1968 Read online

  As the sun came up on January 30th, while anxious Marines scanned the perimeter at Khe Sanh, while a hundred thousand enemy troops studied their infiltration routes, Spider shouldered his heavy pack after a sleepless night—not only full alert, but the 155s booming constantly a couple of hours before dawn—and followed Sarge down the trail that led to the little creek.

  Spider didn’t have enough hands, or enough shoulders. The M16 was slung so that it rested pointing forward at elbow level, so you could snatch it and fire. You kept one hand on it. He had an axe in the other hand. The awkward demolition bag was slung over that shoulder, and it would beat against his ribs as he walked, unless he steadied it with the hand holding the axe. So he had a sort of stooped-over, old-man way of walking. He had enough firepower to knock out a phalanx of Roman centurions, but he didn’t feel very dangerous. He felt sorry for himself.

  It was easier going once they got to the stream. Rather than ascending the hill where Spider had started to see things that weren’t there, they turned right and followed the meandering streambed, roughly in the direction of the road that connected Kontum and Dak To. Spider knew they wouldn’t go as far as the road, though. They’d be cutting northwest for about a mile to a hillock where they’d establish a patrol base. From there they’d set out two ambush teams, which would presumably have nothing to do but wait out the truce. Maybe watch the fire base get hit.

  It made Spider nervous to leave behind the security of the bunker, but Sarge was right about the fire base being underdefended. Half the infantry there were FNGs, unblooded, sent in a bunch from Kontum to give the fire base the regulation number of support troops.

  After about an hour, they stopped to rotate positions. Sarge wanted to stay on point in the center column, so Spider walked back to take up the rear. Better than walking point, he supposed, but only just. At least he was able to pass the demo bag to Moses, which lightened his step. It was only about twelve pounds, but the box of blasting caps inside carried a lot of psychic weight.

  They started moving forward again. They’d gone less than a hundred yards when Spider heard something behind him. He twirled, and there was a man not twenty feet away—but he was the death’s-head ghost, grinning.

  What would happen if he fired at it? Maybe it would go away forever. Spider thumbed the selector switch past SEMI to AUTO. The apparition disappeared.

  “What is it?” a guy to his left whispered. “See something?”

  “Thought I heard something,” Spider said, and turned around to continue walking. He swore that nothing would make him look back.

  A new day dawns

  Beverly almost slept through the alarm. Seven o’clock. Monday was a bad day, an 8:00 math class to pay for the sins of the weekend. She hit the plastic bar that gave her a ten-minute “snooze” delay, knowing that it probably meant another parking ticket. Her sticker spot, Lot EE, was out somewhere in Carroll County—since of course she supposedly lived in a dorm and walked to class—so she had to park illegally or hike a mile to the Math Building. But if she didn’t get an extra ten minutes now, she’d get it during the algebra lecture.

  Lee got out of bed quietly and went downstairs to put on the water, as he did every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It had been a long night of whispered argument, recrimination, tears. The fact that it had ended with love-making didn’t mean that it was resolved.

  What did she want from him? Did she really know what she wanted? Was he really any less confused than she was?

  She wanted him to demonstrate his love for her by “staying true,” but not because sexual fidelity was morally right. She agreed that it was bourgeois ownership of women, a shackle. It was a sacrifice she wanted him to make for the time being, until she got her head straight.

  But how long would that be? Besides, it was almost a non-issue; he had been true to her ever since they first made love—except for one little blowjob, which didn’t really count; he hadn’t even known her name. (Beverly did, unfortunately.)

  Part of it was obviously her distress over having to make a decision about Spider. She said she didn’t love him anymore, except like a brother. Lee told her that she was still confused by the illusions of romance, that only allowed her to admit erotic love for one person at a time. But that was his rational side speaking, and it didn’t seem as strong an argument as it used to. He was in some version of love, too.

