Tree of Smoke (39 page)

“Yes. Roger.”

“There’ll be more strikes coming. Stay put. Do not move or you’ll get our own rockets up your ass.”

“Roger. Roger.”

“If we do this right, we’ll come around from their backside and you’ll be fine going up the hill. On my flare. When you see my flare from the west, you head up the hill to the LZ. Only on my flare.”

He put his hand on James’s shoulder and shook him until James said, “Roger. On your flare.”

The sarge headed back west, over and down into the draw.

On a hooch’s south side, in its shadow, they enlarged a rain ditch with their trenchers, cringing at every boom of mortar and artillery. As big as the biggest thunder James had ever heard.

“I’m doing this a lot faster than I did in training,” the private said. They flopped into the hole, and he said, “Fuck if I know…Gimme an M&M.”

In his web belt, in the place of one of his ammo clips, James carried a bag of M&M’s candy. “Gimme a handful,” the private said.

“I will if you quit saying ‘Fuck if I know’ all the time.”

“It’s a habit. I don’t say it that much.”

“Say ‘For all I know’ or say ‘Jesus God’ or ‘Kiss my ass.’ Just mix it up some.”

“Roger, Corporal.”

“What’s your name?”

“Nash.”

“Goddamn!” James cried. Rounds tore through the huts, knocking bits of thatch everywhere.

He’d had basic training, weapons training, jungle training, night training, survival training, evasion and escape; but he now appreciated that no one could train for this in any way that counted, and that he was dead.

He lowered his voice. “Them aren’t 16s,” he said. “Them are AKs for sure.” Zip, zip, zip, the bullets overhead like poisonous insects, zip, zip. Dust and shreds of thatch whirling in the air. Fronds fell from palm bushes only meters away.

“They’re killing everything!” Nash said.

“They don’t know we’re here,” James said, “so shut up, okay?”

Neither man fired back.

A racket of automatic fire erupted from the west. A voice screamed, “COVER ME, COVER ME, COVER ME, COVER ME!” James rose up and saw Black Man coming down the basin’s west side, now screaming, “SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT,” and James began laying down fire to the east. Black Man carried on his shoulder an M60 machine gun and dragged behind him a fifty-kilo box to feed it from. He dove into their trench right on top of them and blew their eardrums out letting loose with it and yelling, “Nobody gets past this motherfucker!” He raised up on his knees firing, and the dirt splashed off the higher ground ahead of him. He was leveling the basin’s lip like a bulldozer. “Gennemuns, I got ammo enough to kill the human race.”

I will never call nobody no nigger again, James promised in his heart.

He thumbed his selector and fired off a full magazine on auto. The mortars began again up the hill.

“Do you believe this shit?”

“What the fuck? WHAT THE FUCK?”

“Sarge said this whole mountain’s under attack!”

“Folks misbehaving,” Black Man said. “They usually don’t attack in daylight.”

“Goddamn it,” James said.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. You’re making me laugh.”

“You’re making
me
laugh.”

“Why are we laughing?”

They couldn’t stop. The whole thing. It just made you feel so happy you couldn’t stop laughing. James said, “Fuck if I know!” and reloaded and the three of them laughed and fired until James had gone through two more clips, and Black Man shouted, “STOP STOP STOP CEASE YO FUCKING FIRE.”

The immediate area was quiet, though they still heard artillery or mortars from up the hill somewhere.

“Gimme a M&M,” Black Man said.

“Hell, yes.” James gave him the whole pack. Black Man upended it into his mouth and chewed fast.

A chittering came from vegetation that only minutes before had jerked and flown apart under gunfire.

“What’s that? A Vietcong squirrel?”

“A monkey.”

“A gibbon,” James said.

Black Man smiled with chocolate-smeared teeth and said, “There’s the flare. Here we go.”

“Where we go?”

“We’re moving up.”

“Moving ‘up’? Ain’t no ‘up.’”

“We moving soon as my gun cools off. Can’t touch it now.”

“What’s happening around here?”

“Touch it. Fry your finger right off your hand.”

“I ain’t touching shit.”

“Put you another clip in, both of you,” Black Man said. “We got to go up that hill.”

“Those were
mortars
, man.”

“Got to go. Let’s get our feet under us.”

