War Baby (4 page)

The morning after his conversation with Ryan at the
Cercle Sportif
, Webb hitched a ride on a Huey and went out with a Marine patrol in the Delta. The company made one light contact and Webb found, to his surprise, that this time he felt quite calm, and was even able to run off several frames of the action. He got the shakes again afterwards, but not as bad as the first time.

When he got back to Saigon that afternoon he developed his film in the AP darkroom, but none of it was usable. But as he walked back down the Rue Pasteur, he felt a curious sense of accomplishment. Ryan was right, it was like falling off a horse. You just had to get back in the saddle.

He spent the next few weeks slogging through bone-sore days filled with adrenalin, sweat and ochre dirt, building a folio of stark film and sweat-crinkled notebooks crammed with unreadable notes and impressions. He surfed on a cocktail of pills and cigarettes, bennies to wake you up, Seconal to help you sleep, opium to let you unwind.

He hitched choppers to the Delta, slogging through paddy fields and leech-infested streams with the 25th, or rose before dawn to catch the first flight out to Danang. He slept overnight at the Press Centre, with its unmade single beds, dirty sheets, beer cans and cigarette butts littering the floor; out to Dong Ha next morning and then a Marines supply chopper to one of the field units.

He jumped into Hueys like taxis, riding out to Quan Tri and Pleiku and the firebases in the Highlands, hooked up with Special Forces and First Air Cavalry companies and hunkered down with them through long nights of mortar and rocket bombardment, then flew back with the wounded next morning to Qui Non or Danang, covered in blood and mud, to be served T-bones and ice-cream in a spotless mess, laying a starched white linen napkin over his soiled fatigues.

He washed off the dust and sweat at China Beach, where the white soldiers splashed in the surf and the black conscripts hung in the beach cafe eating greasy burgers and playing Motown on the jukebox. They said China Beach was okay because the Viet Cong liked to swim there too.

Through long black nights in the Highlands, huddled in a bunker, mortars and rockets hissing in just before the NVA sappers came through the wire, he thought about Mickey van Himst. He even wrote to her twice, but she never wrote back. Well, he wasn’t in Vietnam to make love to nurses; he was here to carve out a career from nothing.

He discovered something Ryan called the haunting beauty of war. He found it in a water buffalo bellowing at a helicopter gunship in a rice field; in the face of a Montagnard woman carrying a pannier of vegetables, while a long-legged black Marine stared back at her, a transistor radio held to his ear; a hand lolling over the side of a stretcher; the face of a battle-haunted crew chief,
Burn Baby Burn
scrawled on his helmet.

One day he got back to the AP offices in Saigon and glanced at the photograph of the severed heads floating down the Mekong and the crude speech bubble scrawled on it and caught himself grinning.

Crosby was grinning too when he came out of the office. ‘These are fucking A,’ he said, spreading the black and whites across his desk. They were still sticky wet from the developing fluid.

Webb wondered whether he should feel proud. A Marine fired a hooch with a Zippo lighter, ignoring the protests of a Vietnamese woman with two children screaming around her legs; another Marine sat, head bowed with his helmet at his feet, his dead buddy lying a few feet away, a poncho thrown over his body so that only the oversized jungle boots protruded; a small girl, half her face disfigured from napalm scars, huddled under a thatched veranda with the family pig.

‘We can’t use these,’ Crosby said. He pushed two prints to the side; a row of decapitated VC heads, lined on a wall, cigarettes stuck in their mouths; a LURP with a necklace of ears. Their owner called them love beads.

‘This one I love,’ Crosby said, pushing one of the glossies across the desk, as if Webb hadn’t seen it before.

It was a PFC from Ohio, a spindly farm boy with a mop of fair hair and huge ears. His buddies in the platoon called him Flapper. He was sitting in a rice paddy, his M-16 resting against his knees, his hands clasped as if in prayer. He stared directly at the camera, his eyes utterly empty.

‘The thousand-yard stare,’ Crosby said. ‘You’ve got it right there.’

‘Yeah,’ Webb said. ‘I got it right there.’

