Fields of Fire (6 page)

He held her and discovered that his eyes were wet. “Please.”

She did not invite him. Nor did she ask him to leave. She merely turned and walked slowly up the stairs. He watched the golden legs ascend the steps and felt insane, controlled by their measured motion. He followed her.

She unlocked the door and left it open, still not looking back for him.

He entered her apartment, closing the door and walking through the kitchen after her. She stood in the other room, facing away from him, still not acknowledging his presence. He placed both hands on her waist, standing behind her, holding it as carefully as fragile china.

He did not ask and she did not answer. Neither of them needed to. When she reached up and turned out the light they both understood. She stood with her back to him and pulled a long pin out of her hair and it fell straight and black and silky down her back. He gathered it in his hands and pressed it into his face and it was soft and clean and he kissed it, holding it that way. Then he gently pulled on it, turning her around, and lifted her face, her eyes still looking down, not meeting his, and he kissed her.

He held her that way for a long time, careful not to force himself on her, wondering at the fullness of her mouth, trying to understand that part of him that was exclaiming that this was perhaps the most beautiful moment of his life. He experienced the firmness of her back and hips and then the surprising fullness of her breasts. He marveled at the shyness of her response after she had finally committed herself so completely to him.

Then she slowly broke away from him, still not saying a word, and left the room. He stood awkwardly for a moment, watching after her. The hard white of a streetlight flashed on her as she re-entered the room but it was soft and gold and black where it touched her. She did not return to him, though, did not even look at him. Instead she knelt on the floor of her little room and folded down the futon that was her bed.

He noticed that he had begun to tremble. He dropped his clothes where he stood and joined her on the futon, losing his fears and loneliness in the solace of her warmth. Still she was shy, almost passive, but she was mercurial warm when he entered her and she spoke for the first time then, a sharp groan and a lovely word that he did not understand because it was a Japanese word. But he needed no translation.

Then it was over and they still held each other, almost as if both were in shock at their intimacy. He took her hair and wrapped it behind his neck, enveloping them inside the soft black cocoon that her hair made. She laughed softly, her face still fresh and innocent and bright, and he felt that he was somehow experiencing an emotion that had eluded him before, that was not supposed to be a part of him. Not there. Not then. But he felt it and he remarked to himself that he would do almost anything to preserve it.

He noticed it then, on the futon. She saw that he was staring at it and stood quickly, donning a happy-coat, making such a simple thing as that a poem. Then she gathered the sheet and carried it out of the room.

He held his head, laying back on the futon. Oh, wow. I didn't know there was such a thing any more, not on Okinawa. She re-entered the room and went into the kitchen, where she put on a pot of tea. He watched her movements, stunned. Her hair was down around her shoulders, framing her oval face. She was ignoring him again.

A virgin! All the way to Okinawa to learn the ways of sultry, sloe-eyed Oriental women, and he'd happened on a virgin. It explained a lot of things to him. He walked up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. She stared into the teapot as it steamed, taking no apparent notice of his hands.

“Mitsuko. This was your first time.”

She turned around and faced him. She seemed embarrassed, compromised. She nodded.

He shrugged helplessly. “Mine, too.”

HE walked loose and powerful on his way back to Camp Hansen, taking long strides in the middle of the street, avoiding shadowed pockets of buildings where Americans skulked with gutting knives, waiting to split a man's belly for the dollars in his wallet. He reached the camp gate and listened to the bar tales of the others coming in from liberty, all the cruel clichés about Oriental women. He thought of the groin-grinding bar girls of two days before, and for the first time understood the sad part of Mitsuko's stare that kept accusing.

