I Pledge Allegiance (9 page)

“I don’t need any help,” Everett insists, despite not
being able to get himself off that very bit of deck he landed on. “It’d take more than this to get me to go to no stupid doctor. I’m made of tougher stuff than that. What do I look like, Blue Water Navy or something?”

“Hah,” Moses says, standing over us. “He got ya there, Mo.”

“Everett,” the captain says, “everybody appreciates your toughness, but this cannot stay on this boat.”

Cap takes Everett’s hand and raises his arm to show Everett the extent of his own wound.

The arm hangs there like something in a butcher’s window. Everett’s been hit by who-knows, but whatever it was took a chunk the size of my fist out of the underside of his biceps. It is seeping blood and fibrous tissue, like a wolf bite has torn the arm nearly in half.

Everett’s remaining toughness spills onto the deck, his eyes rolling back in his head. Moses cradles him to the deck while I tie a fast and tight tourniquet around the highest part of his arm I can get a purchase on. The bandage is already soaked through by the time I get it tied, but it’s at least making a temporary barrier to prevent his heart pumping all his blood out into the war.

Another crewman comes running with the med bag. Cap grabs it from him, tears it open, and shoots a vial of morphine straight into Everett’s arm, then another
shot, of antibiotics, the needle driving right into the pulp of the open shoulder muscle.

“He’s gonna lose that arm, Cap,” Moses says, perching exactly between question and statement.

“He loses any more blood, the arm won’t be an issue,” Cap says, looking off to where we need to take the patient.

He’s not dead when we leave him, so that’s good. By the time we’ve removed him to the floating med station, though, it looks like we’ve all been shot. Moses, myself, and Cap all get a quick appraisal from the field doctors trying to satisfy themselves that the whole crew hasn’t been shot up. We are eventually allowed to leave Everett and take ourselves back out.

I am looking myself up and down as we move along the river again. Looking at the blood on my arms, my thighs, all over the front of my shirt. When I was a kid, I had to turn away whenever I got cut, to keep myself from getting woozy. Now it’s lots of blood, and I cannot stop staring at it, fascinated. I sniff at it, trying to get a scent. Some completely demented urge, but powerful just the same, comes over me to taste it.

“Wash that business off yourself,” snaps Cap, already cleaned up and re-shirted. I guess I’ve been fascinated by Everett’s blood for longer than I realized.

I guess somebody else’s blood is an altogether different thing.

There is a rotation when somebody leaves ship like Everett does. A full compliment has eleven enlisted men and the captain. Guys choose jobs according to length of time on board this particular boat, and Everett’s job was one of the lower ones, with him being perched in the highest spot of all the battle stations. He liked it, though, for the view, for being able to survey all before him, as he put it, and I could certainly appreciate his logic.

I wouldn’t appreciate having his job, though.

He’s going to live, but there’s no guarantee he’s going to be back with this crew anytime soon. He isn’t being replaced by anyone right off, so I find Moses up in the tall turret beside me as we go on another evening up and down through the syrupy Mekong River. Central Command says a few of the slower troop carriers have been pestered by pods of nasties dug into the banks making night raids, and we have been politely asked to flush them out and start a proper fight.

“It’s far too quiet along this river at night,” Moses says as we lean over the bar armor, scanning for anything indigenous and deadly along the banks. He is right beside me now, but when it kicks off, his battle
Station, the cannon, sits more or less just up over the shoulder of machine gunner me. He’s at the big gun up high above everything, watching over it all. It occurs to me that this is just the situation I envisioned would be best, right after he beat me senseless on the
Boston.
Comforting.

“I am sweltering,” I say.

“You’re always sweltering, man.”

“Come on, Moses, you have to feel the difference. It’s like breathing through sponges.”

“Yeah, it is a little more moist than usual.”

The sky doesn’t have any of the range of colors we usually get during these early evening runs. There’s a gray-brown sameness to almost everything, the river and sky pressing together to sandwich us out of air entirely.

I sit down on the small balcony of the mid-turret deck and take out the phone for another try. I go through the connection protocol for Ninth Division, Second Brigade, Thirty-fourth Artillery.

