“Yes,” the girl was saying, “I know you will find a way. And in Paris—”
The earth tore itself open.
Snorting, eyes rolling, the big buffalo tried to run. It reared violently backward, stumbled, fell to its knees.
The road opened in a long jagged crack, tiny at first, then ripping wide.
“Holy God,” Eddie whispered.
The lieutenant shouted. Stink’s mouth opened and closed, but whatever he said was lost in another series of enormous shock waves. Sheer rock tore open. Dust seemed to swell from pores in the ground.
Then they were falling. Paul Berlin felt it in his stomach. A tumbling sensation. There was time to snatch for Sarkin Aung Wan’s hand, squeeze tight, and then they were falling. The road was gone and they were simply falling, all of them, Oscar and Eddie and Doc, the old lieutenant, the buffalo and the cart and the old women, everything, tumbling down a hole in the road to Paris.
Eleven
Fire in the Hole
Pederson was a mess. They wrapped him in his own poncho. Doc Peret found the broken dog tags and slipped them into Pederson’s mouth and taped it shut. Later the dustoff came. They carried Pederson aboard. Eddie touched his friend’s wrist, Harold Murphy signaled to the pilot, and the helicopter took Pederson away.
They waded out of the paddy. No one talked about Jim Pederson. Moving from man to man, the lieutenant made a list of the lost equipment, then he led them to a hill half a klick away. At the top, they threw off their packs and formed up in a loose perimeter. The day was very hot. Before, coming down into the paddy, the day had seemed cold, much too cold, but now the heat could be seen steaming off the land. There were no clouds. There were no farmers in the fields. Down below, tucked next to the paddy, was the village called Hoi An.
The men waited while the lieutenant went to work with his maps and compass.
Taking turns, they used a towel to wipe away the paddy stink. It was in their hair and noses and mouths. The weapons were filthy. Paul Berlin moved his tongue along his teeth, collecting spit, and when he spat it came out green. Bits of algae swam in the bubbles. His hands were caked with slime. He could feel the muck in his boots, the softness; he could see it like grease on the others. The smell was thick. Harold Murphy took off his trousers and used them to clean his big gun. Eddie wiped the radio, getting it ready for the lieutenant, and Oscar and Vaught and Cacciato began disassembling their weapons.
When the lieutenant was finished with his calculations, he moved to the radio and made the call. He spoke crisply. He read off the coordinates and asked for a marking round.
They waited. Looking down, Paul Berlin saw flat brown paddies stretching off in every direction. The village of Hoi An was dead. There were no birds or animals. The sun made the paddies seem clean. From high up everything seemed clean. He tried not to think about Pederson. The way the cold came, nightly cold, and the incredible heat. He wiped his hands on his shirt and rinsed out his mouth and tried not to think about it.
The radio buzzed. There was a whining sound. The marking round opened high over the southeast corner of Hoi An.
The lieutenant called in an adjustment and asked for white phosphorus.
And again the whine. White phosphorus burned the village.
“Kill it,” Paul Berlin said.
The lieutenant watched the village burn. Then he went to the radio and ordered a dozen more Willie Peter, then a dozen HE.
The rounds hit the village in thirty-second intervals. The village went white. The hedges swayed. A vacuum sucked in quiet and a wind was made. Hoi An glowed. Trees powdered. There was a crackling, scalding sound. Sitting on their rucksacks, the men watched black smoke open in white smoke. Splinters of straw and wood sprinkled down, and there was light in the village like flashbulbs exploding in sequence, and then a melting, and then heat. Even high on the hill they felt the heat. Something liquid seemed to run through the center of the village. The fluid burned and ran off into the paddies.
“Kill it,” Paul Berlin said, but without malice.
The lieutenant returned to the radio.
Next came alternating Willie Peter and HE, first white, then black. The men did not cheer or show emotion. They watched the village become smoke. Rounds pounded the smoke. The trees and huts and hedges and fences were gone. White ash fluttered down. Something gleamed in the smoke, as at the center of a furnace, and the rounds kept falling. There was very little sound. A light, puffy tremble. Oscar Johnson smiled with each explosion, but otherwise the men seemed blank. Then they began firing. They lined up and fired into the burning village. Harold Murphy used the machine gun. The tracers could be seen through the smoke, bright red streamers, and the Willie Peter and HE kept falling, and the men fired until they were exhausted. The village was a hole.