  He heard the upstairs toilet flush and checked his watch. She’d have to run to make class. He found her large Redskins mug and made her a double coffee with milk and sugar, feeling expertly domestic (she only used milk in the first cup of the morning), and put some bread in the toaster. It popped up just as she came running down the stairs, pulling on her coat.

  She looked pretty awful, puffy eyes, no makeup except a slash of lipstick, hair hurriedly tucked into a cap. She thanked him for the coffee and slice of toast and gave him a little peck, and then a hug and a sloppy kiss. Juggling bookbag and toast and coffee, she opened the front door and slid the morning paper inside with her toe. She looked down at the headline.

  “Tet,” she said. “Maybe at least Spider will get some rest.”

  The first version

  This is what Spider would say:

  After we turned north the going got easier. We were temporarily out of the hills, in some kind of a wooded basin. It felt safer. I guess we got careless. We shouldn’t have followed the trail. They were waiting for us.

  First there was a single shot, a loud crack like a stick breaking. It was still echoing by the time I hit the dirt. Then someone’s M16 emptied a full magazine—a half-second rip of pop-pop-pops—and a heavy machine gun, theirs, started to chatter. Short bursts from AK-47s both left and right. Then grenades every couple of seconds. We started shooting back. It was obscenely, impossibly loud, an unrelenting terrifying racket, but I could still hear the soft hum and whisper of bullets and shrapnel flying over my head.

  I slid out of the pack and got behind it, pissing in spasms. The M16 was useless; I had jammed the muzzle into the dirt on the way down. I slid the cleaning rod out but my hands were shaking so hard I couldn’t find the button to break the weapon open.

  But I wasn’t supposed to shoot anyhow. Not until I saw the whites of their eyes. That meant something now. I dug down into the pack and found two grenades and put them in front of me.

  It got louder somehow. Sarge was yelling for the A team to fall back, fall back. Two people were screaming for medics. I found the button on the M16 but nothing happened when I pushed it. It wouldn’t go down. I tried pushing hard on it with the bottom rim of a grenade; it wouldn’t pop.

  I saw the RTO Morrison get hit. A bullet or something hit his steel pot and knocked it off. He put his hand up to his head and it came back bloody and stringy. He fell over sideways, I suppose dead. Sarge lowcrawled back to shout into the radio. He had been hit in the butt and was bleeding pretty hard. He kept twirling the little generator handle on the radio. I don’t think it was working.

  A black guy I didn’t know came squirming by on his back, no weapon or helmet, screaming for a medic. He was holding up his right arm, broken in two below the wrist, blood fountaining out of an artery.

  But I didn’t really lose it until I saw Moses explode. Moses and another guy were running back toward me—or sort of running, scrunched down—when something must have hit the demo bag. There was a yellow flash and a dull whack sound, and then just gray smoke and red mist. His legs were intact, and they rolled off to the left and right.

  I threw the rifle down and got up and ran away. Actually, I ran about three steps and smacked my forehead into a low-hanging tree limb. The universe went all ink and stars and I fell over backwards.

  A calculus of death

  The day that Spider ran in panic and knocked himself out on a tree limb was, stateside, a day of bizarre harmony: The U.S. Army and the Association of University Professors agreed on something.

  The year before, the Selective Service had democratically decreed tha
t being admitted to graduate school was no longer adequate grounds for draft deferment. They hadn’t thought it through.

  With only women and physically handicapped males to draw from, the population of graduate programs was dropping precipitously all over the country. Many schools would not survive the loss of tuition income. Many academic departments would die for lack of junior members. It was a disaster.

  It was also shaping up to be a disaster for the army. They needed under-educated nineteen-year-olds. You could slap them around for a few weeks in Basic Training, then hand them a gun and say Go Kill People, and most of them would do it. College graduates were “harder to handle; more resentful.” They also tended to upset the illiterate nineteen-year-olds by discussing options that were incompatible with the army’s plans for them, like desertion.

