Grace: Funeral

38

“Well, well, grandfather, I hear you’re a hundred years old. Tell me, how has life seemed to you these hundred years?”
 He looked up with inflamed, lashless eyes.
“It’s like a glass of cold water, my child.”
“And are you still thirsty, grandfather?”
 He raised his hand high, as though to call down a curse. “Damn whoever isn’t,” he said.

Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco

1951

The First Baptist Church was a large, yellow-brick building not far from the center of town. It was filled with people. The men wore suits. The women were in somber dresses, dark hats, and gloves. The size of the crowd didn’t surprise me. I thought everyone knew my grandfather, and everyone did. The coffin was in front and just below the pulpit. We, the family, were slightly off to one side. Everyone in the family was there, including a lot of people I didn’t know. Aunts and an uncle, parents, brothers and first cousins I knew. However, my grandmother’s sister had six married children. The great uncle and aunt, second cousins and their spouses, and the whirlpool of their children were not even names to me, but they brought memories of a house in the country with high ceilings, a hammock on the porch, and guinea fowl running free in the yard.

I sat in the row with my brother and between my grandmother and my mother. Brother Anthony stood in the pulpit and preached salvation. He always preached salvation, at least every Sunday in the summer when I was visiting Arkansas. About the only thing Brother Anthony left out was the Invitation and that was probably only because the rededicated would have to walk around the flower-covered casket to get to the preacher. He did, at last, speak of my grandfather and I felt some of the tension, the angriness slip out of my grandmother. She never liked Brother Anthony. Still, she kept in place her purse-lipped expression I knew so well.

I passed the time looking at the flowers and watching the men in dark suits at the back who had seated all the people and handed out the printed folders that listed the hymns and the pallbearers and named the survivors. Survivors. I wondered what that meant. I was thrilled to see my name right there, in print.

The church was nice and cool. Even so all the older women in the congregation were slowly waving their funeral home fans. This was the only place in Van Buren I knew of that had air conditioning, except for the Bob Burns movie theater (for the twenty-five cents from my grandfather I could watch Lash LaRue, Superman, Zorro and Roy Rogers on Saturday afternoons from the front row of the balcony seats).

When it was over they all sang Amazing Grace without even having to open the hymnals. By this time I was looking forward to another ride in the long black Cadillac with the little seats, just my size, that folded down in back of the front seat where the man in the black suit sat and drove the car. But first we had to stand on the sidewalk and watch the men carry the coffin out to the hearse that looked just like the ambulance except that it was black and didn’t have a red light on top or sirens on the fenders.

When that was done we got into the Cadillac and rode in a great parade to the cemetery. Men walking on the street stopped and took their hats off as the parade passed. Cars coming the other way pulled off the road and waited for us to go by. My mother and grandmother sat across from me on the plush gray seats, holding each other’s gloved hands, their eyes barely visible behind the veils hanging down from their hats.

The sun was bright and hot at the cemetery and I wished I had a hat to wear. But the only hat I had was an old floppy straw cowboy hat that my mother wouldn’t let me wear with my suit, the suit that once was my brother’s and that had sleeves that were too long. All the adults sat down in folding chairs beside the coffin resting over the big, deep, dark and cool-looking hole in the ground. I read the names of Floyd and Ruth on granite stones nearby. Brother Anthony began to talk and pray again. I watched a bee hovering over the blossoms of a small crepe myrtle.

* * * * *

For days after the funeral it seemed the house was always full of people. I wasn’t really wanted in there, getting in the way of my grandmother and Juanita and the constant flow of well-dressed people carrying casseroles and sitting and talking — I’d have to be still or at least quiet. Instead, I spent my time down at the packing shed where my uncle was keeping the business going.

I didn’t mind, especially when the boxcars were being loaded and iced down. I loved all of that: the rumbling of the switch engine when it backed a car in; the metal on metal screech of the wheels braking on the rails; the slamming open of the doors; the clatter of the rollers as the boxes went down the conveyor from the shed to the car; the big men in thick leather gloves wielding ice tongs; the howling of the ice crushing machine when one of the child-sized blocks of ice was dropped in; the rushing sound at the end of the hose as the ice flew across the stacked boxes of produce. Best of all was the smell. It was strawberries or tomatoes or spinach or cantaloupes or watermelons or corn or beans and all, all smelled of green.

