The Hour of the Innocents Read online

  “You the guy who wanted him to be an officer?”

  “No. No, that was the battalion commander. The brigade commander, too. Matt was a legend by the time he was halfway through his tour. I would’ve given him a good write-up, if he’d wanted to go to OCS. But he didn’t. I thought he made the right decision, to tell you the truth.”

  “Because he wouldn’t have made a good officer?”

  My guest shook his head. “You don’t really know who’ll make a good officer. Until the bullets start flying. Matt probably would’ve been a solid junior officer out in the field. Garrison might’ve been another story. He really wasn’t interested in all the eternal-Army stuff. And he wouldn’t have been one of the ring-knockers, the West Pointers, or the wannabes. I wasn’t in a position to say anything, but I was glad when he told Colonel Everett he just wanted to do his time and get out. Old Everett was pissed, though. I think that was one more strike against me—as his company commander, I was supposed to persuade him.”

  “But you didn’t try?”

  “No.”

  “Like a beer? It’s just the local swill.”

  “It’s late enough, I suppose.”

  “Why didn’t you try to persuade him?”

  Larry Masters, ex-captain, thought about the question. “It just didn’t feel right to me. I mean, here’s this phenomenal soldier, born to fight. But he didn’t care about it. He didn’t value it. He was just chained to the bench and rowing his oar until his sentence was up. Matt just happened to row better than anybody else. But he didn’t want to spend his life in the galley. Anyway, his heart was in his music. A fool could tell that much.”

  “You’ve heard him play?”

  He nodded. “Plenty of times. When we came in from the field. He had this cheap PX guitar that looked like it’d been through a half-dozen firefights. And a tiny amplifier. Supply sergeant used to haul it around for him when we redeployed. And Doc had this kiddie saxophone. One of the other colored men would play bongos or beat out the rhythm. The soldiers used to crowd into the hooch to listen, or gather outside it. Before he was killed, I used to send Sergeant Campbell around to disperse the audience.” He snorted. “I hated to do it, since I liked to sneak out to listen to them myself. But one mortar round could’ve taken out half a platoon, if I let them bunch up.”

  He scratched his disfigured ear, unthinking, elsewhere. “I do remember one night, though … one night in particular. It was a really heavy kind of dark. Monsoon season. Air thick as a swamp. We’d come in from two weeks in the boonies that afternoon, and I’d just had a come-to-Jesus session with the battalion commander: ‘You numma ten, GI.’ I felt unjustly persecuted and generally pissed at the world.” He sighed. “I just meant to stick my head in their hooch and tell them to knock it off, that it was late. But I found myself sitting … just sitting … in this little niche of sandbags out in the darkness. Listening. To Matt. There we were, all of us moldy and miserable, jungle-rot lepers with the permanent shits, down at the ringworm round-up. In the middle of a war that made less sense every day. And I’m sitting there listening to the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard.” He repositioned his backside in his chair. “Anyway, it seemed that way to me.”

  His face tried on a series of expressions, but none of them fit. “The truth is … I don’t know if you’ll understand this … the truth is that I was sitting there and crying like a kid. I just started to cry. Listening to that music. Crying, where nobody could see me. I mean, it was a lonely place. People all around you, all the time, every minute. But Nam was just the loneliest place in the world.”

  He forced lightness into his tone. “I guess that sounds silly to you. But speaking of lonely … is Matt getting married? To his girl? I forgot to ask.”

  “No. He’s not getting married.”

  The ex-captain frowned. “Did something happen? Is something wrong?”

  “No. But he isn’t getting married.”

  “I thought he had a girl. One he was serious about.” He drank the last of his beer. “I probably misunderstood. I only had a couple of what you might call personal conversations with him. You have to keep your distance. As a commander. The men have to think you have some kind of magic. Even though you don’t. And, to tell you the truth, Matt wasn’t the most approachable human being I’ve ever met. The younger soldiers were just in awe of him. They called him ‘Sergeant Fury.’ He hated it.” The ex-captain laughed a quick bark. “I guess we were all young. Some of them were just kids, really. It just seems different over there. I just remember asking Matt if he had a girl back home. I guess I misunderstood the answer.”

