Fatal Light (5 page)

The little Vietnamese man shadowed the hootch doorway, walked carefully out into a circle of sun, arms straight up. The little man held his arms up and looked at his feet and stood in the circle of sun.

There was a slow wind, birds clacking, monkeys cawing, the wrapped surrender of the little man in his halo.

One soldier spilled a plate of food screaming Goddammit, hold it! the little man's feet clearing earth, one arm laid out in the air, chest jerking perforations, body sailing backward, falling in the shadow of his doorway.

The lieutenant jogged around a corner and up to the hootch. “Nice work,” he said. “This little bastard is no doubt VC. Gotta be. Write it up, Gunny.”

The lieutenant dragged the little man back into the sun circle, kicked the turned-out corpse like he was checking a tire. He opened his Swiss Army knife, sawed off the man's left ear. Blood squirt. “Son of a bitch,” he said into the dead face. The lieutenant stood up, called out, “Which one of you good buddies got a camera?”

Hey, kid, how about this postcard? Thought you might like a look at the old town right about now. Where the hell are you? Sorry I didn't see you before you left. Hot as Hades here but what's new about that? Not enough rain and the Ohio farmers bitching about profits down and how they can't make their tractor payments—same old story. Mainly want to say sorry we didn't get together before you left and we will when you get back and you're not forgotten here with us. Your grandma sends all her love and BE CAREFUL. Can't say it enough. Don't get much room to write on these things do you? Love, Grandad.

Field-stripping weapons: cleaning our pieces, Queen taking down his M-14 as I spread my pistol in parts on a canvas ground cloth, an AMT Combat Government model, .45 caliber semi-automatic: 7-shot clip, 5-inch barrel. All stainless steel construction, target trigger, adjustable combat sights and less than two pounds. I traded a half kilo of marijuana for the gun from an armory sergeant in Pleiku. Queen admired the pistol, more elegant than standard issue, and I offered to sell it to him. Shit, I don't need it, I told him, grinning. And he laughed, saying, You might, bro, you just might. Tell you what, he said, we get outta here in one piece, that little gun'll be mine. Deal, I told him. When we get outta here.

Six months into the tour Private First Class Clovis Taggett of Simpson, Arkansas, shot and killed an old woman advancing into a paddy. Nobody actually saw him fire. We were eating under a copse of banyan, dropped to the ground and saw Taggett on the lip of the dike, lone figure standing black against the sunlight. His rifle was still poised.

The old woman continued to advance, moving away from us. Her arms went up, a hallelujah gesture, and she fell face first into the water. The splash shone brilliant in the light. She was about forty yards out.

“The enemy,” Taggett said flatly. “Trying to escape.”

“Jesus,” the lieutenant said. “Eat your goddam lunch. We're mounting out in fifteen.”

Taggett slung his piece, wandered back to the group, sat down and slumped against an exposed tree root. The lieutenant, crouched beside me, resumed his lunch. I looked at Taggett a moment before I turned and said to the lieutenant, “He lost it. He just snapped.”

“Happens all the time, man,” the lieutenant said around a mouthful of beans. “You've been here long enough to know that.”

I looked again at Taggett, who was staring at the ground, empty-faced. “We gotta get him out of here,” I told the lieutenant. “He's a medevac.”

“He'll be all right,” the lieutenant said.

I took a long breath. “The guy's shooting old women for laughs,” I said, “and you're telling me he'll be all right.”

The lieutenant looked up at me, letting his spoon drop into the bean can. “He'll be all right, man. So give it a rest.” He frowned at me before going back to eating. I turned back to Taggett, still sitting on the tree root, looking like a moody child. I stood and threw what was left of my rations into the dirt, kicking dust over the moist mound. Out in the paddy on the surface of the water shining in sunlight the old woman's corpse was adrift. A boy was shouting at her, and began to wade out.

Monsoon. Rain five weeks, complete in itself. Nothing beyond it, dreams locked in water. Deadfall from flat sky, constant hiss into mud and drum against tents. Four-thirty A.M. A thickness washing the chest and legs for days.

Mud-suck boots onto elevated wood-slat platform of chow tent. Bare hanging light bulbs. Ambulance driver sitting alone at a bench, mug of coffee cooling as he paged through a glossy magazine. Only a few others in line for the powdered eggs and cold, undercooked bacon. Water seeping into the boards, mildew eating canvas. I sat down across from the driver. At one page he turned the magazine around for me to see. A young girl, maybe fifteen, squatting in full-page color. Her breasts were new and her smile was a benign yearbook grin. She was holding a foot-long dildo in one hand, fingering herself with the other.