One time a packer caught me there, standing just inside the door of the boxcar being very still, sniffing the air like a pointer snuffling for quail. They were loading loose spinach leaves into containers in the car. The packer caught me up and carried me, laughing and shrieking, to the beginning of the packing line where the spinach from the fields was being washed and sorted. The packer tossed me into the bin with the dirty spinach and I rolled down through the chute, getting sprayed with water and tumbled about, and surrounded with the smell. The packer caught me at the end of the line.

“Can I go again?” I remember asking. “Please, please?”

Grace: Crow's Foot

Photo courtesy of  South East Asia - Hidden Riches of a Colonial Past

37

We master archers say: with the upper end of the bow the archer pierces the sky, on the lower end, as though attached by a thread, hangs the earth. If the shot is loosed with a jerk there is danger of the thread snapping. For purposeful and violent people the rift becomes final, and they are left in the awful center between heaven and earth.

Eugene Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery

1969

The Crow’s Foot was southeast of Pleiku. It was called the Crow’s Foot because on a map three blue lines representing streams in three valleys merged into a single blue stream, all of them running to the south. That is, on a map it looked like the footprint of a bird. It was just the local American name for the area, and not the only place like it in the country. Even the name was used elsewhere, so that when I told my stories in later days I had to say, “This Crow’s Foot was southeast of Pleiku,” and my listeners would get a rough idea of where it was.

The operation was sort of an experiment. Regular U.S. Forces were given a sector. Regular Vietnamese forces had a sector. And on one flank the local militia units, Regional Forces/Popular Forces or “Ruff-Puffs”, were cobbled together into a battalion and given a sector. At the level of the colonels and the generals it had all the common elements of any decent-size operation: estimates of who and where the enemy might be; lists of units participating; assignments of sectors and objectives drawn on maps; timetables and routes of movement; bound booklets of radio frequency assignments and call signs; and all the rest. At every level and within each level this was expressed in the same five paragraph format, even when it was in different languages. The higher the level, the more pieces of the plan that were put in writing, typed on paper or mimeograph stencils, and drawn on semi-transparent sheets of paper. At the lowest level it was a group of soldiers standing around a sergeant who drew the plan in the dirt and told each man where he was to go and what was expected of him.

The plan was much, much more than just the infantrymen who were out on the points of the arrows spread across the maps. First, and most important, were the schemes for the entire array of indirect fire weapons. Those plans began with the infantry units’ own mortars that we carried with us and would set up and move and set up again as we made our way into the Crow’s Foot. Positioned behind all the infantry units at distances appropriate to their caliber and range were the artillery pieces. These were towed or driven into position. They would be “surveyed in” so that they knew exactly where they were on the ground and in relationship to each other. And, more importantly, where they were in relationship to us infantrymen. The artillerymen would unload some of their ammunition and sort it by type and then, sweating in the heat, drinking water from their canteens and Lister bags, wait. Near them were the mathematicians and geometers, the men who plotted on maps and computed from tables the angle and direction of fire and amounts of propellant needed to launch an explosive shell that would land at the right time and place.

Back near the main road was a small group of M-48 tanks. Almost never in all the years we were in Vietnam was there a time when the terrain, the roads, and the enemy location were right for the use of these monsters, these war chariots, but maybe this time. So the tankers tested their radios and their engines, their main guns and their machine guns, and waited.

Flying orbits overhead were FAC’s in their quiet little airplanes. They were looking down at the ground and talking to Air Force command posts and aircraft waiting on airstrips much further back. They were working together to make educated guesses about what kinds of weapons might be the most useful.

