The sea at Nha Trang was that shade of luminous turquoise that only appears in travel agency ads behind a woman in a white bikini. The sand, too, was white and soft—a sand of forgetting that meant escape from the world and from worry, the kind you imagined laying a towel down on and screwing a sweating rum drink into. We were set up in a row of wooden barracks that opened directly onto the beach. It was hard to believe there was a war going on, despite our having marched through the jungle for a week, despite our malaria and jungle rot, despite the peeling white colonnades of the South Vietnamese Air Force administrative headquarters—our temporary station awaiting further orders. Despite planes taking off and landing on the two nearby airstrips night and day. They might have been passenger jets bringing in vacationers.
Probably it was just the easiest secure place for us to decamp for a little while before going on to whatever was next, but it felt like a reward for shooting up the village. Or rather, for eliminating NVA combatants at Vien Dinh. The rest of the platoon seemed to be in high spirits, lounging on the sand and treating the whole thing as a holiday, but when we were off-duty I mostly stayed inside. I’d caught a fever on the march to Nha Trang, and I sat in the barracks during hundred-degree days, as if I could sweat it out of me (the barracks seemed like a Swedish sauna anyway, constructed as they were from untreated lumber with a long bench against the rear wall). The wood grain would swim before my eyes, like a river of faces surfacing and drowning, surfacing and drowning. Eventually I would emerge for a breath of air, only to feel repulsed by the serene beauty of my surroundings and go back inside.
During this time, I developed a twin pair of ideations—obsessions, it would probably be fair to say. The first was Berlinger. On the march from Vien Dinh to Nha Trang, Berlinger and I had brought up the rear, with me positioned behind him. For two days, a thick silence had been as much a part of the atmosphere we moved through as the humidity. When I tried to engage him, even in inane conversation about sports and girls, he ignored me, just whittled away on his figurine. When I caught glimpses of it, I could see it was becoming more detailed, with little hands, and features emerging from its blank face. In response to his silence, I found myself imagining pulling my rifle up and shooting him in the wet spot between his big shoulder blades, how easy it would be.
When we first got to Nha Trang, I went to visit him in the brig. The brig was a small area located in the basement of the administrative building, past a depressing antechamber full of World War II–era gray-green file cabinets. I signed in with a young, smiling Vietnamese sentry and stood in front of Berlinger; he sat on an upturned white plastic bucket that, according to the label, formerly contained bean curd. I remember thinking it said bean crud the whole time I was down there. There was a window on one side of the room and no bars—the only thing keeping him here, in fact, was the jolly teenage guard who lit a cigarette and watched us.
“Mitch,” I said. He didn’t say anything. “Come on, this is childish.”
“Nanny nanny, boo boo,” he said.
“It’s not going to be so funny when you get court-martialed.”
“Go away, Lazar, I got nothing to say to you.”
I stewed on it—the arrogant nerve of him, the big silent martyr. In my fever dreams, I saw his sainted face watching over me from a shadowed hill, the big wedge of his crew cut like an arrow pointing down. During this period, I simultaneously became, as a subsequent psych report would read, “Negatively Fixated on Lester Hawkins.” Negatively fixated—I fucking hated him. I mean, I had never liked Hawkins, none of us had—he was dumb and loud and always cruising for approval. But ever since the village, he’d been intolerable. Like lots of other guys in the unit—myself included—he had been triumphant after mowing down the NVAs. Unlike most of us, though, he had continued braying about it throughout our final push to the coast. Worse, he had taken one of the tan hats—hard topped with a wide floppy brim—from a dead body, and entertained himself with periodic and extremely unfunny imitations of Charlie on patrol, Charlie making fucky-fucky, Charlie eating with phantom chopsticks, Charlie getting blown away by us. He didn’t seem to have any of the native reservations, the niggling doubts, that eventually caused most of us to shut our mouths, or write long boring letters home, or speculate about the Yankees in ’71. Or maybe the callous bravado was his way of dealing with it—that would have been the charitable view. But watching him in the mess, shoveling food into his face while he talked, the tan hat just a little big for his head, I somehow found myself incapable of forming the charitable view.
