The Phantom Blooper (22 page)

Tiger Eye raises her hand and the people fall silent. The people stare at me and at my uniform with curiosity, fear and hatred until Tiger Eye explains who I am, Bao Chi,
Chien Si My
, a friend.

Commander Be Dan and a squad of
Chien Si
push through the crowd, shoving along a middle-aged Marine Gunnery Sergeant. The Funny Gunny is naked, gagged, his arms bound behind him over a bamboo pole. He is breathing hard, sweating like a pig, whimpering.

Nguyen Hai and Commander Be Dan take hold of the ends of the bamboo pole behind the Funny Gunny's arms and lift him up. They lower him into a hole about three feet deep.

Tiger Eye steps up to the hole and looks down at the Funny Gunny. She greets him: "
Monsieur le Sargent
." Then she says in English: "You owe a blood debt to the people."

In Vietnamese Tiger Eye addresses the assembled villagers: "Someday the war will end. The Americans will leave us in peace. The American armymen will sail away from Viet Nam to descend like the plague upon some other small country, some weaker country, some country where the people are not strong fighters but can be bought and sold like farm animals. The Americans may go to the moon, but they will never get past the determination of the Vietnamese people. Our spirit is strong and the resistance makes us brothers and sisters. American bombs can kill us as men and as women, but no invader can ever destroy us as a people as long as we diligently protect our children."

The villagers crowd together in a semicircle, some holding up torches of rice straw dipped in pitch.

The Phuong twins bring forward a fat Vietnamese man in a white shirt, white trousers, and white shoes. Bound and blind-folded, the man is kicked to his knees by the Phuong twins. The man is begging and crying. When crying doesn't work, he spits and curses. Somewhere in the crowd a woman is screaming and is struggling against villagers who are holding her back. It's impossible to tell if the woman is screaming in anger at the man in white or in his defense.

The Woodcutter steps forward. He raises his arms up over his head, then down. In the torchlight the curved hot silver of a scimitar flashes, lopping off the fat man's head. The head rolls into a shadow. The body slumps forward, legs spasming and kicking. Blood pumps from the severed neck with great force and in great quantities. The black pool of blood soaks into the sand.

The Phuong twins grab the bamboo pole behind the Funny Gunny's arms and lift him up out of the hole. They shove him roughly toward the edge of the clearing and tie him to a palm tree. They pull out the bamboo pole and cut his hands free.

A fireteam of twelve-year-old girls with hammers reports to the tree. Two of the girls carry wooden water buckets. They drop the water buckets upside down and step up onto them. While the Funny Gunny struggles, screaming into the gag, his eyes big, the four girls nail his hands and his feet to the tree.

Another girl walks forward. The girl is tall and white. She walks very slowly, slender and graceful and beautiful. On her perfect face there are no Asian features. She's a certified blue-eyed strawberry blonde with bedroom eyes, flared nostrils, and a pouting lower lip. Her name is Teen Angel. She is the star attraction at the Funny Gunny's steam-and-cream.

Teen Angel is wearing rhinestoned blue jeans, Adidas jogging shoes, and a yellow tank top full of heavy round breasts. The tank top proclaims RICH BITCH in glitter dust which sparkles in the flickering light of the torches. Around her neck hangs a long string of pink plastic pearls.

The Funny Gunny looks at Teen Angel. He is bleary-eyed, crying, and confused. He looks at Teen Angel as though glimpsing a goddess in a dream. Then he looks past Teen Angel and sees me, searches my eyes, scans my face and my Army Captain's uniform.

Teen Angel reaches out and touches the Funny Gunny's cheek, pulls down his gag, leans in so close that he can smell the cheap perfume on her breasts, so close that her hot breath fogs up his thick glasses. She kisses him on the mouth with her perfect lips, pressing her perfect body hard against him.

The surprise on the Funny Gunny's face turns to horror. He struggles, screams, whines, moans, coughs, groans, then screams again.

But it's too late.

Teen Angel turns and displays to her audience of villagers a bloody knife in a bloody hand. In her other hand is her trophy, a bloody mass of pink flesh.

She shows it to the Funny Gunny. The Funny Gunny's eyes are trying to explode out of their sockets as she shows it to him. He tries to scream, he tries really hard to scream, but he can't make a sound.

