1968 Read online

  The winter stars were impossibly high, Orion almost overhead. He knew the constellation under Orion was Lepus, the Hare, but there was a whole bunch of stuff under that one that he didn’t have the faintest idea about.

  The fire base started a mission, at least two guns, a faraway bang-bang … bang-bang. Spider shifted around to look in that direction. Sometimes you could see the artillery rounds fly overhead, swift dull red meteors.

  There was a faint sound like a champagne cork popping in the distance. Someone shouted “Incoming!” and for a moment Spider was puzzled. Our own artillery? Then other people picked up the cry and suddenly there were people running every which way. Someone tripped over Spider’s leg in the dark and went sprawling in a clatter of rifle and helmet, cursed, kept running. Spider got to one knee and tried to orient himself, which way was the bunker, where’s my M16? He put his helmet on just as the first round hit, off to the left about fifty yards, a smoky orange flash and a sharp loud bang and shrapnel hissing and whirring through the air. Spider dropped to the ground and crawled very fast toward the bunker, fuck the M16, let’s just get under something. He found the shelter just as the second round hit, much closer, and toppled into a tangle of arms and legs. The other three shifted around so there was room for all of them to keep their heads below ground level.

  Behind them came a spat sound, not as loud. “They got two,” Batman said. “A light mortar and a medium one.”

  “Are we okay down here?” Spider asked. Another spat, below and to the right, by the LZ.

  “Oh yeah we strack.” Spider translated Batman’s monotone into “Boy, I wish we had another layer of sandbags,” and agreed heartily. His mouth was cotton, his knees were water, he desperately wanted to pee, and his asshole was doing a dangerous flutter. Do people actually shit themselves if they get scared enough?

  In the bunker next to them the artillery forward observer was shouting into the radio. He wasn’t sure where the mortar was, he said, but take the last coordinates, drop a thousand, fire one HE, see what happens. Spider knew enough of the jargon to translate: he wanted a single high-explosive round put a thousand meters from our position, in the direction of the fire base.

  Two people who seemed to be in the same place were yelling for a medic. The heavy rounds started coming in like clockwork, every four seconds, walking across the camp from left to right. The light ones popped all around, sporadically, in syncopation.

  Then somebody yelled “Pig’s got ’em!” and an M60 started chattering, spraying a red-orange arc across the valley—every third round a tracer—at first playing it like a hose, and then settling down in a steady stream. An artillery round, one of ours, shrieked in and exploded in the valley. The forward observer yelled “Drop four hundred left two hundred fire for effect!”

  The enemy mortars stopped. The medic sprinted across to where one person was still crying out. Another machine gun joined the first and the light mortar squad sent a round over there, poink. It turned out to be an illumination round, crackling and sizzling under its parachute. There was no obvious movement on the hill, but they kept up the machine-gun fire.

  The fusillade had been fairly effective on the VC position. The children who had been firing the small antique mortar had probably escaped, but the other four men were caught in a rain of machine-gun fire while frantically disassembling the big Russian weapon. The lieutenant had been hit in the throat; another man had a shattered elbow.

  It was obvious that they would not be able to take the mortar with them. The lieutenant, coughing blood, unable to speak, was suddenly visible in the bobbing stroboscopic light from the illumination round. He made a waving motion, releasing the other three men: get down the hill while you can. Then, bullets spattering around him, blood streaming, he stood and took careful aim with his AK-47.

  It looked kind of pathetic from Spider’s bunker, the constant rain of orange fire being answered by a little line of green tracers. It must have looked more serious from the American target’s point of view, though; one of the M60s stopped.

  Then a salvo of artillery rounds came in right under the bobbing light: four, five, six, seven orange flashes and puffs of gray smoke. The forward observer confirmed that they were on target and asked for two woolly peter. Thirty seconds later, two white phosphorus shells crashed in, making impressive sprays of white smoke and fire just before the illumination round sputtered out. Then another three HE rounds, and another two, and silence.

  “We got ’em,” Batman said. “Can’t be nobody alive up there.”

