A River in May Read online

  Vargas peered at him through sleep-thickened eyelids and grunted, ‘Que pasa, chico?’ He obviously wasn’t listening. Vargas was always a disappointing audience. Lopez tucked him back up in his field jacket. Later there was a film about a teacher, played by Anne Bancroft, working with mentally retarded adults in Boston. It all seemed so gentle, so un-American. Lopez fell asleep when the film was over. When he woke again the plane was making a steep anti-aircraft-fire-avoiding descent into Bien Hoa air base. There had been no sense of passage: the journey hadn’t seemed real.

  Bien Hoa was the second biggest air base in the Saigon region. When Lopez got to the top of the disembarkation ladder, he could see nothing but tarmac and acres and acres of warehouses and aircraft hangars. It looked like someone had paved over the whole of Vietnam. He made out a fringe of tree line in the distance, but the horizon was so distorted by heat haze that the trees might have been mirages.

  After disembarking they were herded past a huge open shed where a hundred or so infantrymen who had survived their duty tour were sprawled among their bags, waiting to board the plane for the trip back. Their uniforms looked bleached and threadbare as if they’d hung on a washing line for a year. The infantrymen themselves seemed dusty and washed out, but the sight of the replacements roused them like a double dose of amphetamine. The newcomers were suddenly subjected to a barrage of obscene gesture and verbal abuse. ‘Lookit all that nice new dead meat – You guys’re gonna get your cherries blasted – Who you lookin’ at, you fucking four-eyed dufus? – Hey, dipshit! I’m talking to you, fuckhead! – Bet your wife’s got a nice tight pussy, but it ain’t gonna be tight when you get back – What sort of wheelchair you want?’

  Lopez and the others were then put on buses with anti-grenade wire mesh over the windows, and shuttled a couple of miles to the transient billets at Long Binh.

  During the rest of the day there were tropical uniforms and boots to collect and forms to fill in. One of the forms asked if you wanted your next of kin notified if you were only slightly wounded. Lopez ticked the ‘no’ box. Later they were given stale sandwiches and sent to a barracks. Lopez lay awake most of the night listening to the creaking of metal bed frames as the other new arrivals turned, also unable to sleep, in the dank and suffocating heat. There was also the distant thunder of eight-inch guns firing pointlessly into the darkness. He got up thirsty in the early hours, but couldn’t find any taps without notices warning ‘Unpotable: Do not drink’. There were the smells of disinfectant, flatulence and cigarette smoke. There were rumbling bowel sounds and a voice coming from one of the toilet cubicles where an alcoholic sergeant, thinking he was alone, was talking to himself, apparently re-scripting past conversations: ‘Found me half a Johnnie’s head in a helmet, Lieutenant, all crawling with maggots. I was a combat engineer in Korea when you were still sucking a sugar tit, so who you think you talking to?’ This was the side of the army that Lopez hated most. He gave up looking for a drink and went back to his bunk.

  The next day Lopez was assigned to the 5th Special Forces Group. Three of the other SF-qualified officers found themselves assigned to line infantry units and were boiling with resentment: they felt like thoroughbreds sent to plough fields with teams of mules. SF officers found it difficult to get on in other units: Lopez knew of one who had been sent to the 5th Mech, and was dead within a month. A rational side of Lopez knew that the whole business was puerile: guns and the other toys of war were emblems of infantile regression; armies were evil playpens full of panzers, oompah music and funny walks. But it was still queerly fascinating. He felt like an impostor who had infiltrated a cult – he wore the vestments, but didn’t have to believe.

  The flight to the Group HQ at Nha Trang was delayed for a half-hour because of a mortar attack. Lopez hadn’t heard any explosions and thought all the fuss was silly. The airfield was so vast that he couldn’t imagine a few mortar rounds doing much damage – potholes in a remote corner of the runway perhaps, nothing more. After the All Clear sounded they set off across the sweltering tarmac to their aircraft. They passed a group of forty Viet Cong prisoners squatting in neat little rows, all blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs, compact and sinewy men who radiated an aura that was arrogant and obstinate. Lopez felt something pulse within himself, a faint but clear whisper of recognition. It was something older and more inexhaustible than the concrete techno-desert, the shrill incessant turbine whine, that whirled all around him.

