When we walked into the little village in the woods on the other side of the rice paddy, I experienced a kind of foretaste of the misery we were to encounter later in a place called la Thuc. If I can say this without setting off all the Gothic bells, the place seemed intrinsically, inherently wrong—it was too quiet, too still, completely without noise or movement. There were no chickens, dogs, or pigs; no old women came out to look us over, no old men offered conciliatory smiles. The huts were empty—something I had never seen before in Vietnam, and never saw again.
Michael Poole's map said that the place was named Bong To.
Hamnet lowered Spanky into the long grass as soon as we reached the center of the empty village. I bawled out a few words in my poor Vietnamese.
Spanky groaned. He gently touched the sides of his helmet. 'I caught a head wound,' he said.
'You wouldn't have a head at all, you was only wearing your liner,' Hamnet said.
Spanky bit his lips and pushed the helmet up off his head. He groaned. A finger of blood ran down beside his ear. Finally the helmet passed over a lump the size of an apple that rose up from under his hair. Wincing, Spanky fingered this enormous knot. 'I see double,' he said. 'I'll never get that helmet back on.'
The medic said, 'Take it easy, we'll get you out of here.'
Out of
'Back to Crandall,' the medic said.
A nasty little wretch named Spitalny sidled up, and Spanky frowned at him. 'There ain't nobody here,' Spitalny said. 'What the fuck is going on?' He took the emptiness of the village as a personal affront.
Leonard Hamnet turned his back and spat. 'Spitalny, Tiano,' the lieutenant said. 'Go into the paddy and get Tyrell and Blevins. Now.'
Tattoo Tiano, who was due to die six and a half months later and was Spitalny's only friend, said, 'You do it this time, Lieutenant.'
Hamnet turned around and began moving toward Tiano and Spitalny. He looked as if he had grown two sizes larger, as if his hands could pick up boulders. I had forgotten how big he was. His head was lowered, and a rim of clear white showed above the irises. I wouldn't have been surprised if he had blown smoke from his nostrils.
'Hey, I'm gone, I'm already there,' Tiano said. He and Spitalny began moving quickly through the sparse trees. Whoever had fired the mortar had packed up and gone. By now it was nearly dark, and the mosquitoes had found us.
Hamnet sat down heavily enough for me to feel the shock in my boots.>
Poole, Hamnet, and I looked around at the village. 'Maybe I better take a look,' the lieutenant said. He flicked his lighter a couple of times and walked off toward the nearest hut. The rest of us stood around like fools, listening to the mosquitoes and the sounds of Tiano and Spitalny pulling the dead men up over the dikes. Every now and then Spanky groaned and shook his head. Too much time passed.
The lieutenant came hurrying back out of the hut. 'Underhill, Poole,' he said, 'I want you to see this.' Poole and I glanced at each other. Poole seemed a couple of psychic inches from either taking a poke at the lieutenant or exploding altogether. In his muddy face his eyes were the size of hen's eggs. He was wound up like a cheap watch. I thought that I probably looked pretty much the same. 'What is it, Lieutenant?' he asked.
The lieutenant gestured for us to follow him into the hut and went back inside. Poole looked as if he felt like shooting the lieutenant in the back. I felt like shooting the lieutenant in the back, I realized a second later. I grumbled something and moved toward the hut. Poole followed.
The lieutenant was fingering his sidearm just inside the hut. He frowned at us to let us know we had been slow to obey him, then flicked on his lighter.
'You tell me what it is, Poole.'
He marched into the hut, holding up the lighter like a torch.
Inside, he stooped down and tugged at the edges of a wooden panel in the floor. I caught the smell of blood. The Zippo died, and darkness closed down on us. The lieutenant yanked the panel back on its hinges. The smell floated up from whatever was beneath the floor. The lieutenant flicked the Zippo, and his face jumped out of the darkness. 'Now. Tell me what this is.'
'It's where they hide the kids when people like us show up,' I said. 'Did you take a look?'
I saw in his tight cheeks and almost lipless mouth that he had not. He wasn't about to go down there and get killed by the Minotaur while his platoon stood around outside.
'Taking a look is your job, Underhill,' he said.
For a second we both looked at the ladder, made of peeled branches lashed together with rags, that led down into the pit.
'Give me the lighter,' Poole said, and grabbed it away from the lieutenant. He sat on the edge of the hole and leaned over, bringing the flame beneath the level of the floor. He grunted at whatever he saw, and surprised both the lieutenant and me by pushing himself off the ledge into the opening. The light went out. The lieutenant and I looked down into the dark open rectangle in the floor.
The lighter flared again. I could see Poole's extended arm, the jittering little flame, a packed-earth floor. The top of the concealed room was less than an inch above the top of Poole's head. He moved away from the opening.
'What is it? Are there any'—the lieutenant's voice made a creaky sound—'any bodies?'
'Come down here, Tim,' Poole called up.
I sat on the floor and swung my legs into the pit. Then I jumped down.
Beneath the floor, the smell of blood was sickeningly strong.
'What do you see?' the lieutenant shouted. He was trying to sound like a leader, and his voice squeaked on the last word.
I saw an empty room shaped like a giant grave. The walls were covered by some kind of thick paper held in place by wooden struts sunk into the earth. Both the thick brown paper and two of the struts showed old bloodstains.
'Hot,' Poole said, and closed the lighter.
'Come
'Yes, sir,' Poole said. He flicked the lighter back on. Many layers of thick paper formed an absorbent pad between the earth and the room. The topmost, thinnest layer had been covered with vertical lines of Vietnamese writing. The writing looked like the left-hand pages of Kenneth Rexroth's translations of Tu Fu and Li Po.
'Well, well,' Poole said, and I turned to see him pointing at what first looked like intricately woven strands of rope fixed to the bloodstained wooden uprights. Poole stepped forward and the weave jumped into sharp relief. About four feet off the ground, iron chains had been screwed to the uprights. The thick pad between the two lengths of chain had been soaked with blood. The three feet of ground between the posts looked rusty. Poole moved the lighter closer to the chains, and we saw dried blood on the metal links.
'I want you guys out of there, and I mean
Poole snapped the lighter shut, and we moved back toward the opening. I felt as if I had seen a shrine to an obscene deity. The lieutenant leaned over and stuck out his hand, but of course he did not bend down far enough for us to reach him. We stiff-armed ourselves up out of the hole. The lieutenant stepped back. He had a thin face and a thick, fleshy nose, and his adam's apple danced around in his neck like a jumping bean. 'Well, how many?'
'How many what?' I asked.
'How many are there?' He wanted to go back to Camp Crandall with a good body count.
'There weren't exactly any bodies, Lieutenant,' said Poole, trying to let him down easily. He described what we had seen.
'Well, what's that good for?' He meant,
'Interrogations, probably,' Poole said. 'If you questioned someone down there, no one outside the hut would hear anything. At night, you could just drag the body into the woods.'
'Field Interrogation Post,' said the lieutenant, trying out the phrase. 'Torture, Use Of, highly indicated.' He nodded again. 'Right?'
'Highly,' Poole said.
'Shows you what kind of enemy we're dealing with in this conflict.'
I could no longer stand being in the same three square feet of space with the lieutenant, and I took a step
