I Pledge Allegiance Page 10

  “I am sweltering,” I say.

  “You’re always sweltering, man.”

  “Come on, Moses, you have to feel the difference. It’s like breathing through sponges.”

  “Yeah, it is a little more moist than usual.”

  The sky doesn’t have any of the range of colors we usually get during these early evening runs. There’s a gray-brown sameness to almost everything, the river and sky pressing together to sandwich us out of air entirely.

  I sit down on the small balcony of the mid-turret deck and take out the phone for another try. I go through the connection protocol for Ninth Division, Second Brigade, Thirty-fourth Artillery.

  “Man, why don’t you just be cool and wait for a call. You seem far too anxious. Gotta play hard to get.”

  “Listen,” I say, “he’s the only one I haven’t heard from. Of my three pals, right? The other two guys, at least they sent me letters….”

  He does what he thinks is an imitation of my voice, as if I were a seventy-year-old lady. “You never call me … you never write …”

  “I’m serious, Moses. It just seems even worse knowing that Ivan is right here, part of this very op. Ninth Division, Second Brigade, Thirty-fourth Artillery … and I can’t even get a call through to him.”

  I look to the rear to see the aft gunners have cast fishing lines. This is about as calm as things get here.

  I felt a lot less nervous when we were all just shooting.

  “Maybe it’s you,” Moses says. “Maybe you aren’t the great communicator after all. You should probably just give that job up, man, and follow your true calling.”

  “Which is?”

  “I saw you shooting, friend. Machine-Gun Mo should be your name. You were lovin’ it.”

  I shake my head. I feel my helmet wobble around. “Just doing my job. It helps me to think of my people out there. It helps to make sense of shooting people I don’t even know…. My brother’s enemy is my enemy, right?”

  Moses takes a long, slow suck on the saturated air. He looks off in the other direction from me, upriver.

  “That’s swell, Mo, it really is. Provided you know who your brother is.”

  I swivel my head around, smiling at him, adjusting my helmet again, checking him out. He’s not smiling.

  “You don’t know?” I ask.

  “Why do you think I’m up here at the very peak of harm’s way?”

  I shrug. “I thought you were ordered up here.”

  He pauses again. “I was. But I would’ve volunteered anyway. Experience tells me I don’t want nobody behind me with a gun.”

  I try again. “Camaraderie? Allies?”

  Now he smiles. “Mo, I have met some Vietnamese people who I wouldn’t mind having a beer with. I have also met some Australian sailors who I would gladly shoot if the Navy would let me.”

  This is making me sad. This is a situation I have not pondered. Some part of me swallowed that whole brothers-in-arms ideal that they started feeding us on the first day of basic, and I feel a little bit like a stupid kid to be finding out it was maybe a fairy tale.

  “So you don’t trust anybody?” I ask.

  He looks disappointed in me now. As if, while he was damaging my idealism, I was spoiling his cynicism, and neither one of us is happy with the outcome.

  “Okay, I trust you. Happy now?”

  Do I make myself a sap forever now if I say yes, in fact, I am, thank you very much, Moses?

  It’s not the biggest risk I’ve taken this year.

  “Yes, in fact, I am, thank you very much, Moses.”

  He tries to be stern, I try to be perky. My helmet tips once more over my eyes and Moses laughs.

  “Your head isn’t even big enough to make that helmet sit up, man,” he says, as if that proves how unqualified I am for everything.

  One of the two fishermen pulls in something substantial and there’s some quiet excitement at the back of the boat. From my perch it looks like some golden-green slimy species I’ve never seen, but in size and feistiness it closely resembles the really big bluefish that would run in abundance off the coast of Massachusetts in August. That kind of fish is so delicious, I’m welling up with saliva at the thought. Beck and I, too young to know any better, used to refuse to eat when our dads brought them home, a war and a world and a warp away from here.

  The fisherman, Foley, holds his rod way up while the fish fights to get free. He swings it around just far enough that the other guy, Marchand, gets a good close-up.

