“I am not a rear-echelon dipshit,” I said. “I don’t want any trouble, but people like him do not own this war.”
“Will you maybe let me save your ass, Sergeant?” he whispered. “Major Bachelor hasn’t been anywhere near white men in three years, and he’s having a little trouble readjusting. Compared to him, we’re all rear-echelon dipshits.”
I looked at his tattered shirt. “Are you his babysitter, Captain?”
He gave me an exasperated look, and glanced over his shoulder at the Major. “Major, put down your damn weapon. The sergeant is a combat soldier. He is on his way back to camp. ”
I don’t care what he is, the Major said in Vietnamese.
The Captain began pulling me toward the door, keeping his body between me and the other table. I motioned for Mike to come out with me.
“Don’t worry, the Major won’t shoot him, Major Bachelor loves the Yards,” the Captain said. He gave me an impatient glance because I had refused to move at his pace. Then I saw him notice my pupils. “God damn,” he said, and then he stopped moving altogether and said “God damn” again, but in a different tone of voice.
I started laughing.
“Oh, this is—” He shook his head. “This is really—”
“Where have you been?” I asked him.
John Ransom turned to the table. “Hey, I know this guy. He’s an old football friend of mine.”
Major Bachelor shrugged and put the .45 back on the table. His eyelids had nearly closed. “I don’t care about football,” he said, but he kept his hand off the weapon.
“Buy the sergeant a drink,” said the haggard officer.
“Buy the fucking sergeant a drink,” the Major chimed in.
John Ransom quickly moved to the bar and reached for a glass, which the confused Mike put into his hand. Ransom went through the tables, filled his glass and mine, and carried both back to join me.
We watched the Major’s head slip down by notches toward his chest. When his chin finally reached the unbuttoned top of his ruined shirt, Ransom said, “All right, Bob,” and the other man slid the .45 out from under the Major’s hand. He pushed it beneath his belt.
“The man is out,” Bob said.
Ransom turned back to me. “He was up three days straight with us, God knows how long before that.” Ransom did not have to specify who he was. “Bob and I got some sleep, trading off, but he just kept on talking.” He fell into one of the chairs at my table and tilted his glass to his mouth. I sat down beside him.
For a moment no one in the bar spoke. The line of light from the open space across the windows had already left the mirror, and was now approaching the place on the wall that meant it would soon disappear. Mike lifted the cover from one of the lamps and began trimming the wick.
“How come you’re always fucked up when I see you?”
“You have to ask?”
He smiled. He looked very different from when I had seen him preparing to give a sales pitch to Senator Burrman at Camp White Star. His body had thickened and hardened, and his eyes had retreated far back into his head. He seemed to me to have moved a long step nearer the goal I had always seen in him than when he had given me the zealot’s word about stopping the spread of Communism. This man had taken in more of the war, and that much more of the war was inside him now.
“I got you off graves registration at White Star, didn’t I?”
I agreed that he had.
“What did you call it, the body squad? It wasn’t even a real graves registration unit, was it?” He smiled and shook his head. “I took care of your Captain McCue, too—he was using it as a kind of dumping ground. I don’t know how he got away with it as long as he did. The only one with any training was that sergeant, what’s his name. Italian.”
“DeMaestro.”
Ransom nodded. “The whole operation was going off the rails.” Mike lit a big kitchen match and touched it to the wick of the kerosene lamp. “I heard some things—” He slumped against the wall and swallowed whiskey. I wondered if he had heard about Captain Havens. He closed his eyes. “Some crazy stuff went on back there.”
I asked if he was still stationed in the highlands up around the Laotian border. He almost sighed when he shook his head.
“You’re not with the tribesmen anymore? What were they, Khatu?”
He opened his eyes. “You have a good memory. No, I’m not there anymore.” He considered saying more, but decided not to. He had failed himself. “I’m kind of on hold until they send me up around Khe Sahn. It’ll be better up there—the Bru are tremendous. But right now, all I want to do is take a bath and get into bed. Any bed. Actually, I’d settle for a dry level place on the ground.”
“Where did you come from now?”
“Incountry.” His face creased and he showed his teeth. The effect was so unsettling that I did not immediately realize that he was smiling. “Way incountry. We had to get the Major out.”
“Looks more like you had to pull him out, like a tooth.”
My ignorance made him sit up straight. “You mean you never heard of him? Franklin Bachelor?”
And then I thought I had, that someone had mentioned him to me a long time ago.
“In the bush for years. Bachelor did stuff that ordinary people don’t even dream of—he’s a legend.”
A legend, I thought. Like the Green Berets Ransom had mentioned a lifetime ago at White Star.
“Ran what amounted to a private army, did a lot of good work in Darlac Province. He was out there on his own. The man was a hero. That’s straight. Bachelor got to places we couldn’t even get close to—he got inside an NVA encampment, you hear me, inside the encampment and silently killed about an entire division.”
Of all the people in the world at this minute, I remembered, the only ones he did not detest were already dead. I thought I must have heard it wrong.
“He was absorbed right into Rhade life,” Ransom said. I could hear the awe in his voice. “The man even got married. Rhade ceremony. His wife went with him on missions. I hear she was beautiful.”
Then I knew where I had heard of Franklin Bachelor before. He had been a captain when Ratman and his platoon had run into him after a private named Bobby Swett had been blown to pieces on a trail in Darlac Province. Ratman had thought his wife was a black-haired angel.
And then I knew whose skull lay wound in rope in the back seat of the jeep.
“I did hear of him,” I said. “I knew someone who met him. The Rhade woman, too. ”
“His wife,” Ransom said.
I asked him where they were taking Bachelor.
“We’re stopping overnight at Crandall for some rest. Then we hop to Tan Son Nhut and bring him back to the States—Langley. I thought we might have to strap him down, but I guess we’ll just keep pouring whiskey into him.”
“He’s going to want his gun back.”
“Maybe I’ll give it to him.” His look told me what he thought Major Bachelor would do with his .45, if he was left alone with it long enough. “He’s in for a rough time at Langley. There’ll be some heat.”
“Why Langley?”
‘Don’t ask. But don’t be naive, either. Don’t you think they’re . . ."He would not finish that sentence. “Why do you think we had to bring him out in the first place?”
“Because something went wrong.”
“Oh, everything went wrong. Bachelor went totally out of control. He had his own war. Ran a lot of sidelines, some of which were supposed to be under shall we say tighter controls?”
He had lost me.
Ventures into Laos. Business trips to Cambodia. Sometimes he wound up in control of airfields Air America was using, and that meant he was in control of the cargo. ”