Meditations in green, p.7
Meditations in Green, page 7
“Yeah?” replied a sulky voice.
“Yaaay-uh? Get your ass in here when I’m speaking at you!”
“Yes, Sarge.” A lanky PFC ambled into the office.
“You spit on that grill one more time, maybe I shove your cheeks down in the bacon and fry ’em for the troops, huh?”
“Aw, Sarge.”
“Didn’t I tell you to mop up that grease under the corner oven?”
“Yeah, and I told…”
“I don’t care who the fuck you told—do it!”
Ramirez gasped like a lanced animal, hunching at the waist, clutching his midsection. He grabbed one of the Gelusil tabs he had left sitting out, swallowed it, then laid the side of his head flat against the desk.
“Sarge, are you okay?”
He was dimly aware of the clatter of men eating in the next room and the taste bud-erecting aroma of percolating coffee. “Oh, my aching gut,” he groaned to whoever would listen.
* * *
Between haircuts Joe, the Vietnamese barber, paced. He paced from his shop beside the mail room to the mess hall, from the mess hall to his shop, from his shop to the orderly room, from the orderly room to his shop, from his shop to the main gate, from the main gate to his shop. He paced and paced. He couldn’t seem to stay still.
* * *
Damn, muttered Wendell, trying to hold his hands steady. In the viewfinder the plane wiggled, shrank into a speck, and disappeared. He lowered the Beaulieu movie camera from his eye. “You got anything else to Da Nang in the next hour?” he asked the young Air Force sergeant with the clipboard and the astonished stare.
“Nothing I know about. Of course, there’s a lot of stuff goes in and out of here I know nothing about. You might try asking around the 101st helicopter pad.”
“Aw shit, I’d probably be too late anyway.”
They were standing on the loading ramp in front of the air terminal.
“Was he a friend of yours?” asked the sergeant.
“Hell, no.”
The sergeant scratched his chin with the edge of the clipboard. “Well, listen, you want pictures of stiffs I can…”
“I needed that one,” cried Wendell, pointing up at the empty sky.
For Wendell this had not been one of the war’s better days. Sergeant Anstin had forbidden him to leave the signal shop all morning and to make sure his orders were carried out had deliberately sat on a counter doing his paperwork in the same room with him as Wendell sorted colored wires with his hands and various tools of assassination with his mind. He had missed the crash itself, the camera had jammed, so he had been forced to stand there like an idiot with a dead lens while the Old Man took the plunge. Now he had missed the corpse, too.
“Do me a favor,” Wendell said to the sergeant. “Hold your clipboard like you’re shading your eyes and look up at the sky, and I’ll make you into a movie.”
The sergeant turned toward the sky and then looked back at Wendell. “What do I shade my eyes for? The sun ain’t even out.”
Wendell frowned. “You want to be in pictures or you want to be an Air Force chump all your life?”
The sergeant raised his clipboard.
“Hey,” he said, crinkling his face at an imaginary sun, “am I gonna be in color?”
* * *
Griffin had been drifting peacefully above the same frame of film for more than twenty minutes when a voice from out of the air spoke abruptly into his ear: “Leaf abscission.”
“Huh?”
It was Captain Patch, chief of the Imagery Interpretation Section. “Define the terminology.”
Whatever “leaf abscission” was, Griffin certainly didn’t want to know about it. Abscissa. Coordinates. Mathematical lines.
“Tree geometry, sir?” He couldn’t stop staring at Patch’s head, he seemed to be seeing it for the first time, seeing into it—a vast geodesic dome constructed out of a complex network of brass tubing through which moved streams of dense blue smoke, swift, silent, sure.
“Thought you’d been to college, Griffin. From the Latin meaning to cut, to strip, to denude. Shredded palm, if you know what I mean. Winehaven’s scheduled to rotate home in sixty days. I want you to start training to take over his herbicide studies.”
“What about my bomb damage assessments?” Small puffs of smoke were coming out the captain’s ears.
