1968 Read online

  The going was easier at first, uphill, because it was easier to keep your balance, leaning slightly forward with the pack on your back. But it got steeper. Spider had to use his free hand sometimes to haul himself up, trying to grab a root or vine rather than a venomous snake.

  The extra physical effort was distracting, though, and after an hour or so Spider was less nervous, even though they were working ever deeper into Charlie’s Country. There were occasional sparkles of blue sky in the canopy overhead, so they must be getting close.

  Then suddenly Homer flopped to the ground and stared silently back at Spider, making a patting motion: get down! Spider repeated the actions.

  God, his body was making a racket. Breath rasping, heart hammering. He strained to hear what was going on up ahead, but knew that was futile. Anything important that happened would be plenty loud.

  He felt a bug on his calf, under the pants leg, and quietly flicked it. It wiggled but didn’t move away. He carefully raised up the loose fabric and sickened when he saw a leech, gorged with black blood, the size of his finger. He must have picked it up in the water.

  He’d heard that you were supposed to apply the end of a cigarette to the thing’s head, to make it let go, but nobody’d been smoking. He eased the Zippo out of his pocket and spun up a flame and held it to the creature, which slid off with no agility and tried to wiggle into the brush. Spider crushed it with his boot heel. Blood trickled from where it had been attached.

  Homer was whispering, “Cool it! Cool it, asshole,” and Spider realized how much noise he’d been making in his panic. Just a blood-sucking worm, nothing to get all dramatic about. He looked down for the thing’s squashed remains and was not happy to see that it wasn’t there anymore.

  Homer eased to his feet and Spider followed suit. The blood was still trickling but he didn’t feel the wound. The thing must inject some sort of anesthetic before it bites.

  After a couple of minutes the compost rot smell of the forest took on a new component, sickening, that Spider recognized immediately. Add a little Lysol and you’d have the holding room at Graves. Homer stopped as the man in front of him worked his way back and whispered in his ear. Then Homer backed down and transferred the message: “We’re gonna move into a circle around this clearing. Watch out for boobytraps.” Spider passed it on down. Homer was clambering off to the left, so he did too, trying to maintain an interval and study every square inch of ground at the same time. He passed by two shellholes, raw craters of fresh dirt.

  He heard it before he saw it, flies buzzing. The roadkill stench was suffocating in the still air. He moved toward the light.

  The clearing was like something out of a gruesome fifties EC comic, the kind he’d hid from his parents. The bottom part of a man’s body lay next to a rifle. Animals had been disputing over it, and intestines were strung all over the clearing. Spider’s practiced eye identified a gnawed liver and heart. He could only locate one arm, fingers chewed off. A head with the cheeks torn out stared at the sky, eyes clotted with insects. He heard two people retching and had to swallow hard himself. Pretty fucking gross.

  The sergeant broke into the clearing, looking at the ground, and lit a cigarette. “Smoke ’em if you got ’em,” he said. Spider fumbled for a Camel.

  “RTO?” The radioman came up behind him, pale. “Tell ’em we got two November Victor Alpha Kappa India Alpha.” Two NVA killed in action. “Enough blood an’ guts for two, anyhow.” He looked around, picked up the dead man’s AK-47, tossed it to the ground, and inspected the mortar tube, which was still standing but was full of holes. “Tell ’em we got a mortar, I guess 82 Mike Mike Sov or Chicom, and a Alpha Kappa Four Seven, both inoperable.” He took a deep drag, looking around. When the RTO stopped transmitting, he said, “Request permission to place mines and withdraw. Let’s get outa this fuckin’ place.”

  The rush of nicotine, combined with everything else, almost made Spider faint. The clearing glowed and shimmered. The revolting smell changed, still a little sickening but sort of like food, like pork chops frying. The sergeant did a remarkable thing: unbuttoning his fly, he walked over to the corpse’s head; he pulled out a big stiff black dick and picked up the head, rotated it, and found the mouth … Spider clenched his eyes shut and shook his head violently.

  When he opened his eyes, the sergeant was toeing the head, hands in his pockets. “Poor bastard,” he said.

