Koko

For a second Poole looked out across the plain on the other side of the village. Two oxen that had bolted when Spitalny shot the water bearer were cropping at the grass, their noses buried deep in wet, electrified green. Nothing moved. In the village before them everything was as still as a photograph. Poole hoped that the people who lived in the scatter of hootches had heard that the round-eyes were coming and fled, leaving behind trophies of bags of rice and maybe an underground hole full of grenades and ammunition clips.

Elvis didn’t have a village, Poole thought: Elvis lived in the jungle like a monkey, and he ate rats and bugs. Elvis wasn’t really human anymore. He could see in the dark and he levitated in his sleep.

Underhill faded off to the right side of the village with half the men, while Poole took the other half off to the left.

The only noise was that made by their feet moving through the vibrant grass. A strap creaked, something rattled in a pot; that was all. Manly was breathing hard: Poole thought he could just about hear Manly sweat. The men began spacing themselves out. Spitalny began shadowing after Dengler and Conor as they faded toward the quiet hootches.

A chicken went buk-buk-buk, and a sow grunted in a pen.

A wooden stick popped in the fire, and Poole heard sparks and ash hissing down. Make them be gone, he thought. Make them all be in An Lat, two or three klicks through the forest.

Off to his right, someone’s hand slapped the plastic stock of an M-16, and the sow, not yet alarmed, grunted a question.

Poole came up alongside a hootch and had a clear sightline across the center of the hamlet to Tim Underhill, who was moving silently alongside another hootch. Off to Poole’s left, twenty or thirty yards beyond the perimeter of the village, the sparsely wooded forest, a hanger from the wooded slope, took over again, and for a second Poole had the ghastly fantasy that a hundred North Vietnamese soldiers crouched among the trees, aiming their weapons at them. He shot a panicky look into the woods and saw no soldiers, only a tall half-concealed mound. It caught his eye for a moment, looking almost manmade, of painted concrete and plaster, like a hill at Disneyland.

But it was too ugly for Disneyland, not picturesquely ugly like a haunted castle or a romantic crag, but naturally ugly, like a wart or a skin eruption.

Across the clearing Tim Underhill held his back against the hootch and looked at him; between them a big black pot sat on a communal fire. A column of smoke wisped up into the air. Two hootches down from Underhill, Lieutenant Beevers silently worked his mouth in a question or command. Poole nodded at Underhill, who immediately shouted “Come out!” in Vietnamese.

“Out!”

No one moved, but Poole heard whispers in the hootch beside him, and the other whispers of bare feet on the hootch’s wooden floor.

Underhill fired a round into the air.

“Now!”

Poole trotted around to the front of the hootch, and nearly knocked down an old woman with sparse white hair and a toothless smile who was just emerging from the opening. An old man with a sunken sun-dried face hobbled after her. Poole jabbed his rifle toward the low fire in the center of the village. From the other hootches came people with their hands in the air, most of them women in their fifties and sixties. “Hello, GI,” said an old man scuttling beside his old woman, and bowed with his hands still in the air.

Spitalny yelled at the man, and clouted him in the hip with the butt of his rifle.

“Stop!” Underhill yelled. Then, in Vietnamese, “Drop to your knees!” and all the old people went down on their knees in the trampled grass around the cooking fire.

Beevers went up to the pot, peered inside, and with his boot gave it a push that sent it rolling off the fire.

The sow began to squeal, and Beevers whirled around and shot it in its pen. An old woman yelled at him. “Poole, get your men to check out these hootches! I want everybody out of here!”

“They say there are children, Lieutenant,” Underhill said.

Beevers spotted something in the ashes where the big pot had been, and he darted forward and thrust his hand almost into the fire, jabbing at whatever he had seen, and finally pulled out a charred piece of paper that looked as if it had been torn from a notebook. “Ask them what this is!” Instead of waiting for a response, he danced up to one of the old men who had been watching him and said, “What’s this? What’s this writing here?”

“No bik,” said the old man.

“Is this a list?” Beevers shouted. “This looks like a list!”

“No bik.”

Poole also thought it looked like a list. He signaled Dengler, Blevins, Burrage, and Pumo into the hootches nearest them.

A wave of noisy protest came up from the old people kneeling near the guttering fire and the toppled pot.

Poole heard a child begin to scream in one of the other hootches, and jumped into the one the old couple had left. The interior was murky, and he gritted his teeth with tension.

“He says it’s a list of names,” he heard Underhill explain to the lieutenant.

Poole stepped into the center of the hootch. He tested the floor for a trap door, jabbed the mats with the barrel of his rifle, and stepped outside to go on to the next hootch.

“Ask them about the sniper!” Beevers was shouting. “Let’s get it out of them.” He saw Poole. “Get everything!” he shouted.

“Yes, sir,” Poole said.

Pumo was hauling a screaming child of five or six toward the center of the village, and an old woman leaped up and took the little boy from him. Dengler stood slumped in the sun, listlessly watching.

A feeling of utter waste and emptiness went through Michael Poole, and he turned to enter the hootch on his left. He heard crying from the meadow side of the village and saw Beevers send Spitalny and Spanky Burrage in that direction with an impatient gesture. He stepped into the hootch, and something moved in the gloom at its far end. A furtive shape came toward him.

There was a burst of machine-gun fire from outside the village, and Poole instinctively fired on the figure advancing toward him, knowing that it was too late. He was already dead.

2

Loud terrible moans came from just outside the hootch’s entrance. Miraculously not dead but knowing that the hootch was seconds from blowing up along with the grenade in the enemy’s hand, Poole threw himself outside and saw Thomas Rowley on the ground, most of his stomach blown away and his purple and silver guts looped all over the grass. Rowley’s face was very white and his mouth was opening and closing. No sounds came out. Poole crawled over the ground. People were firing everywhere. At first Poole thought that all the old people had been killed, but as he crawled away from the hootch he saw that they were huddling together, trying to stay under the fire.

The hootch behind him did not blow up.

Beevers ordered Dengler to check out the woods to the left of the village. Dengler began to trot toward the narrow trees. Another burst of fire came from the woods, and Dengler flopped into the grass and signaled that he was unhurt. He began firing into the woods.

“Elvis!” Beevers yelled, but Poole knew this was nonsense because Elvis did not use a machine gun. Then Beevers saw Poole and yelled, “Air support! Heavy contact!” He turned to the other soldiers and yelled, “Get them all out of the hootches! This is it! This is it!”

After a time there was no more firing. Rowley lay dead before the hootch where Poole had killed the VC. Poole wondered what Beevers had meant by “This is it,” and stood up to see what was going on. He caught Pumo’s eye as Pumo came out of another hootch. Pumo looked like a man who simply did not know what to do, and Poole could not tell him because he did not know either.

The Vietnamese were crying, screaming, shouting.

“Heavy contact!” Beevers was still yelling, and Poole called it in.

“Burn the village!” Beevers yelled at Underhill, and Underhill shrugged.