“Yes sir,” Broussard said. He deeply understood the transformation of environment. It was what brought him across the ocean, and to stand in front of this man in an unmarked section of Laos.
“The secret I have to tell you is this: We are supposed to be here. We, meaning us.” He gestured to everyone. “This squad. Us.” He pointed out into the jungle, to the south. “They aren’t supposed to be here. They. Them.”
“Which way you pointing?” Darby asked.
“To the south, Private Darby, where our country has set up shop to build factories instead of finish lines. Long-term housing instead of forward operating bases deep within the heart of the enemy, to destroy their capacity to wage war and their will to continue. So the south, Private Darby. I’m pointing to the goddamn south.”
Darby took a drag from his cigarette, nodded, and smiled. “That’s what I figured.”
Render looked at Broussard, who looked back at him, wide-eyed. Neither had ever heard any military man speak this way, and certainly not a white one. This was the kind of talk you’d hear from the Black Power brothers, late at night or away from the rest, when the smoke filled the air of the tent and the hooch was passed around. It was heresy, spoken by a commanding officer, and gave them all a jolt of adrenaline.
The man looked up at the sky, squinting at something the rest of the group couldn’t see. “Let’s take this inside, shall we?” He gestured to the bunker, and the men walked to it single file, just like good American soldiers.
11. Public Toasts to Private Wars
Augie Chapel couldn’t take his gray eyes off the wall. The men in front of it—stars gleaming on shoulders and bars weighing down chests, drinking and laughing like this was an oyster brunch at the Old Ebbitt Grill—held the life and usually the death of hundreds of thousands, potentially millions, in their hands, and Chapel couldn’t stop staring at the wall behind them.
It wasn’t the wall itself, but the Martinique wallpaper coating it. The pattern was a series of repeating banana leaves, gently rounded and loosely arranged, with space to move through and see through in between. Lots of white space to contrast with the vivid green spotted with yellow tuffs. Chapel had seen it before, in the Beverly Hills Hotel when he was meeting a Hollywood producer to advise on yet another ridiculous film about the whip-smart intelligence community foiling yet another plan by the Commies. It looked like the backdrop to a Bel Air garden party, not a jungle.
But this was Okinawa, the island nation conquered by the last great empire conquered by the Yanks, and this wallpaper was as non-native to this country as a Vietnamese jungle would be, or the men sitting in front of the sanitized representation of one. Brigadier, lieutenant, and major generals, mixed with admirals of the fleet, vice, and rear variety. Ladder-climbing men of past wars and current politics who would never have to descend into the stinking, devil-haunted Indochinese wilderness where there was no repeated pattern, only chaos and waiting death and wet and rot and mud soaked in blood and soaking through sun-bleached boots to destroy feet and make the mere act of walking a living hell. No strategically placed white space to peer out onto the other side and the bright, clean salvation from the green hell. These red-faced, gossipy men would never be forced to experience how the Ong Thanh jungle smelled and the sounds it made when your ears were listening for any clue as to what your fate would be one second into the future. Their wars were different. Every war before this one was different. It demanded a special sort of thinking, and none of them had it.
These men didn’t belong here, and neither did this wallpaper. Both were an abomination.
And yet Chapel couldn’t stop staring at it. It fascinated him. A fascination with the abomination like Conrad wrote about. His heart of darkness lay in Africa, but there are many hearts beating inside many shades of darkness, and some blacker and colder than anything a writer could possibly conceive or, heaven forbid, personally experience and live to put down on paper.
“Augie, you grouchy sumbitch, you haven’t even touched your drink.”
Chapel looked at the man and his crew cut, the only thing that tied him to his soldiering days in the European theater, when he had done a good job, and had his heart in the right place. These days, his heart was descending into a pool of fat growing north from his belt line.
He placed his index finger on the side of his sweating glass of Irish whiskey, easy on the ice. The brigadier general snorted, shook his head, and downed his scotch, as if to show Chapel how it was done. Once the diapers come off for good, everything in a boy’s life comes down to a dick-measuring contest until the day that boy dies.
The men resumed their conversation about women or baseball or some weird mixture of the two. He couldn’t really follow it, especially since he’d noticed the wallpaper. He traced his finger around the top of his glass, feeling the coldness and the blunted edge smoothed out for his protection. Chapel wouldn’t start drinking until he’d had his say, but that moment hadn’t yet happened. He’d flown in to Kadena Air Base and walked along weirdly suburban, American-style sidewalks and carefully arranged city blocks to discuss strategy for the conflict in Vietnam with all the top brass, to offer his asymmetrical ideas to fight and win and most importantly end what had rapidly become an unorthodox war between a nation too powerful to do what it had to do and a populist insurgency that would do whatever it had to do to transform its own country. That was his specialty, and Chapel had honed his talents by fighting battles around the edges of wars and underneath the covers of nations. He was an alchemist tasked with fusing spycraft with battlefield machinery, and he was very good at what he did. That was why he was sitting at this table in Okinawa, sharing the same rarified air with men who outranked him by a measure of fleets and battalions. But so far, they were the only ones talking, shouting about body counts and media reports and political backchannel bullshit that had nothing to do with winning the war and everything to do with winning the public perception battle back in the States. With jockeying for the next promotion, the senate seat that waited for any war hero brave enough to mount a campaign. They were analyzing, adjudicating, and executing a war on ledger sheets while men were tearing each other to ribbons over five yards of jungle mud.
“Are we going to talk about winning this thing?”
Chapel wasn’t even sure he said this out loud, because he’d been saying it inside his head for months, and probably years. But with the laughter silenced, and every shiny face at the table turned toward him, he knew it had finally passed his lips.
“What do you think we’ve been doing here the past three days?” A rear admiral spoke up. Chapel knew him a little bit. A decent guy, but severely lacking as a strategist. All of these men knew about fighting, and some of them knew about killing, but very few of them knew fuck-all about the delicate dance of war.
“You mean aside from grab-assing?” Chapel said.
There was a silence. Rank and pedigree narrowed eyes and raised noses. Chapel didn’t care. He moved between the ranks, the military branches, like Fred Astaire stepping between raindrops. He didn’t have much time for any of them aside from using them as rooks and bishops while lying in the cut like a queen.
“Yeah, aside from the grab-assing,” the brigadier general said.
“Okay, aside from that, you’ve spent the last three days missing the goddamn point.”
An Air Force general sighed, rolling his eyes to the ceiling. “What the fuck is he doing here, anyway?”