In Pharaoh's Army (3 page)

The Chicom was a heavy, bolt-action rifle with a long bayonet that folded down along the barrel when not in use. It was manufactured in communist China—hence its nickname. Vietminh soldiers had carried it
against the French, and the Vietcong had carried it against us when this war began. They didn’t use it much anymore, not when they could get their hands on AK-47S or M-16s, but the Chicom was a very mean-looking weapon, and indisputably a communist weapon. The perfect trophy. Some of the guys at Dong Tam even had them chromed, like baby shoes and the engine blocks of their cars.

By the end of the year Sergeant Benet and I were living in a wooden hooch with screens on the windows. We had bunks with mattresses. We had electric lights, a TV, a stereo, a stove, a refrigerator, and a generator to keep it all running. But the TV was a black-and-white portable. It was okay for the news, but we really felt the pinch when
Bonanza
came on. We were
Bonanza
freaks, Sergeant Benet and I. They were broadcasting a two-hour
Bonanza
special on Thanksgiving night, and we meant to watch this properly, on a color TV with a big screen. Sergeant Benet had arranged a deal that would significantly upgrade our viewing pleasure, a Chicom for a 21-inch set. Everything was set. That was why he and I were on the road to Dong Tam the day I ran over the bikes, Thanksgiving Day, 1967.

I
DROVE
fast. We’d started late, after trying all morning to find a convoy we could attach ourselves to. There weren’t any. Driving there alone would be dangerous, stupid, we both knew that, and we agreed to call the trip off until we had some other people around us, some padding, but I couldn’t get my mind off that Thanksgiving special. I fooled around with paperwork for a
couple of hours after lunch, then gave up and said the hell with it, I was going.

Sergeant Benet said he’d go too, and though I could see he didn’t like the idea I made no effort to talk him out of it.

He held hard to the handle on the dash while I slithered in the ruts and splashed through muddy holes and found impossible paths between the people on the road. As I drove I indulged a morbid habit I couldn’t seem to break, picking places in the distance ahead and thinking, There—that’s where I’m going to get it … seeing the mine erupt through the mud, through the floorboard, the whole picture going red. Then I was on the place and past the place, and everything that was clenched and cowering opened in a rush. A few minutes later, not even thinking about it, or pretending not to think about it, I chose another place and thought, There—

Sergeant Benet fiddled with the radio, which wasn’t working right. No radio in Vietnam ever worked right.

The VC had blown the bridge a few months back, so we had to take the old ferry across the river. Then up past another hamlet, and another, and the blackened ruins of a militia outpost, and on, and on.

How far was it to Dong Tam? Hard to say, all these years later. But it would have been hard to say then too, because distance had become a psychological condition rather than a measurable issue of meters and kilometers. A journey down these roads was endless until you arrived at the end. No “seems” about it: it was endless until it was over. That was the truth of distance. The same with time. Our tour of duty was
a year, but neither I nor anyone else ever used the word. You never heard it at all. The most we dared speak of were days, and even a day could lose you in its vast expanse, its limits stretching outward beyond the grasp of imagination.

Indeed, just about everything in our world had become relative, subjective. We were lied to, and knew it. Misinformed, innocently and by design. Confused. We couldn’t trust our own intelligence, in any sense of that word. Rumors festered in our uncertainty. Rumors, lies, apprehension, distant report, wishful thinking, such were the lenses through which we regarded this
terra infirma
and its maddeningly self-possessed, ungrateful people, whom we necessarily feared and therefore hated and could never understand. Where were we, really? Who was who, what was what? The truth was not forthcoming, you had to put it together for yourself, and in this way your most fantastic nightmares and suspicions became as real to you as the sometimes unbelievable fact of being in this place at all. Your version of reality might not tally with the stats or the map or the after-action report, but it was the reality you lived in, that would live on in you through the years ahead, and become the story by which you remembered all that you had seen, and done, and been.

So, once again, how far was it to Dong Tam? Far enough. And how long did it take? Forever, until you got there.

We turned a corner and were on the final approach. The road was lined with beer shanties and black market stands. Red-mouthed girls in fishnet stockings and
miniskirts squawked from the doorways, wobbling on high heels. Out beyond the line of hovels I could see farmers in watery fields, some astride buffalo, most on foot, bent down like cranes, pant legs gathered above their knees, working right up to the edge of the minefield.

