I Pledge Allegiance (8 page)

Her face is laminated with tears again. And it’s worse yet. The lines of her face are not recognizable to me. As if her real face has been glazed with those tears, frozen in a freezer, then cracked with a hammer to create fractures and fissures and all kinds of unwelcome wrong angles.

“Ma?” I say, half laughing, all nervous, “it’s a little stain.”

“Blood,” she says. “Looks like blood. There is an artery” — she makes a slashing gesture across her own inner thigh — “you could die … it never stops … on the TV … it … never … stops. We all know these things now….”

I grab her and I hold her and she trembles enough that it reminds me of the tremors coming up from under the ship during bombardment, but I don’t think I’ll share that story. I just keep holding her and I tell her that together we can get this stain out. It’s the kind of challenge she loves anyway. She’s ready to let go now
but I don’t let her, because if she sees me crying, then I just don’t know what kind of situation we’ll have on our hands and we just might end up disappointing Mr. Athenas after all.

I had no idea. How could I be so stupid as to think she wasn’t going to be right there with me every bloody step of the way?

When we stroll through the front doors of Anthony’s Pier 4, after walking along the Fish Pier, it is everything I always imagined it would be. The only reason I had even imagined it was anything at all was because of Ma’s talking about it like it was the restaurant version of a trip to the crying Mary statue at Lourdes. Myself, I was impressed enough with the Fish Pier.

I am finding myself at home with piers and ships, with the smell of the ocean and even sulfuric decaying seaweed.

And I’m wondering how the boys are all doing.

The hostess could not be nicer. She actually salutes me as she seats us. Ma is beaming and gleaming, possibly as proud of her miracle de-staining job on my pants as anything else. Probably not, though.

I am staring at the glory that is Anthony’s menu. There is more ocean life on one page here than I have sailed over all these months. I glance up periodically to catch Ma not really looking very closely at her menu.
She is glancing at it but mostly swimming in the surroundings.

I have the clam chowder, she has the shrimp cocktail. She has the poached salmon while I have the broiled scrod, a fish so mythically delicious I doubt it even exists in nature.

But the truth is, I would find it all wonderful because Ma is finding it all so wonderful, which she would do even if they brought her a boiled shoe.

“Everyone is looking at you in your uniform,” she says. “Now aren’t you glad you wore it?”

“I am, Ma,” I say, quite honestly. But I’m glad because of how she’s feeling.

“Can I have an Irish coffee?” she asks me, impishly, as we’re served Ma’s strawberry cheesecake and my key lime pie.

The tide has now, officially, turned.

She
is asking
my
permission.

I have never seen my mother so proud, so happy.

Almost too happy.

When the coffee’s done, the bill comes, and my head starts spinning all over again. I figure the entire USS
Boston
could be fed for three days for the price of this meal.

“The coffee and dessert were on us,” says the waitress as I empty my wallet almost completely.

But she’s looking at my mother when she says it.

“I feel like I’m in one of those World War Two musicals,” Ma says, very conspicuously looking in all directions, attempting eye contact with any diner or passing staff she can lock onto. She is giddy with Irish coffee and pride, and I know already what movie she is thinking of. She loves musicals, she loves World War II, and she loves to imagine that is what war is.

“On the Town,”
I say. “With Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra.” It’s about three sailors on shore leave in 1944. They’re dressed just like I am now. That’s the only real thing about it.

“Yes,” Ma says, bubbly. “Yes, exactly. And the other one.”

“There’s another one?”

“Yes,” she says. “Yes, yes …
Anchors Aweigh.”

I am looking around at everybody in Anthony’s Pier 4 Restaurant now. I am staring, ogling, just like my mother’s been doing. Only not as she has been doing. I am really looking at their faces, into their eyes. I am really seeing them, while she is projecting MGM musicals onto their faces.

And what am I seeing, in the reality? Nothing. I see nothing everywhere. Nobody is looking back at me. Nobody notices. Nobody knows.

