Sons (55 page)

“I ask you now,” a white man shouted, “is this the one you want in the White House, is this the one you would choose to lead this great nation to its proper destiny, is this the one you will vote for tonight against James M. Cox and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the men who deserve to become the President and Vice President respectively of this our bountiful land, and not a person whose colored ancestry can be traced back through four separate lines! Do we want, I ask you, this blackguard in the White House?”

I dreamt I fell to my knees and said, But you do not understand, surely you do not understand. I am no longer involved with Rosie Garrett, I saw her only a baker’s dozen times, it was the heat, I beg you to understand it was only the dire heat that drove us near to crazy with temptation and desire, it was only the heat that caused our fornication, copulation, then and but a dozen times more in the parlor of her flat, but that was all, I swear to you!

The Indian chants rose from around the lire, sparks fled upward into the night, “We Want Harding, We Want Harding,” and now there was a cross-chant from the white men, “Cox, Cox, Tyler is a Coxman! Cox, Cox, Tyler is a Coxman!”

Wait, I dreamt I begged them, wait, please listen to me, I am a veteran of the Great War, ask these noble savages if I did not personally know Geronimo and Cochise, ask them if I did not fight bravely and watch my comrades fall, ask them if I am not now incensed by these false charges against Mr. Harding and determined to vote for him despite this vicious slander, although I am only twenty years old, having been born on the first day of January in the year 1900, and will not be eligible to vote until two months from now — but I would if I could, I swear to you! Please understand, I know you will understand, I do not speak with a forked tongue, I am no longer forking Rosie, I swear that to you, Nancy, please don’t cry, I am no longer seeing her, it is over, it is done.

“It is over, it is done,” the Indians chanted.

The white men faded into the distance, scattering their leaflets behind them, tossing them into the fire, flames of blue and green changing the colors on the redskins’ faces. The Indians stared at me. Behind them, the sky turned a promising mauve. There was music now, somewhat celestial, harps and violins, a gentle wind sweeping from some secret plain.

We are on the threshold, I said, of greatness, the threshold of greatness. We can go either way, you or I, we can take this treasure that we hold here in our hands, my friends, we can take it and squander it, toss it into the fire there where it will burn like those leaflets bearing malicious slander, libel — is there a lawyer among you, my tribal brothers? Is it libel or slander? Which one is printed and which one spoken? No matter. I tell you now that we can take this gift magnanimously bestowed upon us by a generous Lord, yours or mine — what do
you
call Him, my friends? Is it The Great Spirit? That’s a good name for a righteous God. I have nothing against your God, I tell you we are all one and the same and we all have the duty to make sure we do not squander this heritage of ours, do not scatter it to the winds or toss it on the flames. Side by side we have hunted the buffalo and defended our homes against the invaders from over the mountains, planted our corn and — no, my friends, wait, don’t leave, make no mistake, I do not come to you in Indian guise now, I do not come to you in feathers and buckskin, face painted, it’s just me, just Bertram A. Tyler, your old song-and-dance man, don’t be afraid, don’t leave yet, please wait, please listen.

I think you know what I’m about to tell you. I have the feeling that we’ve shared this dream together, shared it often enough before, lived it together for a long long time, and that we are too wise now to— Damn you, I’m losing my patience!

Shall I talk to you like the ignorant savages you arc, shall I promise dire happenings, heap curses upon your feathered heads, the witch doctor warning of what may come if you do not purchase from me this colorless, tasteless, odorless liquid I’ve naively labeled — well now, where’s the label, must have come unglued. There
is
no name for it then, my friends, you’ll just have to trust me, I suppose. You’ll have to drain bottle after bottle of this stuff, pour gallons of it into your systems to rid your bodies of the sores and chancres, purge the liver and the bile, make yourselves pure again, for Christ knows, The Great Spirit knows, we are sullied and scorned, we are on the edge of an abyss so deep it might just as well be bottomless. Take it, my tribal brothers, pull the cork and drink deep draughts, it will not hurt you, it can only help. For if you ignore my warnings, here then are the things that will happen to us, to you and to all of us, if you do not hear, if you choose to remain deaf to the music coming from somewhere out there — is there a musician among you? Can anyone tell me what that lovely instrument is?