STREETLIGHT’S hard light on the far wall, soft breasts pressed against his middle. How could she have such breasts beneath the unrevealing cloth of waitress uniforms? American songs on the radio. Japanese radio. Armed Forces Network. Don't ask why. Don't ask how. Don't ask forever. Love me now.
^*
Love breaks over green tea that he loaded down with sugar. “Teach me to write your name, Bobby. I show you mine in Japanese.” And in the daytime, he still drinking at the club and she ignoring him, lest she be marked as a participant in the festival of lust. “I love you, Mitsuko. No, really. Really, I do.” “Go back to sleep. Three days you go Vietnam.”

HE lay on his back in the large, stark room, his head against his seabag, smoking a cigarette. He had tried to sleep but the ceiling lights were brutally bright, and besides he was too keyed up. In an hour, at midnight, the room full of solemn, shaved-headed men would depart for Vietnam. An aviator Captain and a First Sergeant sat across from him, conversing easily. The Captain carried a new guitar. He was going back for the second time. He was telling the First Sergeant about how he got his Distinguished Flying Cross. He spoke of Vietnam with a studied familiarity that for some reason irritated Hodges. The First Sergeant was drunk. He was returning from emergency leave, after burying his wife. Foreign names rolled off his tongue like syrupy spit. Quang Tri Phu Bai Da Nang Hue … They both talked too loud and with too much certainty, as if they were competing for the admiration of the ninety-odd boots who sat miserably around them. Hodges thought about asking them to shut up, then tried to block them out.

He had spent three hours in her apartment, from the time she was off work until he had to leave to catch the bus for Kadena Air Force Base with the others. It had been their fourth night together.

Mit-sooo-ko. He had decided not to shower. It seemed like such a final act to wash her off him. He could smell her on his hands and in his hair. He loved smelling her and he knew that the odor would soon vanish in the muck of what awaited him. He wondered if he would ever see her again, if he would ever make it back to Okinawa. He hoped deeply that he would, and that somehow it would be soon.

But first there was Vietnam.

* From the song “Until It's Time For You to Go,” by Buffy Sainte-Marie, ©Copyright 1965, 1973 by Gypsy Boy Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

3

Hodges began processing in Da Nang. At Division headquarters, he and several other new Lieutenants were granted a quick audience with the Assistant Division Commander, then briefed by a string of Colonels regarding the Division's area of operations. One of the Colonels produced a detailed map, on which he had carefully placed a mass of dots, one for each enemy contact in a certain place. The map was loaded with dots. In some places they were speckles, like polka dots, and in others they gathered to make large red smears.

The red dots reminded Hodges of blood, and their collective presence was like a slap that awakened him to the reality of the bush. They were only dots, but each one, according to the Colonel, represented someone killed or wounded. The Twenty-Fifth Marines area of operations, where Hodges was headed, was a large red smear.

The first night he lay on a mildewed cot inside a tent at the Motor Transport battalion's compound, which housed Division transients. On a far ridge, all night long, a .50-caliber machine gun expended ammunition in deep burps. Shadows from distant flares lit one side of the wall, on and off, and Hodges felt vulnerable, naked in his ignorance. He didn't have the slightest idea why the .50-cal kept firing while the compound where he slept was not even on alert. It irritated him. He was finally in Vietnam, but he wasn't a part of it.

The following morning he and two others took a convoy from Da Nang to the combat base at An Hoa. It was a journey into darkness and primitivity, as little by little the comparatively lush surroundings of Da Nang fell by the wayside. Strings of American bases and well-kept villages gave way to wide, ruptured fields, saturated with little ponds, permanent bomb craters from the years of war. The multitude of gravestones and pagodas beginning just outside Da Nang bore chips and divots from a hundred thousand bullets. Hodges could make out old fighting holes along many of the ridges, where units had dug into their night perimeters months and years before. He felt young, even more naive, a stranger to an ongoing game that did not demand or even need his presence.

