Give us data, the Army pleaded, give us a Commission. (The recommendation was noted, considered, and shelved.) We advise an on-site study. (Also shelved.) Good liaison with local police being imperative, we suggest an assignment of officers with police training to police departments in Rest and Recreation areas where incidents such as above have been proven to be likely. (This recommendation, offered as a sop to the Police Department of the City of Bangkok, was never taken any further.) It was recommended that Military Police in Bangkok liaise with the Bangkok Police Department to seek out and locate local witnesses to the attack on PFC Dengler, identify and apprehend the soldier who had been seen in PFC Dengler’s company just before the incident, and seek to apprehend and prosecute all those responsible for the homicide of PFC Dengler. The unidentified soldier who had been seen with PFC Dengler was finally named three weeks later as PFC Victor Spitalny, who had been sent to Honolulu for his R&R.
3
In PFC Dengler’s medical files, cause of death was given as loss of blood due to gross physical trauma.
His parents were informed that he had died bravely and would be very much missed by his fellow soldiers— Beevers wrote this letter half-resentfully, loaded on popskull vodka from Manly’s private stock.
Then the Army held its breath. Victor Spitalny was not pulled out of the Heaven Massage Parlor or the Mississippi Queen by the Bangkok police, and the American MPs in Bangkok did not pull him out of a Patpong gutter. Police in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which rather surprisingly turned out to be the birthplace of PFC Spitalny, did not locate the missing soldier, charged by now with the crime of desertion, at his parents’ house, the house of his former girlfriend, or at the Sports Tavern, Sam ‘N’ Aggie’s, or the Polka Dot Lounge, where the deserter had sought diversion and entertainment before entering military service.
No one in Bangkok, Camp Crandall, or the Pentagon mentioned a little girl who had run bleeding down Phat Pong Road, no one alluded to the shouts and cries that disappeared into the polluted air. The little girl disappeared into rumor and fiction, then disappeared altogether, like the thirty children in the cave at Ia Thuc, and eventually the army, having moved on to other cases and other problems, forgot that it was holding its breath.
4
What was it like to go on R&R?
It was like being on another planet. Like being
Why was it like being from another planet?
Because not even time was the same. Everybody moved with great unconscious slowness, everybody talked slow and smiled slow and thought slow.
Was that the only difference?
The people were the biggest difference. What they thought was important, what made them happy.
Was that the only difference?
Everybody’s making money and you’re not. Everybody’s spending money, and you’re not. Everybody’s got a girl. Everybody’s got dry feet and they all eat real food.
What did you miss?
I missed the real world. I missed Nam. Where there’s a whole different top ten.
Top ten?
Sounds that make you feel sick with excitement. You want the songs from your own planet.
Will you tell me about the girl?
She came out of the screams the way birds come out of clouds. She was an image—that was the first thing I thought. That she
Why did you think she was screaming?
I thought she was screaming because of the nearness of ultimate things.
How old was she?
She might have been ten or eleven.
What did she look like?
She was half-naked, and her upper body was covered with blood. There was blood even in her hair. Her hands were outstretched in front of her, and they were red with blood too. She might have been a Thai. She might have been Chinese.
What did you do?
I stood on the sidewalk and watched her run past me.
Did anybody else see her?
No. One old man blinked and looked troubled. Nothing else.
Why didn’t you stop her?
She was an
How did you feel when you saw her?
I loved her.
I felt I saw everything that was the truth in her face—in her eyes. Nothing is sane, that’s what I saw, nothing is safe, terror and pain are beneath everything—I think God sees things that way, only most of the time He doesn’t want us to see it too.
I had the Pan-feeling. I felt like she had burned my brain. I felt like my eyes had been scorched. She thrashed down the bright street in the midst of all her commotion, showing her bloody palms to the world, and she was gone.
What did you do?
I went home and wrote. I went home and wept. Then I wrote some more.
What did you write?
I wrote a story about Lieutenant Harry Beevers, which I called “Blue Rose.”
1
Michael Poole and Conor Linklater separated on their second day in Bangkok. Conor went through a dozen gay bars in Patpong 3, asking his question about Tim Underhill to baffled but kindly Japanese tourists who usually offered to buy him a drink, to jumpy-looking Americans who usually pretended that they could not see or hear him, and to various smiling Thai men, who assumed that he was looking for his lover and offered the services of decorative young men who would soon heal his broken heart. Conor had forgotten his stack of photographs in his hotel room. He looked at small, pretty boys in dresses and thought of Tim Underhill while wishing that these frothy creatures were the girls they so much resembled. The bartender in a transvestite bar called Mama’s made Conor stop breathing for a few seconds when he blinked at Underhill’s name and stood looking at him, smiling and stroking his chin. But at last he giggled and said, “Never saw him in here.”
Conor smiled at the man, who appeared to be melting a lump of some delicious substance, chocolate or butter, on his tongue. “You acted like you knew him.”
“Can’t be sure,” the bartender said.
Conor sighed, took a twenty-baht note from the pocket of his jeans, and slid it across the bar.
The man pocketed the bill and stroked his chin again. “Maybe, maybe,” he said. “Undahill. Timofy Undahill.” Then he looked up at Conor and shook his head. “Sorry, my mistake.”
