Sergeant Dickinson Read online

  I lie on my bunk wondering if the boils on my back will break and soil my blanket. My ears and the soft skin inside the bony rims of my eyes still have in them the red Highlands dust. If it were night, tiny gnats would be crawling through the holes of my mosquito bar; a net with holes small enough to prevent the gnats from coming in wouldn’t allow me to breathe. My legs jerk; my feet lie at the same angle as Dale’s but his are dead. I turn on my side. Soon I do not know whether I am sleeping or awake.

  Something is in my room.

  “I thought you might be asleep,” Mitch says softly.

  I look for the splayed index and middle fingers on his right hand. They are there; I focus on them. The man is neither an imposter nor a dream impersonation of Mitch. I am awake.

  “No.” I prop myself on my elbow. “What’s been going on?”

  “Not much. I just got off shift. Want to get a beer?”

  “Not now. Maybe later.”

  “Okay. I’ll let you sleep.”

  “Thanks, Mitch.”

  I do not dare to cry. Things too horrible would be released.

  It is dark. Mitch has returned. Through the darkness, his voice: “Are you awake?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Just lying here. Watching the lightning out my window.”

  “That’s not lightning. The Air Force is bombing tonight.”

  “Oh. I thought it was lightning.”

  “I was supposed to tell you earlier that you’re on radio shift tomorrow at eight.”

  “All right, Mitch. Thanks.”

  Roy flips on the light.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “You were making a lot of noise.”

  I didn’t hear any noise. I thought I was dreaming about something else.

  “Sorry to wake you,” I say.

  “I can’t sleep anyway. Do you want to get some coffee?”

  “Sure. Let me get some clothes on.”

  The mess hall is a long rectangular room of round and oblong wooden tables in four disorderly rows. Four full windows on each side wall line the length of the hall. Each table, regardless of shape, seats eight. To the right rear as you enter are two rectangular tables pushed together. This is the Officers’ Section. It is vacant. Rear center is the door leading to the kitchen, closed now. A rat nibbles a piece of popcorn in front of the door, unmolested. Halfway down the left side of the mess hall is a square table covered by a deeply stained linen tablecloth. On this sits a thirty-two-cup stainless-steel coffee pot. Pressed-paper cups, singly and in uneven stacks of three or four or six or eight, canned milk, the can punctured and sticky, cheesy at the punctures, a sugar dispenser, and a large aluminum bowl in which are the stale remains of the evening’s popcorn surround the coffee pot.

  The mess hall is used as a movie theater in the evening; hence the popcorn. The Vietnamese staff cleans in the morning before the first meal; hence the slovenliness. All of the overhead fluorescent lights are on; not a single shadow falls. The lights project an aura of artificial daylight, of artificial energy.

  Only one table, to the right of center toward the rear, bordering the Officers’ Section, is occupied. Four men in mixed uniform and mufti are playing poker. They play with concentration, little and mumbled remarking is audible. A few bills and some change are in evidence. As Roy and I enter, the players do not look up. Roy is of average height, slender, with rich brown receding hair. His features are mobile and angular; they reveal each thought as it occurs. His eyes are alert, moving, appraising. He is quick of mind and mood. I am an inch or two taller, broader and heavier, my hair has begun to grow out from a close crop. We are about the same age, in our middle twenties. Tonight we are also dressed alike in tiger suits. Neither of us wears the crush hat which would complete the uniform. I seat myself at the table nearest the coffee pot. Roy pours two cups.

  “Popcorn?”

  “No, thanks.”

  We watch the rat eating the spilled popcorn. “Skoal,” Roy says. He tosses a kernel into his mouth. One of the card players turns to look at us.

  “Hey, Dixie. I thought you were dead.”

  “Not this time.”

  “That was Terrell,” says a second player.

  “Terrell’s dead? Hell, I didn’t even know he was out there.” The image of Dale’s booted feet, the angle they formed in death, appears in the space between my eyes and my vision. It fades slowly, unwillingly.

