Lieutenant. Third: Coffin, One Boy Enclosed. He had noticed then
and noticed again now that the typewriter Anderson used had a
Flying 'o'. Clewson kept coming out Clewson.
Andrea had wanted to tear the letter up. Dale insisted that they
keep it. Now he was glad.
Billy's squad and two others had been involved in a flank sweep of
a jungle quadrant of which Ky Doe was the only village. Enemy
contact had been anticipated, Anderson's letter said, but there
hadn't been any. The Cong which had been reliably reported to be
in the area had simply melted away into the jungle - it was a trick
with which the American soldiers had become very familiar over
the previous ten years or so.
Dale could imagine them heading back to their base at Homan,
happy, relieved. Squads A and C had waded across the Ky River,
which was almost dry. Squad D used the bridge. Halfway across, it
blew up. Perhaps it had been detonated from downstream. More
likely, someone - perhaps even Billy himself - had stepped on the
wrong board. All nine of them had been killed. Not a single
survivor.
God - if there really is such a being - is usually kinder than that,
Dale thought. He put Lieutenant Anderson's letter back and took
out Josh Bortman's letter. It had been written on blue-lined paper
from what looked like a child's tablet. Bortman's handwriting was
nearly illegible, the scrawl made worse by the writing implement -
a soft-lead pencil. Obviously blunt to start with, it must have been
no more than a nub by the time Bortman signed his name at the
bottom. In several places Bortman had borne down hard enough
with his instrument to tear the paper.
It had been Bortman, the tenth man, who sent Dale and Andrea the
squad picture, already framed, the glass over the photo
miraculously unbroken in its long trip from Homan to Saigon to
San Francisco and finally to Binghamton, New York.
Bortman's letter was anguished. He called the other nine 'the best
friends I ever had in my life, I loved them all like they was my
brothers.'
Dale held the blue-lined paper in his hand and looked blankly
through his study door and toward the sound of the ticking clock
on the mantelpieces. When the letter came, in early May of 1974,
he had been too full of his own anguish to really consider
Bortman's. Now he supposed he could understand it - a little,
anyway. Bortman had been feeling a deep and inarticulate guilt.
Nine letters from his hospital bed on the Homan base, all in that
pained scrawl, all probably written with that same soft-lead pencil.
The expense of having nine enlargements of the Squad D
photograph made, and framed, and mailed off. Rites Of atonement
with a soft-lead pencil, Dale thought, folding the letter again and
putting it back In the drawer with Anderson's. As if he had killed
them by taking their picture. That's really what was between the
lines, wasn't it? 'Please don't hate me, Mr. Clewson, please don't
think I killed your son and the other's by--'
