The Throat

in Harry Truman shirts who carry briefcases and live out in Darlac Province, messing around with the Rhades.' I laughed.

'Sometimes we're asked to fly in wearing civvies,' he said. He placed the beret on his head. It was a dark forest green with a leather roll around its bottom seam, and it had a patch with two arrows crossing a sword above the words De Oppresso Liber. It looked good on him. 'How'd a lousy grunt like you learn so much?'

'You learn a lot, working on the body squad. What is this place, here?'

'Special Operations Group. We ride piggyback on White Star when we're not in Darlac Province, messing around with the Rhade.'

'You really do that?'

John Ransom explained that the CIDG program in Darlac Province had been going since the early sixties, but that he had been assigned to border surveillance in the highlands near the Laotian border, in Khan Due. Last year, they had parachuted in a bulldozer and carved a landing strip out of a jungle ridge line. While they looked for the Khatu tribesmen he was supposed to be working with, his actual troops were press-ganged teenagers from Danang and Hue. The teenagers were a little hairy, Ransom said. They weren't much like the Rhade Montagnards. He sounded frustrated when he told me about his troops, and angry with himself for letting me see his frustration—the teenagers played transistors on patrol, he said. 'But they kill everything that moves. Including monkeys.'

'How long have you been here?'

'Five months, but I've been in the service three years. Did the Special Forces training at Bragg, got here just in time to help set up Khan Due. It's not like the regular army.' He had begun to sound oddly defensive to me. 'We actually get out and do things. We get into parts of the country the army never sees, and our A teams do a lot of damage to the VC.'

'I wondered who was doing all that damage,' I said.

'These days people don't believe in an elite, even the army has problems with that, but that's what we are. You ever hear of Sully Fontaine? Ever hear of Franklin Bachelor?'

I shook my head. 'We're a pretty elite group in the body squad, too. Ever hear of di Maestro? Picklock? Scoot?'

He nearly shuddered. 'I'm talking about heroes. We have guys who fought the Russians with Germany—we have guys who fought the Russians in Czechoslovakia.'

'I didn't know we were fighting the Russkies yet,' I said.

'We're fighting communism,' he said simply. 'That's what it's all about. Stopping the spread of communism.'

He had maintained his faith even during five months of shepherding teenage hoodlums through the highlands, and I thought I could see how he had done it. He was staring forward to see something like pure experience.

I wished that he could meet Scoot and Ratman. I thought Senator Burrman should meet them, too. They could have an exchange of views.

'How did you get on the body squad?' Ransom asked me.

Francis Pinkel popped out of a building and scouted the ghost town for marauding VC. A burly gray-haired man who must have been the senator came out after him, followed by a Special Forces colonel. The colonel was short and solid and walked as if he were trying to drive his feet into the ground by the sheer force of his personality.

'Captain McCue thought I'd enjoy the work.'

I saw Ransom memorizing the name. He asked me where I was supposed to join my unit, and I told him.

He flipped up the watch hanging from his collar. 'About time for my dog and pony show. Can't you get a shower and drink a lot of coffee or something?'

'You don't understand the body squad,' I said. 'We work better this way.'

'I'm going to take care of you,' he said, and began to trot out of the woods toward the senator's building. Then he turned around and waved. 'Maybe we'll run into each other at Camp Crandall.' It was clear he thought that we never would.

I met John Ransom twice at Camp Crandall. Everything about him had changed by the first time we met again, and by the second time he had changed even more. He'd had a narrow scrape at a fortified Montagnard village called Lang Vei. Most of his Bru tribesmen had been killed, and so had most of the Green Berets there. After a week, Ransom escaped from an underground bunker filled with the bodies of his friends. When the surviving Bru finally made it to Khe Sanh, the marines took away their rifles and ordered them back into the jungle. By this time a prominent marine officer had publicly ridiculed what he called the Green Berets' 'anthropological' warfare.

6

I have used the phrase 'the bottom of the world' twice, and that is two times too often. Neither I, nor John Ransom, nor any other person who returned ever saw the real bottom of the world. Those who did can never speak. Elie Wiesel uses the expression 'children of the night' to describe Holocaust survivors: some children came out of that night and others did not, but the ones who did were changed forever. Against a background of night and darkness stands a child. The child, whose hand is extended toward you, who is smiling enigmatically, has come straight out of that dark background. The child can speak or must be silent forever, as the case may be.

7

My sister April's death—her murder—happened like this. She was nine, I was seven. She had gone out after school to play with her friend Margaret Rasmussen. Dad was where he always was around six o'clock in the evening, at the end of South Sixth Street, our street, in the Idle Hour. Mom was taking a nap. Margaret Rasmussen's house was five blocks away, on the other side of Livermore Avenue. It was only two blocks away if you crossed Livermore and went straight through the arched tunnel like a viaduct that connected the St. Alwyn Hotel to its annex. Bums and winos, of which our neighborhood had a share, sometimes gathered in this tunnel. My sister, April, knew she was supposed to go the three blocks around the front of the St. Alwyn and then back down Pulaski Street, but she was always impatient to get to Margaret Rasmussen's house, and I knew that she usually went straight through the tunnel.

This was a secret. It was one of our secrets.

I was listening to the radio alone in our living room. I want to remember, I sometimes think I really do remember, a sense of dread directly related to the St. Alwyn's tunnel. If this memory is correct, I knew that April was going to have crossed Livermore Street in no more than a minute, that she was going to ignore the safety of the detour and walk into that tunnel, and that something bad waited for her in there.

I was listening to 'The Shadow,' the only radio program that actually scared me. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows. After this came a sinister, even a frightening, laugh. Not long before, Dad had shown me a Ledger article claiming that the real Shadow, the one the radio series was on, was an old man who lived in Millhaven. His name was Lamont von Heilitz, and a long time ago he called himself 'an amateur of crime.'

I turned off the radio and then, sneakily, switched it back on again in case Mom woke up and wondered what I was doing. I walked out of the front door and jogged down the path to the sidewalk, where I began to run toward Livermore Street. April was not waiting on the corner for the light to change, which meant that she had already crossed Livermore and would be in the tunnel. All I wanted was to get past the Idle Hour unnoticed and to see April's slight blond figure emerging into the sunlight on the far side of the tunnel. Then I could turn around and go