  Marchand, sitting behind the machine gun that sits beside the flamethrower, waits just long enough, leans sideways, then whooosheshoosh — with a spray that lasts all of an eighth of a second, he fires the flamethrower, and flame broils that fish into something Godzilla wouldn’t pick his teeth with.

  The smell is acrid, sharp, right past my sinuses and directly up into my brain, even from this distance. The heat, even off that little blast, even in the middle of the heat we already have, is stunning.

  The flaming fish drops off the line and back where he came from, unrecognizable to his best friends.

  “Jeez,” I say, rolling onto my back away from it.

  I’m looking right up into Moses’s satisfied smile. He’s pointing at the flamethrower.

  “That’s what I want a crack at,” he says.

  “What’s in that stuff?”

  “Napalm, baby. Basically, it’s highly flammable fuel blended with chemicals that make it thicker, like a gel. So you can shoot it straighter. And it sticks a lot better to the lucky recipients.”

  “Flaming syrup,” I say.

  “Close. More like Vaseline Gasoline.”

  Moses makes his hungry noise.

  I look up and all around. The air is definitely changing. It’s moving. One way, then back again, then down like an elevator gone crazy.

  “There’s a storm coming,” Cap calls from his spot up front.

  I scramble down to the communications shelter, which everybody now just calls The Patio. I try hard to locate Ivan.

  These mad storms always make it even harder.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Saps and Sappers

  It turns out we carry eleven hundred gallons of the stuff on board.

  It turns out when they tell you a storm is coming in Vietnam, a storm is coming.

  It turns out my man Ivan is stationed on a self-propelled barracks ship called Benewah that I have probably passed by eighty different times on my way up- or downriver. When I finally do track him through channels upon channels, I find that I could almost have reached him easier by standing on top of the main turret and shouting his name.

  Which I can’t do now because we’re in the company of the lovely Typhoon Elaine.

  “Ivan!” I scream into the radio phone while we try desperately to get ourselves docked and back into quarters before the worst of it hits. “Ivan, Ivan, Ivan, man, is it really you?”

  “No,” he says very quietly for the conversation’s requirements. “I just left a minute ago. Of course it’s me, man. Jeez, it’s good to hear you.”

  “It’s great to hear you,” I shout over the thunder, the wind, and the rain that’s like some god of water picking up the ocean and dumping it over us over and over again. Just the general maritime, wartime mayhem, only spiced with my first-ever typhoon. “That is, it would be great to hear you, if I could hear you. You have to shout, Ivan.”

  “I don’t wanna shout. Sorry.”

  “What are you talking about? You love to shout. You shout over nothing. You shout when the Patriots don’t protect the quarterback — which is every play. You shout at the movies when the action slows down too much. You shout at hamburgers if they don’t have mustard on them. Ivan, pal, it’s been months. If you don’t shout at me right now, I swear I’m gonna smack ya down.”

  He doesn’t shout. But he does laugh such a real and crystal laugh, it actually clears the phone connection.

  “What’s so funny?” I say, though I couldn’t possibl
y care as long as he keeps it up.

  “The thought of you getting tough with me.” He lets the laugh taper off, and a little silence roll in.

  Thunder wallops. Lightning strikes probably less than a klick away.

  “How are ya, Morris?” he asks.

  “They call me Mo here,” I say.

  He laughs even harder.

  “I won’t be calling you Mo.”

  “I wouldn’t be letting you.”

  I have to wait again. “I tried to get tough again there, didn’t I?” I say.

  “Yeah,” he replies through storm crackle and cackle. “And keep it coming. Laughs are a valuable commodity, Morris.”

  “They are, pal. We can’t be long, but I’m dying to hear how you’re doing. Why haven’t you been writing to me? “

  There’s another pause.

  “You know I don’t like to write.”

  “No, Ivan, I don’t know that. Anyway, even Rudi wrote to me a couple of times.”

  “He wrote to me, too.”

  “Great. Excellent. How was that?”

  “Great,” he snaps. “Beck, too.”

  “Beck, he’s probably writing from an office in the Pentagon, pretending he’s over here.”

