He replied with a Cheshire cat grin that gave me the shivers, it was so out of character for the wooden-faced Bierce.
“What the hell’s that mean, man?”
He jabbed a finger toward the hall.
“The colonel, Joe.
Your ass and a lawnmower.”
I could take a hint. I knocked, entered, and reported to the colonel, coming smartly to attention, heels locked, salute affixed to my forehead.
Jut-jawed, gray-eyed Colonel Jake Lanyard was a recruiting poster. Imagine Clint Eastwood playing John Wayne in a movie. Lean and muscular, the colonel had more hair on his arms than I had on my entire body. Lanyard’s
West Point
ring was big enough to work as brass knuckles. His boots and insignia were blinding, and you could cut a mess hall steak with the creases in his fatigues. He was the 803rd Liaison Detachment’s one true soldier, as much an alien in this goofy outfit as Ziggy’s Martians.
The colonel didn’t initially acknowledge me, and his air conditioner was doing zilch but make a hellacious racket. The GE was gone, replaced by a hand-me-down hunk of junk.
The colonel had my personnel jacket on his desk. I was amazed that he had room for it. There were stacks of papers covering two-thirds of it, all with TOP SECRET CRYPTO cover sheets. They were as neat as could be, too, every stack parallel to or at right angles to the others. They could be pieces in a Pentagon war game. As nosy as I was, I’d never dare snoop when he was out. I pictured a Bouncing Betty popping up if I lifted a cover sheet. I noticed that his walls were bare.
Colonel Lanyard seldom left his desk unless to go to the latrine or to General Whipple’s office or to wherever he went on his overnight trips. I almost piped up and asked if he’d heard about the coup, but I knew he hadn’t. Here at the 803rd, the officers were too busy keeping current on events to know what was going on.
He held my jacket up and let it
drop,
making a face as if he’d stepped in something.
“You and your friend, how did you two duds ever get into this man’s army?”
“Judge Bergstrom made Private Zbitgysz enlist, sir. It was that or the pokey. As for myself, I was driven by an intense hatred of communist tyranny and all it stands for. I had to do my share.”
“You are a draftee, not an enlistee, trooper.”
“Yes, sir, but the result’s the same.”
The colonel ignored my guano and said, “Soldier, you do realize that American fighting units are being deployed in-country. Victor Charles is on the run, his tail between his yellow legs. We are playing a crucial part in fulfilling that mission. The 803rd Liaison Detachment is a can-do outfit.”
I didn’t get what he was getting at. “Sir, yes sir.”
“There are advocates of bombing North Vietnam back into the Stone Age.”
Colonel Lanyard, too?
I desperately wanted to kiss his ass, but I held my tongue. It’d be unwise to guess and offer an opinion that differed from his.
“Not I.”
“Nor I, sir.”
“Foot soldiers win and lose wars, Private, and we’re turning the situation around with the buildup. It’s phasing into a mopping-up operation for us and our South Vietnamese allies.”
The ARVN staged a coup to celebrate their mopping up of Victor Charles and the boys from Hanoi?
“Yes sir.”
“Private Joe, are you and Private Zbitgysz bored with the Saigon gravy train?”
A question as loaded as the aforementioned Bouncing Betty.
“No sir,” I said. “Sir, we are not, sir.”
“Are you bored with your soft duty?”
“No sir.”
He opened my file. “I see Captain Papersmith’s notes. He’s having your MOSs changed to clerk typist.”
“Yes sir.”
“How’s your typing speed?”
“Improving every single day, sir.”
He looked at me suspiciously. “If you’re restless, I can reclassify your MOS to eleven-bravo-ten. Eleven-bravo is Light Weapons Infantrymen. I can send you into the bush to seek out and kill guerrillas. Unless they seek out and kill you first.”
“No sir. Yes sir.”
Air-conditioning or not, it wasn’t a degree colder in here than outside. I was sweating like a racehorse. The colonel was dry as a bone. I’d never seen the colonel perspire. The war would end in ten minutes flat if they put Colonel Lanyard in charge. Team him with Terry Lee, and Ho Chi Minh would be on his knees begging for mercy.
“We have an ample number of the enemy to kill. There is no shortage.”
“Yes sir.”
“There are plenty to go around, for genuine soldiers and clerk-typists alike. I can cut the orders, put you and Zbitgysz on a chopper, and have you in the Delta in thirty minutes.”
“Yes sir.”
“Captain Papersmith informs me that you men occasionally demonstrate resourcefulness. Correct?”
“If I do say so myself, sir, Private Zbitgysz and I are outstanding on special assignments.”
“You may have some can-do in you after all.”
I didn’t like where this was headed, but I had to keep giving can-do answers or my ass
was
grass.
“Yes.
Sir.
