I Pledge Allegiance Page 11

  Life here is less majestic than on the big gliding cruiser I was on in a past life. It’s faster, less intimate, less like a neighborhood, more like a freeway. If you have one of those helicopter pads on your roof, an approaching rotor could mean anything when it lands.

  Ivan’s home, the Benewah, has one of those pads.

  I’ve neither seen nor heard from Ivan since the typhoon. He’s out there. I’m following along as best I can, tracing the Thirty-fourth Artillery movements as best I can. They’re still at it, but he’s not turning up on any lists, so he’s no casualty.

  Like Beck said, though, you’d worry if he wasn’t Ivan. Right?

  Meanwhile, you don’t need a reason to worry about Rudi. I get another letter from him.

  Morris Man,

  So you did it. You finally joined the action. This is great. Now I don’t have to do all the fighting for the two of us anymore. Laugh. I’m just kidding. Actually, I’m fighting for about fifty of us. No fooling, Morris. I have to tell you something, and I want you to believe me.

  I am not leaving the Marines when this is over.

  I belong here. How many times you figure a guy hears his name called in his whole lifetime? I don’t know, either, but ask Beck, ‘cause he will probably know the number and then you will have the number of times I hear my name shouted out every single day.

  Half of it is for the wrong things.

  You know what that means?

  Exactly right. Half the time men are screaming my name out here AND IT IS ALL FOR THE RIGHT THINGS! I mean it, man. And even when I don’t hear the right kind of screaming, I go and do something screwy on purpose, just to hear my name being screamed.

  Morris, I am getting an addiction to screaming. Laugh.

  I make whole villages scream and they don’t even know who I am.

  I am going to tell you another something. Okay? I killed a man. Charlie, VC, right? I killed Charlie. Nothing special, since I kill guys all the time now. But this is a story. I shoot ’em, and I grenade ’em and all that. But this one, we were patrolling and he surprised me because, jeez, these guys — they are like cats and you step right on them in that jungle before you know they are there. I did, too. I really, truly stepped on him.

  Hah. Back home what if I stepped on somebody, like I did lots of times? People call me names, smack me in the head, pee on my lunch, right?

  But here my actions make sense. I step on him, he jumps right up, I turn and don’t let him raise his weapon. Morris, I stabbed him. With my bayonet, right below the belt. I was scared, but I was all energy, too, yeah, so I stick that bayonet in there, and I work it on him like I’m using a great big bread knife on some day-old crusty scali bread. You remember that scali bread, Morris, we used to get day old from Boschetto’s? It was so good, but man it was tough cutting.

  Right, I cut and I cut until he falls back, falls off my knife, and lands on his seat. He sits a few tics, his hands holding his stomach like he can hold it all in when it’s already almost all out. He looks up at me, kind of like crying, but I can’t really read these guys’ faces, Morris, and he is staring up and I am staring down.

  And then the shouting starts. My other guys, the three excellent guys on my patrol, they catch up, standing behind me, and they start chanting my name like whisper-chanting it so as not to attract attention. Ruu-Dee, Ruu-Dee, Ruu-Dee.

  So I do what you do. I don’t think. (You know I’m good at that.)

  I do the whole thing again. Only to his throat.

  With the guys chanting “Rudi, Rudi,” I stick Charlie just under one ear. I start sawing and I have to even angle to keep him upright but I do it and I mean to stop at his Adam’s apple but the chanting doesn’t stop so I doesn’t stop.

  I cut off almost his whole head. I did that. Me.

  I never could have done that back home, that’s for sure.

  The guys went to continue patrol, but I told them I would catch up. I sat down next to Charlie. I just felt like I needed to sit right next to him for a little bit. So I did.

  I told him I was sorry. And I thanked him.

  How are you doing?

  Once you stop being afraid, everything will be okay. Trust me.

