My Detachment Read online

  I waited until after I’d finished my briefing. The colonel had gotten up from his chair. “Sir,” I said softly. “Could I have a word with you?”

  “All right. Make it quick.”

  The S-2 and S-3 were leaving. No one could overhear. “Uh, sir, my men picked up some radio transmissions of yours yesterday, sir. In which, sir, you identified yourself by name.” I didn’t dare look at his face. I stared down at the transcripts in my hands. They were opened to one example, which Pancho had circled in red pen.

  Then I handed him the transcripts, talking fast as he stared at them, saying, “These are for you, sir. They’re the only copies. We just want you to be aware of this. You really shouldn’t do this, sir.”

  The surprise and consternation on his face made me think of my father, who wasn’t used to making mistakes either. “You’re absolutely right, Lieutenant!” He thwacked himself on the leg with his branding iron. “Goddammit!”

  ROSENTHAL WAS ALREADY FAIRLY SHORT WHEN I’D ARRIVED. AFTER HE LEFT, I realized his importance to me, how useful he had been in keeping our little role in the war on a comfortable, theoretical plane. I missed him. Looking for new company, I’d sometimes wander over to chat with the lieutenant in charge of the POW cage. He’d been to college. There was a diffidence about him that I liked. I sensed he didn’t think too highly of this war either and was just trying to get through it to his DEROS. One time, I arrived and found my friend chatting with an Englishman, a jovial, tall, broad-shouldered man with a reddish handlebar mustache, dressed in the uniform of an American Army sergeant. He was a LRRP (pronounced “lurp”), a long-range reconnaissance patrolman. I’d heard of these soldiers, of how they’d parachute alone and in pairs into the forest and sneak around trying to locate large enemy units, like the 3d NVA Regiment. It was perilous work. More than once at the colonel’s briefings I heard of LRRPS being maimed or killed. Noting the man’s accent, I asked him if he was an English citizen. He said he was. But what was he doing in Vietnam in the U.S. Army? I asked. He smiled. “It’s the only war going, isn’t it, mate?” The LRRPs had been mythical soldiers to me, and they still were after that brief encounter, like so much else about the war around me.

  The lieutenant in charge of the POW cage seemed to have a better observation post on the real action than I did. He told me, for instance, that some Americans in dark glasses and civilian clothes had shown up here and asked him with voices a little too eager, “Got any prisoners for us?” They were looking for someone to torture. He knew it right away. He told this with disgust, and then one day I wandered over there and found in the room a small Vietnamese man—a new prisoner, suspected VC, my friend explained. I’d been playing in my mind the kind of speculative game I used to play with Rosenthal. I imagined myself enlarging on the little intelligence we knew and wondered aloud to the lieutenant if this prisoner might know something about the 3d NVA Regiment. My friend beckoned the prisoner over. He asked the man something in Vietnamese. Hearing the answer, not liking the answer evidently, he leaned forward in his chair and yanked the prisoner toward him. He pinned the man between his legs and lashed him across the cheeks with a shoelace three or four times. The lieutenant pursed his lips as he whipped the shoelace back and forth. Then he stopped, satisfied, like a person folding a letter. He let the prisoner go and said, “He doesn’t know anything.”

  We chatted afterward, as if nothing had happened. I went back to my detachment feeling sick. Was there something that could have been done to stop that little cruelty, and was the problem that I couldn’t do it? Forget it, I told myself. I was just the inadvertent cause of something that would have happened anyway, that probably happened all the time. Compared to other interrogations I imagined, that one wasn’t harsh. The look I’d seen on the lieutenant’s face lingered with me, though. How would I act in his place? As badly? Or worse?

  I didn’t have enough to do. I was doing my best to keep busy. I hadn’t trained a replacement for Rosenthal. The map work was interesting to me. I didn’t want to share it. I couldn’t have begun to explain all this to anyone, that it was because I had too little to do that I sometimes had too much, and made mistakes.