Instead, I singled Lester Hawkins out for a hatred purer than any I’ve known before or since. I believe at the height of it, for the three weeks we were in Nha Trang, I would have murdered him if I’d had the opportunity and means. Partly, it was the lack of anything else we had to do—twice a day, on a rotating basis, four men were sent out on a two-hour recon sweep up into the nearby foothills. That was two hours, every other day, in which we were occupied. Otherwise, we played cards, went swimming, jacked off, worked out, convalesced, and waited for our next marching orders. Or, in my case, sat alone in the barracks nursing irrational hatred like a suckling babe at my swollen tit.
It got to where I blamed Hawkins for everything. Not just the killing, which we’d all taken part in besides Berlinger, but for Vietnam, and my deployment there. I saw him as the kind of oblivious shithead who thought the war was a good thing, who’d vote for Nixon upon safely returning home—as he inevitably would, because careless dolts like him always made it back. I watched him cleaning his M-15 in preparation for patrol, smiling with pleasure like he was in for a rare treat. I watched him as he swam in the bay, and hoped he’d get eaten by a shark, if there were sharks here. I watched him do pull-ups on the side of the canteen and drink beer and make his dumbass jokes, all the while wearing that goddamn hat.
I was in the barracks reading—a Time magazine with Ali McGraw on the cover in a floral-print dress—when Hawkins poked his head in. The hat sat back on it at a rakish, relaxed angle. “Lazar?” he said. His deep Delta accent stretched my last name out to four or five syllables.
“What?”
“Some of us guys are getting a poker game together, you want in?”
“Suck my dick, Lester.”
“What?” he said. His bland face registered total shock. In that instant, I realized two things, closely related. First, I realized that the animosity that had welled up in me was so fierce, I had assumed he must have sensed it; more than that, I had assumed he must have felt that way himself. How could he not have seen it, like stink waves off a cartoon character? Second, I realized he had no idea. I was just another grunt to him, one of the crew, a weirdo who mostly kept to himself. The fact that he had no idea made me hate him even more.
I rolled out of bed and walked to where he was standing. The look on his face changed, from confusion to a slow, wide grin. He figured I was fucking with him. He was so guileless, so unprepared for what was coming his way, that he didn’t even flinch or move when I punched him in the face.
Now, let me tell you this. I am not much of a fighter, have been in three fights, in fact, my whole life. If any punches were thrown in these fights, they were perfunctory, flailing. But this was a real punch, with real meaning in it. I reached behind me, through the walls of the barracks, through Nha Trang village, up into the ridge overlooking the bay, through a hundred miles of jungle, all the way back to that gulley where the bodies now decomposed in a pit of quicklime. I clutched those bodies in my hand like a blackjack, and I threw the punch with all the force a human body could muster. He fell backward out of the Quonset hut, and landed twitching on sand. The hat flew up in the air and fluttered down several feet away, like a drab bird alighting. I made a beeline to the clinic. I told them I was worried I’d killed Hawkins; I was certain I’d broken my hand—I’d heard the bone snap.
The doctor had just finished examining my hand and gone to find a splint, when Lieutenant Endicott pushed through the light blue dividing curtain. He sat down by the bed on which I lay, in my camos and Donald Duck T-shirt.
“You proud of yourself?”
“Yes.”
Endicott shook his remarkable head and continued to look at me. He was hatchet faced, in the sense that his face was shaped like an ax—it was narrow even at the ears, and the cheekbones angled in to the long blade of his nose, on which you could have sliced tomatoes. His lips were thin at the best of times; the displeased grimace they were now set in had virtually caused them to vanish. His branch of the family was from a small town in Massachusetts called Endurance, and he looked like what he was, one of those severe New England types with icy bloodlines running back to Cotton Mather. I picture him now on a lonely, scenic mountain homestead, performing some impossible pioneer chore like building a well, looking exactly the same as he did then, since he already looked sixty in 1971.
“Normally, we let you idiots punch each other and take care of things yourselves, but Hawkins has a severe concussion. Throwing up and seeing double, thinks Eisenhower is president. How’s your hand?”
I looked down at the Christmas ham in my lap and said, “Fine.”
“Doctor said it’s broken in three different places, if I understood him properly. Joe Frazier puts on gloves first, you know. They wear them to protect their hands, not the other guy’s face. Why’d you do it?”
“I don’t like Hawkins.”