They spent the night along the Song Tra Bong. They bathed in the river and made camp and ate supper. When it was night they began talking about Jim Pederson. It was always better to talk about it.
Twelve
The Observation Post
The issue, of course, was courage. How to behave. Whether to flee or fight or seek an accommodation. The issue was not fearlessness. The issue was how to act wisely in spite of fear. Spiting the deep-running biles: That was true courage. He believed this. And he believed the obvious corollary: The greater a man’s fear, the greater his potential courage.
Below, the tower’s moon shadow stretched far to the south.
Nearly two-fifteen now, but he was not tired. Lightheaded, he faced inland and listened. He could recite the separate sounds—a roiling breeze off the sea, the incoming tide, the hum of the radio. The others slept. Stink Harris slept defensively, knees tucked up and arms curled about his head like a beaten boxer. Oscar slept gracefully, spread out, and Eddie Lazzutti slept fitfully, turning and sometimes muttering. Their sleeping was part of the night.
He bent down and did PT by the numbers, counting softly, loosening up his arms and neck and legs, then he walked twice around the tower’s small platform. He was not tired, and not afraid, and the night was not moving.
Leaning against the wall of sandbags, he lit another of Doc’s cigarettes. After the war he would stop smoking. Quit, just like that.
He inhaled deeply and held it and enjoyed the puffy tremor it set off in his head.
Yes, the issue was courage. It always had been, even as a kid. Things scared him. He couldn’t help it. Noise scared him, dark scared him. Tunnels scared him: the time he almost won the Silver Star for valor. But the real issue was courage. It had nothing to do with the Silver Star.… Oh, he would’ve liked winning it, true, but that wasn’t the issue. He would’ve liked showing the medal to his father, the heavy feel of it, looking his father in the eye to show he had been brave, but even that wasn’t the real issue. The real issue was the power of will to defeat fear. A matter of figuring a way to do it. Somehow working his way into that secret chamber of the human heart, where, in tangles, lay the circuitry for all that was possible, the full range of what a man might be. He believed, like Doc Peret, that somewhere inside each man is a biological center for the exercise of courage, a piece of tissue that might be touched and sparked and made to respond, a chemical maybe, or a lone chromosome that when made to fire would produce a blaze of valor that even the biles could not extinguish. A filament, a fuse, that if ignited would release the full energy of what might be. There was a Silver Star twinkling somewhere inside him.
Thirteen
Falling Through a Hole in the Road to Paris
So down and down, pinwheeling freestyle through the dark. Time only to yell a warning, time to snatch for his weapon and Sarkin Aung Wan’s hand, and then he was falling.
Far below he could make out the dim tumbling outline of the buffalo and slat-cart, the two old aunties still perched backward at the rear. He heard them howling. Then they were gone. His lungs ached. The blood stopped in his veins, his eyes burned, his brain plunged faster than his stomach. The hole kept opening. Deep and na
rrow, lit by torches that sped past like shooting stars, red eyes twinkling along sheer rockface, down and down. He held tight to the pretty girl’s hand. She was smiling. Odd, but she was smiling as she fell.
Silly, he thought. For a moment he was back at the observation tower, the night swimming all around him, and, yes, even there he was falling, his eyes sliding slick over the surfaces of things, drowsy, pinching himself, but still falling. Silly! Something came plunging by—a peculiar living object, a man—and as it descended he saw it was the old lieutenant spread out full-eagle like a sky diver. Then a flurry of falling objects: weapons and ammunition and canteens and helmets, rucksacks and grenades, all of it falling. Stink Harris sped by. Then Oscar and Eddie and Doc. Doc waved. Graceful even in full flight, Oscar fell with his arms neatly overhead like a springboard diver. Eddie yodeled as he fell, and Stink Harris cackled like a little boy. Tumbling after them, Paul Berlin watched until they’d disappeared deep into the hole.