Nobody cares one little bit what I’m doing in this silly sailor suit.

“What’s wrong?” Ma asks.

I am not Frank Sinatra. I am not Gene Kelly. “New York, New York! It’s a helluva town!” is not ringing in my ears.

“Anchors Aweigh” is, over and over and over.

“Those movies are so unbelievably stupid, Ma,” I say, getting up from the table and waiting for her to do the same.

I might as well have just punched her in the head.

I
spend the next three days of my leave apologizing to my mother in any way I know how. I do laundry. I cook. I take long walks through the neighborhood with her, some in my uniform, some in normal civvies. Gradually, I make my way back.

But back where? More with every walk, this does not feel like home. I want to
be
home, without a doubt. But I just can’t seem to find it.

The last morning, I stand on Peters Hill, looking out over the city of Boston, ready to head back to the ship of
Boston.
I’m anxious now to go. I never thought I would say that. The people I have met have all been polite, but nobody is giving me any of that “go get ’em” stuff like in the movies.

Instead, they say:

“Just come home safe.”

“Keep your head down.”

“Don’t be a hero.”

That last one came from Mrs. Lahar, my sixth grade teacher, who now lives in a retirement home halfway between my house and my old school.

I laughed at first. “Don’t be a hero? Mrs. Lahar, you were the one who taught me about heroes. You were the most gung-ho history teacher I ever came across, before or since.”

She nodded, then pointed a long finger at me with the same old authority. “There are a lot of causes to die for, Morris. Come home from that pointless and immoral war and find one.” Then she kissed me on the cheek. “And try and keep an eye on that idiot friend of yours while you’re there.”

She was walking away when I tried to pull us both out of it. “You mean Beck, of course,” I said.

She stopped, turned, and looked as if I had just torn a scab off her.

“What a waste,” she said sadly.

So all I can think of now, as I look at the skyline of my lifelong hometown is, I don’t belong here. I don’t understand this war — or any war, now that I’m in the middle of one — but I understand I’m supposed to be somewhere and this is not that somewhere right now. If Beck, Ivan, and Rudi are in Southeast Asia, then Southeast Asia is where I belong.

How can that be
pointless and immoral,
to fight for one’s friends? It can’t be. It can’t.

I’m headed back two days earlier than originally planned, because I’ve been called back. Something is up, and I’m not sorry to go and find out what it is.

Ma, sensing some of what is in me — sensing, of course, all that’s in me — is torn to shreds but also not blubbering when I break away from the visit’s final hug.

“Do what you need to do,” she says. “Get it done, and then come back to me. All of you, just do your jobs and get home.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I say, and head down the road five pounds heavier. I can at least carry the scent of home, the essence of it, as I go. It is the scent of meatballs, basil, garlic, and spring onions. And of Pond’s cold cream, Chanel No. 5, and Alberto V-O 5 hairspray.

I just hope it’ll all be the same when I return.

I get a shock when I report.

“Reassigned?” I say, reading the notice on the big board at the naval station at the South Boston Shipyard.

The USS
Boston
is no longer my home. Seems that it’s not just the Terrier missiles that are suddenly surplus to requirements.

The notice tells us to report to the mother ship one last time to collect personal belongings, say good-byes,
and read the new assignments that have been posted. There is a list of names on this notice, probably ten percent of the ship’s crew, who will be moved.

I wonder if it’s a coincidence that every one of the guys I bunk with is being transferred. Except, of course, Vera, who transferred himself. I’m thinking it’s not a coincidence. Is there such a thing as a suicide virus?

I get to the ship, make my way down to The House. I pass under the 8-inch cannons, detouring for one last sight of the Terrier guided missiles, which the war has left behind but still look ready to come off the bench and get in the game.

All the other guys are already there when I reach sleeping quarters. There’s a lot of laughing, head-slapping, shoulder-punching. Hugging, crying, any of that stuff is just not on the menu.