  “Well, at least you got out of it okay,” the second player says. “No wounds?”

  “No. No wounds.”

  Another player asks, “How did Terrell get killed? I heard he exposed himself trying to get a bundle-drop out of the wire.” There is a suggestion of contempt in his voice. He wants to believe that Dale died from his own carelessness, that we die only if we make a mistake. This is our myth, that if you do everything right no harm will come to you. Training is everything, and God knows that we are well trained, even overtrained. Training reduces risk and makes luck predictable; it has been shown statistically, it is scientific. I do not believe it. If it was true last year, it is not true this; the war has gotten too big. Science has lost its grip. We die neither from miscalculation nor from other men’s design, nor even because it is our time. I do not know why we die. Only the fact of death is important.

  I tell him, “He led a patrol out to try to rescue a downed chopper. The NVA got there first. Reilly was wounded, Terrell was killed.” The disappointment, and surprise, too, show on his face. It is my turn to feel contempt.

  “What about the chopper?” the fourth player asks.

  “It burned. The crew was killed on impact, or maybe the NVA killed them. Reilly said their bodies were charred, anyway. The NVA had the machine guns and turned them on the patrol.”

  “Ambushed by our own machine guns. Shit!” the first player exclaims. He turns his attention back to his cards. The other players study their own cards. They resume their game.

  After a while one of them says, “It isn’t the first camp that got hit.”

  Another says, “Only the most recent one.”

  One asks me, “You gonna be assigned here again, Dixie?”

  I nod. “Yeah.”

  One says, “They do that after a camp gets hit. They break up the team. I don’t know why.”

  “Policy,” says a man beside him.

  “Yeah. Policy.”

  “They broke up those teams that were involved in the FULRO revolt last year when the Yards wasted their Vietnamese officers. Sent the American officers home and spread the NCOs throughout the country.”

  “Yeah. The Yards wasted the Vietnamese NCOs, too. Yards don’t discriminate. Say, do you know what Larteguy said about them, the Americans who were with the Yards? He called them defectors.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “I read it in Le Monde.”

  “You read French?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well. Maybe they are. You never know what you’re gonna do until you’re there.”

  “Who’s Larteguy?” the first player asks.

  “The guy who wrote The Centurions,” says one without looking up from his cards.

  “There’s nothing worse than fire,” Roy says, then, when I don’t respond: “The helicopter. Were you here when they brought in that Yard woman that the gasoline exploded on?”

  “Her underpants were made of nylon and they melted into her skin?”

  “God, I’d completely forgotten about that. That was two years ago, and she was a Vietnamese. Stills carried her out of the hut, and he was soaked with gasoline himself. It was in the Delta; I’d forgotten. No, this was a different one. She was trying to light a cooking fire and the gas exploded on her. She was wearing her kid wrapped on her chest.”

  “The flesh was charred all the way through,” a card player says. “The bones of her fingers and toes had melted. Everybody was sick, even the doctors.”

  “They
kept her and the kid on morphine until they died. They were unconscious the whole time,” says another player without looking up from his hand.

  “Yeah,” the first says, “but you could still hear them crying through the morphine.”

  Roy says, “We made bets on which one would die first, and how long it would take them. The kid lasted six days; mama, eight. One of the medics won the bet.” Roy starts to laugh, then doesn’t. He shrugs and looks away.

  “Any way you want to look at it, dead is dead,” one of the others says.

  “I don’t want to burn,” another says “I been shot a couple of times, picked up some shrapnel, but I don’t want to burn.”

  “I haven’t been shot yet,” the first one says. “Picked up some mortar frag once, but that’s about it.”

  “You’re not missing anything.”

  “Hey, Dixie, is it true that some of the troops in your camp were shooting at our aircraft?”

  “Some of the pilots said so,” I say.

  “Jesus, what for? Didn’t they know they were ours?”

  “They knew,” says another player.

  “How the hell should I know? Maybe they were afraid of the noise. I was. Maybe they resented men who could just fly away from it all. I did.”