  When Spider was drafted, only 5 percent of draftees had been college graduates. That was already too many. Next year, the percentage might be as high as 67 percent—recalcitrant, sarcastic, conniving readers and thinkers, whose presence would destroy the army’s infrastructure, even while their absence was destroying the university’s infrastructure.

  The problem was all of those voters who saw the lopsided deferment system in terms of wealth and privilege, rather than the pragmatic business of trainability that it actually was. So the politicians wrapped themselves, collectively, in a fresh flag and appealed to old-fashioned American values of fairness and instituted the draft lottery, which brought the proportion of disgruntled college graduates back down to a manageable level.

  Spider would have liked a lottery, but it came about a year too late.

  Rude awakening

  He had never had a headache like this one. It sang through his eyes and all the way to the base of his skull. The skin on his forehead stung and it felt like there was blood crusted there. He started to raise his hand to touch it but heard a noise. Pop. Then another pop.

  He opened his eyes to slits and turned his head microscopically in the direction of the noise. About twenty yards away, a tall Vietnamese in black pajamas was walking around with a rifle, studying the ground. When he came to a body, pop. He shot it in the head. Just making sure. The one Spider watched was alive enough to raise one arm in feeble protest. Then pop, and the Vietnamese chattered angrily at the man he’d killed.

  Spider closed his eyes and lay still. Maybe he wouldn’t see him over here. Running was out of the question.

  The rifle shots grew louder. Maybe he could actually run. There was only one of them. Maybe he would miss, maybe he would run out of ammunition. But Spider probably couldn’t even stand up and walk.

  Just stick it out. Maybe he’s not shooting everyone. If you look real dead, he might walk by.

  His urethral and anal sphincters were fluttering, threatening to make his last act an embarrassing one.

  An ant crawled up on his neck and stung him.

  He heard the footsteps. He tried not to breathe.

  The muzzle of the rifle was hot on his forehead. He opened his eyes to look at his executioner.

  He was neither young nor old. He looked Chinese. There was an abrasion on one high cheekbone. His eyes were red, and deeply sunk in lines of worry or fatigue.

  He tilted his head to an odd angle, and blinked. Spider squeezed his eyes shut, waiting to die. The man said nine odd syllables, as if he were counting, and then lifted the muzzle and stepped away.

  Perchance to dream

  Beverly could not concentrate on matrices. Determinants. You had one that was just a bunch of random numbers, and so you multiplied it by another, that had ones all down the diagonal. She stared at it and nothing happened. Nothing got into her brain.

  She was mad and confused about Lee and her crotch hurt, her labia, because he had been too forceful last night, this morning, and her body had listened to her heart and withheld lubrication. She was about two days away from her period, and that didn’t help anything. She tended to feel grouchy and helpless this time of the month, and being able to predict it made it worse.

  She remembered the ignorant pawings with Spider. He was so clumsy and sweet. They hadn’t known anything except “you rub this long enough and she starts to moan; you rub this long enough and he spurts.” But it had been exciting to discover stuff that way, to piece together a sexual self-awareness partly out of what other people said, partly from the veiled descriptions in books, partly from the shy fumblings with one another. She didn’t feel guilty about Lee, not really, but it was sad that she’d learned so much so fast. It might have been nicer to work it out slowly with Spider.

  She felt a cold prickling of sweat on the small of her back, from guilt? Poor Spider. That letter he’d written about never having any privacy, he obviously meant masturbation. She’d never talked to him about it, and couldn’t visualize him doing it to himself, even though she’d watched Lee do it, and Lee said men would do it every day if they didn’t have anything else. Well, she liked a little time to herself every now and then, even with all the sex she had with Lee. And Spider had always seemed so desperate; so impatient to come. It must be awful for him.

  She crossed her legs surreptitiously and squeezed, thinking about Spider, trying to project the feeling ten thousand miles. Unfortunately, she closed her eyes.

