Keeping Watch (11 page)

“Not me, but it sure made deRosa nervous.”

“DeRosa. He's the pretty one, isn't he, Carmichael? Special friend of yours, maybe?”

“Special . . . sir!” Allen felt himself go red. “He's a member of my squad, sir.”

“And you had to hold his hand out in the grass.”

“No, sir. I only—”

“Well, there's no elephant grass around here, soldier.”

“No sir, I just meant—”

“You think the man deserted under fire,” Brenda stated.

Allen stared at him. Who the hell would desert out here? You'd have to be insane. “Sir, no, I don't believe deRosa deserted. I never saw any sign of cowardice in him, not even under fire, just in the grass. I think he was claustrophobic. He was okay once we got moving again, just needed his mind taken off it. So no, I don't think he ran.”

“Well, we beat the bushes all around, if he was wounded and crawled away we'd have found him. We can't wait around hoping your boyfriend—that is, your
squad-mate
—comes home. Prepare to move out.”

They beat the bushes for another half hour, found no more sign of this missing member than they had of Dixon in the grass, and finally, looking over their shoulders like a herd of herbivores with a lion on their trail, they moved out.

Unknown to them, deRosa followed. Or more accurately, deRosa was brought along in their wake, across the jungle floor, through the tunnels that wove among the hills, silently flitting through the green gloom in the platoon's wake. They did not know he was there until nearly midnight, and even then they could not be certain it was he. All they knew was that at 23:40, a man started to scream somewhere off in the green, an endless and impossibly high-pitched sound of ultimate agony and hopelessness.

The twenty-nine remaining members of the Second Platoon shot bolt upright, primeval hackles rising along the backs of their necks, fingers nervously working the firing mechanisms of their guns, bracing for the eerie soprano wail to repeat itself. When seven minutes later it did, they instantly wished it had not. There was no telling where it was coming from, no rushing out into the darkness to rescue a comrade.

“Fuck me,” Mouse said, slapping his head. “That's worse than the ringing.”

Allen leaned into him and said directly into his ear, “It's not your ears, man. There's some poor bastard out there.”

“DeRosa?” Allen could only shrug, which Mouse felt even though it was too dark to see the movement. “Shit, what the hell happened to him?”

Long before the noise stopped, it was all too clear what was happening.
What kind of injuries could you inflict on a man, to make him scream like that but not die?

Most of the platoon was thinking the same thing; thought, too, when the noise finally ceased to come at dawn, that the relief for that poor bastard out there was as great as their own. They traveled eighteen miles that day, losing three more wounded to a freshly set mine. All the while they pretended that they were doing a sweep; in truth they were interested only in fleeing the night noises. They dug in, setting up their trip-flares and Claymores, only to find that the man and his torturers had dogged their steps. From midnight until dawn the shrill sounds of torment rose and fell and echoed off the hills, until many of the men were whimpering themselves, or screaming curses into the night. All of them not actively standing guard stuffed wads of cloth into their ears and wrapped their heads in whatever they had. At three in the morning, Allen gave up all attempt at sleeping, and went to talk to Keys.

“Sarge, the loot's got to get us lifted out tomorrow. We'll go nuts if he doesn't.”

“We can't do anything until morning, I'll talk to him them. He's not sleeping either, Carmichael.”

It was true, the sound from the darkness would wreak havoc on the nerves of a coddled REMF, Allen had to agree. By morning, Brenda would be soft enough to agree to anything.

Again the noises died away at dawn; this time, no man fooled himself that their platoon-mate had been granted death, that night's fall would not find them again assaulted by a soul in torment. They bent over their C-rats, watching their lieutenant out of the corner of their eyes. Brennan ate his breakfast with a solid appetite, he shaved without nicking himself, and if he was aware of their collective gaze, he showed no sign of it.

“Prepare the men to move out, Sergeant,” he said. The men just stared at him in growing disbelief, before he relented. “We've got an LZ twelve miles from here, one small ville to check on the way, then it's hot food and clean uniforms.”

And no more sounds of deRosa dying,
they all finished in their minds.

They moved out.

This was the state of the twenty-six members of Bravo Company, Second Platoon, that April morning when they entered the ville the maps called Truc Tho—twenty-one teenagers who should have been bagging groceries and wondering about their chance of scoring at the drive-in Friday night, plus five men who (if they survived) would be old enough to choose between McGovern and Nixon in November. Aside from its leader and a handful of FNGs, the platoon had been under fire more or less continually since before Christmas, four solid months of harassment by invisible ghosts with neither planes nor equipment, who lived in dark tunnels like vermin, and like vermin were proving maddeningly difficult to eradicate. Twenty-six filthy young men, their muscles aching with exhaustion and frustration, who had been in the woods for the last eleven days straight, cut off from the rest of their company, battling an unseen enemy who refused to stand and fight, yet who had sent nearly a third of their brothers off into the blue on stretchers or in bags. They had been the target of daily ambushes, been nearly overrun twice, been continually besieged by mosquitoes and leeches, had not eaten a truly hot meal or shaved or even had their boots off in longer than they could remember. They had spent their days being picked off among the bush and the high grass and their nights cowering inside their feeble perimeters, the last two of them spent in raging impotence while one of their own was slowly peeled apart by animals. Their commanding officer, a man who had narrowly escaped one court-martial two years before, was riding their lunatic energy like a kite in a high wind, pulling them on in his wake.