  Suddenly the light in the mess hall has become too harsh, it rubs across my eyes like a gritty thumb. “I’m going back,” I tell Roy. I walk toward the door. The others pay no attention to me.

  I try to remember how it was when I was wounded the first time. But the dream fragments, I cannot hold it together.

  I think of the Cambodian but I cannot excite myself.

  I light a cigarette.

  Here, I know, I will go mad.

  CHAPTER 3

  The rains arrived. Now the clouds were not red at sunset, but gray and ugly. In the evening they collected and billowed in slate cumulus over the mountains, gaining in mass and space until by dark they took up the entire sky, turning it the color of tarnished metal. They spread ponderously over the valley, so low-drifting it seemed you would bump against them if you stood on the balls of your feet.

  It rained always in the early morning, and increasingly at night and in the afternoon. Sometimes it rained softly, coming in as a thick cold mist, but sometimes the wind caught it and hurled it, and it worked the steady racket of machine guns against the wood and tin billets. On some mornings there were ice puddles in the drainage canals.

  Now the clouds became flat and dark and ceased all motion, they were not really clouds at all but an omnipresent opaque ceiling, dismal and menacing; there was no relief from the knowledge of your own mortality, and the sun, when it broke through, broke through only at the hollow places in the sky, cold and white. The sun had no brilliance but shone in a diffuse luster. It drew no colors but dusky hues of brown and orange, so that the world appeared as through a section of oil paper held to the eye. The mountains lost their purples and blues, the valleys held no secrets, the hills were only dead hills.

  But sometimes the wind blew a hole in the clouds, and through it the sun poured in such pure draughts you could almost drink it. Across the valley to the south, the mountains etched themselves sharp and brittle against the shining turmoil of the sky. The air itself was so brilliant from rain-mist and sun you were drawn into it as into a Chinese water-color; colors were clearly and evenly defined, the purple of a shaded valley ended finally and distinctly against the crest of a wooded ridge, and the buff of the sun began with the same clarity at the dead grass on that crest.

  Mitch, Lambert, and I are in the Bamboo Bar, which doubles as both Officers and NCO Club. We sit at a table across the room from the jukebox which is blasting out Joan Baez’s version of “Old Blue.” A wet bar takes up almost the entire rear from wall to wall. Ten stools line it, fewer than half of these are occupied. In front of the wet bar are a number of unfinished wooden tables. Each, if you tried, will seat four. One table besides ours is occupied. It is nearer the wet bar, and two men playing chess, a can of beer at each of their right elbows, are seated at it. Occasionally one or the other drinks from his beer. Against the left wall is the jukebox. Next to it are two slot machines, neither at present employed. The Joan Baez song goes off; nobody gets up to play another. Finally Sam, the Vietnamese bartender, comes around the bar and puts in a coin. Joan Baez sings “Old Blue.”

  Lambert says, “Beautiful day. I could use more like this.”

  “Perfect day for an airstrike,” Mitch agrees.

  Lambert nods, takes a swig of his beer. His eyes roll, then settle on me: “Just got back off a recon in the la Drang.”

  “I was at Khe Sanh last year when the VC almost overran it,” Mitch says. “You two can have your Plei Mes and la Drangs. I’m going to sit here and get fat.” He puffs out his stomach to show how fat he is getting. He laughs.

  Lambert: “We took a prisoner. A supply officer. A major.”

  “American operation?” I ask.

  “Americans ran it. Two Americans, two Vietnamese, two Yards. Patrol was too big, they ought to cut those down to four men. But I guess politics won’t let them. So we took this prisoner. This major.”

  “Yes.”

  “Guy sang like a parakeet. That the kind of bird that sings? Parakeet?”

  “Canary. Canaries sing,” Mitch says.

  “Canary. Yeah. Those yellow ones. Guy sang like a canary. I forgot why I started talking about this. I know I had something in my mind, feeble as it is. Anyway, the guy told us everything. Unit locations, arms caches, food stores, hospital location. Everything. We couldn’t have asked for a better canary. Cav commander gave us credit for saving sixteen hundred American lives.”

