Deadline (4 page)

Jake heard babies crying. That was the worst. Going through a village and feeling a man’s best instincts, wanting to comfort a crying child. Then realizing you’re carrying an M-16, wearing an ammo belt, and the poor kid is afraid. Looking at old grandmothers and women and children holding their ears and running scared, other times reaching out their arms like they wanted you to pick them up. And you wanted to open your heart and arms to them, but knew they could be VC, that they could kill you, hand you a basket with a live grenade.

Children. They were here to save these children from the ravages of totalitarianism descending from the north. The war could deliver them, Jake thought, if only they were allowed to win the war. But someone had fixed the rules so they couldn’t win. Meanwhile, children died. Nothing was more tragic than the death of a child. Jake had cause to think about that before the war, and he thought it again there. The death of a child. One could only endure the thought by steeling himself against it, by pretending it hadn’t happened.

There was Hyuk, Jake’s closest friend among the Montagnards, the original inhabitants of the central highlands, called 2 Corps by U.S. forces. Hyuk was a brave and loyal Yard, strong in ways his slight build never suggested, kind and light-hearted, a lover of life and a lover of his little family. He was the sort that convinced you these people were worth fighting for, even if the reports from back home convinced you American college students weren’t. Hyuk would smile broadly whenever he’d see Jake, and ask him, “Wha’s sup, bro?”

Hyuk’s son, wife, and mother lived with him in a tiny little hut, reinforced with metal scraps, cardboard, and wood pallets. Mamasan and her young slender daughter-in-law favored Jake with their delicacies, including that rotten fish sauce, the name of which he couldn’t remember. They were warm and generous, good women, loyal to Hyuk and his infant son. One day, ten months into Jake’s tour of duty, the unthinkable happened. While Hyuk was out on patrol, a VC, known locally, fragged Hyuk’s hut, wasting his wife, mother, and son. Then, like a cockroach, he scampered back into the darkness.

Hyuk returned to discover the madness two days later. He fell to his knees and wept and screamed, and afterward was never the same. He became reckless, took foolish risks, maybe because there was nothing left to live for. Jake never saw a hint of meanness in Hyuk before, but he got darker and harder, and his big smile became scarce and twisted. One day he disappeared into the jungle by himself, armed to the hilt, and Jake knew why. He was going to find the man, the traitor, who had taken from him the mother who gave him life, the son to whom he gave life, and the wife who was his life. And finding him, Jake had no doubt what he would do to him.

When Hyuk broke off, Jake knew he would never see him again. He didn’t. He never said good-bye. Hyuk often appeared in Jake’s dreams. He wondered if his Yard friend had managed to take the family-killer with him when he left this world. Jake understood the visceral drive that compelled a man to protect mother and wife and child and to sacrifice anything to extract vengeance on those who ravaged them. This was not mere macho craziness. In the face of such a thing, this was merely SOP—standard operating procedure. It came from deep inside a man and transcended race and culture.

Jake watched this movie as if for the hundredth time. Except each time was slightly different, a buried memory newly unearthed by one little variation, one slight association not made before, taking him a new direction. He experienced again the magic of mail drop, the chopper coming in a couple times a week with troop replacements and mail bag, the latter even more welcome than the former. The sacred letters, each spread out carefully, some bringing words of joy and hope, others words of grief and broken commitments. Whether flowering love sonnets or “Dear John” letters or just newsy hometown updates and clippings, the letters distracted them from a time and place that cried out for distractions. Jake consumed his letters along with sips of too strong coffee from a tarnished aluminum cup, dinged from jostling in his pack on patrol. He savored every word from home as if each were a drop of dew collected by a man dying of thirst.

The letters reminded him how much he missed Oregon air, clean and exhilarating, and Oregon water, flowing and refreshing and blue, not stagnant brownish green. He longed for the gentle rain from gray clouds rather than the monsoons from black clouds that could turn dry dusty ground to muddy mush in ten minutes. But even more than the place, he missed the people. The letters offered much needed proof that other world was real, still there, waiting for his return. On Thanksgiving and Christmas, when he got hot meals he swore never to take for granted again, he’d take out those letters and pictures again, and share his meal with all they represented.

