In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War

  The trim fellow turned to me and took out his toothpick. “Sleep it off, buddy,” he said. “You’re kind of getting in the way.”

  “I was here first,” I said. “You’re the one who’s in the way, asshole.”

  I didn’t see him swing. He came out of nowhere and nailed me right in the face. I felt something crack inside my mouth. I have to say it discouraged me. The tall guy stepped up and swung his cast like a bat. When I ducked under it the redhead grabbed my arm and yanked it behind my back. He slipped a headlock on me and tightened it up to where I couldn’t move without breaking my own neck. Those chimpanzee arms of his were like cables. Then the trim buckaroo hit me in the mouth again, and on the ear, and over my eye. He stood there bopping my head while his pal held me tight. He didn’t have much power in those neat little hands, but they were hard as nuts and he kept them coming. I could hear the guy in the cast laughing wildly. After a time the redhead asked me if I’d had enough. I nodded. He let go and I bent over, hands on my knees, trying to fill my lungs. When I straightened up they were watching me. The guy in the cast was still laughing. The other two were alert. I turned and walked up the alley toward the street.

  Even before I touched my head I felt the bumps coming out. I turned the corner and stopped and checked myself over. There were bumps on my forehead and on top of my skull, under my hair. But it was my teeth that had me worried. Something had broken in there and was floating around my mouth. I spat it into my hand, a jagged black thing. I studied it for a while. It was a chunk of the mouthpiece of my Kaywoodie. Here was a lesson, some profit for my pains. This was the last time I’d start a fight with a pipe in my mouth.

  Still, I hated to lose that pipe.

  I turned and went back up the alley. When they saw me coming they faced me and waited. “You want some more?” the redhead asked.

  I told him I was looking for my pipe.

  They watched as I searched for it, patrolling the ground in a crouch, then on my hands and knees. And then they joined me, even the one in the cast. We were all on our hands and knees, feeling our way in the shadows, patting the damp stones. None of us spoke. After a while the redhead hollered, “Got it!” We gathered around him where he knelt. He turned the pipe over in his hand. “It’s broke,” he said sadly.

  “Mouthpiece is broken,” I said.

  He handed me the pipe. “Still nice and shiny. Maybe they can fix it.”

  “It’s got a guarantee,” I said.

  “Sure, just send it in,” the trim one said.

  The one in the cast said “Ha!” He said it with such bitterness that we all looked at him. “You’ll never see the fucker again,” he said. “They’ll say the guarantee don’t apply because you didn’t do this or you didn’t do that. Some technicality. Lying bastards!”

  The redhead stood and brushed his hands. “So, I suppose you know all about it.”

  “I know. Believe me, I fucking know.” He looked from one to the other of us. He was ready to go the distance on this.

  “I don’t believe Henry’s coming at all,” said the trim fellow.

  Through the open door we could hear Dusty singing “El Paso.” We fell silent and listened to him, right to the very end. One little kiss, and Felina, good-bye.

  Souvenir

  OUR GUNS WERE deployed on the edge of a refugee camp. Some evidence remained of the old village the camp had swallowed—a big, breezy, tile-roofed house that used to belong to the local mandarin, and a few hooches of sturdy construction. The new quarters had been knocked together out of scrap lumber, flattened cans, cardboard, old tarps and ponchos. Open ditches carried sewage to the canal where the women did their laundry and their fishing. There were few men, and they were shy of being seen. These were people who had lost their homes during Tet.

  The battalion had set up headquarters in the mandarin’s house. I was sprawled on the steps, shirt off, baking in the sun. A yellow cat ran past, chased by a pack of kids. A spotter plane circled slowly in the distance.

  Captain Kale clomped down the steps. Captain Kale was a newly arrived infantry officer waiting assignment to another battalion. They’d sent him over to assume my so-called responsibilities until an artillery officer could be found to replace me, which might take a while. Sergeant Benet’s replacement, now off on a supply mission, had come in almost two weeks late.

  Captain Kale was disappointed by this assignment. We had just a few more days until I left, but there were times when I wondered if we’d make it. He was strongly of the opinion that I had failed in my duty. I’d babied the Vietnamese, he thought, instead of raising them to American standards of aggression. They lacked the killer spirit, and Captain Kale was bullish on the killer spirit.