The girls standing on the water buckets go to work. One pinches the Funny Gunny's nose while the other chokes him. Eventually he is forced to open his mouth. Teen Angel stuffs the Funny Gunny's bloody cock and balls into his mouth. The girls on the wooden buckets get a grip on his head and continue to choke him while Teen Angel sews his lips together with heavy black thread.

When the sewing is done, Teen Angel pulls from her blue jeans pocket what appears to be a highly polished rifle-shell casing. She twists out a bright red lipstick. "
Phuong Huoang
," she says as she paints a thick layer of red onto the Funny Gunny's crudely sewn lips. "Phoenix Program."

"You Phoenix," she says, aiming the lipstick at the Funny Gunny. It is strange to hear someone with an American face speaking English with such a thick Vietnamese accent. "You Phoenix," she says again, bitterly. Then, looking into his eyes, her face close enough to be kissed, she says, "You Phoenix . . . I Phoenix you!"

There is a deep silence, like after a battle.

The villagers melt away into the darkness.

Somebody throws a torch into the steam-and-cream and the plywood whorehouse erupts into a palace of fire.

The Funny Gunny's sweaty face looks at me with the same expression I once saw on the face of a dying girl sniper during the battle for Hue City. The Funny Gunny is suffering. His eyes plead for mercy.

I pull the heavy pistol from my shoulder holster and I aim it at the Funny Gunny. He could hang on the palm tree for days, screaming, while the birds and the ants work on his eyes and maggots crawl in and out of his groin wound.

In the red glow of the burning whorehouse his eyes beg me to shoot him. I aim the pistol at his face. The Funny Gunny has no way of knowing that the pistol is empty. I dry fire it at him and he jumps. As I turn away, he looks confused.

Be advised, mercy is not what I do best.

The Woodcutter puts his hand on my shoulder, a signal that Commander Be Dan, the Nguyen brothers, and the Phuong twins are moving out. So we walk away from a place where one dying Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant hangs nailed to a tree and mutilated, his lips painted as red as a whore's.

We walk away fast, as silent as ghosts. Without hesitation we walk hard up against a solid black wall of jungle and the black wall of jungle opens up for us and takes us in.

Back in Hoa Binh, a week after the mutilation death of the Funny Gunny, I hear Song and Commander Be Dan making love. I'm down in the secret tunnel under our hooch. I've been studying an old clay model of Khe Sanh Combat Base. Black flags mark American positions. The model pinpoints every treeline, every bunker, the ammo dump, the command post, and the precise locations of wire, Claymores, land mines, guns, howitzers, quad 50s, and M-60s. I lived at Khe Sanh for a year and never knew this much detailed information about the base.

The Woodcutter and Johnny Be Cool have taken an ox cart loaded with firewood to sell at the market in a neighboring village. It's getting dark. They should he back by now.

I hear the sounds of someone in pain. I peek out through a crack in the trapdoor, cautiously. When you live in Viet Nam you never know who might be paying you a surprise visit.

In the yellow light of a kerosene lantern I can see the joy on Song's face as she looks up at Commander Be Dan.

"
Em
," he says softly. "My darling."

Song stands up, embraces him, kisses him. "
An Tho
," she says. "My lover." And, "
Ma cherie
."

They undress each other, slowly, gently.

Song's body is very beautiful. From my peeping Tom's perch in the tunnel my eyes are more than half open. She has a chrysanthemum in her hair. Her breasts are small, but perfect, the nipples erect and almost black. The only flaws on her body are scars on her legs from working in the paddies and barbed wire cuts and the three toes missing from her left foot from when she was tortured by the National Police.

Commander Be Dan's body is ugly, pocked with bullet and shrapnel wounds and laced with scars from barbed-wire cuts.

Song sinks down to her knees and takes Commander Be Dan into her mouth.

After a few moments they lie down on a reed sleeping mat and make love. Between muted groans and long moans of pleasure they talk to each other in whispers. The tempo increases and their lovemaking becomes urgent and almost violent, like a rape, and then they are fucking, rutting joyfully like strong healthy animals, every muscle straining, sweaty, and beautiful.

They rest, kissing and caressing.

