“Squad, fix … bayonets!” and the rifle butts slammed into the ground, the blades were drawn from their scabbards and in a single clanking, machinelike click locked onto the weapon muzzles. Except one.
Crowe’s bayonet skittered away. He had dropped it.
“Crowe, you idiot, give me fifty of the finest!”
Crowe was silenced by his clammy mask, but his body posture radiated sullen anger. He fell from the formation.
“At ease,” said Donny.
The squad relaxed.
“One, Corporal, two, Corporal, three, Corporal,” Crowe narrated through the mask as he banged out the push-ups. Donny let him go to fifteen, then said, “All right, Crowe, back in line ASAP. Let’s try it again.”
Crowe shot him a bitter look as he regathered his gear and rejoined the line.
Donny took them through it again. It was an extremely hot day and the darkness of his mood was such that he worked the men hard, breaking them down into standard line formation, flank marching them into an arrowhead riot element, counting cadence to govern their approach to the imagined riot, wheeling them left and right, getting them to fix and unfix bayonets over and over again.
He worked them straight through a break as great wet patches discolored their utilities until finally the platoon sergeant came over and said, “All right, Corporal, you can give them a break.”
“Yes, Sergeant!” yelled Donny, and even the sergeant, a shit-together but fairly decent lifer named Ray Case, gave him a look.
“Fall out. Smoke ’em if you got ’em. If you don’t got ’em, borrow ’em. If you can’t borrow ’em, then get outta town because your buddies can’t stand you.”
Then, instead of mingling with the silently furious, sweating men, he himself walked over to the shade of the barracks and declared himself off-limits. Let ’em grouse.
But soon Crowe detached himself and came over, cheekily enough, secretly irritating Donny.
“Man, you really put me through it.”
“I put the squad through it, Crowe, not you. We may have to do this shit for real next weekend.”
“Oh, shit, none of those guys is going to march with bayonets into a bunch of kids with flowers in their hair where the girls are showing their tits. We’ll just hang here or go sit in some fucking building like the last time. What, you figure, the Treasury again?”
Donny let the question simmer in his mind a bit. Then he said, “Crowe, I don’t know. I just go where they tell me.”
“Donny, I got it straight from Trig. They’re not even coming into DC. The whole thing’s going to the Pentagon. Let the Army handle it. We won’t even leave the barracks.”
“If you say so.”
“I thought we were—”
“Crowe, I had fun last night. But out here, in the daylight, I’m still the corporal and squad leader, you’re still a PFC, so you still play by my rules. Don’t ever call me Donny in front of the men while we’re on drill, okay?”
“Okay, okay, I’m sorry. Anyhow, some of us were going to Trig’s tonight. I thought you might want to come. You got to admit, he’s an interesting guy.”
“He’s okay for a peacenik.”
“Trig’s not like that. He was beat up in Selma; he was a fucking hero in Chicago. Man, they say he went out twenty-five times and dragged kids in from the pigs. He saved lives.”
“I don’t know,” said Donny.
“It’ll be fun. You need to relax more, Corporal.”
Donny actually wished the invitation hadn’t come; it was his half plan, dimly formed, just to let his secret assignment peter out, go away in vagueness and missed opportunities. But here it was, big and hairy: a chance to do his job.
Trig, as it turned out, lived off upper Wisconsin, just above Georgetown, in a row house that was one in a tatty block of similar dwellings. The house was crowded; it could be no other way. The furniture was threadbare, almost ascetic. Still, the stench of grass almost levitated the house and made Donny’s nostrils flare when he entered. Everything was familiar but unfamiliar: lots of books, a wall full of shelved albums (classical and jazz, though; no Jimi H. or Bob D.). But also, no posters, no NVA flags, no commie posters. Instead: birds.
Jesus, the guy was a freak for birds. Some were his own paintings, and he had a considerable talent for capturing the glory of a bird in flight, all the details perfect, all the feathers precisely laid out, the colors all the hues of miracle. But others were older and darker, muted things that appeared to have been painted in another century.