  “Probably,” Ivan says.

  The line cracks and kicks, out, then back again.

  “We have to cut this short,” I say, “but now that we’re neighbors, we’re going to see how to get together somewhere for an hour someplace. Maybe have a steak.”

  “Army doesn’t have much steak,” he says.

  “Navy has all the steak,” I laugh.

  “No wonder everybody hates you.”

  “That’s probably it.”

  More cracks, more lightning. Cap is shouting for all hands as we near the docking.

  “I have to go, Ivan. I’ll get back to you. I’ll see you. I really want to see you. You okay? I mean of course you’re okay. You okay?”

  “Yeah,” Ivan says in an un-Ivan, unemotional tone that’s new to me. “I kill people, man. I’m pretty good at it.”

  The line hangs up for us. I stare for a second until Cap calls again, and I run up out of my communications shelter that really isn’t a shelter at all, into the storm.

  Elaine turns out to be a storm like nothing I’ve seen in my life. I thought the biggest meteorological event a guy could experience would be the big nor’easter snowstorms that hit New England in winter, but I’d do a week of those before I’d endure one of these things again. The volume of rain and the ferocity of the wind are the kind of things you might see in Boston once in your life, but if you did, you would see it for about fifteen minutes. A typhoon blows in and hangs around like the most disgusting uninvited houseguest ever.

  At the end of our patrols, crews like us stay on great sea floats moored at stations up and down the Mekong. They started appearing when the Navy decided we were better off being self-sufficient and untouchable, rather than having to do any extra back-and-forthing inland for stuff. Whole floating towns materialized, and ours is this long T-shaped solid dock with seven great barges attached that serve as everything from sleeping quarters to mess hall to supply depot. At any one time they can have a whole flotilla of craft moored up, from a tanker to swift boats and Coast Guard cutters to troop transports or little minesweeping drones that look like heavily armored kayaks.

  When Elaine sweeps in to kick our butts, all these craft are there, and more.

  She wreaks havoc. We lose power. A security tower crashes right down into the river. The whole entire top tears right off our mess hall. Boats pull loose and travel on their own for miles downriver. Some of the smaller ones flip right up onto land.

  And all the while the rain falls like something out of the Bible. I see guys standing in the river, keeping drier in the silt than out of it.

  The only thing even somewhat preventing this from being hell is that for three days Elaine is the only thing we’re fighting. And while she is the tougher fight, and we actually lose badly, at first there’s a place deep inside me that enjoys losing this fight more than winning the other one.

  By the third day, though, I feel different. When we’re collecting, cleaning, and repairing rather than fighting any foe at all, I very suddenly want to shoot again.

  We’re on a recovery trip, like we’ve made dozens of times already. We’re towing a stray PBR, which stands for Patrol Boat, River. These boats are the speed and the sense of all the ops here in the Mekong, and while there are scores of new and improvised task craft here all the time, these are the guys we see every time out, spearheading everything.

  The PBR’s four-man crew are all sitting like holiday pleasure boaters on the front lip of the boat as we tow them up at their much slower than usual pace. The storm left the boat unworkable, which will only last until we get them back to the maintenance float and they will be scouring the river at high speed once —

  Pu-boooooom …

  That is one explosion. I turn quickly toward the PBR from my perch.

  Pu-boooooom …

  The first explosion is bad, leaving only three crew members — or parts of them — stuck clinging to the front rail. One guy hangs on with his one arm, the other one liquidated. Two guys flop on the deck.

  The second explosion finishes the work, taking these remains of sailors and belting them from the opposite side.

  It reminds me a little of the nature program where the orca whales take the seals and throw them back and forth for fun before finishing off the poor bloody blobs. One blast knocks them one way, then the other back again, the second one creating an absolute fountain of heads and legs and cross sections of torsos, loads of foamy blood topping off the massive column of brown water.

  In twenty seconds, it’s almost as if they were never there.

  It takes me less than thirty more to convince myself that they never were.

  Bad dreams are bad, but they are only dreams.

