Sixteen
Pickup Games
They moved through the villages along the muddy Song Tra Bong. They cordoned the villages and searched them and sometimes burned them down. They never saw the living enemy. On the odd-numbered afternoons they took sniper fire. On the even-numbered nights they were mortared. There was a rhythm in it. They knew when to be alert. They knew when it was safe to rest, when to send out patrols and when not to There was certainty and regularity to the war, and this alone was something to hold on to.
Then, in the first week of July, it ended.
There was nothing. The odd-numbered afternoons were hot and still. The even-numbered nights were quiet.
They relaxed. Frenchie Tucker and Rudy Chassler played endless word games on the march, Oscar found time to mend his hammock, Paul Berlin composed letters to his mother and father: Things were fine, he wrote, a nice quiet time with no casualties and no noise, nothing but a river fat with dragonflies and leeches and a million kinds of bugs. A good time. Times were divided into good times and bad times, and this, he told his parents, was clearly among the good times. He saved the letters, tucking them away as he wrote them, and when a resupply chopper arrived on the eighth day of July, he quickly addressed an envelope and handed it to the starboard door-gunner. In return the young gunner tossed out a Spalding Wear-Ever basketball.
So in the hottest part of the afternoon, in a tiny hamlet called Thap Ro, they chose up teams according to squads. Eddie Lazzutti ripped the bottom out of a woman’s wicker grain basket, shinnied up a tree, attached it with wire, and slid down. No backboard, he said, but what the hell—it was still a war, wasn’t it?
With Eddie as captain the Third Squad won handily. They beat Rudy’s team 52 to 30, then came back to whip the Second Squad 60 to 12.
They played until dusk. Afterward, leaving Thap Ro and marching up to a sandy hill that overlooked the river, the talk was of rematches and revenge. They spread out on the hill, dug their holes, then sat down to wait for night. Things were very still. The mountains to the west gave off their red glow. The river below was solid and unmoving.
“The real trick,” Doc Peret was saying softly to Eddie, “is deception. It’s true in all your sports—con the other side into thinking one thing, expecting one thing, then, pow, you zap ‘em with just the opposite. Basic psychology.”
Eddie nodded. He leaned forward and began diagramming a play in the mound of dirt in front of his hole. When he was finished, Doc studied it for a time, frowning, then used his thumb to redraw some of the Xs and Os.
“There, see what I mean?” Doc grinned. “They’ll be looking for you or me to take the shot. That’s what they’ll be expecting. So we take advantage of that—make ‘em overcommit, then, pow, you shovel the ball off to ol’ Cacciato.” Doc giggled at this. “See what I mean? Who’d expect Cacciato?”
The night passed slowly. They were not mortared. In the morning they continued the march east along the river. There were no signs of the enemy and the day was hot and empty.
Later that afternoon they tried out Doc’s new play. Eddie took the ball at center court, dribbled off to his left as if preparing for a quick jumper. Rudy’s team snatched at the bait. They sagged off to the left, every one of them, leaving Cacciato wide open under the basket. Eddie stopped, faked once, pivoted, then made the pass. Cacciato caught it easily. He smiled, turned, shot, and missed.
“Anyhow,” Doc said afterward, “the principle was sound. You can’t bitch about the basic theory.”
Over the next week, as they made their way east along the river, they carried the basketball through fourteen villages that led down the Song Tra Bong toward the sea. The villages were the same and the routine was the same. They destroyed rice caches, blew tunnels, then played basketball until dark. Harlem Globetrotters, Eddie kept saying. He got a bang out of it—Harlem Globetrotters bring their traveling show to Bic Kinh Mi, Suc Ran, My Khe 3, Pinkville. Goodwill ambassadors to the world, Eddie said.
And the lull continued.
Paul Berlin was the first to feel uneasy. He couldn’t quite place it. A milky film clouding the hot days. Lapping motions at night. Artificiality, a sense of imposed peace.
He didn’t understand it but he felt it. He wondered how it would end, and the wondering made him nervous.
