hardly see it anymore.”
They watched the lieutenant’s helmet disappear into the grey air and the swarming bugs. By the time the helmet hit the ground it was nearly invisible. The explosion surprised them all, except at that level where they could no longer be surprised by anything. Again, all except Beevers flopped into the muck. A column of red fire flashed upward and the ground bounced under their feet. Set off either by a malfunction or by the vibration, another mine detonated a beat after the first, and a chunk of metal whizzed past Beevers’ face, so close he could feel its heat. He either fell down on purpose or collapsed in shock next to Poole. He was panting. Everyone in the platoon could smell the acrid stink of the two explosions. For a moment everything was still. Tina Pumo lifted his head, half-expecting another of the mines to go off, and as he did so he heard the insects begin their drilling again. For a moment Tina thought he could see Lieutenant Beevers’ helmet out on the far end of the mined field, lying miraculously undamaged though somehow stuffed with leaves beside a twisted branch. Then he saw that the leaves formed a pattern of eyes and eyebrows inside the helmet. Finally he saw that they were real eyes and eyebrows. The helmet was still on a dead soldier’s head. What he had taken for a branch was a severed arm in a sleeve. The explosion had unearthed a partially buried and dismembered corpse.
From the other end of the field a loud inquisitive voice called out in Vietnamese. Another voice screeched in laughter, and joyfully shouted back.
“I think we’re in a situation here, Lieutenant,” Dengler whispered. Poole had taken his map out of its wax case and was running his fingers along trails, trying to figure out exactly where they were.
Looking across the field at the American head which had floated in its American helmet out of the substance of the field, Poole saw a series of abrupt, inexplicable movements of the earth—as if invisible rodents tore around, roiling the sodden earth here, tossing spears of grass there. Something trembled the log near the field’s far end and pushed it backwards an inch or two. Then he finally realized that the platoon was being fired on from the rear.
“There were a couple of explosions, and a lot of yelling in Vietnamese from all around us—I think they had let us just blunder along without being really certain of where we were. Beevers’ radio silence at least did that much. The ones behind us started shooting, and probably the only thing that saved our lives was that they weren’t sure where we were, exactly, so they put their fire where they thought we were, the same field where they’d wiped out nearly a whole company a week before. And their fire exploded maybe eighty percent of the mines they had buried with the American bodies.”
It looked as if underground fireworks were destroying the field. There came a staggered, arhythmic series of double explosions, the booming thud of the shell answered immediately by the flat, sharp crack of the mine. Yellow-red flashes engulfed orange-red flashes, then both flashes drowned in a boil of smoke and a gout of earth, throwing up a ribcage lashed against a web belt, an entire leg still wearing a trouser leg and a boot.
“Why did they booby-trap the dead bodies?” Maggie whispered.
“Because they knew that someone would come back for them. You always come back for your dead. It’s one of the only decent things about war. You bring your dead back with you.”
“Like going after Tim Underhill?”
“No, not at all. Well, maybe. I suppose.” He extended his arm. Maggie rested her head on it and snuggled closer to him.