Flapper’s real name was Judge. Lenny Judge. Webb had been in Quang Ngai with a company from the Americal division, they were patrolling a freefire zone, an area designated as hostile. The platoon had lost five men that day to booby traps; one had fallen in a
punji
pit, and had been eviscerated on a wooden stake that had been sharpened to a point and smeared with excreta; another had picked up a booby-trapped teapot in one of the hooches and had lost both his hands; a third, the platoon clown, had seen a wooden plough abandoned in a paddy field and had been unable to resist the temptation of jumping behind it. As soon as he moved one of the handles it released the pin on a grenade and he had been killed. Two Marines with him had sustained serious shrapnel wounds.

The platoon commander had retaliated by ordering his men to torch the village, killing all the animals they found - water buffalo, chickens, pigs.

That afternoon a Marine called Tonelli saw an old man leading a water buffalo across a rice paddy in a village about five miles away. ‘How come everyone in this damn country looks like Ho Chi fuckin’ Minh?’ he had said.

‘Maybe it is Ho Chi fuckin’ Minh,’ a black corporal told him. He had
Death Is Nature’s Way of Telling You to Fuck Off
scrawled on his helmet.

Tonelli unslung his M-16. ‘Bet you five bucks I can drop the fuckin’ water buffalo.’

‘You couldn’t hit jack shit from here, Tonelli.’

‘Watch me, motherfucker.’

He fired a short burst, three rounds. The buffalo dropped to its knees. The farmer shouted in despair as he tried to pull the wounded beast back to its feet.

‘What do you think he’s saying, Flapper?’

‘I think he just called you a dick-grabbing, spaghetti-eating Mafioso, Tonelli.’

‘Maybe I should teach him a lesson.’ He fired another short burst and the others laughed. ‘Missed the little motherfucker.’

Flapper had laughed along with the others. ‘I told you, Tonelli. You couldn’t hit your own dick with a howitzer.’

There was shouting from the front of the line. ‘It’s that fucking Lieutenant Bradley,’ Tonelli said. ‘What’s his problem? We got a contact here.’

The black sergeant fired at the old Vietnamese. ‘Shee-it,’ he said. ‘Missed the muthafucker.’

‘No wonder you guys never hit any VC,’ Flapper said. ‘You always aim too high.’

He was still laughing when he put the M-16 to his shoulder and pulled the trigger. Webb saw the man’s conical straw hat disintegrate. His head exploded and the almost decapitated body slid down the body of the dying water buffalo.

When Webb looked around Flapper wasn’t laughing any more. The lieutenant bawled him out and threatened to put him on a charge. But they all knew it would never happen. Bradley didn’t want to get fragged because of some dead gook peasant. Chalk him up to the VC body count and let it drop.

When they stopped to rest an hour later, Flapper came looking for Webb. ‘It was just a joke, right?’ he said. ‘I never meant to hit him or anything. We was just fooling around.’

‘Sure,’ Webb said. ‘You were just fooling around.’

When Webb joined Baker Company, Flapper was nineteen. When Webb left them, three days later, he looked about thirty-five.

By then Tonelli had kicked a mine and had been choppered back to Long Binh. Webb had jumped on the same medevac. Just before it lifted off, Flapper had grabbed his arm. ‘I didn’t mean to do it,’ he said.

Crosby brought him back from his reverie. ‘Had this guy just been in a firefight?’

‘I guess so,’ he said.

Bien Hoa

She was having supper in the mess hall with some nurses and doctors from the ER. When she saw him, her expression changed from weariness to surprise. She came over. Webb was aware of everyone staring.

‘Hello,’ he said.

‘Hello yourself. You look done in. Where have you been?’

‘Up at Quang Ngai with the Americal.’

‘Yeah? Get some snaps for the family album?’

‘Something like that.’

‘You came straight out here?’

‘Kind of.’

She seemed impressed with that. ‘You eaten?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Come and join us.’

‘Just some coffee, maybe.’