  Your pal,

  Rudi

  “You sharing?” Moses says, curling cross-legged on the floor of my communications patio. If I have a friend here and now, it’s Moses. I get along with everybody, but there’s getting along, and there’s Moses, and that’s about all I can manage. We have a language of approach when one of us is reading mail. The sweetness-and-light letters and packages are the ones you want to share, so you can see your happiness in the other guy’s face. The difficult stuff — the stuff that is too complicated, sad, infuriating — when a guy reads that, he almost always takes on the glazed, mummified look.

  “Sharing or staring?” becomes the question.

  When I remain silently looking at Rudi’s letter, the question kind of answers itself.

  Really, he just wanted to share anyway.

  Moses shoves a photo in my face. There is a pair of hands holding up a baby too tiny to hold its own head up. The baby is wearing a tiny T-shirt, which looks like a dress and has print down the front reading SOMEBODY IN VIETNAM LOVES ME.

  I’m staring again, but now it’s a whole different thing.

  I look over, and his eyes are so filled with water, he looks like he might have glaucoma.

  “You’re a father, Moses?” I say.

  “Apparently so.”

  I actually giggle, feeling something so nice, even one degree removed.

  “Well, go ahead and cry, stupid,” I say.

  “I will not,” he says, all butch and ridiculous. “And if you call me stupid again, I’m gonna napalm you worse than that fish.”

  Before he can do that, we get a call on the radio and I take it. We are to haul it as fast as we can, because there is the mother of all firefights and there is blood, US Army blood, Navy blood, spilling and filling this very river. We’ve been headed to base, but command says to reverse upriver and full-speed it to the fight.

  Full speed for this craft is unfortunately not more than six knots, but we give it our all to cover the six-kilometer distance.

  It’s all happening in a kind of slow motion. Everybody gets to battle stations as soon as I let out the shout.

  Captain snags the radio from me and starts banging back and forth with command.

  Guys are flying all over the boat. We shift sandbags and ammunition into best position to kill and not be killed in the most efficient manner possible. You can smell adrenaline like creosote in the air. I pass by a couple of the other guys, a machine gunner, a mortar man shuttling shells to his pit, and we graze each other, a little bump, a bigger bump.

  It becomes a thing, a weird and unacknowledged and unplanned manner of communication between guys who ain’t doin’ no talkin’. It’s deliberate, the bump, the bump, every time any of us passes by any other. Grunts and groans and growls. Greasy testosterone slicks meet shoulder to shoulder.

  The tension, as we chug upriver, gets insane. I feel like these are my loyal-to-death mates in a way I haven’t felt before. Cap is on the line for ages, talking about air cover and readiness, deployment on approach, readiness, hitting the fan running, as he calls it.

  It’s going to sizzle.

  “There are no Zippo boats there yet, boys,” Cap bellows, throwing the phone across the deck as if it were the enemy. I go scrambling for it as he slaps my back hard enough to flatten me. “And the nearest jets carrying napalm got blown away on the ground. VC are entrenched in mangrove swamps and jungle and tunnels so deep, they must’ve been living there for years, waiting. Everybody is waiting on us, and we are letting men die every extra second.” I gather up the phone and watch the captain stomp around, shoving guys in the direction he wants them to go. “I can promise you this, men. You have never been more needed in your entire sorry lives than you are needed right this minute.”

  Everybody starts holle
ring, wordless, primate noises of fury.

  “Guns a-blazin’, boys!” Cap shouts. “We go in guns a-blazin’!”

  Everybody is yelling, bellowing, punching the thick air. Trying to build something up, get something out, keep something away. I’m hollering hard enough that I strain abdominals and grab my side. I shout some more.

  We’re nearly exhausting ourselves before the fight, because it’s taking us so long to get there. We are bizarrely alone on the river, with everyone else on both sides and civilian population, too, either up at the fight or hiding. It takes a while before we even feel the fight, the distant thunder and lightning of artillery growing only gradually, the zip of smaller bombers and A-6A Intruders finally going up against the North Vietnamese MiGs, meaning, holy cow, this is serious indeed.