Twenty-six components of a bomb, primed, loaded, and about to be dropped on the unsuspecting village of Truc Tho.

The ville was firmly inside the free-fire zone, which meant: If it moves, shoot it. These niceties of definition had little impact on the women and old men trying to scrape a living on the lands their families had worked for generations; the grunts had seen this often enough to know that just because a ville was in enemy territory didn't necessarily mean it was entirely VC. Still, they moved in with an even greater expectation of problems than they normally did. The artillery laid its line of fire on the far side of the village, but unusually enough, the residents did not immediately begin to stream out in terror. There were definitely people there—smoking cook-fires, laundry draped on the bushes to dry, and a recently butchered animal hanging from a sturdy tree branch told them that—but either the inhabitants had fled before the bombs hit, or they were staying put. The platoon thumbed their M16s to rock-and-roll, and crept through the fields toward the hooches.

The point man in Alpha Squad, a phlegmatic dairy farmer named Kowalski who'd been in Vietnam for nine months, saw it first; his incredible reaction made half the platoon think he'd been hit by some silent weapon. He whimpered—
whimpered
—and dropped his gun before staggering back to retch violently. In a rapid wave out from the center, the rest of the platoon threw themselves flat and brought their guns up. They stretched their senses and waited: They saw nothing but the hushed village with a few curls of smoke, heard only the usual farm animals, Kowalski's vomiting, and the steady hum of a beehive.

And then the man next to Kowalski gave a shocked curse, and Allen craned to find what had triggered the reaction. It took him a minute to see it; when he did, he felt himself go cold with shock: What he had taken for a slaughtered pig hanging from a tree for butchering was no pig; nor was the insect hum from bees.

A small man hung by his heels from the tree branch, flayed down to muscle and bone. His skin lay in a heap on the ground beneath him, crumpled like a pair of multicolored tights. Delicate red fingers, drips still collecting at their tips, seemed to reach down for the skin; the gesture and the diminished size of the body made it look like a young adolescent, embarrassed by nakedness, hurrying to clothe himself properly again. His muscles looked startlingly like the illustrations in an anatomy book, except for the thick, shifting coat of flies.

One man after another looked, and either froze where he stood or turned to heave the contents of his stomach into the bushes. Had the ville wanted to wipe them out, it would have been easy, for shock reduced the entire platoon into immobility.

Only much later—far too late to do any good—did Allen realize that the ville hadn't wanted to do anything to them, that the people were cowering in their hooches, trapped between the VC who had done this in their ville and the Americans who were sure to revenge it. Right then, in that place, with the blood still dripping off deRosa's fingers and the buzz of ten thousand flies rising loud in their ears, no man stopped to think it through. Six months of rage and shame flooded up through Allen Carmichael's gut and seized his heart and his mind; six months of confusion and hatred and humiliation, long weeks of gut-shrinking terror and soul-withering frustration slammed together in the cleansing red emotion of savagery given a clear target. When Lieutenant Brennan stumbled to his feet and lifted his gun, as one his platoon rose with him, to smash and destroy, to avenge their fallen and restore their lost honor. The mad paroxysm took them all, although none saw that Brennan himself was the first to stop, to stand back and watch his men kill.

The chain reaction did not end until it had burned itself out and there was nothing left to kill. Until every old man had ceased to twitch, each woman had ceased her crying, every child and infant lay still. Until the ville was as lifeless as deRosa.

BOOK TWO

Home Coming

Chapter 12

This is what Allen Carmichael saw on the third of the illegal surveillance tapes made of the O'Connell residence that May:

The man has been sitting for at least an hour on the black leather sofa, watching a baseball game on the television, staring nearly straight at the pinhole camera that Allen planted in the corner of the high window four days earlier. The man on Allen's screen is of average height, the chest under his loose silk shirt testifying to regular workouts, his face good-looking but nothing memorable. The features of that face are capable of considerable charm—Allen has seen this in earlier tapes—but when at rest, a slight twist of the mouth imparts a look of boredom, or petulance, perhaps even a hint of cruelty. Particularly, as now, when he is drinking.

He seems to be paying little attention to the game in front of him, for the occasional crowd roars that Allen's bug picks up have no corresponding effect on the man's expression. He frowns occasionally, and once glances at his wristwatch, but for the past forty-seven minutes his only change of position has been to walk over to the wet bar and refill his glass. He has done this three times.

Now a sound snags his attention, and his light blue eyes flick to the doorway at his side. After a moment, the lower half of a heavily built man appears, and the man on the sofa lifts the empty glass in his left hand. The figure enters the side of Allen's screen, his head cut off by the upper border—when planting the camera, Allen had to sacrifice a broad picture of the room for the invisibility of his lens—and a meaty hand reaches out to take the glass.