Whistling very high in the sky, and very far away, en route from an island in the Pacific Ocean was a flight of B-52 bombers scheduled to deliver an ARCLIGHT into the center of a rectangle drawn near the Crow’s Foot. That was to be the overture, so to speak, of the concerto. Cynics, that is to say the infantrymen in the process of getting off of helicopters or jumping down from the backs of trucks and some of the more jaded staff officers still back in Pleiku, would make the allegation that the Air Force must have been the low bidder on an Army contract to dig a bunch of swimming pools out in the middle of nowhere.

Also in the sky were command and control helicopters. These were filled with radios and the superior officers of the men on the ground. Their place in the sky gave them something of a God’s eye view of the operation. Best case, they had the ability to shift artillery fires and air strikes to exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Worst case, they had a deceptive illusion of control, of being in absolute charge of the men on the ground.

Even further back, near the base camps of the units involved and not very far from the Air Force units, were caches of ammunition, water, fuel, and food for the men in the field. Their orders gave them timetables of when they would move what supplies to which places. In the nearby tented hospitals ward space was cleared out, supplies of blood and bandages checked, procedures and routines checked.

On the ground, on the far right flank of all the thousands of men was one binh-si, one little man about 5’2” tall and weighing maybe 110 pounds. He was walking down a footpath that ran southeast along the edge of orderly rows of tea bushes. To his left and continuing along in a wide, kilometers-long arc were dozens of men just like him, the point men of their respective platoons and companies. He didn’t know about them, nor did he much care. He was focused on what was directly in front of him. His only concern was making it through the day, sorting out the light and the shadows, the natural from the unnatural, the friendly from the hostile.

Behind him was his squad. Behind his squad was his platoon. Behind his platoon was his company commander and with the commander were the only Americans on this flank of the operation — they were my sergeant and me. Each company had three platoons and they were advanced with two platoons forward and one back. That meant that leading the other forward platoon somewhere off to binh-si's left, probably out in the middle of the tea plantation, was another binh-si like him, just as scared, just as hopeful that there was nothing in front of him.

The battalion had three companies and it was advancing with two companies forward and one in reserve. Each company had a pair of Americans who walked near the Vietnamese company commander. At battalion level was another American team, this one with a larger group of four men.

The complexity was extraordinary. Every leader had at least one radio, most had two or three. The Americans could talk to each other. The Vietnamese could talk to each other. The Americans could talk to the Vietnamese. The commanders flying in their helicopters could talk to their units on the ground and the ones back at the base. The artillery and the mortar units could be reached and the Air Force could be called.

In the middle of the morning a grumbling sound came out of the east and the earth began to tremble. The ARCLIGHT had arrived. Thousands of pounds of steel and explosive were falling from aircraft so high they could not be seen. Somewhere to the east the bombs were crashing into the ground, flashing into life, and stirring the earth.

As I said, I was with the company on the far right flank with the binh-si out on point in front of me. The only other American with me was a staff sergeant with a couple of months in country. Our job was to help the captain, the đại-úy in command, bring in fire support and give him advice on how to use his company in battle. It struck me that it was as if we were on a hunt like those once staged for noblemen in Europe. The ARCLIGHT was like the beaters who swarmed through the woods and flushed game to run in panic towards the hunters. The only problem was that in this case the game was armed. Also, there was a good chance, a very good chance, that the ARCLIGHT had hit nothing at all. In any case, any NVA or VC unit in that general direction knew for sure that something was coming. They would be ready.

What was most memorable about the day was the heat, the steam room oppressiveness of the air. The straps of my rucksack began to chafe almost as soon as I put it on. Itching flared in my crotch within minutes. I wrapped an olive drab bandanna around my neck to soak up some of the sweat and before the day was done I would ring it out a dozen times.

Soon we were past the tea plantation and moving into the hills. We walked through a mixed kind of cover. In some places the grass reached up past our knees and the few trees that stood had black burn marks on their trunks. That meant that at some point the Montagnards had cleared the area with fire and had perhaps grown manioc and other food. Now the grass was back and soon the jungle would return.

