Edge of Eternity

  Their mission today was to "cleanse" a village.

  They were in Quang Ngai Province, in the northern part of South Vietnam known to the army as I Corps Tactical Zone, or just "the northern region." Like about half of South Vietnam, it was ruled not by the regime in Saigon but by the Vietcong guerillas, who organized village government and even collected taxes.

  "The Vietnamese people just don't understand the American way," said the man walking alongside Jasper. He was Neville, a tall Texan with an ironic sense of humor. "When the Vietcong took over this region there was a lot of uncultivated land, owned by rich people in Saigon who couldn't be bothered to farm it, so Charlie gave it to the peasants. Then, when we started to win territory back, the Saigon government returned the land to the original owners. Now the peasants are mad at us, can you believe that? They don't get the concept of private property. That tells you how dumb they are."

  Corporal John Donellan, a black soldier known as Donny, overheard and said: "You're just a fucking Communist, Neville."

  "I am not--I voted for Goldwater," Neville said mildly. "He promised to keep uppity Negroes in their place."

  The others within earshot laughed: this kind of banter was enjoyed by soldiers. It helped them deal with their fear.

  Jasper, too, liked Neville's subversive sarcasm. But during their first rest stop this morning he had noticed Neville rolling a joint, and sprinkling into the marijuana some of the unrefined heroin they called brown sugar. If Neville was not a junkie, he soon would be.

  Guerrilla fighters moved among the people as fish swam in the sea, according to the Chinese Communist leader Chairman Mao. General Westmoreland's strategy for defeating the Vietcong fish was to take away their sea. Three hundred thousand peasants in Quang Ngai were being rounded up and moved to sixty-eight fortified concentration camps, to leave the landscape deserted but for the Vietcong.

  Except that it was not working. As Neville said: "These people! They act as if we have no right to come to their country and order them to leave their homes and their fields and go live in a prison camp. What is wrong with them?" Many peasants evaded the roundup and stayed close to their land. Others went, then escaped from the crowded, unsanitary camps and came home. Either way, they were now legitimate targets in the eyes of the army. "If there are people who are out there--and not in the camps--they're pink as far as we're concerned," General Westmoreland said. "They're Communist sympathizers." The lieutenant briefing the platoon had put it even more clearly. "There are no friendlies," he had said. "Do you hear me? There are no friendlies. No one is supposed to be here. Shoot anything that moves."

  The target this morning was a village that had been evacuated and then reoccupied. Their job was to clean it out and level it.

  First they had to find it. Navigation was difficult in the jungle. Landmarks were few and visibility was restricted.

  And Charlie could be anywhere, maybe a yard away. The knowledge kept them all on edge. Jasper had learned to look through the foliage, from one layer to the next, scanning for a color, a shape, or a texture that did not fit. It was difficult to stay vigilant when you were tired, dripping with sweat, and pestered by bugs, but men who let their guard down at the wrong moment got killed.

  There were different kinds of jungle, too. Bamboo thickets and elephant grass were impassable in practice, though the army high command refused to admit it. Canopy forests were easier, for the dim light restricted the undergrowth. Rubber plantations were best: the trees in neat rows, the undergrowth kept down, usable roads. Today Jasper was in a mixed forest, with banyan, mangrove, and jackfruit trees, the green backdrop splashed with the bright colors of tropical forest flowers, orchids and arums and chrysanthemums. Hell has never looked so pretty, Jasper was thinking when the bomb went off.

  He was deafened by a bang and thrown to the ground. His shock did not last long. He rolled away from the trail, stopped in the flimsy shelter of a bush, deployed his M16 rifle, and looked around.

  At the head of the line of men, five bodies lay on the ground. None was moving. Jasper had seen death in combat several times since arriving in Vietnam, but he would never get used to it. A moment ago there had been five walking, talking human beings, men who had told him a joke or bought him a drink or given him a hand scrambling over a deadfall; and now there was just a mess of mangled bloody chunks of meat on the ground.