Still, there was always basketball. Games were won and lost, mostly won, and he found himself looking forward to it. He liked reciting the final scores: 50 to 46; 68 to 40; once, in My Khe 2, a lopsided 110 to 38. He liked the clarity of it. He liked knowing who won, and by how much, and he liked being a winner. So with Eddie and Doc and Oscar Johnson, he spent time diagramming new plays, figuring strategy, diagnosing weaknesses and devising ways to correct them. At night he sometimes found himself replaying whole games in his head. He dreamed of fast breaks. The ball spinning endlessly through the night around the rim of Eddie’s wicker basket. The game in the balance. Balls falling home with soft swishing sounds in his sleep, jumpers and hooks and dunks. He dreamed of stadiums and sleeping crowds. He dreamed once that his father was out there in the bleachers: a rooted-for dream, boosted by an old man who built houses. He dreamed of bad angles and crazy bounces, suspense, victory and loss, blocked shots at the buzzer.
The Third Squad kept winning. In Tan Mau they whipped Rudy’s team 56 to 16; in Ro Son Shei, with a few women and kids on the sidelines, they blew out the Second Squad 83 to 50.
It went that way through July 12. On July 13, in a hamlet called Nuoc Ti, they were rained out.
“I smell something,” Buff said. He was looking out at the river, a big guy with sweat on his face. The river was silvery in the rain. “Something weird … bad. You smell it?”
Doc shrugged. “You win some, you lose some.”
“You don’t smell it?”
They huddled together in a small mud hootch on the outskirts of the ville. The place was deserted. No people and no chickens and no dogs. It was emptiness, but it was lived-in emptiness, emptiness recently vacated, and this made them fidgety. It was an odd-numbered day.
“That fucking smell,” Buff said quietly. “I don’t like it.”
“You win some, you lose some.”
“I guess.”
“And some get rained out.”
They waited through the afternoon. Oscar Johnson rigged up his hammock. Bernie Lynn tossed cards into his helmet. Vaught and Harold Murphy and Buff and some others played poker for pennies, squabbling over the rules, and Sidney Martin sat alone with his maps. In a corner of the hootch, Cacciato practiced his dribbling.
“Psy-Ops,” Doc Peret mumbled. Nobody looked up. “That’s what it is, the gook version of Psy-Ops. Slope Psych.”
“Stuff it,” Oscar said from his hammock. “I don’ need that shit today.”
Doc smiled. “I’m just explaining the concept. It’s basic psychology—silence. Gets you feeling edgy, and then bang! But the trick is to—”
“The trick,” Oscar said, “is to shut up.”
“Psychology.”
“Whatever. Jesus! Somebody tell Cacciato to stop bouncin’ that fuckin ball.”
When dark had set in solidly, Sidney Martin sent them out to form a perimeter around the hootch. Paul Berlin found a notch in one of the high hedgerows. He squatted and tested the field of vision, then sat back. Cold already, he thought. Funny how in the hottest place on earth, hell itself, there was still such cold. Funny … he cradled his rifle close. He let his mind ease away and soon he was rehearsing plays: a pick-and-roll; slick feigns; clearing out for Doc; shovel passes and set shots and fall-away jumpers. But he couldn’t concentrate. His knees ached. He lay back. He thought about the difference between good times and bad times, and how funny it was that he could not state the difference, only feel it.
In the morning the sky cleared. The rain ended and by noon the ground was hard. The men were tense, and the afternoon game was full of stupid errors; afterward there was no hand slapping or razzing or bragging, and Sidney Martin immedia
tely had them pack up for the march east.
The lull continued.
The days were the same. The grass turned brown. The paddies, bone dry even after rain, stretched out in great flat sheets to the horizon, and at the horizon there was only the certainty of more flatness, everything the same. The men complained. The heat, the stillness, Sidney Martin. Once, when Martin ordered them to search a small bunker complex, Stink Harris and Vaught began making pig noises, softly at first, then louder, and others joined in. It wasn’t exactly mutiny, not quite, but it was close. The men walked away. After a time the lieutenant shrugged, threw off his pack, and went down into the bunker himself. They waited quietly. No one cared much for Sidney Martin—too fastidious, too skinny, hair too blond and fine. The way he kept pushing. A believer in mission, a believer in searching tunnels and bunkers. Too disciplined. Too clearheaded for such a lousy war.