Then Commander Be Dan sits up. A turn of his head puts light where it reveals his missing ear, the ear he lost in the fight with the Huey gunship on the march back from the victorious battle at the Nung combat fortress. Naked in the soft yellow light of the lantern, Commander Be Dan breaks down his AK-47 assault rifle. With grunt skill and a precision born only from practice, he manipulates a toothbrush, oily rags, and a bore brush attached to a thin metal rod, using the smooth pink stump of his severed wrist just like it's a giant finger. Commander Be Dan cleans the AK-47 assault rifle that is his constant companion and the centerpiece of his life.

I remember Leonard Pratt, who fell in love with his rifle on Parris Island.

Song sits up behind the Commander, reaches around playfully to fondle his thick penis, rubs her breasts into his back. He slaps her hand away and grunts. Song pouts, punches him in the back with her small fist. Finally, giving up, she reaches around for his web gear and an oily rag.

While Commander Be Dan runs a cleaning rod through the bore of his rifle, Song unloads the curved banana clips inside the canvas pouches hung on an army surplus Russian belt. On the dull silver buckle of the belt is a red star.

In the gold light Song is a Polynesian princess; her long black hair is blacker than the black night outside the hooch. The bullets in her small hands gleam and glint like pieces of antique gold being offered to a god. With the oily rag Song wipes each bullet clean, carefully, almost lovingly, then snaps

it back into a banana clip.

I know it's wrong, but it feels necessary to watch Song and Commander Be Dan in their intimacy. I'm learning clean information vital for me to know. It's hypnotizing to stare point-blank at the depth and breadth of your own stupidity.

I watch them, so close I can smell their sweat, afraid that my breathing might give me away.

Commander Be Dan snaps his weapon together, by the numbers, fast, not missing a beat. He's an enemy of my government, but I think he's good people, a real pro, a raggedy-assed rice-propelled Asian grunt. Sometimes the respect between men who fight against death from opposite sides of the wire can become bigger than flags. To kill a man as dedicated as Commander Be Dan would require another man of equal dedication. And dedicated men are so rare that Commander Be Dan is practically assured of immortality.

Commander Be Dan nods approval as he dry-fires his rifle.

He puts out his good hand. Song leans forward, kisses his hand, then souvenirs him one fully loaded banana clip heavy with thirty golden bullets with which to fight the Black Rifles.

The Commander accepts the banana clip without comment and snaps it into place, then jacks a round into the chamber. He leans the loaded rifle within easy reach against the wall of the hooch.

I close the trapdoor and sit in the darkness.

I can hear them together. They make love again, this time almost in silence. Song's orgasm is like a groan of pain, and for several minutes afterward she sobs, while the Commander whispers, his voice almost trembling, "
Em . . . Em . . .
"

I sit in the tunnel for an hour, until Song and the Commander are sleeping peacefully.

When I peek out of the trapdoor the moonlight coming in through unshuttered and glassless windows is bright enough for me to see that in their sleep they are holding hands.

I crawl down the black tunnel for twenty yards, feeling my way in total darkness.

I walk down along the riverbank. The river flows black and gold in the moonlight. I listen to the crickets having a creaking contest. As I walk, frogs plop into the water. The night air is moist and clean, sweet with the perfume of the night lotus.

I sit in the sand in the dark, near the washing rock, dreaming about the Alabama in my mind, dreaming of escape. If only I didn't have this bad leg . . .

I think, as I fall asleep, that I should steal a weapon and some food and double-time into the jungle like a big-assed bird, with Gunnery Sergeant Gerheim, my old Drill Instructor, as my only companion on the long road home. Gunny Gerheim would walk beside me, reminding me: "All you got to do, prive, is take one step. Just one step. Just one step at a time. Anybody can take one step, Private joker. Even you."

I've got arrowheads in my dreams again tonight. When I was a boy I hiked the rolling red-clay hills of Alabama, picking up arrowheads made of flint, obsidian lances, gray stone axes. Sometimes I'd find baked clay beads and broken pieces of pottery.

The crowing of a rooster wakes me. It is not dawn. The Woodcutter's little red and gold rooster has been fooled again by a false impersonation of dawn. Illumination rounds popped on the horizon, and the rooster decided that it was his cue to cut loose. It's strange, but Communist roosters don't crow any different from the American kind. For a long second I thought I was back in the World, back in Hometown, U.S.A.

The moon is red. The moon is burning up in flames behind a black cloud. Silhouettes of coconut palms are sharply defined against the red sky as masses of swaying black blades.