“I don’t like green beans,” said Endicott, “but you don’t see me beating the shit out of them. I’ve never given green beans severe head trauma.” I didn’t say anything, so he went on, “I don’t want to see you disciplined over this, but it’s out of my hands. I’m going to talk to him on your behalf, but if Hawkins decides to make a stink, it’s all on record.”
“Yes, sir.”
“For what it’s worth, between the two of us, Lester Hawkins is a grubby little booger-eater, and I didn’t too much mind seeing him in that bed, looking like a raccoon. But I’ve still got to brig you up for this.”
“Yes, sir.”
“One more thing.” Endicott looked down at his hands. “While you’re there, maybe you can talk to Berlinger on my behalf.”
“I tried. He’s not talking to me.”
“Well, try again,” said Endicott. “He’s putting me in a bad position here. I’m trying to get him to take a Section Eight discharge, and he won’t do it. Psychiatric discharge—it’s not ideal, it’ll follow him around, but it’s not the end of the world. It’s not dishonorable, and it sure as hell isn’t prison. The stubborn son of a bitch is going to force me to bring him in for a court-martial, and I don’t want to do that. But I can’t do nothing.”
“Why not?”
Endicott looked at me for a moment, as though I was an idiot. I was, in fact, an idiot, but what I had just said didn’t feel idiotic. “Lazar, he refused to participate in a military action under direct orders from his commanding officer. And he did so in front of twenty fellow soldiers.”
“I know what he did.”
“A military court might consider that aid and comfort. They might consider it treason and let him hang.”
“Couldn’t it be ‘conscientious objection’?”
“If he was still stateside, sure.”
“Couldn’t you just forget it? He’s got maybe six weeks before his tour is up.”
“Not in this political climate. Not with that mess at Kent State last month. Not with hippies burning Nixon in effigy. A Section Eight is the best I’ve got. Go and talk to him.”
Berlinger couldn’t help but smile when the MP escorted me in, looking up from his whittling, the little soldier now almost complete in his hand: face, combat boots, tiny rifle at attention behind a tiny shoulder. I said, “I punched Hawkins.”
“I heard,” he said. “I heard you just about killed him.”
“You heard?”
“Word travels.”
I sank to the ground, back against the hot wall, holding my throbbing hand. In spite of everything, my main feeling was a sense of relief that Berlinger was speaking to me again. “So, how much longer until they drag you in front of a tribunal?”
“Martin came by, said tomorrow.”
“You think about pleading insanity?”
“Not for one second.”
“You want martyr of the year, or something? Why don’t you just take the Section Eight?”
He stood and I hunched away from him, surprised, as always, by how goddamned big he was. “Endicott tell you to talk to me?”
“Yeah, so what?”
He laughed. “You realize what a joke that is? I should plead insanity, when I was the only sane one there.”
“How’s that?”
“It was a massacre, Lazar, you dumb fuck. That’s how.”
“A massacre. They were VC.”
He snorted. “Oh yeah. That old woman was VC for sure. The kid with the umbrella.”
I could see the pink umbrella spinning around the village before, the torn fabric after. My vision seemed to darken at the edges, and my ears filled with hot water. “They were working with them, the whole village was. Command said, I heard Endicott on the radio.”
“Oh, bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.”
I wiped my face, clearing away the image of the smoldering village. “Do you really want to go to prison over this?”
He crouched and leaned in toward me. Our faces were close as he talked quietly. “No, I don’t. I want to provide honest testimony before a judge and God. I want Endicott to go to prison. Endicott, fucking Westmoreland. Lyndon Baines Cocksucking Johnson.”
“Good luck with that.”
“Gee, thanks.” He backed off a little.
I said, “Look, I don’t know, maybe you’re right. Maybe it was fucked up, maybe it was a bad call. But orders are orders, all the way down. Take a Section Eight, you’ll be back in Kansas in a week. Endicott’s trying to help you here—he doesn’t want to see you court-martialed.”
“Is that what he said? You know why Endicott wants to Section Eight me? He doesn’t want me testifying at a trial. Not that the army will do anything, but he doesn’t want my testimony on record. The word ‘massacre’ might jump out at some bored correspondent reading a transcript.”
“It wasn’t a massacre,” I said. For a few moments we looked at each other in silence. My mind felt like a car with its back tires caught in the mud. “And what about Carbone?”
“What about him?”
“You forget his leg? One of those VC might’ve planted that mine.”
