The Devil and the River (7 page)

They should have learned then, but they did not. It would never be size or influence or money that would win a war in the jungle. It was knowledge. It was being there. It was
understanding
the land. Only the Vietnamese possessed this, and thus they would never lose.

The history of the place was important to Gaines. He had wanted to know why he was fighting.
Because your president and your country needs you to
had never been sufficient for him.

After the French defeat, they just cut the country in half where the South China Sea became the Gulf of Tonkin. North Vietnam would be governed from Hanoi by the Vi
t Minh. South Vietnam would be governed from Saigon. On the throne would be the French ally, Emperor B
o Ðại. The United States did not agree.

A year later, the South Vietnamese elected a new leader. Ngô Đình Di
m was a tyrant, a corrupt and dishonest man, but he was Catholic and an anticommunist, and the United States wanted to keep him in place. But then rebellion came in 1957, communists and nationalists in the south receiving their orders from the north. They coalesced, grew stronger, and three years later they became the National Liberation Front. Vietnamese communists. The Viet Cong.

These were the people that Gaines had been trained to kill.

Back in ’54, Eisenhower had promised that noncommunist Indochina would never fall to the Reds. It was a matter of principle. America, the mightiest of all, had been outwitted and overthrown by a gang of sandal-wearing Russian collaborators. Eisenhower’s pride had been hurt. He had defeated Nazi Germany, and yet he couldn’t take out a strip of land that was half the size of Texas. Eisenhower was a Texan. Vietnam was a nothing place in the middle of nowhere. He was galled.

In November of 1963, just three weeks before Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, South Vietnamese president Ngô Ðình Di
m was murdered in an army coup. When Johnson assumed the presidency, he declared, “I am not going to lose Vietnam.” August of 1964 saw a US destroyer fired upon by North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin. Johnson launched air attacks on North Vietnamese shore installations. Johnson had a resolution-approved fistfight on his hands. Vietnam was some piece-of-shit backyard where US boys were getting their asses kicked by little yellow guys in sandals and coolie hats. Enough was enough.

By the end of ’65, there were one hundred and eighty thousand American soldiers in Vietnam. By 1968, there were well over half a million. They carried orders to run offensive attacks against NLF guerrillas. Napalm rained down on Viet Cong outposts and guerrilla units in the south. Johnson went great guns. He threw more bombs at Vietnam than the combined total of all bombs hurled at Europe between ’39 and ’45. But this was no European engagement. The enemy the United States fought was faceless, without uniform, familiar with the terrain, its anomalies and idiosyncrasies, and thus they always possessed the upper hand. The United States had fire-power, air cover, strong supply lines, an almost inexhaustible source of men, but they did not have an enemy they could see. They fought ghosts and shadows. They fought a nightmare.

And it was into this nightmare that John Gaines arrived, a twelve-month tour of duty, and it was from this arena of horror that he would bring things that would dictate and define the rest of his life. He had known that within a week.

Afterward, there would be stories. Some lavish, some exuberant, some exaggerated; others brief, succinct, to the point. Those who were not there grew tired of the telling; questioned veracity, questioned the purpose of the stories.
The reason for telling the stories is to join the seams together
, a fellow veteran once told Gaines.
To see if the past cannot belong to the present again … but it’s like trying to stitch the sea to the sky. You know they are somehow made of the same thing, but they will always and forever be incompatible.
For Gaines, it had simply been a matter of trying to understand how the boy he had once been had become the man that he now was. The past was a different country, and if you returned, you soon realized that they spoke a language you no longer understood. War stories. If it did not seem surreal, it probably never happened. If it centered on trust and bravery and self-sacrifice, on some unquestioning loyalty to a man, a unit, a detachment, a mission, it was probably a lie. If it spoke of duty to God, to nation, to a religion, a belief, it was almost certainly a falsehood.

If it appeared unbelievable, you were safe to believe it. If you listened to the telling and even the teller seemed to doubt the story himself, then that was the one you could bet your house on.

War was a drama scripted by spite-fueled and evil children, by warped delinquents, by incarcerated madmen driven into a deep and irredeemable psychosis by the drugs and barbaric shocks of demented psychiatrists, by men with single eyes and hooks for hands and small shards of scorched glass in place of their souls.