  He had a round glistening face as pink as a boiled ham. It was the face of a soft little man but in fact he was tall and bulging with muscles. In the odd moments when we were stalled somewhere, waiting for a ride, waiting for Major Chau, when the cognoscenti found some shade and lay back with their caps over their eyes, Captain Kale knocked out push-ups by the hundred. If there was a solid wall nearby he’d do isometrics. While he worked out he told me how he was going to turn his future battalion into a killer fighting unit, unlike this one, and how it was a good thing I was leaving the army, because if every officer were like me the VC would walk off with the whole country inside of a week. My silence did not discourage him. He regarded talking—“speaking his mind”—as a form of bravery, “and let the chips fall where they may.”

  Captain Kale owned records of people playing accordions, and could tell the difference between them. He had learned just enough Vietnamese to be able to issue peremptory orders that everyone ignored because it was pleasant to do so and because it was known that Major Chau, whom he had already unforgivably affronted, would tolerate such disobedience. He wore an Australian bush hat with little corks that swung from the brim in front of his eyes. In his spare time he ordered things from the catalog of a company in Singapore that sold cut-rate reproductions of Bavarian artifacts—cuckoo clocks, furniture made from antlers, figurines in lederhosen, steins inscribed with folkish sayings. He intended to furnish his house with these goods. He’d seen them, he said, and there was no way you could tell they weren’t German.

  Captain Kale came down the steps and stopped beside me, blocking my sun. His face was awash in sweat. “What are you doing?” he said. “Are you doing something?”

  “As you see.”

  “I need a sling,” he said.

  “A sling.” I sat up. “And what do you need a sling for?”

  “Division wants to move one of the guns. Don’t ask me why, I’ve got negative intel. Nobody tells me squat.”

  “Where’re they moving it?”

  “Negative intel. They just said to get it ready. A Chinook’s on the way.”

  “Lieutenant Nam’s the quartermaster. Next time you need some gear, talk to him.”

  “That’s what I did. He said talk to Sergeant Tuy. Sergeant Tuy said talk to Lieutenant Nam. If I get any more of this runaround I’m gonna start busting heads.”

  “Lieutenant Nam has the slings.”

  “Then why didn’t he goddamn say so?”

  “Maybe you didn’t ask him right. Maybe you didn’t say the magic word.”

  “Maybe,” he said, “you could find it in your heart to say the magic word for me.”

  “That’s what I was planning to do.” I buttoned my fatigue jacket and untied Canh Cho’s leash from the railing. He raised his head and blinked. His coat was powdered with the red dust, fine as talc, that covered everything here. His tail thumped once on the step.

  Captain Kale looked down at him. “This is no job for an American officer,” he said. “Sweet-talking these people.”

  “You should put in for a translator.”

  “Yeah, sure. That’s just what I need, a Cong spy taking down every word I say.”

  Lieutenant Nam was sitting in his jeep, monitoring the radio. I asked him what was happening in the f
ield. Nothing so far, he said. I said, The communists are afraid of us. He agreed with me. I told him a Chinook was coming for one of the guns and that we were going to need a sling. Of course, he said. He called a man over and told him to get a sling.

  I asked him if Captain Kale had spoken to him.

  Lieutenant Nam shrugged and said, “Captain Kale.” Just his name, as if that explained everything. Then he wagged his finger at Canh Cho and smacked his lips. The dog retreated the full length of the leash, trembling violently.

  When I got back with the sling Captain Kale was trying to couple the howitzer to a truck, yelling orders at the driver: Forward! Back! Left! Right! Clearly, it was no easy thing to execute precise rearward maneuvers in a two-and-a-half-ton truck, under the guidance of a red-faced giant whose every word sounded like a curse; but it was also clear that the driver was not doing his best. Au contraire, he was staging a farce for his friends on the gun crews, who cheered him on as he jockeyed the truck to and fro, sometimes teasingly close to the hitch but always just out of reach. “Stop!” Captain Kale shouted. The driver sawed the wheel, raising more dust. “Stop! Stop!”