  On a day around this time, I was doing paperwork that I wanted to be rid of, at my desk in operations, when the commo op on duty handed me a square piece of flimsy newsprint, one-third the size of a sheet of typing paper, with the usual stuff on the top identifying our company headquarters in Chu Lai as the sender and us, the detachment, as the recipient. The commo op had routinely stamped the page SECRET SUNDAE on top and bottom in red ink, sundae being the code word. The content read, THE THIRD NVA REGIMENT IS ON THE MOVE.

  Some brief enemy messages weren’t encrypted but transmitted in an operational code, which our local experts had long since broken. These could be read at my company headquarters in Chu Lai. They were usually messages like this one, in which a unit said it was relocating. But they never said where they were going, and the S-3 didn’t seem to find the information useful. I was supposed to pass it on to him right away, but it wasn’t important, and I didn’t want to interrupt what I was doing.

  “Hey, Pancho.” I’d caught a glimpse of him a moment before, pheebing around operations. “You mind taking something to the TOC?”

  He didn’t mind. He was far from lazy. He always took his turn with chores, burning the shit, fetching fuel, filling the shower with water. He got scowling angry if another man shirked his share of those duties, and in this way helped to make sure that others usually didn’t. And he never minded errands. Anything to go somewhere. He was, I think, the most nonchalant and restless person I’d ever met. He’d told me the other day that he’d spent some time in Cambodia helping to build an ASA listening post. Cambodia, he’d said, was beaucoup number one duty, but he’d given it up and volunteered for Vietnam simply because he wanted to see what was going on here. I put the slip of paper into a file folder and handed it to him and went back to work.

  He was away a long time, but that could have meant almost anything. I had finished my paperwork and was standing on the front stoop of operations, wondering where he’d gone this time, when the jeep pulled in and he walked in through the gate a little more quickly than usual and said, “Hey, Lieutenant, that flatdick message got lost.”

  “Sure,” I said. I wasn’t going to fall for that. I wasn’t easy anymore.

  “No,” he said. “It did.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I’m telling you, Lieutenant. The thing blew out of the flatdick folder.” It happened near the helicopter pad, he said. He’d jumped out and chased the piece of paper, but a chopper was coming in for a landing. The prop wash caught the paper. It rose, slicing back and forth, Pancho jumping up in the air trying to catch it, and then it must have caught a strong updraft because it went straight up. He could still see it, he thought, a little white wisp, floating off toward the forested hills to the west. He climbed back in the jeep and tried to follow it until he came to the perimeter of the base camp and could go no farther. By then he couldn’t see it anymore.

  “A whirlwind came up. It just took off like this. Whish. So I’m out there trying to catch this thing, and there was this guy there, the chaplain or something. He’s watching me.” Pancho shook his head in wonder. “It was high!”

  “I don’t believe it,” I said. I was biting my fingernails again.

  “Okay, Lieutenant. Go ask the flatdick chaplain guy.” He sauntered off toward his hootch, and I noticed again how he carried himself, a graceful-looking shamble with a policeman’s arms-at-the-ready air. I hated him.

  Maybe it really was a joke. I had to know. I ran back inside operations, put on my shirt, then ran to the cubicle Pancho had carved out for his cot and his various acquisitions, in the front half of one of the EM hootches. “Who is this guy? Where is he?”

  Pancho was lying down, taking a rest from his exertions. “I don’t know. Some shaky-looking guy, said he was a chaplain or something.” He described the building wh
ere the man worked.

  I ran to the jeep. I found the building and the man in question, a thin, pale young soldier with a chaplain’s cross on his collar. He was the chaplain’s assistant, in fact. I wondered to myself if he was a conscientious objector. Certainly he seemed conscientious. He had a very soft voice. He’d been out for a walk when he saw a soldier chasing a piece of paper. He’d tried to help, but they just couldn’t catch the thing. He described the ascent of the document. He said, in a tone that one might use to describe one of nature’s wonders, “I never saw a piece of paper go so high.”

  I remembered my audience with the full-bull colonel in Saigon, the commander of Radio Research in Vietnam, and how nearly apoplectic he had seemed when he’d talked about some fool lieutenant who had lost classified information. This sort of thing reflected badly on a commander. I found Pancho in operations. “This is really serious, Pancho.”

  “Maybe we just shouldn’t tell anybody.”