  We could already tell, from the first call, that this was something special. Now I can see and feel in every part of me that this will be like nothing I have ever encountered before.

  Still, it’s not completely revealing itself, the tension building from the unknowns as much as from the mounting audible buzz of the warfare, until we make the last big bend in the river.

  “Here it comes, gentlemen!” Cap roars.

  My hands on my machine gun are trembling as much now as they will be when I start firing.

  Moses has been granted his wish. His new baby’s picture tucked into his breast pocket, he is nestled in at his flamethrower. He turns up toward me, points sharply, then swings around to take on all comers.

  And holy, holy, holy, there they are.

  Every type of Riverine craft from our side seems to be represented, and fully deployed. PBRs are shooting across the scene every which way, attempting to get a bead on whatever and wherever all that VC firepower is coming from. There is one Seawolf helicopter gunship strafing each bank, shooting an unmeasurable amount of ammunition into apparently deserted foliage. But the foliage is defending itself, and almost as soon as we engage, a surface-to-air rocket comes screaming up out of the bush, tears the double-blade chopper almost in half. The whole thing spins, clockwise, drunkenly, and crashes into the water.

  Cap is on the radio again, and suddenly we’re headed somewhere with a purpose.

  “What are we doing, Cap?” calls my new cage mate, a guy called Silk, up in the turret. He’s the latest to man the unlucky cannon, but he’s no rookie and Cap treats him almost like a peer. Because he’s a lifer and somebody like me is clearly a short timer.

  “We are doing our jobs, sailor,” Cap barks. “Fire that weapon. Fire and fire until everything is gone!”

  That kind of command does not need to be repeated around here.

  The monitor erupts all at once as we announce our arrival at the party. Explosion after explosion bursts up from the bank. We create so much sound wall, it ceases to have any definition at all. Like if pitch-black were a sound, this would be it.

  It’s obvious why Silk was questioning our direction. We’re powering straight across both lines of fire, as deep into harm’s way as it’s possible to get.

  We’re headed straight for the flash that produced the SAM that brought down The Wolf.

  We’re in it now.

  I’m firing, firing, firing into that bank, sweating, maybe crying, fear and anger pushing up and out my eyeballs in equal measure. The gun is heating up, throwing billows of heat up over itself into my face. It bakes the sweat right off my face, but the sweat reappears instantly. It all happens again.

  There’s foot soldier action apparent a quarter-mile inland. That would be our Ninth Infantry Division brotherhood.

  That would be Ivan.

  The air cover has largely been called out over the field troops since we have arrived and so has one of the water cannon boats. This bank is our job now.

  I fire like a madman into that bank, into that invisible nest of enemy. Die, guys. Nothing personal, but die. You gotta die.

  I keep looking up from my work, watching the air cover boys doing their thing. I figure wherever they are above, the Thirty-fourth Artillery is below. I have no strategic information on this. I just believe it.

  Gradually, I notice the air cover is coming closer to the river. The Army is advancing our way.

  I fire away like a born killer.

  Silk pounds the land a hundred yards in.

  Midship, the mortar boys sling shells that sound like they could bring down cities.

  All the while, bullets ping off the boat’s metalwork, ringing like a ticker in the spokes of God’s own bicycle wheel.

  We are so close, crazy close, to the bank, maybe seventy yards, that Charlie could reach us with a rock if it came to that. There’s fire coming every possible way, east and up and behind and south, and I’m very quickly losing my bearings, my sense of direction, my heart and my nerve and my bladder.

  And that air cover, Ivan’s air cover, is probably as close to the bank as we are. We have a Charlie sandwich, but who can tell? Who can tell, because they’re still firing away, and firing away and firing bullets and I know already from the howls more than one of our crew is fighting with some new bits of metal inside him….