  At that moment, he was wrong. The lieutenant, blood still pulsing from his throat, his eardrums shattered by the artillery blasts, his body torn by more than a dozen shrapnel wounds, was patiently trying to fit a fresh magazine into his AK-47. He was choking on blood and phosphorus fumes and two particles of phosphorus were burning their way into arm and forehead. He knew he had only seconds to live and was trying with every molecule of his will not to cry out, to die well. As he raised the rifle toward the American hill he felt no anger but only immense, hopeless sadness. He thought a prayer for his wife and children and pulled the trigger.

  From the American side it looked like a gesture of defiance, the green tracers flying every which way, to no effect. The action did bring in another five artillery rounds, but by the time they hit, there was no one left on the enemy hill alive.

  The VC would have been better off if they had fired one round and split. The first round caused the only serious casualty. A later round did score a direct hit on a bunker, but the structure held, and the men inside only suffered ringing in the ears and temporary incontinence. The earlier casualty was very serious, though: right leg blown off at the knee, left leg mangled, genitals history. He’d lost quarts of blood and was in deep shock. The medic said he needed a dustoff ASAP or the guy was meat.

  The captain was doubtful, nighttime and hostile fire, but said he’d try. He ordered the X-Rays down to the LZ with blinkers and purple smoke.

  Choppers

  No American who fought in Vietnam would ever be able to hear the sound of a helicopter throbbing without a sudden rush of remembered emotion, a compound of relief and anxiety. Usually helicopters came to save you. Sometimes they came to carry you to places you would rather leave alone.

  The time and place where Spider was fighting, most of the helicopters were UH-1 Hueys, “slicks.” These were general-purpose machines that ferried people and supplies around, and evacuated the wounded and dead. Some of them were turned into gunships, by adding on machine guns and rocket launchers, but the main gunship was the sleekly streamlined Cobra, with its Gatling-style minigun and automatic 40-millimeter grenade launcher and wing-pods full of rockets. The other common helicopter was the fat, ponderous Chinook, inevitably called a “shit-hook,” a flying boxcar that could deliver a whole company of men at once, albeit slowly and with a lot of noise. They were heavily armored on the bottom, out of necessity, because they drew a lot of attention and were easy to hit.

  Most of the men who flew Hueys loved them. They were nimble and fast as a sports car, if also as cantankerous. Some pilots developed a scary don’t-give-a-shit hotrod attitude—either confident of their immortality or certain they were going to die no matter what—and jumped at any mission, the hairier the better. One such cowboy was available in Kontum when the call came from Spider’s captain. He hauled his door gunner and another pilot—“crew chief”—out of the EM Club, beers in hand, and within five minutes they were sailing up into the hills, into the darkness.

  Chill

  Dear Spider,

  Here’s the map of the Southern constellations that you wanted. Boy, I had to Xerox it three times before it came out, all that black.

  It must be really neat to see stars you’ve never seen before. Does anybody in your platoon have binoculars you can use? I remember all the great stuff you showed me with your telescope that night last year, Jupiter and the O’Brien Nebula.

  I hope all that bullshit with the chem
istry department didn’t put you off science when you come back to college. You really ought to be an astronomer. Maybe an astronaut! I read in the paper the other day that NASA is taking guys with PhDs and teaching them how to be test pilots, so they can fly on the Apollo missions.

  Funny to think about you in the jungle this morning. I got caught downtown yesterday in a sudden blizzard and had to just leave my car and walk to a friend’s house. Nobody in Washington knows how to drive in the snow! It’s like it was a southern city that gets surprised every year. Anyhow I better close this and trudge back and see if the snow plow buried my car. Brrr! I’m gonna put some boots in the car for the next time this happens!

  Love,

  Beverly

  Road race

  The pilot’s name was Smeeps, but he wanted people to call him Fangio, after a racing-car driver he admired. They usually called him Fang. He had an overbite.

