I Pledge Allegiance (10 page)
Read I Pledge Allegiance Online
Authors: Chris Lynch
Vaseline Gasoline
I
t makes too much sense. Eventually, my grand design would melt all over itself. Operation Overlord, where I’m looking out for my friends from my place of vision and vigilance, is a great idea. If only I were capable.
The more natural outcome would have the brilliant Beck looking out for all of us. And more and more that seems to be what we have.
Hey Pal,
Remember how I took care of you when you were on the USS
Boston
, getting you bombed and sent home to the real Boston for a vacation? Well, I’m at it again. Sometimes it seems to me like I am over here expressly for the purpose of watching over your shoulder, looking for anything I can do to make your life a little more pleasant or less dangerous.
Guess what they’re having me do now. Pruning. Weeding. Making the banks of the Mekong a more Morris-friendly place to play.
Seriously. I am spraying defoliant. Operation Ranch Hand, they call it. I am spraying this wicked concoction called Agent Orange that basically burns the crap out of all the green life growing all around the rivers, up through most of Vietnam and Laos. We kill their crops to make them weak, and we kill their cover so we can get a clear shot at them.
Morris, I’ve seen it. I’ve seen the before and the after. It looks like a forest fire has swept through the banks of rivers for three hundred yards either side. Then you hit the Cambodian border, and it’s as if someone opened a door from the death planet into the Amazon forest.
You’re welcome.
Don’t get killed, Morris. Don’t waste all my fine work.
Have you heard from Ivan? I haven’t. Not one word since basic training, when he told me he was going infantry instead of cavalry because he wanted that “human touch.” My guess is he’s giving them a lot of touch, but very little humanity.
I don’t like the silence, though. If he weren’t Ivan, I’d be worried. I saw a local on a sampan the other day stick a fish with a spear. Reminded me of a bluefish. I’d love a piece of blue right now.
Can you talk to Rudi? See if you can radio him, will you? He says he’s doing great. He writes once in a while now. Looks like he’s writing with a crayon stuck up his nose while he eats at the same time. But at least he writes. He sounds confident. Yeah, I know.
Guys here never talk about winning and losing and all that. They talk about accumulated time, sorties and landings, tonnage, time, time, time.
What are your days like now? A lot hotter than Boston, or Boston, am I right? Try to talk to Rudi.
Your Man in the Sky
Mail reading time isn’t anywhere near as organized an event as it was on the
Boston.
Partly, I guess, because of the more disjointed nature of life down here in the delta. Every layer of existence is wilder and more chaotic than it was when we were cruising at a stately
pace way out there on the coast. We have big mother helicopters swooping low all the time, landing everywhere, beating the bushes for the enemy, dropping supplies, picking strays up out of the water. Lots of these smaller river craft have their own makeshift helipads tacked right onto the boats, a sturdy and fixed version of my canvas sun shield. We come off the boat like a factory ship, we work with hundreds of other boats, thousands of other guys. We work with all the other services.
Life here is less majestic than on the big gliding cruiser I was on in a past life. It’s faster, less intimate, less like a neighborhood, more like a freeway. If you have one of those helicopter pads on your roof, an approaching rotor could mean anything when it lands.
Ivan’s home, the
Benewah,
has one of those pads.
I’ve neither seen nor heard from Ivan since the typhoon. He’s out there. I’m following along as best I can, tracing the Thirty-fourth Artillery movements as best I can. They’re still at it, but he’s not turning up on any lists, so he’s no casualty.
Like Beck said, though, you’d worry if he wasn’t Ivan. Right?
Meanwhile, you don’t need a reason to worry about Rudi. I get another letter from him.
Morris Man,
So you did it. You finally joined the action. This is great. Now I don’t have to do all the fighting for the two of us anymore. Laugh. I’m just kidding. Actually, I’m fighting for about fifty of us. No fooling, Morris. I have to tell you something, and I want you to believe me.
I am not leaving the Marines when this is over.
I belong here. How many times you figure a guy hears his name called in his whole lifetime? I don’t know, either, but ask Beck, ‘cause he will probably know the number and then you will have the number of times I hear my name shouted out every single day.