  Finally the driver took the truck out of gear and faced Captain Kale with a look of calculated stupidity.

  “That’s enough,” I told him in Vietnamese. “I’ll take over.”

  The driver climbed down from the cab, bowing at the applause.

  Captain Kale walked up to me. “What did you tell that man?”

  “I think I’d better drive.”

  “Did you tell him to quit?”

  “He seemed to be having some problems understanding you.”

  “I said, did you tell him to quit?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “He was under my orders. Not your orders—my orders!”

  “Yes sir.”

  “That Chinook is going to be here any minute now, and this gun’s going to be ready for it.”

  “Yes sir. I’ll drive.”

  “No! You’ll fuck up. I’ll drive. You hitch the gun.”

  We accomplished this without difficulty. Then Captain Kale drove the howitzer out of its emplacement and over to the courtyard of the mandarin’s house, where he stopped and turned off the engine. The courtyard was still open in the middle, but a ring of hooches had encroached on the periphery. I walked up as the crew began to unhitch the gun. “Wait,” I said. They stopped what they were doing. Before Captain Kale could say anything, I told him we needed more space.

  “Horse manure. There’s plenty of room. It’s not going to land, it’s just going to grab the gun and go.”

  “These hooches are too close.”

  “So where else is there?”

  “There’s that field by the canal.”

  “Too swampy.”

  “We could try.”

  “Truck’ll get bogged down. Then I’m really in dutch.”

  “Okay then, the road. We can drive out of town a little ways and do it there.”

  “No time for that. Chopper’s on the way.”

  “They’ll wait. What’ll it take, another twenty minutes?”

  “No time, like I said. I was told to have this gun ready, and it’s goddamn going to be ready.” He ordered the crew to finish unhitching the howitzer.

  “You haven’t actually done this before,” I said.

  “Bet your ass I have.”

  “Not really.”

  “Have too.”

  “When?”

  “You are fucking with my shit, Lieutenant. I will not have my shit fucked with.”

  When the gun was free Captain Kale had the truck driven away while he attached the sling. Then he popped a smoke grenade. Women and kids gathered in front of the hooches to watch. They knew they were in for some kind of show. Captain Kale should’ve had them moved out, he should’ve had the whole area cleared, but I didn’t tell him that. Nor did I offer him the ski goggles in my pack. I just stood there with the others and watched.

  The gun crew heard it first. They straightened up and stared into the sky, hands above their eyes. Then I heard it, a faint thwacking in the air. A few moments later the Chinook came into view, flying in high from the east. It followed the canal up to the village, then banked into a slow circle overhead, huge even at this height, huge and improbable.

  “Lieutenant?” Captain Kale said. “Yoo-hoo, Lieutenant? Do you think you could handle the radio? If you’re not too busy? Do you think you could do that without totally fucking up?”

  Our radio operator had set up shop on the edge of the courtyard. I squatted beside him and dialed up the air support frequency. The pilot was already giving our call sign. I answered him, and he asked if that was our smoke he was seeing. That’s it, I told him. You’re right above it. He asked if I was sure I wanted him to come in there. That’s what the boss wants, I said. The pilot said it looked a little tight, but he could do it, if that was the deal.

  This was the way out. I could have called the Chinook off, asked him to come back in twenty minutes, then told Captain Kale that the pilot wouldn’t come in so close and we’d have to go to the road. That’s what I should have done, but I didn’t think of it, and the reason I didn’t think of it was that I wanted Captain Kale’s will to be entirely fulfilled. I wanted his orders followed to the letter, without emendation or abridgment, so that whatever happened got marked to his account, and to his account alone. I wanted this thing to play itself out to the end. I was burning, I wanted it so much.

  “That’s what he wants,” I said.

