I saw Tubby sinking fast over the wrong part of the field. I had two chutes out, so I cut one off and dropped over toward him, pulling on the left lines so hard I almost didn’t have a chute at all for a while. I got level with him and he looked over, pointing down. He was doing his arm up and down. Could have been farmers or just curious rubbernecks down in the field, but there were about ten of them grouped up together, holding things. They weren’t shooting, though. I was carrying an experimental gun, me and about ten of my boys. It was a big, light thing; really, it was just a launcher. There were five shells in it, bigger than shotgun shells. If you shot one of them, it was supposed to explode on impact and burn out everything in a twenty-five-yard radius. It was a mean little mother of phosphorus, is what it was. I saw the boys shooting them down into the other side of the field. This stuff would take down a whole tree and you’d chute into a quiet smoking bare area.
I don’t know. I don’t like a group waiting on me when I jump out of a plane. I almost zapped them, but they weren’t throwing anything up. Me and Tubby hit the ground about the same time. They were farmers. I talked to them. They said there were three Cong with them until we were about a hundred feet over. The Cong knew we had the phosphorus shotgun and showed ass, loping out to the woods fifty yards to the north when me and Tubby were coming in.
Tubby took some film of the farmers. All of them had thin chin beards and soft hands because their wives did most of the work. They essentially just lay around and were hung with philosophy, and actually were pretty happy. Nothing had happened around here till we jumped in. These were fresh people. I told them to get everybody out of the huts because we were going to have a thing in the field. It was a crisis point. A huge army of NVA was coming down and they just couldn’t avoid us if they wanted to have any run of the valley five miles south. We were there to harass the front point of the army, whatever it was like.
“We’re here to check their advance,” Tubby told the farmers.
Then we all collected in the woods, five hundred and fifty souls, scared out of mind. What we had going was we knew the NVA general bringing them down was not too bright. He went to the Sorbonne and we had this report from his professor: “Li Dap speaks French very well and had studied Napoleon before he got to me. He knows Robert Lee and the strategy of Jeb Stuart, whose daring circles around an immense army captured his mind. Li Dap wants to be Jeb Stuart. I cannot imagine him in command of more than five hundred troops.”
And what we knew stood up. Li Dap had tried to circle left with twenty thousand and got the hell kicked out of him by idle navy guns sitting outside Gon. He just wasn’t very bright. He had half his army climbing around these bluffs, no artillery or air force with them, and it was New Year’s Eve for our side.
“So we’re here just to kill the edge of their army?” said Tubby.
“That’s what I’m here for, why I’m elected. We kill more C’s than anybody else in the Army.”
“But what if they take a big run at you, all of them?” said Tubby.
“There’ll be lots of cooking.”
We went out in the edge of the woods and I glassed the field. It was almost night. I saw two tanks come out of the other side and our pickets running back. Pock, pock, pock from the tanks. Then you saw this white glare on one tank where somebody on our team had laid on with one of the phosphorus shotguns. It got white and throbbing, like a little star, and the gun wilted off of it. The other tank ran off a gully into a hell of a cow pond. You wouldn’t have known it was that deep. It went underwater over the gun, and they let off the cannon when they went under, raising the water in a spray. It was the silliest looking thing. Some of them got out and a sergeant yelled for me to come up. It was about a quarter mile out there. Tubby got his camera, and we went out with about fifteen troops.
At the edge of the pond, looking into flashlights, two tankmen sat, one tiny, the other about my size. They were wet, and the big guy was mad. Lot of the troops were chortling, etc. It was awfully damned funny, if you didn’t happen to be one of the C-men in the tank.
“Of all the fuck ups. This is truly saddening.” The big guy was saying something like that. I took a flashlight and looked him over. Then I didn’t believe it. I told Tubby to get a shot of the big cursing one. Then they brought them on back. I told the boys to tie up the big one and carry him in.
I sat on the ground, talking to Tubby.
“It’s so quiet. You’d think they’d be shelling us,” he said.
“We’re spread out too good. They don’t have much ammo now. They really galloped down here. That’s the way Li Dap does it. Their side’s got big trouble now. And, Tubby, me and you are famous.”
“Me, what?”
“You took his picture. You can get some more, more arty angles on him tomorrow.”
“Him?”
“It’s Li Dap himself. He was in the tank in the pond.”
“No. Their general?”
“You want me to go prove it?”
We walked over. They had him tied around a tree. His hands were above his head and he was sitting down. I smelled some hash in the air. The guy who was blowing it was a boy from Detroit I really liked, and I hated to come down on him, but I really beat him up. He never got a lick in. I kicked his rump when he was crawling away and some friends picked him up. You can’t have lighting up that shit at night on the ground. Li Dap was watching the fight, still cursing.
“Asshole of the mountains.” He was saying something like that. “Fortune’s ninny.”
“Hi, General. My French isn’t too good. You speak English. Honor us.”
He wouldn’t say anything.
“You have a lot of courage, running out front with the tanks.” There were some snickers in the bush, but I cut them out quick. We had a real romantic here and I didn’t want him laughed at. He wasn’t hearing much, though. About that time two of their rockets flashed into the woods. They went off in the treetops and scattered.
“It was worthy of Patton,” I said. “You had some bad luck. But we’re glad you made it alive.”
“Kiss my ass.”
“You want your hands free? Oliver, get his ropes off the tree.” The guy I beat up cut him off the tree.
“You scared us very deeply. How many tanks do you have over there?”
“Nonsense,” he said.
“What do you have except for a few rockets?”
“I had no credence in the phosphorus gun.”
“Your men saw us use them when we landed.”
“I had no credence.”
“So you just came out to see.”
“I say to them never to fear the machine when the cause is just. To throw oneself past the technology tricks of the monsters and into his soft soul.”
“And there you will win, huh?”
“Of course. It is our country.” He smiled at me. “It’s relative to your war in the nineteenth century. The South had slavery. The North must purge it so that it is a healthy region of our country.”