Over the next week they destroyed twelve tunnels. They killed a water buffalo. They burned hootches and shot chickens and trampled paddies and tore up fences and dumped dirt into wells and provoked madness. But they could not drive the enemy into showing himself, and the silence was exhausting.
The men bickered and fought. Caution became skittishness. Irritability became outright meanness, then worse. They walked with their heads down, stiffly, thinking of land mines and trickery and ambush. Sluggish and edgy. Slow to rise from rest breaks, fitful sleep, quick to anger, wound up tight. Doc Peret catalogued the symptoms. Psychosomatic, he said when Harold Murphy’s face puffed up in a rash of boils and open ulcers. Rudy’s back began hurting. Stink Harris complained of numbness in his fingers and feet. Even Doc felt it. He kept saying it was all simple Psy-Ops, advanced behavior modification, but even so he popped Darvon and smoked too much and began walking near the rear of the column. His theories turned disjointed.
“What we have here,” Doc said at the start of the fourth week of the peace, “is your basic vacuum. Follow me? A vacuum. Like in emptiness, suction. Can’t have order in a vacuum. For order you got to have substance, matériel. So here we are—nothing to order, no substance. Aimless, that’s what it is: a bunch of kids trying to pin the tail on the Asian donkey. But no fuckin tail. No fuckin donkey.”
The morning was bright with white light seeming to rise from the earth itself. Doc lay on his stomach, looking listlessly out across a brown paddy that ended at the river. Beyond the river was more paddy.
“A vacuum. No substance, no conceptual matériel. Follow me. Bad logistics. We’re getting short-changed on conceptual supplies. And, mark me, armies rise and fall on the packhorses. When the supply channels fail, everything goes bust. It happened to the Krauts in Russia. Kept stretching their supply lines till they snapped, crackled, popped—poof, down the Siberian drain. Got to have conceptual matériel, right?”
Paul Berlin nodded.
“It’s the truth. Ask Napoleon. You can’t win wars on a shortage of matériel. Can’t win in a vacuum. You end up like Bonaparte, drifting in the drifts.”
Sidney Martin kept pushing. Inland through My Khe 1 and 2 and 3, then south, then southeast, then straight north back to the river. The silence continued and they did not find the enemy. The afternoon games of basketball turned vicious. Cacciato lost a tooth; Harold Murphy’s jungle sores popped open and bled; Ben Nystrom talked privately with Doc Peret about self-inflicted wounds: where were the best places—the hand, a foot, a finger? There were bitter quarrels over where to camp, where to rest, what to eat, whether to search the tunnels or just blow them and move on. Stink compulsively cleaned and oiled his weapon. Frenchie Tucker complained of respiratory problems, chest pains, a fluttering pulse. Vaught broke out in hives. And Paul Berlin dug deep holes for the night, working long, piling up stones and blocks of clay before the holes, carving grenade sumps and battlements out of packed mud. At night he slept in the holes, his back against the cold earth, dreaming of basketball and moles and tombs of moist air.
A bad time. In early August, Ben Nystrom collapsed and began crying. He wouldn’t stop. He lay face-up on the trail and cradled his head and cried. He was limp. Doc helped him up and led him by the arm, but Nystrom could not stop crying.
And later, after a fierce afternoon of basketball, Stink and Bernie Lynn began fighting.
No words were spoken. They were simply fighting. Tangled together and falling, wrapped around each other. No one moved to stop it. Stink clawed at Bernie’s face with fingernails and thumbs. Bernie fought with fists and elbows. They fought to hurt. Stink went at Bernie’s eyes, and Bernie’s face bled, and Stink raked the bleeding parts. A slab of skin dangled free and Stink tore it away. It was not a fight of strategy or quickness. Stink bit into Bernie’s scalp, shaking hair in his teeth, and Bernie kept using his fists and elbows. Clawing and gouging and hitting. The men watched without moving. Stink pressed his thumb deep into Bernie’s ear, and Bernie hammered at the gap between Stink’s legs. Bernie’s face was red. A flap of skin lay open and Stink kept clawing at the flesh. It ended that way.
