So I blamed Nancy as well, blamed her for not being here tonight but being instead in Eau Fraiche with her sister Clara, blamed her besides for being not as female as she might have been, even though the doctor had said there was nothing wrong with either of us (I knew there was nothing wrong with me, but I could not believe there was nothing wrong with her), told myself that somehow her inability to conceive a child made her less womanly, while knowing of course this was not true, and suspecting that perhaps there were passions in her I preferred not to explore lest she become in my mind the equivalent of a whore, neither a mother (which she could not become, it seemed) nor a respected wife. The deception having failed, the guilt and the shame persisting, I allowed the excitement to take complete control, allowed Rosie’s humming to envelop me, allowed her hand to work its way toward my fly, allowed her fingers to unbutton me and to enclose me while we drove slowly toward South Lawndale and Allen snored in the back seat.
And then we had a conversation that seemed to me representative of the precarious balance we were all trying to maintain between the simplicity we had known before the war and the sophistication rapidly engulfing us. With her hand curled around me, with her husband drunk and unconscious on the back seat of the automobile, Rosie Garrett casually asked, “How’s Nancy’s sister?”
“Still in bed,” I said, “but coming along.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Oh, just a bad cold is all. But she’s been running a fever.”
“She’s got how many children?”
“Two.”
“It’s terrible when the woman of the house comes down with something,” Rosie said.
“Especially when she’s married to someone like Ed.”
“What’s the matter with Ed?”
“Can’t stand anybody being sick. Gets absolutely furious, treats Clara like a dog just when she needs him most.”
“When’s Nancy coming back?”
“Wednesday, I think. Or Thursday. It depends on how Clara’s doing.”
“Will you come see me Monday night?”
“What?”
“Monday night. Allen’s staying late in Joliet.”
“I... don’t know, Rosie. Maybe we’d just better forget what happened.”
“No,” she said. “You’ll come see me.”
September
There were five rows of protective barbed wire around the base camp at Cu Chi, and the sandbagged bunkers were spaced at seventy-five-yard intervals inside the perimeter, with one man in each bunker during the daylight hours, and three at night. During the daytime, the line troops manned the perimeter. But between six p. m. and six a. m., two men from the rear echelon joined a single combat-experienced soldier in the bunker, and it was then that things got a little tense. Rear-echelon troops were inclined to shoot at anything that moved, and orders had come down from above that no one was to fire a weapon without permission from the sergeant or officer of the guard in the CP bunker, it being reasoned that the folks out there could be a returning friendly patrol as easily as some Vietcong infantrymen setting up a mortar. So whereas there were plenty of weapons in each bunker — M-60s and M-50s, grenade launchers, M-79s, Claymore mines, and of course our own pieces, the M-16s — we weren’t allowed to use them before we checked upstairs. It was a very comical war, all right.
The base camp at Cu Chi looked like a postage stamp from the air. Visualize those five rows of tangled barbed wire as the perforated edges of the stamp; and inside that the evenly spaced bunkers as the stamp’s border; and moving toward the center, the line-troop hootches with their wooden frames and screened upper halves and tented roofs as a second khaki-colored inner border; and then the body of the stamp itself, a geometric abstract with battalion headquarters to the southeast, and the mile-long air strip running perpendicularly off-center, and to the southwest the rear echelon hootches, a base within a base with its own mess hall and motor pool, its own orderly room and EM’s Club, its own showers and latrines and chapel — for those Remfs who had anything to pray about.
My own hootch was just inside the perimeter to the northwest, and it had a metal roof, which meant that it was very popular after dark, when all us guys would climb up onto it to watch the Night Show — the pyrotechnic display of the Hueys tiring tracer rounds, or of the mortars (ours and the V.C.’s) chewing up the countryside. Fresh back from the boonies, there was comfort in watching the action from a safe distance; it beat Batman all to hell. Some of the rear echelon hootches at Cu Chi were as sumptuously equipped as the Waldorf-Astoria, with electric fans, refrigerators, hot plates, lawn chairs, foot lockers (made by the gooks out of discarded tin cans, and sold at the PX) and even television sets. We were out in the boonies more than we were back at the base, however, and our hardback was only sparsely furnished. The only advantage this gave us over the Remfs was that our empty Spartan cells seemed infinitely larger than their crowded Playboy pads, even though they all measured about the same — thirty feet long by fifteen feet wide. There were eight guys in my hootch, including Lloyd Parsons and myself.
Muhammed Ali, a man I enormously admired because he had announced to the world at large, “I don’t have no quarrel with them Vietcongs,” and then had been informed by the Illinois Boxing Commission that his spring title bout with Ernie Terrell was thereby canceled, later learning as well that he was persona non grata in such patriotic centers as Louisville, Pittsburgh, and Bangor, Maine, those guardian cities of America undoubtedly believing that a man who laid it on the line before millions of people each and every time he stepped into a ring was merely a downright yellow-bellied lily-livered coward for protesting his 1-A draft classification; Muhammed Ali, whom the press insisted on calling Cassius Clay despite his repeatedly slated preference for the Muslim name he had adopted; Muhammed Ali might have been surprised and pleased by the comfort in which we lived, exalted besides by the racial breakdown in our hootch, there being five white men and three Negroes present and accounted for, though I doubt he would have appreciated the democracy we experienced out in the boonies, where each of us, black or white, had a fair and equal opportunity of getting killed by them Vietcongs with whom, like Muhammed, many of us had no quarrel.