“We’ll pass those on to Specialist Cross.” Patch’s voice sank into oily confidential. “You know you’re the only one I can trust to do this job properly. These studies are top priority. The General has expressed a personal interest. I need someone I can depend on, someone who appreciates the situation.” He straightened up. “This duty shouldn’t be any problem, you’re the brightest boy in the class.”
“Yes, sir.” Patch had also designated PFC McFarland “the brightest boy” when he appointed him in charge of office supplies.
“This’ll look damn fine on your record.” He placed a hand on Griffin’s shoulder. “I’ll see what I can do about some in-country R&R. Have you seen Saigon yet? There’s a good chance I can get you there next month. Chief Winkly needs someone to go with, you know how he is about traveling alone. Okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fine then, real fine.”
“Wonderful,” mumbled Griffin, leaning out again over the light. He had always been interested in plants. The craters shone up at him like watery eyes.
* * *
From its position of honor above the bar the painted head of the screaming woman stared into a fog of tobacco smoke, alcohol fumes, and body odor that comprised the constant atmosphere of the 1069th officers’ club. The large yellow eyes focused in horror upon an invisible point high above the commissioned heads. Here she was known as Minnie, Sweetheart of the Crafty Eye.
A glass of amber liquid was held dramatically aloft.
“Here’s to the colonel, a soldier, a gentleman, maybe not the best pilot in the world, but certainly one ace of a drinker.”
“Hear, hear.”
“Watch it, Osgood.”
“Oh, shut up, Ed, we all know what a flaming asshole he really was.”
The stereo twanged out a raucous version of “Ring of Fire.” On the corner of the bar stood a table lamp cast in the shape of an Hawaiian hula dancer. A red light bulb stuck in a socket on top of her head lit up a shade depicting a dozen imaginative sexual positions. Slowly the pink plaster hips swiveled from side to side in mechanical voluptuousness.
Even at this hour the club was already more than half full.
“How about a couple more drinks over here. C’mon, Lee, you old lecher, I’ll be running on empty in about half a second.”
The Vietnamese bartender produced an automatic smile. “No more ice,” he said. “Machine broke.”
“Whaddya mean there’s no more ice? There better be, pardner.”
“He said the machine was broken.”
“Well get a man in here to fix it, an ice mechanic.”
“The beer had best be cold or somebody tells me why.”
“Why is the army like a copulating sow?”
“It’s a question of technique, Harv, there are those of us who take the time to learn and there are those who, well…”
“So I said to the general, ‘No, sir, I’m afraid I am unfamiliar with that particular section of FM 380-5’ and that’s why I’m here now with you guys in this paradise.”
“That moron, that bastard, that scumbag.”
“I know damned well somebody did it.”
“The Twenty-fifth uncovered a big rice cache in the Ashau today. A lotta zip bellies gonna be rumbling out there in the woods.”
“Yes, it’s my boy’s birthday tomorrow.”
“Has someone been watering the Scotch or did my tongue die?”
“As far as I can tell, the only way we’re ever going to get a leg up on this war is to give every damn gook his own two-bedroom ranch complete with nice shrubbery, a lawn, and a white picket fence.”
“What about a garage, they’re gonna need a garage, too.”
“Okay, they got a garage.”
“Built-in.”
“Do you know that if this show lasts another three years I can make major before I’m thirty?”
“Say, Jimbo, isn’t it about time we organized another joint party with the Ninety-second Evac. I’ve got something I need a nurse to attend to.”
“And at least two cars, preferably Torinos or better.”
“Is it true the new CO’s father-in-law is an Agency station chief in Chile?”
“No, we’re no longer permitted to mention Hill Nine Seventy-six in the briefings anymore. It depresses the general.”
“All the major appliances and a color TV.”
“Buy me a drink, guys, I just extended for another six months.”
“There we were, four thousand feet on a deck of flak.”
“That’s okay, I always bet on Navy in the Army-Navy game, anyway.”
“Did you get a peep at that NVA love letter that came in the other day? ‘Though I move in the world’s dust, my heart lives in dreams of you.’ Pretty steamy, huh?”
“A good job, a private office, a secretary, and a briefcase, everybody gets a monogrammed briefcase.”