Whatever it is you need, we can can-do for you, sir.”
“I ordered you in here alone because you have soldierly potential, Private Joe. Despite appearances, I’m confident you do. Soldierly bearing and military performance are not beyond your capability.”
That was news to me. I was more insulted than flattered. “Thank you, sir. I appreciate your confidence in me. I am truly trying to be a good soldier, sir.”
The colonel shuffled paper stacks and cocked a thumb at the air conditioner. “I requisitioned a replacement unit. Put out a tracer and see how the request is moving through channels. I expect the mission accomplished by the end of the day.”
“Sir, the end of the ―”
“That is all.”
I controlled my mouth and didn’t ask how come he didn’t just go across the street to the Annex and take his pick. I whipped my smartest salute on him. The colonel returned it with his eyes on his paperwork so they wouldn’t have to be on mine. That the colonel was also corrupt affirmed my faith in the human race. It was heartwarming.
I tiptoed to General Whipple’s office-terrarium. His door was cracked. He was in, and so was the GE, in his window, humming a sweet tune. Even in the hallway you could feel a pleasant autumn breeze.
The general didn’t see me. He was busy watering his plants that lined the shelves and hung from the ceiling in baskets, as dense as a nursery, growing denser by the day, nearly impenetrable. Saigon’s atmosphere was a natural humidifier, and that delighted him. He was watering his vegetation from an olive-drab watering can that had a silver brigadier general’s star painted on each side. He’d been given it as a going-away present by his botanical research colleagues before he shipped out.
Smiling and watering, that’s all I’d ever seen the general do. Former Supply Sergeant Rubicon once told us that the general was the smartest man he ever knew and that he’d gone to college for upwards of ten years and then taught in colleges until he was summoned from his National Guard unit to active duty. I guess that’s why he was in charge of writing reports when he wasn’t busy smiling and watering his plants.
On the rare occasion that General Whipple addressed his men, he was given to plant-animal comparison, frequently reaching into metaphor and aphorisms. He believed that troops and plants craved a natural photosynthesis. While our need for oxygen and carbon dioxide were the opposite, plant and man both required water and sun. We required nourishment and energy to thrive and to be productive organisms.
General Whipple spent sixty hours a week in his office, minimum. By order of General Westmoreland, everyone at MACV Headquarters worked at least sixty hours a week, even if it meant creating busywork to maintain sanity.
The top brass thought sixty hours per week was a sound military tactic. Seeing the
oil in the offices, Vietcong infiltrators would be so impressed by our resolve, they’d conclude it was fruitless to resist.
By order of General Whipple, we worked sixty hours, too.
Theoretically.
Ziggy and I tended to be a tad slippery in that area. Our working hours were inversely proportional to our amount of supervision. Our new special assignment duties made malingering less a challenge than a sacred responsibility.
General Whipple didn’t look like a general. He was slender and bespectacled. He looked like a dad in a TV series. You know, those shows where the kids screw up, not doing their homework, a serious offense along those lines, and the dad sits them down at the end and gives them a mild-mannered lecture and the kids promise to straighten up, and sure enough, they do.
General Whipple made me wonder how I’d’ve turned out if I’d had my dad who was killed at Inchon or had General Whipple for a stepdad rather than my dildo of a stepdad, who wasn’t there even when he was there.
When I walked out to the orderly room, Ziggy was paging through a little red book with gold lettering and a gold star on the cover. He was moving his lips.
“What’ve you got, Zig?”
“Don’t know exactly. ‘All reactionaries are paper tigers.’ What’s that mean, Joey?”
He handed me the book. It was
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung
, his infamous Little Red Book, with which Chairman Mao brainwashed a billion Chinese Reds. I pushed Ziggy into a corner, away from prying eyes and ears. It was like winching an Olds 98 out of a ditch, but my adrenaline was pumping.
“Zig, are you out of your gourd?” I sputtered in his ear. “The colonel sees this, he’ll have us shot. No, wait, he’ll do it himself. Where the hell’d you get it?”
“The oddballs were getting off the bus, going in the Annex. It fell out of one of their pockets.”
On the inside flap, Ralph Buffet, one of the idiot-genius warrant officers, had written his name.
Proof of ownership, proof of misdemeanor treason.
Those oddballs and their zero common sense.
I hurried outside to dump it into a sewer grate.
Then I had one of my self-destructive inspirations.
I stuffed it in a pocket instead.
MILITARY TRAFFIC was thinning. A smattering of taxis and cyclos tentatively ventured out. South Vietnamese Air Force (VNAF) airplanes were circling and swooping like dragonflies. They were propeller planes, obsolete hand-me-downs from some past war of ours. There were itchy trigger fingers by air and by land, and who knows what was happening on the
Saigon
River
.
