The T-34 is a reasonably good tank. They gave us a hard time in Korea, and while I suppose they’re considered obsolete now, this one wasn’t so bad. The steering was simple and the ride, though uncomfortable, made up for it with the feeling of security it conveyed. I suddenly knew how a box turtle feels when he draws in his head and legs and closes the hinge on his plastron. All at once we didn’t have to worry about a thing. It didn’t even matter if the locals became suspicious of us. We could ride right through them while the bullets bounced off us. No North Vietnamese soldier would be foolhardy enough to fire a bazooka at one of his own tanks just because it seemed to be out of position. We had it made.
When we eventually overtook a long column of foot soldiers, the incredible value of our new vehicle made itself dramatically obvious. They must have heard us coming a long way off. By the time we were in sight of them, they had formed ranks on either side of the roadway to afford us easy passage. They took their caps off at our approach, and as we reached them a cheer went up all around us. They were glad to see us, they wanted to wish us all manner of luck on our way to meet the enemy. I fished around the control panel for a horn button to answer their salute. I guess tanks don’t have horns, perhaps because they are not afraid of collisions. I gave up the hunt, took up a pistol, opened the hatch, and snapped off a volley of shots at the heavens. The soldiers roared their approval. After we had passed them, after they were out of sight, the sound of their hoarse applause still echoed around us.
“They really got excited,” Tuppence said.
“Yes.”
“They thought we were on their side.”
“Logical mistake.”
“I guess. Feels funny, doesn’t it? All that cheering because they think we’re out on our way to go shoot at us. Did you see their faces? Some of them are just kids.”
“Uh-huh. So are most of our Marines, and in a few days those kids you just saw will be lobbing mortar shells at them.”
“That’s a bad scene.”
“That’s war.”
“War,” she said, “is hell.” I don’t think she was quoting Sherman; I think the observation merely occurred to her, as it must to everyone, in every language.
I thought all the way back to Korea. The mud, bullets, the lousy rations, the bad summer, and worse winter. “I wouldn’t call it hell,” I said.
“No?”
“Not really. It’s very alive and exciting, and it’s fought by young men, and if they are young enough, they are convinced that what they are doing is very important. There’s a hill, say, and the other side has the hill, and your side wants to take it, and you have to help your buddies and support them and you have to knock out the machine guns that are spraying bullets at you, and it’s all very important, taking that hill. It’s worth dying for.”
“All that for a hill.”
“You don’t get the point. It doesn’t really matter if it’s a hill or a swamp or a plastic cesspool. It’s something that seems very important and worth dying for. If you have to die, you might as well go thinking you’re doing it for a good reason. When you look at it that way, it doesn’t matter if you die in combat or in your sleep, at eighteen or seventy-eight. Either way you wind up just as dead.
“But it only works when you’re young. Because when you get older, you realize that there’s nothing worth dying for, and that it doesn’t matter very much whether you take a hill or not, because the world is full of hills, and you are the only you you’ve got.”
I thought of the old man in Tao Dan, riding his own funeral pyre into the mouth of hell for the glory of France. What, really, had he given his life for? For the safety of three strangers, none of whom was likely to do anything to enlarge the French colonial empire. For the glory of Charles de Gaulle, who would probably be at least as horrified as Ho Chi Minh himself at the thought of French reconquest of Indochina.
A wasted death? Hardly. He could have spent a few more years living on dead dreams and sucking marrow from the bones of memory. Instead he had died well, that old man.
I corrected myself. “You don’t have to be young,” I said. “It’s easier when you’re young because then it comes naturally. You can still manage it when you’re old, but then you have to talk yourself into it.”
I drove that tank all night. Tuppence and Dhang had dropped off to sleep muttering something about food and water, neither of which we had with us. We could get along without food, but water would become a problem before very long. I felt more and more like Bogart.
Somewhere between the middle of the night and dawn we lost the road. This could never have happened farther back, with the dense jungle on either side, but as we moved south the jungle gave way to vast stretches of open ground. I suppose we must have entered the demilitarized zone. I’m not too clear on the geography of the region, and even now I don’t know exactly where we were. At any rate, I drove us right off the road without even noticing the difference. By the time I realized what had happened, there was no way to correct the error. The tank had a compass, so I kept us on a southerly course and hoped it would take us where we wanted to go. By the time the sky lightened, we were far out of sight of the road, so we kept on going south. When Tuppence woke up and asked where we were, I told her we were in Asia, and she told me nobody likes a smartass.
We were still in Asia when the plane attacked us.
We were still in the open, too, surrounded by vast reaches of grassland on either side. We were the only tank around, and he was the only plane, and unfortunately he was one of ours, and the tank was one of theirs. I didn’t even see him until he started shooting at us. Then a rocket went off a few yards to our left, and we could feel the impact inside the tank.
“You idiot,” I screamed, “we’re on your side!”
“Maybe if you got out and waved to him-”
“I don’t think so,” I said. I tracked him – he was banking now, preparing for another run. I looked at Dhang. It was too much for him, and he was cowering in one corner like a rat driven mad in an insoluble maze. The jungle was one thing, but riding in the belly of an iron monster while an iron bird shot at you, that was too much. He didn’t want to have anything to do with it.
Neither did I. I had closed the hatch, of course, and now I watched the plane through the tank’s sights. He was ready again. He came at us lower this time and fired off two rockets in turn. They were both wide on the left.
“He’s a lousy shot,” I said. “He’s really terrible. We’re barely a moving target, and he has all the room in the world to move around in. He should have blown us to hell by now.”
Tuppence was shaking.
“That’s a small consolation,” I went on, “but it’s something. If all our fliers are this bad, it’s amazing we’re holding our own. Maybe he’ll run out of rockets.”
“Maybe we’ll run out of tanks.”
He showed no sign of running out of rockets. His next pass brought him even lower, and I cooperated brilliantly by stalling the tank. This time he scored a near miss, and the tank rocked with the force of the explosion.
“He’s getting warmer. Evan-”
“What?”
“Can’t this thing shoot back?”
I looked up. There was a sort of steering wheel. I turned it, and our gun moved. There was a little door that you opened to insert a shell, and behind me on the floor there were shells. I snapped a command, and Dhang handed me a shell.
“They’re probably duds,” I said. “And I don’t really know how to work this thing.”
“We have to do something.”