“Good?” He looked surprised.
“Yes, good.” I nodded. “Tell her.”
He did, and the girl smiled.
As the girl limped off to have lunch with her family, I decided I would have her teach me some Vietnamese. I told Nguyen. After a lunch of C rations for Meyers and me and rice and unidentifiables for the Vietnamese, the girl sat on the tree trunk with me.
She told me her real name but insisted that I call her by an American name. This beautiful and innocent girl on the other side of the world insisted that I call her Sally. It was depressing.
I learned words by pointing at objects and writing what she said in my notebook—phonetically, of course. Before the day ended, I had recorded many words: among others, clock (damn ho), knife (kai zowa), tooth (zing). We spent an absorbing hour making up sentences that worked with the words I was learning. In the process of teaching me, she became more relaxed, and smiled.
I heard Nguyen yelling, and looked up. He was scolding a group of people at the south side of the clearing. I noticed that Meyers was sleeping in the Jeep with his hat on his face. I stood up and looked around the circle. At the north side I saw a man sitting in the field, in the midst of busy machetes. I was wondering why he would sit down there when Sally tapped my shoulder.
As she taught me the Vietnamese word for a thing, she would ask me the English word. She tapped my shoulder because I was looking around now instead of teaching her more English. “Tree,” I said as she patted our bench. That was not what she meant. I got up and walked toward the Jeep. On the way, I looked back at the man who had been sitting. He was now lying down. That was enough. Give ‘em an inch and they take a mile. I called Nguyen over. “Go tell that guy to get to work.” I pointed to the malingerer, about a hundred yards away. Nguyen ran off.
“Get up, Sergeant,” I said as I got to the Jeep. Meyers lurched forward, dropping his hat. “Sorry, sir. I was on guard duty all night.” That was possible. “Okay, but try to stay awake for the hour or so we have left.”
“Yes, sir.”
As Meyers walked off, I looked to see how Nguyen was doing. He was on his way back. Behind him, the man still slept.
“What’s going on, Nguyen?”
“He not work more, Da wi. He dead.”
“Dead?” I blinked. “Did you say dead?”
“Yes, Da wi,” Nguyen nodded matter-of-factly.
There must be some mistake. This dumb gook doesn’t know what I’m saying. The guy’s asleep, and Nguyen is trying to protect him. If the guy was dead or dying, all those people around him would have said something. Was it a trick? Nguyen’s a VC and he wants me to go over there and be hacked to pieces? Certainly Meyers would never notice.
I walked toward the sleeping man. Nguyen ran up beside me. The guy’s probably his brother-in-law.
“Nguyen, I know this guy’s sleeping, so don’t try to stop me.”
Nguyen didn’t answer. I felt a tightening in my throat, but I didn’t know why.
The man did not get up when I stood next to him. He lay comfortably on his side in the grass while flies and gnats swarmed around the sores on his legs. (All of the Vietnamese had sores on their legs.) He did not breathe. Meyers came up from somewhere, knelt, and checked the man’s pulse at his throat. “He’s dead, sir.”
Nguyen showed me what killed him. Six feet from his body was a beheaded snake. Somewhere among the mass of sores and cuts on his leg was a snakebite. He had been bitten, killed the snake, and then sat down to die. His friends working around him did not stop their work to help. They knew, and he knew, that when that snake bit you, you died. So he did.
At quitting time the refugees lined up fifty feet away from the waiting trucks. The pay officer arrived just as a Jeep was taking the body to an aid station inside the camp. He carried a black vinyl briefcase that looked very out of place in the jungle and from which he produced Vietnamese cash to pay the workers.
While he paid the people, I looked for Sally. I had not seen her since the snakebite incident. She was the only person I knew outside the army. She seemed bright and sensitive. I harbored fantasies of somehow saving her from a grueling existence. I could not find her.
While I looked, I noticed a boy near the front of one of the lines step back onto the toes of the man behind him. The man immediately smashed him on top of the head with his closed fist. The kid sank weakly, almost to the ground, grimacing, but did not say a word.
The trucks drove off. Meyers and I made one last check before we left. We found three distinct arrows pointed at sandbag positions on our distant perimeter. Hash marks on the stems presumably indicated the range. We scattered them.
Late that afternoon I drove into the village of An Khe with Shaker, Farris, and Resler. It was an official trip to buy stuff for the men—candles, kerosene lamps, rice mats, and plastic lawn chairs. Resler and I were along to do the carrying.
The village was small and dusty. A few other Jeeps were parked here and there. One bar seemed pretty lively, but Shaker wouldn’t let us go in.
When I looked down the streets, I wondered where the refugees who had worked on the refueling depot lived. I didn’t see anybody I recognized.
“Mason, they found a couple of platoon tents this morning,” Resler announced through the canvas. I wasn’t up yet. He usually beat me to breakfast. “They want us to move out of the pup tents but keep them pitched for now.”
“Why?” I said groggily.
“They’re going to use them for storage. There’s still going to be twenty men in the GPs, so there won’t be much room for your golf clubs and polo gear.”
Hello, big time. The platoon tents, or GPs, were made of heavy olive-drab canvas stretched over a huge ridge pole. The sides were kept rolled up during the day because the tent’s dark color absorbed so much heat that you could feel the outrush of air, like a hot, stale breath, as you walked in the doors. The combination of heat and moisture generated great quantities of mildew and fungus. The tents were mostly uninhabited during the day because of the heat, and because we were supposed to be outside working anyway.
That night the pup-tent colony moved into the cozy new GP. My bed and eight others lined one side of the tent. Ten more ran down the other side. Six inches of space separated my cot from Nate‘s, on my right. John Hall, from the advance party, was six inches away on my left. Wendall and Barber were across the aisle from me. Still, we could stand up in the tent.
During our first night in the GP we talked about our deposed leader, Major Fields. A lingering ear infection got him grounded. At a surprise meeting before evening chow, he announced his retirement to Saigon and introduced his replacement, Major Williams. For more than two years Fields had been basically one of the boys, with gold braid. Williams gave us a sample of what was to come, with all the charm of an army textbook.
“I’ve got the highest respect for Major Fields and what he has done with Bravo Company. I can see how much you have done here.” He did not smile as he looked over our very loose formation near the mess hall. “But, starting tomorrow, the pace quickens. We have more work to do on the company area, missions corning up, and a lot of training flights. Training is the key to survival. And survival is what it’s all about, gentlemen.” Heavy eyebrows slanted toward his nose. The wrinkles around his mouth pulled down sternly as he talked about the upcoming missions. His face suited the job perfectly.