  Mitch says, “You were lucky you got a supply officer.”

  “Yeah. Fucker died. After twelve hours. Fuckin’ Vietnamese got carried away. The other American, this young E-five, gets upset, wants to take him back with us, this is before the guy is dead but he’s already pretty near dead, the fuckin’ Vietnamese still workin’ on him. This E-five wants to take him back with us. Jesus. How? We’re walkin’ out. We gonna carry him? The guy’s got to die, we can’t leave him alive or we’ll never get our own asses out. Okay, this young buck sergeant says, then let’s kill him now, put him out of his misery. Listen, I says, you interfere with those guys and they’re liable to kill you too. I mean, they’re having fun! They’re laughing! Jesus. Fuckin’ Ia Drang. Fuckin’ Vietnamese. You can have it, man. I’m goin’ home. Six more days. Gonna forget this shit.”

  Mitch: “I was on a convoy once, through the Mang Yang, and we came on this Vietnamese column that had been ambushed, dead and wounded lying all over the road. We had oranges with us, so we gave out oranges to the Arvins. It was all we could do. That, and our medic started doing what he could. One of the Arvins had half his jaw shot away, and both balls. It was just jelly there.”

  I start to laugh. I am thinking how at Plei Me one of the officers, a lieutenant, got groin-shot, his left nut was hanging by the threads, and while he’s lying there a medic crawls up to him, picks up the nut, dusts it off with a brush like a shaving brush he carries in his kit, places the ball back in the scrotum, clamps it shut, and says to the lieutenant, “That’s all right, sir, it’ll be as good as new.” But I do not tell this now to Mitch and Lambert, and I am laughing and they are looking at me and starting to laugh too, and Mitch goes on with his story.

  “So these other two Arvins who are standing around take their oranges and put them between the guy’s legs. And they’re laughing. And shit if the guy lying there doesn’t start laughing. He’s got half his face blown away and he’s going ‘uh-uh-uh’ and pointing to those goddamn oranges, and laughing.”

  And now Mitch and Lambert are wearing that wide toothy lip-curled-back grin that you do when you mean just the opposite but can’t say it. And I feel the grin on my face too. And on Lambert’s face the vertical misery lines are not broken in the least. And finally we stop grinning and Lambert shakes his head and says “Jesus,” and then
there is no talk for a while. Finally Mitch says to Lambert: “This your first tour?”

  Lambert laughs: “My third, man. One in Laos, two here. I know, I know. I’ll be back. But I’m not gonna think about that now. Six more days.”

  First chess player, putting his beer down on the table: “We’ll all be back.”

  Second chess player: “I killed my first man yesterday. Blew him away with a shotgun. He was coming out of his hooch.”

  Mitch: “All in a day’s work, m’ man.”

  Second chess player: “What do you mean?”

  Mitch: “Nothing.”

  Second chess player: “I guess I’m not callous about it yet.”

  Lambert: “Get this, man. I met this guy at Holloway—that young buck sergeant, he got dinged on the way out, maybe it was the Arvins that hit him, maybe it was the NVA, I dropped him at the Eighth Field at Holloway—so I met this guy, he’s the lone survivor of a Cav platoon that got ambushed, he hid under their bodies while the NVA made sure. You should have seen this guy’s eyes, man, like there was no back to them, there was nothing behind ‘em, they just didn’t end.”

  Mitch: “Did they change color?”

  Lambert: “What?”

  Mitch: “Did they change color. Sometimes people’s eyes change color.”

  Lambert: “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Second chess player: “He don’t know.”

  Mitch: “Everybody’s crazy in this war.”

  First guy at the bar: “Amen to that.”

  Lambert: “It ain’t craziness, man. It’s reality. Like he sees something that nobody else sees. But it’s real.”

  Second chess player: “I can dig that.”

  Mitch: “If nobody else sees it, it ain’t real.”

  Lambert: “That’s a very limited view, man.”