Sergeant Benet unloaded our rifles as we pulled up to the gate. The sentries usually waved us through when they saw we were American, but this time we got stopped. A big MP captain came out of the guard shack and stuck his head inside the window. He was one of those pink-skinned people who disintegrate in daylight. His nose was peeling, his lips were blistered, his eyes bloodshot. Without due ceremony, he asked me what our business was.

I said, “Just visiting.”

“Sir,”
he said.

“You didn’t say ‘lieutenant’ to me.”

Sergeant Benet leaned over and looked at his name tag. “Afternoon, Captain Cox. Happy Thanksgiving, sir.”

The captain didn’t answer him. “Get out,” he said.

“Get out,
Lieutenant,”
I said. “Get out,
Sergeant.”
But I got out, and so did Sergeant Benet, who came around the front of the truck and walked over to the captain. “Is there a problem, sir?”

The captain looked him up and down and said, “What’ve you got in there, Bennet?”

“Benet,” Sergeant Benet said. “Like the writer, sir.”

“What writer? What are you talking about?”

“Stephen Vincent Benet, sir.”

“What did he write? Spirituals?”

The other MP, a private, shook his head:
Don’t blame me
. The captain went to the back of the truck and lifted the canvas flap. Then he dropped it and walked up to the cab, where we had the Chicom jammed behind the seat. He found it right away. “Well, well, well,” he said, “what have we here?” He turned the rifle over in his hands. “Very nice. Very nice indeed. Where’d you get it?”

“It’s mine,” I said, and reached out for it.

He pulled it back and showed me his teeth.

“Come on,” I said. “Give it here.”

“You’re not allowed to bring enemy weapons onto this base. I’m taking this into custody pending a full investigation.”

“In answer to your question, sir,” Sergeant Benet said, “that rifle is a gift from our division commander, General Ngoc, to General Avery on the occasion of the American national holiday. General Avery is expecting it at this very moment. If you like, sir, I’ll be more than happy to give him a call from the guard shack and let him explain the situation to you.”

The captain looked at Sergeant Benet. I could see him trying to figure all this out, and I could see him give up. “Take the goddamn thing,” he said, and pushed the rifle toward me. “Let this be a warning,” he said.

“Sir, I apologize for the confusion,” Sergeant Benet said.

After we drove away I asked Sergeant Benet just what he thought he was doing, taking a chance like that. Say the captain had actually gotten General Avery on the phone. Then what?

“That outstanding officer isn’t going to bother a busy man like General Avery. Not on Thanksgiving, no sir. Never happen.”

“But what if he did?”

“Well, sir, what do you think? You think the general’s going to insult our Vietnamese hosts by turning down the offer of a number one gift like this?”

“As simple as that.”

“Yes sir. I believe so, sir.”

I followed the muddy track through the base. The base was nothing but mud and muddy tents and muddy men looking totally pissed off and brutal and demoralized. In their anger at being in this place and their refusal to come to terms with it they had created a profound, intractable bog. Something was wrong with the latrine system; the place always stank. They hadn’t even bothered to plant any grass. At Dong Tam I saw something that wasn’t allowed for in the national myth—our capacity for collective despair. People here seemed in the grip of unshakable petulance. It was in the slump of their shoulders and the plodding way they moved. A sourness had settled over the base, spoiling and coarsening the men. The resolute imperial will was all played out here at empire’s fringe, lost in rancor and mud. Here were pharaoh’s chariots engulfed; his horsemen confused; and all his magnificence dismayed.

A shithole.

Sergeant Benet and I stopped at the PX to buy a few things for Major Chau before going on to pick up the television. We sat down for some burgers and fries, then had seconds, then got lost in the merchandise, acres of stuff: cameras and watches and clothes, sound
systems and perfume, liquor, jewelry, food, sporting equipment, bras, negligees. You could buy books. You could buy a trombone. You could buy insurance. You could buy a Hula-Hoop. They had a new car on display in the back of the store, a maroon GTO, with a salesman standing by to stroke the leather seats and explain its groundbreaking features, and to accept cut-rate, tax-free orders for this car or any other you might want—ready at your local dealer’s on the scheduled date of your return home, with no obligation to anyone if, heaven forbid, some misfortune should prevent your return home.

