“Sir?”
“Specialist Broussard.”
“I don’t mean to interrupt, but…” Broussard hesitated, not sure if he should continue.
“Speak freely.”
“Well, sir, what’s been bothering me since I arrived at base camp is, well, this team doesn’t make sense.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah, I mean, this isn’t your normal fire team, is it? Render’s a Marine. Darby, too. McNulty, Medrano, and I are Army. I don’t know who or what Morganfield is, but he looks like Air Force.”
The men laughed. Chapel smiled and crossed his arms. “He is most definitely not Air Force.”
“So, how did we all get here? Together, I mean.”
“I chose you. All of you.” Chapel’s eyes moved across each of the men. “You were selected.”
“But why?”
A smile played across Chapel’s lips. A grunt who needed to know why raised the dander of any officer, but Chapel also appreciated a soldier who took the risk to question, to judge motives, looking for truth and suspicious of abuse of power. He was the same sort of grunt, way back when. “Because I believe in second chances,” Chapel said. “Third and fourth, even, in the case of Lance Corporal Darby.”
More laughter.
“Hey, for that third one, I was framed.”
“But I’m also a pragmatist,” Chapel continued, “and I’m selfish, and I want to execute this mission, on my terms, with no outside interference. To do so, I needed good soldiers who stumbled and were cast aside, declared unfit for combat, when nothing could be further from the truth.”
Broussard thought about that night, the two a.m. perimeter rush by the VC at Hill 407 when he didn’t take the shot from the lip of his foxhole, his muscle memory of how to pull the trigger when he was commanded failing him utterly, the ignorant flesh seizing up and shutting down, leaving his brain in charge. His brain told him to close his eyes, curl up and not draw attention with a muzzle flash. The brain decided to protect the body, to keep it going to accomplish its genetic imperative of replicating itself instead of this secondary mission of killing another human or many humans, denying them their right to endow their genetic code to the greater species. His brain hoped they’d all pass right over him, each sandaled foot and grunting body; that it all would go away and the world would return to normal. That somehow he’d be back in the bayou, lying in tall, hot grass of his grandmother’s back yard, the wet blades itching his skin, listening to the insects whisper secrets to each other. He wasn’t a killer, and didn’t know how to be. There was no light switch on the back of his head to flip from one who was embarrassed to hit a boy on the playground to one who could kill a complete stranger in the pitch blackness of two a.m. He didn’t know how to negotiate that in his mind, didn’t have enough time to travel to that new destination in his soul. The muscle training and mental reprogramming of boot camp didn’t get him there, nor did humping uniform and rifle and his terror through the jungle, being eaten alive by mosquitoes and leeches and jumping at every sound that didn’t seem to come from the sky or the trees, knowing that each moment could be his last. And the insects sounded different here. Alien. The birds, too. All of it was wrong, and he had wanted it to just go away but it didn’t, even when the gunfire ended and he was dragged from his foxhole by his lieutenant, screaming into his face and spitting on the ground. No one in his platoon would look at him. He hadn’t even be in-country long enough to learn anyone’s name.
No one died for what he did, or more rightly, what he didn’t do, but they could have. After pulling him from the ground, his lieutenant had kicked him out of the bush and sent his ass back to Quang Tri to await a transfer and possible charges. He’d sat in a chair then, too, but his eyes hadn’t changed. Not yet. They were the same ones he always had, weak and half blind and in need of correction. He sat with himself and those memories of Hill 407, wishing he could do it all over but afraid that it would turn out the same way. It was the first time since he was ten that he wanted to kill himself, and set his brain to that while his muscles claimed amnesia regarding that last night in the jungle. That was when the note came, the doors swung open, a jeep waiting for him outside. His bootlaces were in his hand, the pipe above him already picked out.
“Each of you became an ‘issue’ to your commanding officers,” Chapel continued, “and were removed from your platoons or squads and set up to disappear inside the belly of the United States military, which is where I came in. I found you all, and brought all here, for that last shot at honor. In this theater, anyway.”
Broussard looked at Chapel, the man who had saved his life. Chapel returned his gaze with those shiny gray eyes, the slightest hint of a wry grin twisting itself across his face again. Broussard wondered if he knew. Somehow, he was confident that he did, but also didn’t consider it worthy of any special notice. He probably did things like that all the time. Habitual heroism.
“How?” Medrano asked. “How’d you come in? I mean—” he gestured around the bunker—“this don’t exactly look like it’s on the books, know what I mean?” The men were loosening up, realizing that this wasn’t a normal military situation, and that communication was more of a two-way affair.
“Never ask a girl her secrets, Private Medrano.” Chapel said, eyes winking without the lids ever closing. The soldiers laughed, loosening up. Some men were just born with that natural way.
Chapel opened up a leather case from the table and took from it a worn corncob pipe that was surely made a century or two prior. He held onto the pipe as he addressed the group.
“Gentlemen, I’ve brought all of you to this place for what I see as a very important reason. The United States government might not necessarily agree with me, but I felt the need to call an audible here, and check down into a new play after surveying the defensive alignment. Do we understand each other?”
“Yes sir,” four of the men said in unison.
Medrano looked puzzled. McNulty cuffed his arm. “Football, dummy.”
“That’s good,” Chapel said. “We need to understand each other, now and for the duration of this specialized commission, and even afterwards. An understanding, and a trust, will be important to successfully see this through. Can I count on you?”
“Yes sir,” all of them said.
Chapel nodded and leaned forward, hands gripping the edges of the table, like a professor in lecture. “The situation is this: We’re only officially fighting Charlie on one side of a border that is invisible to our enemy, allowing the Ho Chi Minh Trail cut through the mountains of Laos to act as a greased conduit to move farm-fresh troops, extract casualties, and resupply all manner of warm and fuzzy weaponry gifted by our friends the Chinese. These weapons are killing our brothers in record numbers up and down this confused nation we have pledged our lives to cleanse of the insidious virus of Communism. We cannot allow this to go on.”
“No sir,” McNulty said, a weird grin on his face. The true believer, zealot of any religion that allowed him to wage war against the Other. Chapel was just the latest prophet. Lord willing, there’d be more.
“No sir, indeed.” Chapel carefully unwrapped a cloth covering a tightly wound braid of tobacco, its spicy musk cutting through the humid air. “In a war, if the enemy leaves the battlefield and retreats to the village, you chase him to the village. If the enemy runs to a church, you pursue him into that church. If the enemy runs across borders, we cross those borders to defeat our enemy, politicians and gold stars be damned.”
“Goddamn them anyway,” Render said.
Chapel opened a bowie knife, its long, fat blade catching the lantern light. “We will chase our enemy to their village, to their church. We will go where they go to hide, to heal, and to rest, and we will roust them from their beds.” He lowered the knife to the table and carefully cut the tobacco. “That is what brings us here, away from the politicians and the gold stars, and the platoon commanders who follow them like good soldiers. I don’t blame them, but I also don’t cut smoke for them, for they’re not the brothers I need.” He picked up a plug of tobacco and brought it to his nose, closing his eyes and inhaling deeply. Chapel opened his eyes and held up the moist brown leaf. “But you are the brothers I need.”