of prostitutes, gambling, crime, narcotics, which the Diems not only encouraged but also from which they profited. How could he love the Diems if they loved silk, perfume, their own power and pomp more than the people they ruled, whom they yet felt themselves removed from and immensely superior to? His father counseled him to forgive them their arrogances and to use them as a vessel for carrying God's will. But his father never saw the politics, the corruption, the terrible way they abused the peasants, the remove from the people.
Huu Co went north in 1961, when the Diems' corruption had begun to resemble that of a city destroyed in the Bible. He renounced his Catholicism, his inherited wealth and his father, whom he would never see again. He knew the South would sink into treachery and profiteering and would bring flame and retribution upon itself, as it had.
He was a humble private in the People's Revolutionary Army, he who had sat in cafes and once met the great Sartre and de Beauvoir at the Deux Maggots in the Fourteenth Arrondisement, he, a major in the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam, became a lowly private carrying an SKS and wanting to do nothing but his duty to the fatherland and the future and seek purification, but his gifts always betrayed him.
He was always the best soldier among them, and he rose effortlessly, though now without ambition: he was a student officer after two years, and his passage in the west and in the south, after six months' strenuous reeducation in a camp outside Hanoi, where he withstood the most barbarous pressures and purified himself for the revolutionary struggle, only toughened him for the decade of war that was to follow.
Now he was tired. He had been at war since 1950, twenty-two years of war. It was almost over. Really, all that remained was the camp called Arizona, and between himself and it, there stood nothing, no unit, no aircraft, no artillery. He would crush it. Nothing could stop him.
CHAPTER twelve.
In the dream, he had caught a touchdown pass, a slant outside, and as he broke downfield all the blockers hit their men perfectly, and the defense went down like tenpins opening lanes toward the end zone. It was geometry, somehow, or at least a physical problem reduced to the abstract, very pleasing, and far from the reality which was that you ran on instinct and hardly ever remembered things exactly. He got into the end zone: people cheered, it was so very warm, Julie hugged him. His dad was there, weeping for joy. Trig was there also, among them, jumping up and down, and so was Sergeant Bob Lee Swagger, the sniper god, a figure of preposterous joy as he pirouetted crazily, laden with firearms and dappled in a war face of camouflage.
It was such a good dream. It was the best, the happiest, the finest dream he ever had, and it went away, as such things do, to the steady pressure of someone rocking his arm and the sudden baffling awareness that he was not there but here.
'Huh?'
'Time to work. Pork.'
Donny blinked and smelled the wet odor of jungle, the wet odor of rain, and felt the wet cold. Swagger had already turned from him and was off making his arcane preps.
The dawn came as a blur of light, just the faintest smear of incandescence to the east, over the mountains on the other side of the valley.
In its way, it was quite beautiful in that low 0500 light: vapors of fog clung to the wet earth everywhere, in valleys and hollows and gulches, nestled thickly in the trees, and though it wasn't at present raining, surely it would rain soon, for the low clouds still rolled over, heavy with moisture.
Still, so quiet, so calm, so pristine.
'Come on,' whispered Swagger into Donny Fenn's ear.
Donny shook sleep from his eyes and put his dreams of Julie aside and reconfirmed his existence. He was on a hillside in heavy foliage above the An Loc Valley, near Kham Due and Laos. It would be another wet day, and the weather had not broken, so there would be no air.
'We got to get lower,' said Bob.
'I can't hit nothing from up here.'
The sergeant now wore the M3 grease gun on his back and in his hands carried the M40 sniper rifle, a dull pewter Remington with a thick bull barrel and a dull brown wooden stock. It carried a Redfield scope, and a Marine Corps armorer had labored over it, free floating the barrel, truing up the bolt to the chamber, glass-bedding the action to the wood, torquing the screws tight, but it was still far from an elegant weapon, built merely for effectiveness, never beauty.
Bob had smeared the jungle grease paint on his face, and under the crinkled brow of the boonie cap his visage looked primitive, he seemed a creature sprung from someone's worst dreams, some kind of atavistic war creature totally of the jungle, festooned with pistols and grenades, all smeared with the colors of nature, even his eyes gone to nothing.
'Here. Paint up and we'll get going,' he said, holding the stick of camo paint out to Donny, who quickly blurred his own features. Donny gathered his M14 and the impossibly heavy PRC-77, his real enemy in all this, and began to ease his way down the slope with Bob.
It seemed they were lowering themselves into the clouds, like angels returning to earth. The fog would not break, it clung to the floor of the valley as if it had been enameled there. No sun would burn it away, not today at any rate.
Now and then some jungle bird would call, now. and then some animal shudder would ripple from the undergrowth, but there was no sense of human presence, nothing metallic or regular to the eye. Donny scanned left, Bob scanned right. They moved ever so slowly, frustratingly slowly, picking their way down, until at last they were nearly to the valley floor and a field of waist-high grass, in the center of which a worn track had been beaten, by men or buffaloes or elephants or whatever.
From far away, at last, came some kind of unnatural noise. Donny couldn't identify it and then he could, it was the noise of men, somehow--nothing distinct, not breaking talk discipline--somehow become a herd, a living, breathing thing. It was No. 3 Battalion, still a few hundred yards away, gearing up for the last six or so klicks of quick march to the staging area for their assault.
Bob halted him with a hand.
'Okay,' he said.
'Here's how we do it. You got the map coords?'