Though you are brave, you will tremble before ghosts.

Though you are free, you will remain as slaves to the past.

Though you are provident, you will shun visions of the future.

Though you are considerate, you will slaughter your leaders.

Though you are wise, you will engage in thoughtless battle.

Though you would populate the earth with sons, you will send generations yet unborn to perish in their youth.

Though you would stand a hundred thousand years, you will witness the end of your nation instead, and neither it nor you will ever again rise from the ashes.

There was the sound in my dream of feathers blowing on the wind. And then one of the Indians stepped forward, came close to the foot of the platform in the light of the fire and, looking surprisingly like my brother-in-law Oscar, stared up into my face and said only, “Why did you steal our lands?”

There was, the surprise was complete, we realized instantly. I stopped, I, the noise, sudden automatic rifle and machine-gun fire coming from ahead and from one side of the jungle trail. Bravo had followed Alpha into an L-shaped ambush, the first fire-team fully contained within the right angle and caught in a deadly cross-fire, my team only partially enclosed with Rudy Webb and I just entering the long side of the trap. Everything screamed urgency — Hit it! Move! — but I did not leap instantly into the bushes on the left because I’d been caught in this kind of ambush before and had learned that the side of the trail from which no enemy lire came, the supposedly
safe
side, was often lined with angled punji stakes waiting to impale the man who hurled himself reflexively into the undergrowth. I hit the dirt where I was standing instead, and then crawled swiftly off the trail on my belly, elbows working, eyes scanning the ground ahead, and whirled to find Rudy beside me already returning fire.

I was Private Walter Tyler of Captain Finch’s D Company, 2nd Battalion of the 27th Infantry, 2nd Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division. We had started Operation Ala Moana on the first of December, two weeks ago today, and were pushing now through the dense jungles in Nau Nghia Province, some thirty miles north-west of Saigon, where only yesterday we had found an enemy cache of 10 AT mines, 46 tons of rice, a ton of sugar, and 570 gallons of pickled fish.

(The jungle off the trail has not been booby-trapped. Wat Tyler hugs the ground, his M-16 on automatic, and fires long bursts into the trees across the trail. He hears someone calling for a medic. This one is going to be very bad, he knows that. He cannot imagine anyone in Alpha having survived the ambush, and he suspects that Bravo’s lead rifleman and the grenadier five meters behind him have also been hit and possibly killed. He recognizes the voice of the man yelling. It is Lloyd Parsons. But he cannot tell whether Lloyd himself has been hit, or is only calling for a medic to help the men ahead of him in the order of march.)

A mechanized unit had yesterday discovered seven bunkers and two tunnels in the area just to the rear of us, and had captured twelve 81-mm rounds as well as 11,200 small-arms rounds, more than a ton of rice, and a Russian-made radio. A recon patrol filing out into the jungle had reported back with the information that a V.C. base camp with two dozen buildings was located a mile to the southwest. Our march this morning was intended as an encircling maneuver, similar to the procedure we used in a vill sweep, where we surrounded a suspect hamlet during the night and then attacked at first light, hoping to catch Charlie before he left his woman and his rice bowl to go off into the jungle again. The difference here was that this was 0905 in the morning, and we were still a half-mile away from the enemy position, and Charlie had obviously known we were coming, Charlie had closed the trail and lined it with rifles and machine guns, and was determined now to annihilate each and every one of us. I heard Lloyd yelling for aid again, but nobody seemed to be going to him, and so I assumed our medic had been hit in the initial burst. Somewhere off on the left of the trail, I heard Jerry Randazzo, our RTO, radioing back for help, and then there was renewed intensive fire, and Jerry’s voice stopped. The jungle was still.

(Wat Tyler is wearing a fiberglas flak jacket over his cotton jungle shirt and field pants, leather-soled, canvas-topped jungle boots with holes for water drainage, black nylon socks, a helmet liner, and a steel pot with a camouflage cover on it. Hanging from his belt suspender straps are a first-aid kit containing gauze, salt tablets, and foot powder; an ammo pouch containing magazines for his automatic rifle; a Claymore pouch containing six M-26 fragmentation grenades and two smoke grenades; a bayonet, a protective mask, and two canteens of water. He is dressed for war, but he is frightened. He thinks he will be killed this morning.)

