We were camped in a stand of trees at the edge of a paddy. That day we had lost two men so new that I had already forgotten their names. Damp gray twilight settled around us. We couldn't smoke, and we were not supposed to talk. A black, six-six, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound grunt named Leonard Hamnet fingered a letter he had received months before out of his pocket and squinted at it, trying to read it for the thousandth time while spooning canned peaches into his mouth. By now, the precious letter was a rag held together with tape.
At that moment someone started shooting at us, and the lieutenant yelled, "Shit!" and we dropped our food and returned fire at the invisible people trying to kill us. When they kept shooting back, we had to go through the paddy.
The warm water came up to our chests. At the dikes, we scrambled over and splashed down into the muck on the other side. A boy from Santa Cruz, California, named Thomas Blevins got a round in the back of his neck and dropped dead into the water just short of the first dike, and another boy, named Tyrell Budd, coughed and dropped down right beside him. The F.O. called in an artillery strike. We leaned against the backs of the last two dikes when the big shells came thudding in. The ground shook and the water rippled, and the edge of the forest went up in a series of fireballs. We could hear the monkeys screaming.
One by one we crawled over the last dike onto the solid ground on the other side of the paddy. A little group of thatched huts was visible through the sparse trees. Then the two things I did not understand happened, one after the other. Someone off in the forest fired a mortar round at us—just one. One mortar, one round. I fell down and shoved my face in the muck, and everybody around me did the same. I considered that this might be my last second on earth and greedily inhaled whatever life might be left to me. I experienced that endless moment of pure helplessness in which the soul simultaneously clings to the body and readies itself to leave it. The shell landed on top of the last dike and blew it to bits. Dirt, mud, and water slopped down around us. A shell fragment whizzed overhead, sliced a hamburger-sized wad of bark and wood from a tree, and clanged into Spanky Burrage's helmet with a sound like a brick hitting a garbage can. The fragment fell to the ground. A little smoke drifted up from it.
We picked ourselves up. Spanky looked dead, but he was breathing. Leonard Hamnet picked up Spanky and slung him over his shoulder.
When we walked into the little village in the woods on the other side of the rice paddy, I experienced a kind of foretaste of the misery we were to encounter later in a place called la Thuc. If I can say this without setting off all the Gothic bells, the place seemed intrinsically, inherently wrong—it was too quiet, too still, completely without noise or movement. There were no chickens, dogs, or pigs; no old women came out to look us over, no old men offered conciliatory smiles. The huts were empty—something I had never seen before in Vietnam, and never saw again.
Michael Poole's map said that the place was named Bong To.
Hamnet lowered Spanky into the long grass as soon as we reached the center of the empty village. I bawled out a few words in my poor Vietnamese.
Spanky groaned. He gently touched the sides of his helmet. "I caught a head wound," he said.
"You wouldn't have a head at all, you was only wearing your liner," Hamnet said.
Spanky bit his lips and pushed the helmet up off his head. He groaned. A finger of blood ran down beside his ear. Finally the helmet passed over a lump the size of an apple that rose up from under his hair. Wincing, Spanky fingered this enormous knot. "I see double," he said. "I'll never get that helmet back on."
The medic said, "Take it easy, we'll get you out of here."
Out of here?" Spanky brightened up.
"Back to Crandall," the medic said.
A nasty little wretch named Spitalny sidled up, and Spanky frowned at him. "There ain't nobody here," Spitalny said. "What the fuck is going on?" He took the emptiness of the village as a personal affront.
Leonard Hamnet turned his back and spat. "Spitalny, Tiano," the lieutenant said. "Go into the paddy and get Tyrell and Blevins. Now."
Tattoo Tiano, who was due to die six and a half months later and was Spitalny's only friend, said, "You do it this time, Lieutenant."
Hamnet turned around and began moving toward Tiano and Spitalny. He looked as if he had grown two sizes larger, as if his hands could pick up boulders. I had forgotten how big he was. His head was lowered, and a rim of clear white showed above the irises. I wouldn't have been surprised if he had blown smoke from his nostrils.
"Hey, I'm gone, I'm already there," Tiano said. He and Spitalny began moving quickly through the sparse trees. Whoever had fired the mortar had packed up and gone. By now it was nearly dark, and the mosquitoes had found us.
Hamnet sat down heavily enough for me to feel the shock in my boots.>
Poole, Hamnet, and I looked around at the village. "Maybe I better take a look," the lieutenant said. He flicked his lighter a couple of times and walked off toward the nearest hut. The rest of us stood around like fools, listening to the mosquitoes and the sounds of Tiano and Spitalny pulling the dead men up over the dikes. Every now and then Spanky groaned and shook his head. Too much time passed.
The lieutenant came hurrying back out of the hut. "Underhill, Poole," he said, "I want you to see this." Poole and I glanced at each other. Poole seemed a couple of psychic inches from either taking a poke at the lieutenant or exploding altogether. In his muddy face his eyes were the size of hen's eggs. He was wound up like a cheap watch. I thought that I probably looked pretty much the same. "What is it, Lieutenant?" he asked.
The lieutenant gestured for us to follow him into the hut and went back inside. Poole looked as if he felt like shooting the lieutenant in the back. I felt like shooting the lieutenant in the back, I realized a second later. I grumbled something and moved toward the hut. Poole followed.
The lieutenant was fingering his sidearm just inside the hut. He frowned at us to let us know we had been slow to obey him, then flicked on his lighter.
"You tell me what it is, Poole."
He marched into the hut, holding up the lighter like a torch.
Inside, he stooped down and tugged at the edges of a wooden panel in the floor. I caught the smell of blood. The Zippo died, and darkness closed down on us. The lieutenant yanked the panel back on its hinges. The smell floated up from whatever was beneath the floor. The lieutenant flicked the Zippo, and his face jumped out of the darkness. "Now. Tell me what this is."
"It's where they hide the kids when people like us show up," I said. "Did you take a look?"
I saw in his tight cheeks and almost lipless mouth that he had not. He wasn't about to go down there and get killed by the Minotaur while his platoon stood around outside.
"Taking a look is your job, Underhill," he said.
For a second we both looked at the ladder, made of peeled branches lashed together with rags, that led down into the pit.
"Give me the lighter," Poole said, and grabbed it away from the lieutenant. He sat on the edge of the hole and leaned over, bringing the flame beneath the level of the floor. He grunted at whatever he saw, and surprised both the lieutenant and me by pushing himself off the ledge into the opening. The light went out. The lieutenant and I looked down into the dark open rectangle in the floor.
The lighter flared again. I could see Poole's extended arm, the jittering little flame, a packed-earth floor. The top of the concealed room was less than an inch above the top of Poole's head. He moved away from the opening.