After basking in the warmth of their letters, Jake would write his own back to Janet and Mom. He’d propped up both their pictures by his bunk. There was no picture of Dad. Somehow it seemed appropriate. Dad had never been there when Jake needed him. So it seemed, anyway.

Sometimes one of the guys would toss his porn mag near the picture of Janet. More than once Jake turned her face away as he thumbed through the pages. He felt ashamed, but also lonely, so very lonely. Porn was like pot, an anesthetic that dulled the pain of loneliness, yet somehow with its counterfeit love seemed only to deepen the void inside him. It wasn’t just the round bodies of the women in the pictures, it was their round eyes, eyes like the girls he went to school with, eyes that reminded him of home. Home. What was happening at home? Would he ever see it again? If so, would it ever seem the same?

Visions of his first leave marched onto the center stage of Jake’s fevered mind. There he was, sitting in Bangkok, reading an American newspaper, his insides boiling with shock and anger. Who were these nitwit reporters who couldn’t even get the basic facts right, much less interpret their meaning? They talked as if Lieutenant Calley and the My Lai massacre were typical behavior for U.S. military. Even the communist atrocities, their vicious massacres of the innocent, were laid at the feet of U.S soldiers. If only we’d stop bombing these nice North Vietnamese, they wouldn’t hurt anybody.
Yeah, right. Who started this war against innocent people? It wasn’t us
! If Jane Fonda had her way U.S. school children would get the day off on Ho Chi Minh’s birthday instead of George Washington’s. Jake blamed her, but not as much as he blamed the journalists who promoted the shallow uninformed ideas of people like her. She was just ignorant and stupid and self-centered like the rest of Hollywood. But they, the journalists, should have known better.

What made these reporters think they were a cut above the farm boys dying in the jungle to keep their “free press” free? Who were they, pontificating on what was right and wrong, what was or was not a “just war” ten thousand miles away? What did they know of those who fought on the front lines for a freedom they were quick to spend, but which cost them nothing? Cost them nothing because other men, brave men, had paid for it with their lives? Distortion was SOP for these parasites building careers off other men’s sweat. They were like those blood-sucking slugs he had to peel off after crossing the rivers. Had these journalists walked the Ho Chi Minh trail, holed up at Khe Sanh or stood tall during the Tet Offensive they were so quick to herald, falsely, as an NVA victory? These bozos couldn’t lift a backpack or load a rifle or zip up their pants without an instruction manual. They wouldn’t know a Claymore mine if it blew up in their rear ends, and Jake found himself wishing it would. They didn’t know beans, the arrogant jerks. He resented them big time—“boo koo resentment,” he thought, commandeering the old Vietnamese expression from the French
beaucoup.

The memories suddenly turned sweet as the movie rolled on, because on that same leave he linked up with Finney and Doc. Though they’d gone through training at Fort Benning the same time, there was no guarantee their years in Nam would overlap each other. But they did. Even then, as three lieutenants in different companies they could easily have gone the year without seeing each other. But as fate would have it—as fate seemed always to have it with them—they’d ended up in the same battalion, over seven hundred strong. Though they wouldn’t trudge through the jungles side by side, they would always know their buddies were out there, somewhere in 2 Corps, less than a thirty-minute chopper ride away, which compared to the rest of the world was like sleeping in the same bunk. And if they stopped Charlie today, they might be stopping him from killing their best friends three weeks from now. In Vietnam you clung to thoughts like that, to any thought that made the job a little easier, that gave it a little more meaning.

It was Doc who managed to get them together for that precious week of R & R. They all applied for the same week, requesting Bangkok, but knew it was unlikely all three of them would get it. But Doc, the consummate poker player, Doc who could bluff the devil himself, had won enough money to convince a clerk at HQ they should have their reunion. When the three friends met in Bangkok, it was no small triumph.

Finney was the first to reach their appointed meeting place. Jake snuck up on him from behind, grabbed him and cried, “What’s up, bro?” They slapped each other on the back and poked each other in the stomach, and wrestled, the way men hug each other without hugging. Doc joined them within the hour. They bragged of their exploits, told of close calls. They sang a few rounds of “A comin’ home soldier.” There was nothing so rousing, nothing so exhilarating as to anticipate coming home at last after having served faithfully. All three were on the homeward slide of their tours, Jake only three months from the end. They vowed to survive, to serve their remaining year in safer places and go on with their lives together back home. Jake watched in his dream as Doc raised his Budweiser in an elegant toast. “Gentlemen, it may not be much of a war, but it’s the only war we’ve got!”

