Garden of Lies (37 page)

want to worry me? You write that you love me and miss me, but if you’re suffering and

don’t tell me, that separates us even more. I’d rather worry than be shut out. So please,

please, tell me everything. I pray for you every day, every minute. But most of all, I

pray this letter reaches you before you give up hope on me.

Love Always, Rose

xxxxxxxoooooooooo

[216]
P.S. I’m enclosing a Polaroid snap April took of me last night even though I

look like something the cat dragged in (don’t show this to any of your buddies if you

can help it). And don’t ask why I’m wearing only one earring. It’s sort of a good-luck

charm, like a four-leaf clover. Two would spoil it, don’t you think? Anyway, I’m

wearing it for you. I won’t take it off until you come back to me.

Chapter 12

VIETNAM, 1969

“You ever think ’bout what happens after you dead?” the black kid from Alabama asked softly

from behind in the darkness of the trail. “I mean, goin’ to heaven and all that kinda shit?”

“No,” Brian whispered back. He slapped at something crawling on his cheek, he couldn’t see

what. The rain-swept darkness of the jungle was complete. He moved guided only by the quiet

squelching of Matinsky’s boots just ahead.

It was long past midnight. His platoon had been marching on boonie patrol since four that

afternoon, and he felt as if a hundred years had passed between now and then. Five or six

kilometers back, one of the men—Reb Parker—had stepped on a Bouncing Betty mine that

literally blew him in half. He died with his boots on ... except that his legs just didn’t happen to

be attached to his body at the time.

No, Brian didn’t believe in heaven. But he sure as shit could imagine what hell would look

like: endless wet corridors of jungle, waist-high elephant grass that sliced at your hands and arms

like razor blades, never-ending rain, and everywhere the death-stink of rot.

“Why not?” the kid pressed, edging up alongside him. Brian could just make out the broad

brown features under his camouflage helmet, and smell his breath, acrid with chewing tobacco.

“You Catholic, ain’t you? I seen you crossin’ yo’self.”

“It’s not a given.”

“Givin’ what?”

“It means just because I’m Catholic doesn’t mean I accept everything the Church tells me.”

“You believe in God, doncha?”

“I’m not sure anymore.”

[218] “Man, don’t say that. I got the willies bad enough as it is.”

“This your first boonie patrol?” Brian had been on half a dozen so far. He pulled Recon his

first day in country, but Alabama had just joined the platoon.

“Man, I wish it was. I been humpin’ these woods so long, I figure my number’s due. This

here’s my third outfit. Cain’t pull snake-eyes every time.”

Brian paused. “Listen. Do you hear it? The river. We’re almost there, I think. We’ll be okay

once we get there. That’s our PZ.”

“That’s just the rain you hearin’, boy.” The kid, whose name Brian had forgotten, laughed

softly. “Been nothin’ but rain since they shipped me up-country. Lord, I’d give my left nut for a

pair of dry socks and a smoke. Any gooks out there, you ain’t gonna hear ’em ’cause they don’t

wear no boots. They ain’t so busy dreamin’ ’bout dry socks they goin’ get their fuckin’ heads

blown off.”

He chuckled softly, and the chuckles turned to a stream of hysterical giggles, muffled so it

came out sounding like the high whine of tracer fire. Brian wondered if the kid was losing his

mind. Christ, weren’t they all, one way or another?

You think about dry socks, so you won’t think about dying.

You hear the river, so you don’t have to think about how far away it might still be.

Like you never hear a boonie rat say how long he’s been in country, Brian thought, only how

short he is, how many more months before he goes home.

Home. Oh God, can’t think about that. Home’s where they send you when you’re dead.
He

knew of platoons where the grunts carried their own body bags, even slept in them to keep dry.