Berlinger laughed again, right in my face, and I felt myself turn red with the knowledge of how far I was reaching. He said, “One might have. All of them didn’t. The village didn’t. And who gives a fuck, anyway? Did you give a fuck about Carbone? I didn’t.”
Outside the window, some jungle bird cycled through an endless three-note song. “Okay, fine. I tried. So what’s your defense gonna be at the court-martial then?”
He picked up the wooden figurine by the tips of its feet and head, and spun it around and around in his huge hands. “Lazar, I ever tell you about my father?”
“No.”
“He was a real piece of work. Got fired from every job he ever had, drank all the time, had an affair with just about every woman in Manhattan. He made my mother miserable, and he was a shitty father to me and my sister. He didn’t hit us or anything, just wasn’t ever there and could have given a shit, you know? I fucking hated him.”
“Yeah, I have a father, too.”
“Listen, so one night after dinner, I must have been around fifteen, I waited up for him to come home from wherever he was. Around midnight, he came in drunk as usual, and I let him have it. Told him what I thought of him. You know, ‘You’ve never been there for us,’ and blah blah. I said he’d never given me a single piece of fatherly advice I could use. He laughed and said, ‘That’s the best advice I could ever have given you, Mitch. Figure things out for yourself, and don’t listen to what anybody tells you. Nobody knows a goddamned thing, at least I don’t walk around pretending I do.’ Berlinger moved to the window and set the figurine down on the sill and for a moment they both looked outside, at the beach and sea in what he must have realized was an absurdly dramatic pose, because he quickly shook his head and returned to the middle of the room, sitting again on the bucket of bean crud. “And he was right, you know? Rip those stripes off Endicott’s sleeve, he doesn’t know a goddamned thing. Nobody knows a thing all the way up the line, bunch of dipshits and yes-men and cowards and hacks, all the way to whoever at command sent down that fucking kill order. And I’ll be goddamned if anyone is going to tell me to take part in a massacre. You wanted to know what my defense is going to be, there it is.”
The next day, Berlinger was led out by the MPs. He nodded back at me and was gone. I noticed that wooden soldier was still where he’d left it, standing on the windowsill, looking out. I had the strange sense, that whole day, that he’d left it as a sort of totem, a miniature version of himself standing guard—although whether over me, or the outside world, I couldn’t tell.
Two days after that—two days of the most intense boredom and dread I’ve felt in my life, short of waiting to see the Eagles on the Hell Freezes Over tour—the Vietnamese MP waved me out. Davis Martin was there, said Hawkins was conscious and wanted to talk. If I was smart, he said, with a look suggesting he thought I probably wasn’t, I would apologize, grovel if need be. I went over to sick bay, a cinder-block cube on the edge of base, and found Hawkins on a metal bed in the corner. He really did look like a raccoon.
“Lazar,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you I’m not pushing for a court-martial.”
“Thanks.”
“Why’d you hit me?”
“It was the hat, I think.”
He seemed to consider this, then said, “Here’s the thing. The doctor said it looks like when I fell, this little itty piece of my skull chipped off inside. Says it’s fine, no big deal, ’cept I can’t be out in combat, that a mortar concussion or something like that could cause it to kill me. They’re sending me home in a week, you believe that?”
“No.”
“So I called you in here to say thanks. I’ve had these nightmares ever since I’ve been in-country, slept like an hour every night for three months. Thought about shooting off my own toe, turns out all I had to do was wear that gook’s lid, and your dumb fucking ass took care of the rest.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
He said, “I bet you are. Hey, one more thing. You hear about your buddy Berlinger?” I guess the blank stare on my face informed him I hadn’t. “He got zapped on the way down to MACV for his tribunal. Tough shit, huh? No good deed, huh?”
“You’re lying.”
“Unh-uh.” He rearranged himself on his bed with a look of satisfaction, like a man who’d just eaten a little more than he should have. “Ask around. He got ambushed on that same convoy line we rode in on when we first got here.”
His big rubbery lips were assembling themselves into the formation of a smile as I retreated from the room. “Poor old Berlinger. I guess maybe it don’t matter much how smart you are.” He turned, grinning horribly now. “Hey, Lazar. I hope you get shot just like your buddy.” I couldn’t get out before hearing him say, “I hope some gook sniper draws a bead on your fat head. Brains for monkey dinner. You hear me? I hope you get cut wide open, you fucking son of a bitch.”