  Fang was in Operations, drinking coffee and trying to learn whist, when the dustoff call came in from Spider’s hill. No one would be ordered to fly a mission like that, but you could volunteer, and it was uncool not to. Fang tossed his cards in, wrote down the coordinates in his notebook, and checked the wall map. No sweat in this moonlight, he said; just follow Route 47 about fifteen miles south, then have them pop a flare. He went next door to the EM Club and asked Willy Joe if he’d like to go scrag some gooks. The door gunner put a couple of beers in his side pockets and followed him down to the pad. His crew chief Monsoon, actually a copilot, shrugged and came along, too. They’d left the slick set up, ready to crank; they had it in the air in less than a minute, flying at treetop level with no lights.

  Fang was among the best, but this mission was not quite the milk run he’d pretended it to be in Ops. The people in Ops knew that, of course, and so did Monsoon and Willy Joe, who leaned out the door with studied nonchalance, sober enough to be terrified. He sipped the warm beer while he scrutinized the flickering darkness of the treeline, waiting for the stream of tracers that would give him something to aim at: bright red or green balls that floated toward you with deceptive slowness. He’d seen them a few times, and twice the slick he was in had been hit, both times without doing major damage. It bothered him that he hadn’t known they’d been hit, either time, until they landed. But the rotor blades and his M60 made a lot of noise; more noise than a bullet popping through soft aluminum.

  Fang kept one eye on the elapsed time; when it looked like they’d gone about fifteen miles, he radioed the LZ for a flare to guide him in. They rogered that, but said they couldn’t hear the slick. That was weird. A few seconds later, Monsoon yelled Shit! loud in his earphones and punched him twice on the shoulder. Fang craned around and saw a dim flare hanging maybe ten miles away, behind and to the right.

  In the thin wash of moonlight, he’d picked up the wrong road. Cursing monotonously, he circled the machine around, climbing, and took a bearing on the flare as it faded. He stayed fairly high and told them he’d be about five minutes; pop another flare when they heard him approach. Then he muttered a line that Monsoon would make famous: “If that motherfucker bleeds to death I’ll kill him.”

  Lunacy

  Spider sat on the ground in the semi-darkness, M16 in his lap, turning the blinker over and over in his hands, looking up at the moon’s face, remembering the names of some dark areas: Oceanus Procellarum, Mare Tranquillitatus, the man-in-the-moon eye of Mare Crisium, and tiny Sinus Iridium. He could barely make out the ray system radiating from the crater Tycho, or maybe he just thought he could, since he remembered how it looked in a telescope. He was staring at the moon, naming its parts, in an unsuccessful attempt to take his mind off the shattered sobbing wreck of a man behind him, flanked by medics who murmured at him while he mourned his legs, his balls his cock, no no no no no no. He was quiet for a minute and then said in a strangled whisper, “Just shoot me. Please just shoot me. Once in the head.”

  Where was the fucking helicopter? That flare a minute ago had to have been to guide it in. Maybe it got shot down. That would be a bitch; this guy’s gonna die anyhow, or wish he was dead. Maybe somebody should just shoot him; maybe the medics ought to keep popping him morphine until he dies.

  Graves was bad enough, but all those dead bodies were just like cartoons of dying, compared to this. The real thing, real pain, a real person. Spider knew the guy from fire base, although he didn’t know his name. He was one of the guys with Bangkok pictures. Bang cock, Jesus. Two guys’ dicks blown off in two days.

  Oceanus Procellarum, sounds good, but what the hell does it mean? Ocean of Procells. Mare Serenitatis, the Sea of Serenity. Spider wondered whether he was going crazy. Anybody who didn’t go crazy with this shit going on must have been crazy before it started. So everybody is crazy and nobody can tell.

  One of the medics lit a joint and offered it to the wounded man. He didn’t pay any attention. He passed it to the other medic, who passed it to Spider. Spider took two big tokes, holding the second one in for as long as he could.

  He declined a third hit. The dope made him feel dizzy and even more tired. He chugged a Coke and ate a piece of jungle chocolate, which gave him a little bit of a compensating buzz.