They all got drunk that night—Finney too (it was back before the change)—and for one glorious evening, or so it seemed, they pretended to be home. Jake wrote in his journal when he got back to his post, “Drunkenness knows no geography. It makes where you are seem beside the point, which is probably why it’s the most popular way to spend your leaves here.” He had signed off 86, or some such number—the number of days he had to survive before hopping the chopper that would take him to the 707 that would fly him home. One day closer to Janet and his dog Champ and Corvettes and Dea’s hamburgers and flush toilets and real seasons, seasons with a wider venue than “boiling” and “insufferable.”

Jake reviewed the troops he’d known, seeing visions of gentleness and meanness. Some who fought beside him were the kindest, finest men he’d ever know. Moving in and out of his dream were three little boys in Benton County, playing war in the wheat fields, back when losing meant you had to buy the other guys a bottle of pop at Miller’s store, rather than be sent home to your family in a pine box.

Wasn’t that Slider, the grunt from Pensacola with the dense accent and the big smile? No, it was happening again. Slider, don’t go over there. Get back! The VC mine, not nearly as potent as a Claymore but deadly nonetheless, blew off Slider’s leg and splattered Jake with his blood. Someone cried out in pain. It wasn’t Slider. He was too far gone. It was Jake himself. Exploding with anger and anguish, he held his right ear, which felt like it had been punctured and still plagued him periodically twenty-six years later. Instead of rushing to Slider he turned away, later ashamed that in his own pain he’d let someone else reach his buddy first. Commotion and panic trailed off into silence, the silence of surrender that always followed death. Then the vacancy. The loss of a familiar voice, and smile, a familiar snore. Slider, a guy who choked on cigarettes but smoked anyway, a guy with a lousy poker face that would never play poker again. A guy who always carried his girl friend’s picture, who would never see his girl again.

Death. That was the enemy, wasn’t it? The only real enemy. The one enemy of all the young men in that jungle. The one enemy Jake had in common with the NVA he fought.

Jake writhed on his back, drenching the hospital bed with sweat from a jungle heat twenty-six years old. He saw disturbing images now he hadn’t seen until coming home, some of them worse than war itself, moving pictures of protests and debates and politicians’ lies. They’d made a promise to those good people, Hyuk’s people, and they hadn’t kept it. Men died, some of them his friends, to keep that promise, and the nation broke it. Then they turned and looked at those they’d sent as if they were bastard children, reminders of an ugly episode they just wanted to forget. Jake trembled with anger even now, and the anger gave him energy, pulling him back from the dreams and memories that consumed him, pulling him closer to the present time and place.

Jake saw light and heard noises. Were these incoming mortar rounds? He couldn’t hear the dreaded “whump” sound that warned of the coming blast like lightning warns of thunder. He had a splitting headache. He reached to his pocket for the aspirin he chewed like candy, but couldn’t seem to find it. There wasn’t even a pocket there. What was he wearing? Why couldn’t he get his bearings? Funny, it didn’t seem as hot as it should be. And the noises weren’t the right noises.

He heard voices, hoping they were English. Yes, English. Something besides a rock or blanket was under his head. Wait. Was this a hospital? He must be at Cam Ranh Bay. He frantically wiggled both sets of toes. Yes, he still had his legs, both of them.

He was so tired. Vietnam was a year without real sleep, only catnaps and dozes.
I can’t fall asleep. My buddies’ lives are in my hands. I can’t fall asleep.
His body obeyed. It would not fall back asleep. He would not let it. Jake opened his eyes again and held them open, stung by the light. Good. The pain would wake him up.

In the white and blue swirls above him Jake saw fleeting images of busy figures hovering about. One of them was mumbling and another nodded her head. Was this still a dream? No, he could feel the tension of the sheets against his toes. He also felt localized discomfort he couldn’t identify, from an IV and catheter.