“The left engine was on fire all the way in to Quang Tri and the TOs bouncing up and down, shouting, ‘Jump, jump, you cock-sucker, we’re gonna die.’”
“So sorry, no more ice, sir.”
“No one’s ever really ruled out nukes, you know.”
“And suburbs, we’ll have to build suburbs for all the gooks to live in and gook schools, gook city halls, gook shopping centers with little gook consumer items.”
“I love my wife, I really do.”
Glasses clinked, matches flared.
“…and all the time you’re fucking her, see, she’s got this long silk scarf tied in tiny knots that she’s shoving up your ass and damn, if it don’t feel surprisingly fine.”
“I always wondered about you, Matt.”
“Well, at least my asshole opens, Frank.”
The officers gathered around the table exchanged knowing smiles. Through a process of bardic repetition and baroque embellishment the tale of Major Brand’s R&R had long ago evolved into accepted ritual. Just as much of the comfort of the church depends upon the familiarity of its liturgy, so was Brand’s performance enhanced by these good-natured interruptions. Raillery was as much a part of the program as the actual story line. The worst jokes would be tolerated, even welcomed, not simply because Major Brand outranked them and it was their duty to laugh, but because they honestly enjoyed these moments, this communion of belief in some sort of pleasure, no matter how brief or how obtained. Everyone leaned forward for the climax.
“And this little cunt, see, has got a fantastic sense of timing ’cause just when I’m about to shoot my rocks she whips that rag out and My God! my body busted open and shit, piss, farts, and come went flying in every direction all at the same time. And that, gentlemen, is how I got my cock banged in Bangkok.”
The round eyes of the unit emblem stared unblinking through laughter and applause. On the bar the plaster hips went up and down.
* * *
Behind the secured doors of the communications shack the stutter of teletypes was incessant day and night. The paper spilled out of the machines and rolled on the floor in long yellow tongues. Information. Incoming. Outgoing.
* * *
Back in a grove of picturesque palm and other nameless trees and broad-leafed plants, at the end of a neat gravel path lined with coconut shells painted white to resemble skulls or cue balls or ostrich eggs, distant in aura and architecture from the uniform mundanity of the rest of the compound, stood a shaggy brown bungalow, quiet, unobtrusive, a CO’s quarters perhaps or an enlisted men’s day room except for the electrified fence, the gates, the armed guards who answered no questions, turned away all visitors. The list of names of those permitted access was itself the privileged information of a rigorously investigated few. The building was draped in heavy folds of security, its covert projects partitioned into secret fragments. Upon secluded planning tables inside originated operations whose purposes the participants themselves were often unable to decode. For outsiders the only clues to the activity within were in unexpected glimpses of those strange figures arriving and departing day and night by helicopter onto the private pad in back or by field ambulance and canvas-covered jeep, strict military types of every branch and rank, scruffy dudes in nonregulation hair and handlebar moustaches, government civilians with and without gray frame glasses and chained briefcases, pot-bellied corporate tech reps from McDonnell Douglas and ITT; and all the Vietnamese in tailored tiger stripes, facial scars, and dead black eyes. Some you recognized, one or two you were allowed to know. People like Kraft. Or Conrad, “the man from Motorola,” who wore Hawaiian shirts, white jeans, canvas deck shoes, and never went anywhere without his Swedish Carl Gustav machine gun. All the flamboyance of the 1069th could be divided between the recon pilots and the “students” of Foreign Studies. The unit, in its boredom, turned toward these two groups for relief, a ride in the sky, an Eyes Only crumb from the bungalow. What was going on behind all that jungle gingerbread? Everyone had an idea. Something to do with shadows, shadows reconnaissance cameras at classified altitudes couldn’t photograph, a structure of shadows linking water to road, bush to market, shadows falling, shadows leading in, the shadows everywhere.
Foreign Studies Section, Major Benson Quimby commanding. The Spook House.
* * *
Twenty kilometers to the west everything was green and slippery and wet. The sergeant thought he was catching a cold, a stupid Vietnamese cold. He had to squeeze his nostrils to keep from sneezing. There was a stench and a mist that hung like gauze above the paddies. Water dripped from the vegetation above, clung to the vegetation below. When they entered the village the old men, the women, and the children stood quietly watching. Only a skinny brown dog looked them directly in the eyes but he did not bark.