Might be the VNAF was supporting the coup.
Or supporting the generals who used to be in charge.
Or staging a coup
of their own
. Or the coup had simply fizzled out, political attention spans in this country being what they were.
For my Dragon Lady’s sake more than mine, I wished the last. Marauding troops would take one look at her and judge her politically incorrect, an unlovely phrase from the future. Summary punishment would be gang rape.
Captain Papersmith remained out. We took the colonel’s Jeep, the one the captain hadn’t gotten around to giving him. Where we were going, we didn’t know. Brand-new GE air conditioners on the back of USAF flatbeds stuck in traffic did not grow on trees.
“Lanyard will rip us new poopers if we don’t come up with a unit. Suppose we do, it’ll cost an arm and a leg,” I thought aloud. “Where the hell do we get the money?”
Ziggy patted the side of the Jeep. “We’re riding in it, Joey.”
Was my giant compatriot a genius or what?
I U-turned in the direction of Bombay Tailors.
This vehicle wasn’t contributing much to the war effort anyhow. The antique warplanes continued their circling and swooping. Rockets and bombs hung on their bellies. As I drove, Ziggy watched for objects falling out of the white-hot blue sky.
I’d had my fill of fireworks of any definition before I shipped out. My worst trouble had been in the Fort Ord AIT barracks one morning, when the barracks NCO, an illiterate three-striper named Spangler, had flicked on the lights to awaken us, one of the few duties he’d been competent to perform. When I hadn’t sprung out of my bunk, he’d marched directly to me and blown a whistle in my ear. There had already been bad blood between Sergeant Spangler and me, blood brought to a boil as he’d been drunk and I’d been hung over.
I’d come out of the prone position faster than either of us anticipated. Versions varied as to who’d thrown the first punch. It was on record that I threw the last. The sergeant had gone down with a gushing eye, a broken nose, and teeth on the floor.
That I’d only been reduced in rank and reprimanded was due to extenuating circumstances. Even my barracks mates who’d slept through it all volunteered to testify that I was provoked and attacked. Spangler had been unanimously despised, and, fortuitously for me, he had been busted not two hours earlier for drunken driving by police in nearby Salinas.
My idle threat to hire a civilian lawyer had been the clincheroo. My CO and the post JAG (Judge Advocate General’s office--
armyese
for legal advisory services) had wanted nothing to do with outside talent. There was a pervasive fear in the military hierarchy of the superiority of anything civilian. They had swept me under the rug. I’d graduated from cook’s school without honors or further incident.
Ziggy and I arrived at Bombay Tailors and presented our dilemma to Mr. Singh. He beamed his thousand-watt smile on us and said, “Gentlemen, I have a solution. It has providentially come to my attention that your own United States Navy Exchange has received a shipment of household air conditioners.”
“How do you always know all?” I asked.
Singh’s smile brightened to two thousand watts. He made no comment.
“Okay, Mr. Singh, how much will you give us for the Jeep?”
“You Americans and your impatience for immediate action, Mr. Joe.
That is why you rule the world.
One hundred American dollars.”
“Ouch,” I said. “You oughta run a used car lot in
California
, Singh.”
“Gentlemen, there are complications. This vehicle is not accompanied by a title of ownership. This poses additional administrative costs.”
Additional administrative costs: a euphemism for forgery.
“Well,” was all I
managed.
“What is your expression? The air conditioners, they shall sell faster than cakes that are heated?”
“What’s your deal, Singh?”
He rubbed thumb against forefingers. “There is a waiting list for those air conditioners that can be circumvented for a supplemental consideration of one hundred dollars.”
“Impossible, man.
Highway robbery.”
Mr. Singh literally kicked a tire.
“This cream puff has low miles and the USARV Motor Pool rebuilt the engine last week,” I said sincerely.
Mr. Singh squatted and looked underneath, then made the same sourpuss face he’d worn had when we’d brought him the Spam.
“There are fluids seeping and dripping.”
“Normal part of the break-in process on a rebuilt mill,” I said.
We haggled, and he wound up paying us less than I wanted and more than I thought we were going to get. He paid us in piasters, which the PX wouldn’t accept. So we had to change them back to him for greenbacks at a discounted rate, $90.25 net to us. Basically, Singh screwed us twice. He did give us a name of a “helpful” PX employee.
I’d been a business major for a quarter, a marketing major for two. In retrospect from The Great Beyond, I should have used the G.I. Bill upon my army discharge, gone back to college and actually graduated, then on to grad school like Baby Brother. But, yeah, I know, hindsight.
My real world experience in
Saigon
was invaluable. A potential master’s thesis title: Microeconomic Exploitation of First World Individuals by Subcontinent Individual in Macroeconomic Third World Environment. It would’ve been a breeze; the research was already done.