  I lit another cigarette, fumbling with my lighter.

  “You look shaky, Lieutenant.”

  I stared at him. How could he be so casual about this? He should be worried sick. It seemed the least that he could do. “This is fucking terrible, Pancho. I’m in deep shit.”

  “What are they gonna do to you, Lieutenant?” he replied. “Send you to Vietnam?” And he walked away, disgusted with me, obviously.

  It was what they could do, not what they might be likely to do. Not Long Binh Jail. Even Morrisseau was treated better than that. I hadn’t killed anyone, hadn’t broken the law. Maybe, as Pancho suggested, we should just keep quiet and try to forget the whole thing. But suppose by chance, just by chance, someone found that slip of paper with SECRET SUNDAE written on it along with the name of my detachment, and it was turned in. Or suppose Pancho got drunk and told the other men, who by now probably sensed that something untoward had happened, and one of those men went drinking at the EM club in Chu Lai and told the story, and some sergeant overheard and told the first sergeant, who of course would tell the captain. Then a whole skein of evil consequences was not impossible. Court-martial and a foul punishment. Pancho didn’t have to worry. If we hushed this up, he’d have something over me. He’d be implicated, but I’d be the one who had told him not to talk.

  I called the operations officer in Chu Lai and told him everything. He groaned. I expected recriminations, but he didn’t utter any, just a long series of groans. I guess he knew what was coming for him. He’d have to spend the next week or so writing up an entire manual about how detachments must handle code-word material outside their compounds. This would mean double-wrapped packages, two couriers to carry them, and even then he’d get some blame for not having written such a manual before I let Pancho lose the message.

  The news of our infraction, I knew, was moving up the line, to our next higher headquarters in Nha Trang. After my briefing the next morning, I told Colonel Mahoney what had happened.

  His brow furrowed. He turned to his S-3. “Lieutenant Kidder’s in some trouble, Nat.” Perhaps they could spare a helicopter for an hour or so to look for the lost document. I felt a surge of hope, but when I got to the helicopter pad at the appointed time, the pilot shook his head. There was something wrong with the main rotor, he explained. “I can land this thing in a hurricane without an engine. But if the rotor’s broke, it turns into a stone.” At the moment, I wanted to say I’d take the chance. Obviously, though, he wouldn’t. I really thought we might find that tiny slip of paper, hanging in a tree, out there in those steep, green hills. The next day it rained, and I gave up all hope and went back to imagining the very worst things that could happen.

  It’s a habit of mind described in a story by Borges, a habit I’d discovered on my own. If you imagine the worst, then it has already happened in a sense and seems unlikely to happen again. But there was more to this strategy, I now think. “What are they going to do to you, send you to Vietnam?” If that was all, if there was no chance they’d make me an infantry platoon leader, if the worst real possibility was that they’d relieve me of command and have me spend the rest of my year doing paperwork in Nha Trang or Saigon, then I had no reason to feel scared. But I was scared. So I needed to have good reasons.

  My first company commander back in Chu Lai, the jaded captain, had long since departed and been replaced by a captain I liked much more. Even the enlisted men liked him. He was cheerful. He was temperate. He was probably only in his late twenties, but he seemed older. I think this was because, except for the fact that he seemed to plan to make the Army a career, he had no obvious flaws. A few days after the message flew away, he called on the landline and told me that Lieutenant Colonel Riddle, commander of the radio research battalion in Nha Trang, was coming for a visit.

  “What’s going to happen, sir?”

  “I don’t know. He’s pretty upset.”

  “Oh, God.”

  But at least my captain was on my side. I was on good terms with the brigade commander, Colonel Mahoney, right? Well, my captain said, I should tell Colonel Mahoney that my battalion commander, Colonel Riddle, was coming to visit my detachment because of the lost document. And I should ask Colonel Mahoney if he’d be willing to speak to Colonel Riddle on my behalf.

  “And make sure that your vehicles are washed,” said my company commander. “I mean it. That’s very important to Colonel Riddle.”

