13th Valley (21 page)

“If you're going to start preaching to me again,” Lila had said, “don't. I don't want to hear it.”

“I wasn't going to say anything,” Rufus had said.

Brooks leaned forward, scratched his chin and returned to the typewriter.

Lila, I want to tell you something I found tonight. In a discussion with several of my men, I should call them my friends, I could feel the old Rufus return. We were discussing the war and racial conflict—they bicker as if they are trying to place blame on someone other than themselves or their particular ancestors—when it came to me … a semantic determinant theory of war. I can feel it, see it, hear it. It may be the most significant lesson that I or anyone may learn from Vietnam.

I must analyze this, concentrate upon this, answer this. What causes war? The situation here is perfect for study. I've brought with me all my knowledge of philosophy. It is dusty and tarnished but it is here, in me. And here are all the elements of war about me. Here are all the major races of mankind, representatives from every socio-economic group, from every government-politico force, all clashing. And the language groups: English, French, Vietnamese, Chinese, American technologese, Spanish. Here a democracy upholds a dictatorship in the name of freedom while a dictatorial governing group infiltrates five percent of its nation's population to a different country in the name of nationalism. The answer to the question must be here, waiting to be discovered.

Brooks paused again. In his mind he formally composed his thoughts. Hawaii and pre-army times kept springing into his thoughts. It took a strong effort to repulse them.

Differences! Inter-people differences and people's reactions, people's paranoia. Do we frighten people with our differences? Do others who are different frighten us? The more insecure we are the more defensive we become. If our personal insecurity is built into our national or racial character, passed down from generation to generation, then in order to alter our defensiveness, we have got to change our basic character. And what forms that character? What passes it down?

LANGUAGE. Thought structured by language. And WHOSE language? English. The white man's language.

The causes of war run very deep in white American culture and to this culture black America is being assimilated or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, digested. Our world is coming apart and it is imperative that we analyze the causes and help our world develop a different perspective about conflict.

Oh Lila, I hope I am not begging the issue between us by digressing. I know that I have failed you, for 18 months have not been a husband at all. Not even a man to you. What? I do not know. An idea, a past tense image that has lost reality? You existed in my soul long before you came into my life. Now you are withdrawing, and in so doing have perhaps withdrawn the essence of my being. From so great a distance, just when one withdraws the other cannot know. Now, with these papers before me, papers printed weeks ago, the loss comes to me in past tense, comes to me at a time when perhaps your own feelings have changed and the emptiness I feel is, in reality, refilled. I have attempted to reconstruct what you must have gone through, what you must have been going through, the thoughts, the anxieties, at the time and just prior to the time you allowed these papers to be sent. I'm sure you suffered silently with the decision for many nights until finally, with nothing to counter the flow of your thoughts, you knew there was no other way.

Lila, I must decide by the 21st of this month to either extend to January and obtain the 150-day active service reduction or to DEROS from here in 25 days and have ten months remaining to serve. I will wait to decide until the 21st in hopes of hearing from you before then. May I say again, you mean more to me than anything I have ever known. I know I can return, revert to the man you married, grow quickly in the direction in which you've evolved, become a unity of spirit with you. You have always been my soul and I believe I have been yours. Before separating our spirits, and this I plead, allow us a chance to reunify. There is in me still the same man you married. He may be blunted by the experience of war, by the army more than the war, but he is not dead.

Lila, I love you.

Rufus

C
HAPTER
9

PIO

The moon was higher now. It was blunt not crisp, an immense lopsided ovoid emitting soft light into a hazy sky where stars are dim and do not twinkle. Cherry followed Doc and Egan over the drainage ditch by the EM four-holer and up the graveled dusty road toward brigade headquarters. El Paso and Jax had decided to return to their sleeping area but Egan had said to Doc, “Let's go up to brigade and do our heads a favor,” and Cherry had been pulled along in the excitement which followed the brawl at the Phoc Roc.

