My Detachment Read online

I was up a few hours later. I went to the colonel’s briefing and returned, feeling frantic again. I found Pancho outside. “He’s coming soon,” I said.

  Pancho had a disgusted look on his face. He muttered something, walking away. I thought I heard the words “Ain’t like a man.”

  Major Great looked very fresh in his fatigues. He made a quick tour of the men’s quarters. “This is fine, Lieutenant.” Was that all? I thought. Just “fine”? After what I’d been through? But I felt a great relief, almost like happiness when, before climbing into his jeep, he said, “If you keep your detachment in this kind of condition, Lieutenant, you won’t have any problems.”

  And then I went down to my hootch, lay down on my cot, turned on my fan, pulled the mosquito net around me, always that smell of treated rope, that Army-surplus-store smell, and fell asleep again. I slept through the baking heat. When I woke up it was evening.

  Oh, no, I thought. What did I do last night? What did they hear? What had Pancho said? Had he really said, “Ain’t like a man”?

  When I walked into the lounge, they were all shirtless and drinking, and they stopped talking, and most of them didn’t quite look at me. Schulzie came up and gave me a friendly punch on the arm. “Have a beer, Lieutenant.”

  I felt sick, all hollowed out. I sat down and took a long swig of beer, the usual Carling Black Label in the rusty cans, but at the first contact bitter and bracingly fizzy. Watching myself stroke the beer can, I told them I hated the Army as much as they did. I didn’t believe that officers’ shit didn’t smell. I was going to serve out my time here because I had no choice, and I’d do whatever I could to keep the lifers from puking on them. And from now on, they should call me by my first name.

  The men looked at one another. A couple of them smiled, a couple shrugged.

  “Good by me,” Spikes said. He looked serious.

  Pancho was standing at the end of our makeshift bar. He said, “Nah, fuck that. I’ll just call you Lieutenant.”

  I went back to my hootch. I didn’t sleep much. Clearly, Pancho knew my secret. So did the other men, probably. If only it had to do with cowardice of the rational, physical kind, and not with what my favorite writers called “character.” It seemed more important than anything, and I didn’t believe I would get another chance to prove I had it, the way Conrad’s Lord Jim does. I was aware my reaction was excessive, and I think I sensed the cause. If only I didn’t have such an inflated idea of myself, then I wouldn’t have been afraid of some major with a funny name, and I wouldn’t have made a spectacle of myself in front of the men, and I wouldn’t be lying in my cot, knowing that the memories of the last two days would be coming home with me.

  THE DEATH OF LIEUTENANT DEMPSEY

  A YEAR LATER, I IMAGINED LIEUTENANT DEMPSEY’S LONG LAST DAY.

  He has been through a great deal by now. He’s gotten his platoon lost. His men have killed a water buffalo and terrorized an elderly peasant. On the second day on combat patrol, he awakes in his foxhole with firm resolution:

  The old water buffalo must never be killed again, nor old men beaten with stones. Pride jumped up and danced in him. “I’m in control here, I’m in control,” he sang to himself as he ran forward from the rear, as he supervised the order of march. He made up a song to the tune of “Jody” and sang it as he ran along in cadence, singing, “Jody, Jody, don’t be blue. We are fighting for Vietnamese, too. Jody, Jody, don’t be sad. Second platoon’s best platoon in the whole damn land.” It was a tune they used to sing while marching in ROTC summer camp. Only these words were his own. And he was singing under his breath, trotting along in the airborne shuffle and looking at the troops.…

  But then he realizes the men are mocking him. He descends into a rage. He loses all control of his platoon. By midday, his men are gang-raping the Vietnamese girl and the sergeant is about to take his turn. Dempsey tries to intervene. He orders the sergeant to stop, the sergeant disobeys, and Dempsey announces that the sergeant is under arrest. The platoon slogs on.

  And that is how they came into the province of the hills, where a troubling vaporous smell came down from the jungle and met them. Then the land behind them turned up its evening mellowness. And then, there before them, among a stand of trees with narrow trunks and leaves like African hair, of yellow, green, and purple bushes, they first caught sight of a ruined building.

  This was the place where the story ends. Here they stopped walking and hushed awhile and stared at the ruin through the trees. Then this was the time of Ivory Fields.