“Two guys got blown to pieces as soon as we started moving into the field. Beevers ordered us forward, and he was right, because they were readjusting their fire to blast the shit out of us where we were. The first guy to go was a kid named Cal Hill who had just joined up with us, and the other was a guy named Tattoo Tiano. I never knew his real name, but he was a good soldier. So Tattoo got killed right away. Right next to me. There was this blast that almost tore my head off when Tattoo set off the mine, and honest to God the air turned bright red for a second. He really was right next to me. I thought I was dead. I couldn’t see or hear anything. There was nothing but this red mist all around me. Then I heard the other one go off, and I could hear it when Hill started screaming. ‘Move your tail, Pumo,’ Dengler yelled. ‘You still got it, move it.’ Norm Peters, our medic, somehow got over to Hill and tried to do something for him. I finally noticed that I was all wet, covered with Tattoo’s blood. We started getting a little light fire from up ahead, so we got our weapons off our backs and returned fire. Artillery rounds started landing back in the fringe of jungle we had just left. I could see Poole yelling into his radio. The fire got a little heavier. We scattered out through the field and hunkered down behind whatever we could find. Along with a few other people I flattened out behind the fallen tree. I could see Peters wrapping up Cal Hill, trying to stop his blood loss, and it looked inside out to me—it looked like Peters was torturing Hill, squeezing the blood out of him. Hill was screaming his head off. We were demons, they were demons, everybody was demons, there were no people left in the world anymore, only demons. Hill sort of didn’t have any middle—where his stomach and guts and his cock should have been there was only this flat red puddle. Hill could see what had happened to him, and he couldn’t believe it. He wasn’t in Nam long enough to believe it! ‘Stop that man screaming!’ Beevers yelled. Some more light fire came at us from ahead, and then we heard someone shouting at us from up there. ‘Rock ’n roar,’ this guy was shouting, ‘Rock ’n roar!’ ‘Elvis,’ Dengler said, and a whole bunch of guys started yelling at him, and squeezed off a couple of shots. Because this was the sniper who had appointed himself our official assassin. He was one amazing shot, let me tell you. I raised up and got off a shot, but I knew it wasn’t any good. M-16s used these little 5.56 millimeter bullets instead of 7.62 rounds, and so the cartridge clips were easier to carry, eleven ounces instead of more than twice that, but the rounds spun in the air, so they wobbled like crazy once they went a certain distance. In some ways, the old M-14 was better—not only did it have better distance, you could actually aim an M-14. So I squeezed off some rounds, but I was pretty sure that even if I could see old Elvis, I wouldn’t be able to hit him. But at least I’d have the satisfaction of knowing what he looked like. Anyhow, so there we were, stuck in a minefield between a lot of NVA, maybe a couple of companies working their way south to link up with whatever they had in the A Shau Valley. Not to mention Elvis. And Poole couldn’t tell anybody where we were, because not only had the lieutenant gotten us lost, his radio had been hit and the fucker was no good anymore. So we were locked in. We spent the next fifteen hours in a field full of dead men—with a lieutenant who was losing his mind.”
“Oh God oh God,” Pumo heard the lieutenant repeating over and over. Calvin Hill noisily continued to die, screaming as if Peters were poking hot needles through his tongue. Other men were screaming too. Pumo could not see who they were, and he did not want to know who they were. Part of Pumo wanted to stand up and get killed and get it over with, and part of him was as scared of this feeling as of anything else that had happened. He made the interesting discovery that there are layers of terror, each one colder and more paralyzing than the one before it. Mortar rounds landed in the field at regular intervals, and machine-gun fire now and then sprayed in from the sides. Pumo and everyone else huddled in whatever troughs, shellholes, or bunkers they half- found, half dug for themselves. Pumo had finally seen the lieutenant’s ruined helmet: it rested against the kneecap of a dead soldier who had been lifted out of the ground by an exploding mine. His kneecap, attached to his calf but to nothing else and white beneath its coating of grime, lay on the ground only inches from the soldier’s head and shoulders, likewise attached to nothing else. The dead soldier was looking at Pumo. His face was very dirty. His eyes were open, and he looked stupid and hungry. Every time the ground rumbled and the sky split apart with a new explosion, the head tilted a little more toward Pumo and the shoulders swam across the ground toward him.
Pumo flattened himself against the ground. The coldest, deepest layer of terror told him that when the dead soldier finally swam up and touched him, he’d die. Then he saw Tim Underhill crawling toward the lieutenant and wondered why he bothered. The sky was full of tracers and explosion. Night had come on in an instant. The lieutenant was going to die. Underhill was going to die. Everybody was going to die. That was the great secret. He seemed to hear M.O. Dengler saying something to Poole and laughing. Laughing? Pumo was intensely aware, as the world darkened and swooned around the impossibility ofthat laugh, of the odor of Tattoo Tiano’s blood. ‘Did the lieutenant shit in his nice new pants?’ Underhill said. ‘Mike, get your radio to work, will you?’ Dengler asked in a very reasonable voice.
A huge explosion rocked Pumo as it tore apart the sky. The air turned white, red, deep black. Womanish-sounding screams came from a soldier Pumo could immediately identify as Tony Ortega, Spacemaker Ortega, a good but brutal soldier who in civilian life had been the leader of a motocycle gang called the Devilfuckers