But the lull did not end.
On August 12 they made laager along a narrow stretch of the Song Tra Bong. Across the river was the village called Trinh Son 2. And in the morning, Lieutenant Sidney Martin said, they would cross the river and enter the ville and search it. He looked directly at Oscar Johnson. If tunnels were found, he said, they would be searched. He said this plainly and without drama. The men looked away.
“Is it understood?” the young lieutenant said. “If we find tunnels, we’ll search them thoroughly, by the book, and we’ll do it right. I hope it’s understood.”
“Lovely,” said Oscar Johnson.
“I just hope it’s clear.”
“Like the sun,” Oscar murmured. “Like the man in the moon.”
Full night came slowly.
The men ate supper and then dug their holes and waited. Unwilling to face the village directly, they would now and then glance across quickly, obliquely, watching without really watching. There was nothing much to see: the tops of a few thatched roofs, the deep hedges, a narrow clay trail that wound down to the river in shadow.
The talk was soft. Buff said he’d seen the place before, months ago. Bad business, he said, grim. A bad place. Stink Harris laughed. Big guy’s spooked, Stink said, but Rudy Chassler shook his head and said maybe it was smart to be spooked, and Murphy nodded.
Oscar spat. He looked across at the lieutenant, who sat near the river with his maps. “And the man. The man says we gon’ search the tunnels. You hear that?”
“I heard.”
“The man. Some brave man.”
Oscar absently removed a grenade from his belt and tossed it from hand to hand as though testing its weight.
“Diggin’ hisself trouble,” he said. “That’s all I say, the man diggin’ hisself some deep fuckin trouble.”
“Tell it.”
“I tol’ it.”
“Jesus!”
“Is that—?”
“Cacciato!” Eddie hollered, too loud. “Stop bouncing that damn ball!”
Cacciato smiled. He went to his hole, dropped the ball in, then climbed in himself. Later he began whistling.
“Trouble with a T,” Oscar said softly. He still played with the grenade, rubbing it the way pitchers do when they get a new ball. “The man wants trouble.”
They watched the river and smoked. Dead dragonflies drifted toward the sea. Live dragonflies and fishflies and other insects swarmed just over the face of the water.
“Listen to that quiet, man.”
“I’m listening.”
At the border of night, when the river turned a final shiny rose color, a dog came from the village to drink. It waded in to its belly. When full dark came, the dog limped back up the trail into the trees.
Paul Berlin did not sleep. He didn’t try. He sat with his back to the river, deep in his hole, glad to have water behind him. Sure, the silence was scary, but even so he could not imagine dying beside a river. In thick forest, maybe, or on t
he slope of a mountain, or in one of the paddies. But not beside a river.
He tried for stillness. He counted aloud, passing time. He listened to the river. He tried to distinguish, as his father could, the river sounds from those of the moving grass and trees. Darkness grew on itself. Well after midnight a warm fog groveled down the river, a great softness that drenched and covered him.
He dreamed of basketball.
When he awoke he heard Cacciato in the next hole over, bouncing the ball. After a time the bouncing stopped and again there was quiet.
Crouching deeper into a corner of his hole, Paul Berlin bowed his head and closed his eyes and listened hard. But there was nothing. Not the wind or the grass, not even the river now.
A bad place, Buff had said. Bad place, bad time. He tried not to think about it, which started him thinking. In the morning they would cross the river and enter the ville and search it, that was what Sidney Martin said, and … and still the quiet. The nerveless quiet. It was in his head now. Silence that wasn’t silence. And in the morning they would cross the river and enter the ville and … He thought about basketball. Winning, that was the sweetest part. The moves and fakes and tactics were all fine, but winning was what made him warm. Warm where the silence hurt, that was where the winning felt so good. Right there, the same place exactly. Bad places and good places. Winning—you knew the score, you knew what it would take to win, to come from behind, you knew exactly. The odds could be figured. Winning was the purpose, nothing else. A basket to shoot at, a target, and sometimes you scored and sometimes you didn’t, but you had a true thing to aim at, you always knew, and you could count on the numbers. And in the morning …