Somehow he found himself talking to a girl about birds and told her that he, uh, hunted them. It wasn’t the right thing to say but she was one of those snooty Eastern ones, who wore her hair long and straight and had a pinched look to her.
“You kill them?” she said. “Those little things?”
“Well, where I’m from they’re considered good eating.”
“Don’t you have stores?”
This wasn’t going too well. This grouping was smaller and more intimate than last night’s and everybody seemed to know everybody. He felt a little isolated, and looked for Crowe, because even Crowe would have been a welcome ally. But Crowe was nowhere to be seen. And on top of that he felt incorrectly dressed: he was in chinos and Jack Purcells, plus a madras sport shirt. Everyone here wore jeans and work shirts, had long, exotic hair, beards, and seemed somehow in some kind of Indian conspiracy against the ways that he felt it was proper for a young man to dress. It made him uncomfortable.
Some spy, he thought.
“Don’t give Donny a hard time,” said someone—Trig, of course, simply appearing dramatically, an event for which he had a little gift.
Trig was more moderate today, his hair back in a ponytail, which he wore over a blue button-down shirt and, like Donny, a pair of chinos. He also had an expensive pair of decoratively perforated oxfords on, in some exotic, rich color.
“Trig, he shoots little animals.”
“Sweetie, men have been hunting and eating birds for a million years. Both the birds and the men are still here.”
“I think it’s strange.”
Donny almost blurted, No, it’s really fun, but held himself in.
“Well, anyway,” said Trig, drawing Donny away. “I’m glad you could come. I don’t know who half these guys are myself. People just hang out here. They drink my beer, smoke grass, get stoned or laid and move on. I’m hardly here, so I really don’t care. But it’s cool that you came.”
“Thanks, I didn’t have much to do. Well, actually, I wanted to talk to you.”
“Oh? Well, go ahead.”
“It’s Crowe. You know, he’s really borderline in the unit, and he keeps fucking up. I know he’s a smart kid. But if he gets booted from the company, his tour is no longer stabilized, and he could go on levy to the ’Nam. And I don’t think he’d look too good in a body bag.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“As he said, anyone who gets wasted this late in a lost war is a moron.”
“I’ll mention it.”
“Cool.”
Trig was also cool. Donny could see how he’d be a good man in a firefight, and while everybody wept or cowered, he’d be the one to go out and start bringing the people in from the beatings.
“Can I ask you?” he suddenly said to Donny, fixing him in one of those deep Trig looks. “Do you doubt it? Do you ever wonder why, or if it was worth it? Or are you foursquare the whole way, the whole nine yards?”
“Fuck no,” said Donny. “Sure, of course I doubt it. But my father fought in a war and so did his father, and I was raised just to see that as a price for living in a great country. So … so I went. I did it, I came back, for better or worse.”
They had now wandered into the kitchen, where Trig opened his refrigerator and got a beer out for Donny and then took one for himself. It was a foreign beer, Heineken, from a dark, cold green bottle.
“Come on, this way. We’ll get away from these idiots.”
Trig
took Donny out on a back porch, toward two deck chairs. Donny was surprised to see they were on a little hill and that before him the elevation fell away; across the falling roofs, in the distance he was surprised to see the huddled buildings of Georgetown University, looking medieval in profile.
“I forget what real people are like,” Trig said, “that’s why it’s cool to talk to you. Nobody’s more hypocritical and swinish than the pretty boys and the fairies of the peace movement. But I know how important soldiers can be. I was in the Congo in sixty-four—I’d gone with my uncle to paint the Upper Congo swallowtail darter. We were in Stanleyville when some guy named Gbenye declared it a people’s republic and took about one thousand of us hostage and set out to ‘purify’ the population of its imperialist vermin. Murder squads were everywhere. Man, I saw some shit. What people do to each other. So anyhow, we’re in this compound, the Congolese Army is fighting its way closer and the rumor is the rebels are going to kill us all. Holy shit, we’re going to die and nobody gives a shit about us. It’s that simple. But when the door is kicked down, it isn’t rebels. It’s tattooed, tough-ass, kick-butt Belgian paratroopers. They were the meanest pricks I ever saw in my life and I loved them like you wouldn’t believe. Nobody would stand against the Belgian Airborne. And they got us out in a convoy, all the white people from the interior. We would have been butchered. So I’m not one of these assholes who says there’s no role for soldiers. Soldiers saved my life.”