The figure that now crosses the room is called “Howard” by Jamie and his father, “Mr. Howard” by the housekeeper; Allen thinks he is probably the George Howard listed as an employee of O'Connell's company. He looks like a professional bodybuilder, cropped blond hair and muscles that strain his polo shirt and the thighs of his tan pants. He does not live here, although he spends most of his time with O'Connell, doing pretty much whatever needs doing, from picking up the boy at school to hauling the garbage and recycling bins from garage to street. And now, filling his boss's glass with expensive whiskey and carrying it back to him. The big man then turns, taking three steps toward the television before a movement from the sitting man's mouth brings him to a halt. Allen can't tell what has been said, since the noise from the game drowns out the words, but it makes the bodybuilder stop, then turn to go out the door again.

When the other has left, O'Connell sets his glass sharply on the table in front of the sofa and goes over to the wet bar again, this time continuing around behind it. He ducks down, disappearing from view for a few seconds; when he comes back up, he is holding a beautiful old double-barreled shotgun. He also has a pair of shells, sticking out from between his fingers like cigar stubs, but even though Allen replays the recording several times at slow speed, he cannot tell if the man has taken them from a box, or from the gun itself. He can, however, see that the man's expression is no longer bored.

O'Connell returns to his position on the sofa, laying the gleaming weapon onto the black cushion beside him. He leans forward to stand the two shells on end next to the glass, which he picks up, shooting the contents down his throat in one quick gulp that causes Allen's constricted throat to burn in response. The crowd on the television roars. The man stretches out to prop his heels on the dark glass tabletop. Allen sees that the man is wearing worn-down leather moccasins with no socks.

Then O'Connell sits upright, returning his feet to the floor. His head turns, but not before Allen has caught a change of expression on the handsome face. He rewinds his tape several times here, too, until he is certain he has seen the beginning of a smile on the man's lips.

Two figures now enter the side of the screen. The pair of tree-trunk legs continues over out of the camera's reach, taking up a chair next to the television, stretching out so that a pair of expensive shoes is clearly visible at the bottom of Allen's screen. The room's third pair of legs is naked, the feet shoeless, the thin preadolescent torso bare. The only clothing on the boy who has been brought in is a pair of snug white briefs.

The boy clearly knows what is expected of him, and without hesitation takes up a position facing his father, back to the camera, skinny white calves pressed back against the edge of the low table. Allen's gut tenses, in his hotel room miles away and hours later; his thumb hovers over the fast-forward button. But what happens next is nothing that long experience could have led him to expect.

The boy's hands come back, gripping each other at the base of the bony spine. Only then does the man move, reaching out—not for his trouser fly, nor for the boy, but for the shotgun lying on the sofa.

The father is looking directly into his son's eyes. The boy stands still, although Allen knows that he is trembling ever so slightly, because of the minute vibrations of the shotgun shells on the smoky glass. The child's chin is raised to meet the eyes of the sitting man. Those thin hands, in much the position of a soldier on parade, grip each other so hard that Allen can see the knuckles turn white, but the boy does not move. When his father holds the gun up between them, peeling the hammers back to cock both barrels, the child does not move. The man's eyes never leave his son's, not even when he lowers the heavy gun to the floor, wedging its stock between floor and sofa so that it is pointing up between his legs. The boy moves only when the barrels of the gun actually come to rest against his belly, a slight shift of position caused (Allen is somehow sure of this) more by the weight of the gun than by any psychological reaction. The pair of upright shells on the glass table jiggle, then steady.

Does their presence on the table mean the gun is unloaded?

Allen has to remind himself that this has taken place hours before, that there is nothing he can do about this episode, it's over. Beyond his reach. The boy has to do this alone.

The two figures remain in their positions for a long, long time. The weight lifter's expensive shoes are still stretched out into the room, their ankles casually crossed in the lower border of the screen as their owner, apparently unmoved, watches the tableau of father and son linked by the gun. The baseball game goes on, the crowd and the announcer roar indistinctly, and the two figures lean into each other's eyes.

Only when the first hammer snaps down does the boy react, with a sharp, uncontrollable shiver that tips one of the standing shells over. The father's faint smile grows, as if he's scored a point, but both he and the boy stay where they are, the bones under the child's skin seeming to grow ever more pronounced, until the hammer comes down over the second barrel. Another shiver, but this one does not stop. The boy is quaking now like a birch leaf in a wind, and the grin the father gives him is one of the creepiest things Allen has ever seen. The man tosses the gun aside, reaches out and tousles his son's hair affectionately, then sits back on the sofa, looking past the boy toward the blond man—or at the television, Allen can't actually tell.

The boy, clearly, is dismissed, even forgotten. The small hands behind the spine separate, then involuntarily go up to hug his naked shoulders, as if attempting to conserve warmth, or modesty. The boy steps away from his father's knees to retreat toward the door; he moves as if his feet are uncertain of their surface.

But he does not flee. Instead, in the doorway he turns to look back at his father, and he is just short enough that the hidden lens captures the whole of him. On his chest are the twin crescents of the shotgun barrel; on his face is the sickly expression of fading terror, and a flush of shame. But the face holds some other emotion as well, hopeless and confused, and Allen has to play and replay this three-second section of the tape a dozen times before he can be sure what he sees there.

It is hate, but it is also love.