I sat with my ass inside the tent to put my boots on. The storm had stopped during the night. The morning was bright, even pretty. Morris and Decker were shaving behind the GP, using their steel helmets as basins. I laced my pant legs into my boots and got up shirtless to walk to the piss tube. The rain had even washed some of the ammonia smell away from the area around the empty rocket case stuck into the ground. These piss tubes were strategically located around the company area. They worked pretty well until they filled up. The soil would absorb only so much. When they were full, the bad smell helped us find them at night without a flashlight.
I was thinking about going back to my tent to shave before breakfast when I noticed the crowd around the bunker.
“I cannot fucking believe it.” Shaker walked back and forth in the middle of the crowd. “I asked you to build a goddamn bunker. A bunker. Look at what I get. I get a fucking burlap-covered mud pile. That’s what I get!”
The bunker had collapsed. Trees and PSP lay at odd angles, with sodden sandbags drooping among them. Nothing rose more than two feet high in the jumbled wreckage.
“Goddamn it.” Shaker stalked away.
“Maybe we should’ve made the walls thicker,” Resler said.
Almost everyone in the company sweated in heavy physical labor every day. New tents were set up. Their guy wires blocked our makeshift trails. The company road was finished. We were trenching around tents and hacking and digging the stumps on the Golf Course. The company’s bunker project had been abandoned. I still lived in the pup tent, but I had reduced the chance of snakes crawling into my bed roll by squeezing a cot into the tent and sleeping at the peak. It worked. Police call continued every morning, even though there was nothing to pick up except twigs. Fresh gray dirt was scattered everywhere as evidence of our work.
A select few of our company flew administration flights to neighboring units in Pleiku, 50 miles west; Qui Nhon; and even Saigon, 260 miles south. Our commanders and their friends got a chance to secure important information about building bunkers and such, to do a little scouting, to go on beer runs, and to get laid.
When the rest of us finished working at the end of the day, we sponged ourselves clean with water from the water trailer, using our combat helmets as washbasins. The administrators took showers at the Special Forces camps they visited.
Feeling that I had been sold into slavery, I was honored when Shaker told me to come with him on an admin flight to Pleiku. I packed a clean set of clothes and my dop kit. The Special Forces adviser compound in Pleiku had showers. I would also get a chance to fly for the first time in almost two weeks.
Being alone with Shaker was more like being alone. During the entire flight over and back, he said not a word to me. I guessed that he was checking me out, but if so, he was doing it in silence.
The adviser compound was great. I walked on side-walks, took a shower, put some change through a slot machine, and bought some junk, including a small camera, at the PX.
“You should’ve waited and bought yourself a good camera,” Wendall examined my 16mm Minolta back at our company area. “A good camera, like a Nikon F.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said, feeling bad that I had bought the thing. “I’ll just keep it around for quick shots. I’m going to get a good camera as soon as we get some at the PX—when we get a PX.”
“Let me go with you when you do,” said Wendall. “I know everything about every camera ever made.”
The day after the flight to Pleiku, I got my first chance to meet some Vietnamese. Hundreds of them.
“We’re clearing a field here”—Shaker pointed to a spot outside the northern perimeter on the map in the operations tent—“for a refueling depot. Vietnamese labor. They started a couple of days ago, and it’s our turn to supply a overseer. That’s you, Mason.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Just watch ‘em. They’ve got a Vietnamese boss who knows the details. You’re there to make sure they’re working and to watch for tricks.”
“Tricks?”
“Yeah. They’ve been finding trimmed poles pointing right at our mortar and machine-gun positions. Obviously some of the people in the work crew are VC.”
Truckloads of Vietnamese had already arrived at the clearing when I got there. I rode in a Jeep driven by Sergeant Meyers. Four large deuce-and-a-half trucks were crammed with 150 men, women, and children—refugees, I was told, who were glad to have the opportunity to earn money. The men were paid a hundred piasters a day and the women and children seventy-five. (A piaster was worth roughly a penny.) When Meyers and I pulled up, the truck drivers allowed the workers to get out.
I had no idea what to do next, but their boss did. Black pajamas and conical hats piled out of the trucks and hurried purposefully off in all directions while the boss yelled orders. A group of adolescents lingered near one truck, and the boss ran over and kicked one of them in the ass. The boss was of sergeant quality. In less than five minutes I was standing in the center of a circle of Vietnamese peasants armed with slashing machetes and flashing axes, watching the edge of the clearing dissolve as they hacked away like large, maddened termites.
The boss surveyed his charges, and when they all seemed busy, he walked toward me with a big grin.
“You like, Da wi?” That was the word for captain. Neither of us knew the word for warrant officer.
“Yeah. Looks like you’ve got everything under control.”
“You like?”
“Yes.”
“Ah.”
“What’s your name?”
“Nguyen, Da wi.”
I saw a group of teenage boys talking in a group, facing camp.
“What are those guys doing over there?” I pointed.
Nguyen followed my gesture and immediately rattled off some harsh words that sent the boys back to work. Were they VC? Was Nguyen VC? Was anybody VC? So far, VC were rumors to me, noises on the perimeter at night.
The chopping continued in the blazing sun. Children dragged the debris back toward the center of the circle and piled it up for burning. Everyone sweated profusely. I sweated just sitting on a felled tree trunk. The air sweated.
Sergeant Meyers sweated as he came over from the Jeep.
“What should I be doing, sir?”
Do? I thought to myself. Do? How the fuck would I know what to do? Do you see a sign on me that says Jungle Clearing Specialist? I’m the pilot, you’re the sergeant. Sergeants are supposed to know what to do with work details. Everyone knows that.
“Ah,” I finally said, “just wander around the circle of workers, Sergeant, and watch the people. Uh, watch for signs, too.”
“Signs, sir?”
“Yeah, these people might put markers on the ground to point out our defense positions.”
“Oh, I got it.” He turned and walked away. I decided to give him the advice always given to me. “Be careful, Sergeant.” He turned and nodded gravely.
I had wandered away from the tree I was using for a seat while I talked to Meyers. When I turned to go back, Nguyen was attending to a wounded young girl as she sat on the tree. When I walked up to them, the girl jumped up, but Nguyen barked and she sat back down.
She had a two-inch cut on her ankle. Nguyen wiped at it with the filthy rag that had been his headband. I called to Meyers—who was leering at one of the women fifty feet away—to get the first-aid kit out of the Jeep. The girl watched me carefully, curious and scared.
Meyers got back with the kit, and Nguyen stepped aside, visibly miffed at the intrusion. The girl’s dark eyes looked even more frightened in the clutches of an American. Was that what she was thinking? “I’ll do it, sir,” said Meyers. He rolled her black silk pant leg up past her knee and began to clean the wound with cotton swabs and hydrogen peroxide. The wound foamed with pink bubbles and the girl whimpered. I guess she’d never seen hydrogen peroxide work before. I told Nguyen to tell her it was good medicine.