Black Man headed uphill with his gigantic machine gun balanced on his shoulder like a miner’s pickaxe, cushioned by an olive towel and gripped by its bipod. Houston followed Black Man, and Nash followed Houston.

Above them paddies terraced the hillside. They moved along the dikes and trudged generally upward.

From nowhere came the racket of gunfire, bullets jerking the small shoots and chirping in the water.

They raced without speaking over the dikes and flopped on the dry side and crawled along until they found a gulley and dropped into it and scrambled away from whoever was trying to kill them.

“You don’t understand,” Nash said. “I’m not ready for this at all. I only been here three days!”

“I just took a second tour,” James said. “I don’t know which one of us is the stupider shit.”

They passed burning hooches and empty hamlets and never saw any people. By their complete absence they seemed to suggest themselves vividly. But there was activity ahead. They heard shooting. At one point they heard a voice crying in a foreign language. They came on a hamlet whose dwellers had just cleared out minutes ago. They’d even left an animal picketed in a garden, a goat with his neck stuck out as if offering it to the axe, but he was only shitting. Right in the middle of a war.

The three soldiers climbed on toward the peak.

By sundown they’d traversed seven kilometers of mountain full of people trying to murder them. To James the ascent seemed to have taken no time at all. The sky was pink and purple as they climbed the last half kilometer to the LZ. Coming into the perimeter they saw a prone figure in a U.S. uniform, half of it torn away down the side, and hardly any head left. James wasn’t sure it was a body, because no one was even looking at it.

By the bull’s-eye some medical corpsmen waited for the return of a chopper, which they said had turned around and left due to reported missile fire. “It might’ve been just flares,” a corporal explained to Black Man. “One got in through the port and had to be kicked out.” Still no one mentioned the corpse. James stayed with Black Man and Nash. They sat on a sandbag wall and looked down the mountain they’d just spent five hours climbing in a crazy zigzag. The east valley lay in a cool shadow.

“What was that all about?”

“I have no idea.”

“They attacked us. We are their enemy.”

“I’m not anybody’s enemy.”

“I don’t want to be friends, or enemies, or anything.”

“Where’s the sarge?”

“Where’s Echo?”

A captain James couldn’t remember having seen before came up to them, red from head to toe with rotor dust, chewing on a cigar stub, and blinking at the sweat in his eyes. “This is an established base camp.” A bug flew into his forehead—“I want this whole area secure.”—swooped around, recovered, was gone.

“Captain, we’re looking for Sergeant Harmon.”

“Where’s Echo Platoon?”

The captain pointed at Black Man and his big gun. “Find a placement for that 60.” He left. The three didn’t move.

A hippie-looking corpsman with a long mustache and a blue bandanna tied around his head brought them three hot meals stacked on top of one another, and they thanked him sincerely, though Nash said, “You got one of them crawly-caterpillar mustaches.”

Toward all these men around him James felt goodwill at an unprecedented depth. The corpsman said they’d had one KIA in a mortar attack. James said, “I seen that guy! I seen a dead corpse. But I thought it was something else.”

“Something else? What else could it be, man?”

“Right, yeah,” Black Man said, “we seen him.”

“I’m not figuring this out,” James said. He still couldn’t determine whether he’d just fought a battle. “Was this whole mountain under attack or not?”

He ordered his memory to produce some sort of history of the afternoon. It was all very vivid and disordered. He knew one thing. He’d never moved so fast or felt so certain of what he was doing. All the bull-shit had been burned away.

It seemed to be over. There was no explanation. No guerrilla activity had ever troubled this mountain. Suddenly the west-side people had dematerialized, and then these VC, and now the VC too had gone up in smoke. James hunkered down and ate his franks and beans. His fatigues still dripped with sweat. Nash, he noticed, was also completely sopped. James said, “How you doing?”

Nash said, “I’m doing fine, man. Why? Don’t you believe me?”

James was nonplussed and could only say, “Yeah. I believe you. Sure. Yeah.”

Nash said, “My
balls
are sweating, that’s all. It ain’t piss.”

In the dusk the medic took them along a zigzag path to a glen where shirtless youngsters bathed themselves above the waist. Somebody squatted on the bank, squeezing out his socks over the muddy creek. They were all pumped up, laughing, whooping. Boots off, shirts off—a legitimate swim call meant it had to be over, they were definitely safe. In the dying light James felt jazzed and happy and every blurred young face he looked at gave him back a message of brotherly love.