We went under the canopy and the air was even more still. When we waded through a stream that hadn’t been on our maps I rinsed out the bandanna and tied it back around my neck. For a moment it felt so cool that a shiver ran down my spine. We broke out of the jungle at the base of a hill that was oddly clear of trees and brush. The point man, the binh-si, was well ahead of us, about halfway up the hill, his squad spread out behind him. The point man stopped, seeing something not quite right in front of him. Then he fell. He was so far away that it seemed to take minutes for the sound of the rifle shot to reach the command group. And then that was mixed with the small clatter of noise coming down the hill and up the hill.

The ruff-puffs went to ground. That was the wrong thing to do, but ill-trained soldiers will not do what seems so insanely counter-intuitive as run up a hill into fire. Nothing I could do, nothing my sergeant could do, would get them up and moving forward. After a few moments cajoling the đại-úy, I got on my radio and began bringing in artillery on the hillside.

I ended up behind a tree trunk checking coordinates on my map and watching the gray puffs of the incoming artillery march up the hill. As always I was struck by how benign it looked from a distance. Even the sound was a soft crump, crump, crump. But I knew it was only because I wasn’t near.

“You must go now,” I told the đại-úy after the last rounds had landed. Suddenly, for no reason I could see or understand, the ruff-puffs shook themselves into a decent unit. Small groups rushed forward, covered by their mates and machine guns. Bit by bit they worked their way up the hill.

I scrambled up the hill with my sergeant trying to listen to my radio, keep my rifle ready, and watch everything all the way up. We rushed from one small fold in the ground to another, keeping watch over each other, but there was nothing coming our way. I saw a still Vietnamese in an odd green uniform sprawled in the bottom of a shallow hole, but that was all I saw of the enemy.

We reached the top of the hill and flopped on the ground. Below us was an abandoned Montagnard village. Of the buildings only the structural posts of the long houses remained. Grass was already growing into the edges of the fire pits. On the far side of the village I could see the first of the streams of the Crow’s Foot running between steep banks. Except for the dead soldier I’d passed on the way up, there was no sign of an enemy. The soldiers were scattered about and seemed confused and disorganized.

“We’ve got to get this sorted out,” I told my sergeant. “You take the platoon over there. I’ll try to get the đại-úy on track.”

I spoke with the đại-úy and listened to him shout his orders to his lieutenants. In ten minutes or so the men were set into a perimeter and linked up with the company on our left. A medevac came in for the point man’s body and took the sniper’s body with it. I put together a report and called it in. From my team leader I got a summary of the rest of the action so far. Across the front it was much like their encounter — a few snipers, but no real concentration of force.

We stayed in a hasty defense long enough to open a couple of cans of C-rations, but what I wanted more than anything else was water. I drained one canteen and started on a second. From the radio chatter I could tell that some of the artillery was displacing so that they would stay in range. I heard, then saw, one of the FAC birds fly over. The troops began to move out, cautiously wading through the stream and up the mottled hillside beyond. They generally followed the edges of the fields that had once been cleared, not quite in the open, but not in the jungle either. Drops of sweat ran off my forehead and into my eyes, blurring my vision and stinging. When I crossed the stream I stopped for a minute, filled my canteen, dropped in a couple of iodine tablets, and shook it a few times before putting it back in its carrier.

By mid-afternoon we were on the top of the second of the ridges that defined the Crow’s Foot and looking down into a part of the box that had been struck by the ARCLIGHT. In the last hundred meters the smell of the wood smoke told us we were near. From the ridge it was a landscape of potholes and shattered trees marked by wisps of black and gray smoke. I was pleased that, according to the plan, it would not be my company sweeping through. Instead, we would turn to the south and establish a position at the place where the map showed the three streams meeting.

As I moved I could sense the units in the operation condensing together. They were gathering as they approached their objectives. My company followed the middle stream bed. The reserve company was swinging out to my right and the other company was coming up on my left. As the afternoon waned we found our objective, an odd little hillock overlooking the confluence of the streams. The company spread out on the forward slope and began to dig in. The chatter among the soldiers began to increase in volume. I went off to find the company on my right and found them close to where they were supposed to be. Talking with their American advisors we adjusted the two foxholes that were on their respective flanks and gave quick lessons on emplacing Claymore mines to the squad leaders.