  Dempsey takes up residence alone in the ruin. “In what little light remained, Dempsey now finished brushing off his pack and did a little careless whistling. Why should he care? Nobody was anybody else’s business.” He neatens up his gear.

  Long, bony fingers arranged these things and were arranging when he began to cry.

  It was what he had been waiting for.

  Convulsed and twitching like some wounded animal, and long-legged as a spider, Dempsey laid himself on his back and wept into his hands. His lips parted in the dark, his teeth appeared. He was leaping up. He was meeting the night sky, fighting, twisting. It was exquisite pain. Some stars were out already, but through the trees now all rushed out, like very eager things. Darkness flooded the air. But soon the tropic night was only muttering again and was as sweet as the tropics around him. And the stars winked warm and brightly like little silver fishes swimming over him, tickling him and consuming. Hid in full darkness, the awkward young man lay with his guns and his flashlight beside him, a warrior of sorts.

  Actually, he is about to be a warrior for the first and only time. The sergeant has arranged a misunderstanding between the lieutenant and Ivory Fields, so that each believes the other intends to rape the girl, as the rest of the men already have. The moment will be Dempsey’s next to last on earth.

  Hawklike face forward, Lieutenant Dempsey sang out delighted into the dark. “I’m protecting her!” He heard his rival bellow again, and his own delighted yell back at him, but the next things he heard were not like sounds at all but thuds the soft parts of his body heard. That was all right. His pain was not a moment long, and was white.

  A FEW DAYS AFTER MAJOR GREAT’S VISIT, I ASKED SPIKES IF HE THOUGHT burning the shit in my latrine was something I shouldn’t make the men do. He paused, looking me in the eyes, and then he said that no, it wasn’t too much to ask. A few days later, I was taking my morning nap when I heard Pancho outside yelling that my shitter was burning. I grabbed the fire extinguisher that sat by the door of my hootch, but it made just one feeble squirt. Pancho said he guessed he’d used too much diesel fuel. Since then, I’d used the enlisted men’s latrine.

  On a day soon afterward, I was looking out the screen walls of operations, and I saw Melvin Harris sitting in the passenger seat of the three-quarter-ton truck, helmet on, chin straps dangling. He looked unhappy. Pancho had that green gun of his slung over his shoulder. He handed Harris the dog, Tramp, and then climbed into the driver’s seat. For days beforehand Pancho had been saying the animal was sick. It just seemed to have a cold, I’d told him. But Pancho had insisted, “No, he’s sick.” I remembered it as a puppy walking along behind Pancho, wagging its tail. Lately, Pancho had been shaking his head, looking back at the now half-grown dog, saying, “You’re sick, Tramp. You’re fuckin’ sick.” I wasn’t surprised when he and Harris came back without Tramp. When we were alone in operations that night, Harris said to me, “It was so sad. That nice little dog. I don’t know why he had to shoot that dog.”

  I said only, “Well, it was his dog.”

  What I liked about Pancho was all wrapped up in what I didn’t like or was afraid of. At times like that, I saw him as unfathomable, and unstoppable. Certainly it was easier to see him that way, but I wished I’d tried to reason with him about the dog the way I did about haircuts and inspections. I couldn’t help but wonder if he just wanted to try out his green gun on something living. Now that he had tried it out, he packed it up for home. He’
d learned that what held for stereos was also true of refrigerators. A soldier could buy a refrigerator over here and ship it home. So he’d bought a refrigerator at the Chu Lai PX. He’d taken the back off it, dismantled the Swedish K, secreted the pieces of the gun among the refrigerator’s innards, put the refrigerator back together, and shipped it to Fort Home.

  Not long after all of that, two weeks or so after Major Great’s visit, Pancho got permission to leave my detachment for the radio research detachment at LZ Baldy, some thirty-five miles to the north. It seemed amazing to me that a lowly enlisted man could get himself transferred so easily and quickly, but in Pancho’s case it made sense. I figured the authorities in Chu Lai were happy to have him as far away as possible. He told me, “I’m gonna beat feet, Lieutenant.” I said I was sorry he was leaving, meaning more than I said. He told me, “I’m too short for this shit, Lieutenant. Too many fucking pukes coming out here. I’m gonna go hide at Baldy.” He had friends there. They didn’t get inspected as often as we did.