  “Beverly?” the graduate assistant said. “Would you please come to the board?”

  Dulce et decorum est

  Spider lay with his eyes tightly shut, listening to the man rummage through his rucksack, muttering in Vietnamese. Apparently he was alone; maybe the others had moved out because reinforcements, Americans, were coming.

  Why weren’t they here yet? How long had he been unconscious?

  Even with the radio not working, the people at the fire base would have known they were in trouble. Or had they gone so far that the sound of gunfire wouldn’t carry?

  The noises stopped. Spider could visualize the man looking at him, thinking. Why hadn’t he pulled the trigger; was he changing his mind? After a minute the man walked off, his footsteps growing fainter and disappearing.

  Spider decided to continue playing dead. The jungle sounds returned, muted this time of day. A few birds. Wind rustling the canopy.

  Tiny ants stung him on the arm and neck. He tried to ignore them by cataloging all of his other pains. The forehead was the worst, but he had also done something to his leg, to the back of his thigh. Couldn’t be a bullet wound; that would hurt more. His back ached, as always, and he had small sores in his mouth and anus that he didn’t associate with Li. A persistent rash of jungle rot on the back of one hand, which didn’t hurt much but looked awful, a running sore. And now a prickly kind of diaper rash from peeing on himself.

  He remembered Morrison looking at a handful of his brains and dying. Moses exploding. You could see the bone in the top of his leg as the leg flew away, charred meat. Never knew what hit him, as they say. Or maybe he had known. One awful microsecond of agony as his body blew into a million pieces. Maybe he’d have to feel that for all eternity. No. That would be too awful.

  Footsteps again, light, walking toward him. Don’t open your eyes this time. Just let him do what he’s going to do.

  The footsteps stopped. There was a long minute of silence, Spider trying not to breathe. Then a sudden sharp stab of pain in his infected hand. He rolled away instinctively and looked up. A huge vulture flapped its wings and screeched at him.

  The big birds were all around, six of them feeding on the bodies of his comrades. They all looked up at the sudden motion.

  Kill the bastards. He looked around for his rifle, but it was gone. There was his rucksack, but no rifle, no grenades. He crawled over to it and fished around inside. The grenades and ammunition were gone, and his Randall Made Fighting Knife, but there were still some cans of pop and beer and two boxes of C rations.

  He stood up and slung the rucksack over one shoulder, staggering. The birds hopped nervously. He could see ten or twelve bodies lying around with the strange random postures dead people ta
ke. One man was sitting up, slumped over, his hands still clasped under the pile of bluish intestines he’d been holding in.

  Their heads were all shattered, except for one who had no head. There was one lone leg that probably belonged to Moses. Smell of raw meat starting to spoil.

  Sarge was lying on his back, the front of his shirt slick with blood, completely saturated. He had also been shot in the mouth. A man next to him was curled up in a ball with no apparent wound except for the one that had sheared off the top of his head and sprayed his brains all over the grass.

  Spider vomited over and over, until nothing came out but acid mucus. Then he limped away, anywhere, just away. He knew he should look around for a weapon, but he didn’t care. He didn’t expect to live. He just wanted to die someplace else.

  He staggered a couple of hundred yards down the trail, collapsing three times. The third time, he didn’t stand up, but just dragged the rucksack and himself over to a big rubber tree. He leaned up against the tree and unclipped the water bag from the packframe. He washed his mouth out and drank some and it stayed down. Then he drank three beers in rapid succession and passed out as night began to fall. He didn’t hear the rolling thunder of artillery that proclaimed the official beginning of the Tet Offensive.

  Spider had always remembered two dreams from childhood, from second or third grade. In one of them, he was exploring through some woods and cautiously peeked from behind a bush and saw a glade full of prehistoric monsters. In the other, he was a soldier dying unattended on a muddy battlefield, probably Korea. Life was ebbing from him as wakefulness slips from a tired child. It felt noble and correct and terribly alone and sad.