We must have spent over an hour in there. We had the place almost to ourselves, and later, as we drove to the signal company where our TV was waiting, I noticed that the base itself seemed strangely empty, almost as if it had been abandoned. I smelled turkey baking. There must have been a bird in every oven in Dong Tam. The aroma contended with the stench of the latrines, and made me feel very far from home. That was always the effect of official attempts to make home seem closer.

We found Specialist Four Lyons playing chess with another man in the company mess hall. They were both unshaven and wrecked-looking. Lyons took a pint bottle of Cutty Sark from under the table and offered it to us. Sergeant Benet waved it off and so did I. The argument against drinking and driving carried, on these roads, a persuasive new force.

“Where is everybody?” Sergeant Benet asked.

“Big show. Raquel Welch.”

“Raquel Welch is here?”

“I think it’s Raquel Welch.” Lyons took a drink
and gave the bottle to the other man. “Raquel Welch, right?”

“I thought it was Jill St. John.”

“Hey, maybe it’s both of them, I don’t know. Big difference. What with all the officers sitting up front you’re lucky if you can even see the fucking stage. Seriously, man. They could have Liberace up there and you wouldn’t know the difference, plus all the yahoos screaming their heads off.”

“So,” I said. “We’ve got the Chicom.”

“Yeah, right. Oh boy. Problem time.”

“Don’t tell me about problems,” Sergeant Benet said. “I didn’t drive down here for any problems.”

“I hear you, man. Really. The thing is, I couldn’t swing it. Not for one Chicom.”

“We agreed on one,” I said. “That was the understanding.”

“I know, I know. I’m with you, totally. It’s just this guy, you know, my guy over there, he suddenly decides he wants two.”

“He must be a crazy person,” Sergeant Benet said. “Two Chicoms for a TV? He’s crazy.”

“I can get you some steaks. Fifty pounds.”

“I don’t believe this,” I said. “We could’ve gotten killed coming down here.”

“T-bone. Aged. This is not your average slice of meat,” Lyons said.

The other man looked up from the chessboard. “I can vouch for that,” he said. He kissed his fingertips.

“Or two Chicoms and I can get the TV,” Lyons said. “I can have it for you in, like, an hour?”

“Who is this asshole?” I said. “Get him over here. We’ll settle this right now.”

“No can do. Sorry.”

“We shook hands on this,” Sergeant Benet said. “Don’t you be jacking us around with this we-got-problems bullshit. Where’s the TV?”

“I don’t have it.”

“Get it.”

“Hey man, lighten up. It’s not my fault, okay?”

Sergeant Benet turned and left the tent. I followed him.

“This is fucked,” I said.

“We had a deal,” Sergeant Benet said. “We shook hands.”

We got in the truck and just sat there. “I can’t accept this,” I said.

“What I don’t understand, that sorry-ass pecker-wood wanted two Chicoms, why didn’t he
say
he wanted two Chicoms?”

“I refuse to accept this.”

“Jack us around like that.
Shoot.”

I told Sergeant Benet to drive up the road to an officers’ lounge where I sometimes stopped for a drink. It was empty except for a Vietnamese woman washing glasses behind the bar. The TV was even bigger than I remembered, 25 inches, one of the custom Zeniths the army special-ordered for clubs and rec rooms. I motioned Sergeant Benet inside. The cleaning woman looked up as Sergeant Benet unplugged the TV and began disconnecting the aerial wire. “The picture is bad,” I told her in Vietnamese. “We have to get it fixed.”

She held the door open for us as we wrestled the TV outside.

On the way to the gate Sergeant Benet said, “What if Captain Cox is still moping around? What you going to do then?”

“He won’t be.”

“You better hope not, sir.”

“Come on. You think he’d miss out on Raquel Welch?”

Captain Cox stepped outside the guard shack and waved us down.

“My God,” I said.

“What you going to tell him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then you best let me do the talking.”

I didn’t argue.

Captain Cox came up to the window and asked where we were headed now.