Watching the film, one felt something very like a moral objection. But the moral objection was overridden. People were more important than termites.
So moral objections were sometimes overridden by larger and more profound concerns. One had to take the long view. It was also true that at a certain point the view might become too long and moral objections appear irrelevant. To view things at such length was an error. The human reference point must be maintained.
Really, Converse thought, I know all about this. He pressed his thumb against the wall and removed a dry particle of reptile spine from its cool surface. It was an error to take the long view in the face of moral objections. And it was an error to insist on moral objections when they were overridden. If one is well grounded in youth, the object of love and sound toilet training, these things become second nature.
In the red field, when the fragmentation bombs were falling out of what appeared to be a perfectly empty blue sky, he had experienced no moral objections at all.
The last moral objection that Converse experienced in the traditional manner had been his reaction to the Great Elephant Zap of the previous year. That winter, the Military Advisory Command, Vietnam, had decided that elephants were enemy agents because the NVA used them to carry things, and there had ensued a scene worthy of the Ramayana. Many-armed, hundred-headed MACV had sent forth steel-bodied flying insects to destroy his enemies, the elephants. All over the country, whooping sweating gunners descended from the cloud cover to stampede the herds and mow them down with 7.62-millimeter machine guns.
The Great Elephant Zap had been too much and had disgusted everyone. Even the chopper crews who remembered the day as one of insane exhilaration had been somewhat appalled. There was a feeling that there were limits.
And as for dope, Converse thought, and addicts — if the world is going to contain elephants pursued by flying men, people are just naturally going to want to get high.
So there, Converse thought, that’s the way it’s done. He had confronted a moral objection and overridden it. He could deal with these matters as well as anyone.
But the vague dissatisfaction remained and it was not loneliness or a moral objection; it was, of course, fear. Fear was extremely important to Converse; morally speaking it was the basis of his life. It was the medium through which he perceived his own soul, the formula through which he could confirm his own existence. I am afraid, Converse reasoned, therefore I am.
_
IT WAS STILL DARK AT TANSONHUT WHEN CONVERSE arrived. Transport was an old Caribou with brown and green camouflage paint. As it fueled, he waited beside the strip with his briefcase in his hand, his anorak folded into a neat square and secured to his belt
Waiting with him were three young men in madras shirts. They were Harvard lawyers from the Military Legal Defense Committee and from their conversation he surmised that they were on their way to My Lat to try the fragging court-martial of a black Marine. They were Movement people; they had Movement sideburns and Movement voices. Converse kept away from them although they did not seem at all unlucky.
The Caribou took off at first light. When it was airborne, Converse strapped his briefcase to the steel seat beside him and, through the hatch, watched the batteries deliver their morning rounds to the greening horizon. As the sky lightened, dark formations of bloated Dragon gunships spread out between the shells’ illuminated arc and the morning star, coming home from Snuol and the Line.
There was too much noise for anyone to speak and be heard. Converse went to sleep.
When he awoke, the sun was hot in his eyes and he looked down through the after cargo door to see the plane’s shadow running over pale green ocean. They were about two hundred yards offshore. There was a white sand beach lined with coconut palms and behind the beach tin roofs ablaze with the sky’s reflected light.
My Lat was a cluster of warped metal; the scarlet flame trees rose among its rooftops like bright weeds among tin cans. Beside the harbor were the tiled buildings of the old French fort which served as the base headquarters. At the town center were two low church spires of oxidized copper surmounted by twin crosses.
On the port side, Converse could see the ships lying in the roadways — slate gray AKAs and AKs spiky with A-frames and winches. In the center of the line, guarded from amphibious sappers by two patrol boats, was the Kora Sea. The Skyhawks on its flight deck were fast under tarpaulin.
The Caribou came in abruptly, clanking down a runway of perforated steel and halting among sandbags in a storm of white dust. Converse stepped out into a hot wind laced with stinging sand. There was no one to meet them. He and the lawyers made their way past the unmanned emplacements in the direction of some colorless plywood buildings with numbers stenciled on them.
The section of the base where they had landed was like a city of the dead; there was not a soul to be seen. The ground under their feet was gravel and crushed seashell, barren as if it had been sown with salt. Converse had brought no hat with him and by the time he found the public affairs office his hair felt like hot wire.
Inside he found a sleepy yeoman and a cooler dispensing Stateside water. He drank a good deal of it. The yeoman informed him that the public information officer was also the base first lieutenant and had important business elsewhere. He had not been seen for a week. The duty journalist was at luncheon.
Converse sat down on a runner’s bench to read Time magazine. The office smelled of floor wax and stamp pads, odors of the American presence.
Within half an hour Journalist First Class Mac Lean arrived and introduced himself. Journalist First Class Mac Lean was a small round-bellied man wearing parts of a Sea-bee uniform with a forty-five holstered on his guard belt. His arms were freckled and thickly tattooed; he had a pink boozer’s face adorned with a sinister goatee and wrap-around sunglasses. It seemed to Converse that they had met before, in a bar near Santa Monica Beach. But then Mac Lean had been wearing sandals and carrying bongo drums.
“You wanna see the beach?” Mac Lean asked. “You gotta see the beach. It’s the best in the country.”
Converse had come to associate Vietnamese beaches with leprosy because of the beggars at Cap St. Jacques; he declined with grace. Instead of going to the beach, they went to sick bay, where Converse obtained his malaria pills and had his temperature taken. It was just over a hundred.
As the afternoon progressed, it became apparent to Con verse that the PIO was utterly uninterested in his existence so that there would be no necessity for the tiresome busi ness of pursuing a non-story for appearance’s sake. However, it was difficult to detach from Mac Lean, who hungered for news of the Great World.
For what seemed to Converse a very long time, they chatted of Music, Literature, Film, and the pleasures of California. Mac Lean showed Converse current copies of the Gulf Gazette, of which he was the editor.
“I try to keep it hip,” he explained.
He also showed Converse the file cabinet in which he kept his pornography collection and the movie film can that was loaded with Laotian Red. Converse promised to come back the next day and smoke it with him. As he went out, Mac Lean gave him the peace sign.
Heat lightning was breaking outside and there was a breeze from the ocean that was good for the soul. He walked past the helicopter pad and along a sandy road that led toward the church spires. Far off to his right were the low gray buildings of the wharf area, to his left thick stands of trees beyond the wire fencing. The ground within the compound was the color of ashes and looked as barren.