  “No problem.” I fetched him another beer. “So … if Matty got a Bronze Star for that ambush stuff, what’d he have to do to get a Silver Star?”

  Larry Masters looked down at the floor. “That involved Lieutenant Gibbons, too.”

  * * *

  The remainder of the platoon lay behind a paddy dike, weapons ready and watching as Sergeant Rodriguez’s squad approached the hamlet. Rodriguez was down to seven men, including himself. Since Lieutenant Gibbons had taken over, the platoon had suffered a 45 percent casualty rate. All of the men were aware of the scuttlebutt that Captain Masters had tried to relieve the el-tee, but the CO’s superiors had been unwilling to risk the wrath of the lieutenant’s three-star old man back in the Pentagon.

  Sergeant Tomczik hated what he saw: seven men moving across a broad, brown paddy at noon. Begging to be taken out by a single machine gun. Had it been his decision, he would have enveloped the hamlet, then cleared it from the rear, with a single squad positioned for covering fire. The lieutenant had done the opposite, holding the bulk of the platoon near himself and sending in a squad too weak to defend itself. Lieutenant Gibbons always liked to keep at least two squads near the command group.

  Rodriguez tried to move his men in bounding overwatch. But there was no cover. So the soldiers just took turns kneeling in the mud while their buddies slogged forward. The sun hit so hard that an M-60 barrel could burn your hand before it fired a shot.

  It was more than two hundred meters to the cluster of hooches. Too far for accurate supporting fire from the rest of the platoon, if the squad got into close combat. Nothing about the movement made tactical sense. And Rodriguez knew it. He hadn’t wanted to go. But Lieutenant Gibbons had given him his standard song and dance about cowardice and a court-martial.

  Tomczik always kept an eye on the lieutenant now. And one thing had changed: Gibbons was no longer so quick to make a decision. The new problem was that he avoided decisions, only to make bad ones too late. His moods were unpredictable. One day, he’d try to ingratiate himself with his subordinates. The next morning, he’d be stiff and dismissive. In the beginning, Tomczik had wanted his platoon leader to be less demonstrably aggressive, less obvious about his pursuit of medals at his men’s expense. Now the el-tee was, if anything, too timid, obviously avoiding contact with the enemy. The short-timers were content with that, but to Tomczik excessive caution was as likely to get men killed as swaggering brashness.

  It was like music. There were times to let it rock and times to hush things down. And you had to sense the difference.

  Tomczik brushed a posse of ants from the stock of his rifle and swept a small population from his chest. Shifting a couple of feet to his left, he kept his focus on the advancing squad. They were just entering the hamlet. The place looked deserted. But you could never trust appearances.

  “Fucking ants,” Specialist Byron said. “They’re all over the place.”

  “Shut up,” Tomczik whispered. Then he added, “DeLong, I want the sixty ready to stop anything coming over that dike behind the hooches.”

  “Got it, Sarge. Ain’t nobody coming in that way.”

  But they didn’t have to come over and in. The VC were already inside the hamlet. They waited until Sergeant Rodriguez ordered his men to start clearing the hooches. Then they began firing out of their spider holes.

  Every soldier in the s
quad fell. Some writhed upon the ground. Others lay dead-meat still. In seconds, the VC had pulled back into their hides. There was nothing to shoot at. Except the platoon’s own wounded.

  Down one squad, the platoon would have to work its way around the hamlet and come in from behind, after all. Although the VC would have the rear dike covered, just as Tomczik had wanted it kept clear. It was going to be a mess.

  No, it already was a mess.

  In the hamlet, two pairs of men in black pajamas darted from separate hooches. Each team grabbed a wounded American, then used him as a shield as they pulled their captive inside.

  “Shit,” Doc Carley said. “Motherfuckers.” He pulled a Lucky from the ration packet stuck in his helmet band. But he made no move to light the bent cigarette.

  Corporal Halversen scrambled up the dike and dropped flat beside Tomczik. “Sarge, we got a problem.”

  “We’ve got plenty of problems.”

