The Throat

I had not entirely left my old self behind on the tarmac at Tan Son Nhut, after all.

Scoot was regarding me with real curiosity. 'It's the new boy's job,' Attica repeated, and I guessed that although the term was ridiculous when applied to him, he had been the new boy before me.

I bent over the long black bag. There were fabric handles on each end, and the zipper ran from one to the other.

I grasped the zipper and promised myself that I would not close my eyes. Behind me, the men took a collective breath. I pulled the zipper across the bag.

And I almost did vomit, not because of what I saw but because of the dead boy's stench, which moved like a huge black dog out of the opening in the bag. For a second I did have to close my eyes. A greasy web had fastened itself over my face. The gray ruined face inside the bag stared upward with open eyes. My stomach lurched. This was what they had been waiting for, I knew, and I held my breath and yanked the zipper another twelve inches down the bag.

The dead boy's mud-colored face was shot away from his left cheek down. His upper teeth closed on nothing. A few loose teeth had lodged in the back of his neck. The other tag was not in the cavity. The uniform shirt was stiff and black with blood, and the blast that had taken away the boy's lower jaw had also removed his throat. The small, delicate bones of the top vertebrae were fouled with blood.

'There's no tag on this guy,' I said, though what I wanted to do was scream.

Di Maestro said, 'You ain't finished yet.'

I looked up at him. A big fuzzy belly drooped over his pants, and four or five days' growth of beard began just under his rapacious eyes. He looked like a fat goat.

'Who cleans these people up?' I asked before I realized that the answer might be that the new guy does.

'They make 'em presentable at the other end.' Di Maestro grinned and crossed his arms over his chest. The tattoo of a grinning skull floated over a brown pyramid on his right forearm. Millhaven, my Millhaven, was now present all about me, the frame houses with peeling brickface crowded together, the vacant lots and the St. Alwyn Hotel. I saw my sister's face.

'If you can't find the tag inside the shirt, sometimes they put 'em in the pockets or the boots.' Di Maestro turned away. The others had already lost interest.

I struggled with the top button of the stiffened shirt, trying not to touch the ragged edges of flesh around the collar. The odor poured up at me. My eyes misted.

The button finally squeezed through the hole, but the collar refused to separate. I pulled it open. Dried blood crackled like breakfast cereal. His throat had been opened like a surgical diagram. A few more teeth were embedded in the softening flesh. I knew that what I was seeing I would see for the rest of my life —the ropes of flesh, the open cavity that should have been filled with speech. Lost teeth.

The tag was nowhere inside his neck.

I unbuttoned the next two buttons and found only a pale bloodied chest.

Then I had to turn away to breathe and saw the rest of the body squad going efficiently down the rows of bodies, dipping into the unzippered bags, making sure the names matched. I turned back to my anonymous corpse and began fighting with a shirt pocket.

The button finally passed through the buttonhole, and I pushed my fingers into me opening, cracking it open like the pocket of a stiffly starched shirt. A thin hard edge of metal caught beneath my fingernail. The tag came away from the cloth with a series of dry little pops. 'Okay,' I said.

Di Maestro said, 'Attica used to shake down these units in five seconds flat.'

'Two seconds,' Attica said, not bothering to look up.

I got away from the gaping body in the bag and held out the unreadable tag.

'Underdog's a pearl diver,' di Maestro announced. 'Now wash it off.'

The stained, crusty sink stood beside a spattered toilet. I held the tag beneath a trickle of hot water. The stench of the body still clung to me, as gummy on my hands and face as the film of fat from ham hocks. Flakes of blood fell off the tag and dissolved to red in the water. I dropped the tag and scrubbed my hands and face with PhisoHex until the greasy feeling was gone. The body squad was cracking up behind me. I rubbed my face with the limp musty rag that hung between the sink and the toilet.

'Looking forward to the field?' Ratman asked.

'The unit's name,' I said, picking the tag out of the pink water at the bottom of the sink, 'is Andrew T. Majors.'

'That's right,' said di Maestro. 'Now tape it to the bag and help us with the rest of them.'

'You knew his name?' I was too startled to be angry. Then I remembered that he had the field officer's list, and Andrew T. Majors was the only name on it not also found on a tag. 'You'll get used to it,' di Maestro said, not unkindly.

I had not even understood what the rest of the body squad had seen at once, that Bobby Swett had been killed by an American explosive; and that Captain Franklin Bachelor, the Green Beret with the briefcase and the Rhade mistress, had scared Ratman's lieutenant right back to camp because he was leading the 'cadre' the lieutenant had spent two weeks chasing.

When I turned up at the shed the next day, Attica actually greeted me. I jolted along in the back of the truck with Attica and Pirate and felt a naive pride in myself and what I was doing.

Five units tagged with the right names waited on the tarmac. All five had died of concussion in a field. (Walking across anything that resembles a field still makes me nervous.) Apart from killing them, the shell did no damage at all. Three of them were eighteen-year-olds who looked like wax dummies, one was a heavyset baby- faced lieutenant, and the fifth man was a captain in his mid-thirties. It was all over in about five minutes.

'Shall we pop over to the country club, play a round a golf?' Attica asked in a surprisingly passable British accent.

'I fancy a fucking tea dance,' Scoot said. His slow-moving drawl made the sentence sound so odd that no one laughed.

'Well, there is one thing we could do,' said Pirate.

Again I felt a comprehensive understanding from which I was excluded.

'I guess there is,' said di Maestro. He stood up. 'How much money you got on you, Underdog?'

I was tempted to lie, but I took what I had out of my pocket and showed it to him.

'That'll do,' he said. 'You ever been in the village?' When I looked blank he said, 'Outside the gate. The other part of the camp.'

I shook my head. When I got to White Star, I had been still so turned around that I had noticed only a transition from an Asian turmoil to the more orderly disorder of an army base. I had the vague impression of having gone through a small town.

'Never?' He had trouble believing it. 'Well, it's about time you got wet.'

'Get wet time,' Pirate said.

'You walk through the gate. As long as you're on foot, they don't bullshit you. They're supposed to keep the gooks out, not keep us in. They know where you're going. You turn into the first lane and keep going until the second turn—'

'By the bubble,' Attica said.

'You see a sign says BUBBLE in big letters. Turn right there and go under the sign. Go six doors down. Knock on the green door that says LY.'

'Lee?'