Falling, flickering in and out, he wondered briefly what had happened to his fine march to Paris. And then the fear came. Silly, he thought.
He squeezed Sarkin Aung Wan’s hand. She was smiling. “Lovely,” she whispered, her eyes half-shut and moist.
Wind in his ears, falling, he felt the fear fill his stomach. He had to pee. He crossed his legs, closed his eyes, but the pressure swelled and then came the wet leaking feeling. He wanted to giggle. “Lovely,” murmured the girl falling beside him. Her lips were parted. She was licking her upper teeth. “Isn’t it lovely? I knew you’d find a way! I knew it!”
He couldn’t control himself. Brain neatly divided, wet all over, arms and legs flailing as if jerked by strings, down and down he sailed.
He hit softly.
Mercifully, the roar in his ears ended. Succeeded by silence. Succeeded by the sound of someone laughing. It was an eerie, echoing sound. He sat up, shivering and hugging himself, looking for the source of the laughter.
Oscar Johnson struck a match.
It was a narrow tunnel with walls of hard red stone. Giggling bounced off the walls, high crazy giggling.
“It’s okay,” Doc whispered. “Quiet down, man. It’s over now.”
But Paul Berlin couldn’t stop giggling. Like when Billy Boy took it, dead of fright. He couldn’t stop.
“Easy,” Doc purred, taking his arm. “Grab hold now. Up we go.”
But he couldn’t stop.
“Easy,” Doc said. “Ease up. Nobody ever said there wouldn’t be pitfalls along the way.”
It was a tunnel complex lighted by torches every fifty meters, an interlocking series of passageways that they followed single file, taking great care to watch for bats and punjis and booby traps. Stink Harris led the way. Next came the old lieutenant. Then Oscar and Eddie and Doc Peret. Paul Berlin brought up the rear, holding tight to the girl’s hand. The buffalo and slat-cart and two old women were gone.
The tunnel curved, widened, and emptied into a large lighted chamber.
Along the far wall, his back to them, sat a small man dressed in a green uniform and sandals, a pith hat on his head. He was peering into a giant chrome periscope mounted on a console equipped with meters and dials and blinking lights. The man hadn’t noticed them.
Motioning for silence, the lieutenant crept across the chamber and leveled his rifle against the man’s neck.
“Move,” the lieutenant growled, “and it’s auld lang syne.”
But the man moved. Swiveling on his stool, he smiled and reached out with his right hand.
“Welcome,” he said. “It is a pleasure you dropped in.”
His name, he said, was Li Van Hgoc—just Van was fine—a major, 48th Vietcong Battalion. Standing, the man came just barely to the lieutenant’s shoulder. His skin was sallow and he squinted when he smiled. The squinting produced wrinkles around his eyes.
Bowing, ignoring the leveled weapon, the man led them into an adjoining chamber where candles lit a large banquet table filled with pots of rice and meats and fish and fresh fruit.
“So,” Li Van Hgoc smiled. He poured brandy from an amber decanter. “So now we shall talk of the war, yes?”
Again there was a falling feeling, a slipping, and again Paul Berlin had an incomplete sense of being high in the tower by the sea. It was a queasy feeling, a movement of consciousness in and out.
He had never seen the living enemy. He had seen Cacciato’s shot-dead VC boy. He had seen what bombing could do. He had seen the dead. But never had he seen the living enemy. And he had never seen the tunnels. Once he might have: He might have won the Silver Star for valor, but instead Bernie Lynn went down, and Bernie Lynn won the Silver Star. He had never seen the enemy or the tunnels, or the Silver Star, but he might have.
Drowsy now, and yet still excited, he felt himself falling. The fear was gone.