As far as I could tell, if there had ever been anyone there, they were gone. If that sniper we’d encountered in the early morning had been part of a larger unit, that larger unit had long since abandoned him.

I took my helmet off and wiped the soaked sweatband with my bandanna. “What do you think?” I asked my sergeant when he came up.

“Not bad.” He pointed to a location down the slope to his right. “That’s about the only place they can get close. If we get an outpost out there we’ll have some warning.”

It wasn’t going to get any better. This was going to be our place for the night. There was plenty of daylight for the company to work on their holes, clear their fields of fire, plot mortar and artillery fires, plant more Claymores, and plan their night patrols. Nearly smokeless cooking fires were lit and the smell of rice boiling drifted over the positions. I and my sergeant ate cold C-rations and settled in for the night. We then endured the black hours of mosquitoes humming. We scratched the salt residue on our skin. Our hearts raced at sudden clanks and clicks out beyond the perimeter. We heard soft pops and saw brilliant white lights in the distance. At odd moments we heard the sound of water moving through the stream below us.

More cooking fires were lit as soon as the morning light filtered down through the mist. Two cigarettes, a malaria pill, and a cup of coffee made from water boiled over a chunk of C-4 explosive opened the day. Then I got a call telling me the units were staying in place, at least for a while. I was told to report to the battalion command post for a meeting. The message ended with a cryptic line: “Bring soap.”

I gave đại-úy a little pep talk about staying alert and went with my sergeant back down the path we’d walked the day before.

We found the CP on the back side of the ridge. The Battalion Advisor, a Major from our province team, looked as scruffy as all the rest of us. He waited for the rest of the teams to show up.

“We’ve got too many advisors out here,” he said, “but I was overruled on that at the beginning. We need to give them a chance to run their own units for a while. They’ve changed the plan anyhow. The ruffs-puffs are going to stay in place for the rest of the morning and then we’re all pulling out.”

He drew some arrows on his map and showed us. “The rest of the task force is going to continue to swing around to the south and will simply sweep past where we are at about the same time that we pull out.”

He looked at his sergeant with a grin. “In the meantime, the we’ve got something to show you guys.”

He led us up into the valley and then along the side of the stream. A squad of Vietnamese was off to our flank as security. The path took a sharp turn and then the jungle opened out and revealed a glade, a glen, a copse, or whatever word rightly describes something out of a Tarzan movie. A gentle, graceful waterfall spilled from a ledge about 15 feet high into a still pool beneath the jungle’s trees and vines. The banks of the pool were lined with feathery ferns, pale green moss, and small blossoming plants. The Vietnamese soldiers kept on going up the path until they were above the waterfall. I saw them settle on rocks and light cigarettes, American cigarettes, and turn to watch the jungle upstream.

I crouched beside the pool and drew water into my hands. It felt cool and it was very clear, if tea-colored.

“Take turns,” the Major said. He indicated his sergeant. “We’ll take the first watch.”

With a few mumbled, appreciative obscenities the rest of us dropped our gear, stripped to our skins, grabbed our soap, and waded out into the pool.

My first step was tentative and I realized that for a very long time, since the morning of the day before, my senses had been cranked up to an extra level of alertness. They had been tuned for specific kinds of sights and smells and sounds, tuned to wrongness. I’d walked through an Edenesque countryside, but all that I saw, all that I looked for, was something out of place, something not quite right. I had not listened for the gurgle of water or the call of a songbird. I had listened for the sound of metal on metal or the crack of a branch. The smells that mattered were raw tobacco, sweat, and human shit, not the perfume of flowers or the dampness of watered earth.

Now I watched the sunlight dance on the splashing water, felt the coolness sluice over my bare skin, smelled the pungent soap I lathered on. I got my turn to stand in the waterfall to rinse off and I just stood there, eyes closed, feeling the water drum on the top of my head, hearing the childish laughter of my fellow soldiers. When I stepped out from under the waterfall and opened my eyes the first thing I saw was a huge iridescent dragonfly hovering and flitting and then dashing away.