“Man, why don’t you just be cool and wait for a call. You seem far too anxious. Gotta play hard to get.”

“Listen,” I say, “he’s the only one I haven’t heard from. Of my three pals, right? The other two guys, at least they sent me letters….”

He does what he thinks is an imitation of my voice,
as if I were a seventy-year-old lady. “You never call me … you never write …”

“I’m serious, Moses. It just seems even worse knowing that Ivan is right here, part of this very op. Ninth Division, Second Brigade, Thirty-fourth Artillery … and I can’t even get a call through to him.”

I look to the rear to see the aft gunners have cast fishing lines. This is about as calm as things get here.

I felt a lot less nervous when we were all just shooting.

“Maybe it’s you,” Moses says. “Maybe you aren’t the great communicator after all. You should probably just give that job up, man, and follow your true calling.”

“Which is?”

“I saw you shooting, friend. Machine-Gun Mo should be your name. You were lovin’ it.”

I shake my head. I feel my helmet wobble around. “Just doing my job. It helps me to think of my people out there. It helps to make sense of shooting people I don’t even know…. My brother’s enemy is my enemy, right?”

Moses takes a long, slow suck on the saturated air. He looks off in the other direction from me, upriver.

“That’s swell, Mo, it really is. Provided you know who your brother is.”

I swivel my head around, smiling at him, adjusting my helmet again, checking him out. He’s not smiling.

“You don’t know?” I ask.

“Why do you think I’m up here at the very peak of harm’s way?”

I shrug. “I thought you were ordered up here.”

He pauses again. “I was. But I would’ve volunteered anyway. Experience tells me I don’t want nobody behind me with a gun.”

I try again. “Camaraderie? Allies?”

Now he smiles. “Mo, I have met some Vietnamese people who I wouldn’t mind having a beer with. I have also met some Australian sailors who I would gladly shoot if the Navy would let me.”

This is making me sad. This is a situation I have not pondered. Some part of me swallowed that whole brothers-in-arms ideal that they started feeding us on the first day of basic, and I feel a little bit like a stupid kid to be finding out it was maybe a fairy tale.

“So you don’t trust anybody?” I ask.

He looks disappointed in me now. As if, while he was damaging my idealism, I was spoiling his cynicism, and neither one of us is happy with the outcome.

“Okay, I trust
you.
Happy now?”

Do I make myself a sap forever now if I say yes, in fact, I am, thank you very much, Moses?

It’s not the biggest risk I’ve taken this year.

“Yes, in fact, I am, thank you very much, Moses.”

He tries to be stern, I try to be perky. My helmet tips once more over my eyes and Moses laughs.

“Your head isn’t even big enough to make that helmet sit up, man,” he says, as if that proves how unqualified I am for everything.

One of the two fishermen pulls in something substantial and there’s some quiet excitement at the back of the boat. From my perch it looks like some golden-green slimy species I’ve never seen, but in size and feistiness it closely resembles the really big bluefish that would run in abundance off the coast of Massachusetts in August. That kind of fish is so delicious, I’m welling up with saliva at the thought. Beck and I, too young to know any better, used to refuse to eat when our dads brought them home, a war and a world and a warp away from here.

The fisherman, Foley, holds his rod way up while the fish fights to get free. He swings it around just far enough that the other guy, Marchand, gets a good close-up.

Marchand, sitting behind the machine gun that sits beside the flamethrower, waits just long enough, leans sideways, then
whooosheshoosh
— with a spray that lasts all of an eighth of a second, he fires the flamethrower, and flame broils that fish into something Godzilla wouldn’t pick his teeth with.

The smell is acrid, sharp, right past my sinuses and directly up into my brain, even from this distance. The
heat, even off that little blast, even in the middle of the heat we already have, is stunning.

The flaming fish drops off the line and back where he came from, unrecognizable to his best friends.

“Jeez,” I say, rolling onto my back away from it.

I’m looking right up into Moses’s satisfied smile. He’s pointing at the flamethrower.

“That’s what I want a crack at,” he says.

“What’s in that stuff?”