She made the introductions, and then the doctors got back to their shop talk, a surgical procedure that should have worked but didn’t. Back home there would be a post mortem and the family would sue. Here you just moved onto the next patient.

She came back with his coffee. ‘How’s your friend?’

‘He’s fine. He’s got more scars than an old tomcat.’

‘He was lucky. T&Ts count as minor wounds in here. What brings you out this way?’

‘You, I guess.’

‘Really?’ She pushed an errant lock of hair out of her face and put her chin on her hand. ‘Well, you know, one burning helicopter and I’m anybody’s.’

‘I didn’t mean …’

‘Don’t look so serious, I was just fucking with you. Hey, I’m bagged. I guess it’s the heat. Plus I’ve been changing dressings on pseudomonas all afternoon.’

She was right; she had the same look in her eyes as Wally Judge.

‘A few of us are having drinks in the lieutenant’s hooch. Want to come over?’

‘Sure, why not?’

The lieutenant was the hospital’s neurosurgeon. He was celebrating being over the Hump - halfway through his twelve-month service in Vietnam. His hooch was equipped with the luxuries of rank; a record player and a refrigerator. Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Mrs Robinson’ was playing when they arrived; the doctors and techs and nurses were all drinking but none of them seemed drunk. There was shop talk, medical jargon Webb didn’t understand, complaints about the ‘lifers’ and the army regulations. A few people were talking about the first things they were going to do when they got home.

Mickey drifted away among the crowd. Webb thought he had been dumped. He stayed for a while, talking to an ER tech from Georgia who wanted to tell him about the trout fishing in the Alleghenies. He was about to leave when Mickey magically reappeared at his side. ‘Let’s go back to my hooch,’ she whispered.

Mickey shared a hooch with five other nurses, and her room was not much bigger than a store cupboard. There was a bed and a small wardrobe with hanging space, little else.

She flopped down on the bed and Webb shut the door. The only light in the room filtered through a small window high in the wall. ‘I’m drunk, Hugh,’ she said. She put up both her hands, like a child, and let him take off her T-shirt. She slid out of her fatigue pants.

She held out her arms. ‘You want to sleep with me?’

Webb guessed that in a few moments she would be asleep. ‘I’m not big on necrophilia,’ he said.

‘Oh boy, dead people! If it’s corpses you want, I can really help you out.’

Her arms flopped back to her sides. Webb lay beside her on the narrow cot and put his arms around her. She snuggled her face into his chest. She was crying. ‘It’s okay,’ he said.

‘No, it’s not.’

He didn’t know what else to say or do and so he just held her.

After a while she stopped crying and he thought she was asleep. But then she reached up and stroked his cheek.

‘Two this morning, I got out of bed, I was still mostly asleep, and I’m staring at this farm kid from Kansas, he’s a virgin, doesn’t even shave yet, and he’s had his penis blown away by a bouncing mine. On the next gurney there’s a guy who tells me his wife’s just had a baby, and I lift up the dressings and he’s never going to see that baby because something just blew his face off. And he’s not going to be able to throw that kid a ball either because whatever it was took his hands off as well.’

Webb held her tighter.

‘Then, right in the middle of all this good shit, they wheel an NVA chest wound into theatre. And the guy with no eyes and no hands is still waiting in the corridor and we’ve got this fucking NVA colonel in there, because that’s triage, because this gook fucker is not stable. But Nurse Mickey van Himst puts on her latex gloves and she spits on them. If he gets an infection and dies because of her, well, fuck him. I wanted him to die, I wanted to push him right off that gurney and let him choke on his own blood. Only now I’m ashamed, because now the war owns me too, it’s made me hate like everyone else. It’s me so I don’t even want to go to sleep because of what I might wake up to.’

He thought about McCague, killed posing for a photograph that eventually earned him sixty dollars from AP. ‘We all do things we’re ashamed of,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t mean we’re bad people.’

‘Yes it does,’ she said.

She curled into him like a child, and he held her. After a while he realized she was asleep, even if she didn’t want to be.