  The truck that picked up Lopez and the other 5th Group replacements made a detour along the Nha Trang esplanade on the way to the HQ. Travis, a languid Texan from an old military family, drawled in a fake English accent, ‘Nha Trang rather reminds one of Cannes. Do you not agree, Don Francisco?’

  Lopez nodded. There were a lot of French colonial buildings with ornate balconies and gray shutters, and it had that Riviera ambience of elegant seediness and decay. Also like Cannes, it was located on the curve of a mountain-fringed bay. The bay was a bright cobalt blue and rocky islands materialized out of the morning mist like the fantasy scenery of a Disney film. The mainland mountains were less unreal and changed from gray to blue to bright green as the sun climbed, and then back to gray in the evening. Between the gaps in the first rank of mountains were views of steep verdant valleys and the silhouettes of more mountains beyond them, overhung with dark gray smoke from a bombing run.

  After they had settled into the transient barracks – bright airy dormitories with views of the mountains – most of the lieutenants went off to the town to find prostitutes. The search parties were led by earlier arrivals who, after all of three days ‘in-country’, wanted to show off that they knew their way around. Lopez was tempted to go with them, but stretched out on his bunk and tried to get some sleep instead. He hated the idea of prostitution, but was tormented by sexual frustration. He started to think about all the women – not very many – with whom he’d had sex. He tried especially to focus on a rampant Ocean City weekend with a shopworker called Mary-Louise – both of them had only wanted one thing, and there hadn’t been any emotional complications. He tried not to think about Ianthe.

  He closed his eyes. He always liked being alone in barracks, whitewashed, austere and smelling faintly of disinfectant. He liked the simplicity of a personal space reduced to a green footlocker and a narrow bunk – taut stretched sheets, crisp hospital corners, a coarse wool blanket. If you needed anything else – a desk or a bazooka, a jeep or a tank – they gave it to you.

  Travis had also remained behind in the barracks. He put aside his copy of Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior of Africa and called over to Lopez, ‘Hey, Francis, you awake?’

  ‘I am now.’

  ‘You remember that medical briefing in Bien Hoa? That pinhead quack and his scare tactics about how your dick would rot off if you pleasured yourself with the locals?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Remember him saying Vietnam was in the throes of a clap epidemic and that Saigon had the second highest VD rate in the world? But he sure didn’t say which town was number one, did he? Bet you don’t know where that is.’

  ‘Where then?’

  ‘Houston. Don’t you forget, Lopez: America’s always number one – and Texas, boy, is always number one in America. Our poontang is the most dangerous poontang in the world and we’re proud of it.’ The other officers had begun to filter back from the brothels. ‘Here come the whoremongers,’ said Travis. ‘They found girls, and are now calculating their chances of having found gonococci and spirochetes as well. La tristesse post-coite.’

  All the 5th Group newcomers had to go to Hon Tre Island for the Combat Orientation Course, a final training exercise. The course included a ‘live’ patrol against a ‘real’ Viet Cong fishing village on the eastern side of the island. The same two old men were always taken prisoner and then released a few days later. The joke was that the men really were Viet Cong and occasionally took time off from fishing to attach limpet mines to ships anchored in Nha Trang Bay. The
y were, however, too valuable a training resource to be killed or kept as prisoners. In any case, the newcomers proved more of a risk to each other than did the enemy. A week earlier a new lieutenant embarrassed by diarrhea had left his patrol’s night perimeter to do his business. When he came back a nervous colleague shot him dead.

  Lopez and the others were billeted in a former hunting lodge, a rambling wooden building with verandas and large airy rooms. The island had once been a game reserve for the last of the Annamite emperors. In the evening, when Lopez relaxed on the veranda with a beer in his hand, he tried to conjure up the shades of the emperors. He could imagine them reminiscing over their brandy about a close call with a tiger in the elephant grass or a tryst with a mistress in the Rue du Faubourg St-Honoré. But that was a different empire. There weren’t any more tiger or emperors on this island, just the training camp and the constant whir of a rotating radar dish.