The Navy appears to have reassigned us in twos. Seven is playing his guitar, all packed and sitting in his rack, encouraging Huff to get a move on so they can get to their new assignment on the tank landing ship
Westchester County.
Bruise and Rascal have their bags over their shoulders, itching to report to their new life aboard the destroyer
Sacramento.

Vera’s belongings have been packed up by somebody and are waiting to be collected. Even his dog tags,
which he opted not to take with him to the bottom of the sea, sit on top of it all, waiting.

“Where the action is, pal,” Moses says, grabbing me in a half-headlock. I’m reading the postings list, trying to make sense of it.

“What is this, ‘RAF’?” I ask. Really, I should know. Really, I don’t. “Does it mean we’ve been transferred all the way to the British Royal Air Force?”

“Riverine Assault Force vessel, Mo. It’s a floating tank they’re putting us on, guns everywhere. We are now part of the Mobile Riverine Force, working together with the sad fools of the Army. We go right upriver, into the very heart of this whole crazed show. We deliver Army jokers way up-country, we go back and forth and supply Army jokers, and when the time comes, we go back up and collect whatever’s left of them Army jokers. All the while we blast away at everything that moves.”

I just keep staring at the list. “Oh,” I say.

Moses points at my designation letters. “At least you finally got your wish, Mr. Communications. You’re a radioman.”

I brighten up right away. All I ever really wanted was to be in communications, whatever craft they put me on. So not only could I watch over my pals, I might be able to contact them as well. Just to hear them …

Another happy thought occurs to me. “So I won’t have to do any shooting?”

“Oh, no,” Moses says, laughing. “Everybody on that ship is shooting, pal. Even the cook has to be shooting, if you want to get up- and downriver in one piece.”

“Oh,” I say again. “Oh.”

With very little fanfare, I go to my rack and pack up the remains of my life aboard USS
Boston.
It all peters out to the end.

“See ya” and “Good luck” and “Maybe we’ll catch up again” are about all we give to each other, all we get from each other. Just like that, The House empties for the last time.

“Come on,” Moses says, “let’s go. I don’t want to spend one more minute than necessary on the USS
Crackerbox.”

I would have thought Moses had been the happiest guy on the whole ship.

But maybe I don’t know anything.

We’re headed out the door when we bump right into the big Marine officer coming in. Moses and I snap right to attention, salute, and stand aside as the officer walks past.

Col. Rivera
it says on his name tag.

We stand frozen in place as he walks silently to Vera’s rack.

He stands over the rack, over the really puny little hump of belongings that are what is left of his son. He stands, hunched over it, exactly the way a person pauses on his way past a coffin at a funeral.

He does not move for the longest time. It is so tense, so sad, so gut-wrenching, I would throw my own self into the ocean right now if I had half a chance.

Colonel Rivera breaks the stillness by saluting his son.

I am certain it is the first and only time he has done so. I am wondering how things might have been different if he had done it, just once, while Vera was alive.

“You men can go,” the colonel says, his voice cracking but still clearly the authority in the room. “Move on, gentlemen. Please, move on.”

We don’t need to be told again. We scramble as Colonel Rivera sits on the rack, his back still to us, gathering up the dog tags, picking up — and smelling close and deep — his boy’s shirt.

He is definitely humming softly as Moses and I depart.

Anchors Aweigh.

A
fter reporting, with our lives stuffed into these long canvas duffel bags, we are once more transported across the ocean, on a converted World War II troop ship, back to the action. Only this time, we’re taken much deeper into the action.

For only the second time in about a hundred years, the US Navy has divided itself in two. My life on the USS
Boston,
floating off the coast and on the ocean, was part of the Blue Water Navy. What a lot of people would call
the easy war.

From now on, that won’t be the case at all. I am now part of the Brown Water Navy, where life is a whole lot more complicated.

