Solaratov walked by the colonel without noticing him, surrounded by sycophants and bootlickers. He actually reminded Huu Co of a figure that had been pointed out to him back in the late forties, in Paris, another man of glacial isolation whose glare quieted the masses, who nevertheless — or perhaps for that reason, indeed — attracted sycophants in the legions but who paid them no attention at all, whose reputation was like the cloud of blue ice that seemed to surround him. That one was named Sartre.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ietnam leaped up at him as if out of a dream: green, endless, crusted with mountains, voluptuous, violent, ugly, beautiful all at once. The Land of Bad Things. But also, in some way, the Land of Good Things.
Where I went to war, Donny thought. Where I fought with Bob Lee Swagger.
It wasn’t a dream; it never had been. It was the real McCoy, as glimpsed through the dirty plastic of an aircraft dipping toward that destination from Okinawa, where grunts headed to the ’Nam touched down on the way back from R&R. Monkey Mountain loomed ahead on the crazed peninsula above China Beach, and beyond that, like downtown Dayton, the multiservice base and airstrip at Da Nang displayed itself in a checkerboard of buildings, streets and airstrips. Hills 364, 268 and 327 stood like dusty warts beyond it.
The C-130 oriented itself off the coastline, dropped through the low clouds and slid through tropic haze until it touched down at the ghost town that had once been one of the most populous cities of the world, the capital of the Marine country of I Corps, home of the ruling body of the Marine war, the III Marine Amphibious Force.
The palms still blew in the breeze, and around it the mountains still rose in green tropic splendor, but the place was largely empty now, its mainside structure shrunken to a few tempo buildings, an empty or at least Vietnamized metropolis. A few offices were still staffed, a few barracks still lived in, but the techies and the staffs and the experts who’d run the war in Vietnam were home safe except for the odd laggard unit, like the boys of Firebase Dodge City and a few others in the haphazard distribution of late-leavers across I Corps.
The plane finally stopped taxiing. Its four props ended their mission with a turbine-powered whine as their fuel was cut off. The plane shuddered mightily, paused like a giant beast and went still. In seconds the rear door descended, and Donny and the cargo of twenty-odd short-timers and reluctant warriors felt the furnace blast of heat and the stench of burning shit that announced they were back.
He stepped into the radiance, felt it slam him.
“This fuckin’ place will git me yet,” said a black old salt, with a dozen or so stripes on his sleeve, and enough wound ribbons to have bled out a platoon.
“Ain’t you short?” someone asked.
“I ain’t as short as the lance corporal,” he said, winking at Donny, with whom he’d struck up a bantering relationship on the flight over from Kadena Air Force Base on Okie. “If I was as short as him, I’d twist an ankle and head straight for sick bay.”
“He’s a hero,” the other lifer said. “He ain’t going in no sick bay.”
The old black sarge pulled him aside.
“Don’t you be takin’ no bad-ass chances in the bush, you hear?” the man said. “Two and days, Fenn? Shit, don’t git busted up. It ain’t worth it. This shit-hole place ain’t worth a thing if you ain’t a career sucker gittin’ the ticket punched one more time. Don’t let the Man git you.”
“I copy.”
“Now git over to reception and git your grunt ass squared away.”
“Peace,” said Donny, flashing the sign.
The sergeant looked around, saw no one close enough to overhear or overlook, and flashed the sign back.
“Peace and freedom and all that good shit, bro,” he said with a wink.
Donny hit reception with his sea bag, to arrange temporary quarters for the night and the soonest chopper hop back to Dodge City.
He felt … good. A week on Maui with Julie. Oh, Christ, who wouldn’t feel good? Could it have been any better? Swagger had slipped him an envelope as he’d choppered out after debriefing, and he’d been stunned to discover a thousand dollars cash, with instructions to bring none of it back. Why would Swagger do such a thing? It was so generous, so spontaneous — just a strange-ass way of doing things.
It was — well, a young man back from the war with his beautiful young wife, in the paradise of Hawaii, under a hot and purifying sun, flush with money and possibility and so short he could finally, after three years and nine months and days, see the end. See it.
I made it.
I’m out.
She said, “It’s almost too cruel. We could have this and then you could get killed.”
“No. That’s not how it works. The NVA fights twice a year, in the spring and fall. They fought their big spring offensive, and now they’re all stuck up in a siege around An Loc City, fighting the ARVN way down near Saigon. We’re out of it. Nothing will happen in our little area. We’re home free. It’s just a question of getting through the boredom, I swear to you.”
“I don’t think I could stand it.”
“There’s nothing to worry about.”
“You sound like the guy in the war movie who always gets killed.”
“They don’t make war movies anymore,” he said. “Nobody cares about war movies.”
Then they made love again, for what seemed like the 28,000th time. He found new plateaus from which to observe her, new angles into her, new sensations, tastes and ecstacies.
“It doesn’t get much better than this,” he finally said. “God, Hawaii. We’ll come back here on our fiftieth anniver—”
“No!” she said suddenly, as sweaty as he and just as flushed. “Don’t say that. It’s bad luck.”
“Sweetie, I don’t need luck. I have Bob Lee Swagger on my side. He is luck itself.”
That was then, this was now, and Donny stood at the bank of fluorescent-lit desks in a big green room that was reception until a buck sergeant finally noticed him, put down the phone and gestured him to the desk.
Donny sat, handed over his documents.
“Hi, I’m Fenn, 2-5-Hotel, back from R&R on sked. Here’s my paperwork. I need a billet for the night and then a jump out to Dodge City on the 0600.”
“Fenn?” said the sergeant, looking at the order. “All right, let me just check it out; looks okay. You’re one of the guys in the Kham Duc?”
He entered Donny’s return in the logbook, stamped the orders, adroitly forged his captain’s signature and slipped them back to Donny, all in a single motion.
“Yeah, that was me. My NCO pulled in some favors and got me R&R’d out for ten days.”
“You’ve been nominated for the Navy Cross.”
“Jesus.”
“You won’t get it, though. They’re not giving out big medals anymore.”
“Well, I really don’t care.”
“They’ll probably buck it down to a Star.”
“I have a Star.”
“No, a Silver.”
“Wow!”
“Hero. Too bad it don’t count for shit back in the world. In the old days, you could have been a movie star.”
“I just want to make it back in one piece. I can pay to see movies. That’s as close to movies as I want to get.”
“Well, then, I have good news for you, Fenn. You got new orders. Your transfer came through.”
Donny thought he misunderstood.
“What? I mean, there must be — What do you mean, transfer? I didn’t ask for a transfer. I don’t see what—”
“Here it is, Fenn. Your orders were cut three days ago. You been dumped in 1-3-Charlie, and assigned to battalion S-3. That’s us, here in Da Nang; we’re the administrative battalion for what’s left of Marine presence. My guess is, you’ll be running a PT program here in Da Nang for a couple of months before you DEROS out on the big freedom bird. Your days in the bush are over. Congratulations, grunt. You made it, unless you get hit by a truck on the way to the slop chute.”