Davis Martin confirmed the rumor at an impromptu meeting in the mess hall during lunch and told us, matter of fact, that Berlinger had been killed in transport to army headquarters in Saigon. An insurgent mortar attack, the wreckage discovered by the supply truck fifteen minutes behind it. Endicott had gone to Saigon, too, to testify at the trial, but he’d been choppered in. Martin told everyone to shut up and observe a moment of silence, bowed his fireplug head, then left the room to its questions, its inane chatter, its guilty feelings of relief that it hadn’t been them, its turkey potpies. No one seemed that bothered, and it occurred to me that most of the guys considered him a traitor.
I walked outside. It was a gorgeous clear day. I went back to the barracks, polished off the warm dregs of a bottle of brandy, and vomited. I sat there for a very long time, sweating, watching the river of faces on the wall, watching Berlinger surface and resurface, live and drown, over and over again. I watched as the other guys came in chattering, laughing, lying down, snoring. I watched in the dark. I didn’t get up in the morning, and I didn’t get up when someone was in the door talking, surrounded by a rectangle of harsh, white light. I didn’t say anything and they went away, and then I was alone again, with the same thoughts circling in my head: It had been a massacre, Endicott had given the order, I had followed it, Berlinger hadn’t, he’d been right, and he’d died for it.
That evening, I approached Martin in the canteen. A ceiling fan overhead seemed to beat in slow motion, and I could see the helicopter touching down, Endicott crouching under the spinning blades, getting the news from some crew-cut hack. I could see his long face, touched with sadness, and with relief at being spared the trial. Martin was drinking a beer and thumbing through a Whole Earth Catalog someone stateside must have sent him.
“Look who it is.” He didn’t look up, kept thumbing through the pages.
“Sir, can I ask you a question?”
“You already did. Just ask.”
“I was wondering if there was any more news about Berlinger.”
“What other news could there be?”
“I mean, is there any word about what happened?”
“Just that the truck got hit.”
“Did they recover the bodies?”
He put down the catalog and gave me a look, his eyebrows screwed up. “How the fuck would I know, Lazar? And why does it matter? Either the mortar got them, or Charlie got them after. What happened to their bodies I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.”
“Is Endicott still in Saigon?”
“Lieutenant will be back next week. Until then, I’m your CO.” He went back to the catalog. “And I don’t give a fuck what kind of miserable state you’re in, Jack, you better be up and on duty tomorrow. Ten-hut.”
Ten-hut. Back at barracks, I loaded my field pack with clothes, water, provisions, sidearm, and a grenade; I ate an MRE and brushed my teeth; I lay in bed and pretended to sleep, and later I walked off base.
Deserting was surprisingly easy. I waited until the barracks were filled with the rattle and hiss of several dozen sleeping men, opened the door, and walked out. The beach side of the base was dark—no one was worried about a surprise attack by the famous NVA Navy—but the moon and the photoluminescence of the water provided enough light to see. I scurried around the edge of the base, almost to the eastern gate and its guard post, and I waited. There wasn’t really much to it—when guard shift changed over, there was usually a little lag as the guy on duty grabbed his sleeping replacement. It wasn’t how things were supposed to work, but not much here worked how it was supposed to. I waited until the guard walked over to the barracks, then ducked through the gate and into the shadows by the perimeter wall. The spotlight swept the road in front of the base, and when it passed, I ran. In what seemed like only a few seconds, I’d dashed across the road, through the open, weedy strip that buffered base from village, past the village itself—a sprawling, chaotic Tinkertown of concrete structures, colonial houses, thatched huts, and lean-tos; everyone, even a mottled terrier sleeping near a crumbling stone wall, dead asleep at three in the morning—and up a steep and sparsely wooded hummock. In a small clearing, I caught my breath and took a last look toward the sea. Spotlights on each side of the base scanned the road and moved up into the middle dark; the airstrip and distant conning tower were lit yellow and orange and red, and the whole thing glowed glamorously in the night like a movie marquee. As I climbed farther, it was the last of this light that led me to the distant, indistinct scar curving through waist-high elephant grass, up the hill, and into the jungle. It was the dirt road we’d walked in on, that Berlinger had been killed on—the road to Saigon.