Because of the geography of Vietnam, it eventually became obvious to the people who decide such things that if we wanted to make progress there had to be a more clever approach than
one if by land, two if by sea.
There is certainly a great deal of land around here, and it sure is blessed with a good long coastline. But
there’s much more of what you might refer to as
other
terrain for fighting.

There is a lot of jungle in Vietnam. There is a
lot
of jungle. And it is cut up, north-south, east-west, and every possible combination of all that, with rivers. Thousands of miles of rivers. If you are going to move effectively around here, if you are going to find the enemy, engage the enemy, deliver troops, equip them, move them from place to place, and above all cover them with the Navy’s special brand of protection, you are simply going to have to use a good bit of boat power to do it.

And where that jungle and those waterways come right up close and personal to each other? Well, that is about the most dangerous place on planet Earth.

Welcome to my new home. Welcome to the Mekong Delta.

They are called river monitors, because of their resemblance to the
Monitor,
one of the first two armored warships, from the Civil War. I studied that bit, the
Merrimac
and the
Monitor,
bouncing cannonballs off each other like it was nothing more than a game of dodgeball.

One look at my new place of work, and I know things are going to get a lot more interesting than that.
There will be only eleven of us on board, which means much more responsibility, and much more risk.

Moses was right: This is a floating tank we are looking at as we stand waiting on the barge to be welcomed aboard. But what even Moses didn’t realize was this is also a beast. A growling, snarling, howling, grinning, booming, fire-breathing sea monster.

It’s known as the battleship of the river force because it’s designed to provide heavy-duty support to our Army brothers in the thickest of battles along the banks and some ways inland. We’re so armored, and so armed, it looks like movement was just an afterthought for the craft. This creature looks to me as if it could defeat any and all comers up and down the river all by itself. The forward turret has a 40-mm cannon and an M-60 machine gun. Halfway up ship, dug in as if they were in foxholes on land, are an 81-mm mortar and two .50-caliber machine guns. The rear carries two 20-mm cannons, another two .50-caliber machine guns, and four more M-60 machine guns.

Mounted up front and center at the nose of the operation are two smaller turrets, each with one more machine gun mounted side by side with …

“Moses,” I ask, having not seen these bits of kit before, “what is that?”

Moses can barely speak. “We’re on a Zippo, man. I didn’t know we were gonna be on a Zippo!”

“A Zippo?”

He turns to me and grabs me by the shoulders in an almost teary embrace. “Zippo. Like the lighter. Those ain’t cannons, Mo. Those are flamethrowers.”

We both turn in silence back to the hugeness we’ve been assigned to. Like Moses, I am now entranced, looking again over every inch of this ugly, mighty
thing
floating here under the ungodly Vietnamese sun. It ain’t pretty, that’s for certain. It’s got tires strapped here and there as bumpers, it’s got steel caging around the turrets, sandbags packed within the caging. The turrets themselves look like they were copied straight out of some medieval book of castles and pounded out of metal — and then, while they were at it, they roped in an honest-to-goodness dragon for laughs. It’s got crazy eyes and teeth painted straight across the bow, and somebody has printed
Burning Sensation
across the side.

The river monitor could easily have been the brainchild of an inspired twelve-year-old death merchant with a sense of fun. Male, naturally.

I look to Moses, who just keeps running his eyes up and down and all over the vessel admiringly.

“What do you make of this?” I finally ask him.

“My boy, I am stone-cold in love.”

The communications shelter is the spot on the boat where I do my most professional work.
Shelter
isn’t quite the right word, since the area where I do most of my communicating is lodged pretty plainly on deck, in between the forward turret and the midship turret, which looms over everything. I’m surrounded by the same bar armor as most of the other stations, though it’s hard to see how that really protects us from, say, bullets. For most of the time, like now, when it is life threateningly sunny, we also have this canvas sunshade rigged up over my head that makes my station kind of like a patio, sociable and all, but still not much protection from rocket-propelled projectiles.