“Napalm, baby. Basically, it’s highly flammable fuel blended with chemicals that make it thicker, like a gel. So you can shoot it straighter. And it sticks a lot better to the lucky recipients.”

“Flaming syrup,” I say.

“Close. More like Vaseline Gasoline.”

Moses makes his hungry noise.

I look up and all around. The air is definitely changing. It’s moving. One way, then back again, then down like an elevator gone crazy.

“There’s a storm coming,” Cap calls from his spot up front.

I scramble down to the communications shelter, which everybody now just calls The Patio. I try hard to locate Ivan.

These mad storms always make it even harder.

I
t turns out we carry eleven hundred gallons of the stuff on board.

It turns out when they tell you a storm is coming in Vietnam, a
storm
is coming.

It turns out my man Ivan is stationed on a self-propelled barracks ship called
Benewah
that I have probably passed by eighty different times on my way up- or downriver. When I finally do track him through channels upon channels, I find that I could almost have reached him easier by standing on top of the main turret and shouting his name.

Which I can’t do now because we’re in the company of the lovely Typhoon Elaine.

“Ivan!” I scream into the radio phone while we try desperately to get ourselves docked and back into quarters before the worst of it hits. “Ivan, Ivan, Ivan, man, is it really you?”

“No,” he says very quietly for the conversation’s
requirements. “I just left a minute ago. Of course it’s me, man. Jeez, it’s good to hear you.”

“It’s great to hear you,” I shout over the thunder, the wind, and the rain that’s like some god of water picking up the ocean and dumping it over us over and over again. Just the general maritime, wartime mayhem, only spiced with my first-ever typhoon. “That is, it would be great to hear you, if I could hear you. You have to shout, Ivan.”

“I don’t wanna shout. Sorry.”

“What are you talking about? You love to shout. You shout over nothing. You shout when the Patriots don’t protect the quarterback — which is
every
play. You shout at the movies when the action slows down too much. You shout at hamburgers if they don’t have mustard on them. Ivan, pal, it’s been months. If you don’t shout at me right now, I swear I’m gonna smack ya down.”

He doesn’t shout. But he does laugh such a real and crystal laugh, it actually clears the phone connection.

“What’s so funny?” I say, though I couldn’t possibly care as long as he keeps it up.

“The thought of you getting tough with me.” He lets the laugh taper off, and a little silence roll in.

Thunder wallops. Lightning strikes probably less than a klick away.

“How are ya, Morris?” he asks.

“They call me Mo here,” I say.

He laughs even harder.

“I won’t be calling you Mo.”

“I wouldn’t be letting you.”

I have to wait again. “I tried to get tough again there, didn’t I?” I say.

“Yeah,” he replies through storm crackle and cackle. “And keep it coming. Laughs are a valuable commodity, Morris.”

“They are, pal. We can’t be long, but I’m dying to hear how you’re doing. Why haven’t you been writing to me? “

There’s another pause.

“You know I don’t like to write.”

“No, Ivan, I don’t know that. Anyway, even Rudi wrote to me a couple of times.”

“He wrote to me, too.”

“Great. Excellent. How was that?”

“Great,” he snaps. “Beck, too.”

“Beck, he’s probably writing from an office in the Pentagon, pretending he’s over here.”

“Probably,” Ivan says.

The line cracks and kicks, out, then back again.

“We have to cut this short,” I say, “but now that we’re neighbors, we’re going to see how to get together
somewhere for an hour someplace. Maybe have a steak.”

“Army doesn’t have much steak,” he says.

“Navy has all the steak,” I laugh.

“No wonder everybody hates you.”

“That’s probably it.”

More cracks, more lightning. Cap is shouting for all hands as we near the docking.

“I have to go, Ivan. I’ll get back to you. I’ll see you. I really want to see you. You okay? I mean of course you’re okay. You okay?”

“Yeah,” Ivan says in an un-Ivan, unemotional tone that’s new to me. “I kill people, man. I’m pretty good at it.”

The line hangs up for us. I stare for a second until Cap calls again, and I run up out of my communications shelter that really isn’t a shelter at all, into the storm.