“Roger that,” said Donny.
“But,” said Trig, holding it in the air, “even if I admire courage and commitment, I have to make a distinction. Between a moral war and an immoral war. World War II: moral. Kill Hitler before he kills all the Jews. Kill Tōjō before he turns all the Filipino women into whores. Korea? Maybe moral. I don’t know. Stop the Chinese from turning Korea into a province. I guess that’s moral. I would have fought in that one.”
“But Vietnam. Not moral?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
Trig leaned forward. Another of his little, unsung gifts: listening. He really wanted to know what Donny thought and he refused to pigeonhole Donny as a baby killer and Zippo commando.
Donny could not resist this earnest attention. “What I saw was good American kids trying to do a job they didn’t quite understand. What I saw was kids who thought it was like a John Wayne movie and got their guts blown out. I was in a place once, a forest or a former forest. All the leaves were gone, but the trees still stood. Only, they shined. It was like they were covered in ice. It reminded me of Vermont. I’ve never been to Vermont, but it reminded me of it just the same.”
“I think I know where you’re headed. I saw the same thing on the convoy out of Stanleyville.”
“Yeah, well, in this case we called in Hotel Echo, on a stand of trees because we saw movement and thought a unit of gooks was infiltrating through it. We got ’em, but good. Those were their guts. They were just pulverized, turned to shiny liquid, and it plastered the stumps and limbs. Man, I never saw anything like that. Of course it was a platoon of Army engineers. Twenty-two guys, gone, just like that. Hotel Echo. It wasn’t very pretty.”
“Donny, I think you know. Underneath. I can feel you getting there. You’re working on it.”
“My girl is already there. She’s coming in in this Peace Caravan deal they got going.”
“Good for her. Do you talk about it with her?”
“She says she decided she’d do her part to stop the war when she visited me in the San Diego Naval Hospital.”
“Good for her again. But—are you there?”
Donny couldn’t lie. He had no talent for it.
“No. Not yet. Maybe never. It just seems wrong. You have to do what your country tells you. You have to contribute. It’s duty.”
Trig was like a confessor: his eyes burned with empathy and drew Donny forward to reveal more.
“Donny, I know you’d never leave or quit or anything. I wouldn’t ask you to. But consider joining us after you get out. I think you’ll feel much better. And I can’t begin to tell you how much it would mean to us. I hate this idea we’re all a bunch of chickenshits. A guy who’s been there, won a medal, fought, dedicating himself to ending it and bringing his buddies home. That’s powerful stuff. I’d be proud to be a part of that.”
“I don’t know.”
“Just think about it. Talk to me, keep in touch. That’s all. Just think about it.”
“Donny, my God!” a voice called, and he looked up and saw a dream coming onto the porch to him. She was thin, blond, athletic, part tawny cowgirl, part perfect American sweetheart, and he felt helpless as he always did when he saw her.
It was Julie.
CHAPTER FOUR
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“I did. And I wrote you, too.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Can we leave? Can we go someplace? Donny, I haven’t seen you since Christmas.”
“I don’t know. I’m here with this PFC from my squad and I sort of promised I’d, uh, look after him. I can’t leave him.”
“Donny!”
“I can’t explain it! It’s very complicated.”
He kept looking off, back into the house as if he was trying to keep his eye on something.
“Look, let me go tell Crowe I’m leaving. I’ll be right back. We’ll go somewhere.”
He disappeared back inside the house.
Julie stood there in the Washington dark on a street above Georgetown as the traffic veered along Wisconsin. Pretty soon Peter Farris came out. Peter was a tall, bearded graduate student in sociology at the University of Arizona, the head of the Southwest Regional People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice and nominal honcho of the group of kids he and Julie had shepherded out by Peace Caravan from Tucson.