How, he asked Li Van Hgoc, did they hide themselves? How did they maintain such quiet? Where did they sleep, how did they melt into the land? Who were they? What motivated them—ideology, history, tradition, religion, politics, fear, discipline? What were the secrets of Quang Ngai? Why did the earth glow red? Was there meaning in the way the night seemed to move? Illusion or truth? How did they wiggle through wire? Could they fly, could they pass through rock like ghosts? Was it true they didn’t value human life? Did their women really carry razor blades in their vaginas, booby traps for dumb GIs? Where did they bury their dead? Which of all the villages were VC, and which were not, and why were all the villes filled with old women and kids? Where were the men? Did he have inside information on the battle at Singh In in the mountains? Had he been there? Did he see what happened to Frenchie Tucker? Was he present when Billy Boy Watkins expired of fright on the field of battle? Did he know anything about the time of silence along the Song Tra Bong? Was it really a Psy-Ops operation? Which trails were mined and which were safe? Where was the water poisoned? Why was the land so scary—the criss-crossed paddies, the tunnels and burial mounds, thick hedges and poverty and fear?
“The land,” Li Van Hgoc said softly.
And sipping his brandy, the officer smiled.
“The soldier is but the representative of the land. The land is your true enemy.” He paused. “There is an ancient ideograph—the word Xa. It means—” He looked to Sarkin Aung Wan for help.
“Community,” she said. “It means community, and soil, and home.”
“Yes,” nodded Li Van Hgoc. “Yes, but it also has other meanings: earth and sky and even sacredness. Xa, it has many implications. But at heart it means that a man’s spirit is in the land, where his ancestors rest and where the rice grows. The land is your enemy.”
Stink Harris was snoring. The lieutenant and Oscar and Eddie and Doc Peret had moved to a row of cots, where they slept with their boots on.
“So the land mines—”
“The land defending itself.”
“The tunnels.”
“Obvious, isn’t it?”
“The hedges and paddies.”
“Yes,” the officer said. “The land’s own slough. More brandy?”
With Sarkin Aung Wan’s help, they spent many hours discussing the face of Quang Ngai, whose features told of the personality, but whose personality was untelling. The underground, the smiling man said, was the literal summary of the land, and of mysteries contained in it; a statement of greater truth could not be made. Xa Hoi, the party, had its vision in Xa, the land. The land is the enemy.
“Does the leopard hide?” asked Li Van Hgoc. “Or is it hidden by nature? Is it hiding or is it hidden?”
And later, while the others slept their endless sleep, Li Van Hgoc led Paul Berlin on a tour of the tunnels.
Chamber to chamber they went, exploring the war’s underground. Bats nested in beams like pigeons in a hayloft; the walls were lined with tapestries and mosaics of tile and stone; among winding roots and tubers were the makings of an army: kegs of powder and coils of fuse and crates of ammo.
The chambers were linked by narrow passagewa
ys, one to the next, and at last they returned to the operations center.
Smiling, Li Van Hgoc led him up to the chrome console.
“Wait,” he said.
The little man pushed a series of buttons. The periscope whined and began to rise. When it clicked into position, he pulled up a stool and motioned for Paul Berlin to look.
“What is it?”
“Ah,” said Li Van Hgoc. “You don’t know?”
Peering into the viewing lens, squinting to see better, Paul Berlin couldn’t be sure. Several men appeared to be grouped around the mouth of a tunnel. The forms were fuzzy. Some of them were talking, others silent. One man was on his hands and knees, leaning part way down into the hole.
“What?” Paul Berlin said. “I can’t—”
“Look closer. Concentrate.”
Fourteen
Upon Almost Winning the Silver Star
They heard the shot that got Frenchie Tucker, just as Bernie Lynn, a minute later, heard the shot that got himself.
“Somebody’s got to go down,” said First Lieutenant Sidney Martin, nearly as new to the war as Paul Berlin.
But that was later too. First they waited. They waited on the chance that Frenchie might come out. Stink and Oscar and Pederson and Vaught and Cacciato squatted at the mouth of the tunnel. The others moved off to form a perimeter.
“This here’s what happens,” Oscar muttered. “When you search the fuckers ‘stead of just blowin’ them and movin’ on, this here’s the final result.”
“It’s a war,” said Sidney Martin.
“Is it really?”
“It is. Shut up and listen.”
“A war!” Oscar Johnson said. “The man says we’re in a war. You believe that?”