  “There’s a pack of dinks, must be fifty or sixty—”

  “VC, or NVA?” Since Tet, they’d been seeing more North Vietnamese regulars in their sector.”

  “No, naw. Gook civilians. They must be from the ville. They’re all back there in a gully. Jones and Babitch are keeping an eye on them.”

  “Does the lieutenant know?”

  “Sergeant Riker went to tell him. But he thought you should know, too.”

  At that moment, the lieutenant and Sergeant Riker dropped behind the dike, headed rearward. Tomczik sensed the world slipping out of balance.

  “Corporal Garrity. You’ve got the squad. Keep an eye on the ville. You see any VC movement, send a man to get me, ricky-tick.”

  It was just great. American wounded taken prisoner. And the platoon leader and two squad leaders headed away from the firing line. Tomczik hoped the new platoon sergeant would rise to the occasion, but he had his doubts. In the ten months he’d spent in-country, he’d seen the quality of the 11B senior noncoms plummet. The good ones just got killed and the Army replaced them with homesteaders from Camp Swampy.

  Before Tomczik could move, they heard the first screams. From the hamlet.

  “Motherfuckers.”

  “Shut up,” Tomczik said. The VC were trying to lure them in. They knew Americans couldn’t resist trying to save their comrades. The gooks were tougher. They’d let anybody die. For their cause.

  The only cause the Americans had was one another.

  Tomczik had seen enough recovered bodies to know that torture didn’t have to be refined to do the job.

  “Nobody moves,” he said. “Hold in place. Watch the ville. Nobody fires without a clear target. Halversen, show me where the dinks are holed up.”

  Two American voices were screaming now. The sounds carried wonderfully in the afternoon calm, so dehumanized that no one could identify the victims. Every man’s instinct was to charge across the open paddy without wasting another minute. But Tomczik went after the lieutenant first.

  The Vietnamese had hidden themselves in a gully between a line of trees and the jungle. As if they’d left their homes quickly, unsure of where to go. They sat crammed together. Staring up at the Americans. Shaking. Some tried to smile. None spoke.

  The lieutenant looked at Tomczik in alarm. “You should be back with your men.”

  “Yes, sir. I just thought you might need help.”

  “Sergeant Riker’s with me. And these men. Go back to your squad. We just have to take care of this.”

  “Sir … we’ve got to move out. The VC—”

  “Then help.” The lieutenant’s eyes looked past him. Gibbons turned to the soldiers standing guard over the Vietnamese. “They’re all VC. Anybody can see that. I want them all killed.”

  A private with “FTA” inked on his helmet band lifted his rifle. But he didn’t fire.

  Sergeant Riker said, “Sir … them’s civilians … just kids and all…”

  “They’re VC. Kill them.” He looked at the two junior enlisted men. “I ordered you to fire.”

  “Nobody fires,” Tomczik said.

  The lieutenant turned a maddened face toward him, then wheeled about and lifted his own rifle. Before anyone could reach him, he had emptied a magazine into the crowd.

  As Gibbons lowered the weapon to reload, Tomczik leapt up beside him and tore the M-16 from the lieutenant’s hands. The shrieks and wails from the gully sounded as he had always imagined lamentations in the Bible stories.

  He broke the lieutenant’s jaw, knocking him cold. Gibbons fell on his back and slipped a few feet down the gully’s bank. Nobody moved to help him. The other soldiers stared at Tomczik.

  “Nobody fires again,” he said. “Not one round. I don’t care if they have an artillery battery hidden down there. Nobody fires. Got that? And pick up the lieutenant.”

  He didn’t wait for a response, but took off back toward the line of soldiers behind the dike. Instead of heading directly to his own squad, he trotted, sweat-soaked, up to the platoon sergeant’s position. Sergeant First Class DesFresnes was a former drill, straight from Benning. He looked overwhelmed, paralyzed. Shiny boots and midnight barracks inspections didn’t help anymore.

  Tomczik went to ground beside him. “We need medevacs. At least two. The el-tee went nuts. He shot up a bunch of civilians. I don’t know how many were hit.”

  “Battalion won’t green-light any dust-offs for gooks,” DesFresnes said. “There’s a brigade sweep going on. We got more to worry about.”

