The Phantom Blooper (14 page)

Humping along Indian-file with the
Chien Si
I feel like a target, like back at Khe Sanh when I painted that bull's-eye on my helmet. Not only am I wearing a red sash two shades below neon, but I am six feet three inches tall. Over half of the Viet Cong are under five feet tall. I'm about as inconspicuous as a water buffalo trying to pass himself off as a baby duck.

Battle Mouth stumbles up and down the line of march, looking lost and confused, stopping fighters and asking them what he's supposed to do. He's loaded down with homemade hand grenades, a borrowed AK-47, a machete, a small-caliber revolver, a B-40 rocket launcher, and half a dozen rockets.

When Song sees Battle Mouth, the super-fighter, she laughs. Then she says to the three Nguyen brothers, who are also on their first combat mission, "Don't fall behind. The tigers will eat you." And she laughs again.

Commander Be Dan, however, is all business. He frowns at Deputy Commander Song for not maintaining noise discipline. He waves his hand and says,
"Tien!"
--"Forward."

We hump into a jungle full of loud and gaudy birds. No talking on the trail; not because we're afraid of being heard, but so that we can hear approaching aircraft.

I wave goodbye to Johnny Be Cool, the trail-watcher, squatting on a tree branch fifty feet up, a grenade in his hand. He waves back but does not smile. Johnny Be Cool is always serious about his responsibilities when be is standing guard.

The Front fighter ahead of me in the line of march is wearing red and white tennis shoes. A red ball on the tennis shoes say U.S. KEDS. The fighter is humping a Chinese field radio. For twelve hours I watch the radioman's tennis shoes and the bouncing red ball.

The radioman is as skinny as a bean pole. He eats snacks constantly as we hump.

We hump, and we hump some more. We hump, swatting big black flies and flailing with rifle butts at clouds of mosquitoes too thick to see through. We stagger up rocky trails into a landscape of brutally stark hypnotic beauty that is teeming with life. Purple valleys. Brown mountains like the backs of dinosaurs. Birds the color of fire. Snakes with heads like semiprecious stones. In our rubber sandals we climb outcroppings of black volcanic rock. We descend on a trail beneath black cliffs. We stumble down into riverbottom land that reveals new shades of green so fast that we are swallowed up by a rainbow of greens.

Our point man is a girl about fifteen years old. Lifting a rifle almost as big as she is over her head, she calls a halt. Commander Be Dan moves up the line of march to investigate. The radioman in the Keds sticks close to the Commander, so I go too.

The girl on point is excited. She aims a finger at the deck. Commander Be Dan squats down, examines the trail, then nods his approval. It is a good omen for our mission: tiger tracks on the trail.

We hump through a defoliated rain forest that is too dead even to smell dead. Ancient trees stand stark and black and stripped of leaves. The black trees are hung with limp wind-blown flowers that are parachutes from illumination shells.

Later we see trees that are as white as bone, sun-bleached skeletons of the great hardwoods, white trees with black leaves. The trunks and branches of the trees are warped by unnatural cancerous growths that look like human faces and human hands and human fingers growing out of decaying wood.

In the poisonous folds of the defoliated rain forest we see monsters, freaks, and mutants. We see a water rat with two heads and as big as a dog, birds with extra feet coming out of their backs, Siamese-twin bullfrogs joined at the stomach. The bullfrogs scurry for cover with clumsy and desperately frantic movements horrible to see, finally sinking into oozing slime inhabited by shadows that are alive and best never seen by human eyes.

Total light-and-noise discipline forbids our shooting the deformed animals out of kindness.

Night comes but we do not make camp. We march on. The order is repeated down the trail from fighter to fighter by hand signal:
une nuit blanche
--"White Night." We will march all night without stopping and without sleep.

The night march turns into a real ball-breakiiig hump. Every step of the way the jungle grabs at us as though alive. The rocks attack us. My feet are numb and I got rock-bites all over my legs. I'm bleeding. We're all bleeding. But I'm the only one who's straining to keep up. It's easy to see that the Viet Cong cut their baby teeth on ball-breaking humps.