“How's your head?” Egan asked Doc. He stopped the black man in the middle of the deserted road to inspect the cut on his forehead and feel the lump coming up on the back of his head. “You're okay,” he said. “Let's see if Lamonte and the dudes are partyin.”

“Them white folk,” Doc said. “Them are some crazy mothafuckas. Sucka'd me right up the backside a my head. Mothafucka. Hey, Man,” Doc said to Cherry and Egan as they resumed walking, “I wanta jus say thank you fo helpin me out a there. That mothafucka nailed the backside a my head but good.”

A few steps farther Doc turned to Cherry. “You handle yourself pretty well. I see you dealin on that one dude and I says, ‘Cherry's gonna be alfuckin-right.'”

“Them Delta Company mothafuckers,” Egan said looking straight ahead as they walked, “losing their fuckin cool. God fuck. Suckered you but good. Wish I'd gotten a better shot at the mothafucker.”

“Cherry nailed the fucka,” Doc said.

“I'm not sure,” Cherry said glancing first at Egan then at Doc and then back at Egan. “I'm not sure I got it all straight what happened.”

They spoke quickly and quietly as they walked, their words running into each other as the words of men will do when adrenaline is still flowing though the fight is over. “We was jus teasin each otha,” Doc said. “Except fo Jax, Egan here my Main Man. Like best friend.”

“You coulda fooled me in there,” Cherry said.

“We were just discussin,” Egan said. He was embarrassed by the warmth of Doc's statement.

“You was really dealin on that one fucka,” Doc said. “Eg, your Cherry gonna be al-fuckin-right-on.”

“Hope I didn't hurt him,” Cherry said. “I've never hit anybody like that before. Not that hard.”

“He had it comin,” Egan said.

“I think I might of broken his nose. I felt it crunch. I'm really sorry.”

“Sorry! Sorry, Mista?! You broke that dude's nose, he gonna be the happiest luckiest mothafucka round. You maybe saved that man's life, Mista, if you broke his fuckin nose. You know that?”

“Hey,” Egan said wanting to change the subject, “these dudes up here are really into their dope. Don't be a bummer. Okay?”

“We oughta invite Lamonte out with us,” Doc said. “He'll wanta go.”

“Yeah,” Egan answered. “Cherry, you know anything bout pot protocol?”

“About what?”

“These dudes really got a rigid way of doin their dew.”

“Ah, you're losin me. Their what?”

“God fuckin damn. How'd you get to be such a fuckin cherry?”

“Their dew, Man,” Doc said. “You know, like in the morning the dew is on the grass. Dig?”

“Look,” Egan stopped in the road again. He turned to Cherry and stopped him. “There are about ten dos and ten don'ts at a set. Those dudes find it necessary cause a downer'll wreck a high and that's UN-For-givable.”

“I'll watch it,” Cherry said.

“No. Just let me tell ya. After they torch up a bowl be powerful mellow. Like never pass an unlit bowl; never reach for a bowl til it's passed; never let your rap put the bowl out.”

“Yeah, dig?” Doc added. “Never rap anyone inta a bummer and never keep a dude's lighter after lightin a bowl.

“Bowls pass to the right up at brigade. Take a toke and pass the bowl. Dig?”

“Hey. Okay,” Cherry said. “If you see me doin somethin wrong, tell me. Okay?”

They continued up the road a quarter of a mile and turned at the break in the low sandbagged wall that preceded the trenches for brigade rocket security. No one was about. It was 0145 hours. Behind them, beyond the Oh-deuce, beyond the perimeter, illumination flares popped and slowly sank against the black wall of the mountains. Up the hill before them were half-a-dozen hootches. At the right end of the line were the quarters for the Vietnamese interpreters then the hootch of the attached personnel then, the APO, the Military Intelligence Office, the PIO and Civil Affairs office and finally the MARS station. All the offices were vacant, the interpreters' hootch was dark and silent. From the quarters for the attached personnel music drifted, oozed from the glow at the edge of the windows. The music seemed to have a difficult time squeezing through and expanding in the thick air. At irregular intervals the blast of artillery from the batteries deeper into Camp Eagle interrupted the music and the woosh of the mortar flares streaking skyward then popping, igniting and gently whizzing to earth added an eerie harmony to the sounds.

