The Snowfly Page 11

  “There ain’t none,” somebody shouted to me.

  I did not think. I acted. I took the soldier’s severed wet arm and set it aside. He objected, “That’s mine, man!” Blood spurted from his armpit and pink bubbled from his mouth. I had no idea what to do to stanch the blood and all I could think of was finding somebody who could help. I picked up the soldier in a fireman’s carry, bent under his weight, then picked up his severed arm and started through the camp with the man on my back. “Medic? Medic?”

  Soldiers pointed and yelled, “That way, man. Keep going! Move, move, move!”

  There were explosions all around me, but I couldn’t stop. Red dust hung in the air and things whooshed through it. Fumes of cordite hung heavy. My ears rang. I felt like I was going to choke and sneeze all at once. And die. My eyes burned and tears ran freely.

  All-out combat is pure chaos; when you are in the middle of it there is no strategic point, only the immediacy of where you are and what you are trying to do. Motion and time slow down. I passed the helipad I had arrived at that morning. Three Hueys were broken skeletons, black against hot tongues of orange flames, ammo from their guns popping.

  All along my route troops kept pointing the way to an aid station, which was downhill. Behind me, the explosions continued. Ahead, beside a bunker, I saw a woman smoking a cigarette. Her surgical scrubs were purple, red blood mixed with blue-green cloth and dust, blood in her hair, on her forehead.

  “Hospital?” I said.

  “There,” she said, pointing to a bunker entrance. “Put him down.” I held out the severed arm, which she ignored as she knelt and felt the wounded man’s neck.

  “Ernie!” she shouted into the bunker opening. A cigarette stuck to her bottom lip.

  A squinting soldier came cautiously out of the bunker. “Take the arm,” the woman said.

  “Okay, doc.”

  “You’re a doctor?”

  She looked up at me with glazed eyes. “No shit,” she said, flipping the cigarette away. “Help me get him inside. Buddy of yours?”

  Because I was so often in the field, I was dressed in green army fatigues. “No, I’m a reporter. There was nobody else to bring him.”

  A bullet whacked the door frame of the bunker, spitting dust and some small splinters of wood. She never flinched. The man who had taken the arm came back, carrying a stretcher, which he unfolded.

  I helped slide the wounded soldier onto the stretcher and watched as another man came out of the bunker and helped take the soldier down into the darkness. I was tempted to follow.

  Another soldier arrived, carrying a wounded man, lowered him gently, and looked at me. “Can you help me, man?”

  “Help you what?”

  “Move wounded. We got beaucoup down and we’re short of guys.”

  The doctor touched my arm. “See you later?”

  I nodded and turned to follow the Good Samaritan, but the doctor held on to me and pulled hard enough to turn me around. “See you later,” she repeated. “Here, okay?”

  My new partner had gemtfooh written on the back of his helmet liner in nail polish. “Gemtfooh? What kind of name is that?”

  “Get Me The Fuck Out Of Here,” he said as we jogged uphill.

  We carried wounded all afternoon and left the dead where they were.

  A huge round exploded as I tried to scoop up one GI with a stomach wound and knocked me flat, taking my breath and leaving me gasping like a trout on a riverbank. The middle of my back throbbed, I had an erection unlike any I had ever had before, and my testicles ached. The soldier I had been trying to lift was no longer breathing but stared dead-eyed up into the sky. I moved on, aching, stumbling, gagging, fighting to reclaim my breath.

  The attack finally slowed late in the day, but the pain in my back remained. As did the erection.

  I was hurting and tired and went looking for the doctor I had met earlier. Someone at the aid station directed me into another bunker. Blood was everywhere, the interior lit with arc lights that were hot and made clicking sounds. The smell was terrible. There was a lot of talk, but it was subdued, not panicked.

  “Scrub there,” a soldier said to me.

  “I’m not a doctor.”

  “Who is?” he said grimly.

