The Brothers K (71 page)

—Sparky Anderson, manager of the Detroit Tigers,
       trying to explain why he prefers younger ballplayers

R
eturning from a mad dash to the radio operators’ tent, having dutifully delivered Captain Dudek’s message (“Tell ’em shut the fuck up about the prisoner. We have taken no prisoner. Understood?”), Spec 4 Irwin Chance finally set eyes on the little Vietcong who’d created such a stir that morning. Irwin was shirtless, hatless, painfully sleepy, but stumbling dutifully along with a pot of coffee he’d just commandeered for the Captain. The VC was wide awake but motionless, handcuffed to the bumper of a jeep. He wore a South Vietnamese infantry uniform, the shirt pocked with several neatly sewn but wrong-colored patches where bullets or shrapnel had evicted its previous tenant, the pants enormous,
crotch at his knees, cuffs a pile of baggy creases—and his toes peeked out from beneath. Bare toes. He wore no shoes. Irwin smiled as he approached. Some enemy. Some disguise …

Then he noticed the VC’s face and his smile withered. From a distance it had appeared dirty, expressionless, and not much else. Slope face. Generic dink. But as Irwin drew closer the eyes began to dominate, growing larger, more frightened and younger at every step. This was the beginning: noticing that the eyes were so young. It changed everything for Irwin. Instead of sweat streaking the dirt on the cheeks, he now saw tears; instead of the bandage on the head, he now noticed the brownish smear leaking through at the temple; instead of a captured enemy, a neutralized threat, he now felt he was seeing some kid who’d been caught playing war by bigger, stronger, far more dangerous boys.

A
s he set Dudek up with a second cup of coffee and finally went to work on his own, Irwin grew awake enough to wonder about the message he’d delivered.
We have taken no prisoner
… He’d delivered it without thinking, but now had a suspicion as to what it might mean. Thanks to the presence of políticos, photojournalists, television crews and other observers, there’d been a Washington-hatched edict, ever since Tet, banning the execution of untried prisoners: summary executions made for bad suppertime TV back home. But just three mornings before their “nonexistent” prisoner was captured, Irwin’s friend Bobby Calcagno had opened the door of his half-track and a wad of plastic explosives crammed near the hinge had blown most of his face away …

There is a well-known GI equation (founded, I think, upon the healthy old American distrust of anyone endowed with power) which goes: “Captain = Asshole.” But Captain Dudek was aware of this equation, and worked hard to defy it. He often acted upon the advice of his sergeants, which helped. He was not a West Point man, which helped. He smoked as much dope as was discreetly possible, which gave him something in common with the average GI, whether or not it helped. He also hailed from southern Louisiana and could switch at ease from bayou slang into an idiom as cadenced and eloquent as an old plantation raconteur’s—which at least made his orders a pleasure to hear, however unpleasant they might be to carry out. Dudek, as captains go, was something of a crowd pleaser. And he knew that Bobby Calcagno had been a well-liked man. He also knew that there were plenty of ways of slipping past a Washington-hatched edict. And
No fuckin prisoner
, Irwin began to realize, might be one of them.

The little VC had been carrying a canvas satchel when he was captured. While Irwin sipped his coffee and tried to relax, the Captain invited a half dozen men in to help him analyze the satchel’s contents. Dudek liked an audience. Especially a stoned one. And judging by the bloodshot eyes and odors as the men filled the tent, this audience was going to be choice. The Captain placed the satchel on a card table and began removing its contents with melodramatic flourishes. He liked to make people smile while keeping a straight face himself. He liked to make Spec 4 Chance smile most of all. But watching his flourishes, studying his coy manner, Irwin felt the same creeping panic one feels at a poker game when the stakes suddenly shoot so high that to fold or to cover are equally unthinkable. Because what had convened in this tent, he now understood, was a kangaroo court: what Dudek pulled from the satchel may well decide the Cong boy’s fate.

