soon as piss on you.” With that, the sage of the jungle rose, picked up his rifle, and walked out of the mess tent.

  As he stood up, his shirt fell open, revealing a length of black twine threaded through many leathery scraps.

  Back at the squad, Allen found Chris flat on his back snoring and Mouse playing poker with Streak and Hal over an upturned C-ration carton.

  “Got a new friend there, Lucky?” Mouse asked him.

  “Jeez,” Allen said. “That guy’s definitely been in the woods too long. He’s got a necklace of ears, for Christ sake.”

  “Half the grunts I know collect ears,” Hal said, amused at the repulsion in the new guy’s voice. “Other platoons, ’a course—The Wolf doesn’t like it.”

  “That’s just sick,” Allen said.

  “Wait’ll you’ve been here a couple months,” Streak commented. “It’ll seem pretty tame.”

  “Do you have any ears?” Allen demanded, and immediately wished he could retract the question. Streak, however, seemed unoffended.

  “I don’t, no, but you see Charlie kill enough of your guys, maybe a few ears seem like the least you can do. Like the First Cav leaving a playing card on their kill sites as a message to the Cong. An ace of spades.”

  Mouse looked up from his cards. “Always wondered, how they do that?”

  “Well, they shoot the guy and then stuff the card in his mouth.”

  “No, I mean, how they come up with that many ace of spades? They buy ’em by the deck? Or does the whole First Cav play with fifty-one-card decks? Seems to me kinda impractical—unless you don’t got a lot of dead bodies. Maybe that’s it. Message like that would sort of depend on not having a very high body count. I can see where ears’d be better.”

  “What I’d like to know is,” Hal interjected, “how do you keep the ears from rotting? Everything rots in two seconds here, ‘specially when the rains come. Leather, canvas, armpits, you name it.”

  Human beings, thought Allen. A man’s soul.

  “Maybe they smoke them, over a fire,” Streak suggested.

  “Could be they use some kinda curing stuff,” Mouse volunteered. “Had this crazy uncle once, went out and shot him a deer—well, said he shot it, but I always figured he scraped it off the side of the road somewhere. Anyways, he took the thing to a taxidermy I think it was, had it stuffed, these glass eyes and ever’thin’, put the fuckin’ animal in his front room. But the taxi guy did a shit job on it, began to stink, my aunt made him put it out on the front porch. Neighbor kids were pretty hard on it, I have to say.”

  “Shit,” Allen burst out, “what the hell is with you guys? These are human ears we’re talking about.”

  “No they’re not,” Streak objected. “They’re gook ears.”

  “I don’t care. Can you imagine taking them home to your mother?”

  “I can’t imagine taking me home to my mother,” Streak answered coldly. He dropped his cards onto the box table and walked off.

  Chapter 7

  Second Platoon went out the next day, and the day after that, and for many days thereafter. Chuck got short and lifted out; Hal, only two days behind Chuck, wavered and finally signed up for another tour. They had two solid days of rain, and overnight, the company’s hill took on the consistency and odor of a monumental cow pat.

  Patrols now rarely went without some sign of the enemy: a bullet out of the heavens, the odd booby trap, once a patch of pungi-sticks stretched across a faint path, serving to keep their eyes stretched and their spines crawling. The night assaults continued, with the artillery response screaming out of the east and hammering the darkness with explosions.

  Boredom and terror: A mortar came through the roof of the next hooch over one night, killing one man and tearing up two others; the next day, a careless jungle boot triggered a mine, taking off the offending leg and peppering five men with shrapnel and gore, the point man dying before the chopper could get him. Half the platoon went down with dysentery after filling their canteens in a creek, and through it all, Allen went unscathed, but for the sucker marks of leeches and the tiny nick on his forehead.

  He grew used to the jungle and its noises and rhythms. He no longer had to think about where to put his feet, no longer looked around to see where his companions were. As the hours he spent in the green turned into days, then weeks, he felt as if he was developing another sense, a feeling that, even if he closed his eyes and stopped up his ears, he’d be able to find his way around.

  Three weeks in, approaching a ville on a search-and-destroy, Allen’s squad had the point position. There was no sign of life in the hooches ahead, although they had seen some figures working in the paddies as they walked up the valley, and Mouse, who was point man, headed for an inviting break in the wobbly fence.

  “Wait!” Allen shouted urgently. The Snakeman’s voice: Never go through an open gate. “Hold on, there could be a booby trap.”

  Mouse glanced at him as if he was nuts, because Allen had been too far back to see any trip wire unless it came with a painted sign and an arrow, but he stopped short and examined the ground. Allen came up beside him, and they were joined by T-bone and Chris, incongruously sharp-eyed when he had his glasses on and when he wasn’t stoned.

  “Shit,” Chris said. “He’s right. Look at that kind of a twig there. That could be . . .”