  He showed me how to scrub and helped me into gloves, a mask, and a silly little hat like the doo-rags some of the troops wore.

  “Over here,” a voice said. It was the doctor I had met earlier. She was wearing a mask, which was splashed with blood.

  “I’m not trained.”

  “Got all your parts?”

  “So far.” My back ached and so did my balls.

  “Good, just do what I tell you to. No more, no less. Got it?”

  I did. I saw the insides of dozens of bodies. My doctor was calm, decisive, and worked fast. I clamped arteries, put my gloved hand on warm living organs, and did whatever I was told to do.

  Some time later a gravelly voice said, “Take a break, Louie.”

  The doctor nodded to me. “Let’s blow this pop stand.”

  We walked outside, shuffled quickly across open ground, and ducked into another earthen bunker. This was was filled with broken wooden ammo boxes. There were sporadic shots outside now, not many. No big stuff.

  “Dworkin,” the doctor said, lighting a cigarette and offering it to me. Then she lit one for herself. “Louise . . . Louie to the others.” She held out a canteen. I took a long pull. “What happened to your back?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “You were bent over like Quasimodo the whole time we were working down there.”

  “Something knocked me down.”

  She said, “Let’s have a look. Peel ’em off,” she added with a tug on my belt.

  “Peel off what?”

  “Your clothes. Off.”

  I did as I was told. Her hand felt cool on my skin and I was embarrassed as she bent close to examine my genitals. The inspection done, she picked up my flak vest and ran her hand over it, then clucked and held the vest out to me. “Feel.” I felt a lump of something inside. “Whatever it is, your vest paid for itself today,” she said. “You’re probably going to hurt for a few days.”

  I stared at the vest, then at my penis, which stood like a flagpole.

  She took the jacket, put it on the ground, piled my soiled fatigues on top, quickly shed her own clothes, added them to the pile, took my hand, knelt, and said, “We don’t have a lot of time.”

  I sat down clumsily. She did not move fast.

  “I thought we were in a hurry.”

  She laughed mischieviously. “Who’s the doctor here?” Her hair was short, the left side caked flat with dried blood. I smelled blood, cordite, dust, urine, our sex.

  When we finished, we lay on the pile of clothes. “God, I could go to sleep now,” she said. She sat up, dug through her shirt for cigarettes, lit two, and passed me one.

  “We both needed that,” she went on, sitting beside me, relief in her voice. Then in a clinical tone, “Back injuries can cause priapus, which is the fifty-cent word for an endless, painful hard-on. You took a bad whack in the back.” Her hand continued to fondle and examine. “It’ll go down,” she said. “Which is too bad,” she added.

  “You’re putting me on?”

  She laughed out loud. “Medically no. I don’t know if ejaculation eases the condition, but why waste the opportunity, right? We’ve got to reaffirm life in the face of so damn much dying.” Her voice turned serious. “All these kids,” she said. “Kids, for God’s sake. This isn’t like the World. So much pointless death here. Hell, all death is pointless. We were here on an inspection, can you believe that? Stopping for a few hours. You have a name?”

  “Rhodes, Bowie.”

  “You did good things today, Rhodes, Bowie. I’ll be going back to Cam Ranh when this shit is ov
er. You come see me so I can check your medical progress, okay?” She exhaled smoke. “I can smell us over the rest of this shit,” she said, “life over death.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “For balling you?”

  I smiled. “For making an insane moment seem sane in the middle of so much insanity.”

  She placed her hand on my chest. “It’s crude out here, filthy. Our medicine is less than basic under these conditions.” She kissed me slow and long, then pushed me away playfully. “When I get you into a real bed, I’ll show you what a great physician I really am.” She grinned. “Cam Ranh, got it?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “You’d better. The sooner, the better . . . medically speaking.” We dressed slowly in clothes that were both wet and stiff.

  It was quiet outside the bunker, but dust lingered in the air like fog. “Be careful,” she said over her shoulder as she scuttled back to surgery.