* * *

Some time during the night he heard the hum of rotors, and then someone running down the corridor outside, hammering on the doors. ‘Let’s go, Mickey. Mas-cal. We’re on!’

In a moment she was on her feet fumbling in the darkness for her clothes. By the time he had swung his feet out of the bed the door was yawning open and she was gone. He watched the other nurses running out of the hooch.

At dawn the helicopters were still coming, landing one after the other outside the hospital. Webb got dressed and drove back to Saigon. By ten o’clock that morning he was back in the Delta with the 25th.

The cathedral was on the Tu Do, across the road from the post office, a monstrosity in red brick. Ryan sat at the back during the service, and did not leave his pew to take communion. He thought that might be a bit rich, even for someone as tolerant as Jesus.

Instead he watched Souer Odile at the brass communion rail, her hands joined in prayer, eyes closed. What am I going to do about this?

* * *

What am I to do about this?

Odile had asked the question of herself many times, but the Divine had so far withheld his guidance. She wanted to live as simply as other women. She wished to be a wife and a mother. Was it sin to want to be a woman more than wanting to serve God? In the darkness of the cathedral she looked for grace.

She prayed for strength. She raised her face to the Madonna and begged for purity. She stared into the candles on the altar and asked for faith.

Just a few weeks ago, before she met Ryan, her choices were clear. But he had muddied everything. What was it he had said?
You have to listen to your heart. You’ve only got one life.
She wished he had never said those words. When she only thought them to herself they had no power over her. When he said them, it made them seem … possible.

After she had accepted communion, Odile rose from the altar steps and walked, head bowed, back to the pews. She raised her eyes for a moment and saw him, in the shadows at the back of the church, and it took her breath away. She knelt down again, beside her fellow nuns and novices, and lowered her head once more in prayer.

How can I concentrate on the eternal when all I can think of is now?

After the Mass he found her on the steps outside, with the
canonesse
and several other novices, in conversation with the French curé and a Catholic Vietnamese family. When she saw him she left the group and approached him. ‘Monsieur Ryan?’

‘I have to see you again,’ he said.

The
canonesse
was watching them over the priest’s shoulder.

‘This is so easy for you. Is not so easy for me.’

‘Falling in love with a nun is easy?’

Her eyes went wide. She looked around at the
canonesse
, and then back at Ryan. ‘Do not say it if you do not mean it.’

‘I mean it.’

She bit her lip. Ryan waited. ‘Tomorrow. In the
Jardins Botaniques
. Ten o’clock.’

She walked away.

They were all watching him now. He knew what they were thinking. Bugger them all. He’d had enough of nuns to last him a lifetime.

Except for this one.

* * *

The caretaker at the Hashish Hilton was a Vietnamese called Duc, who had inevitably been rechristened Donald by the tenants. Donald Duc acted as their intermediary with the Tonkinese landlady, organized their food and their laundry, cronied the work out between the members of his immediate family, who all lived in one of the downstairs rooms. For a little extra he also procured opium or girls.

When he got back that afternoon Ryan found Cochrane lying on his bed, smoking opium; Donald’s uncle lay on the floor, on some raffia matting, lighting pipes for Cochrane and for Prescott, who sat in Ryan’s chair by the window. Mick Jagger was wailing his way through ‘Paint It Black’. Webb sat at the foot of the bed, smoking a large opium-laced cigarette. The air conditioner had broken again and the air was thick with pungent smoke.

‘Sean,’ Webb said.

‘Spider,’ Ryan said.

‘How’s the arm?’

‘Still bloody sore. You got back from Quang Ngai in one piece?’

‘Brought you this.’ He held up two bottles of Courvoisier. ‘From the PX at Danang. A small token of my esteem. That bullet in your shoulder had my name on it.’

‘Then it’s a bloody good job you’ve got a short name.’ Ryan took the proffered bottles. ‘Been hearing great things about you, mate. Croz reckons you’re David Bailey in jungle greens.’ He unscrewed the Courvoisier and fetched two beer glasses. He splashed some brandy in each. ‘Health.’

‘Long life.’