War was a firework display for the shallow entertainment of darker gods. War cleansed men of all that was best in them. It cleansed with fire, with bullets and blades and bombs and blood. It cleansed with loss and pain, and with its own sense of unique and incommunicable disbelief engendered in all who attended the ceremony of battle. In ten thousand years, all that had changed was distance. Perhaps, eons ago, there was some small nobility in seeing the face of the man you killed, in watching the already-too-brief light extinguished, in hearing the silence as breathing halted. Now you could kill a man a mile away. Now you could release bombs through clouds and obliterate thousands.

At first you dropped the terrible fire from the sky and you believed it was purifying. In some small way, you were an emissary of right and truth and justice, perhaps of God. Later, when you saw the burned children, you understood you were simply an emissary from hell.

There were those who got their kicks herding a half-dozen sandal-footed, coolie-headed gook collaborators into a chopper and then throwing them out from a height of three hundred feet. Hands and feet, a guy at each end—
Three-two-one-awaaaay
—like teenagers at the poolside. The speed of their descent just kicked the air right out of them. Gaines never heard one of them scream. Not even the kids.

A man who possessed a motivation for war was a man who hated. Hatred sourced its foundations in ignorance. Yet hatred of another was also hatred of self, for beneath all things we were the same. Agreeing to go to war did not make you wrong. It was agreeing to stay that was at fault. And the ones who went back a second time, a third time, had already lost so much of themselves, they knew they could never belong elsewhere.

There were the rationales that came afterward. The alone times when men had to justify their actions, when they had to explain to themselves why they did those terrible things.

But they did them in war. In times of war. They did not do them for love, nor for money, nor for the satisfaction of some dark and horrifying compulsion.

Outside of war, you were faced—simply—with people. Gaines believed that the vast majority of what went on in people’s heads should stay in people’s heads. But people carried shadows inside them, and sometimes the shadows escaped.

The death of Nancy Denton, what had been done to her, the things that Gaines had seen—this was an act performed out of some strange and terrifying vision of hell that exceeded much of what he had experienced.

He had told Judith Denton that he would do his best to find the truth of what had happened.

It went beyond that.

Someone had murdered a girl. Someone had cut out her heart and replaced it with a snake. Someone had roughly stitched her body and buried it in mud, and there that body had remained—undisturbed—for twenty years. It had taken six men four hours to bring her back.

There were questions to be asked. Many questions.

The burden of responsibility came down upon him like a wave, like the downdraft of a Huey.

He possessed his own ghosts and specters. His own phantoms. He would carry these things forever, and they would always lie heavy upon his conscience.

He did not need any more.

B
ob Thurston appeared at Gaines’s office a little after five. He apologized. He’d had to leave the autopsy to attend to a delivery at the hospital.

“It is beyond belief,” Gaines said.

“Beyond disbelief,” Thurston said.

“You saw the snake?”

“I did.”

“Any thoughts?”

Thurston shook his head. “What is there to think? Voodoo? I don’t know, John. There are some crazy, crazy people out there.”

Gaines was quiet for a time, and then he said, “I saw Judith. I told her. She came and identified the body. I think it might be a good idea to go see her as soon as you can.”

“I will,” Thurston replied.

“And I need this kept as quiet as possible, Bob, for obvious reasons, but I know I’m whistling through a tornado on that one.”

“Hell, then don’t say a goddamned word to your mother, John. She’ll be laying brooms across all the doorways and making us wear bundles of pig bristles …”

Gaines smiled sardonically. “You see some line of black humor in everything?”

“I have to,” Thurston replied. “Keeps me from drinking.”

“My mother will find out,” Gaines said. “She’ll find out from one of the neighbors.”

“You better tell Caroline not to say anything.”

“Caroline is a nineteen-year-old with nothing better to do than help me look after my mother. She’s gonna be the first to get into it with her. I can’t stop her finding out, Bob, and I can’t stop the things she will do or say as a result. You know that. You know her better than anyone. Regardless, you’re changing the subject … Fact is, we have a sixteen-year-old girl murdered, buried in the riverbank, her heart removed. Took six of us to dig her out.”

“So where do you even begin on something like this?”

“I have no idea, Bob, no idea at all,” Gaines replied. “My first thought is that I might be looking for a killer who is dead themselves. This is twenty years old.”

“You think some of the ones who were around at the time can help you?”

“Hell, Bob, I don’t even know that there is anyone around apart from the girl’s mother. Right now, I don’t even have a confirmed cause of death.”