  I returned to the upper camp, found a sergeant, and told him I needed to get a story out. I figured I could hand-write it, send it by chopper to Saigon, get it on a commercial flight to Manila, and get it on the wire there.

  “Is it over?” I asked the sergeant. He had a new scab stretching across most of his forehead.

  “Who the fuck knows? You can’t predict these assholes.” He looked at me. “Where’s your weapon?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  He handed me a rifle with a scope. “Can you shoot?”

  “I’m a reporter,” I said.

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “I’ve shot targets,” I said, “but I don’t know if I can shoot another person.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder. “I like an honest man. Take it.” He gave me a canvas bag of clips. “If you have to shoot, you’ll be glad you’ve got it.”

  “Is there a way to get a message out?”

  “Not until we start getting dust-offs when this shit dies down.” Dust-offs were helicopters used to remove the wounded. I would not be getting a story out anytime soon.

  I found a bunker and went inside to try to get some rest. At four o’clock the next morning the rockets started again and were followed by salvo after salvo of mortars. There was a captain and a lieutenant in the bunker with me, and a buck sergeant with a radio. The captain’s head was bandaged like a mummy and he was on the radio jabbering coordinates. And swearing incomprehensibly.

  “What’s happening?” I asked the lieutenant.

  “Maneuvering in force,” he said wearily. “The LBMFs, not us.” LBMF meant Little Brown Mother Fucker, one of many terms the grunts had for the enemy. “Our asses are stuck here. Our LPs have been reporting heavy troop movements all night.”

  “Are they coming in?”

  “We’re not sure yet. Stay tuned,” he said, trying to smile.

  Outside the bunker the night turned white as flares popped and floated slowly down under tiny parachutes.

  “We’re gonna keep it lit bright as hell,” the lieutenant said. “They come, they’re gonna get fucked over. At least for a while,” he added.

  But the enemy did not come and I never had to face a decision with the rifle. Instead snipers popped away at us from nearby positions, keeping our heads down, harrassing us. The camp commander figured we were a minor obstacle the enemy had brushed against on its way to something of greater strategic value.

  In the morning I carefully made my way back to the aid station. The destroyed choppers on the helipad were smoldering. I wondered how long before we could get medevacs in. Helicopters were lifelines in this war.

  I asked for Dr. Dworkin.

  A heavy man immediately shuffled over to me, put his arm around my shoulder, and steered me toward the bunker in which Louise and I had made love. It stank of death. A naked lightbulb illuminated a slapdash pile of muddy body bags, some of them torn. The wooden boxes were gone.

  “You the reporter?”

  I nodded.

  He exhaled loudly, painfully. “She told me what you did to help.” His eyes were listless, sunk deep in their sockets, his skin gray. “Thanks.”

  I stared at the bags of remains and knew why we were there. “Is Louise dead?”

  “I’m sorry,” the man said. “It was a fucking sniper.”

  “When?”

  “First light today. We worked all night. She went out for a smoke. I told her to be careful. She was, but it didn’t matter.” His tone was one of barely restrained anger. “The round wasn’t meant for her. She was down low, well protected, out of the line of sight. A soldier near her stood up and was hit in the temple. The bullet went into his head, exited his throat, and hit Louise here.” He reached over and touched the knob of bone at the base of the back of my neck. “Instantaneous. Doesn’t take much to break the spine right there. She was a great surgeon and a great gal. This fucking war sucks and if this is God’s plan, he sucks too.”

  “I want to see her.”

  The man knelt, opened a bag, and stepped back. I saw for the first time that he wore the black eagles of a full colonel on his left collar along with a caduceus, the emblem of doctors and the medical corps.

  Louise Dworkin looked asleep.

  It took three more days before the choppers returned and I got a hop out. The belly of my bird was stacked two deep with body bags and the inside of the chopper was coated with splotches of dried blood and what I knew were bits of human tissue. The gunner gave me cotton to stuff in my nostrils. I strapped into a web seat and tried to figure out where to put my feet.