Elaine turns out to be a storm like nothing I’ve seen in my life. I thought the biggest meteorological event a guy could experience would be the big nor’easter snowstorms that hit New England in winter, but I’d do a week of those before I’d endure one of these things again. The volume of rain and the ferocity of the wind are the kind of things you might see in Boston once in
your life, but if you did, you would see it for about fifteen minutes. A typhoon blows in and hangs around like the most disgusting uninvited houseguest ever.

At the end of our patrols, crews like us stay on great sea floats moored at stations up and down the Mekong. They started appearing when the Navy decided we were better off being self-sufficient and untouchable, rather than having to do any extra back-and-forthing inland for stuff. Whole floating towns materialized, and ours is this long T-shaped solid dock with seven great barges attached that serve as everything from sleeping quarters to mess hall to supply depot. At any one time they can have a whole flotilla of craft moored up, from a tanker to swift boats and Coast Guard cutters to troop transports or little minesweeping drones that look like heavily armored kayaks.

When Elaine sweeps in to kick our butts, all these craft are there, and more.

She wreaks havoc. We lose power. A security tower crashes right down into the river. The whole entire top tears right off our mess hall. Boats pull loose and travel on their own for miles downriver. Some of the smaller ones flip right up onto land.

And all the while the rain falls like something out of the Bible. I see guys standing in the river, keeping drier in the silt than out of it.

The only thing even somewhat preventing this from being hell is that for three days Elaine is the only thing we’re fighting. And while she is the tougher fight, and we actually lose badly, at first there’s a place deep inside me that enjoys losing this fight more than winning the other one.

By the third day, though, I feel different. When we’re collecting, cleaning, and repairing rather than fighting any foe at all, I very suddenly want to shoot again.

We’re on a recovery trip, like we’ve made dozens of times already. We’re towing a stray PBR, which stands for Patrol Boat, River. These boats are the speed and the sense of all the ops here in the Mekong, and while there are scores of new and improvised task craft here all the time, these are the guys we see every time out, spearheading everything.

The PBR’s four-man crew are all sitting like holiday pleasure boaters on the front lip of the boat as we tow them up at their much slower than usual pace. The storm left the boat unworkable, which will only last until we get them back to the maintenance float and they will be scouring the river at high speed once —

Pu-boooooom …

That is one explosion. I turn quickly toward the PBR from my perch.

Pu-boooooom …

The first explosion is bad, leaving only three crew members — or parts of them — stuck clinging to the front rail. One guy hangs on with his one arm, the other one liquidated. Two guys flop on the deck.

The second explosion finishes the work, taking these remains of sailors and belting them from the opposite side.

It reminds me a little of the nature program where the orca whales take the seals and throw them back and forth for fun before finishing off the poor bloody blobs. One blast knocks them one way, then the other back again, the second one creating an absolute fountain of heads and legs and cross sections of torsos, loads of foamy blood topping off the massive column of brown water.

In twenty seconds, it’s almost as if they were never there.

It takes me less than thirty more to convince myself that they never were.

Bad dreams are bad, but they are only dreams.

Debris floats in the water while the crew of my boat stares, uniformly numb. Debris. But there’s always debris in the Mekong River.

The whole time, we weren’t fighting Typhoon Elaine. The whole time, the war wasn’t suspended. While we were playing River Rat Boy Scout games, their swimmers,
sappers, were operating as usual. Tying off mines along the riverbed, attaching limpet mines to boat hulls like big evil barnacles that would explode once the swimmers were safely away.

The whole time, it was business as usual underneath the river. Of course, they know their land and water and storm better than we do.

I feel the need to talk to my friends.

I feel the need to shoot somebody.

But in what order?

Not that that’s a choice for me. The need for revenge is strong, and every fighting man in the service suffers from these sneak attacks, these clever bombs and daring sabotage raids, and every one of us makes noise about teaching the sneaky cowards a good and proper lesson. Lemme at ’em.

Then we inhale, and exhale, and slip into the water to do the only thing we can do. We collect the men, the bits and pieces of them. We tell them we are sorry, we tell them we will do everything humanly possible. And we tell ourselves we know that isn’t very much.

All this firepower, and vulnerable as infants.