I lean into it and take it one step at a time. One step at a time. I can almost hear Gunnery Sergeant Gerheim, my Senior Drill Instructor back on Parris island. "Private Joker," he says, rapping me on my chrome dome helmet liner with a bamboo swagger stick, after I have had the bad manners to faint on a

three-mile run with full gear and a backpack full of rocks in one-hundred-degree heat. "You little maggot! You will put forth effort! You better show me something, sweet pea. You better start shitting me some Tiffany cuff links."

We hump. The sun comes up. We hump some more. The radioman looks back at me constantly to see how I'm keeping up. And Commander Be Dan, who is on the move constantly up and down the line of march, checks me out each time he goes by, like a doctor looking over a patient in a terminal ward. But be doesn't say anvthing.

I'm insulted by all this attention. What am I, a candy ass? Some kind of New Guy? I want to say, "Hey--I'm a United States Marine, people. I will hump until my leg falls off. No sweat. Marines know how to hop."

Every time we pass anything that looks like it might possibly be food, the radioman eats it. Bananas, coconuts, berries, green leafy plants, orchids, even honey ants, down they go. The Viet Cong radioman is defoliating the jungle by eating it.

We hump.

We have to go far away from Hoa Binh to fight, because the Woodctitter has a deal with General Fang Cat, the province chief, not to attack anything within the General's Tactical Area of Responsibility. In exchange, the General reports that there is no Viet Cong activity in our area and that Hoa Binh is a leper colony.

We're going to team up with a battalion-size force and attack an enemy fortress twenty miles south of Khe Sanh.

We see two old men cutting down a banana tree. They wave.

In a bombed-out clearing the order comes back to pick up the pace.
"Tien! Tien!"

We enter a smelly black-water swamp. The water is neck-deep and teeming with slithering invisible nameless things and leeches like big black garden slugs. We wade through slime, rifles held high, our sandaled feet straining for traction on an underwater bridge that can't be seen from the air. Some of the fighters giggle from the tickling on our legs as fish nibble at our scabs.

Then we're pushing through blue-green elephant grass ten feet high and as sharp as swords. The deck is a damp, spongy layer of decaving leaves. Creepers and vines grab at our legs and feet as though alive.

We move through the black jungle as silent as ghosts. We don't fight against the jungle the way foreigners do. The jungle is alive and the jungle never dies. The jungle is the one thing you can't beat, and the fighters know it.

To the Americans the jungle is a real and permanent enemy. The jungle is undisciplined. The jungle does not respond to subpoenas. The jungle definitely is not going along with the program.

The jungle grows and eats and fucks and dies and just goes on and on and on, getting bigger and meaner. The jungle is always hungry, always ready to meet new people and make new friends. The jungle is cruel, but fair.

To a place older than the dinosaurs come puny Americans wagging their fingers like sternlibrarians telling library patrons to keep quiet. Naughty jungle, say the white foreigners, and the jungle welcomes them in with big yellow flowers and funny brown monkeys.

When night comes, the jungle sucks their brains out, boils them alive, pulls out their hearts and eats them whole, then swallows up their pale pink bodies, because the jungle eats raw meat and shits dry bones and the bones fall apart and flesh scraps rot and the jungle stands like a black wall while the jungle eats more raw meat and shits out more dry bones and a billion insects are chewing and chewing until the jungle sounds like an eating machine bigger than the world and the green cannibal engine's moving parts are all lubricated by warm red blood and the jungle just goes on and on forever and it never stops feeding.

White Night. When we feel safe we light little perfume bottles full of kerosene. The perfume bottles have been fitted with wicks held in place by shell casings. As we move down the trail the golden dots are like a string of fireflies flying in formation.

A shadow on the trail! The order comes back: danger, halt.

"Dong Lai,"
says Commander Be Dan on his way up to the point to investigate.

After a infinite or so Commander Be Dan gives us permission to bunch up. We move toward the bad smell.

In the faint flickering light of our tiny lamps we can see the great head of a tiger, still fierce, still beautiful, with teeth as sharp as the point of a bayonet and thicker than a man's thumb. The eyes are gone. The orange-and-black-striped fur is charred and burned. The huge claws are dug deep into the earth. The powerful jaws are locked in a final tree-shaking roar of defiance.

We all crowd in for a quick look.