  “Riddle?” said Colonel Mahoney the next morning, seated in his canvas chair. He looked off across the briefing room, resting his chin on his branding iron. “Dean Riddle? Oh, yes.” Colonel Mahoney looked at me. It was time for him to be getting on his helicopter. “You tell Colonel Riddle I expect both of you for dinner tomorrow night at the field grade officers’ mess.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Spikes had the men wash the truck and jeep and sent them back to wash them again because they hadn’t done it well enough. He even worked himself, cleaning up operations. In the evening, I put on a fresh uniform and my steel pot and stood outside. When the jeeps pulled in, I spotted the one that carried our lieutenant colonel, and when he stepped out, I was right in front of him, saluting crisply.

  He was a tall man. His uniform was of course impeccable, like Colonel Mahoney’s, but I felt at once that there was something sloppy underneath. Maybe this impression was all in my mind, was and still is. It came from his face, especially the corners of his mouth. To me, he looked both slack and crafty, like someone with a secret vice. But after all, it was the face of a man with great power over me, and perhaps I felt revolted by the dishonest, excessive courtesy I was prepared to show him.

  He was smiling faintly at me. I remember the impression. The man was going to take some pleasure in whatever it was he planned to do with me. I don’t know what he had planned to say, though, because I didn’t give him a chance to speak. I said, “Welcome to the detachment, Colonel Riddle, sir. Sir, the brigade commander, Colonel Robert Mahoney, told me to tell you that he expects us for dinner this evening.”

  “Colonel Mahoney?” he said, and his eyes widened slightly. I already knew of course that somewhere, sometime, he had served under Colonel Mahoney. Now I also knew that it had been for Lieutenant Colonel Riddle, as for many others, no doubt, an unforgettable experience.

  “What time, Lieutenant?” He had a southern accent.

  “Eighteen hundred hours, sir.”

  “What time is it now?” he snapped at one of the officers beside him.

  It was 1730. I asked Colonel Riddle if he’d like to take a look at our operations hootch. He said all right. “But we don’t want to be late for Colonel Mahoney now.” He didn’t even look at our vehicles.

  Colonel Mahoney gave Lieutenant Colonel Riddle a cordial greeting at the door to the mess, though I sensed a certain reserve in him, which matched, I thought, the obsequiousness of Colonel Riddle, bending over to bring himself closer to the more exalted colonel’s height, smiling eagerly every time the brigade commander opened his mouth to speak. He was like a butler, and I a
butler’s butler. Colonel Mahoney told us to sit beside him at the head of the table. I gave myself silent orders. Don’t talk unless someone speaks to you. Call everyone sir. Watch what Colonel Mahoney does. Don’t pick up your fork until he does. I had only limited experience in keeping my mouth shut. It seemed like something I should do more often. One noticed things. In the field grade officers’ mess hall, there was French wine, and roast beef, and orderlies to serve them. A major seated to my left started speaking to me, and then I couldn’t hear much of the two colonels’ conversation, but somewhere near the end of the meal, I heard Colonel Mahoney say, “I don’t want to see this young lieutenant get hurt.”

  “No, sir,” said Colonel Riddle.

  “He might want to make this his career,” said Colonel Mahoney.

  And I felt, desperately, for an instant, that his saying so might make it true, and that I had to set him straight. The words rushed into my mind. “No, sir, I’m getting out of the Army as soon as I can.” I wiped my mouth with my napkin, real cloth. The moment passed.

  The next day my company commander told me that in due course someone would come from Nha Trang to conduct an official investigation. But the outcome was already fixed, just an administrative reprimand.

  Drinking in the lounge that night felt like the end of a long, hard journey. Alone in my hootch afterward, I wrote, “Dear Mom and Dad, Nothing has happened really, except that I’ve gotten in a pile of trouble for something one of my men lost. No cure for it, and it doesn’t worry me. Let them do what they like—they can’t send me to jail.”

  All the next day, though, I had the feeling I was being watched. In the evening, when I walked into operations, the place seemed too quiet. I sat down at my plywood desk to begin preparing the next day’s briefing. The light was dim. I reached up to turn on the wall lamp that extended over the desk. Then I saw a bright green snake, long, slender fangs bared, slithering down the neck of the lamp toward me. “Holy shit!” I threw myself back in the chair, nearly tipping over.