  Finally, the faint throb of a helicopter beating its way over. After a minute, the mortar team popped an illumination round and the RTO shouted “Blinkers on.”

  The engineers and three other guys were positioned around the inside of the LZ with blinkers, small but powerful red lights that were shielded so as to be visible only from overhead. Shadows danced crazily as the illumination-round flare bobbed under its parachute.

  The helicopter got louder and the blades changed pitch. Moses yelled, “Pop smoke on the LZ?” The RTO shouted back, “No, he’s got you.” The flare sputtered out.

  Then there was a swirling gale and the dark bulk of the helicopter slid in front of the moon, louder and larger than any slick had ever seemed in the daytime. For a few seconds, hovering, it shined down a dazzling spotlight—Spider incongruously thought of the Lucas Lasers he’d installed in his Chevy’s brights—and, satisfied that the way was clear, dropped swiftly.

  The helicopter didn’t even land. It bobbed a foot off the ground, a few inches, while the two medics hoisted the wounded man aboard. He was struggling and screaming something, unintelligible over the whack-whack-whack of the blades. One of the medics got aboard, hauled into the red-lit darkness by the door gunner, and the slick shot straight up and banked away.

  As the sound faded, Spider reached down and tugged at his scrotum, an unconscious magical gesture that most of the other men were conjuring as well.

  THIRD WEEK

  Beverly’s sex life (3)

  Two weeks with Lee, and Beverly had done things the bare mention of which would have made her mother faint. Everything was equally new and different, and she was willing to try almost anything. She knew he would never hurt her on purpose, though sometimes her own inexperience, her tightness, caused pain. She was uncomfortable for a couple of days after the first time they enjoyed anal intercourse, the sphincter bruised and some pain deeper within, but in a way even that was nice; she could sit in class and take notes automatically while feeling the ghost of him hard inside her, plumbing, probing. He showed her how to practice for oral sex with a banana, to subvert the gag reflex, saying he’d learned it from a Berkeley student, a co-ed who was a part-time prostitute, which was mostly true, except for the co-ed part. The prostitute was male and had skipped college.

  In the dialectic of a slightly later period, people would say he was exploiting her mercilessly for sex, but in his own mind he was patiently, lovingly, initiating her into the mysteries of a sacred order.

  No one would deny that he had a lot of energy; most would give him credit for more positive qualities. He had actually gotten a job, three weeks of inside painting in an office building downtown. On weekends, he and Beverly put in ten- or twelve-hour days doing volunteer work for Martin Luther King’s upcoming Poor People’s March on Washington. The
y ran a hand-cranked mimeograph together, slipsheeting and collating, dead on their feet and feeling good about it.

  Police cars cruised slowly by the small shopfront, and at one time, for several days, a conspicuous white man in a suit walked by and peered in every couple of hours. Finally they all waved at him. He never came back. They knew that a lot of powerful people didn’t want a hundred thousand poor blacks descending on the Mall. “Martin better watch his ass,” Lee said once. “The pigs are gonna get him. If they want him dead, he’s dead. Just like they got JFK.”

  Lee was always saying things like that. It upset Beverly that he could be so cynical and nihilistic. But other times he was upbeat and almost childlike, exuberantly playful. His orthodontist father diagnosed him as a manic-depressive and had tried to get him into therapy, which was one reason he left California.

  Beverly and Lee felt especially virtuous, working on the 6th of January, most of Washington paralyzed by an 11-degree cold snap. That same day, five people, including Benjamin Spock, were indicted for “conspiracy to block the draft,” and, in a better part of town, the Reagan for President office quietly opened.

  Love letter

  Beverly didn’t want to tell the truth to Spider, and she didn’t want to lie:

  January 6th

  Dear Spider,

  Just a short note, I’m beat. Spent all day cranking a mimeograph. My new roommate Lee and I are working down at Martin Luther King’s Poor Peoples March office downtown. Lee’s pretty, has long hair, plays the guitar, kind of a hippy. I think you’ll like Lee.