  Shit, I’m losing it, Spider thought. A couple of puffs of marijuana could do that? Better stay away from it.

  “Sarge, they say we gotta DX the enemy ordnance, or hump it back.”

  “Sure, we’re gonna hump this shit back.” The mortar with its plate weighed more than a hundred pounds. “X-Ray? Get your ass up here.”

  Spider moved into the clearing, stepping carefully over dirt-crusted intestines.

  “You wanna blow this shit? Give it about a two-minute fuse.” He threw down his cigarette after using it to light another one. “Homer and Stick, get a couple shovels and get up here.” To Spider: “You set up the plastic and I’ll check it out after we do the mines.”

  Spider slid out of his rucksack and opened the demo bag. He had only a vague idea of what to do, but he supposed a stick of C-4, one kilogram, would be enough. No way they could reuse that mortar anyhow. He jammed the top end full of the white stuff.

  He took the coil of red time fuse out of the demo bag, measured off two feet, and cut it. Then he took a deep breath and opened the green cardboard box of blasting caps.

  Blasting caps made him nervous. The one part of his demolition training that really stuck with him was the pictures they passed around of hands with freshly missing fingers and one guy with his jaw and nose blown off from crimping a cap with his teeth.

  The box was full. He had to pick one out with his fingernails. The cold touch of the clean metal was electric. He had a vision of his hands as bloody stumps, and almost dropped the box. That would be cool. He folded the box closed and returned it to the bag.

  He tried to remember the ritual. Inspect the open end of the cap, tap it over your wrist, blow into it gently, slip the fuse into it gently, make sure it’s all the way in, and gently squeeze it closed with the crimpers. Then poke a hole in the plastic explosive with the pointy end of the crimpers and slide the cap in.

  The AK-47 was covered with blood and had most of a lung sticking to the stock. He picked it up by the magazine, which was reasonably clean, scraped the lung tissue off with his foot, and was able to balance it on top of the muzzle of the mortar. That would surely blow it in two.

  He looked around. Sarge and the other two had buried their mines and were camouflaging them. The RTO was over at the corpse’s head, sawing an ear off with his knife. He put it in his pocket. Then the second ear, which he licked and put into his mouth.

  Spider sat down hard, his face in his hands. Cold sweat trickled down his ribs. He looked at the RTO again and he was just pushing the head around with a stick. It still had both its ears.

  “Pretty tough shit for a new guy,” Sarge said, inspecting Spider’s handiwork. “Funny arrangement, but I guess it’ll work. Why don’t you go on down and get in line. I’ll light the fuse when we get clearance.”

  “Thanks.” Spider saddled up and headed for the treeline, not looking back. God knows what he’d see.

  The men had lined up in the same order as before, facing downhill. Spider found his place behind Homer and sat down, leaning back against the rucksack in a half-comfortable position, and lit a fresh cigarette off his old one. He opened a Coke to help settle his stomach. Only one left now. He’d heard two slicks come in to the LZ while they were humping, though; maybe they brought fours and fives.

  Was he going nuts? There wasn’t anybody he dared talk to about it. The sergeant fucking that head and the RTO eating the ear were just as real-looking as anything around him now. Maybe all this would go away, too, if he could close his eyes long enough.

  Sarge hustled down the line saying laconically, “Fire in
the hole, fire in the hole, fire in the hole. Let’s get the fuck outa here.” Everybody got to their feet and followed him fast.

  After a couple of minutes a loud bang echoed through the valley, along with a whirring sound that must have been the AK, or part of it, trying for orbit. They worked their way downhill for about ten minutes more and then the word came up to stop, take a five-minute break in place. Spider could hear four or five people working out to the right and left, he supposed as listening posts.

  He gratefully slumped to the ground and sorted through his rucksack. Beans and franks would be okay cold. He opened the can and mixed in some Tabasco sauce.

  “God, you can eat after that?” Homer whispered.

  “Hungry.”

  “Yeah, you’re the guy from Graves. That must do something to ya.”