Egan, Doc and Cherry entered the hootch from which the music seeped. The interior had been sectioned off with plywood sheets forming six rooms with a narrow-hallway down the center. A single incandescent bulb lighted the hall. A mural had been crudely painted on the wall of the first room to the left. The scene was a country road running back into green grassy hills with clusters of rounded trees here and there and fences paralleling the road over the hills, in and out of sight, finally disappearing at a vanishing point. A sign in the foreground had arrows pointing in five different directions: Quang Tri-78 km; Saigon-514 km; Big Moose, Montana-19,757 km; N.Y.C.-24,460 km; and one arrow pointing straight up, Moon-386,800 km±.

Wooden ammo crate tops served as cafe doors for the room.

Egan, followed by Doc and Cherry, pushed the doors aside and entered. Inside the room there were three men. They had been talking sporadically. Two of them sat behind a bar on high stools and the third sat on a footlocker turned on end. The bar had been the old bar from the Phoc Roc which the men had scavenged.

The room was dingy. At each end a cot was covered by sloppily hung mosquito netting. Above the cot to the left was a stereo receiver/amplifier and 8-track tapedeck. Above the bunk to the right was a bookshelf full of volumes varying from
The Working Press
by Ruth Adler and
The Information War
by Dale Minor to a volume of Shakespeare and
Joseph Heller's Catch-22.
Hung below each shelf was an M-16 rifle and a bayonet. Below the rifle to the right there hung a crude sign:

IN MANY COUNTRIES POLITICIANS HAVE SEIZED ABSOLUTE POWER

AND MUZZLED THE PRESS;

IN NO COUNTRY HAS THE PRESS SEIZED ABSOLUTE POWER AND

MUZZLED THE POLITICIANS.

The man to the right behind the bar was thin and slight. He had long straight brown hair, longer than regulation. He wore civilian clothes, a western shirt with embroidered shoulders and blue jeans. He was known variously as Lamonte, PIO or Photog. Lamonte was an Army Information Specialist—Journalist, Spec. 4, assigned to the 1st Brigade Public Information Detachment. He was an infantry correspondent and he took himself and his job seriously. He traveled repeatedly with the same twelve infantry companies and he became close friends with many boonierats. Amongst them he was known as the Boonie Rat Correspondent.

Everyone has always portrayed infantryman, boonierat, as dumb. Everyone, except anyone who has ever been a boonierat. Boonierats were not dumb. Lamonte often emphasized this fact in his stories. He liked to tell people, especially soldiers, that the average soldier drafted into the army in 1969 had 14.4 years of schooling. “A junior in college,” he would say. “This army is probably the most highly educated army ever, anywhere.”

Beside Lamonte stood a heavy soldier in jungle fatigues. He was Lamonte's replacement. He'd been in-country two months though he had only limited field experience. His name was George.

On the turned up footlocker was Le Huu Minh, the Vietnamese scout and interpreter of Company A. Like most Vietnamese he was small by American standards, just over five feet. GIs called him Minh or Little Minh in deference to the South Vietnamese general and political figure known as Big Minh.

Whenever Lamonte and Minh were in the rear together they discussed politics and current events.

“I heard on your radio today,” Minh had been saying in his soft precise English, “your federal tribunal reaffirm your chain-of-command courts.”

“Oh, on My Lai,” Lamonte said. “Yep. The courts ruled … Egan!” Lamonte shouted as the three entered. “You ol' rattlesnake, good to see ya. Doc! Jesus H., what happened to you.”