Later in the morning, back with my ruff-puffs, feeling clean and refreshed, I walked the perimeter with my sergeant. It was a sound defense. They owned this small piece of ground. I used my rudimentary Vietnamese to congratulate the đại-úy and his soldiers because they had done a good thing. They had done what infantrymen do. They had staked this claim and would defend it, or, as it turned out, simply move on to another place. Did it make any difference in the long run? Probably not. Nevertheless, at that moment, at that time and place, things were exactly as they should be.

Grace: Regret

36

Comfort, content, delight,
The ages’ slow-bought gain
They shrivelled in a night.
Only ourselves remain
To face the naked days
In silent fortitude,
Through perils and dismays
Renewed and re-renewed.

Rudyard Kipling, For All We Have and Are

1972

The worst thing that ever happened to me, the worst thing that I ever did, what I could not and did not want to forgive, did not happen in war or in training for war. It happened on a bright clear January day in Orlando, Florida. The moment was as resonant as, and much more painful, than the imagined ping that drew me into the infantry.

The pain struck as I looked out the circular window of the airplane. It struck just above my diaphragm, near my heart. It was not a blow, exactly. It was a clenching, a tightening, a collapsing inward that took the air out of my lungs. There they were. I could see them at the airport window. I raised my hand and gently touched the scratched plastic. It was the movement of a palsied old man, my fingers crooked with pain. She, she with the dark hair, saw the gesture through the layers of glass and pointed to me, then caught our blonde daughter up into her arms and turned her towards the plane. “See,” she seemed to be saying, “See! See! There he is!”

The whine of the engines overwhelmed my hearing and through a blur I could see my wife and daughter begin to recede from me as if I were sitting still and they were gliding away from me on a moving sidewalk that took them further and further into the distance.

The worst of it was I could not say exactly why I was doing it. Almost all the rest of my generation had decided that this war was a mistake and I was pretty sure they were right. It was very personal to abandon my family without even a righteous cause to fight for. When asked why by civilian friends all I could say was, “Because they told me to.” And that was true, but only the World War Two veterans of my father’s generation had nodded their heads. 

Or was the worst of it that I was going back? That this was not a trip into the unknown? I knew the musty smells of Asian markets. I knew the green underwater feel of the jungle and the clacking of bamboo groves.

The engines spun up louder and louder as we waited at the end of the runway. The terminal was out of sight and all I could see from the window was concrete and brown grass and pine trees in the distance. I was going away and going to. I had left those that meant everything to me to a year of loneliness.

I could not tell when the pain went away. I am not sure that it did. It seems still inside me like some black insect captured in amber, a shadow that sometimes blocks the light.

Grace

A Cretan once said to me, “When you appear before the heavenly gates and they fail to open, do not take hold of the knocker to knock. Unhitch the musket from your shoulder and fire.”

“Do you actually believe God will be frightened into opening the gates?”

“No, lad, He won’t be frightened. But He’ll open them because He’ll realize you are returning from battle.”

Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco

Blood: From the Sky

The Night Café, Vincent Van Gogh, 1888

35

...the officers were playing billiards in the mud-walled club-house when orders came to them that they were to go on parade at once for a night-drill.

Rudyard Kipling, The Lost Legion 

Who are these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?

Woody Guthrie, Deportees

1972

The road from Mỹ Xuyên to Lịch Hội Thượng on the South China Sea paralleled a wide canal that eventually emptied into a slackwater inlet that barely deserved to be called a bay. The hamlet there was a shallow-water seaport with a few fishing sampans tied up at ramshackle docks. Not many Americans ever visited this hamlet even though there was a lovely Catholic church set in a bamboo grove nearby with a Vietnamese priest who spoke very good French and kept a large garden enclosed by the bamboo and banana trees.