He thought back to his first day. Landing in Saigon aboard a Continental jet with Glen

Yarbrough spinning a sugary melody over the headphones, a pretty blond stewardess chirping,

“Welcome to Vietnam, gentlemen, I’ll see you again in a year.” Then hours of standing out on the

broiling tarmac, waiting along with thirty or forty other cherries to be assigned to a unit. The guys

were joking around with each other, punch-drunk from the heat and from eighteen hours in the

air, one kid all revved up to get assigned to a frontline unit so he could “kick some ass.” Brian

hadn’t been too worried. From what he’d seen so far, he figured the stories he’d heard about Nam

had been mostly exaggerated.

[219] Then a big chopper landed and its crew began tossing large bags out like so many

duffels. At first he’d thought it
was
some sort of cargo, and maybe he even could have convinced

himself of that ... if it hadn’t been for the dull squelching noises those bags made when they hit

the tarmac. Then one burst open, and in the ghastly split second before he fainted, Brian had his

real welcome to Vietnam: a lump of bloody chopped meat in the shape of what had once been a

human being.

Now, as he slogged through the jungle, Brian tried instead to blank his mind, the way Trang

had taught him. Maybe he really would hear the river, maybe they really were getting close.

But all he could hear was the rain. The kid—Jackson, wasn’t it?—was silent, and there was

only the endless drumroll of the rain, the wet slap of leaves against plastic ponchos. A cloud must

have lifted because Brian, peering through the gloom, could now make out the blurred shape

ahead (was it almost dawn? Christ, please, yes), the hump of Matinsky’s rucksack under his

poncho, the antennae of his PRC-25 poking up alongside his head. He looked like some weird

insect, maybe the man-roach of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” And beyond Matinsky, walking point

ahead of the CO, Lieutenant Gruber, Brian now caught fleeting glimpses of the reed-shadow that

was Trang Li Due, moving through the dense brush with uncanny grace.

He thought:
If there’s any NVA action out there, Trang will spot it.

Trang, a Kit Carson scout, knew this piece of jungle better than anyone, and he had the eyes

and reflexes of a leopard. At fourteen, he’d been forcibly recruited by the NVA, and by the time

he fled at sixteen, he’d learned such tricks as listening for enemy activity by placing a small flat

piece of wood on the ground and putting his ear to it, and locating claymore tripwires at night by

sweeping the darkness just ahead of him with a blade of grass.

Some of the guys weren’t so sure about Trang. “Once a gook, always a gook” was Matinsky’s

expression. But it had been Trang, not Matinsky, who’d saved Brian’s ass on a boonie patrol like

this less than a month ago. They’d been humping the hills above Tien Sung, Brian walking point

that time, exhausted after hours of trying to hold to a straight line on the steep ridge. By dawn,

Brian was so beat he would have stretched out in a rice paddy full of leeches if it meant getting

some shut-eye.

[220] They came upon the village just as the sun was casting its first red blaze above the trees.

A sleepy little village tucked way high into the hillside with rice paddies like stair risers leading

up to it. Smoke curling above the thatched huts, water buffalo, the whole pastoral bit. They had

stopped for a good long time, checking it out, no sign of VC, just old men and mama-sans and

little kids. One old mama-san was cooking a big pot of rice. Nothing unusual there. She gave

Brian a toothless smile and wrapped some in a banana leaf for him. He was reaching out to take it

when Trang suddenly grabbed him, shoving him to one side. A split second later a burst of sapper

fire tore up the ground where Brian had stood. Two guys bought it before they could make it to

cover.

“How did you know we were walking into an ambush?” Brian asked Trang later.

Trang looked at him with those flat, oddly expressionless black eyes and said, “Rice. She cook

too much rice for one village.”

But now Brian’s aching body made it hard to think about Trang, or anything but his own

misery. He wanted a pair of dry socks as bad as Jackson. Inside his boots, his feet felt like a

couple of rotting sponges. They hurt, too. They hurt in a way that made him afraid of what he’d

see when finally he got to undo the laces and pry off these damn boots.

But nothing he could do about it now. You could no more get away from jungle rot than you

could the bugs and the leeches and the rain. But, Christ, wasn’t there ever going to be any end to

it? The mud seemed to suck at him, drag him down a little bit farther with each step he took.