Mr. Singh asked, “When is it we shall become the fifty-first province in your great nation? The stories of such an impending occurrence are rampant.”
“Any day now,” I said.
“I shall then be an American citizen?”
“You and Patrick Henry and Sonny Liston, Mr. Singh, same same.”
I think of Mr. Singh now as I page through The Great Beyond’s useless telephone directory. Is he with us? Who can say? There are a zillion Singhs listed. Half the surnames in
India
are Singh and half the cabbies in the
U.S.A.
are likewise.
My directory is half an inch thick but it lists
everybody
. Though it should be ten miles high, I can thumb though all those Singhs while it stays a slender volume. How? You’ll have to ask our ringmasters to explain their hocus-pocus.
Ziggy grabbed an English-language
Saigon Post
from a newsstand, where we were on the lookout for a still-scarce taxi.
“What’s new on the coup?” I asked. “Didn’t their ace reporters know about it yesterday?”
Ziggy
snorted,
a noise like a sewage backup. “Who gives a diddly-shit about this rinky-dink coupe-de-tot when they’ll go and do it again next week?”
A valid point.
I finally spotted a taxi, practically threw myself in front of it, and we piled in.
“Here’s another fuckin’ genius,” Ziggy said, reading on. “He claims Mars is cold and it got thin air.
Yeah, maybe.
He says
Mars don’t have no water and nitrogen neither
.”
When Ziggy got excited, his voice carried. In this little blue-and-cream Renault taxi, it had nowhere to carry. I expected glass to shatter. The cabby couldn’t keep his eyes out of his mirror.
“Easy, Zig. This guy in the article’s a scientist?”
“He’s the village idiot is what he is. Listen. He claims it’s according to this spectrographic analysis they done. Ain’t that a crock of shit?”
“If you say so, Zig.”
“Mariner 4 ain’t even there. He oughta hold his horses for the pitchers before he opens his trap. The Martians here now, they’ll rise up. He’s gotta be high up on their shit list. His ass’ll be the first one they fry.”
“Uh-huh,” I mumbled, hoping he’d change the subject.
Unfortunately, he did.
“There are not a few people who are irresponsible in their work, preferring the light to the heavy.”
Ziggy had spoken, but it was not his voice.
One of his Martians?
I looked at him.
He grinned and dug Mao’s Little Red Book from a back pocket. I’d gotten cold feet and had given it to Ziggy to carry until we put our plan in motion.
“This stuff in here, Joey, it ain’t too bad, like that quotation I quoted.”
“You’re amazing, man. You’re a speed-reader who absorbs like a sponge,” I said, yet again awed.
“It is man’s social being that determines his thinking. Once the correct ideas characteristic of the advanced class are―”
“Zig, please put it away before we’re arrested,” I said, plugging my ears until he did stop.
At the PX, we saw the gentleman Singh had told us to see, a Vietnamese backroom employee named
Vo
, who refused eye contact or conversation. We paid him the $90.25, which, remarkably, was his exact price. Into the taxi beside the driver, we loaded our purchase, a brand-spanking-new GE air conditioner, and had
him
head to Tan Son Nhat so we could poach a replacement Jeep.
I waited in the taxi at the gate, soothing the cabby’s nerves with piasters. Ziggy was back in ten minutes at the wheel of said Jeep. It was a rat, but we had no time to be picky, and Captain Papersmith wouldn’t know the diff. It had an engine knock, ripped seat covers, and a shimmy. We released the relieved cabby,
then
went to the Esso to have new markings sprayed on.
Back at the 803rd Liaison Detachment by 11:30, I felt like we’d put in a full day. We removed the rattletrap from the colonel’s window and stuck it in the new a.c. It was so powerful that the lights flickered when we switched it on.
Colonel Lanyard sat at his desk doing his work, completely ignoring us. I guess if we weren’t there, none of what was going on was going on. Despite pretending we didn’t exist, he angled the TOP SECRET CRYPTO cover sheet of the pile he was working on so we couldn’t see what was beneath.
His packed duffel bag was in a corner. When he was gone on one of his trips (all classified, naturally), the 803rd’s testosterone level plummeted.
A bus pulled up to take the oddballs to “noon chow.” We went outside, my screwball plan to say we had a telegram for Warrant Officer Ralph Buffet. That usually meant that somebody on the home front was dead or dying. We’d be able to cut Buffet from the herd without anybody questioning us too severely. It was a cruel thing to do, but, hey, we were in a war.
Then I saw Mai. She stood alone at the next corner, unmoving. Enchantingly demure in her
áo-dài
, she was the most delicate of statues, delicate as translucent Renaissance marble.
Captain Papersmith wasn’t with her, and I knew she wasn’t here to see him.
I knew because she was looking at me, holding a single white lily.