Croyd went to the door, craned his head out. A raindrop exploded on the tip of his snout, between the widely spaced nostrils. “It’s a good thing I’m not actually cold-blooded,” he said, “’cause this is real primetime for me.”
“What?” Mark asked, lying down and pulling an army blanket up his long legs.
“Hunting. They all come out at night, just like the song says.”
“Album title. What does, man?”
“I’m going hunting. Lot of big bugs out, a night like this. And every once in a while I come across one of these big-ass Vietnamese rats”
“I’m sorry I asked.”
Chapter Twenty-four
“All right, ladies, drop your rucks and take ten.” The sergeant eyed the squad in disgust. “Maybe we better take twenty. Don’t want any myocardial infarcts.”
“That’s sexist,” complained Eraserhead. His weak arms stretched like warm wax as he lowered his backpack onto the paddy dike. “Calling us ladies. It ain’t politically correct.”
“Out here in the bush, what I say is by definition politically correct, dung-beetle. Do I make myself clear?”
Everything was green, green to the point of being painful, from the stinking water all around them to the conical hills that poked up out of the flats at intervals, like models from an HO railroad set. Out in the monsoon-flooded paddies the farmers were at work, their conical straw hats bobbing. None turned toward the party of strangers that had stumbled into the midst of their world, any more than they heeded the aircraft swarming in the sky above Da Nang to the northeast. Such things were not novelties.
The joker called Spoiler slammed his own pack down. He was a tall kid, tough as a rawhide thong, whose nostrils were shrouded by a shelf of cartilage and bone and whose skull shelved way out in back. As always his anger made Mark wince.
“You son of a bitch!” he shrieked at the sergeant. “The days of slavery are over!”
He came forward with his skinny chest stuck out as if to overpower the sergeant that way. He wore a T-shirt with BURN NATS NOT OIL stenciled on it. Attempts to enforce uniformity of dress on the Brigade hadn’t met much success, especially since most of their uniforms were castoffs and hand-me-downs. Their headgear ran from gimme caps to floppy K-mart boonie hats. Scuttlebutt said the Republic couldn’t afford to give them helmets.
“Fucker!” Spoiler yelled at the sergeant. “Fucking nat-lover! You oughta be necklaced. We oughta see your head burn, you fuck!”
About then he got inside the sergeant’s personal space. The sergeant extended two hard brown fingers and poked them into Spoiler’s solar plexus.
The young joker doubled and sat down hard, gasping like a carp. “Get back to your ruck, seed-bag,” the sergeant said. He turned his back on Spoiler and walked away.
Mark was down with his back to the bole of a palm tree and his insides weak and wavery, from heat, fatigue, and reaction to the ugly scene. Each little wavelet out on the flooded paddy was a tiny laser beam firing white death through Mark’s eyes to the top of his skull. He had gone from chilly Takis to the high latitudes of Europe. The wet Vietnamese heat hammered him like mallets. He almost missed the monsoon rains, which had momentarily retreated.
The sergeant plopped down next to Mark. He had a snouted face with a damp nose and sad eyes that turned down at the outside corners. He shook his head.
“That was bad,” he said. “Shouldn’t have to touch a man to discipline him. That’s my fault, but shit. Kids were never like this, back in the old days. Don’t know what’s happening in the world.”
Spoiler was getting his air back. He sat up squealing. “He hit me! He hit me! I want a court-martial.”
“You not back in your white-bread nat world now, white boy,” called a joker with his Demon Prince rank tattooed on his right hand. “You got no Bill of Rights.”
“It’s not my nat world,” Spoiler snarled. But in a subdued way; he sensed the consensus going against him.
“Dink officers hit their men,” said Slick, wiping his forehead. He was one of what the young recruits called “politicals” – older jokers, mostly but not all ex-Brigaders. Like Brew and Luce and the rest of the Rick’s crowd, Slick had no prior military experience. “Do it all the time, in the artillery camp next door. Discipline.” He flicked his fingers, spattering the brown shit-scented water with droplets that flattened into disks reflecting the light in rainbow colors.
“Discipline?” Eraserhead wheezed. “What we need discipline for? We’re the good guys.”
“Nobody ever threatened noncoms, back in the old days?” Mark asked. “That’s not what I heard.”
“Threaten? Hell. We did more than that. One time there was this nat second lieutenant, fresh out of the Point, and he… No. That’s ancient history.” The sergeant hung his head between his knees and was quiet a long time. Mark offered him a drink from his canteen.
“I don’t know,” the sergeant admitted. “Maybe I’m kidding myself. But the kids these days seem sharper, harder. Meaner than we ever were.”
“It’s the routine,” Mark said. “It’s pretty tough on everybody, man. All this training.”
“Tough? Tough?” The sergeant laughed in disbelief. “This is nothing. Compared with Basic, this is a walk in the park.”
“Yeah. But at least, like, you had Basic. Some kind of training. These kids are coming in cold…”
“…Yeah, and they got a bunch of old out-of-shape farts to try to warm ’em up.” He looked at Mark. “You never even went, did you? What, were you a draft dodger or something?”
“Student deferment. Like, I would’ve gone to Canada, though. Or jail.”
The sergeant looked outraged. “That’s chicken-shit, man.”
Yeah? How many times have you died in action, bunky?
Flash wanted to know. Mark blinked at the sergeant.
“Wait a minute. Here you are over here ready to fight for the North – uh, the Vietnamese. And here you’re telling me I’m chicken-shit for not fighting against them?”
“That’s different. That was then. This is now.”
“That’s some answer,” Mark and J. J. Flash said in unison.
“Well, at least I was over here with my ass in the grass. I knew what it was like, knew what was really going on while all you protesters at home”
“Well, I’m really here now, man. And I didn’t switch sides.” The sergeant glared at him. For a moment Mark thought the guy was going to hit him. Whoa! I never used to talk like that.
The air and anger went out of the noncom in a rush. ’Maybe you got a point.”
“I’m sorry, man, I didn’t mean”
“No. No. You’re right. It’s a pretty fucked-up set of circumstances. I came over here in ’71 to serve my country. Country never did nothing for me up until then but say, ’Drop ’em and spread ’em for the whole nat world, joker.’ 1971. Shit, by that time we’d lost already; fucking Nixon had thrown in the towel. Nothin’’ left to do but hold a few more sessions on the shape of the table and have a whole lot more good jokers die. Yeah, and nats too.”
He had to pause, then, because a shadow flashed them and flattened them with a powerful roar. The young ex-Demon Prince with fins on his head like an old Chevy yelped and jumped into the water, to the jeers of his buddies. Mark glanced up to see a MiG-27 Flogger strike plane low, smoking south under full military throttle. He wondered where it was going, loaded down like that.
“When I heard the Colonel was coming back here,” the sergeant went on, “trying to pull the old joker Brigade back together again… I mean, Sobel, he was always different. He never treated us like we was The Dirty Dozen recruited out of old horror movies. He treated us like we were men. He made us feel clean and brave. He made us feel like – like heroes.”
He accepted another hit from Mark’s canteen. “It all started coming back to me then. What we’d done – what the war had done – to this country, these people. And what the nats had done to us, before and after. And I looked around, man, I saw this Leo Barnett smilin’ away on the tube, and I saw my man Gregg Hartmann going down in Atlanta with Dr. Fuckin’ Tachyon’s knife sticking out of his back, and then all this shit hit with the jumpers and the Rox and everything, and suddenly it looked like it was going to be open season on wild cards any old time. And then here was the Colonel, ’way down yonder in Vietnam, sayin’ come to me, I’ll let you be free. Let you feel like men again.”