  “I guess it does.” He looked straight at Homer because he didn’t like what he’d glanced in the can. Shit and crawling worms. “You gotta eat, though.” He took a bite and it tasted like beans and franks.

  “Not as bad as that up there,” Spider continued, nodding uphill. “You can get used to almost anything, I guess. But we never had anybody get his dick shot off or lose both legs.”

  “Yeah, well, those are the first two casualties we’ve had in weeks. I guess the law of averages ought to keep us safe for a while.”

  Spider knew from reading Analog that there was no such thing as a “law of averages”; that the probability of one independent event didn’t affect the probability of another. If they had killed a few thousand enemy soldiers, that would reduce the probability of an attack tonight. Killing one, and making as much noise as the bombing of London, might have the opposite effect. It could draw attention to them.

  But he didn’t say anything. Nobody likes a smartass.

  Some day he ought to make a list of the valuable things he’d learned in the army. Nobody likes a smartass. How to use a floor waxer. How to break an egg with one hand. How to burn shit; just knowing that you could burn shit. Hospital corners on a tight bunk. How to roll socks. All that stuff about guns and knives was interesting, but wouldn’t be very useful in civilian life, unless you took a job with the Mafia.

  The humping back to camp was more relaxed, though Spider had a feeling it shouldn’t have been. If the enemy hadn’t heard them crashing through the woods, he certainly would have heard the C-4 blowing up. Of course, Charlie didn’t usually come out during the day. Sneaky little bastards. Smart little bastards!

  All the way down one hill and up the next, Spider intermittently felt a sniper’s sights on his back. But at least he didn’t see anything else interesting.

  Schizophrenia (1)

  1968 was not a simple time for people to be seeing things that weren’t there. There were legions of people going out of their way, breaking laws while building bridges, or walls, seeking out constructive, revealing hallucinations—but others who were just plain nuts. Or mentally ill. Or temporarily unable to cope with stress in a socially acceptable way.

  The medic who gave Spider a couple of tokes from his joint may or may not have been smoking straight marijuana; he may or may not have known exactly what he was smoking. A lot of dope in Vietnam was seasoned with opium, horse tranquilizer, speed, or heroin, any of which might cause one to see odd things. Twelve hours later? Who knows? Every body’s different.

  Schizophrenia. An ordinary Joe who was walking down the street and saw a man eating eyeballs out of his hand or heard voices telling him to jump naked from the Empire State Building would probably seek medical help. He would be diagnosed as schizophrenic.

  But Spider, like most laymen at that time, would never have applied the term “schizophrenia” to those symptoms, or his. He thought it meant “split personality,” but it never had. Schizophrenia was a term applied to people who exhibited some of a cluster of related symptoms, including visual and auditory hallucinations—and olfactory ones, like smelling pork chops when there aren’t any around. Not all schizophrenics had dramatic symptoms, though; some just acted foolish or stopped acting at all; withdrew, became lumps.

  It was hard to get two scientists to agree on what caused schizophrenia. Some thought it was strictly biochemical. Others blamed the genes or the environment. The diet or gross brain malformation or a bad child/mother relationship. A few said that schizophrenia was not a disease or even a maladaptation, but simply a reasonable response to an insane world.

  One minor school of thought related schizophrenia to body shape. They would have loved Spider, because he was a perfect asthenic: lean with long limbs, long face, narrow trunk. You did see more asthenics than roly-poly types in the schizo wards.

  Spider’s hallucinations of corpse sodomy and cannibalism might not have put him in that ward, though, depending on the clinician who examined him. Hallucinations can be precipitated by fatigue and emotional stress, both of which he had in abundance, even without having smoked marijuana of unknown provenance. If he kept seeing such things “back in the World,” he would be in trouble.

  He didn’t feel he had to worry about that, though. Unwittingly agreeing with his replacement Lee, Spider was absolutely convinced that he would never leave Vietnam alive.