“You boys from Recon travel light.”

The speaker was new, perhaps; he didn’t realize Echo was a joke. They did travel light. James himself no longer carried a rucksack, just a Boy Scout knapsack holding a poncho and entrenching tool, seven twenty-round magazines, a few sentimental talismans—rubbers, poker chips, and candy—and dosers of insect repellent and bandannas soaked with the stuff. He’d concluded that wanting something was generally less painful than hauling it.

Somebody said, “Well, the war’s over. I’m going down to the ville and get laid. The whores give it away free on Tet.”

“What’s Tet?”

“It’s the Hooky-Gooky new year, asshole. Today is Tet.”

“Tomorrow is Tet. It’s January the thirtieth, man.”

“When?”

“To-
day
. Jesus.”

One of the grunts from the LZ came into the clearing and said, “Goddamn! Goddamn!” James realized he himself probably looked like that—sweaty, dirty, wild in the eyes. “Shit! Shit!” the boy said. He ran to the clearing’s edge and faced the purple distance, the shadows of other mountains. “SHIT.”

One of his friends said, “Shit what?”

The boy came back and sat down shaking his head. He took both his friend’s hands in his own as if in some foreign style of heartfelt greeting. “Shit. I killed a guy.”

“I guess. Shit.”

The boy said, “It ain’t no different than shooting a deer.”

“When did you ever shoot a deer?”

“I guess I had it mixed up with the movies. But this was just—bing. And now it’s over.”

“It don’t sound like it’s over, Tommy.”

“Hey. Half his skull flew up in the air. Is that over enough for you?”

“Lay it down. You’re losing control of yourself.”

“Yeah, okay,” Tommy said. “I gotta lay it down.”

“Hey, let go of my hands, you fruit.”

James had killed someone too. He’d seen a muzzle flash, tossed a grenade into a small garden, and after the bang two VC had dragged a man out of the place and into the bush, and he hadn’t looked too alive. James had been so shocked he hadn’t fired at the two rescuers. Who may or may not have been VC.

He’d been in possession of five twenty-round magazines and the lieutenant had brought twenty-eight more. He’d fired over three hundred rounds and thrown two grenades and traveled ten kilometers and killed one possible VC.

The others watched while Tommy took a cigarette and a Zippo from his breast pocket. He lit up and blew smoke with a certain authoritative air and said to his friend, “Did you kill any of them?”

“I think I did.”

“Which one?”

“I don’t know which
one
. How the fuck would I know that?”

James had done a whole tour without injuring a single person, and here he’d just said yes to his second trip around and already people were dead—and this guy, Tommy, singing a happy song about it.

The medic went into the trees with a couple guys and pretty soon the smell of green reefer came wafting over, but that was all right, let them wreck their minds, this was war.

The sun, falling farther to the west, came from behind a mountain and shone down the valley. Beyond the paddies the jungle boiled with soft colors. From far below came the squeals of a pig being slaughtered in preparation for Tet. One boy sang new words to a Beatles melody:

Close your eyes, spread your legs,

And I’ll fertilize your eggs—

Another boy said, “Shit, you guys were fighting? We patrolled halfway down the mountain and back up again and never saw fuck-all, never pulled the trigger. We heard rockets, man, jets, choppers, bombs—never saw shit. We heard mortars, man. Never saw shit.”

A youngster came among them saying, “Hanson enters the area bringing good cheer to all,” and breaking up a six-pack of Budweiser among the nearest, who came at him like wild dogs.

“Who’s Hanson?” James asked.

“Me! I’m Hanson!”

He pictured Hanson’s head blowing apart. In basic he’d heard about people just dropping dead of a random bullet or hidden enemy sniper: thinking a thought, saying a word, dropping dead. Bending to tie your shoe, your head flying apart. He didn’t want to drop dead and he didn’t want to be around anyone else who dropped dead.

Black Man addressed them all. “You got to watch your karma in a time of war. You don’t rape the women or kill any of the animals, lest you get fucked around by the karma. Karma is like a wheel. You turn a wheel below you, it turns a wheel above you. And I’m beside you. Your karma touches mine. You must not, no never, disturb any of the karma.”