  At five each morning they had to double-time up the steep mountain road to the radar station, burdened with combat gear and a rucksack filled with forty pounds of sand. Lopez always got to the summit well ahead of the others. He liked those few moments of being alone in a wilderness. Across the moon-silvered furrows of the bay, Vietnam lay like a dark recumbent beauty. A few tactically important knolls and hills were ringed with high intensity lamps. In the dawn twilight the rings of illumination looked like pieces of jewelry carelessly discarded across rumpled bedclothes in the passion of the night. She was, he thought, so beautiful, so beautiful.

  After completing the Hon Tre course, the replacement levy returned to Nha Trang to get their postings. Someone said that getting your assignment from the Group Adjutant was like going to see St. Peter. When Lopez went into the headquarters building he felt he was descending into a tomb; one moment he was sweating in the blinding glare of the midday sun, and a moment later he was shivering and blind in a windowless corridor. The air-conditioning seemed to reach for his testicles, like a sly scoutmaster, before sliding its hand along his sweat-damp spine. When his pupils finished dilating he could read the tall wall plaques adorned with little brass nameplates commemorating the Fifth Group’s 544 dead and missing. Lopez scanned the roll of names, dates and locations – often marked Classified – as he waited his turn to see the adjutant.

  The adjutant was a major who had a face as lugubrious as Gregorian chant. His head and arms had been badly scarred by burns. ‘You look pretty fit,’ he said to Lopez. ‘Enjoy your stay on Hon Tre?’

  Lopez said it wasn’t too bad and tried not to make it too obvious that he was looking at the adjutant’s wounds.

  ‘We’ve had two really bad weeks. I’ve got to replace fourteen officers and I have all these fucking citations to write up.’ He hefted a ragged pile of rough handwritten notes from his in-tray, some looked smeared with either mud or blood. ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘if a decoration makes the family feel any better?’ The adjutant paused and stared into space for a second. ‘You all come across this desk, one way or another.’

  The adjutant began searching through another pile of paper. Lopez wondered if he’d forgotten he was there. After a minute he broke the silence and asked where he would be going.

  The major went over to a wall map and pointed to a place called Nui Hoa Den in the upper left hand corner of the country: it was the second northernmost of the border camps. He then pointed to a place next to the Laotian border. ‘It used to be there, at Kham Due, but that one had to be shut down.’ He then handed Lopez two dozen copies of his orders – it was necessary to leave a trail of paper at each stop along the way – and wished him good luck.

  As soon as he left the office, Lopez started to feel nauseous; his armpits were soaked with cold sweat. He thought that once he got outside, away from the tomb-chill of the HQ building, it would be better. The sudden blast of sunlight struck like a hammer and blinded him, and the heat haze rising from the parade ground was making the barracks shiver. Lopez wanted the dry midday heat to sweat the sickness out of his pores, but it made him more nauseous still.

  Lopez and four others who had been assigned to the northern camps had a long sweaty boring wait on the edge of the runway at Nha Trang airfield. Their flight was two hours late. The aircraft, when it finally arrived, was a Command and Control ‘Blackbird’: a C-130 camouflaged black and dark green for covert night operations. There were no markings to identify the plane. The newcomers filed up the loading ramp and found the forward section of the cargo hold blocked off by a black curtain stenciled with TOP SECRET KEEP OUT. After the plane took off, Travis tried to lift the curtain and peep underneath. There was a quick movement behind the curtain and a large boot nearly crushed his fingers. Then a hidden voice, ‘Do that a-fuckin’-gain and I’ll chop your fuckin’ hand off.’

  Vargas shouted, ironically, ‘That’s an officer you’re talking to.’

  The voice replied, long and low, ‘No sheee-it!’