  For traveling, everyone had a standard-issue olive-drab duffel bag. Except for Pancho, who packed his gear in a red mailbag he’d picked up somewhere. I watched him toss it up into the truck that was driving him away. I felt more bereft than I’d ever felt at the departure of a friend. From now on my detachment would be lacking versatility. More than that, I suspected he was leaving, at least in part, to get away from me, the disappointing spectacle of me.

  I saw him briefly a week or so later. In the wake of Major Great, I’d decided we had too many hootches to take care of and should dismantle one. My captain in Chu Lai approved but said, “The roof belongs to this company. I want that roof.” Technically, it belonged to LZ Bayonet, to the brigade. But the captain wanted another hootch built for the detachment at LZ Baldy, and metal roofing material was hard to come by. A job for Pancho, clearly. He and a bunch of other soldiers from Baldy came and scalped it off in no time, Pancho bossing the operation. They covered it with tarps in the back of their truck and got away.

  A couple of weeks after that, I heard some news about him. Pancho had told me that whenever he went to Chu Lai he would look around for the operations officer, would yell hello to him, and give him his shaky “Heh-heh-heh-sir” laugh. Pancho had told me once, “That lieutenant’s shaky, he never fucks with me.” Now, visiting company headquarters in Chu Lai, I stopped in at the office of the operations officer, and the first subject he mentioned was Pancho. “I heard he shot his dog.”

  “Well, he said the dog was sick.”

  The lieutenant put his hands flat on his desk, as if he were going to stand up in a hurry. “But he just couldn’t wait to do it, could he?”

  Then the lieutenant looked around, as if afraid someone might overhear, and said in a low voice, “Do you know what he did up at Baldy?”

  “NO.” I was sincerely curious.

  “He threatened to put a poisonous snake in Lieutenant Johnson’s bunk!”

  I didn’t know Lieutenant Johnson well, but I liked him. I said that Pancho was probably joking. I wondered. It wasn’t like Pancho to make outright threats. I imagined that Lieutenant Johnson told him to get a haircut, and Pancho replied that people who puked on EM scum some-fucking-times found bamboo vipers in their racks. Anyway, Pancho wasn’t my problem anymore.

  I had come to Chu Lai that day to ask my company commander if I could spend the rest of my time doing some job at headquarters and have another lieutenant replace me at the detachment. But the only lieutenant who might have been available had tried some time ago to trade jobs with me, and I had turned him down. Now his situation had improved, and he demurred. My captain sent out his second in command to have a talk with me. We sat in my detachment’s hillside bunker, looking west at the steep hills. He asked me what was wrong. I liked the man, but I could hardly begin to explain. I told him I was just tired, but I’d be all right, and I didn’t mind finishing my time out here. I turned away as I said this, averting my eyes, gazing again at the hills. They’d been transformed some time back, when planes had swooped down dropping trails of the defoliant Agent Orange all around the base camp. I couldn’t remember the date, only that it had been the worst-smelling day of my life. The leaves hadn’t fallen yet but had simply turned a sickly orange.

  I really was tired. Sergeant Spikes had decided to stay in country an extra six months. In return, he got a thirty-day leave to the States. I’d refused my commander’s offer of a new sergeant, saying I could manage until Spikes returned. I didn’t mind the extra work, but now, really for the first time, I was responsible for an enlisted man whom I despised. Higgins. He was tall, with stooped shoulders, always trying to get out of the communal chores, and if he got his way and someone did his chores for him, he’d say in a whining southern accent: “I was about to do that. How come y’all didn’t wait for me?”

  Several times the MPs caught Higgins and one of the other men in the whorehouse in the ville. Higgins always managed to get someone like Rose caught, too. After the first of those arrests, the base camp’s provost marshal, its chief cop, another major, told me he wanted a written report of the disciplinary action I was going to take. So I had to type up reports that made it sound as if I had punished my men.