  Debris floats in the water while the crew of my boat stares, uniformly numb. Debris. But there’s always debris in the Mekong River.

  The whole time, we weren’t fighting Typhoon Elaine. The whole time, the war wasn’t suspended. While we were playing River Rat Boy Scout games, their swimmers, sappers, were operating as usual. Tying off mines along the riverbed, attaching limpet mines to boat hulls like big evil barnacles that would explode once the swimmers were safely away.

  The whole time, it was business as usual underneath the river. Of course, they know their land and water and storm better than we do.

  I feel the need to talk to my friends.

  I feel the need to shoot somebody.

  But in what order?

  Not that that’s a choice for me. The need for revenge is strong, and every fighting man in the service suffers from these sneak attacks, these clever bombs and daring sabotage raids, and every one of us makes noise about teaching the sneaky cowards a good and proper lesson. Lemme at ’em.

  Then we inhale, and exhale, and slip into the water to do the only thing we can do. We collect the men, the bits and pieces of them. We tell them we are sorry, we tell them we will do everything humanly possible. And we tell ourselves we know that isn’t very much.

  All this firepower, and vulnerable as infants.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Vaseline Gasoline

  It makes too much sense. Eventually, my grand design would melt all over itself. Operation Overlord, where I’m looking out for my friends from my place of vision and vigilance, is a great idea. If only I were capable.

  The more natural outcome would have the brilliant Beck looking out for all of us. And more and more that seems to be what we have.

  Hey Pal,

  Remember how I took care of you when you were on the USS Boston, getting you bombed and sent home to the real Boston for a vacation? Well, I’m at it again. Sometimes it seems to me like I am over here expressly for the purpose of watching over your shoulder, looking for anything I can do to make your life a little more pleasant
or less dangerous.

  Guess what they’re having me do now. Pruning. Weeding. Making the banks of the Mekong a more Morris-friendly place to play.

  Seriously. I am spraying defoliant. Operation Ranch Hand, they call it. I am spraying this wicked concoction called Agent Orange that basically burns the crap out of all the green life growing all around the rivers, up through most of Vietnam and Laos. We kill their crops to make them weak, and we kill their cover so we can get a clear shot at them.

  Morris, I’ve seen it. I’ve seen the before and the after. It looks like a forest fire has swept through the banks of rivers for three hundred yards either side. Then you hit the Cambodian border, and it’s as if someone opened a door from the death planet into the Amazon forest.

  You’re welcome.

  Don’t get killed, Morris. Don’t waste all my fine work.

  Have you heard from Ivan? I haven’t. Not one word since basic training, when he told me he was going infantry instead of cavalry because he wanted that “human touch.” My guess is he’s giving them a lot of touch, but very little humanity.

  I don’t like the silence, though. If he weren’t Ivan, I’d be worried. I saw a local on a sampan the other day stick a fish with a spear. Reminded me of a bluefish. I’d love a piece of blue right now.

  Can you talk to Rudi? See if you can radio him, will you? He says he’s doing great. He writes once in a while now. Looks like he’s writing with a crayon stuck up his nose while he eats at the same time. But at least he writes. He sounds confident. Yeah, I know.

  Guys here never talk about winning and losing and all that. They talk about accumulated time, sorties and landings, tonnage, time, time, time.

  What are your days like now? A lot hotter than Boston, or Boston, am I right? Try to talk to Rudi.

  Your Man in the Sky

  Mail reading time isn’t anywhere near as organized an event as it was on the Boston. Partly, I guess, because of the more disjointed nature of life down here in the delta. Every layer of existence is wilder and more chaotic than it was when we were cruising at a stately pace way out there on the coast. We have big mother helicopters swooping low all the time, landing everywhere, beating the bushes for the enemy, dropping supplies, picking strays up out of the water. Lots of these smaller river craft have their own makeshift helipads tacked right onto the boats, a sturdy and fixed version of my canvas sun shield. We come off the boat like a factory ship, we work with hundreds of other boats, thousands of other guys. We work with all the other services.