  He could guess what had happened. Someone had stepped on a hidden pressure mine. Why had the mine dog not set it off? The boy must have spotted it and had the presence of mind to keep quiet and walk around it. Now he was nowhere to be seen. He had got the better of his captors in the end.

  Another of the men came to the same conclusion. He was Mad Jack Baxter, a tall Midwesterner with a black beard. Screaming, "That fucking slant led us into it!" he ran forward, firing his rifle, sending rounds uselessly into the greenery, wasting ammunition. "I'll kill the motherfucker!" he screamed. Then his twenty-round magazine was empty and he stopped.

  They were all angry, but others were more sensible. Sergeant Smithy was already on the radio, calling in medevac. Corporal Donny was kneeling down, optimistically looking for a pulse in one of the prone bodies. Jasper saw that a chopper could not possibly land on this narrow trail. He jumped up and yelled to Smithy: "I'll look for a clearing!"

  Smithy nodded. "McCain and Frazer, go with Murray," he shouted.

  Jasper checked that he had a couple of Willie Petes, white phosphorus grenades, then struck out from the path, followed by the other two.

  He looked for signs that the terrain might be turning rocky or sandy so that the vegetation might thin out and form a clearing. He was careful to note what landmarks he could, so as not to get lost. After a couple of minutes they emerged from the jungle onto the banked edge of a rice paddy.

  At the far side of the field Jasper saw three or four figures wearing the thin cotton pajamas that were the everyday clothing of peasants. Before he could count them they had spotted him and melted into the jungle.

  He wondered whether they were from the target village. If so, he had inadvertently warned them of the company's approach. Well, that was too bad: saving the injured took priority.

  McCain and Frazer ran around the edge of the paddy, securing the perimeter. Jasper exploded a Willie Pete. It set fire to the rice, but the shoots were green and the flames soon went out. However, a column of thick white phosphorus smoke rose into the air, signaling his location.

  Jasper looked around. Charlie knew that when the Americans were preoccupied with their dead and wounded it was a good time to attack them. Jasper held his M16 in two hands and scanned the jungle, ready to drop to the ground and shoot back if they were fired on. McCain and Frazer were doing the same, he saw. In all probability none of them would get the chance to duck. A sniper in the trees would have all the time in the world to draw a bead and fire an accurate deadly shot. It was always like that in this fucking war, Jasper thought. Charlie sees us but we don't see him. He hits and runs. Next day the sniper is pulling up weeds in a rice paddy and pretending to be a simple farmer who wouldn't know one end of a Kalashnikov from the other.

  While he waited he thought of home. I could be working for the Western Mail now, he mused; sitting in a comfortable council chamber, dozing while an alderman drones on about the dangers of inadequate street lighting, instead of sweating in a rice paddy wondering if I'll take a bullet in the next few seconds.

  He thought of his family and friends. His sister, Anna, had become a big shot in the book world after discovering a brilliant Russian dissident writer who went under the pseudonym of Ivan Kuznetsov. Evie Williams, who had once had an adolescent crush on Jasper, was now a movie star living in Los Angeles. Dave and Walli were millionaire rock stars. But Jasper was a foot soldier on the losing side in a cruel, stupid war a thousand miles from nowhere.

  He wondered about the antiwar movement in the States. Were they making headway? Or were people still fooled by the propaganda that protesters were all Communists a
nd drug addicts who wanted to undermine America? There would be a presidential election next year, 1968. Would Johnson be defeated? Would the winner stop the war?

  The chopper landed and Jasper led the stretcher team through the jungle to the site of the explosion. He remembered his landmarks and found the platoon without difficulty. As soon as he arrived he could see, from the attitudes of the men standing around, that all the casualties were dead. The medevac team would be taking back five body bags.

  The survivors were fuming. "That slant led us right into a goddamn trap," said Corporal Donny. "Ain't that some kind of fuckin' us around?"

  "Fuckin'-A," said Mad Jack.

  As always, Neville pretended to agree while implying the contrary. "Fool kid probably thought we might kill him when we had no more use for him," he said. "Too dumb to realize that Sergeant Smithy was planning to take him home to Philadelphia and put him through college." No one laughed.