  Birdman went back to report the possible trap to the lieutenant, and in a short time The Wolf was there with what he called his blow-’em-up team. The twig was, in fact, attached to an enormous mine, made from an unexploded American shell wrapped in C4. Had Mouse gone through the gate, the entire squad would have been vaporized.

  “Good work, Private,” Woolf said. “What’s your name?”

  “Carmichael, sir,” Allen answered.

  The Wolf nodded and went back to the operation. Chris nudged Allen in the ribs. “Sir. Sir.”

  “Yeah I know. What can I say? The Wolf brings out the kid in me.” In fact, Woolf was the only lieutenant Allen knew who seemed to require the honorific.

  “You sure enough are a lucky bastard, Carmichael. How’d you know that was gonna be there?” Mouse asked him.

  “I keep my ears open when people t
ell me things.”

  “Well, you go on ahead keeping them ears of yours open. In the meantime, can I hold your hand when we walking patrol, huh?”

  “Yeah,” T-bone chimed in, “maybe sleep curled up next to you?”

  But Allen didn’t feel like a lucky bastard—he was in Vietnam, wasn’t he? Besides, talking about luck invited its opposite.

  Five weeks, six. The company moved from its hillock to a defense post in the woods. It hadn’t rained in weeks, but no sooner had they hacked their holes into the solid earth than the sky opened up. Leather mildewed in hours, pack straps rotted, boots fell apart mid-patrol, and ponchos developed diabolical leaks into sodden flak jackets. Allen took to leaving his socks in his pack—the Snakeman was right: Bare boots gave a grunt fewer blisters than wet wool.

  Seven weeks. The rains came and went, the platoon lifted out for a few days in the bush: C-rats, skirmishes, the same old shit. The zip of bullets and the cries of “Incoming!”; in the morning the rise of medevacs heavy with stretchers and body bags; in the evening came the choppers bearing food, water, bullets, and new faces with clean uniforms and jumpy trigger fingers, all the supplies necessary for the business of war. Then back to the NDP for one night or four, gaunt with sleeplessness and stinking to high heaven, to fall on the hot food and warm beer. Chris got his second Purple Heart—a pungi-stick through the side of his boot—and was shipped out to the hospital, but it didn’t infect, which meant that the stake’s layer of shit had been washed clean by the rain, and he was back in a week. One of the FNGs shipped in to boost their numbers, a complete virgin on his first day in the bush, caught a bullet in the spine before the sun went down.

  They killed Cong and NVA and a handful of peasants who were probably just doing their job on the land but got unlucky. Allen felt bad about them, but what could he do? The first time he objected, the others razzed him—and they were right, it was naive to fret over civilian casualties in a war zone. The next day Birdman brought down an old man in a field; Allen turned his back. As he did at the episodes of grunt humor, like when four VC sheltering in a bomb-hole met a grenade, and the next morning some of the grunts posed the stiff corpses with cigarettes in their dead lips and C-rat can teacups clasped in their rigid fingers, to take Instamatic snapshots of the kill.

  The patrols, company-sized, full-platoon, or one squad at a time, baked and sweated and humped their way through dripping jungle, reeking paddies, and mountain paths, in no particular direction but out and back. The new guys grew frightened, then tired, and finally thin and hard. The days and the kills began to blur together, until even the DEROS date on their helmets didn’t mean shit. Just keep moving, that was all.

  Even Thanksgiving, back at the muddy hillock, did not manage to strip away the lethargy Allen had drawn over himself. The slabs of turkey and watery tinned cranberry sauce the cook dished out were almost worse than if he’d stuck to beef stew. For a moment, when the mass-produced pumpkin pie was set before him, Allen was with his family the year before, home from college in a kitchen fragrant with spice, his twelve-year-old brother Jerry winning a bet by eating one of their Aunt Midge’s three-inch-thick pies single-handed—after a full dinner. Laughter, fragrance, disbelief—and then Allen was back in a mess tent in Vietnam, gazing down at the taunting reminder of The World. He pushed the tired object over to Mouse and went to swipe a joint from Chris’s stash.

  Chris came back from his hospital rest with a new string of love beads, a fresh supply of hugely potent weed, and a lot of far-fetched stories about the hospital nurses. One evening, a week or so before Christmas, Allen was sitting beside him as they stirred their C-rats over the heat tabs and waited for night.

  “Chris, you know the funny thing about this war?”

  Chris snorted. “Whoa, man, don’t get me started.”

  “Well, yeah. But really. Wars are supposed to have some kind of strategy—you know, push the line forward, take that hill, drive the enemy back. But here, what’ve we got? What the fuck are we after? Do you have any idea? I mean, look at what we do here: We go out, we bump around in the trees looking for people who’ve got nothing to do with us, and try to kill them before they spot us. Then we count up the bodies and hotfoot it away again before their big brother comes along and pounds the shit out of us. There’s no front line, just hills we borrow for a while and stick an NDP on top of so we can hide behind the wire, and hell, half the time the enemy’s some poor bastard who’s just trying to grow enough rice to keep his kids from starving. I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t this whole thing seem just a little fucked to you?”

