“No, see, I don’t—”
“You go on over to battalion, check in with the duty NCO and he’ll get you squared away, show you your new quarters. You’re in luck. You won’t believe this. We closed down our barracks and moved into some the Air Force vacated, ’cause they were closer to the airstrip. Air-conditioning, Fenn. Air-conditioning!”
Donny just looked at him, as if the comment made no sense.
“Fenn, this is a milk run. You got it made in the shade. It’s a number-one job. You’ll be working for Gunny Bannister, a good man. Enjoy.”
“I don’t want a transfer,” Donny said.
The sergeant looked up at him. He was a mild, patient man, sandy blond hair, professional-bureaucrat type of REMF, the sort of sandy-dry man who always makes the machine work cleanly.
He smiled dryly.
“Fenn,” he explained, “the Marine Corps really doesn’t care if you want a transfer or not. In its infinite military wisdom, it has decreed that you will teach a PT class to lard-ass rear-echelon motherfuckers like me until you go home. You won’t even see any more Vietnamese. You will sleep in an air-conditioned building, take a shower twice a day, wear your tropicals pressed, salute every shitbird officer that walks no matter how stupid, not work very hard, stay very drunk or high and have an excellent time. You’ll take beaucoup three-day weekends at China Beach. Those are your orders. They are better orders than some poor grunt’s stuck out on the DMZ or Hill 553, but they are your orders, nevertheless, and that is the name of that tune. Clear, Fenn?”
Donny took a deep breath.
“Where does this come from?”
“It comes straight from the top. Your CO and your NCOIC signed off on it.”
“No, who started it? Come on, I have to know.”
The sergeant looked at him.
“I have to know. I was Sierra-Bravo-Four. Sniper team. I don’t want to lose that job. It’s the best job there is.”
“Son, any job the Marine Corps gives you is the best job.”
“But you could find out? You could check. You could see where it comes from. I mean, it is unusual that a guy with bush time left suddenly gets rotated out of his firebase slot and stowed in some make-work pussy job, isn’t it, Sergeant?”
The sergeant sighed deeply, then picked up the phone.
He schmoozed with whomever was on the other end of the line, waited a bit, schmoozed some more, and finally nodded, thanked his co-conspirator and hung up.
“Swagger, that’s your NCO?”
“Yes.”
“Swagger choppered in here last week and went to see the CO. Not battalion but higher, the FMF PAC CO, the man with three stars on his collar. Your orders were cut the next day. He wants you out of there. Swagger don’t want you humping the bush with him no more.”
onny checked in with the PFC on duty at 1-3-Charlie, got a bunk and a locker in the old Air Force barracks, which were more like a college dormitory, and spent an hour getting stowed away. Looking out the window, he could not see a single palm tree: just an ocean of tarmac, buildings, offices. It could have been Henderson Hall, back in Arlington, or Cameron Station, the multiservice PX out at Bailey’s Crossroads. No yellow people could be seen: just Americans doing their jobs.
Then he went to storage to pick up his stowed 782 gear and boonie duds, and lugged the sea bag to supply to return it, but learned supply was already closed for the day, so he lugged the stuff back to his locker. He checked back in at company headquarters to meet his new gunny and the CO; neither man could be found — both had gone back to quarters early. He went by the S-3 office — operations and training — to look for Bannister, the PT NCO, and found that office locked too, and Bannister long since retreated to the staff NCO club. He went back to the barracks, where some other kids were getting ready to go to the movies — Patton, already two years old, was the picture — and then to the 1-2-3 Club for a night of dowsing their sorrows in cheap PX Budweiser. They seemed like nice young guys and they clearly knew who Donny was and were hungry to get close to him, but he said no, for reasons he himself did not quite understand.
He was tired. He climbed into the rack early, pulling clean, newly issued sheets around him, feeling the springiness of the cot beneath. The air conditioner churned with a low hum, pumping out gallons of dry, cold air. Donny shivered, pulled the sheets closer about him.
There were no alerts that night, no incoming. There hadn’t been incoming in months. At 0100 he was awakened by the drunken kids returning from the 1-2-3 Club. But when he stirred, they quieted down fast.
Donny lay in the dark as the others slipped in, listening to the roar of the air conditioner.
I have it made, he told himself.
I am out of here.
I am the original DEROS kid.
I am made in the shade, I am the milk-run boy.
He dreamed of Pima County, of Julie, of an ordered, becalmed and rational life. He dreamed of love and duty. He dreamed of sex; he dreamed of children and the good life all Americans have an absolute right to if they work hard enough for it.
At 0-dark-30, he arose quietly, showered in the dark, pulled on his bush utilities and gathered up his 782 gear and headed out to the chopper strip. It was a long walk in the predawn. Above him, mute piles and piles of stars were humped up tall and deep like a mountain range. Now and then, from somewhere in this dark land, came the far-off, artificial sound of gunfire. Once some flares lit the horizon. Somewhere something exploded.
The choppers were warming up. He ducked into the operations shack, chatted with another lance corporal, then jogged to the Marine-green Huey, its rotors already whirring on the tarmac. He leaned in, and the crew chief looked at him.
“This is Whiskey-Romeo-Fourteen?”
“That’s us.”
“You’re the bus to Dodge City?”
“Yeah. You’re Fenn, right? We took you outta here two weeks back. Great job at Kham Duc, Fenn.”
“Can you hump me back to the City? It’s time to go home.”
“Climb aboard, son. We are homeward bound.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
ou will crawl all night,” Huu Co explained to the Russian. “If you do not make it, they will see you in the morning and kill you.”
If he expected the man to react, once again, he was wrong. The Russian responded to nothing. He seemed, in some respects, hardly human. Or at least he had no need for some of the things humans needed: rest, community, conversation, humanity even. He never spoke. He appeared phlegmatic to the point of being almost vegetable. Yet at the same time he never complained, he would not wear out, he applied no formal sense of will against Huu Co and the elite commandos of the 45th Sapper Battalion on their long Journey of Ten Thousand Miles, down the trail from the North. He never showed fear, longing, thirst, discomfort, humor, anger or compassion. He seemed not to notice much and hardly ever talked, and then only in grunts.
He was squat, isolated, perhaps desolated. In his army, Huu Co’s heroes were designated “Brother Ten” when they distinguished themselves by killing ten Americans: this man, Huu Co realized, was Brother Five Hundred, or some such number. He had no ideology, no enthusiasms; he simply was. Solaratov: solitary. The lone man. It suited him well.
The Russian looked across the fifteen hundred yards of flattened land to the Marine base the enemy called Dodge City, studying it. There was no approach, no visible approach, except on one’s belly, the long, long way.