I thought all the way back to Korea. The mud, bullets, the lousy rations, the bad summer, and worse winter. “I wouldn’t call it hell,” I said.
“No?”
“Not really. It’s very alive and exciting, and it’s fought by young men, and if they are young enough, they are convinced that what they are doing is very important. There’s a hill, say, and the other side has the hill, and your side wants to take it, and you have to help your buddies and support them and you have to knock out the machine guns that are spraying bullets at you, and it’s all very important, taking that hill. It’s worth dying for.”
“All that for a hill.”
“You don’t get the point. It doesn’t really matter if it’s a hill or a swamp or a plastic cesspool. It’s something that seems very important and worth dying for. If you have to die, you might as well go thinking you’re doing it for a good reason. When you look at it that way, it doesn’t matter if you die in combat or in your sleep, at eighteen or seventy-eight. Either way you wind up just as dead.
“But it only works when you’re young. Because when you get older, you realize that there’s nothing worth dying for, and that it doesn’t matter very much whether you take a hill or not, because the world is full of hills, and you are the only you you’ve got.”
I thought of the old man in Tao Dan, riding his own funeral pyre into the mouth of hell for the glory of France. What, really, had he given his life for? For the safety of three strangers, none of whom was likely to do anything to enlarge the French colonial empire. For the glory of Charles de Gaulle, who would probably be at least as horrified as Ho Chi Minh himself at the thought of French reconquest of Indochina.
A wasted death? Hardly. He could have spent a few more years living on dead dreams and sucking marrow from the bones of memory. Instead he had died well, that old man.
I corrected myself. “You don’t have to be young,” I said. “It’s easier when you’re young because then it comes naturally. You can still manage it when you’re old, but then you have to talk yourself into it.”
I drove that tank all night. Tuppence and Dhang had dropped off to sleep muttering something about food and water, neither of which we had with us. We could get along without food, but water would become a problem before very long. I felt more and more like Bogart.
Somewhere between the middle of the night and dawn we lost the road. This could never have happened farther back, with the dense jungle on either side, but as we moved south the jungle gave way to vast stretches of open ground. I suppose we must have entered the demilitarized zone. I’m not too clear on the geography of the region, and even now I don’t know exactly where we were. At any rate, I drove us right off the road without even noticing the difference. By the time I realized what had happened, there was no way to correct the error. The tank had a compass, so I kept us on a southerly course and hoped it would take us where we wanted to go. By the time the sky lightened, we were far out of sight of the road, so we kept on going south. When Tuppence woke up and asked where we were, I told her we were in Asia, and she told me nobody likes a smartass.
We were still in Asia when the plane attacked us.
We were still in the open, too, surrounded by vast reaches of grassland on either side. We were the only tank around, and he was the only plane, and unfortunately he was one of ours, and the tank was one of theirs. I didn’t even see him until he started shooting at us. Then a rocket went off a few yards to our left, and we could feel the impact inside the tank.
“You idiot,” I screamed, “we’re on your side!”
“Maybe if you got out and waved to him-”
“I don’t think so,” I said. I tracked him – he was banking now, preparing for another run. I looked at Dhang. It was too much for him, and he was cowering in one corner like a rat driven mad in an insoluble maze. The jungle was one thing, but riding in the belly of an iron monster while an iron bird shot at you, that was too much. He didn’t want to have anything to do with it.
Neither did I. I had closed the hatch, of course, and now I watched the plane through the tank’s sights. He was ready again. He came at us lower this time and fired off two rockets in turn. They were both wide on the left.
“He’s a lousy shot,” I said. “He’s really terrible. We’re barely a moving target, and he has all the room in the world to move around in. He should have blown us to hell by now.”
Tuppence was shaking.
“That’s a small consolation,” I went on, “but it’s something. If all our fliers are this bad, it’s amazing we’re holding our own. Maybe he’ll run out of rockets.”
“Maybe we’ll run out of tanks.”
He showed no sign of running out of rockets. His next pass brought him even lower, and I cooperated brilliantly by stalling the tank. This time he scored a near miss, and the tank rocked with the force of the explosion.
“He’s getting warmer. Evan-”
“What?”
“Can’t this thing shoot back?”
I looked up. There was a sort of steering wheel. I turned it, and our gun moved. There was a little door that you opened to insert a shell, and behind me on the floor there were shells. I snapped a command, and Dhang handed me a shell.
“They’re probably duds,” I said. “And I don’t really know how to work this thing.”
“We have to do something.”
I loaded the shell, closed the little door, and searched the control panel for a gadget that would fire the thing. How the hell was I supposed to manipulate a tank gun to pick a plane out of the air? I had enough trouble manipulating a tank.
“Hey, wait a minute,” I said. “I can’t shoot him down.”
“What’s wrong?”
“He’s an American,” I said. “That’s one of our guys up there!”
“This is us down here,” Tuppence said.
He came on again, undaunted, diving straight for us. I spun the little wheel and found the gun sights. I zeroed in on him as he swept down on us. He fired his rockets, and I fired the tank gun, and we rocked wildly with the force of all this explosive power, and he missed completely and so did we.
Dhang handed me another shell. “I don’t like this,” I said.
“Maybe you can just wing him, baby.”
“Sure.”
“Or maybe he’ll give up and go home.”
I loaded the shell, put my eye to the sight, and started tracking him. I wondered if he were the same idiot who had put a few hundred holes in our poor little dugout. That one hadn’t given up easily, either. At least now we could shoot back.
He began his run again, and I had the damnedest feeling that this was the last chance we were going to get. He was coming from our right front. I swung the gun at him and kept it on him, and I fired before he did.
“You hit him!”
The tail of the plane seemed to disintegrate. Then the plastic canopy popped open, and the pilot ejected, seat and all. He sailed high into the air, as if shot from a cannon. His parachute opened, and he floated gracefully down to earth.
I watched him land, roll, and come up on his feet. I felt a lot better then. It had been a kill or be killed situation, certainly, but that didn’t change the fact that I had felt less than delighted at the thought of knocking American planes out of the sky. I started the engine, and the tank headed for him.
“He’ll have flares,” I said. “With any luck at all, somebody saw him go down. They’ll send a helicopter for him, and we can hitch a ride on it.”
“He may not be happy to see us.”
“He’ll be happy when he finds out we’re us. Right now he’s getting ready to surrender to a North Vietnamese tank.”
Except he wasn’t. We had a good look at him as we drew closer. He was a very young Negro airman with a very valiant look on his face, and he had one hand on his hip while he used the other to point a pistol at our tank.