The water is just as advertised. The opposite of what I knew in the Blue Water Navy, this soup is a couple of shades darker than the sunset, a thin, murky, scary mystery.

There is something honest about that.

The captain has trained me up in the fairly simple business of communications, and has given me the even more important information about who among the vast population of Army personnel we will be communicating with. I take regular updates from the command center in Saigon, letting us know what parts of the river we need to be patrolling and what we are to look out
for. And if we see anything that looks out of the ordinary in a hey-that-could-kill-us kind of way, I need to be contacting the center for the green light on doing something about it. Other times we are loading up supplies for the Army grunts, or cleaning and oiling and generally babying our implements of destruction as if our lives depended on it.

“Our brothers in arms throughout this whole great endeavor of the Riverine Assault project are the Ninth Division.”

“Huh,” I say. “I have an old pal in the Ninth.”

“Second Brigade …”

“Wow. That’s …”

“Thirty-fourth Artillery.”

It’s one hundred and seven degrees in the shade, and I get a chill.

“Ivan,” I say right out loud.

“Yeah,” the captain says, “they’re pretty much all called Ivan. Or Bruno, or Knuckles, or somethin’. Listen, I’ll just leave you to it, then.”

He leaves me to it. This is the beauty of my job, if there is beauty to it. The
it
he is leaving me to is working on the task of radioing my pal Ivan. The communications job on one of these dinky tubs is nothing like it would have been on one of the monster ships. Those things have every which kind of radar, sonar,
electronic gear for getting and giving information. By contrast, what I have here can look more like a glorified telephone operator’s gig. Sometimes not even much glorified. But it does mean I am the man, in charge of the box. And in my downtime I have just this little bitty bit of authority, all my own.

It would be so great to hear his actual voice. To hear any of the guys’ voices.

Maybe I will get better at this, but I seem to be chasing my tail in my effort to reach Ivan. I suppose it is fair to expect the infantry to be on the move and fighting as long as they are here, but still, I figure, he could take one lousy call.

I laugh when I hear myself think that. I will talk to him eventually. We have jobs to do, and just like I was hoping, I am one step — actually several steps — closer to what I thought of as my mission when I first joined up. I am watching over my boys. Providing backup and cover while they are out there doing the truly hard and dangerous dirty work of this war. And I have the added bonus of being The Communicator, pulling us all together. Which is really as it should be.

We’re cruising south down the Mekong, returning from dropping a load of Army troops off about halfway to the Cambodian border. Cruising back down should be the simple part, but nothing is simple in this brown
water. We can go days without seeing anything hostile on the banks, but that by no means indicates that hostility isn’t hiding in there. Facing the Vietcong sprinkled throughout the heavy foliage of the southern riverways or in the hills beyond is a much more dicey and uncertain thing than taking on the regular army of the North.

Ping!

It starts with just one shot bouncing off of plate metal. Then two and three and six, like popcorn starting up.

“Incoming! Incoming! Incoming!” somebody bellows, just a little after we have all figured that something’s incoming. Bullets are zinging past, whistling right by my ears, dinging off all the various angles of metal all over the boat. Unlike the
Boston,
nobody has to sound any sirens when the action kicks off down here. You know, and you move.

And you realize that you are close to death, for crying out loud, or death is close to you, and will be from now until you get discharged.

I scramble to my battle station, which is high up in the midship turret. I feel like a carnival clown, so exposed, so ready for plucking. Guys are shouting; the sun, finally setting, is making the horizon glow a beautiful brown. We can’t see the bullets as they sail for every one of us.

Even though it’s a tiny fraction of the size of the giant cruiser of my first tour, the monitor feels as if it has every bit as much firepower. Every time the gunner beside me fires his cannons, it sounds and feels as if a plane has crashed into something right beside me.

I must be doing my staring and cringing routine, which I perfected out at sea and which will
not
be tolerated here, because the gunner, Everett, hollers at me, “Use that thing, right now!”