A rustling sound deep in the bush caused him to break stride, cocking an ear. The river? He

couldn’t really tell. Probably not yet. Dickson back there with the funny papers had said two,

maybe three klicks more to go before they hit the water. But that had been more than an hour ago,

hadn’t it?

“Wish I had me one of them Starlight scopes,” Brian heard a voice behind him mutter. “You

could see a snake taking a piss in the dark two miles away with one of them suckers.”

Another, wearier voice, “Oh, man, I just wish I was home.”

Then no one spoke. Just the slapping of leaves, the squelch of boots pulling away from mud,

the faint fuzzy static of Matinsky’s radio.

[221]
Home,
Brian thought. An image of Rose formed in his mind. He felt as if he’d swallowed

a heat tab. A flame that crawled up from his gut and settled in just above his Adam’s apple. He

saw her in his room at Columbia kneeling on the floor spangled with pennies, naked, her face wet

with tears. He saw himself hunkering down, gathering her in his arms, making love to her right

there on the floor. The image was so vivid he could almost feel each sensation, even the pennies

pressing cool circles into his flesh, the furious heat between those long legs wrapped about his.

Don’t leave me, Bri, don’t ever leave me. ...

Then it vanished. He was back in the jungle. The rain pelting against his helmet, slithering off

his poncho. The sound of the river just a whisper in the back of his head now. Brian felt like

crying. If only he could have held on to her, just for a little while longer, until they made it to the

river.

Wise up, man, she’s forgotten all about you.

No, he wouldn’t believe that. He
couldn’t.
But face it, it had been months since he’d gotten a

letter. She could have met someone else. Maybe she did. No, it didn’t make sense. Another girl, it

could happen, not Rose. But what
did
make sense anymore? Out here in these jungles, he had

seen things, monstrosities, that before he never would have thought possible. Now he could

believe just about anything.

Disneyland West. That was grunt lingo for Nam. A make-believe place. But here, now, Nam

was as real as something he’d swallowed, something hard and cold settled deep in the pit of his

stomach. It was home that didn’t seem real anymore. Brian could hardly remember what it felt

like to walk on a sidewalk, to lie in a bed with clean white sheets, to go through a whole day

without looking over his shoulder expecting someone to try to shoot him.

Even Rose seemed not quite real. When she did come to him, it was usually in the morning,

those first few seconds before coming fully awake. In that gray DMZ between sleep and

alertness, he would feel her breath warm against his cheek, certain that when he opened his eyes

he would find her asleep beside him, a tumble of dark curls against his pillow, one long golden-

skinned arm stretched across his belly. Then someone would flop over in the bunk above his, or

start banging on the corrugated metal side of the hootch, and her image would evaporate like faint

morning haze.

[222] In the real world guys got dumped all the time. That poor bastard O’Reilly, boasting

nonstop about how his wife could never get enough of him. Then just last week come the divorce

papers. Not even a dear John letter.

Jesus Christ. If only Rose would write. Just one letter. That’s all he was asking.

Brian felt himself shivering. The rain had leaked through his poncho, soaking his fatigues. He

thought about the notebook carefully wrapped in oilcloth at the bottom of his rucksack. The

journal he’d been keeping since day one of this nightmare. If he ever made it out of here, he’d

need that journal, if only to convince himself all this had really happened.

A sudden noise. Brian froze in his tracks. A rustling, but louder and closer than before. Farther

up the trail, he glimpsed Trang sink into a crouch, his M-16 swing into position.

Brian dropped to his belly, hammered the bolt back on his own M-16, chambered a round, as if

a switch had been pulled in his head. Beside him, Jackson did the same. Ahead, Matinsky broke

clumsily for cover, a big slow-footed Nebraska farmboy, the radio on his back lurching and

bobbing.

Brian heard popping sounds, like a string of firecrackers going off, and Matinsky toppled,

crashing into the brush like a downed chopper.