  Wired

  When the patrol had worked up to the top of the hill, they found their way blocked by Slinkies from hell. Two strands of concertina barbed wire, like the fire base had. Concertina gave a quick way of putting up temporary barbed-wire entanglements to slow down an enemy charge. Each strand was a more or less taut spiral of metal, covered with rusty spikes, encircling the camp, a sadistic giant version of the child’s toy. The two strands together made, effectively, a metal bramble bush about six feet thick.

  Its springiness was its strength. A direct hit from a mortar round or grenade wouldn’t break it; it would just bounce. If the enemy snuck up in the middle of the night and snipped it with wire cutters, it would embarrass him with a loud sproing! You couldn’t charge through it or over it—not until bodies piled up deeply enough to weigh it down and make a bridge, which was uncommon.

  There was a gate of sorts around on the other side of the hill, the place where the two ends of the coils had been joined together. A man with pliers and heavy gloves opened the circle so they could come in, and closed it back up behind them.

  Spider trudged back to his area. The other engineers and Freeling, the rifleman Sarge had excused, were relaxing with beer and soft drinks. Spider’s fours & fives were stacked on top of the bunker. He dumped his pack and opened a beer.

  “You were the lucky one,” Killer said, holding up both hands wrapped in bandages. “That concertina’s a bitch.”

  “Yeah; looka me.” Batman held up uninjured hands. “Gloves.”

  “Too hot,” Killer groused.

  “Heard you found a couple bodies,” Freeling said.

  “Just one.” Spider flopped down and leaned against the bunker. “Enough blood an’ guts for two, but I think it was just one, got blown to pieces by artillery.”

  “Take any pictures?” Killer said.

  “Didn’t think of it.” Spider had an Instamatic that Beverly had sent him.

  “Guess you’ve seen worse,” Freeling said. “Guys say you come from Graves.”

  “I don’t know.” Spider sipped the beer. “Maybe this was about the worst. I guess it’s easier when they bring ’em to you in bags. And it was an old guy. It got to my head.”

  “Your head?” Moses said.

  “Hard to explain.” Sure, tell them about the guys fucking and eating the corpse. “Some animals had got to him. Also I was feelin’ kinda nauseous from last night, smoked some kinda shit with the medics, that didn’t help much.”

  “You’re not used to it?” Batman said.

  “Huh uh. Couple of times.” Once, actually, at a party with Beverly. He hadn’t liked it, which was why he hadn’t smoked at Graves. Almost everyone else did. “It’s not my bag. Oh.” He unbuckled the shoulder harness and handed the Magnum to Killer. “Thanks.”

&nbs
p; “Sure.” Killer set it carefully on top of his pack. “No new rifles came in. I was on the LZ for both of the slicks.”

  “Well, shit. I wonder how long it takes.”

  Freeling stood up and brushed himself off, to no visible effect. “Don’t hold your breath. If I was you I’d stock up on grenades.” He found his weapon and helmet. “Better get back. See you guys.”

  “Not for long, asshole,” Batman said.

  “Short!” Freeling squawked, high-pitched like a big bird. “Short! Short!”

  “Twelve days, they ought to just send him back,” Moses said. “How long does it take to outprocess?”

  “I don’t know,” Batman said. “Tell you in eighty-nine days.”

  Killer lit a cigarette off his old one. “He was really blown apart?”

  “Yeah, really. We don’t have to talk about it, do we?”

  “Musta been somethin’ else,” Batman said, “gross out the Spider.”

  “Like I say, different.” Spider upended the can, drained the beer in two gulps, and then stretched out with the rucksack as a pillow, steel helmet tipped over his eyes. “Wake me up for the next truce.”

  Truces

  The next truce was going to be for the Tet holiday, three weeks away, and Spider would be awake.

  The previous truce, the New Year’s one a week before, hadn’t been all that peaceful. The Americans recorded eighty-two Viet Cong violations of the thirty-six-hour “stand-down,” the most impressive of which was a human wave attack on a Tay Ninh camp on January 3rd, where twenty-seven Americans were killed and over two hundred wounded, in an action that began six hours before the end of the truce—or eighty minutes before the end, according to the Viet Cong. The two sides never agreed on much.