Even in death there is something royal about all eight-hundred-pound Bengal tiger. We can all see the tiger, awesome in his final moments, roaring, pouncing, clawing at the fire that falls from the sky, strong and beautiful in a burning jungle. We see the tiger, wet with fire, fighting fearlessly against a power it could never understand. Then the great beast shrivels to ash under a splash of napalm while jellied gasoline drips from tree branches like hot jam.

As we stare in respectful silence at the napalmed tiger, Commander Be Dan reaches down, grabs one of the big smooth ivory fangs, gives it a hard tug, says, "A good omen," and then moves out.

Without a word or a sound, each of the
Chien Si
touches the tiger's tooth in turn, then moves on.

I touch it too.

At dawn we take a break on the strangely silent site of the abandoned Marine Corps Combat Base at Khe Sanh.

The scary, ghost-guarded mound of red dirt has already been plowed and the Word is that it's to become a coffee-bean plantation.

The section will rest until noon before moving on, because we know that when the day is hottest, Americans in the field break for chow.

Not much is left of my old hometown. What the Marines left behind as junk, refugees have hauled off as building materials or to sell on the black market: scraps of lumber, rusty truck parts, torn plastic sheeting, brass shell casings, scraps of rotting canvas, steel planking from the airfield. Our trash is their treasure, and the army ants have stripped the hill clean.

I sit down on some crumbling sandbags where I estimate Black John Wayne's bunker used to be. It's hard to be sure. In the year since the Woodcutter captured me, the jungle has come back like thick hair sprouting all over a bald man's head. I should feel at home here, but I don't.

Commander Be Dan squats near me, not for a neighborly visit but to keep an eye on me. Being back on my old stomping grounds might revive my bad road habits as a running dog lackey of the imperialists.

The Viet Cong soldiers laugh, eat chow, and tell tall tales, sea stories, about their many heroic exploits against the Black Rifles who held Khe Sanh. When the lies of the New Guys get too big, the older
Chien Si
tell the New Guys about fighting the French as Viet Minh, the Viet Cong "Old Corps," back when war was really tough.

Commander Be Dan's radioman sits next to me. I've already assumed that Commander Be Dan has ordered the radioman to stand guai-d over me and waste me if I so much as blink an eye.

The radioiman puts out his hand, touches his chest with his other hand. "Ha Ngoc," he says shyly, politely avoiding looking me directly in the eye. Then: "I have never met an American bandit.

I shake Ha Ngoc's hand. "Bao Chi," I say.

"Bao Chi Chien Si My?"

I nod. "Yes," I say in Vietnamese, "Bao Chi, the American who fights for the Front."

Ha Ngoc smiles. "American," he says, pointing at his tennis shoes. "American." Then he says, "You know, Bao Chi, America must be supernaturally rich because Americans shoot very many bullets."

Ha Ngoc digs into his shirt pocket and pulls out a pack of Ruby Queen cigarettes.
"Truoc La?"
he says, offering me the pack. I shake mv head as he lights up the bitter black tobacco.

"Lien So,"
he says, showing me his wristwatch. Russian. I nod. Ha Ngoc pulls the wooden plug from a length of bamboo shoot he has fashioned into a canteen. He offers me a drink of green tea. Only after I decline does he take a drink himself.

Then Ha Ngoe fumbles around inside his muddy knapsack and produces two mangoes. He offers me one.

"Cam on."
I say, "Thank you." I accept a mango. I take a bite.

Ha Ngoc smiles. He pulls a black ballpoint pen from his knapsack and shows it to me like it's a family heirloom. On the pen is Chinese writing in gold characters. I look the pen over like it's a valuable antique and nod my approval. "Good," I say, but Ha Ngoc just looks at me without expression, not satisfied with my reaction. So I say, "This is the finest specimen of a Chinese ballpoint pen I have ever seen in my entire life." And Ha Ngoc beams, a rich man whose wealth has been confirmed by the highest source.

We eat tangy mangoes. "I don't hate Americans," Ha Ngoc says. "I only kill them because they have killed so many of my friends."

I nod. I say, "There it is."

Commander Be Dan is having a cigarette too. Using a page torn from his pocket diary, he's rolling his own, like my grandfather used to do.

Ha Ngoc produces a greasy paperback book from his knapsack. The title of the book is
How to Win Friends and Influence People
, in French. There's a photograph of Dale Carnegie on the back. The book has lost its spine and the loose pages are bound together by a black rubber band.