“I don’t like it,” said the lieutenant.
“Let’s torch it,” said the sergeant.
Another sergeant named Kraft whispered something in the captain’s ear. He had dark skin and dark curly hair and no one had ever seen him before this patrol.
“Round up all the males,” ordered the captain.
The males totaled six: two old men with yellowish-white hair and broken teeth and four small boys, one missing his right arm. Kraft and the captain ambled over to this group, inspected them in silence.
Suddenly a shadow detached itself from the rear of a hut and sprinted into the light. A PFC with a flushed face and a green towel draped around his neck took a step forward, raising his rifle. “I’ll take him, sir.” Kraft brushed the weapon aside and ran off in pursuit. He caught up with the figure at the top of one of the muddy dikes surrounding the rice fields and both men toppled over into the water on the other side. The patrol heard splashes, blows, slaps, grunts, and then screaming in high-pitched Vietnamese answered by shouting in low-pitched Vietnamese and more splashes and silence. They saw Kraft climb out of the paddy, stumble for a moment in the pasty mud, they saw him walk slowly back, his uniform dark with moisture, his reddened nose leaking blood, the clay streaking his face. “Who is that guy?” muttered the PFC with the towel. “Press?” replied someone else. Everybody laughed.
Once a comical newspaper reporter had joined them for what he hoped would be a satisfactory period “waxing gooks.” The reporter bragged that already he had dispatched two commies to their Commissar, victims of the Sten gun he flaunted in spite of Geneva Convention suggestions concerning the behavior of journalists. Unfortunately, no gooks exhibited themselves for a waxing so on the way back in the reporter, ferocious with unleashed violence, leaped onto the back of a stray pig that had wandered into the road. Yelling that he was going to kill the beast with his bare hands, he hung there, feet dragging in the dirt, as the squealing animal zigzagged up and down until his grip weakened and he was tossed into a ditch and kicked in the forehead by a departing hoof. No one could stop laughing, all the way in, laughing. That was the famous laughing patrol. The reporter packed Sten gun and duffel bag and rode out on the first chopper.
They laughed, remembering, but this was not the same. Kraft was not a reporter and though he had only been among them for a few hours he did not seem to be a comical person. The look on his mud-caked face was one they recognized. They had sometimes seen it on each other and it had nothing to do with comedy.
* * *
In the afternoon a helicopter deposited the new CO at the main air terminal. The colonel’s driver picked him up, Val-Pak and briefcase, and drove him back down the spongy red road past the old man and into the unit area. The new CO ordered everyone to get a haircut and then went inside to inspect his new office. His first quotable remark: “What a dump.”
* * *
And McFarland had crotch rot and Ellis malaria again and Cross worried about his feet and Samuels wet his bed and Trips sat all day in Ops reading The Mind Parasites where the flame-proof-suited pilots bearing stained mugs of bad coffee came and went, the metal buckles of their seat harnesses jingling like tiny bells and Sergeant Anstin ran through the hootches at night with a flashlight searching for bags of dope and Lieutenant Hand hadn’t spoken to anyone for three days and Noll was out in the hangar trying to tattoo FTA on his arm with a bottle of ink and a hypodermic needle and the bomb craters on the film reminded Chief Warrant Officer Winkly of little pussies and someone cried himself to sleep and everyone hoped that Captain Fry would crash and burn and Hogan claimed he had never had this much fun in civilian life and hoped his home town was blown up so he wouldn’t have to go back to it anymore and Feeny counted his money each morning and evening and the woman in Cage 1 wished the Americans would kill her today and Boswell, who was leaving, asked Griffin how many days he had left and when he heard the answer said, “Do trees live that long?” and out on the perimeter girls from the nearby village bared their breasts across the wire, tiptoed in among the Claymores, giggled on the bunker floors, and Wurlitzer dreamed of bald monks in maroon robes descending stone passageways in the far-off temples of Katmandu, and a pack of stray dogs roamed up and down the compound searching for someone to play with.