At Liberty Bridge, the Vu Gia and Thu Bon rivers joined, isolating the An Hoa Basin from the rest of civilized Vietnam. The convoy crossed the river on a pull barge, one truck at a time. There was no bridge at Liberty Bridge. The old bridge had been blown by the VC years before, and the new bridge was not yet completed. On the far side of the rivers, after they passed a combat base that sat on a large J-shaped hill, was land as chewed and devastated as the pictures Hodges had seen of Verdun. Whole treelines were torn out by bombs. All along the road were tatters of villages that had been ripped apart by the years of fighting. Fields were porous with bomb and mortar craters. The scattered hootches that served as homes for the villagers were no more than straw thatch, often patched with C-ration cardboard, appended to large earthen mounds where the families that remained hid from the battles.

The convoy road ended at An Hoa. There was nothing beyond the combat base but the mountains, across the river, which stretched all the way to Laos. The enemy owned the mountains. Hodges quickly comprehended the isolation, studying the wasted terrain on all sides of the narrow convoy road. It was as if the convoy had passed through a distance-warp when it barged across the river, and had ended up a million miles from Da Nang.

An Hoa, for all its red dust and oven heat, seemed an oasis. He watched the base as the convoy approached, attempting to distinguish its structure. None was apparent. An outpost appeared, surrounded by reams of concertina and barbed wire, then another. The tents of the larger base were packed onto one red hill, then fell into a draw and continued on another bald ridge. Hodges remembered that it was a futile effort to attempt to find order, that An Hoa was merely another legacy passed on from French times, turned into an American base because there had already been an airstrip capable of use.

There's barbed wire, he finally decided, surveying a wounded countryside swollen with anger. That'll do for starters.

MORE processing in An Hoa. Regiment to battalion to company. He dragged his Valpac from place to place, receiving instructions about how to be a Good Lieutenant. His stateside utilities became completely soaked from his sweat. Finally the company supply clerk brought him to the supply tent, where he stored his Valpac and was issued jungle utilities and boots, a flak jacket, a helmet, and the full ration of combat gear. His new boots were embarrassingly unscuffed. His flak jacket was too bright a shade of green, undulled by the dust of the Basin, which penetrated every type of weave known to man. But, finally, he could begin to blend in.

That night the base was mortared and he shared a small bunker with four other men and a few fleeting rats. He heard the mortars fall in random bursts across the base and could not fight back a feeling about how neat it was. By God, he pondered, leaning like an unconcerned old-timer against the bunker wall, it's finally happening to me.

The next day, as he was walking to an indoctrination class with another new Lieutenant, the base was rocketed. He sprinted to a dry ditch and dove in, feeling like a true combat veteran. One rocket landed perhaps fifty meters away, directly on top of a tent, and he began composing in his own mind how he would put that into a letter to someone. But then he climbed out of the ditch and almost stepped on the severed hand of a man who had been inside the tent. It lay on the road, in perfect condition, having been blown more than a hundred feet by the rocket's explosion. The man's wedding ring was in perfect place. Someone from near the tent shouted that the First Sergeant was dead.

And it wasn't fun anymore.

On his second night in An Hoa he was awakened by a company clerk who told him that the company was in contact, and asked him if he wanted to watch. It was past midnight. He couldn't quite understand the man's meaning. Do I want to watch, he pondered over and over, gathering his flak jacket and helmet and weapon. Do I want to watch. Why? Is it on TV?

But he dutifully followed the man and joined several clerks from the company office on top of a large sandbag bunker. They pointed north, across the river, and he followed their fingers as his eyes searched into the hell that was known as the Arizona Valley.

And he sat, feeling slightly obscene, as if he were a peeping tom to someone's private doings, and watched his company dying across the river. Red and green tracers interlaced and careened into the black night air. Mortars and B-40 rocket-propelled grenades flashed and impacted, spewing dirt with whumps that he could hear from the three-mile distance he was watching. Illumination flares dangled like tiny streetlights in the distance.

He was washed with a mix of helplessness and fear that overrode any emotion he had ever experienced, and continued to stare, an armchair spectator to the sport of dying. And tomorrow, he said over and over as he watched, tomorrow that will be my very own Vietnam.