  And then they come with the rocket-launched grenades. They explode — two, three, four — in the water right in front, beside, behind us. Next to us, the PBR rushing past to create mayhem absorbs some of its own as, pu-boom, first one, then a second rocket-launched grenade hits, and the boat goes dead before our eyes. It’s a bucket of smoke, engine off, floating like a dead duck right across a line of merciless fire. Charlie peppers the PBR with all he’s got.

  The source of the grenades and the surface-to-air missiles finally becomes obvious. A cluster of moving bushes, dense but nearly completely flat to the ground, is openly slinging grenades at every one of our boats.

  “Nape! Nape, nape, nape!” Cap shouts, and everybody knows where he means. We have shot everything we have at that spot repeatedly and it just keeps fighting, zombielike.

  Moses is practically jumping over the handle of his weapon as he and the second rear flamer pour it on into that greenery like nothing I have ever seen.

  It looks as if a reptile — half gun, half Moses — is flashing a tongue of fire out of its mouth, across the water, into the trees. The first ten feet of napalm jumps and dances like a bonfire as it comes out of the gun. It’s a thing of rare, sickening beauty. Like a Bob Gibson curveball and fastball combined, it arcs, crests, slashes the air with condensed fire, then lands so accurately there on the bank of the Mekong.

  Once they start, they finish. The two flamethrowers find their range, and they pour it on and pour it on, until trees and shrubs actually appear to melt before they burn. Then the human activity, you can see it clearly, like an illustration of your most horrific nightmare. Human shapes of fire, jumping, falling — standing back up and shooting! Falling again.

  All the while they pour it on, and we pour it on.

  Their nests open up. There’s such a fine arrangement of tunnel bunkers worked tight into the mangrove and palm, woven right down into the roots, it almost makes you stop to marvel at the craft of it all, but there they are, doing their thing as hard as they can do it.

  We were taught in boot camp that you dishonor yourselves and your enemy if you do not give it right back to him just as hard as you can. So I give it to these rotten incredible fighting madmen just as hard as I can.

  I shoot my machine gun — my murderous, relentless .50 — until I’m well past blisters and well into bleeding. I shoot a man trying to escape his bunker. I shoot one who’s shooting back and one who’s just standing there. I shoot people who are already on fire, and I shoot people who are already dead. I cannot reload my gun fast enough to keep it going.

  Passage of time now is incomprehensible to me. Everything lasts an eternity, instantly.

  What does not last is this bank of life. It is flame, burning hot and fast and tall, probably twenty feet into the air. There is nothing to do but let it go.

  The fight is still on all around, but t
his nest was the real crux of it. The air cover is just about to the bank now, the Army just about to overrun the enemy. There is nothing coming out of there anymore like antiaircraft, mortar, rocket-propelled. They’re down to bullets now, and like the end of popping a batch of popcorn, you can hear the pop run all the way down.

  Cap orders us to stop, and we all do.

  Then Moses lets rip, one more violent flare of hell in the direction of a bank that was some people’s idea of paradise before we got here an hour ago.

  I am looking down on Moses, my friend Moses, and thinking, somebody’s dad.

  I look at the charred bank, the bodies now burned beyond fire, the Vaseline Gasoline now their permanent mummy coating while they are posed into eternal agony figurines.

  Somebody’s dad did that. Some brand-new tiny baby’s dad did that.

  I look farther up the bank. The helicopters are already gone, the Army guys moving in.

  I was just shooting there.

  They start filtering down out of the remaining growth, the pathetic remaining growth we have left them, and I see the US Army uniforms. Ninth, Second, Thirty-fourth.

  How do we know we don’t shoot each other?

  Two infantry guys wave to us, thanks, we’ll clean up here. We wave back.

  Could be Ivan. Could be. Can’t tell.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Funny, How

  We’re sent back up to that same spot a couple days later. We go as an escort to a diver boat, The Baby Giant. It’s used to recover sunken boats. There are several here.

  Funny, how different something can feel.

  Funny, how often I say “funny, how” since I’ve been here, in the unfunniest place you could imagine.