  Travis whispered, ‘Non-commissioned filth,’ and everyone else laughed. The incident broke the tension. For the first time the new officers felt like comrades, with a sense of shared pride. It was they, after all, who had been assigned to I Corps, the northern border sector – Khe Sanh, Hue, the DMZ, Lang Vei, Hamburger Hill – ‘where the action was’. By the time the plane landed at Da Nang they were all high on bonding and shared adventure. As the pilot taxied to an unloading area Lopez stood up, slung his rifle and donned his beret. He felt almost heroic. The engines shut down and the hydraulics wheezed as the rear ramp lowered into place. He squinted into the sunlight. At first he thought it was a mirage or some trick of the light, but then he realized they were real. Five coffins. The five new arrivals marched off the aircraft, and the five coffins were carried on. Travis said, ‘That’s just a load of bullshit. They’re probably empty. I bet it’s just an act they put on to scare the new guys.’

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ said Vargas.

  The bus waiting to transport them was riddled with bullet holes. Two sergeants, from a covert project known as C and C, were leaning against the bus. The driver, a languid Chinese Nung mercenary with long Mandarin nails and fabulous Fu-Manchu moustaches, was blissfully slumped in the driver’s seat until one of the sergeants kicked him awake. There was something odd about the C and C NCOs. Instead of green berets, they were wearing black bowler hats. Then Lopez saw that they weren’t real English bowlers, but narrow-brimmed jungle hats that had been dyed black and starched to remove the floppiness.

  The headquarters compound was on a strip of beach four miles south of Da Nang. To get there, the bus skirted the shanty towns that fringed the city and went over a girder bridge guarded by a detachment of sleepy-looking Vietnamese soldiers and a team of US Navy divers who had to continually check the bridge abutments for explosives. The black twisted remains of the previous bridge stuck out of the river about a hundred yards away. As the bus crossed the bridge one of the sergeants said, ‘Now, Moustachio.’ The Nung driver did something with the choke and starter, and the bus responded with an explosive backfire. The Vietnamese guarding the bridge flung themselves to the ground; one guard’s helmet clattered into the road. The C and C sergeant rocked with laughter and shouted, ‘Fuckin’ asshole slopes!’ Moustachio hissed liquidly through gold-capped teeth.

  Further on, the bus had to stop for a few minutes to allow a column of armored personnel carriers to rumble by in a cloud of dust. On one side of the road was a huge scrapyard, covering acres of land and sealed off from scavengers by chainlink fence, barbed wire and armed guards authorized to shoot on sight, where billions of dollars’ worth of blown-up, shot-down and worn-out war equipment was stripped for its scrap value by a private contractor.

  On the other side of the road was a depressing group of shanties constructed from discarded ammunition boxes and cardboard ration cartons. The prostitutes who lived in the shanties – ‘the RMK girls’ – were named after the scrap company that ran the junkyard. One shanty had a sign above the door which said, SUCK ’EM SILLY SALLY. Her next door neighbor had a
sign advertising SUCK ‘EM SILLY SALLY’S SISTER. Travis was fascinated. ‘Do you suppose,’ he said, ‘they’re part of a franchised chain?’ Two US marines, one white and one black, were haggling with two of the girls. One of the girls left the group and came over to the bus. She looked up at Travis and said, ‘You Special Forces, Trung Uy?’

  Travis nodded.

  ‘Special Forces eat pussy.’

  Lopez surveyed a wasteland of dust, diesel fumes, tank tracks, barbed wire and acres of scrap iron, and listened to the taunting laughs of beautiful teenagers who sold their bodies to foreign soldiers. He wondered if it had been anything like this when Cortes landed in Mexico – exotic galleons at anchor in the offing, smaller cargo boats carrying supplies and men ashore, sacks and crates piling up on the sand, while the Aztecs stared full of wonder and wrath from the forests.

  The commanding officer of the northern camps was a black lieutenant colonel named C.J. Cale who came from a background of abject poverty in rural Mississippi. Behind his back his fellow blacks called him ‘home-boy’; among the white officers he was known as Catfish.