tears instantly filled his eyes.
The men before him were three-fourths jungle fighters with everything but Claymores and M-16s, and one- fourth pudgy WWII vets who looked like ex-boxers. Michael realized that the sun had come out only when he saw their long shadows stretching out to him on the street.
He could see Tim Underhill, another long shadow, striding along with his belly before him and cigar smoke drifting in his wake. In his mind, Underhill was muttering obscene hilarious remarks about everyone in sight and wearing his summer uniform of a bandanna and blousy fatigue pants. A streak of mosquito blood was smeared across his left shoulder.
In spite of everything, Michael wished that Underhill were beside him now. Michael realized that he had been considering Underhill—not brooding or thinking about him,
In two separate incidents, three people, an English tourist in his early forties and an older American couple, had been murdered in Singapore just about the time the Iranian hostages had returned to America. The murders were thought to have been committed at least a week to ten days apart. The Englishman’s body was found on the grounds of the Goodwood Park hotel, those of the American couple in a vacant bungalow in the Orchard Road section of the city. All three bodies had been mutilated, and on two of them had been found playing cards scrawled with an unusual and enigmatic name: Koko. Six months later, in the summer of 1981, two French journalists were found similarly mutilated in their Bangkok hotel room. Playing cards with the same name had been placed on the bodies. The only difference between these killings and those that had happened after Ia Thuc, a decade and a half earlier, was that the cards were not regimental, but ordinary commercial playing cards.
Michael thought Underhill lived in Singapore. At least Underhill had always claimed that he was going to move there after he got out of the army. But Poole could not make the mental leap required to convict Tim Underhill of murder.
Poole had known two extraordinary human beings during his time in Vietnam, two men who had stood out as exceptionally worthy of respect and affection in the half-circus, half-laboratory of human behavior that a longstanding combat unit becomes. Tim Underhill was one, and a boy from Milwaukee named M.O. Dengler was the other. The bravest people he had ever known, Underhill and little Dengler had seemed perfectly at home in Vietnam.
Tim Underhill had gotten himself back to the Far East as soon as possible after the war and had become a moderately successful crime novelist. M.O. Dengler was killed in a freakish street accident while on R&R in Bangkok with another soldier, named Victor Spitalny, and never returned from Asia at all.
Oh, Michael Poole missed Underhill. He missed them both, Underhill and Dengler.
The group of vets behind Michael, as scattered and varied as those before him, gradually caught up with him. He became aware that he was no longer marching alone, but was moving along between the crowds lining both sides of the street with a couple Dengler-sized boonie-rats, fiercely moustached, and an assortment of polyester- suited VFW types.
As if he had been reading his thoughts, one of the Denglersized boonie-rats walking beside Michael sidled up to him and whispered something. Michael bent down, cupping his ear.
“I was a hell of a fighter, man,” the little ex-soldier whispered a shade louder. Tears gleamed in his eyes.
“To tell you the truth,” Michael said, “you remind me of one of the best soldiers I ever knew.”
“No shit.” The man nodded briskly. “What outfit was you in?”
Poole named his division and his battalion.
“What year?” The man cocked his head to check out Poole’s face.
“ ‘Sixty-eight,’ sixty-nine.”
“Ia Thuc,” the boonie-rat said immediately. “I remember that. That was you guys, right?
Poole nodded.
“Fuckin’-A. They shoulda give that Lieutenant Beevers a fuckin’ Medal of Honor for what he done, and then took it away again for shootin’ off his mouth in front of fuckin’ journalists,” the boonie-rat said, sidling away with an easy fluid motion that would have been noiseless if they had been walking over brittle twigs.
Two fat women with short fluffy hair, pastel pantsuits, and placid church-picnic faces were rhythmically waving between them a red banner with the stark black letters POW-MIA. A few paces behind marched two youngish ex-soldiers bearing another banner: COMPENSATE FOR AGENT ORANGE. Agent Orange—
Victor Spitalny had tilted his head and stuck out his tongue, claiming that the stuff tasted good.
Poole caught himself wiping the palms of his hands together, but it was too late to wash away the Agent Orange.
How does it feel to kill somebody? I can’t tell you because I can’t tell you. I think maybe I got killed myself, but not before I killed my son. You shit in your pants, man, you laugh so hard.
3
By the time Michael Poole reached the park, the parade had melted down into a wandering crowd, marchers and onlookers moving together across the grass. Loose, ragged groups streamed over the entire landscape, walking through the sparse trees, filling the whole scene. Though he could not see the Memorial, Michael knew where it was. About a hundred yards before him, the crowds were moving down a grade into a natural bowl from which came the psychic flare of too many people. The Memorial stood at the bottom of all those people. Michael’s scalp tingled.
A phalanx of men in wheelchairs were pushing themselves across the long stretch of grass before the bowl. One of the chairs tilted over sideways and a gaunt, black-haired, legless man with a shockingly familiar face spilled out. Michael’s heart froze—the man was Harry Beevers. Michael started to run forward to help. Then he checked himself. The fallen man was surrounded by friends, and in any case he could not be Poole’s old lieutenant. Two others righted the chair. They held it steady as the man braced himself on his stumps. Then he pushed himself up onto the metal footrests. The man reached up, grasped the armrests, and with neat gymnastic skill deposited himself in his own seat.
The men in wheelchairs were gradually overtaken by the crowd. Michael looked around him. All about were familiar faces which at second glance resolved into the faces of strangers. Various large bearded versions of Tim Underhill were moving toward the grassy bowl, also several wiry Denglers and Spitalnys. A beaming, round-faced Spanky Burrage slapped the palm of a black man in a Special Forces hat. Poole wondered what had happened to the dap, the complicated series of handgrips that blacks in Vietnam used to greet one another. There had been a wonderful mixture of seriousness and poker-faced hilarity about daps.
People streamed down into the bowl. Old women and babies clutched tiny flags. To Michael’s right, two young men on crutches were followed by an old gaffer, his bald head factory-white, with a row of medals pinned above the left pocket of his plaid shirt. Beside him a florid septuagenarian in a VFW garrison cap struggled with a shiny four-sided walker. Poole looked into the face of every man roughly his own age, and found most of them looking back at him—a crossfire of frustrated recognitions. He took a step forward across the trampled grass and looked straight ahead.
The Memorial was a long, intermittently visible line of sheer black tying together the heads and bodies of the people before it. Men ranged all along its top, walking along over its crew cut of grass as if pacing it off. Others lay down and leaned over to trace names engraved in the polished stone. Poole moved several steps forward, the crowded bowl in front of him widened and fell away, and the entire scene stood before him.
The huge broken black wing of the Memorial was surrounded by people without being engulfed by them.