He pulled the magazine back and continued flipping pages. He showed me the cover: two teenagers in a sixty-nine with black flags covering the important places. He finished the cold coffee and rolled the magazine into a hip pocket and stomped out.

A chopper came down into the LZ, rotors cutting a space in the rain. The weight that started in my stomach grew in my lungs like a tide.

Contact near Fire Base Louise, no survivors. We bagged the captain and the legless lance corporal and called Motor T to get the bodies to Graves. I went out behind the tent, feeling it all in slow motion. I was forgetting every detail, could not remember my name. Nausea swam behind my ribs and I could not remember my name.

Queen said, “The man has got to go.”

We were in a bunker, sharing a joint on a wind-locked night.

I said, “You out of your mind or what? That's called murder where I come from.”

Queen rolled his eyes, drawing in a lungful, holding, swallowing smoke, blowing it out through clenched teeth, talking with the smoke. “What you think we be doing, my man, all day every day? That just a popgun you packing?” He spit a seed on the concrete floor, handed me the joint. An ember flew, flared an arc.

“Besides,” Queen went on, “that dude gonna get us all wasted anyway.”

“What I'm saying,” I said, “is there's one thing and there's another. And you're talking about the other.”

Queen looked at me red-eyed and said, “What I'm saying is I'm gonna blow that peckerwood into China. He be arriving in Peking in small pieces.'”

Queen and I sat, alone in the bunker, looking at each other, looking. A rain began to spatter, into the mud, hissing. Then the full roar of downpour.

“I mean it, man,” Queen said.

“Let it go,” I said.

“New guys get you killed, bro.”

I studied the glow of the joint between my thumb and finger, and I said, “Let's just hit him over the head when he gets out of hand.”

Queen began to laugh.

And I began to laugh. And we laughed and I dropped the joint as I tried to pass it back to Queen, watching Queen howl as the rain roared against the bunker and into the jungle as we rolled on the concrete floor gasping, short of breath and wasted, two soldiers afraid for their lives and laughing.

Months passed before the second card from my grandfather. The picture side depicted the gleaming suspension bridge that could be seen from his kitchen windows, CARTER RIGNEY BRIDGE, AN ENGINEERING TRIUMPH, with the message below the legend, six weeks out of date.

My grandmother was dead.

Killed when the car she was riding in—driven by her youngest daughter—left the road near Salem, West Virginia, and slammed into the side of Big Harper Mountain. My grandfather went through the details like a newscaster.

I sat against a sandbag retaining wall, turning the postcard to the picture side, back to the message side. Read it again. Queen sat a few feet away, opening a package from his mother, no shirt and black skin glistening in the open sun.

“My grandmother's been killed,” I said.

Queen looked up, studying me. “I'm sorry to hear, man,” he said. He studied a moment longer, and said, “I really am. You close to her?”

“Car wreck,” I murmured.

“Goddam cars, man.” Queen shook his head. “Put away more people than we do in this piss-ant war.”

I felt remote, too small for the sky.

“You wanna be left alone or anything?”

“I'm OK,” I said. “Gotta be, right?”

Queen said, “I guess.”

I asked Queen what his mother had sent him, and he went back to his package.

Eight months in-country. Five to go.

Dear Mary,

Coming down the road in the fog and everyone here is a ghost, changed by mist and a haze of rain, and I think of coming back to this valley ten years from now, twenty years from now, seeing the past I belong to: we will all be here still, in this moment we must live and keep living, walking down the road talking, laughing, complaining, wishing, finding the way to a latrine, to a card game, to the mail drop. Hearing, out of sight, the sounds of other conversations, of weapons being cleaned, jeep engines idling and waiting for officers moving from one useless briefing to another. It will be like it is now, walking down the road with the rest, except I will seem more real, I will hear the inside of my heart moving, the rush of blood through the chambers of my heart. I will remember the smell of this rain as clearly as I am breathing it now: this is the way it is with ghosts. We look at our own hands and even in this fog we are real as ever, veins branching, tendons rising and moving, fingers clenching and spreading and feeling, simply alive with a whisper of rain and the hours rolled into a map.