  The door gunner looked over at me and shouted, “Those fuckers can’t feel it, man.”

  I gingerly put my feet on the remains and stared down. Beside my foot there was a single dog tag covered with red mud. I picked it up, scraped it clean, and read the name. fistrip, richard l. ist lieutenant. blood type: o+.

  My mind swam. I felt dizzy.

  “You okay?” the gunner yelled over the whine of the turbine engine.

  I held out the dog tag.

  He shook his head. “Pitch it,” he said.

  “Is it from here?” I shouted.

  The gunner shrugged. “No, man. It’s been rattling around in here since last night when we were picking up bags from a camp east of here. How the fuck it didn’t fall out is beyond me. I guess his ghost wanted somebody to have it.”

  Yeah, I thought. I tried to convince myself that Fistrip had gone to Hell, but I couldn’t. He was a creep, but nobody deserved to die here, not like this.

  I didn’t get back to Saigon until a week after Gillian and I had fled the Trout House. My place on the Street of Spider Trees had been ransacked, all of my belongings stolen. The outer walls were pocked by bullet marks. My office in the press center had plywood where glass had been and everybody had a Tet story to tell.

  I was certain that I had seen Tet at its seed, and, as it turned out, I probably had. The countrywide attacks were supposed to begin several hours after the assault on the Trout House, but for some reason attacks around Da Lat and Nha Trang had been launched early and far ahead of the rest of the country. The North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong had risen up in hundreds of locations and struck simultaneously across the length and breadth of the country; from what I could tell, most of the attacks had been failures, but a major fight still raged in Hue, the country’s historic capital. Such was the fog of war. You could never extrapolate. You saw what you saw, experienced what you experienced, and that was that. In the years ahead historians would try to make sense of it, but they wouldn’t. There wasn’t much sense to be made.

  There was a telegram waiting for me at MACV after the fighting relented in Saigon. It was from Lloyd Nash, who said that the photograph I had sent to him was being “passed around by colleagues” and that there was “every reason to believe that this is a new and heretofore unknown species.” His excitement wa
s clear and he had numerous questions, none of which I could answer.

  I gave much thought to unknown animals after that and, later in my life, would encounter something I would never have dreamed of back then in Vietnam. There’s one hell of a lot to learn about this earth of ours.

  But Nash’s letter was nothing compared to the Trout House manuscript. The combination of the two events brought the snowfly into a new focus. Because it seemed mostly myth and baloney, this did not necessarily render it untrue. Besides, I had held Key’s manuscript in my hands.

  I had a couple of long, mostly unfruitful assignments in II Corps after the Tet mess. In August UPI asked me to extend and offered a substantial raise, but I refused. The accumulation of experience was too heavy to carry any longer. The deaths of Louise Dworkin, whom I’d known intimately but only superficially, and Rick Fistrip, whom I’d once hated, were too much. A telegram from Yetter told me to take a month’s vacation and then we’d mutually decide my future.

  On my way home to the States I flew to Hobart, Tasmania, and spent a week fishing for trout with Gillian at her place in the highlands. Dickie Goodwin was there, too, but busy with business and Gillian and I enjoyed ourselves. We fished every day and I commiserated with her loss of the Trout House. She explained how her husband had purchased the coffee plantation from the Oxley Trust of London. At the time this information didn’t really mean much. But it would. I was twenty-four. UPI got hold of me and wanted me to go to Northern Ireland, but Lilly sent me a telegram telling me the old man was sick. It was time for me to go home.

  6

  My mother had withered with age, but the old man had always seemed immune to the ravages of time and, over the years, Lilly and I had assumed he’d outlive us both.

  I flew into Pellston, which several times each winter is the coldest locale in the lower forty-eight. Lilly handed me a beer when we met in the terminal. These were the days when airport security consisted almost exclusively of trying to prevent overcurious paying customers at rural airports from wandering into moving propellers.