“Oh, this is the life!” Connors yelled from outside. “Oh, yes. Clean, clean, clean. I wish some of you smelly bastards would take the goddamn hint!” He broke into unintelligible song.
Banjo bounded outside, naked.
“The first of the smelly bastards arrives,” Connors announced. “Welcome, miss. Set your helmet down here.”
“Oh, thank you,” Banjo said in falsetto.
Kaiser ran out, then Riker, then Nate and some officers from the next tent. Soon most of the company was outside, showering in the rain.
Even me. Against my better judgment. Last time we tried this, the rain stopped when I was fully lathered. Several of us had got caught. We had waited around, standing in the mud, soap suds tightening on our skin as it dried, for the rain to start again. It never did.
Thirty of us played around in the mud near the long washstand we’d made. A bunch of steel helmets stood on the frame as washbasins, collecting water in case the rain did stop.
“It’s my dick, and I can wash it as often and as fast as I want,” somebody yelled.
“Well, I never!” Banjo minced. “Don’t you know that’s bad for you?”
“Well, what the hell, I’ve been shaving my palms since I was fourteen.”
There was the usual horseplay: cover-your-asshole-when-you-bend-over jokes, soap-bar wars, falling in the mud and rinsing off. It was the first good time we’d had in a month. And we got clean.
We found some more of our missing Conex containers. Most of our tents turned up. The warrant tent was divided: nine warrant officers in one GP. Luxury at last. Five of us—Leese, Kaiser, Riker, Resler, and I—each got an eight-foot section along one side. Nate, Gotler, Connors, and Banjo each got a ten-foot space along the other side. This was to be our permanent tent.
We decided to install a wooden floor and electric lights. Four of us went to town to buy the wood for the floor and the stuff for the lights. I was in charge of getting the wire and fluorescent fixtures because I lied about knowing how to wire the place. I wanted to go to town.
As our truck passed through the division’s southern perimeter, the guard pointed to a man hanging dead from the flagpole. We’d heard about this the day before.
“The local authorities caught him with some American supplies. The Cav had them hang him up there as a lesson,” he said.
The man’s head was bent over to one side as the noose cinched into the skin of his neck. As we drove by, the angle changed, and I watched him turn slowly and then grow smaller as we continued on.
“Some lesson, huh, Gary?” I said to Resler, who sat across from me in the back of the deuce-and-a-half.
“Yep,” he said. “Guess he’ll never steal again.”
We rolled into town. Resler and I jumped out while Leese and Nate went to park the truck. They were supposed to shop for wood while Gary and I looked for the electrical supplies. First, we decided to have a look around. We hadn’t been here for a couple of weeks, and the place sure had changed.
Dusty old An Khe was now a jumping army town. New bars were packed to overflowing with hundreds of GIs. The streets were crowded with busy vendors from miles around.
We walked by a girl with a baby on her back, papoose style. I had seen her approaching some GIs from a distance, but I didn’t realize what she was doing until we passed her. She was asking for money, then pushing the baby toward the shopper, making it clear that she wanted to sell the kid. My head twisted around to watch her as I walked. I finally figured it out and turned to follow her. Gary said, “What’s wrong?”
“I can’t believe it. She’s trying to sell that baby!”
“Who?” Gary hadn’t noticed, but when he saw where I was going, he said, “Oh,” and followed me.
The girl was all of twelve or thirteen years old. I had started to tell her that it was wrong to do what she was doing when I noticed something peculiar about the baby. Gnats were crawling all over the slits of its eyes. It wasn’t blinking. I reached out to touch its pale cheek. When my fingers touched cold skin, I knew I had discovered something I didn’t want to know.
“Why does she want to sell a dead baby?” asked Gary.
“I don’t know.” My voice was calm, but inside I cringed away from her. She saw the fear in my eyes. I stared at her for a moment while I thought, How could you do this? Her weary eyes flicked away from mine to find another customer.
We walked across the street, which was strewn with gum wrappers and cigarette butts. I stopped to look for a hardware store.
Gary went on ahead. There weren’t any stores around here, just bars. I saw Gary duck into one of the doorways. I followed him.
I stepped through the beaded curtain. The bar was crowded with GIs and bar girls. It seemed to me there were more bar girls there than there had been people in town two weeks before.
“Buy me a drink?” a girl said as I walked farther into the mob. She pushed me to a seat at a little table. Three more bar girls argued with my captor about who was to be my girl friend. As flies and gnats swirled around us and played in the beer puddles on the table, one of the girls got out of her lawn chair to sit in my lap.
“You numma-one jai,” she chopped out in a monotone as she wriggled her buttocks against me. “You numma-one jai,” she repeated and moved her face closer to mine, nervous eyes darting in a smiling mask.
I think she was just as embarrassed as I was. She was new at her job. So was I. I sat there wide-eyed but trying to look nonchalant, like a warrior out to get laid.
“You numma-one jai,” she said again and pushed her little, flat nose against mine and breathed fish breath into my face. That breath and her limited vocabulary were snapping me out of grinning aw-shucks-ness. I wanted to leave.
She saw my expression change, and realizing that I was getting ready to make a break for it, she pulled out the reserves.
“You numma-one jai!” At last, some emotional inflection. Her eyes flirted. Her free hand reached down through her lap to grab a sincere handful of my crotch.
I jumped with surprise. I was embarrassed, also a little titillated, but I stood up and put the little masher back in her chair. Once I was standing, I used the opportunity to make it obvious I was looking for Resler. So I stood there for a minute searching through the mob, slapping little, sneaky hands away, but I couldn’t find him.
“Shouldn’t even think about it,” I muttered as I walked outside to resume my search for a hardware store. I liked that girl; at least, my hormones liked that girl. Warnings about the dreaded Vietnamese cock-rot came to mind. “Sometimes amputation is the only cure” was one description of its severity. Another was “There are guys who have been quarantined in ‘Nam since ’61 trying to be cured.” Or “I heard of a guy who woke up one morning and found his pecker had fallen off. Son of a bitch has to squat to piss. Damn.”
“Hey, Bob, where you going?” I turned and saw Resler coming up the street toward me.
“To find some light fixtures, remember? Where were you?”
“Me? I was looking for you. Did you get any?” We both walked down the dusty street. If there had been horses instead of Jeeps, it would have looked like an Old West town. Most of the doors we passed were entrances to small bars. Small boys ran up to every soldier, yelling, “Hey, numma one, you. Want boom-boom? You come with me. Two dollar.”
“ ‘Get any’? Not me, Resler. I don’t need the clap,” I said smugly. We turned off the main street into a narrow, shaded alley. There were shops here with everyday goods behind glass windows.
“You can’t get the clap, Mason. You’re immune.” We stopped in front of a store window featuring cheap tools, wire, small electric motors, and light fixtures. This was the place.