I have a field telephone slung like a knapsack over my shoulder, but he doesn’t mean that. With a crew of eleven, everyone has multiple jobs, and everyone knows if you fail to do yours.

I settle in at my second duty.

I am a man of war now, for real. Settled in alongside Everett, I take my place behind my .50-caliber machine gun. I pepper every bit of coast I see, where tracer bullets lace through the evening air like murderous mosquitoes trying to put us away.

I won’t lie. It feels good. I have my helmet on, and as I blast away, the shaking of the gun, the boat, my bones, keeps jiggering the helmet down over my eyes. I push it back every time without missing a beat, and I fire-fire-fire like it’s my sworn nemesis out there who has insulted my mother and killed all my pals and sworn to knife every man, woman, and child I’ve ever known.

The thing, finally, that makes shooting at a person feel right? It’s shooting at them. Shooting a gun is the thing that convinces you of the rightness of shooting.

Because it works. It solves problems, after all, right? I can feel it right this second, as the repeating action of the machine gun shakes my hands to a state of absolute numbness that works its way from my fingers up my hands and all into me everywhere. I am not, for the moment, afraid. I am not useless or out of place or just getting by. I am shooting something, stopping something — I am meeting aggression with aggression, saving my friends in the process, saving everybody’s friends in the process.

As my bullets penetrate the jungle, I swear I can actually feel my fears and worries and problems go down. I am
forcing
them down with my .50-caliber machine gun.

The mortar fire booms from below us, pushing the massive bulk of the monitor down farther into the water. We hear as the shots connect with their target in the distance. The explosion is unbelievable, as if it’s an explosion of explosions, two rockets hitting each other nose-to-nose in midair.

BOOM
goes Everett’s cannon again, and a whole section of jungle seems to buckle under the blast fifty yards beyond the bank. My instruction is to hammer
away at whatever tracers I see coming out of the bush, and I have to say I’m adapting to it. Part of me would rather be on the line to our big buddies, calling in coordinates for the helicopter gunships, the killer Seawolves, to come in and finish them off.

But sometimes it’s your own fight.

I don’t know how we’re doing it, but we’re firing on all cylinders, with machine guns, howitzers, mortar fire, and rockets obliterating whatever threat has just been unleashed on us. Gradually, over maybe twenty minutes of heat and holler, we put the attack out entirely.

There’s one last, loud salvo from shore, then Everett throws an arm around my neck as the captain powers up the monitor to head upstream. The air is filled with sulfur, smoke, and sunset. Everything around us is burning.

The brown water is like gravy, bubbling in our wake. To make us more nimble on shallow water, we have light, crisp armor plating and jets instead of propellers pushing us on.

My heart has never pounded like this. I take a moment to watch all thirty-two inches of my sweaty chest puff crazy like a hummingbird. Then I look back out at the water, the banks, the low sky ceiling. There is something beautiful there, in the smoking murky scene we’re fleeing.

“Wow,” I say to Everett. “Who did we shoot?”

“Who knows?” He laughs weakly. “We got ’em all, though, whoever they were.”

There’s something wrong. I look down at where Everett’s arm is draped over and down my chest. There’s blood. His blood.

“You’re hurt,” I say.

He tries to wave it off, but he can’t. He’s leaning hard on me now.

“It’s just my arm,” he says. Then he collapses and pulls me to the deck with him.

After two other guys take Everett off me and lay him down, I radio ahead and make sure medical coverage is waiting. Part of the special nature of the Riverine Force is that all its parts seem to be in motion at once. There are medical teams stationed on various boats. Some craft are dedicated medical units, like great big amphibious ambulances. And there are units positioned all up and down the river from the Delta to the DMZ, harboring small but expansive med teams that can do everything from lancing a boil to relieving you of a gangrene-filled hand before it’s too late. We are directed to a spot about six klicks from where we are, where one of the stationary pontoons has just the stuff to make Everett right again.