Everything inside the canvas had been wrapped in cloth to keep it from clattering, so Dudek unwrapped each item, like a gift-wrapped present, before holding it up for the men to identify. He then placed it on one of two piles, which he verbally labeled “Ours” and “Theirs.” On the “Ours” pile he set an Army-issue pocketknife, a Zippo lighter, some waterproof matches and a Prince Albert tobacco tin. “Boy was settin’ up a tobacco shop,” he drawled, and the men all grinned. But as he opened the Prince Albert tin he suddenly hollered,
“Kablooey!”
—and the same men lurched so violently that five or six seconds passed before even the stoutest of them could grin again. The tin was empty. On the “Theirs” pile Dudek tossed a pair of Chinese pliers, an odd little hemp-handled screwdriver, a stout pair of wire cutters, and was reaching in for the next item when he did a double take, drawled, “This is too good,” pointed back at the cloth the wire cutters had been wrapped in, then held it up: it was a pair of baby-blue Fruit of the Loom boxer shorts.

A couple of men whooped, but Dudek quieted them with a look. He then began to toy with the shorts, not in a slapstick way, but like a smalltime tragedian toying with a Yorick skull. He pondered the little horn of plenty on the label, snapped and unsnapped the two buttons, turned the shorts this way and that. “Gentlemen,” he finally said, unleashing his softest Southern eloquence. “Consider this artifact carefully, and then tell me, if you can: Is this war a tragedy? Is it a farce? Or is it a blend far too deadly, sad and delicate for mere mortals to separate or define?”

There was a silence, during which the Captain’s rhetorical questions sailed like three seaworthy little schooners through the thick, blue-tinged
air. Then Spec 4 Chance barked, “Oh, it’s tragedy! Definitely just plain tragedy, sir!”

The three schooners did nothing so scenic as sink: they just popped, leaving the air full of the reek of stale pot smoke. The Captain turned to his aide and tried to wither him with a gaze. Irwin didn’t even notice. He just kept staring sorrowfully at the undershorts. Dudek finally snorted. He’d made Irwin an aide because of the guileless laugh, the muscles, the forthrightness, and Sergeant Felker’s opinion that of all the men in ’Nam, this one was the least likely ever to get drunk, stoned or vengeful some dark night and shoot his commanding officer in the back. But after four months of his company, Dudek was considering transferring, or at times like this murdering, his aide for these same sterling qualities.

Dispensing with melodrama, the Captain reached abruptly back into the satchel. But as he unwrapped the next item, dramatic tension was instantly restored. He drew a sharp breath, sighed it out—
Ahhhhhhh—
and made sure that every man present, especially Irwin, saw that what he held in his hand was a wad of plastic explosives: the very same stuff that had deprived Bobby Calcagno of his face.

C
alcagno had remained conscious all through the forty-minute wait for the chopper, burbling with what was left of his mouth
“Kill me! God! Please kill me!”
over and over. Of course Dudek couldn’t let them do it, though even Irwin had been tempted. And later they’d learned that, in a Saigon hospital, there’d been three more days of surgery, skin grafts, infections and torment before Bobby was able to die.

Irwin was one of the men who held Bobby down, and all through the wait he’d tried to think of some appropriate prayer to shout over the screaming. But all that ever came to his mind was the famous old Memory Verse:
Unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek, offer also the other
. And Irwin was ashamed to even think it, let alone say it aloud. Because for Bobby it had no meaning. He literally hadn’t another cheek to offer.

T
he two men who’d made the capture that morning came into the tent and made their report. PFC Swasey—a burly New Jerseyite who brought to mind a twisted Yogi Berra—said it was the smell of gas wafting out of one of the personnel carriers that had alerted him to the fact that “some kinda bole shit was comin’ down.” Thinking the vehicle could be booby-trapped, the men were easing toward it when they heard noises in under the hood. Figuring that nothing human could fit in an engine or make such a sound, they decided it was an animal and that the problem should
be dealt with at once. So while Swasey aimed his rifle, the other man, PFC Bork, quickly lifted the hood—and there lay the little VC, blinking in the early-morning sun.

“A treacherous babe in a greasy manger,” intoned the Captain.

“Dat’s correct, sir,” croaked PFC Swasey.

Dudek winced slightly, and began to massage his temples.

PFC Bork, a skinny blond kid from upstate Wisconsin, spoke up to say that the VC had surrendered without a fight. But Swasey turned livid at this. Jammed as he was against the engine, Swasey maintained, it was impossible for the dink to move. Yet as soon as Bork had lifted him out, “the li’l fucker started spittin’ at us.”

“Flummery!” said Bork—who’d lately been devouring a stack of Nero Wolfe novels. The prisoner, he maintained, had merely been sick from heat and gas fumes, and what they’d heard in under the hood was vomiting.