At the intersection of the canal road and the road that led to the church was a little shop. It could perhaps be called a tea shop, or a cigarette shop, or maybe just the corner store. The building was a shabby mixture of tin, woven bamboo, and thatch. The roof projected enough forward to provide a small rectangle of shade and shelter from the rain over the beaten earth in the front. Under the shelter an old woman sautéed plantains for passersby and for folks such as myself and my little team. I was making my rounds in that peculiar window of time in Vietnam where the war, for Americans, was at an end and the Delta was relatively peaceful. We stood in the shade and watched the bananas sizzle in the black pan. My interpreter and I chatted with the Deputy District Chief, a civilian, in a bizarre mixture of French, English, Cambodian, and Vietnamese. We spoke of Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism, and other Existentialists.

This sort of thing happened in the Delta because it was not really a good place for war. This man, the Deputy District Chief, was of mixed blood, Cambodian and Chinese. He was a French-trained bureaucrat who could remember the Japanese occupation of the area during World War Two. He fondly recalled his one visit to Paris and his teacher of calligraphy in Chợ Lớn. We sat at a rickety table and drank tea and ate fried plantains.

My interpreter, Kiêm, was also a man out of time and place. He was Vietnamese by ethnicity but he and all his kin had lived for generations in Phnom Penh until they were driven out in the early 70’s. They fled downriver to end up in Ba Xuyen Province. (He would, much later, after re-education, flee again and traverse Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand before finally coming to live in Arlington, Virginia.)

We spoke of Albert Camus and the final irony of his death, as a passenger, on a highway in France. 

The Deputy District Chief led us into the gloom of the store/cafe/tea shop and from there into a back room where he swept his arm out like a headwaiter showing us to the finest table in the house. He grinned and the gold in his teeth flashed in the dim light. There stood a billiard table.

For a moment two images competed in my mind. The first was of a faintly-remembered painting of a green billiard table in a pool of Van Gogh’s inimitable yellow light. The second was in black and white, a recollection of a movie and of a man sweeping the cover off a billiard table to Paul Newman’s astonishment.

But here in Vietnam? In the Delta? In Lịch Hội Thượng? A billiard table? A Catholic church down the road? A Khmer Buddhist temple visible in the distance? 

The cues were warped and only thin shreds of leather remained on the tips. The heavy, ivory-appearing balls had chips gouged out of their surfaces. I rolled a creamy yellow ball across the table. It lurched over the seams where pieces of the slate bed had become misaligned. The ball eventually fell against the dead rubber and torn felt of the rails. I looked at the Deputy District Chief and we both slowly shook our heads in respect to an irretrievable past.

I went back to my jeep. We all shook hands and bowed to each other. The hiss of the radio hung from the back of the seat intruded as my driver fiddled with the squelch. We drove away leaving the French-trained, Cambodian-Chinese, official of a Vietnamese equivalent of an American county standing in front of the billiard parlor. I checked my weapons, chambering rounds into my M-16 and into my .45. I used the radio to tell the Province Headquarters where I was and when I expected to return. We drove along the canal, the flat, felt-like Delta on both sides of us.

We crossed the ferry at Mỹ Xuyên and went on towards Sóc Trăng. I dropped my interpreter off at the entrance to the refugee village where he lived with his father, wife, and daughter in a hut made of woven bamboo. The road led past the airport on its way into the city and as we came near we saw a black cloud beginning to boil up out of the rice paddies between us and the airport.

Death came to the Delta that afternoon when a C-130 transport plane fell out of the sky in sunlight so bright that, after the plane exploded, the flames could barely be seen. The plane gouged a wide furrow in the paddy and spilled out its fuel. The black pillar of smoke arose softly and quietly. My driver and I saw the cloud and at almost the same time the radio began to chatter. Jeeps and trucks were coming out of the city. My jeep was coming into the city. We gathered on the side of the road.

Soon we were struggling thigh deep in the rice paddy mud. Americans from the Province Team and Vietnamese soldiers from the airport converged and got as close to the heat as we could. But then we had to wait, holding our hands in front of our faces, circling around the pyre, dodging the pools of flame that spread across the top of the water with the leaking fuel.

Eventually the flames slackened and we could approach. We heard the clicking cooling of the aluminum. The stench reached into us. On that day death was in my hands and death became simply work. It became the gathering of charred remnants of human beings into heavy rubber bags and zipping the bags up.