Half of it is for the wrong things.
You know what that means?
Exactly right. Half the time men are screaming my name out here AND IT IS ALL FOR THE RIGHT THINGS! I mean it, man. And even when I don’t hear the right kind of screaming, I go and do something screwy on purpose, just to hear my name being screamed.
Morris, I am getting an addiction to screaming. Laugh.
I make whole villages scream and they don’t even know who I am.
I am going to tell you another something. Okay? I killed a man. Charlie, VC, right? I killed Charlie. Nothing special, since I kill guys all the time now. But this is a story. I shoot ’em, and I grenade ’em and all that. But this one, we were patrolling and he surprised me because, jeez, these guys — they are like cats and you step right on them in that jungle before you know they are there. I did, too. I really, truly stepped on him.
Hah. Back home what if I stepped on somebody, like I did lots of times? People call me names, smack me in the head, pee on my lunch, right?
But here my actions make sense. I step on him, he jumps right up, I turn and don’t let him raise his weapon. Morris, I stabbed him. With my bayonet, right below the belt. I was scared, but I was all energy, too, yeah, so I stick that bayonet in there, and I work it on him like I’m using a great big bread knife on some day-old crusty scali bread. You remember that scali bread, Morris, we used to get day old from Boschetto’s? It was so good, but man it was tough cutting.
Right, I cut and I cut until he falls back, falls off my knife, and lands on his seat. He sits a few tics, his hands holding his stomach like he can hold it all in when it’s already almost all out. He looks up at me, kind of like crying, but I can’t really read these guys’ faces, Morris, and he is staring up and I am staring down.
And then the shouting starts. My other guys, the three excellent guys on my patrol, they catch up, standing behind me, and they start chanting my name like whisper-chanting it so as not to attract attention. Ruu-Dee, Ruu-Dee, Ruu-Dee.
So I do what you do. I don’t think. (You know I’m good at that.)
I do the whole thing again. Only to his throat.
With the guys chanting “Rudi, Rudi,” I stick Charlie just under one ear. I start sawing and I have to even angle to keep him upright but I do it and I mean to stop at his Adam’s apple but the chanting doesn’t stop so I doesn’t stop.
I cut off almost his whole head. I did that. Me.
I never could have done that back home, that’s for sure.
The guys went to continue patrol, but I told them I would catch up. I sat down next to
Charlie. I just felt like I needed to sit right next to him for a little bit. So I did.
I told him I was sorry. And I thanked him.
How are you doing?
Once you stop being afraid, everything will be okay. Trust me.
Your pal,
Rudi
“You sharing?” Moses says, curling cross-legged on the floor of my communications patio. If I have a friend here and now, it’s Moses. I get along with everybody, but there’s getting along, and there’s Moses, and that’s about all I can manage. We have a language of approach when one of us is reading mail. The sweetness-and-light letters and packages are the ones you want to share, so you can see your happiness in the other guy’s face. The difficult stuff — the stuff that is too complicated, sad, infuriating — when a guy reads that, he almost always takes on the glazed, mummified look.
“Sharing or staring?” becomes the question.
When I remain silently looking at Rudi’s letter, the question kind of answers itself.
Really, he just wanted to share anyway.
Moses shoves a photo in my face. There is a pair of
hands holding up a baby too tiny to hold its own head up. The baby is wearing a tiny T-shirt, which looks like a dress and has print down the front reading SOMEBODY IN VIETNAM LOVES ME.
I’m staring again, but now it’s a whole different thing.
I look over, and his eyes are so filled with water, he looks like he might have glaucoma.
“You’re a father, Moses?” I say.
“Apparently so.”
I actually giggle, feeling something so nice, even one degree removed.
“Well, go ahead and cry, stupid,” I say.
“I will not,” he says, all butch and ridiculous. “And if you call me
stupid
again, I’m gonna napalm you worse than that fish.”