  I didn’t much mind the deceptive paperwork. I was good at it by now. But I disliked going into the brigade stockade and retrieving Higgins and whoever else was locked up with him. I’d wear a disgusted look for the desk sergeant. I’d say, “These men, always out to mess with us, huh, Sarge?” The problem was that I had begun to believe it. And the place itself gave me the creeps. It was a shack, essentially, with makeshift wooden doors to its two jail cells.

  I was standing there one evening, signing papers, my men a few feet away in the lockup, when two MPs brought in a soldier, or rather half-carried him in, an MP on each arm. The man had dark hair and olive skin. Hispanic or Filipino, I guessed. His hair was full of dust and his fatigue pants torn. The MPs sat him down on a bench.

  “Are you going to be quiet now?” one of the MPs said to him.

  The soldier’s face, I now noticed, was wet with tears, sweat, and mucus. He had a bloody nose.

  Suddenly, he got up from the bench, turned around, and began beating his hands on the plywood wall behind him, yelling in a high-pitched voice, “Sons of bitches, you fuckin’ sonsabitches!”

  One of the MPs grabbed his arms and turned him around. The other slapped him across the face. Then, as if remembering that an officer was watching, that MP turned to me and said, “He pulled a .45 on us on Highway One, sir. We don’t like to be too rough on these guys, they got it so bad in the field. But you can only take so much of their crap.”

  The prisoner started screaming in Spanish. The MP raised a hand, and the prisoner dropped his head and started muttering. I heard individual English words—“fuckin’ die, fuckin’ kill …”

  The desk sergeant got my men out of the cell finally. Higgins came out wearing a big grin, as if he were very pleased with himself. I told him to wipe that grin off his face. When we got outside, the soldier was yelling again, and Higgins started laughing about this latest caper of his, thinking of course that I was just playing the game back inside the jail-house. “Shut up,” I said. He sulked for several days afterward.

  About a month before, a hootch at Lieutenant Johnson’s radio research detachment had been hit by a mortar round. One soldier had been badly wounded. Colonel Riddle had gone to survey the damage. I was called in to Chu Lai to see him and receive some new orders or, as he would have it, old ones. He said that Lieutenant Johnson’s man wouldn’t have been hurt at all, hardly, if the hootch had been properly sandbagged, and he’d been telling Lieutenant Johnson for months to get his hootches sandbagged. Didn’t everyone damn well remember his orders about that?

  I studied his face as he spoke. I suppose I might have tried to imagine his life and how he’d arrived at his present state, but to do that would have been to imagine myself like him, and perhaps that seemed all too easy to do. So I si
mply said, “Yes, sir,” and, back at my detachment, started filling new sandbags, shoveling for an hour or more each day, bare-backed in the sun, streaming sweat. One or another of the men, usually Schulzie, came out and helped me sometimes. I said once or twice to them that they ought to be filling sandbags, too, but I didn’t feel like giving them orders to do it. I imagined, briefly, that they’d see me working and be inspired by my example. Actually, I liked the mindless, heavy work, shoveling bags full, then tying them up, alone in the sun, outside the lounge, hearing beer cans hiss open. It made the days go by.

  When Spikes finally returned, weeks later than he was supposed to, he told me, face alight, that he’d met a clerk in Okinawa who had managed to lose his orders temporarily, extending his leave. I smiled. “Number one, Stoney.” But actually I felt hurt that he hadn’t wanted to come back right away and help me.

  The men had complained about the way I’d been treating Rose. He’d been chattering away in operations with a rifle in his hands, banging the butt down on the floor to emphasize a point. The rifle went off, and the bullet missed me by only a few inches. I didn’t say anything. I just walked away. I’d mostly spoken sarcastically to him since then. Actually, the same men who complained about the way I treated Rose were downright cruel to him. This wasn’t strange, of course. Criminals tend to feel indignant when cops break the law. A lieutenant was supposed to be fair to everyone. But I resented their hypocrisy. My men had a habit of going off to the ville in the afternoon and coming back half an hour or an hour late when Rose was the commo op on duty. Rose said to me one night, “It ain’t fair, Lieutenant.”

  When the overdue commo op returned, in the dusk, I went out and met him by the truck.

  “You’re late for duty. You made Rose work an hour extra.”

  The offending commo op had been the one who first heated up my shaving water. “Hey, no biggie, Lieutenant,” he said.