“Where’s your friend?”
“He’ll be back.”
“I knew that’s what he’d be like. Big, handsome, square.”
But then Donny returned, ignoring Peter.
“Hi. It’s stupid, but Crowe wants to go to another party and I think I ought to go with him. I can’t … It’s just … I’ll get in touch with you as soon as…”
But then he turned, troubled, and before she could say a thing, he said, “Oh, shit, they’re leaving. I’ll get in touch” and ran off, leaving the girl he loved behind him.
The next morning, waking early in his room in the barracks, almost an hour before the 0530 alarm, Donny almost went on sick call. It seemed the only sane course, the only escape from his troubles. But his troubles came looking for him.
It was a boneyard day, he knew. His team was up. He had stuff to do. He skipped breakfast in the chow hall, and instead re-pressed his dress tunic and trousers, spent a good thirty minutes spit-shining his oxfords. This was ritual, almost cleansing and purifying.
You put a gob of spit into the black can of polish, and with a scrap of cotton mixed the black paste and the saliva together, forming a dense goo. Then you applied just a little dab to the leather and rubbed and rubbed. You should get a genie for your troubles, you rubbed so hard. You rubbed and rubbed, a dab at a time, covering the whole shoe, and then the other. You let it fry into a dense haze, then went at it again, with another cotton cloth, went at it like war, snappity-snap. It was a lost military art; they said they were going to bring in patent leather next time because the young Marines couldn’t be trusted to put in the hours. But Donny was proud of his spit shine, carefully nursed through the long months, built up over time, until his oxfords gleamed vividly in the sun.
So stupid, he now thought.
So ridiculous. So pointless.
The weather was heavy with the chance of rain and the dogwoods were in full bloom, another brutal Washington spring day. Arlington’s gentle hills and valleys, full of pink trees and dead boys, rolled away from the burial site and beyond, like a movie Rome, the white buildings of the capital of America gleamed even in the gray light.
Donny could see the needle and the dome and the big white house and the weeping Lincoln hidden in his portico of marble. Only Jefferson’s cute little gazebo was out of sight, hidden behind an inoffensive, dogwood- and tomb-crazed hill.
The box job was over. It had gone all right, though everybody was grumpy. For some reason even Crowe had tried hard that day, and there’d been no slipup as they took L/Cpl. Michael F. Anderson from the black hearse to the bier to the slow-time march, snapped the flag off the box, folded it crisply. Donny handed the tricorn of stars to the grieving widow, a pimply girl. It was always better not to know a thing about the boy inside. Had L/Cpl. Anderson been a grunt? Had he been a supply clerk, a helicopter crew member, a military journalist, a corpsman, combat engineer? Had he been shot, exploded, crushed, virused or VD’d to death? Nobody knew: he was dead, that was all, and Donny stood at crisp attention, the poster Marine in his dress blue tunic, white trousers and white cover, giving a stiff perfect salute to the wet-nosed, shuddering girl during “Taps.” Grief is so ugly. It is the ugliest thing there is, and he had fucking bathed in it for close to eighteen long months now. His head ached.
Now it was over. The girl had been led away, and the Marines had marched smartly back to their bus and climbed aboard for a discreet smoke. Donny now watched to make certain that if they smoked they took their white gloves off, for the nicotine could stain them yellow otherwise. All complied, even Crowe.
“You want a cigarette, Donny?”
“I don’t smoke.”
“You should. Relaxes you.”
“Well, I’ll pass.” He looked at his watch, a big Seiko on a chain-mail strap he’d bought at the naval exchange in Da Nang for $12, and saw that they had another forty minutes to kill before the next job.
“You ought to hang your coats up,” he told the team. “But don’t go outside unless you’re buttoned and shined. Some asshole major might see you, put you on report and off you go to the ’Nam. You’d be back for the next box job. Only, you’d be the one in the box, right, Crowe?”