‘Christ, no. If I thought I was going to have a long life I’d have to start eating properly and taking care of myself. ‘He sat down on the end of the bed, resting the Courvoisier on one knee. Dust drifted on the yellow sunlight that slanted through the blinds. ‘So, you’ve been here six weeks. Have you figured out a reasonable political solution for the Vietnam people?’

‘No, have you?’

‘Know what this American colonel said to me the other day? He had the perfect solution, he reckoned. First, you go round the whole country, get everyone you’re absolutely certain is on your side and you put them on a boat. You sail that boat into the China Sea. Then you nuke the whole country, north and south. And then . . .’ Ryan drained his brandy and poured another. ‘… then you sink the boat. It’s called Winning Hearts and Minds.’

‘The Americans can’t win this. Trying to find the Viet Cong is like trying to find a needle in the proverbial haystack.’

‘Know how the Americans find a needle in a haystack? They napalm the haystack and anything that’s left is going to be a needle.’

Webb didn’t like thinking about the politics of the war. What had seemed like a simple conflict between his country’s traditional allies and the communists, a word he had equated with villainy from childhood, was in reality far more complex, more tragic, more disturbing. For the first time he had started to wonder if he was on the right side.

Ryan finished his brandy. Webb held out the bottle and poured three fingers into his glass. The opium smoke and the brandy was already making him light-headed. ‘You ever think of getting out of Vietnam?’ he said.

Ryan shook his head. ‘It’s not much of a war, but right now it’s the only one I’ve got.’

* * *

The noise of the Saigon traffic was muted, almost drowned out by the chirrup of crickets. A few old amahs squatted on their haunches on the grass and sparrows fussed and fluttered in the bushes.

Ryan wandered around the botanic gardens for almost half an hour before he found her, sitting alone on a wooden bench in the shade of a giant tamarind tree. She was wearing a white silk
ao dai
with a mandarin collar, her hands clutched tightly at her knees. She looked as fragile as porcelain.

He sat down beside her. She did not look up.

‘Odile,’ he said.

He had not called her ‘sister’, as she was accustomed. ‘Monsieur Ryan,’ she said, carefully.

‘I thought you might not come.’

‘But of course. I promise you.’

It was sticky hot and his shoulder itched under the swathe of bandages. ‘I can’t stop thinking about you. Night and day. I even dream about you.’

‘It is a sin. I am for God. You must ask for absolution.’

‘From you?’

‘From your confessor.’

‘I don’t have a confessor.’

‘You make my life impossible,’ she whispered.

‘Like you’re making mine.’

‘I do not do anything to you!’

‘You drive me crazy. Isn’t that enough?’

‘If you do not stop, I will go.’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘If you do not confess your thoughts, you will be damned!’

‘Damned if I do, damned if I don’t,’ Ryan said. He touched her arm, very lightly. She gasped. ‘Listen, I haven’t met many women that I’ve really admired. Not just for their looks, for what they are.’

‘It is impossible for us. I come here today to tell you this.’

‘Do you really want to shut yourself away for the rest of your life knowing there was a bloke who was crazy about you, who would have married you and given you children? I want you more than I’ve ever wanted anything. I won’t let you walk away from me. I won’t lose you, I won’t.’

He noticed the fluttery rise and fall of her breasts beneath the
ao dai
. I mean what I say, Ryan assured himself. Right now, I mean it.

He reached up with his good arm and stroked her hair. ‘You’ve got the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen,’ he said, and his voice dreamy.

She slid away from him, along the bench. ‘
C’est impossible!
I must have time to think.’

She stood up abruptly and walked away, slim and straight, leaving ghosts of patchouli and incense. The most exotic creature he had ever seen.

God forgive me.

* * *

Odile walked blindly, fighting an instinct to run. She had come here today to end this, before it could begin, to return to the safety of a life ordered by duty, by virtue. She had been imprisoned by the circumstances of her life and now the jailer had left the door ajar for a moment, unguarded, and for a moment she could see out. Impossible not to approach that door, curious to see beyond.

If only her faith were a stronger, faith in God, or faith in herself.