Night patrol, in a hamlet marked Blueville 5 on military topographical maps. The platoon securing a village supposedly a VC stronghold. I was holding in a cleared area with the rest of the unit closing down around me, my partner gone to pull his radio off the command jeep, and I leaned against a grass bale hearing pigs root and grunt from some other part of the settlement, hearing the voices of women, children crying, soldiers shouting. Across from my position the open door of a hootch gaped black and I heard movement in the doorway, a soft scraping. I could see nothing. I felt for my flashlight, remembered I left it with my pack next to the radio on the command jeep, and there was another noise, a dry click. I called my partner's name, and again a sound in the doorway, the scratch of footfall on straw, unmistakable. There was no cover around me. The jungle a few yards to my rear. I called for help, going to one knee saying to the doorway, in English,
Anyone there?
My voice was a horrified rasp, barely audible, the sound of it frightening me more than I already was. I unholstered my service pistol, released the safety, thinking I could turn into the jungle and cover the doorway until the platoon swept this far in another thirty seconds.

Then I thought: Unless that is what is expected of me, and I brought the pistol up in both hands, elbows locked, and said, in Vietnamese as I was trained to do,
Identify yourself or I will shoot.
Silence. Another rustle in the doorway. Silence.

I fired the pistol into the center of the darkness, the powder burst sparking a clean light that seemed to arc forward from the barrel's tip and back in again. There was the .45's short open roar, echo crushing in behind it, empty air sucked into the vacuum. A fire team was suddenly all around me, submachine guns trained and flamethrowers cocked. The lieutenant turned a high-intensity beam into the doorway, and I saw the man.

He was blown off his feet by the blast and his body was in the distinctive scarecrow disarray that instant death brings. I was still on one knee ten yards from the doorway, and I stood and walked to the body. A Vietnamese man, my age or younger, unarmed, alone, with nothing on but his traditional black silk pants.

I had shot him in the face.

In the evening we were quiet, sitting in base camp in damp T-shirts in the damp air looking out to the perimeter. We were home from an extraction, the sort of mission you mount out for having dismissed all regret and second thought. We went out, two gunships up front and me behind on the evacuation chopper, pilots fired on the adrenaline wail, hitting their fists together as we waited for the go. We brought home a long-range reconnaissance patrol that had infiltrated the Cambodian line. December twenty-fourth and sweat dripped from my eyebrows and the salt stung my eyes and I felt as if I were short of breath, squinting into too much silver light.

It was clean flying in open skies, verdant unbroken jungle below. We were up nearly twenty minutes when the pilot waved me forward.
Hot pursuit,
he shouted over the rotor roar.
Going in under fire.
I saw the spout of emerald phosphorus, smoke pluming out of the jungle about two miles ahead. The gunships, tiny in the distance, banked starboard as if they were tied together, angled out, adjusted their slip, and pumped three rockets apiece into the jungle floor. We continued to close as pockets of flame blew silently out of the forest, erupting one beside the
other. A moment later the shock waves reached us, distant thunder that might have been imagined. The pilot was shouting into his headset; ahead, the LZ clearing was visible. Smoke rose and dispersed on a fresh wind. The pilot swung the chopper around on its axis and as we rotated I saw the front range of trees on the enemy flank charred and blasted from the rockets, here and there in flames. Automatic weapons fire whanged off our armor plate as the aircraft fell, our pickups breaking from underbrush before we touched down, dragging wounded and dead, pushing bound prisoners ahead of them. I watched a soldier—another man on his shoulders in a fireman's carry—work his way into the elephant grass, trying to run and limping, halfway out when his chest opened in a bloody gush and he went down in a wet heap with the man on his back. The cockpit glass shattered in a white spray; the pilots seemed to take no notice. My ears roared and head pounded as I squatted in the helicopter doorway. The dead man's comrades stepped over him, running, stumbling, and we began to bring them aboard. A soldier shoved a man into the hatch and ran back for the dead, dragging two at a time by the boots, and somewhere behind me the world exploded—slammed me onto my back—but when I took a breath I was clear, strangely calm, the shell of the helicopter intact around me. I got up, went back to work, did my job, and in the evening we sat quietly, reading, writing letters, smoking, sharing around gifts of food or magazines that had come as Christmas gifts from the families at home. I sat on a canvas stretcher, back against a supply chest, looking into an invisible distance, not reading or writing or smoking or eating or talking, stunned by a luck of the draw that was weak as the past or future, and it was as if I were simply earning my keep, and could only have this much, and tomorrow was never another day.