Keeping Watch Read online

  “Just, uh, make sure the guys know that we’re out there.” Allen saw the lack of expression in his lieutenant’s face, and knew he’d just put his foot in it. “Sorry.”

  “Go.”

  Allen gathered his squad-mates ahead of him, carrying only rifles as they crouch-ran along the lee of the terrace wall. Once among the trees, they scrambled uphill until they were even with the sniper, still invisible among a pile of rocks. Without thinking, Allen put up his hand, but no one argued with his assumption of command.

  “Somebody should take a position here, in case he comes straight over. Chris?” The surfer dude was never very determined when it came to actually killing the enemy, even when he wasn’t stoned; sitting and waiting was about his speed.

  “Fine, man.”

  “Keep your head down. And for God’s sake, if you shoot, watch you don’t hit us.”

  T-bone, Mouse, Streak, and Allen continued through the undergrowth. Halfway up the hill, Mouse and T-bone dropped off. Allen and Streak were twenty yards from the pair of trees that they’d decided was their goal when the platoon opened up; with a wall of noise, bullets spat a cloud of dust on the far side of the two trees. It was their bad luck that the sniper was bright—or experienced—enough to know in an instant that there was only one reason the GIs would be firing to one side of his location.

  The black-clad figure broke from the trees, sprinting directly into the hail of mis-aimed fire. Before Allen or Streak could get their sights on him, the man tumbled to the ground, then rolled, shot to his feet, and dove into a clump of bamboo. Streak snatched at a smoke flare to signal the platoon to stop shooting, but when they reached the bamboo, the sniper had vanished. The only trace of their man was a smear of blood the shape of a small hand; it looked like some child’s fingerpainting experiment.

  Streak slung his rifle over his shoulder and shook his head. “I was beginning to think the little fucker was a ghost.”

  “Well, this ghost bleeds.”

  “Want to go after him?”

  The two young men gazed without enthusiasm at the wall of green that had swallowed up the pajama-clad sniper. “Maybe we should ask The Wolf.”

  But Lieutenant Woolf said no, they’d wasted enough time, they had to be at the burned ville by nightfall. The medevac was on its way, they’d be off as soon as Hal was gone. One glance at their mate’s shredded ankle, they all knew that Hal was back to The World.

  Their bleeding ghost, however, either hadn’t been seriously hit or else had brothers. They met the first one less than a mile up the trail. This time the artillery response was successful, although the sniper’s body was so torn up, they couldn’t tell if it was the one they’d winged. They searched the man’s single surviving pocket, tossed a fragmentation grenade into his hole, and found neither cached weapons nor additional VC. They left his remains where they lay.

  Twice more that day they came under fire. Once they responded with their M16s and a few LAWs, the second time they were close enough to heavy tree growth to break for cover. Running left a lousy taste in their mouths, since by this time most of them were so fed up, they would have happily gone after the bastard with their bare hands, but the lieutenant said to leave him, so they did. The whole day had been as maddening as mosquitoes in Alaska.

  “You think Charlie gets as pissed off when we won’t stand and fight as we do when he didis away?” Allen speculated aloud.

  “Shit no, man, Charlie’s the ghost. He don’t get mad, he gets even.”

  They eventually reached the ville, a burned-out and stinking wasteland with the skeletons of hooches teetering over piles of swollen corpses with four and two legs. Nine children, thirteen women and old men, an uncounted number of dogs and pigs—all had been shot, many with a single bullet in the head, at least two days before. The stench was ungodly.

  “Ah, ain’t that the shits,” Mouse drawled. “Now we’re gonna have to clear another damn position.”

  Allen grunted in agreement, then started to chuckle. The rest of his squad stared at him in disbelief, which made it all the funnier. He giggled until the tears came.

  “The fuck?” Mouse demanded.

  “Ah hell, man,” Allen finally got out, “listen to yourself. We’re knee-deep in corpses with the snipers closing in on us, and you’re bitching because we have to go down the road to dig in.”

  “Hell yes, I’m bitching,” the indignant PFC retorted. “If Charlie hadn’ta shot all them damn pigs, we coulda had fresh pork chops for dinner.”