“Wat...” the voice was Lloyd’s, a whisper in the jungle stillness. “I’m hit,” he said, and the V.C. opened up again. There was no question of marksmanship here, the jungle was too dense, they fired only at the sound of his voice, spraying the undergrowth with automatic bursts, pausing only long enough to reload and doing that in an overlapping pattern so that the fire was constant. They had the machine gun going in there, too, adding its heavier clatter to that of the rifles, ripping through the leaves on this side of the trail some fifteen meters ahead. I did not think Lloyd had a chance, he was too deep inside the trap.

(Wat Tyler docs not want to consider the possibility that the entire squad has been annihilated, and yet he docs not hear any answering fire from this side of the trail, and he knows that an ambush such as this calls for heavy return fire, blind return fire, spray the bushes, spray the trees, rip the jungle apart, keep firing, keep hurling grenades, keep everything going until help arrives or until it becomes possible to withdraw. But no one else is firing.)

“Cover me!” I heard Lloyd shout up ahead, and suddenly a grenade exploded on the V.C. side of the trail, and Rudy and I began firing again as Lloyd pushed free of the hanging vines, stepping out of the tangled brush in a long loping stride, one arm bloody and dangling, the other pulled back to toss a second grenade. The V.C. machine gun opened up, cutting him down before he’d moved six inches out of the jungle, the grenade dropping in the center of the trail not a foot from where he fell. The explosion tore a hole in the ground and ripped off one of his legs. There was a tick of time, a hiatus the length of a heartbeat between the explosion and the renewed Vietcong fire. Lloyd was lying motionless in the center of the trail. The bullets kept striking his body, nudging it slightly with each soft steady plopping hit, as though trying in concert to roll him off the trail and back into the jungle. The ground around him was covered with blood.

(Wat Tyler is frightened. The one thing he docs not want to do is get killed in this stupid fucking war. In the eye of the camera, he sees himself as a terrified child crouched on the edge of a jungle trail, trembling on the narrow brink of death in the company of an idiot from Newark, New Jersey. He suspects that even now the Vietcong are moving their machine gun further up the trail so that they can fire directly across it into the thicket where he and Rudy are waiting. He docs not want to die this morning.)

“Let’s get the nigger before they do,” Rudy whispered to me.

“What?” I said.

“Your buddy. Let’s get him off the trail before these motherfuckers butcher him.”

“He’s dead,” I said.

“You want them to slice him up like a piece of meat?”

“He’s dead.” I said, “it’s too fucking late.”

“It could be you out there,” Rudy said.

“It isn’t,” I said.

“You coming or not?”

“I’m not.”

There were two things you did not do in Vietnam. I had learned both of those things from Lloyd Parsons, who had been my closest friend and who now lay dead on the trail fifteen meters ahead, with one of his legs blown off besides. The first thing you did not do was leave a dead or wounded buddy, it did not make any difference, dead or alive the Vietcong or the NVA would hack him to pieces and throw him in an open pit. The other thing you did not do was get yourself into a situation that looked suicidal. Suicide was for heroes, and there were hardly any heroes in Vietnam, there were only guys wasting time till they were short, only guys trying to stay alive. I was not a hero, and everybody else in the squad was dead, and going out there to get Lloyd’s body would be suicide. I was too scared to think.

“You coming, Tyler?” Rudy said.

His helmet was very close to mine, he nodded his head for emphasis as he whispered to me, and metal clicked against metal, and for an instant I thought of a Talmadge playing field and a football huddle, thought I would call a Roger-Hook-Go, after which we would run out there with rifles blazing and pull Lloyd off the trail before they cut him limb from limb, though one limb was already gone, wasn’t it, and Lloyd was dead. I wanted to stay alive. I did not want to die this morning.

“Let’s go, Tyler,” Rudy whispered.

On the other side of the trail, I heard movement in the underbrush, the snapping of twigs, the rustling of leaves. There was a small mechanical click.