Before he can do that, we get a call on the radio and I take it. We are to haul it as fast as we can, because there is the mother of all firefights and there is blood, US Army blood, Navy blood, spilling and filling this very river. We’ve been headed to base, but command says to reverse upriver and full-speed it to the fight.
Full speed for this craft is unfortunately not more than six knots, but we give it our all to cover the six-kilometer distance.
It’s all happening in a kind of slow motion. Everybody gets to battle stations as soon as I let out the shout.
Captain snags the radio from me and starts banging back and forth with command.
Guys are flying all over the boat. We shift sandbags and ammunition into best position to kill and not be killed in the most efficient manner possible. You can smell adrenaline like creosote in the air. I pass by a couple of the other guys, a machine gunner, a mortar man shuttling shells to his pit, and we graze each other, a little bump, a bigger bump.
It becomes a thing, a weird and unacknowledged and unplanned manner of communication between guys who ain’t doin’ no talkin’. It’s deliberate, the bump, the bump, every time any of us passes by any other. Grunts and groans and growls. Greasy testosterone slicks meet shoulder to shoulder.
The tension, as we chug upriver, gets insane. I feel like these are my loyal-to-death mates in a way I haven’t felt before. Cap is on the line for ages, talking about air cover and readiness, deployment on approach, readiness, hitting the fan running, as he calls it.
It’s going to sizzle.
“There are no Zippo boats there yet, boys,” Cap bellows, throwing the phone across the deck as if it were the enemy. I go scrambling for it as he slaps my back hard enough to flatten me. “And the nearest jets carrying napalm got blown away on the ground. VC are
entrenched in mangrove swamps and jungle and tunnels so deep, they must’ve been living there for years, waiting. Everybody is waiting on us, and we are letting men die every extra second.” I gather up the phone and watch the captain stomp around, shoving guys in the direction he wants them to go. “I can promise you this, men. You have never been more needed in your entire sorry lives than you are needed right this minute.”
Everybody starts hollering, wordless, primate noises of fury.
“Guns a-blazin’, boys!” Cap shouts. “We go in guns a-blazin’!”
Everybody is yelling, bellowing, punching the thick air. Trying to build something up, get something out, keep something away. I’m hollering hard enough that I strain abdominals and grab my side. I shout some more.
We’re nearly exhausting ourselves before the fight, because it’s taking us so long to get there. We are bizarrely alone on the river, with everyone else on both sides and civilian population, too, either up at the fight or hiding. It takes a while before we even feel the fight, the distant thunder and lightning of artillery growing only gradually, the zip of smaller bombers and A-6A Intruders finally going up against the North Vietnamese MiGs, meaning, holy cow, this is serious indeed.
We could already tell, from the first call, that this was something special. Now I can see and feel in every part of me that this will be like nothing I have ever encountered before.
Still, it’s not completely revealing itself, the tension building from the unknowns as much as from the mounting audible buzz of the warfare, until we make the last big bend in the river.
“Here it comes, gentlemen!” Cap roars.
My hands on my machine gun are trembling as much now as they will be when I start firing.
Moses has been granted his wish. His new baby’s picture tucked into his breast pocket, he is nestled in at his flamethrower. He turns up toward me, points sharply, then swings around to take on all comers.
And holy, holy, holy, there they are.
Every type of Riverine craft from our side seems to be represented, and fully deployed. PBRs are shooting across the scene every which way, attempting to get a bead on whatever and wherever all that VC firepower is coming from. There is one Seawolf helicopter gunship strafing each bank, shooting an unmeasurable amount of ammunition into apparently deserted foliage. But the foliage is defending itself, and almost as soon as we engage, a surface-to-air rocket comes screaming up out
of the bush, tears the double-blade chopper almost in half. The whole thing spins, clockwise, drunkenly, and crashes into the water.
Cap is on the radio again, and suddenly we’re headed somewhere with a purpose.
“What are we doing, Cap?” calls my new cage mate, a guy called Silk, up in the turret. He’s the latest to man the unlucky cannon, but he’s no rookie and Cap treats him almost like a peer. Because he’s a lifer and somebody like me is clearly a short timer.