“Bole
shit!”
was Swasey’s reply to this. True, there was barf all over the engine. But this didn’t mean the prisoner didn’t spit at them, or even “aim his fuckin’ gook puke,” for that matter. “I have personally read how these pygmies in Brazil’ll take and spit actual poison right in your goddamn face,” Swasey told the Captain.

“Ingenious,” said Dudek, who’d begun to enjoy himself again.

“You’d think the poison’d kill the pygmy first,” remarked Bork.

“Hmm,” went the Captain.

“I read it in a goddamn
book!”
Swasey exploded, “which is in my goddamn
tent
this goddamn
minute!
It explains,” he added more calmly, “how they build up their immunities bit by bit, till after a while they can pract’ly drink the shit.”

“Remarkable!” said the Captain.

“Bosh!” said Bork.

At any rate, this spit or vomit, whether aimed or involuntary, was why PFC Swasey had proceeded to strike the Cong in the skull, twice, with the butt of his rifle, which in turn explained how the prisoner’s head had come to be bandaged.

When Swasey and Bork had finished, the prisoner was brought into the tent for interrogation. But the air was so stifling and he smelled so strongly of puke and gas that the Captain ordered the guards to seat him in the open doorway and train a fan on him, to blow the smell outside. Then the radio operators were summoned to conduct the interrogation, they being the only men on the fire base who spoke any Asian languages.

The radio men proved patient and very thorough, bending like wellmeaning
big sisters over a recalcitrant sibling as they asked question after question. But the little VC just stared into the whirring blades of the fan. Never flinched, never changed expression, never said a word—not in Cambodian or Laotian, not in Hmong or Vietnamese; not in French, German, Italian or Spanish either, though by the time the radio operators got to these languages they were asking nothing but Berlitz-style questions—things like “What shall we do this fine evening?” “Which local restaurants would you recommend?” “Could you please direct us to the nearest enemy stronghold?” “Do you prefer Victor or Charles?” They had Dudek and his men in stitches.

Sergeant Pillard, the demolitions man, got a chuckle too when he returned from the personnel carrier and said he “felt like a boob” for having put his demo suit on to inspect it. But Pillard wasn’t after laughs. Jerking a thumb back at the prisoner, he said, “How he got onto the base or why he crawled like a damned rodent up into that engine, I have no idea. But he sure didn’t know what to do once he got there.”

“Bole
shit!”
PFC Swasey burst out. “He sabotaged the
fuck
out of it!”

Dudek turned to Pillard, and raised an eyebrow.

The sergeant shrugged. “He cut a fuel line, an’ hooked some sorta firecracker fuse to a plug wire, an’ scattered matches around. But I’d call that vandalism, not sabotage. If he thought he’d kill anybody but himself with that mess, he’s crazy. Which, come to think of it, could be the answer. Insanity, I mean.”

Captain Dudek strolled over to the doorway, leaned down over the prisoner, looked straight into his eyes for several seconds, straightened, stepped back inside, and said to Sergeant Pillard, “He doesn’t look insane to me.”

“He looks like a damned
kid
, is what he looks like,” the demo man muttered. And seeing the hard smile cross Dudek’s face, Irwin understood what the sergeant’s game had been all along; their prisoner may well be Calcagno’s killer, but Pillard was determined to play up his ineptitude no matter what—because he’d seen at a glance that, whatever he’d done, whoever he’d killed, the boy was just a boy.

“Before you perjure yourself any further,” the Captain said, still smiling, “take a look at this.” He pointed out the plastic explosives.

The demo man looked, but didn’t react.

“And maybe this too.” Dudek held up the baby-blue boxer shorts.

Most of the men laughed. Pillard didn’t.

“Do either of these artifacts alter your opinion?”

The demo man said nothing.

Dudek took a satisfied slurp of coffee, scowled down into his cup, then into the heat and smoke sent a single word:
“Why?”

Every man in the tent turned to him.
Why what?
their faces all said—but no one was willing to speak for fear of sounding stupid. Or almost no one.

“Why what?” Irwin asked.

The Captain smiled: this time, for rhetorical emphasis, he’d desired his idiot aide’s reaction. “Why,” he repeated, “would a mere ‘kid,’ if our prisoner
is
a kid, go to the trouble of sneaking onto our base with these materials? I want to hear, from Sergeant Pillard or anyone else, every possible reason he could have had—barring insanity, which I find ridiculous.”