  They dug in, spending a restless sleep punctuated every thirty to ninety minutes by one sort of attack or another. The company’s first platoon, dug in a couple of miles off, got it about eleven o’clock, and Second lay listening to the thumps carried by ground and air, hearing the frantic radio noises, seeing the flashes of illumination rounds and mortar fire as their company brothers fought for their lives. It was a relief to them all when the sky lit up with the distant artillery wading in; after that Fourth of July display, things quieted down.

  At dawn, Charlie subsided back into the hills, leaving the daylight to the foreign invaders. Unslept and edgy, the platoon prepared to move out.

  But not toward extraction. The Powers on High had come to realize that the amount of activity in the area meant something, although intelligence reports conflicted as to whether the enemy was local or imported. In either case, VC cadre or NVA infiltration, Saigon wanted to know, and Bravo Company was already in position to find out.

  The three platoons continued north, spread out across the hills and lowlands, meeting sporadic fire all the way. Second Platoon spent most of the day climbing up and down a series of hills, and rarely an hour went by without someone opening up on them from somewhere. They stopped by a stream for a smoke and some food, but as Allen sat with half a dozen others in the shade of a tree, mechanically spooning his grease-clotted beans and wieners into his mouth, the familiar slap of a bullet hitting something solid shuddered through the group. Food cans flew into the air as rifles were grabbed, and they were all flat on their bellies before the shot had ceased to echo. They waited, but nothing else came.

  Allen lay there, his lunch already attracting a swarm of ants and a rock burning into his thigh, and had suddenly had enough. If today was his day, then so be it, but he wasn’t going to lie with his face in the mud for any damned gook. He stood up, brushed off his filthy flak jacket, and walked across the intervening open ground to retrieve his spoon. He cleaned it off on the edge of his shirt, put it into his chest pocket, delivered the taller half of the peace sign to the invisible enemy, and stalked back to where his gun lay, refusing to hurry.

  “You crazy bastard, Carmichael,” Mouse shouted, “you’re gonna get yourself killed!”

  “When your time’s up, it’s up. I’m sick of being a rabbit. Fuck ’em, I say.”

  “Carmichael,” came the voice of authority from behind. Allen swiveled and looked into The Wolf’s face. “You feel like committing suicide, let me know, we’ll leave you on point or give you a nice isolated listening post.”

  “Sorry, Ell-Tee, he pissed me off is all. I thought I’d lost my favorite spoon.” He pulled the disreputable object out of his pocket as illustration.

  “Looks to me like you lost more than that,” Woolf said.

  Allen followed the lieutenant’s gaze to the place the rest of the squad had so rapidly abandoned, and saw that their leader, Andy Bird, was still there, stretched peacefully on his back with his C-rat and spoon clasped firmly in either hand, resting on his belly. It took a moment for Allen to realize that the Birdman’s chest was not moving.

  “Ah shit!” Allen lunged for the Birdman’s legs and hauled him back to shelter, felt for a pulse, called for a medic even though he had known, as immediately as the lieutenant had, that there was no life left to save. The medic shook his head, more at the small and nearly bloodless chest wound than to indicate a judgment, and sent two men off to fetch a stretcher.

  Bird had been due to leave th
e bush in three days.

  The Wolf was still standing at the edge of the clearing. Allen looked up at him, questioningly.

  “Who in your squad’s got the most time?” Woolf asked.

  The men looked over at Streak. Not only was he the longest among them in the bush, but Streak knew what he was doing, was neither gung-ho nor cowardly. They’d be okay under him.

  Woolf’s eyes traveled to the man with the white patch on his scalp. “Look’s like it’s you, Rychenkow.”

  Streak thought about it for a minute, shrugged, and picked up his gun. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s move out.”

  The spoon episode changed Allen’s nickname from Lucky to Crazy—although given the backwards logic of Vietnam, they meant much the same thing.

  The sniping went on, as ominous as a cockroach in the kitchen: You just knew that there had to be a whole swarm more of them in the woodwork. Cigarette or water breaks were taken crouched behind the thin trees, open ground was to be gotten over at a fast trot, and the lack of sleep brought alternating bouts of lethargy and hypersensitivity. The whole of Bravo Company ached, for sleep or for action, it hardly mattered which.