  Jasper told Smithy about the peasants he had seen in the rice paddy. "Our village must be in that direction," Smithy said.

  The company went with the bodies back to the chopper. After it took off, Donny deployed an M2 flamethrower to napalm the rice field, burning the entire crop in a few minutes. "Good work," said Smithy. "Now they know that if they come back they won't have anything to eat."

  Jasper said to him: "I guess the chopper will have warned the villagers. We'll probably find the place empty." Or, Jasper thought, there could be an ambush; but he did not say that.

  "Empty is okay," said Smithy. "We'll flatten the place anyway. And intelligence says there are tunnels. We have to find those and destroy them."

  The Vietnamese had been digging tunnels since the start of their war against the French colonists in 1946. Beneath the jungle were literally hundreds of miles of passageways, ammunition dumps, dormitories, kitchens, workshops, and even hospitals. They were difficult to destroy. Water traps at regular intervals protected the inhabitants from being smoked out. Aerial bombing usually missed the target. The only way to damage them was from the inside.

  But first the tunnel had to be found.

  Sergeant Smithy led the platoon along a trail from the rice field into a small plantation of coconut palms. When they emerged from the palms they could see the village, about a hundred houses overlooking cultivated fields. There was no sign of life, but all the same they entered cautiously.

  The place appeared deserted.

  The men went from house to house yelling: "Didi mau!" which was Vietnamese for "Get out!" Jasper looked into a house and saw the shrine that was the center of most Vietnamese homes: a display of candles, scrolls, incense pots, and tapestries dedicated to the family's ancestors. Then Corporal Donny deployed the flamethrower. The building had walls of woven bamboo daubed with mud, and a roof of palm leaves, and the napalm quickly set the whole place blazing.

  Walking toward the center of the village, rifle at the ready, Jasper was surprised to hear a rhythmic thumping noise. He realized he was listening to the beat of a drum, probably a mo, a hollow wooden instrument struck with a stick. He guessed that someone had used the mo to warn the villagers to flee. But why was he still drumming?

  With the others he followed the noise to the middle of the village. There they found a ceremonial pond with lotus flowers in front of a small dinh, the building that was the center of village life: temple, meeting hall, and schoolroom.

  Inside, sitting cross-legged on a floor of beaten earth, they found a shaven-headed Buddhist monk drumming on a wooden fish about eighteen inches long. He saw them enter but did not stop.

  The company had one soldier who spoke a little Vietnamese. He was a white American from Iowa, but they called him Slope. Now Smith said: "Slope, ask the slant where the tunnels are."

  Slope shouted at the monk in Vietnamese. The man ignored him and continued drumming.

  Smithy nodded to Mad Jack, who stepped forward and kicked the monk in the face with a heavyweight U.S. Army M-1966 jungle combat boot. The man fell backward, blood coming from his mouth and nose, and his drum and stick flew in opposite directions. Creepily, he made no sound.

  Jasper swallowed. He had seen Vietcong guerrillas tortured for information: it was commonplace. Though he did not like it, he thought it was reasonable; they were men who wanted to kill him. Any man in his early twenties captured in this zone was probably one of the guerrillas or someone who actively supported them, and Jasper was reconciled to such men being tortured even when there was no proof they had ever fought against the Americans. This monk might have looked like a noncombatant, but Jasper had seen a ten-year-old girl throw a grenade into a parked helicopter.

  Smithy picked up the monk and held him upright, facing the soldiers. His eyes were closed but he was breathing. Slope asked him the question again.

  The monk made no response.

  Mad Jack picked up the wooden fish, held it by its tail, and started to beat the monk with it. He hit the man on the head, shoulders, chest, groin, and knees, pausing every now and again for Slope to ask the question.

  Jasper was really uncomfortable now. Just by watching this he was committing a war crime, but it was not so much the illegality that bothered him: he knew that when U.S. Army investigators looked into allegations of atrocities they always found insufficient evidence. He just did not see that this monk deserved it. Jasper was sickened, and turned away.