  Streak had been listening to Allen’s tirade and started to crow with laughter. “Hey, headline in the Stars and Stripes: ‘Carmichael Declares, War Is Fucked.’ ”

  “Maybe Westmoreland’d read it,” T-bone sniggered. “Spray-paint us a nice front line down the trees.”

  “Jesus, Carmichael, you’ve been here, what, going on three months now, and you’re just discovering how completely shit-faced this war is?”

  “I always was a slow learner, okay? But I mean it. The whole thing’s like some kind of lethal kids’ game, like—I don’t know, musical chairs played with toe-poppers. I mean, I know the guy on the ground never has much of a clue on what the generals are doing, but I can’t help thinking that if we’d carried on like this in the Second World War, we’d have an Emperor of California and a Führer of New York.”

  Mouse protested. “Maybe we only get one or two KIAs each patrol, but how many patrols the Army runnin’, huh? Look at the body count, man.”

  “And what the hell’s that mean?” Allen retorted. “You know damn well that hundred-year-old mamasan Birdman wasted last week got tallied as VC, and probably got bumped up to three NVA by the time Washington added up the numbers. Hell, they probably tally the dead pigs and water buffalo, too.”

  “ ‘If it’s brown and it’s down, it’s VC,’ ” chanted Chris.

  “Damn straight they count the pigs, man,” Streak said. “Those animals are dangerous.”

  “Body count,” Allen spat out, jabbing at the beans in his can with the plastic spoon. “How the fuck can you run a war when the only thing you’re interested in is a body count? How long is it going to take us to kill off the country at this rate? Maybe we ought to just dump poison in all the wells and we can go home.”

  “Tell you straight, Carmichael my man, you oughta run for general,” Mouse said. “You got my vote. ’Til then, you got any of that Tabasco sauce left?”

  Allen subsided, although the whole idea of war by numbers still seemed to him insane, and basically as repugnant as napalming civilians or taking ears. With time, however, the methods of war-making would become so familiar he no longer questioned them, just kept on keeping on.

  But the reasons behind collecting ears: Those were to become a lot clearer on his very next venture out into the bush.

  Chapter 8

  A report came in during the night that the VC had burned a village ten miles north. Instead of being lifted in, however, the company was to split up and sweep in that direction, in the hopes that they might meet the enemy on its way south. So off they humped along the paddy dikes, the sun sucking clouds of moisture from the earth and using it to beat into stupidity the humans below, silent but for the occasional cursing stumble into the knee-deep muck.

  Just before noon a heavy tree line began to close in on Second Platoon’s right hand; any troop with more than a couple weeks’ experience in the bush crept out from under his heat stupor and began to eye the approaching trees warily. Sure enough, the staccato burst of AK47 fire came just as the platoon was straggling out of the dike system. Men splashed belly-down into the mud and returned fire over the paddy walls; the crack of the rifles was punctuated by the spat spat of bullets hitting the muck. Two men were hit before the artillery responded to The Wolf’s call for a strike on the offending clump of brush. The shells came in, sending a miniature tidal wave through the paddy mud. The men waited throug
h ten minutes of silence before scraping off the thick ooze and going up to check the sniper’s site. They found only shell casings and a spider hole in the ground, so they tossed a grenade down it and then looked in, but it was empty. The medevac came for one man, the medic patched up the other wounded, and on they went.

  A mile later another AK47 opened up on them, and they jumped for cover again. Another artillery strike, another empty spider hole; the only difference was, this time they picked themselves up unwounded.

  The third time it happened they were spread out across a hillside of derelict terraces. Allen dove into what looked like a bomb crater but turned out to be the other half of a terrace wall, crumbling with disrepair but still running all the way to the tree line. He ventured a glance across the stones to the other end of the terrace, where he saw the Birdman ripping open someone’s blood-soaked bootlaces with the point of his bayonet, cursing in chorus with the owner of the boot.

  “Who’s that?” Allen called across the break.

  “Hal,” he said, without looking up.

  “Shit, man, sorry. Look, is the lieutenant there? I need to talk with him.”

  “We’re kind of busy over here, Carmichael, case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Bird, I need to talk to him. Tell him I think I can get a line on the shooter.”

  Birdman said something over his shoulder, and in a moment Lieutenant Woolf was on the other side of the gap.

  “Loot, we’ve got a clear line down here to the trees. We can circle around and be waiting for him when he tries to get away.”

  “Let the artillery do its job, Carmichael.”

  “They’ve missed him twice already,” Allen pointed out.

  The Wolf thought for a minute, then nodded. “Worth a try. But he’s not going to hang around waiting, so we’ll send him a mad minute in three, aiming to the right. See how close you can get by then.”