  Mines came next, clear evidence that the enemy knew where they were and where they were heading. With the first trip wire, the platoon’s progress dropped to a near crawl as booby traps were disarmed or blown up, and the next trap watched for intently. Meanwhile, snipers continued to harry them, they were running short of both food and ammunition, and night was coming on. The Wolf called a halt early in a site that would be defensible, although the resupply choppers wouldn’t be able to reach them. There they dug in, spending the dark hours under sporadic torment, with a mortar attack at one in the morning, ten or twelve shells pelting down all around them but miraculously killing no one. The sniper’s attentions resumed at dawn.

  Allen’s fingers fumbled to open his second-to-last can of C-rations, clumsy with exhaustion and nerves. He stared down at the greasy lump of ham and limas, and decided he’d rather starve. He put the can down on the ground and dropped his filthy, sweat-caked head into his hands.

  “What’s the Vietnamese for ‘Harassment and Interdiction’?” he asked nobody in particular.

  “What I wanna know is, when we gonna H & I they asses?” Mouse retorted. “This shit sucks, man. I feel like a white rent collector in Harlem on a Saturday night. Not really welcome, know what I mean?”

  “Nobody loves you, Mouse,” T-bone lamented.

  “Everybody loves me, asshole, just not Luke the Gook.”

  “Luke loves us all,” Chris said. “He just loves us better dead.”

  “He gonna find us dead, we don’t get resupplied,” Mouse complained. “You gonna eat that C-rat, Crazy?”

  “I thought I could, but I looked at it and thought I’d rather eat my bayonet. You want it?”

  “Sure. Lima’s my fav’rite. Reminds me of my mama’s cooking.”

  So worn down were they, not one of them reacted to the outrageous concept of any human female producing the slop in that can.

  The lieutenant had spent the night studying his maps, and plot-ted out a change of course that led them away from the mined trails and into terrain that grew clear and flatter as they went on. They picked up speed, outrunning the mine setters, although the snipers soon found them again. Just after noon they swept into a ville that clearly hadn’t heard they were coming. A pair of armed figures burst from a hooch and sprinted for the trees—too far away for the rifles, although several grunts opened fire anyway. One of those was Allen, who was so pissed off at the ghosts that he’d happily waste some bullets just for the sake of the noise.

  The Wolf called them into line and sent them to searching the ville. They ordered the weeping women and half-naked children out into the village square, and the nervy platoon took out its frustrations on the huts, merrily smashing pots, gouging the floors in an ostensible search for bunkers, and tossing grenades into any minor depression they came upon. One of the other squads was headed toward the thatch with a torch when The Wolf caught them and sent them to round up the livestock.

  Even here, however, he had problems controlling the men: One soldier gunned down a young male water buffalo that was placidly chewing its cud in the river. And then the villagers were wailing about the buffalo as well, and one of the GIs made an obscene comment about the animal’s equipment, and suddenly out of a clear sky rose a cloud of sexuality, encompassing the entire platoon. An electrical current crackled back and forth across the clearing as the platoon of young and severely frustrated males realized that they had several presentable women in their hands, and no one to object. One man reached out and dragged a villager to her feet, and had his hand inside the woman’s shirt before the lieutenant noticed what was happening.

  “What are you doing, Malone?” The Wolf’s cold voice cut through the hectic glee like a whip. Malone’s hand dropped away from the woman’s breast, but his other hand kept hold of her arm as he turned to stare insolently at the platoon leader.

  “Thought I’d question her.”

  “You speak Vietnamese now?”

  “I didn’t reckon we’d do all that much talking, Loot.” A couple of the new guys laughed nervously at the joke, but no one else; this was The Wolf they were dealing with.

  “You didn’t.”

  After a long minute, Malone’s hand let go of the captive arm, and the air’s electricity flickered, and guttered out.

  Lieutenant Woolf held the gaze of each of his men until he was certain that the urge to atrocity was dead. “Save it for the whores, boys,” he said in the end. “These women don’t deserve that.”

  “They’ve been sheltering VC, Loot,” someone groused.

  “And they’ll probably lose their land because of it,” Woolf answered evenly. “We’re supposed to be the good guys here. Never forget it.”

  That night, twenty-year-old Allen Carmichael lay bundled inside his poncho liner, unable to take his mind off the picture of his countryman’s hand inside the woman’s blouse. His eyes replayed the motion, his hand felt the warm shape as if it had ridden there itself. He told himself that he would never have raped the woman, assured his self-respect that he would have stopped Malone if The Wolf hadn’t. But although he was dead certain about the first declaration, he could be none too sure about the second. He too had felt the electricity, he’d been aware of the lust for savagery.