One pair I will remember forever, because they were a pair. The inferno fused their bodies together. I and my team mates could not bring ourselves to tear them apart. We placed both of them into one bag and made an annotation on the tag attached. 

Every one of us working in that mess of mud and blackened aluminum and broken rice stalks found his own way through the afternoon. Some were angry. They tore pieces off the plane with their hands and wrestled bodies out to have them flop and almost disappear under the water into the mud before someone else would grip a hand or toe or shoulder. Others wore gloves, the thick leather kind used for stringing barbed wire, as if that layer of leather would keep death and pollution away. Some were excruciatingly gentle, so gentle that they would stay inside the fuselage for ten or twenty minutes just to loosen a melted seat belt and gently, so gently, try to separate a form from the charred frame of a seat. One of us thought to relieve his own anxiety through a blackly humorous comment and was angrily rebuked, although several days later, over a bottle of sour mash whiskey, the same comment brought unrelenting, tear-evoking laughter. We worked in pairs or threes, sharing the burden, solving the small puzzles of where one body stopped and another started, lifting the corpses together, taking turns on the really difficult tasks.

Hours and hours it seemed that we bagged blackened bodies and dragged them to the edge of the paddy. Chopper after chopper lifted off. Truck after truck drove away. Someone arrived with a manifest and the body count didn’t match the list. Cables from armored personnel carriers were attached to odd pieces of the aircraft that stuck out from the wreckage and the plane was ripped apart. We spent the twilight looking for the last body, but we never found it.

We returned to our compound and drank a lot that night. We all showered again and again until the hot water was gone and then we took more showers. We put our uniforms into plastic bags and threw the bags away. But we couldn’t escape the smell.

Those were not infantrymen’s deaths. Falling out of the sky? How could that be a way for a soldier to die? Helpless, belted into a machine. It could not be right. We, we infantrymen, like to think we have a choice. Is this just the arrogance of youth, that we will choose the time and manner of our dying? Or is it any soldier’s necessary illusion?

Blood: Arkansas Evening

34

But a man’s life breath cannot come back again — no raiders in force, no trading brings it back,once it slips through a man’s clenched teeth.

Homer, The Iliad

1951

The red light pulsed up into the branches of the tree overhanging the driveway behind the house. A long, white, high-topped Cadillac with torpedo-shaped silver sirens on its fenders and the red light on its roof was there, its engine idling, the gate-like rear door open, light pouring out. It waited.

Voices out on the sleeping porch, but I could not go out there. I had to stay in my room with my brother. My grandmother had told us to go there and stay there in a firm voice. So I opened my window and looked down through the screen and watched the ambulance and wondered about the sound of my grandfather falling off the bed on the sleeping porch.

I had fallen out of bed myself before, but not this night, so I knew what the fall was like. I remembered how confusing it was to wake up on the floor. I knew how different the room looked from down there — the narrow oak planks, the throw rugs, the little clusters of dust under the bed, the smell of floor wax and time.

But this sound was not quite like anything I’d ever heard before. It was a grunting sound and a thud like a feed sack falling from the bed of a truck. I hadn’t been quite awake. I wasn’t quite sure what I’d heard. I thought I remembered something my grandmother had said. It sounded like, “Oh! Jim!” I had heard the sound of the phone dialing, that clickity, clickity, clickity of the dial twirling back. I remembered being walked half asleep from the sleeping porch to my room where I now sat on the window ledge and stared down at the revolving red light.

I listened to thumping and grunting and a clattering sound on the stairs. Then I saw the white-jacketed men walking through the pool of light above the kitchen door carrying the gurney. I saw my uncle’s Packard drive up just as they were pushing the gurney into the back of the ambulance. The red light bounced off the Packard’s windshield.

I watched my uncle talk to the men. One of them shook his head. My uncle came into the house as the ambulance drove away. I watched the flashing of its red light diminish as it went down the hill. I wished they would turn the great silver sirens on. I’d like to hear that. It would tell all the town that my grandfather was coming down the hill.