  Tomczik brought his face close to the senior NCO’s. “Just try. Tell them the general’s little boy needs a dust-off. Somebody broke his jaw.”

  “What—”

  “And give me some smoke.” He reached down and tugged a canister from DesFresnes’s web gear. “I’m going to take care of this.”

  Tomczik hustled off toward his men. As he passed down the line, he tapped the shoulders of his two best shots. “Keep your eyes on the hooches, not on me. Fire at any muzzle flashes.”

  “Where you—”

  With no further preparations, Tomczik dropped over the far side of the dike and moved toward the American screams as fast as the paddy mud let him.

  They wouldn’t fire at him. Not until he came close. Very close. He understood them. They’d been having a ghostly conversation for months. And now he understood them. But they wouldn’t understand what he was doing: A single American splashing across an exposed rice paddy had to be a trick. They’d let him get close. He was sure of it. They just had to let him get close.

  He knew the odds were better than good that he was going to die. But it didn’t matter; abstract knowledge was irrelevant. It wasn’t that he cared nothing for his life. Life had never seemed more brilliant than in those minutes spent wading across the paddies. It was only that he no longer belonged to the common world, he was operating in a hidden universe behind the one others knew. It was as strange as those time-bending stretches when he played so well that commonplace things dissolved.

  Just as he knew the notes to play, he knew what to do now, invading the souls of the men he was going to kill and who meant to kill him. Men who could see him clearly. Juiced, he waited for the flash from a muzzle, the crack of a shot. If he would even hear it. He and his opponents were engaged fatally now. There was no chance that all would remain alive.

  He felt the eyes of his own kind on his back, while the eyes of his mortal enemies watched him approach. He didn’t duck, or cringe, or move evasively, but came straight on through the paddies. Aware that the last ten meters before he reached dry land formed the kill zone he had to pass through safely. He hoped his enemies would not understand that, that they’d want his carcass close enough to drag off.

  “Let them be confident,” he prayed. “Let them wait. Let them be sure of themselves. Just let them wait.”

  He needed them to be greedy for another wounded prisoner, to distrust what they saw, to fear a trap, snipers, anything.

  Judging his ground, he plodded on, avoiding any spurt of speed that might provo
ke a nervous shooter. He tried to etch the hamlet’s layout, the buildings and the distances, into his brain. Seeking to register every slight depression, every fold of the ground.

  The world had gone remarkably silent. Even the insects had paused in curiosity.

  A knee-high mud bank rose five meters away. The ground beyond was dry.

  What did they expect him to do? He listened to their minds as he closed the distance. They’d expect him to drop behind the little embankment, to catch his breath after the plod through the mud, to get his bearings. An impatient enemy would shoot him first.

  In a burst of movement, he leapt onto dry ground, hurling himself to the left and tucking his body into a dusty swale. Gunfire chased him, hunted him. But they couldn’t fire low enough from their positions.

  He pulled the smoke grenade from his harness and lobbed it behind himself, between the village clearing and the paddy. It hissed out a purple cloud, “Goofy Grape” in fire-support lingo. As the smoke spread, the VC fired into it, expecting him to use it as concealment. Instead, he ran the other way, through clear daylight, diving behind a hooch.

  Rounds punched through primitive walls. One shooter was close. Tomczik low-crawled along, as fast as he could, until he ran out of cover. He closed his eyes just for a pair of seconds, to listen to the report of the enemy weapons. Trying to get a fix on their positions.

  The screams of the prisoners had stopped. He hoped his actions hadn’t led the VC to cut their throats.

  He hurled a frag grenade and dropped low again before sprinting through the dissipated blast and the excited dust. Emerging into the clear, he kept running. Until he reached the rear rank of the hooches.

  He heard cheers in the distance. From his own kind. But the purple haze by the paddy’s edge obscured the view back toward his comrades.

  No bullets pursued him. That told him two things. First, the VC had known which way the Americans were coming earlier in the day and probably even knew which platoon it was, who was leading them. So they’d gotten lazy and failed to dig firing positions that would let them fight in any direction. He was behind them now.