  He did not blame the men. In every place, in every time, in every country there were men who would do this kind of thing, given the right circumstances. Jasper blamed the officers who knew what was happening and did nothing, the generals who lied to the press and the people back in Washington, and most of all the politicians who did not have the courage to stand up and say: "This is wrong."

  A moment later Slope said: "Give it up, Jack, the fucker's dead."

  Smithy said: "Shit." He let go of the monk, who fell lifeless to the ground. "We have to find the fucking tunnels."

  Corporal Donny and four others came into the temple dragging three Vietnamese: a man and a woman of middle age, and a girl of about fifteen. "This family thought they could hide from us in the coconut shed," said Donny.

  The three Vietnamese stared in horror at the body of the monk, his robes soaked in blood, his face a pulpy mass that hardly looked human.

  Smithy said: "Tell them they're going to look like that unless they show us the tunnels."

  Slope translated. The peasant man answered him. Slope said: "He says there are no tunnels in this village."

  "Lying motherfucker," said Smithy.

  Jack said: "Shall I . . . ?"

  Smithy looked thoughtful. "Do the girl, Jack," he said. "Make the parents watch."

  Jack looked eager. He ripped the girl's pajamas off, causing her to scream. He threw her to the ground. Her body was pale and slender. Donny held her down. Jack pulled out his penis, already half erect, and rubbed it to stiffen it.

  Once again Jasper was horrified but not surprised. Rape was not commonplace, but it happened too frequently. Men occasionally reported it, usually when they were new to Vietnam. The army would investigate and find the allegations unsupported by evidence, meaning that all the other soldiers said they did not want any trouble and anyway they had seen nothing, and the matter would end there.

  The older woman started talking, a stream of hysterical, pleading words. Slope said: "She says the girl is a virgin and really only a child."

  "She's no child," said Smithy. "Look at the black fur on that little snatch."

  "The mother swears by all the gods that there are no tunnels here. She says she doesn't support the Vietcong because she used to be the village moneylender but Charlie stopped her."

  Smithy said: "Do it, Jack."

  Jack lay on the girl, his big frame hiding most of her slight body. He seemed to be having difficulty penetrating. The other men shouted encouragement and made jokes. Jack gave a powerful thrust, and the girl screamed.

  He pumped vigorously for a minute. The mother continued to plead, t
hough Slope did not bother to translate. The father was silent, but Jasper saw tears streaming down his face. Jack grunted a couple of times, then stopped and withdrew. There was blood on the girl's thighs, bright red on her ivory skin.

  Smithy said: "Who's next?"

  "I'll do her," said Donny, unzipping.

  Jasper left the temple.

  This was not normal. Any pretext of getting the father to talk was now redundant: if he had known anything he would have revealed it before the rape began. Jasper had run out of excuses for the men of this platoon. They were out of control. General Westmoreland had created a monster and deliberately let it loose. They were beyond sanity. They were not even animals; they were worse than that; they were mad, evil fiends.

  Neville followed him out. "Remember, Jasper," he said, "this is necessary to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people."

  Jasper knew that this was Neville's way of bearing the unbearable, but all the same he could not stomach Neville's humor at this moment. "Why don't you shut the fuck up," he said, and walked away.

  He was not the only one sickened by the scene in the temple. About half the platoon were out here, watching the village burn. A pall of black smoke lay over the village like a shroud. Jasper could hear the girl screaming in the temple, but after a while she stopped. Minutes later, he heard a shot, then another.

  But what was he going to do about it? If he made a complaint, nothing would be done except that the army would find ways to punish him for stirring up trouble. But maybe, he thought, he should do it anyway. In any case, he vowed to go back to the States and spend the rest of his life exposing the liars and fools who made this kind of atrocity happen.

  Then Donny came out of the temple and approached him. "Smithy wants you," he said.

  Jasper followed the corporal back into the temple.

  The girl lay splayed on the floor, a bullet hole in her forehead. Jasper also noticed a bleeding bite mark on her small breast.

  The father was dead, too.

  The mother was on her knees, begging, presumably, for mercy.