  When battle couldn’t be joined against the enemy, sometimes the definition of enemy had to expand.

  Chapter 9

  By the time Allen had been in-country three months, his mind held a lifetime of savage images. A three-year-old child burned to raw meat, burned beyond pain, stumbling blind and bewildered through the napalmed ville; a stack of what had once been human beings, now half a ton of squirming rat food; the belt buckle of a fellow GI, still fastened to the stubs of its belt on both sides, sitting in the middle of a path where it had been blown free of its wearer; a weirdly flattened NVA who had fallen from the sky onto rocky ground, a quick means of encouraging his fellow prisoners on the chopper to talk. Men bled impossible amounts; men were impossibly violated by various kinds of metal; men died in silence from tiny wounds while others screamed and screamed and refused to die. Allen had seen so many weeping women that their tears had no power to move him; weeping men were harder to take, when they were his own, but even those had become more of an irritation than something that wrung the guts. He had seen so many Vietnamese smacked around and beaten that the sounds did not even make him look around.

  For a while, the everyday horror had festered inside Allen’s mind. For a few days after Christmas, he had felt as if he would burst with the memories, swollen as a corpse about to spill itself out onto the earth. For a time, he had almost wished for the release of pressure, looking for ways to cause his mind to break up, thought about just pulling a grenade pin and hugging the thing to his heart.

  In the end, the buildup had simply leaked out of him, leaving him a functioning shell
. The vivid dreams of raining belt buckles and his foot coming down onto the trigger of a Bouncing Betty ceased to torment him, and during the day he grew accustomed to seeing men he knew were dead walking or sitting with the others: blink hard enough, they went away. As for fear, it was a tool, adrenaline cranking up the perceptions. It could even be a thrill—like the sheer, heart-pounding helplessness of coming down into a red-hot LZ, when the zip and clang of bullets made your balls shrivel up behind your navel, until you set down in an orgasm of terror, finding release in a stream of heavy-laden men pouring out the back of the chopper. Exhaustion, pain, filth, it all got converted into bau, pronounced as if it were a Vietnamese word, a joke-adaptation of business as usual. Tedium? Turn off the brain and hump the pack. Horror? Let the eyes glaze over. The bright and shining terror of an FNG make you want to just bash him on the head and put him out of his misery? Don’t sit near him, don’t ask his name.

  More and more rarely did he stand back, reflecting on how strange it was that he didn’t find the war intolerable, or even particularly awful. He wasn’t even afraid of death any longer, looked unmoved on horror, and only the rare pulse of his body’s fear told him he was still alive. Life was a long stretch of tedium broken by the fierce joy of battle.

  And joy there was, now that he was learning the language of the jungle. In the bush, as the thud of rotors faded, the men would stand motionless until sounds returned: the buzz of insects, the cry of birds, the hiss of the radio. Then slowly they would move out, hunting the enemy, seeking out his hiding places, offering themselves to him as a snake hunter might offer his hand to coax a rattler from his den. And the smaller the group, the more Allen liked it—being stripped down to a night ambush party of three men carrying nothing but M16, canteens, and a Claymore was an experience so intense, it was like being drunk, or in love. Saigon was far away then.

  Allen learned the bush, his senses screwed tight to the brink of madness: the chill back-of-the-neck sensation that meant Charlie was watching; a sure conviction that the path ahead held a booby trap; the sixth sense that kicked in when you could feel—smell—the enemy with a kind of internal radar. Nights were the best, keeping watch, when only your alertness stood between your brothers and death—he loved them then, his brother soldiers, loved them like he’d never loved Lisa, or his parents, or even Jerry. He discovered that he had a knack for ambushes, working with Streak and Mouse to triangulate a suspected hole in the ground and wait for Charlie to stick his head out, and he developed rituals the night before a patrol—laying out his boots just so, repacking his field pack, covering two sheets of paper with a dutiful set of entertaining lies to Lisa; they became a kind of meditation. He ate less meat, used mud on his exposed skin instead of the Army’s insect repellent, he eyed everyone other than his platoon-mates with close suspicion.