  The Chinook made several spirals, dropping fast, then leveled off and began to lower itself more slowly, even gingerly, as if by inches, its vast drab belly growing laboriously more vast, eclipsing the sun, the sun backlighting a fiery line around the body and glinting in the blur of the rotors. The shadow overspread the ground, fell over every upturned face. The great rotors beat the air, pounding hypnotically, ardently, like the sound of a heart through a stethoscope. The thatch on the rooftops started to rustle. I put my hand to my cap. The women claimed their children and pulled them out of the yard. Their hair blew in the stiffening downdraft. Dust swirled around them. They backed away coughing, waving their hands in front of their faces. The Chinook lurched downward, caught itself, then resumed its measured descent.

  The center of the courtyard was deserted except for Captain Kale, who stood atop the howitzer with the sling noose in his hands. I could barely see him through the thickening storm of dust. The Chinook was maybe thirty feet overhead, letting itself down in a series of short drops and checks. The rotors whipped the air down and whipped it down again as it rushed upward off the ground. It grew wild, furious, a chaos of winds. A man ran out of a hooch with a small child under one arm. Then, as if they’d been waiting for a signal, people were boiling out of the doorways, shouting, stumbling, some half dressed, carrying babies and boxes and bags. Canh Cho started howling. The thatch lifted on the hooches, snapping back and forth, straining, tearing loose, whirling in the eddies. The air was full of it. A sheet of tin flapped on a wall, broke off, banged away over the ground. A big piece of plywood went flying. I heard a hooch collapse across the yard. The Chinook was suspended above the howitzer, the hook swinging from its belly. Captain Kale raised the noose above his head. The hook was just out of reach. He lifted the noose higher and made a lunge but missed, and the Chinook rose a few feet and held on there, pounding, pounding, pounding. Another hooch crashed down. Then, almost in the same instant, another. They were coming apart. The junk they’d been made of was blowing all over the yard. The Chinook inched down again. Captain Kale reached up with the noose. The hook was just above him. He couldn’t miss. He missed. He missed again. The dust had blinded him, for sure. I got up and started toward him, but just then he made another pass at the hook and caught it and jumped off the gun. His knees buckled and he fell hard. The Chinook eased upward, cables creaking as they tightened around the howitzer. The barrel tipped down, then rocked back as the gun lifted free. The Chinook beat its way up. I
shielded my eyes against the churning dust. I heard a loud crack somewhere, the whump of the blades, Canh Cho wailing. He hadn’t stopped since he started. The Chinook rose steadily, the gun swinging below it, then made a lumbering turn and chopped back eastward above the canal.

  I watched until I couldn’t hear it anymore.

  The courtyard was still. The air had an ochre tint. I looked around at what had been done here. This was my work, this desolation had blown straight from my own heart. I marked the discovery coolly, as if for future study. This was, I understood, something to be remembered, though I had no idea what that would mean. I couldn’t guess how the memory would live on in me, shadowing my sense of entitlement to an inviolable home; touching me, years hence, in my own home, with the certainty that some terrible wing is even now descending, bringing justice.

  I suspected none of this. I felt regret, but even more surprise.

  Captain Kale was limping in little circles, talking to himself and rubbing angrily at his eyes. He looked demented. As I came toward him I told him to stop rubbing, that he was only making it worse. He stood there with his fingers spread out in front of his face, blinking hard. I screwed the lid off my canteen and held it out to him. He seized it and tilted his head back and let the water pour into his open eyes. It ran down his cheeks and neck and under his collar, washing pale streaks in the dust that caked his skin. His uniform was red with the stuff. He took a mouthful of water, spit it out, took another, and looked around. His eyes were swollen almost shut. “My God,” he said.

  “It’s a mess, all right.”

  He handed me the canteen. “It’s like a bomb went off.”

  “Not really,” I said. “A bomb is something else again.”

  He didn’t answer. He was staring around at the women in the courtyard, watching them shuffle through the debris on the ground. They seemed to know which piece of wood was theirs, which scrap of tin. There was no quarreling among them. I noticed an unframed picture lying a little ways off. I walked over and picked it up. A picture of a girl. Stiff paper with scalloped edges, yellow with age. Captain Kale asked to see it. I blew off the dust and handed it to him. We both studied it. A sepia portrait of a teenage girl in white ao dai, sitting erect before a painted backdrop of hanging vines with a crescent moon shining through. Her hands were in her lap. Her expression was grave and dreamy.